"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 12

In December 1929 Wittgenstein began to think about an autobiography, a plan which was in the end abandoned. Such an autobiography would likely have drawn much from Augustine's Confessions, which he approvingly considered likely 'the most serious book ever written'. Characteristically, a favourite passages of his from this work was: "Yet woe betide those who are silent about You! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find the words to describe You." Wittgenstein recast this passage rather freely, at one time stating it as: "And woe to those who say nothing concerning Thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense", or even: "What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!" According to the biographer, the meaning of Wittgenstein's rendering is that one should silence "chatterboxes" but not necessarily stop talking "nonsense" (i.e. talk about ethics, God-talk) oneself: it all depends on the spirit in which the act is done. It is equally important to stop people's blabbering about ethics and to see that the inclination to talk nonsense pointed to something of significance. He was particularly sympathetic with the existentialists, e.g. Heidegger's language in lines such as "That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such" and Kierkegaard's in speaking of "this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion".

[Blogger's note: this kind of notion in Kierkegaard reflects an anti-rationalist tradition in German thought which draws strongly from Luther and seems to me always to have been an element of Lutheranism. Luther sometimes goes to the extent of denouncing Reason altogether in his hyperbolic fashion. This tradition also crops up in Bach, in an aria the title of which the musicologist Taruskin translates as "Shut up, stumbling Reason".]

These are not thinkers that were favoured by the Vienna circle. Heidegger in particular was often referred to by the logical positivists as the an example of what they condemned. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein cooperated with the Vienna circle on a book of theirs which was to introduce the ideas of the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein began to introduce thinking which diverged from that of the Tractatus and eventually withdrew his cooperation. The book remained unpublished. Wittgenstein's somewhat ambiguous position in Austrian philosophical circles as a respected but shadowy figure led some to speculate that he was a kind of Bourbaki at this time.

Wittgenstein now started to investigate the more complex syntax which he believed to necessary since he had abandoned the idea that elementary propositions were independent and that all inference was based on tautological form. To do this he had to describe the role of the relationships between propositions. Wittgenstein's thinking changed by the week during this process. As an example of the "syntax of propositions", he imagined someone describing a "circle" that was 3cm long and 2cm wide. Such a "circle" is ruled out by the "syntax" of geometrical terminology, according to Wittgenstein. Similarly, the fact that blueness and redness cannot be predicated of the same point is ruled out by the "syntax" surrounding colour. There are different grammars that form systems of interconnected elementary propositions, and these allow for inferences that could not be made on the basis of the theory set forth in the Tractatus, which insisted that all inference was based on the concept of tautology. Wittgenstein insisted that he was not doing physics, mathematics or the like: he was not trying to establish what was true, but what could be meaningfully said and what was nonsense. He further commented:

Once I wrote, 'a proposition is laid against reality like a ruler....' I now prefer to say that a system of propositions is laid against reality like a ruler. What I mean [is:] If I lay a ruler against a spatial object, I lay all the graduating lines against it at the same time.

Schlick found this unpleasantly Kantian, especially since Wittgenstein used the term "structure of phenomenological states", one which described the structure of how the world appears without reference to objective physical relationships. He asked, "What answer can you give to a philosopher who believes that the statements of phenomenology are synthetic a priori judgements?" Wittgenstein's reply is obscure, but a remark not addressed to Schlick shows that he believed his view that certain grammatical rules are not replaceable by tautologies "explains... what Kant means when he insists that 7+5=12 is not an analytic proposition, but a synthetic proposition a priori". Wittgenstein thus claims that where Kant tries to say, he shows.

Schlick and the Vienna Circle were better pleased by "Wittgenstein's Princple of Verification": that for propositions, to be meaningful, we must have some understanding of what would be the case if they were true, and therefore we must have the means of establishing their truth-value. This was adopted by, and became closely identified with, logical positivism, for example in Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. The principle became embodied in a slogan: "The sense of a proposition is its means of verification". Wittgenstein also said, "The verification is not one token of the truth, it is the sense of the proposition." Wittgenstein rejected the idea that there is meaningful propositions could only be verified to a limited extent or by approximation; a specific and completely adequate procedure of verification was needed, and if one could not be found, the proposition meant nothing.

