Philosophical Writings Vol. 40 No.1

Transcription

1 Philosophical Writings Vol. 40 No.1 1 University of Limerick Ludwig Wittgenstein s Tractatus has rightly been regarded as paramount to the rise of analytic philosophy and a dominant influence on the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. Otto Neurath, however, and subsequently Ayer, did come to realise that Wittgenstein was not offering the positivist committal of metaphysics to the flames. Nevertheless, they regard his conception of the tautological necessity that is the mark of logical truths as exerting a positive influence on the development of their own thought. This paper maintains that Wittgenstein has here been misunderstood through excessively analytic readings of his text. The recontextualisation of Wittgenstein s Tractatus within the frame of the Kantian tradition, of which he is equally the inheritor, reveals a deep discrepancy between Wittgenstein and the positivists with regard to the nature of necessity. For Wittgenstein, it will be argued, unlike the positivists, extends necessity to the realm of ethical, as well as logical truths. Date Submitted: 10/10/2010 Date Accepted: 07/04/2011 Vol. 40 pp This paper is adapted from my PhD thesis, Tractarian Holism: Transcendental Solipsism in the Context of the Kantian Tradition (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2005). Neither the paper nor the thesis could have been completed without the close supervision and expert guidance of Dr. Stephen Thornton, to whom I am indebted for the interest in Wittgenstein and much else besides. 1

2 Moritz Schlick s The Turning Point in Philosophy opened the first number of Erkenntnis Volume I. Schlick here expresses a confidence that we have reached a turning point in philosophy in which we can now, finally, consider ourselves as moving beyond the fruitless conflict of systems that has hitherto hindered philosophical progress. Schlick claims that the methods are already at hand to make such conflict unnecessary. What is required is the resolute application of these methods, and so firstly an acquaintance with the new philosophical paths. The paths have their origin in logic. Leibniz dimly saw their beginning. Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege have opened up important stretches in the last decades, but Ludwig Wittgenstein (in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 1922) is the first to have pushed forward to the decisive turning point.the insight into the nature of logic itself (Schlick 1959, pp ). The insight into the nature of logic itself is Wittgenstein s contention that the propositions of logic are tautological. For Schlick, this allowed a complete adherence to empiricism, to which logical necessity had provided the greatest previous stumbling block. Kant s notion of synthetic a priori propositions could finally be discarded and the members of the Vienna Circle could consistently cling to conventionalism with regard to necessary truth. With the rejection of Kant s notion of necessity thus comes a regression to Humean empiricism, and an equally Humean characterisation of the philosophical enterprise: Thus metaphysics collapses not because the solving of its tasks is an enterprise to which the human reason is unequal (as for example Kant thought) but because there is no such task (Schlick 1959, p. 57). A.J. Ayer initially consolidated the positivist conception of Wittgenstein s attitude to metaphysics (Ayer 1971, p. 9). But by the publication of Wittgenstein in 1985, he had formed a very different conception of his subject: His attitude was much more akin to that of Kant whose criticisms of metaphysics were intended to limit the scope of the understanding in the interests of faith (Ayer 1985, pp ). Otto Neurath was, from the outset, more perceptive than other members of the Vienna Circle in recognising the gulf between Wittgenstein s position and their own. In Sociology and Physicalism, appearing in Volume II of Erkenntnis, Neurath lists Wittgenstein along with Mach, Poincare and Frege as beginning the work which the Vienna Circle aim to continue (Neurath 1959, p. 284). While Wittgenstein s place within the analytic tradition thus remains assured, Neurath was nevertheless overtly critical of what he, like Ramsey, perceived to be Wittgenstein s inclinations towards 2

3 metaphysical assertion, conceived as something other than the plain nonsense that Hume or members of the Circle would have taken them for (Ramsey 1959, p. 321). The conclusion of the Tractatus, Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent, is, at least grammatically, misleading. It sounds as if there were a something of which one could not speak. We should rather say: if one really wishes to avoid the metaphysical attitude entirely, then one will be silent, but not about something. We have no need of any metaphysical ladder of elucidation. We cannot follow Wittgenstein in this matter, although his great significance for logic is not, for that reason, to be less highly valued. We owe him, among other things, the distinction between tautologies and statements about empirical events (Neurath 1959, p. 284). Such discrepancies between the thought of Wittgenstein and those analytic thinkers whom he both influenced and was influenced by have been well documented. And it has become clear that considering the Tractatus exclusively as a work in analytic philosophy, in the mould of Frege s Begriffsschrift or Russell s Principia, is highly problematic. The false construal of the Tractatus as offering the positivist committal of metaphysics to the flames is a much documented example of the problems thus created. In keeping with the dominant picture of the Tractatus as a work of analytic realism, however, it is equally evident that commentators have assumed that Schlick, Neurath, Ayer and others have at least remained faithful to Wittgenstein in construing the only true necessity as tautological in nature. It is my contention that such an assumption is misguided, and is, furthermore, based on excessively analytic readings of Wittgenstein s Tractatus. While it is difficult to overestimate Wittgenstein s early contribution to the rise of analytic philosophy, or the influence of the new logic of Frege and Russell on Wittgenstein s early thought, Wittgenstein is equally the inheritor of the linguistic and cultural discourse of a continental, Kantian tradition. It is a tradition which, although not entirely ignored in past scholarship, has been largely marginalised. Through the re-contextualisation of Wittgenstein s Tractarian account of necessity within the frame of this latter tradition, this paper will illustrate that any construal of the Tractatus as ridding us finally of the last vestiges of Kant s synthetic a priori is a flawed one. For both Frege and Russell logical propositions were conceived of as the most general of truths. Hacker, in Wittgenstein s Place in Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy, remarks that Frege and Russell had given no satisfactory account of logical necessity. The question of necessity and contingency did not feature as a problem for either of them, although it was to become so for Wittgenstein. For him, 3

