WITTGENSTEIN
Our discussion has brought us, by various routes, to that point in
philosophical history from which, for a long time, many philosophers
have dated its commencement. The discovery of the new logic
precipitated ‘analytical’ philosophy, bringing about, first logical atomism,
then logical positivism and finally linguistic analysis, the practitioners
of which have often paid scant heed to the arguments and aims of their
predecessors. A single figure contributed decisively to the formation of
each of these schools, and the same figure sowed in each of them the
seeds of its destruction.
The rise of ‘analytical’ philosophy
Much has been written in recent years about the life and philosophy
of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951). It is now widely thought that
he is the most important philosopher of our century. It is hard,
nevertheless, to fit his thought into the history of the subject, partly
because of its later iconoclasm, partly because, like Frege, he began
from reflections which, in the light of that history, may seem
parochial and even without philosophical relevance. As a prelude,
therefore, it is necessary to say something about the state of English
philosophy at the time when Wittgenstein first took an interest in it.
This interest presaged the prolonged influence of Viennese ideas on
Anglo-American thought. We must return a little in time, to the ideas
of Russell and Moore.
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Bertrand Arthur, third Earl Russell (1872–1970) has been mentioned
so far in connection with the new logic, which he transformed into a
powerful tool of philosophical analysis. No less important historically
was his friend G.E.Moore (1873–1958), the writer of an important
treatise on ethics, Principia Ethica (1903), and the relentless foe of all
forms of metaphysical speculation that seemed to be the enemies of
common sense. Together, Moore and Russell devoted themselves to the
demolition of the arguments of British idealism, as these were represented
by Bradley (at Oxford) and J.M.McTaggart (1866–1925) at their own
university of Cambridge. Russell, in his early work on the foundations
of geometry, acknowledges the influence of Bradley’s Logic. But this
did not prevent him from discerning, in Bradley’s famous proof of the
makeshift character of both objects and qualities (see p. 233), a confusion
between the ‘is’ of predication and the ‘is’ of identity, or from accusing
Bradley and McTaggart of sleight of hand in almost all their proofs for
the inadequacy of our common sense conceptions of space, time and
matter. Moore joined in the battle, adding not so much arguments as
peculiarly dramatic assertions. How is it possible, he asked, for my belief
that I have two hands to be less certain than the validity of all the
philosophical arguments which have been adduced to disprove it? The
combination of Russell’s mercurial logic, and Moore’s robust refusal to
think further than his nose, or hands, proved extremely destructive,
and it became fashionable to describe idealist metaphysics not as false,
but as meaningless. Other philosophers—notably Hume—had said
similar things. But now more than ever it seemed possible to prove the
point, by developing a theory of the structure of language that would
show precisely what could and what could not be said. And it was
supposed that among the things that could not be said, metaphysics
was the most easily recognisable.
The first such theory was logical atomism, adumbrated by Russell,
and more or less completely expressed in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus (1921). This work, more succinct even than
Leibniz’s Monadology, claimed to give the final answers to the questions
of philosophy. It was inspired in part by Russell’s famous theory of
descriptions, published in 1905, in an article that F.P.Ramsey (1903–
1930) described as ‘a paradigm of philosophy’. This theory will therefore
serve as a fitting introduction to Wittgenstein’s work.
WITTGENSTEIN 269
The theory of descriptions
It is strange, but nevertheless true, that one of the most important
publications in modern philosophy should have had, as its ostensible
purpose, the explanation of the meaning of the word ‘the’. What is the
difference, Russell asks, between the sentence ‘a golden mountain exists’
and the sentence ‘the golden mountain exists’? The first expression is
explained by the new logic as follows: the predicate ‘golden mountain’
is instantiated, or, more formally, there exists an x such that x is a golden
mountain. This proposition is clearly false. But what about the second
proposition? Here the word ‘the’ seems to change the predicate ‘golden
mountain’ into what Russell would call a denoting phrase (and what
Frege had called a name). This is a strange effect of grammar. It has a
yet stranger logical consequence, namely, that the sentence seems to
refer to something—the golden mountain. But how is that possible, if
no golden mountain exists? Here, Russell argued, we have a paradigm
case of a grammatical form which conceals the logical form of a sentence.
Taking his cue from his own and Frege’s implicit definition of number,
he offers an implicit definition of the word ‘the’. We cannot say explicitly
what the term ‘the’ denotes, but we can show how to eliminate it from
all the sentences in which it occurs.
