COLLAPSING THEORY: THE LIMITS OF SCIENTIFIC THINKING
3.2 Wittgenstein’s Neo-Kantian Grammar?
Thinking is surrounded by a nimbus. – Its essence, logic, presents an order: namely, the a priori order of the world; that is the order of possibilities, which the world and thinking must have in common (PI
97).
‘Language (or thinking) is something unique’—this proves to be a superstition (not a mistake!), itself produced by grammatical illusions. And now the impressiveness retreats to these illusions, to the problems (PI 110).
An important question in reading Wittgenstein concerns the relationship between his critique of language and Kant’s critique of reason. Much is at stake in this question given the significance of the Kant’s constructive method upon all philosophy, and while it is clear that Wittgenstein is not an explicit follower of Kant, the question remains to what degree Wittgenstein works within a Kantian space.26 In general, the
Tractatus asserts that language is meaningful only through the representation of simple
objects, and only by way of facts are propositions able to function rightly. Seemingly,
26 P. M. S. Hacker has engaged in detail the relationship between the thought of Kant and Wittgenstein, and I am indebted to him on this topic. Following Hacker’s survey of Wittgenstein’s published and unpublished writings as well as personal interactions with others, we cannot discern much regarding Wittgenstein’s familiarity and engagement with Kant’s work. Wittgenstein mentions Kant once in the pre-Tractatus notebooks (NB 19.10.14) and once again in the Tractatus 6.36111 regarding Kant’s problem of right and left hands. Kant is mentioned twice in the Nachlass, the first time perhaps significantly stating “we’re concerned with the Kantian solution to the problems of philosophy” (TS 211, 173; cf. MS 107, 183, TS 209). Wittgenstein specifically listed in 1931 Schopenhauer as an influence, yet Kant was not mentioned (MS 154, 16r). Hacker comments: “The catch from the trawl is meager. It does not suggest any significant Kantian influence on Wittgenstein nor even any evident Kantian inspiration.” Hacker, 2013: 31-32.
these are “a priori conditions of the possibility of logic and language—of thinking (reasoning) and representing. And is that not a transcendental argument?”27
Hacker identifies at least six areas of convergence between Kant and Wittgenstein. 1) Metaphilosophy: both philosophers reflected heavily on the nature of
philosophy itself; both agreed that philosophy (Kant’s “pure philosophy”) is distinct from natural or mathematical sciences.
2) Dialectic: both philosophers engaged the Dialectic of Reason—the “logic of conceptual illusion”—agreeing to certain systematic patterns of philosophical error and the “unquestioned assumptions underlying philosophical controversies.”
3) The bounds of sense: both Kant and Wittgenstein engaged the bounds of sense; Kant sought ‘deduction’ of a priori concepts, seeking the “conditions and limits” of their use in “judgments and experience” respectively. Wittgenstein investigated the conditions for the meaningful use of language. 4) Rationalism and empiricism: both philosophers “repudiated foundationalist epistemology of the Cartesian or Lockean kind—our knowledge of how things are in the world around us is not inferred from how things sensibly seem to us to be.”
5) The nature of necessity: Kant maintained that the “necessary truths of logic are ‘entirely without content’” while Wittgenstein argued that the “tautologies of logic are ‘senseless’ (i.e. have ‘zero sense’). More generally, “both located
27 Hacker, 2013: 31.
the roots of non-logical necessity in us—albeit for different reasons and in a very different sense.”
6) Rational theology: Kant and Wittgenstein alike “repudiated” rational theology.28
Crystallizing much of the above six confluences are phrases from Wittgenstein such as: “Men have always thought that there must be a sphere of questions whose answers – a priori – are symmetrical and united into a closed regular structure” (T 5.4541). From Kant: “How else can we account for our inextinguishable desire to find firm footing somewhere beyond the limits of experience? Reason has a presentiment of objects which possess a great interest for it” (A 796, B 824).29 Cunningham in particular suggests that Wittgenstein parallels Kant even to the point that “‘language game’ may well be a metaphysical term.”