Wittgenstein later stated that the question of how one could verify assertions is just one means of determining meaning (other means include asking how a child learns a word), that the "verification principle" was never meant to be the basis of a theory of meaning, and it was not a dogma. Wittgenstein's minimisation of his own former dogmatism about verification can be understood when one bears in mind that he wished it to be considered in a Kantian and not an empiricist context. Questioned later on verification, he told a parable about a kind of census in which people's employment is recorded. If it is discovered that a citizen does not work, this fact is also recorded because it is important. The biographer interprets this to mean that the discovery that a proposition cannot be verified is to understand something important about it, but not that there is nothing in the proposition to understand.

In 1930 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge to find that Ramsey was ill. It soon became clear that he was dying. Wittgenstein is said to have been particularly kind and personally grieved under these circumstances. He gave his first lecture a day after Ramsey's death.

Wittgenstein's lectures were given without notes, and he appeared to be thinking aloud. Indeed, he would often stop altogether in order to think something out. The lecture might restart when a student asked a question and Wittgenstein responded by cursing his own stupidity. His hearers remarked that his approach to lectures on philosophy appeared to proceed on poetic rather than formal lines; and that this was deliberate is indicated by Wittgenstein's own remarks.

According to Wittgenstein, the practice of philosophy was founded on the aim of getting rid of the puzzlements of language. The features of the grammar of a language were to be pointed out, since grammar "fixes the degree of freedom" in language by defining what makes sense and what doesn't. Grammar concerns possibility and not truth and is a "mirror of reality". It should be grasped that Wittgenstein's notion of "grammar" was very wide; he defined geometry as a grammar.

The relations defined by grammar are internal to the grammar and contrasted it with a causal theory of meaning in which the relationship is external. Russell had claimed that words are correctly used when they make the images or sensations intended by the speaker appear to the hearer, but Wittgenstein saw the emphasis on cause and effect as misguided. He satirized Russell's view as follows: "If I wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach. taking away my appetite, then it was this punch in the stomach that I originally wanted."

At the end of the term, his money was running out, and Moore applied to Russell for a favourable assessment to secure him another grant. Russell was understandably not enthusiastic, the more so since he was desperately overworked, with a collapsing marriage. Wittgenstein, for his part, made an effort by producing his Philosophical Remarks, which is usually seen as a transitional work between the Tractatus and the Investigations. It is his most verificationist and phenomenological work, using the Vienna Circle's means, but opposed to their aims. Wittgenstein harshly criticized Russell's popular works concerning ethics.

Russell's rather tired attempt to give a reply to Moore was found to be sufficient when rewritten in 'grander language, which the Council will be able to understand.' Wittgenstein received another 100-pound grant. That summer, Goedel revealed his Incompleteness theorems, which are widely believed to have rendered Russell's aims in the Principia Mathematica unreachable.

The same summer, Wittgenstein also worked on further clarifications on the Tractatus that include statements on verification:

If I say 'My friend is angry' and establish this in virtue of his displaying a certain perceptible behaviour, I only mean that he displays that behaviour. And if I mean more by it, I cannot say what that extra consists in.

Wittgenstein quickly grew dissatisfied with these statement, however, believing that they partook of the mistaken dogmatism in the Tractatus.

In a double irony, the turn he now took was presaged in the Tractatus - which had not however conformed to its own statements in the matter. This turn was one towards not stating any doctrines at all. Instead, a technique of achieving clarity should be demonstrated. In the Tractatus this idea is stated in saying that the only strictly correct method in philosophy would be to make only non-philosophical statements of natural science and to respond to all statements of metaphysics by a demonstration that certain signs in those statements had not been properly invested with meaning.