Consider the sentence, ‘the King of France is bald’. For this to be true,
there must be a king of France, and he must be bald. Moreover, to capture
the distinctive sense of the word ‘the’ we have to add that there is only
one king of France. The conditions which make the sentence true give us
its meaning; hence we can say that ‘the King of France is bald’ is equivalent
to the conjunction of three propositions: ‘there exists a king of France;
everything which is a king of France is bald; and there is only one king of
France.’ (More formally—there exists an x such that: x is a king of France
and x is bald, and, for all y, if y is a king of France, y is identical to x.) It
follows from this analysis that, if there is no king of France, then the
original sentence is false. The phrase ‘the King of France’, which seemed
to be a denoting phrase or name, is in fact no such thing, but rather a
predicate attached to a concealed existential claim. The King of France is,
as Russell put it, a logical fiction. (There is a historical antecedent for this
kind of philosophical theory in Bentham’s theory of fictions.)
Philosophically, Russell directed his arguments against certain
phenomenologists (notably Alexius Meinong (1853–1920)) who had
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wanted to conclude that, if we can think of something, such as the golden
mountain, then that thing must, in some sense, exist. (If you don’t like the
word ‘exist’, then another—‘subsist’—is offered to allay your logical
susceptibilities.) Russell did not fully grasp that Meinong and his associates
were not so much engaged in exploring the logic of denotation, as in
examining the ‘intentional object’ of thought. Be that as it may, however,
Russell’s argument lent itself to instant generalisation, and in this
generalised form provided a basis for the philosophy of the Tractatus.
Logical atomism and the Tractatus
According to the Tractatus, everything that can be thought can also be
said. The limits of language are, therefore, the limits of thought, so that
a complete philosophy of the ‘sayable’ will be a complete theory of
what Kant had called ‘the understanding’. All metaphysical problems
arise because of the attempt to say what cannot be said. A proper analysis
of the structure of the terms used in that attempt will show this to be so,
and thus either solve or dissolve the problems.
What then is the structure of language? Wittgenstein divided all
sentences into the complex and the atomic, and asserted that the former
were built up from the latter by rules of formation which could be fully
interpreted in terms of Russell’s logic (as this had been expounded in
Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (1910–1913)). Atomic
sentences are those which employ the primitives of the language: the
elementary names and predicates which, being themselves indefinable
serve to pick out (or ‘picture’) what Wittgenstein called atomic facts.
Only a completed proposition can be true or false, and so only a
completed proposition can tell us anything about the world. Hence there
can be no more basic constituent of the world than that which
corresponds to the atomic sentence. This basic constituent is the atomic
fact, and the world is therefore the totality of such facts.
Corresponding to complex propositions are complex facts, and to
understand these complex facts we must understand the complexity of
the language used to express them. This complexity is entirely given by
the Fregean and Russellian logic. Thus ‘the King of France is bald’ is
(although it seems not to be) a complex sentence, since its true structure
(that is, its structure as represented by the new logic) shows it to consist
of three incomplete sentences, combined and completed by quantification
WITTGENSTEIN 271
and the connective ‘and’. Many sentences are like that. They seem to be
basic, but are in fact complex. In general many of the things we refer to
are logical constructions (or fictions). Sentences which describe them
are shorthand for more complex sentences referring to the constituents
of quite different, but more basic, facts, in which these ‘logical
constructions’ do not occur. A sentence like ‘the average man has 2.6
children’ is really shorthand for a complex mathematical sentence relating
the numbers of children of men to the numbers of men. ‘The average
man’ features in no atomic sentence, which is to say that ‘the average
man’ names no constituent of reality. The same is true of the English
nation, and of many ‘metaphysical’ entities that have seemed to pose
philosophical problems. Wittgenstein was less specific than Russell, and
certainly less specific than the logical positivists, for whom nevertheless
the Tractatus provided the complete apparatus of philosophical
argument, as to which facts are atomic and which are not. He wished to
give the clear, statement of the logical structure of the world: its actual
contents did not concern him.