The operational a priori nature of the concept of language game comes further to the fore when Wittgenstein refers to the ‘framework on which the working of our language is based (for example in giving descriptions)’, or declares that ‘the common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret’; meanwhile radical human concurrence ‘is agreement not in opinion but in way of life’ (PI 240; 206; 241).30
Cunningham contends that such an “a priori centrality of language” follows from Wittgenstein’s description of the workings of language that enable “signification, intelligibility, and does so by regulatively demarcating sense from nonsense in whatever guise.” Key for Cunningham’s reading is that grammar is “structural” and provides
28 Hacker, 2013: 33-34.
29 Kant, 1965: 629-30 (A 796, B 824). Cf. Kerr, 1998: 241-43. 30 Cunningham, 1999: 76.
rules that constitute sense, and the benchmark of grammar is the grammar itself: “The very fact that Wittgenstein stipulates that grammar is also non-arbitrary illustrates the a
priori formalism of the term: ‘If we could justify a rule, it could be violated.’ It is the
transcendental nature of rules that renders justification unintelligible.”31 In short, for Cunningham, rules and grammar, alongside forms of life and language games (PI 656) all function for Wittgenstein in a mode quite similar to Kant’s categories. In seeking to validate human knowledge, the a priori is relocated in “meaning rather than experience,” and while Wittgenstein’s “semantic relativisation” seems non-metaphysical, Cunningham instead sees in the later Wittgenstein an “ad hoc transcendentalism” where (1) certain constitutive categories or concepts are posited and yet (2) an “indeterminate actuality” questions the veracity of categories and instead resides only ever “in what is shown (zeigen), that which comes out.”32 Despite the challenge of alternate statements from Wittgenstein such as “no part of our experience is also a priori…there is no order of things a priori” (T 5.634) and “when someone else wished to say something metaphysical…demonstrate to him that he has given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions” (T 6.53), Cunningham’s Wittgenstein employs a neo-Kantian grammar in support of an ad hoc transcendentalism.
Drawing back from Cunningham’s neo-Kantian reading of Wittgenstein, we can see pre-modern, theological commitments against philosophical metaphysics—“the positing of reality other than God”—as the primary framework for Cunningham’s arguments such that, broadly speaking, the Kantian discourse is most problematic in that it is non-
31 Cunningham, 1999: 76. 32 Cunningham, 1999: 77.
theological and immanentized, finding its only point of possible stability within finitude.33 Such commitments against philosophical metaphysics further raise the stakes for the ways we understand Wittgenstein aligning with Kant. Does Wittgenstein advocate—intentionally or unintentionally—a “philosophical metaphysics?” What is the extent of Kerr’s claim that Wittgenstein’s critique of language (TLP 4.00431) is a “radicalization of Kant’s critique of reason?”34 It will be important to return below to Cunningham’s broader reading of Wittgenstein advocating “transcendental vitalism” and “philosophical metaphysics”35 where I will make the case that Wittgenstein actually supports in part Cunningham’s main thesis by contesting transcendental and metaphysical theorizing. First however, further groundwork is needed regarding the way Wittgenstein and Kant employ transcendental arguments.
For all the above points of convergence and similarities, vitally important differences can be discerned between Kant and Wittgenstein’s use of transcendental arguments. In one sense, much of the way one reads Wittgenstein will turn on discerning these nuances, hence rendering Kerr’s statement on Wittgenstein’s “radicalization of Kant” as either an assertion of Wittgenstein’s remarkable Kantian consistency or of his remaking and actual critique of the Kantian horizon.
The first point to recall is Wittgenstein’s emphasis upon philosophical methodology that serves as a critical backdrop for grasping Wittgenstein. “Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (PI
33 Cunningham, 1999: 86.
34 Kerr, 1997: 37. Cf. Kerr, 1998: 241-43. 35 Cunningham, 1999: 85-86.
109). Likewise, Wittgenstein stated plainly: “[w]hat I am opposed to is the concept of some ideal exactitude given to us a priori, as it were. At different times we have different ideals of exactitude; and none of them is supreme” (CV 37e). Systematic philosophy seeks advances through theories or theses, and this is directly opposed by Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy. “If someone were to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them” (PI 128). What concerned Wittgenstein were not “realms of phenomena whose study is the special business of a philosopher and about which he or she should formulate profound a priori theories and sophisticated arguments in support of them.”36 Such philosophical discoveries or the “unearthing of something” signifies the confusion that Wittgenstein was motivated to deflate. In seeking to deflate confusion amidst philosophical theories, however, Wittgenstein navigates amidst such theories that may lead to misreading him as favoring the very metaphysical conundrums he seeks to remedy.