The all-important feature of complex sentences is that the connectives
which are used to build them must be ‘truth-functional’. That is to say,
they must be such that the truth-value of the complex sentence is entirely
determined by the truth-values of its parts. This is the ‘principle of
extensionality’ that we have already encountered in discussing Frege,
and which, according to Wittgenstein, is a precondition of logical thought
and analysis. Logic is concerned purely with the systematic
transformation of truth-values, and hence a logical language must be
transparent to truth-values. It must be possible to see every operation in
terms of the transformation of truth and falsehood. (The word ‘not’ has
the sense that it turns truth to falsehood and falsehood to truth; ‘if’ that
it makes a complex sentence that is false if the antecedent is true and the
consequent false, otherwise true; and so on.)
The notion of a truth-functional language gives exactness and cogency
to Wittgenstein’s claim that there is a real distinction between atomic and
non-atomic sentences. He is able to say not only what the distinction is,
but more importantly, how we are able to understand it. There is no
difficulty, with a truth-functional language, in explaining how the
understanding of atomic sentences leads to an understanding of all the
infinite complexes that can be built from them. (This is another application
of a principle of Frege’s, discussed here on pp. 245–6.) The conditions for
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the truth of a complex sentence formed truth-functionally can be derived
immediately from the truth-conditions of its parts. And hence if we
understand the truth-conditions of the parts, we understand the whole.
Moreover, Wittgenstein is able to provide a novel and seemingly
utterly clear distinction between the necessary and the contingent, the
analytic and the synthetic, the a priori and the a posteriori. These
distinctions become one distinction, that between logical truth and
contingency. A sentence is a logical truth if it is made true by every
substitution of terms for the ‘primitive’ parts which it contains. (A
primitive part being one which admits of no further definition.) The
paradigm example of the logical truth is the truth-functional ‘tautology’.
Consider the sentence ‘p or q’. The definition of ‘or’ reads thus: p or q is
false if both p and q are false, otherwise true. The definition of ‘not’ is:
not-p is true if p is false, false if p is true. From which it follows that the
sentence ‘p or not-p’ is always true, whatever the truth-value of ‘p’. So,
no matter what we substitute for the primitive term ‘p’, the resulting
sentence will always be true. Sentences of this form are therefore
necessarily true, and can be seen to be true a priori by anyone who
understands the logical operations of the language.
This theory of necessary truth has the consequence, Wittgenstein
thought, that necessary truths are empty: they say nothing because they
exclude nothing. They are compatible with every state of affairs. The
world is described by the totality of true atomic propositions: these are
true, but, being atomic, might have been false, since there is nothing in
their structure to determine their truth-value. Another way of putting
this is that facts exist in ‘logical space’. This logical space defines the
possibilities; the true atomic sentences describe what is actual, while
tautologies reflect properties of logical space itself.
There are deep metaphysical problems raised by this account of
language. First there is the problem of the relation between atomic
sentences and atomic facts. Wittgenstein calls this relation one of
‘picturing’, and this metaphor has misled many of his commentators.
He also says that the relation cannot be described, but only shown:
indeed it was his view that what is most basic must be shown; otherwise
description could never begin. Precisely what is meant by ‘showing’ is
not clear. Perhaps the best way to understand this theory—sometimes
called the ‘picture theory of meaning’—is as a denial, to use a later
phrase of Wittgenstein’s, that we can use language ‘to get between
WITTGENSTEIN 273
language and the world’. We cannot give an account in words of the
relation between an atomic fact and an atomic proposition except by
using the proposition whose truth we are trying to explain. We cannot
‘think’ the atomic fact without thinking the sentence which ‘pictures’ it.
The limits of thought are the limits of language. Wittgenstein concludes
his book with the laconic statement: ‘that whereof we cannot speak we
must consign to silence.’
One of the problems for the philosophy of the Tractatus is indicated
in that very utterance. Only atomic sentences, truth-functional
complexes, and tautologies are meaningful. But what of the theory which
says so? It is not an atomic sentence, nor any complex of such: it purports
to say, not how things are but how they must be. But it is not a tautology.
Is it then meaningless? Wittgenstein actually says ‘yes’, and with that
bold gesture moves on to the conclusion of his philosophy, adding that
his propositions must serve as a ladder to be thrown away by those
who have managed to ascend it.
Wittgenstein and linguistic analysis
There is about the Tractatus something of the fascination of Kant’s first
Critique: the fascination of a doctrine that struggles as hard as possible
to describe the limits of the intelligible only to be compelled, in the
course of doing so, to transcend them. Wittgenstein nowhere
acknowledges the likeness of his thought to Kant’s, or indeed to anyone’s
except Russell’s, but the parallel between the two philosophers becomes
more and more striking, so striking, indeed, that some have seen the
argument of the posthumous Philosophical Investigations as completing
at last the work of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction.