What is metaphysical there is not the content of some belief but the laying down
of a requirement, the requirement of logical analysis. We do make sense, our
propositions do stand in logical relations to each other. And such-and-such is
required for that to be so. The metaphysics there is not in something other than
language and requiring that it be like this or like that; that sort of metaphysics the Tractatus uses only ironically: it uses apparently metaphysical sentences, but in a way which is disposed of by the sentences which frame the book, in the Preface and the final remarks. The metaphysics of the Tractatus—metaphysics not ironic and not cancelled—is the requirements which are internal to the character of the language as language, in their being a general form of sentence, in all sentences having this form. The metaphysics of the Tractatus is a kind of metaphysics that does not involve what is unsayably the case outside language…37
36 Horwich: 2012, 1.
Reading Wittgenstein in such a light, we are able to discern more accurately how Wittgenstein employs the term “a priori” amidst a “philosophical Weltanschauung” at odds with Kant. Whereas Kant’s essential concern is to investigate the possibility both of synthetic a priori judgments (B 19) and metaphysics as a science (B 22), Wittgenstein contested the “theorists of the past cultural period [who sought] to find the a priori where it isn’t” (MS 183, 81). As Hacker has argued, the propositions of mathematics and logic for Wittgenstein are a priori, meaning that “apparently synthetic a priori propositions” such as “nothing can be red and green all over” or “time-travel is impossible” are a priori. Such a priori propositions are non-analytic, however, and are not “correctly characterized as knowing the truth of a description of how things necessarily are in nature” as proper “a priori descriptions of the scaffolding of the world.” To the contrary, no such scaffolding exists—“neither original (traditional metaphysics), nor constructed and imposed (Kantian metaphysics of experience). Such (apparently synthetic a priori) propositions constitute the scaffolding FROM which we describe the
world.”38 At stake are two different visions of knowledge: Kant’s synthetic a priori knowledge of the world purports to describe necessarily how things are whereas Wittgenstein’s knowledge is “knowledge of rules of representation.”
Consequently, Kant’s question: ‘How is synthetic a priori knowledge of nature possible?’ crumbles in Wittgenstein’s hands…For, in Wittgenstein’s view, what appear to be necessities of nature, and what Kant argued to be a priori principles that the understanding imposes upon intuitions to constitute nature, are no more than shadows cast upon nature by the grammar of our language.39
38 Hacker, 2013: 35.
Beyond these considerations of philosophical worldview and intent for Wittgenstein’s thought, a deeper consideration of transcendental arguments is in order, especially to engage a reading such as Cunningham’s where Wittgenstein’s ad hoc transcendentalism may be implicitly present. Looking first to the Tractatus, if we understand transcendental arguments in the general, logical sense of a modus tollens, then most certainly the Tractatus is transcendental—as would be Plato’s or Aristotle’s metaphysics and all other philosophers who have argued “from the nature of language or thought to the nature of the world.”40 This common and generalized form of transcendental argument, however, does not accord with Kant’s specific notion of ‘transcendental proof.’ Kant’s deduction relies above all upon “the mode in which the manifold of sensible representation (intuition) belongs to one consciousness precedes all knowledge of the object as the intellectual form of such knowledge, and in itself constitutes a formal a priori knowledge of all objects, so far as they are thought (categories)” (A 129- 130). Hence, for Kant, any transcendental proof necessarily requires the existence of transcendental idealism, whereas the Tractatus denies the possibility of Kantian “pure” and “necessary” concepts of understanding emerging “only in ourselves” (A 130). Hence, Hacker summarizes:
(i) [The Tractatus] is not an attempt to vindicate the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge. In fact, it denies that there is such thing, since it holds that all expressible necessity is logical necessity. Insofar as there is metaphysical necessity it is inexpressible in propositions with a sense, and so cannot be the content of propositional knowledge.
(ii) The Tractatus does not link independent concepts by reference to possible experience and the a priori conditions of its possibilities. (Rather, it links material concepts with the formal concepts that are in effect variables of which the meanings of the material concepts are values.)
40 Hacker, 2013: 45.
(iii) The Tractatus does not attempt to prove that the world of appearances (outer experiences) is a condition of the possibility of inner experience. That objects exist and that there are states of affairs is a presupposition of logic, not of experience.41
Wittgenstein’s explorations in logic do not equate in the Tractatus to systematic reliance upon transcendental ideals in the precise Kantian sense. The opening factual claims of the Tractatus alongside the closing reminders of the ineffable and “what can only be shown” render a vital context for understanding the form of Wittgenstein’s arguments: in a Kantian way, logic and language do present a necessary structure or scaffolding, and yet contra Kant this structure is not something to be scaled for knowledge of the truth of how things are in nature but rather for identifying our norms of description, our propositions from which we describe the world. The world and all its facts are contingent for “there are no rules or necessities in the natural world.”42 Hence the
Tractatus states:
A necessity for one thing to happen because another has happened does not exist. There is only logical necessity (T 6.37).
As there is only a logical necessity, so there is only a logical impossibility (T 6.375).
As these quotes intimate, the world and all its facts are not necessary in their states nor is it impossible for them to exist in another way. “‘Strange coincidence, that every man whose skull has been opened had a brain!’” (OC 207). Likewise, “I know = I am familiar with it as a certainty” (OC 272). This contingency opens the possibility for Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy to clarify and seek understanding verses articulating first
41 Hacker, 2013: 46.
principles as knowledge. Wittgenstein’s concern is not foundationalist; his goal, rather, is to identify necessity and impossibility where it is present in the human sphere of logic and language. The “scaffolding of our thoughts” that forms our way of looking at things arises from our inherent experience in the human realm; Wittgenstein notes obviously that just as every human being has parents, so, too, thoughts grow from within the context of experienced life (OC 211). Such conceptual scaffolding naturally bears a Kantian reminiscence, and yet such forms arise from communal experience and hence lack a true transcendental origin.
To better understand Wittgenstein’s focus on necessity from within human experience and logic, we can look to his developing thought around the year 1929 when he was engaging Schlick, Waismann, and others within the Vienna Circle regarding how the
Tractatus may or may not align with their positivism. According to Monk, Wittgenstein
began during this time to attend to “a more comprehensive syntax” that functioned amidst the inner connections of logical propositions, and he saw this syntax exemplified in the geometry of a circle. Imagine someone posits that a “circle” has a length of 3cm and a width of 2cm. The natural response of course is to ask what one means then by a circle? “These rules are provided by the syntax, or, as Wittgenstein also says, the ‘grammar’ of our language, which in this case establishes an ‘internal connection’ between something’s being a circle and its having only one radius” (VC 78).43 Wittgenstein’s point was that the rule for a circle having only one radius arises from the syntax or the “grammar” of our language and not some other presumed a priori necessity of “what is” a circle. By thus turning the question, Wittgenstein sees inference emerging
43 Monk, 1990: 285.
from the syntax of systems of propositions agreed upon within the human realm just as the syntax of human agreement regarding colors distinguishes between, say, red and blue. Were someone to call a red ball “blue,” the natural response would be to question this statement based on the agreed upon definition of the two colors. Why make this distinction? What is, in effect, the real difference between the syntax of agreed upon propositions and “necessary properties of space, time, and matter?” Wittgenstein’s answer addresses contingency—and demonstrates his phenomenological approach (distinguishing sense from nonsense) verses one of physics (determining true or false): “Physics does not yield a description of the structure of phenomenological states of affairs. In phenomenology it is always a matter of possibility, i.e. of sense, not of truth and falsity” (VC 63). Wittgenstein’s thought was very much in development at this time, and yet, contra the positivists, he landed firmly on the necessity of determining the syntax and sense of things. Monk draws attention to Wittgenstein’s distancing himself from a positivistic “dogmatic application” of a theory of meaning:
I used at one time to say that, in order to get clear how a sentence is used, it was a good idea to ask oneself the question: ‘How would one try to verify such an assertion?’ But that’s just one way among others of getting clear about the use of a word or sentence. For example, another question which it is often very useful to ask oneself is: ‘How is this word learned?’ ‘How would one set about teaching a child this word?’ But some people have turned this suggestion about asking for the verification into a dogma – as if I’d been advancing a theory about meaning.”44
Implicit within Wittgenstein’s aim to uncover the syntax and sense of things is a certain givenness in language, evidenced empirically, that differs notably from Kant’s ideal language. Hence in Garver’s reading, Wittgenstein can be seen presenting a
44 Monk, 1990: 287-88; cf., 283-85.
generalization of Aristotle’s categories, especially where Aristotle indicates varieties in truth-claims. Wittgenstein picks up significantly on puzzling variations in language— jokes, orders, exclamations, etc.—that constitute a phenomenon to be experienced and reflected upon.45 This givenness of language is not that it has to exist but that it does as a “feature of human life” and a “very general fact of nature.” Wittgenstein assumes no “ultimate or metaphysical value” in the rules of grammar à la transcendental reasoning but rather that these rules are social facts simply given to us.46
Our mistake is to look for an explanation where we ought to regard the facts as ‘proto-phenomena’. That is, where we ought to say: this is the language game that is being played. The point is not to explain a language-game by means of our experiences, but to take account of the language-game. What is the purpose of telling someone that previously I had such-and-such a wish? – Regard the