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy evolved out of a reaction to the earlier,
or rather to a certain extremely influential interpretation of it. In the
Tractatus the metaphysics of logical atomism is presented with almost no
reference to any specific theory of knowledge. Russell’s own version of
the theory was decidedly empiricist, identifying the ‘atomic facts’ as facts
about the immediate contents of experience (or ‘sense-data’ as Russell
called them). Using the apparatus of Wittgenstein’s theory, Russell was
then able to restate a version of empiricism in the sceptical spirit of Hume,
proposing to construe every entity in the world other than sense-data as a
‘logical construction’. Whether or not we do mean, when referring to
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tables, to refer to logical constructions out of sense-data, it is, Russell
thought, all that we ought to mean. As he put it, ‘wherever possible,
logical constructions are to be substituted for inferred entities’. Philosophy
thus took a step in the direction of logical positivism, according to which
all metaphysical, ethical and theological doctrines are meaningless, not
because of any defect of logical thought, but because they are unverifiable.
The slogan of positivism—that the meaning of a sentence is its method of
verification—is taken from the Tractatus, as was much of the apparatus
whereby it sought to rid the world of metaphysical entities. But its spirit
was that of Hume, and its principal theories were restatements of Hume’s
ideas concerning causality, the physical world and morality, in terms of
an ‘analytic’ rather than a ‘genetic’ theory of meaning. By the time this
programme was under way, in the work of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970)
and others of the so-called ‘Vienna Circle’ (see especially Carnap’s Logical
Structure of the World, 1928), Wittgenstein had renounced all allegiance
to atomism and its progeny, had ceased publication and begun a hermetic,
and often nomadic, existence which ensured that, until his death, what
influence he had was confined to those privileged to know him personally,
or to catch sight of the manuscripts which he occasionally allowed to
pass from his hands. Among these manuscripts the most famous—The
Blue and Brown Books—reached Oxford in the 1940s, and there
precipitated the school of ‘linguistic analysis’ for which J.L.Austin (1911–
1960) and Gilbert Ryle (1900–1977) were already preparing the way.
But that school, consisting as it does of figures too many and too minor
to warrant our attention, and being characterised less by any theory than
by the refusal to subscribe to one, is not one that I shall discuss. Nor shall
I consider the later development of logical positivism in America, where
it entered into a fruitful marriage—through Carnap’s pupils Nelson
Goodman and Willard van Orman Quine—with the local ‘pragmatism’
of C.S.Peirce, (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910) and C.I.Lewis
(1883–1964). Instead I shall conclude this work with an outline of certain
arguments expressed in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), The
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956) and elsewhere.
Because they relate directly to the history of the subject as I have so far
described it, these arguments will give some indication, however slight,
of the extent to which Wittgenstein’s later philosophy has transformed
and even brought to an end the tradition of intellectual enquiry which
began with Descartes.
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The later Wittgenstein
The emphasis of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is decidedly
anthropocentric. While still interested in questions concerning meaning
and the limits of significant utterance, the starting-point has become,
not the immutable abstractions of an ideal logic, but the fallible efforts
of human communication. At the same time, the human element has
not entered through the usual channel of epistemology, but in a wholly
surprising way. Wittgenstein introduces it through a priori reflections
on the nature of the human mind, and on the social behaviour which
endows that mind with its characteristic structure. What is ‘given’ is
not the ‘sense-data’ of the positivists, but the ‘forms of life’ of Kantian
philosophical anthropology. To put it in another way: the subject of
any theory of meaning and understanding is the public practice of
utterance, and all that makes this practice possible. Thus Wittgenstein
begins his later investigations into the nature of language at the point
where Frege broke off. He develops the thesis of the ‘publicity’ of sense,
which had already led Frege to reject traditional empiricist theories of
meaning. The result is not only a new account of the nature of language,
but also a revolutionary philosophy of mind. The metaphysical problems
that had occupied Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer are rephrased as
difficulties in the interpretation of consciousness. Construed thus they
suddenly seem capable of resolution.
The social perspective caused Wittgenstein to move away from Frege’s
emphasis on the concept of truth, or rather, to see this emphasis as
reflecting a more fundamental demand that human utterance be
answerable to a standard of correctness. This standard is not God-given,
nor does it lie dormant in the order of nature. It is a human artifact, as
much the product as the producer of the linguistic practices which it
governs. This does not mean that an individual can decide for himself
what is right and wrong in the art of communication. On the contrary,
the constraint of publicity binds each and all of us; moreover that
constraint is intimately bound up with our conception of ourselves as
beings who observe and act upon an independent world. Nevertheless,
it is true that there is no constraint involved in common usage other
than usage itself. If we come up against truths which seem to us to be
necessary, this can only be because we have created the rules that make
them so, and what we create we can also forgo. The compulsion that
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we experience in logical inference, for example, is no compulsion,
independently of our disposition so to experience it.
This kind of reflection led Wittgenstein towards a highly sophisticated
form of nominalism: a denial that we can look outside linguistic practice
for the thing which governs it. The ultimate facts are language, and the
forms of life which grow from language and make language possible.
Nominalism is not new, nor has it lacked exponents in our day. Nelson
Goodman (b. 1906), for example, has advocated, using arguments that
often resemble Wittgenstein’s, a kind of nominalism that incorporates a
whole philosophy of science together with a theory of knowledge. What
is peculiar to Wittgenstein is the transition that he makes at this juncture
from the philosophy of language to the philosophy of mind. During the
course of this transition, he attempts to overthrow the major premise of
almost all Western philosophy since Descartes—the premise of the
‘priority of the first-person case’.
Wittgenstein uses a variety of arguments, designed to show what
this premise really means, and in the course of doing so to demonstrate
its untenability. Together these arguments provide what can best be
described as a ‘picture’ of human consciousness. This picture has many
aspects, some metaphysical, some epistemological: it involves the
rejection of the Cartesian quest for certainty, the demolition of the view
that mental events are private episodes observable to one person alone,
the rejection of all attempts to understand the human mind in isolation
from the social practices through which it finds expression. It is
impossible here to give all the considerations whereby Wittgenstein
upholds ‘the priority of the third-person case’. I shall therefore mention
one or two central strands of argument and draw some conclusions as
to the historical and philosophical significance of the thesis.
The private language argument
The most famous argument advanced for the Wittgensteinian position
is that which has come to be known as ‘the private language argument’.
This occurs in many versions in the Philosophical Investigations and
has been the subject of much commentary. In outline, it seems to me the
argument is as follows: there is a peculiar ‘privilege’ or ‘immediacy’
involved in the knowledge of our own present experiences. In some
sense it is nonsense to suggest that I have to find out about them, or that
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I could, in the normal run of things, be mistaken. (This is the thought
which also underlies Kant’s thesis of the ‘Transcendental Unity of
Apperception’, see pp. 137–8.) As a result there has arisen what we
might call the ‘first-person illusion’. I can be more certain about my
mental states than about yours. This can only be because I observe my
mental states directly, yours indirectly. When I see you in pain, I see
physical behaviour, its causes, a certain complex state of an organism.
But this is not the pain that you have, only some contingent
accompaniment of it. The pain itself lies hidden behind its expression,
directly observable to its sufferer alone.
That is, in brief, the Cartesian theory of mind, presented as an explanation
of the first-person case. Both the theory, Wittgenstein argues, and the thing
that it is put forward to explain, are illusions. Suppose the theory were
true. Then, Wittgenstein argues, we could not refer to our sensations by
means of words intelligible in a public language. For words in a public
language get their sense publicly, by being attached to publicly accessible
conditions that warrant their application. These conditions will determine
not only their sense, but also their reference. The assumption that this
reference is private (in the sense of being observable, in principle, to one
person alone) is, Wittgenstein argues, incompatible with the hypothesis
that the sense is public. Hence, if mental events are as the Cartesian describes
them to be, no word in our public language could actually refer to them.
In effect, however, Cartesians and their empiricist progeny have
always, wittingly or unwittingly, accepted that conclusion, and written
as though we each describe our sensations and other present mental
episodes in a language which, because its field of reference is inaccessible
in principle to others, is intelligible to the speaker alone. Wittgenstein
argues against the possibility of such a private language. He attempts to
prove that there can be no difference made, by the speaker of that
language, between how things seem to him and how things are. He
would lose the distinction between being and seeming. But this means
losing the idea of objective reference. The language is not aimed at reality
at all; it becomes instead an arbitrary game. What seems right is what is
right; hence one can no longer speak of right.
The conclusion is this: we cannot refer to Cartesian mental events
(private objects) in a public language; nor can we refer to them in a
private language. Hence we cannot refer to them. But, someone might
say, they may nevertheless exist! To which Wittgenstein replies, in a
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manner reminiscent of Kant’s attack on the noumenon, that a nothing
will do as well as a something about which nothing can be said.
Moreover, we can refer to sensations; so whatever they are, sensations
are not Cartesian mental events.
Wittgenstein accompanies this argument with an acute description,
from the third-person point of view, of many complex mental
phenomena—in particular those of perception, intention, expectation
and desire. His arguments, as he acknowledges, refute, if successful, the
possibility of a ‘pure phenomenology’, since they have the implication
that nothing about the essence of the mental (or about the essence of
anything) can be learned from the study (in Cartesian isolation) of the
first person alone. The ‘immediacy’ of the first-person case is an index
only of its shallowness. It is true that I know my own mental states
without observing my behaviour; but this is not because I am observing
something else. It is simply an illusion, thrown up by self-consciousness,
that the necessary authority that accompanies the public usage of ‘I’, is
an authority about some matter of which only the ‘I’ has knowledge.
The priority of the third person
Despite this rejection of the ‘method’ of phenomenology, however,
Wittgenstein showed himself sympathetic to an ambition which had
become—through a series of historical accidents—allied to it. Thinkers
like the Kantian Dilthey (see p. 255) had sought for the foundations of a
peculiarly ‘human’ understanding, according to which the world would
be seen, not scientifically, but under the aspect of ‘meaning’. Wittgenstein,
in common with some phenomenologists, such as Merleau-Ponty and
Sartre, argued that we perceive and understand human behaviour in a
manner different from that in which we perceive and understand the
natural world. We explain human behaviour by giving reasons, not causes.
We address ourselves to our future by making decisions, not predictions.
We understand the past and present of mankind through our aims,
emotions and activity, and not through predictive theories. All these
distinctions seem to create the idea, if not of a specifically human world,
at least of a specifically human way of seeing things. Much of
Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is devoted to describing and analysing
the characteristics of human understanding, and demolishing what he
thought to be the vulgar illusion that science could generate a description
WITTGENSTEIN 279
of all those things with which our humanity (or to put it more
philosophically, our existence as rational agents) is mingled. He defends
the positions not only that our knowledge of our own minds presupposes
the knowledge of the minds of others, but also that as the phenomenologist
Max Scheler (1874–1928) put it—‘our conviction of the existence of other
minds is earlier and deeper than our belief in the existence of nature’. In
other words, despite the attack on the method and metaphysics of
phenomenology, Wittgenstein shares with the phenomenologists the sense
that there is a mystery in human things that will not yield to scientific
investigation. This mystery is dispelled not by explanation, but only by
careful philosophical description of the ‘given’. The difference is that, for
Wittgenstein, what is ‘given’ is not the contents of immediate experience,
but the forms of life which make experience possible.
The demolition of the first-person illusion has two consequences. First,
we cannot begin our enquiries from the first-person case and think that it
gives us a paradigm of certainty. For, taken in isolation, it gives us nothing
at all. Secondly, while the distinction between being and seeming does not
exist for me when I contemplate my own sensations, this is only because I
speak a public language which determines this peculiar property of firstperson knowledge. The collapse of being and seeming into each other, as in
first-person awareness, is a ‘degenerate’ case. I can know, therefore, that if
this collapse is possible, it is because there are people in the world besides
myself, and because I have a nature and form of life in common with them.
I do indeed inhabit an objective world, a world where things are or can be
other than they seem. So, in a standing way, the argument of Kant’s
Transcendental Deduction is found. The precondition of self-knowledge
(of the Transcendental Unity of Apperception) is, after all, the knowledge
of others, and of the objective world which contains them.
Much has changed in philosophy since Wittgenstein produced his
arguments. One thing is certain, however. The assumption that there is
first-person certainty, which provides a starting-point for philosophical
enquiry, this assumption which led to the rationalism of Descartes and
to the empiricism of Hume, to so much of modern epistemology and so
much of modern metaphysics, has been finally removed from the centre
of philosophy. The ambition of Kant and Hegel, to achieve a philosophy
which removes the ‘self’ from the beginning of knowledge so as to return
it in an enriched and completed form at the end, has perhaps now been
fulfilled.