4 the mark of a logical proposition is not that it is an absolutely general truth, but that it is an absolutely essential, necessary one (Hacker 1996, p. 25). The common error of interpretation has been to posit conversely that all necessary truths are, for Wittgenstein, consequentially logical ones. Wittgenstein himself explicitly states, in Tractatus 6.37, that The only necessity that exists is logical necessity (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 85). This remark seems nothing more than a restatement of the earlier tautological necessity of logical deduction. Such a reading is implied in Schlick s contention that, in accepting Wittgenstein s conception of logical propositions as tautologies, one is finally rid of the final remnants of Kant s synthetic a priori. It was Schlick s acceptance of Wittgenstein s conception of the nature of logic which allowed him to cling consistently to an empirically grounded conventionalism as regards the nature of necessity. Even Neurath, we have seen, so quick to criticise Wittgenstein s silence directed towards some ineffable truth, is equally quick to cite the division between a tautology and an empirical fact as exerting a positive influence over members of the Circle. This paper deems it to be a misreading of the Tractatus to suppose, as such positivists as Schlick and Neurath subsequently did, that The only necessity that exists is logical necessity says nothing more or less than The only necessity that exists is tautological necessity. For Wittgenstein, it will become clear on a closer reading of the text, uses the term logical in more than one sense. G.E.M. Anscombe, in the introduction to her An Introduction to Wittgenstein s Tractatus, quite rightly says that: If we look for Wittgenstein s philosophical ancestry, we should look (rather) to Schopenhauer; specifically, his solipsism, his conception of the limit and his ideas on value will be better understood in the light of Schopenhauer than of any other philosopher (Anscombe 1971, p. 12). More specifically again, we can say that all of the above themes, as well as Wittgenstein s identification of ethics and aesthetics, are best understood when considered together as indicative of an early tendency towards the transcendental idealism that he had discovered in Schopenhauer. Indeed, the nature of a possible a priori order is, Wittgenstein states in the Notebooks, the fundamental question upon which his early philosophy is based: The great problem round which everything that I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in? (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 53e). Phillips Griffiths, in his article Wittgenstein and the Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, comments on the above quote as follows: For Wittgenstein, what 4

5 the order a priori might consist in seems to be what Schopenhauer said it did consist in (Phillips Griffiths 1976, p. 4). For Schopenhauer, The Principle of Sufficient Reason has four basic forms, which are differentiated by virtue of the four classes of objects which may be subject to necessity. These are: Knowledge, which gives rise to logical necessity; Change, giving rise to physical necessity; Being in general (time and space), giving rise to mathematical necessity; and finally, Motivation, which gives rise to moral necessity. For Phillips Griffiths, Wittgenstein allows only logical necessity (Phillips Griffiths 1976, p. 5). Tractatus seemingly leads one inexorably to this conclusion: Just as the only necessity that exists is logical necessity, so too the only impossibility that exists is logical impossibility (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 85). Phillips Griffiths conception of Tractarian necessity above ought to be construed as emblematic of a more generally held view which found its inception in the earliest interpretations of Wittgenstein s analytic contemporaries. Both Russell s introduction to the Tractatus and the aforementioned accounts of the Logical Positivists have fashioned Wittgenstein as something of an empiricist, with an analogously empirical conception of necessity as strictly tautological in nature. It is a view of necessity that is, of course, at odds with the a priori necessity that we find grounded in the conceptual framework of the metaphysical subject of the Kantian tradition. Monk relates that Wittgenstein had read Kant s Kritik, whilst in prison during the First World War (Monk 1991, p. 158). To some degree at least, tales of Wittgenstein s inability to acquire insight into the ideas of Kant, Spinoza and others are explicable by virtue of a seemingly conscious effort on Wittgenstein s part to disassociate himself from the philosophical tradition. Wittgenstein himself stated in the preface to the Tractatus that he is not concerned with the extent to which his efforts coincide with those of other philosophers but continues nonetheless to mention that he remains indebted to Frege and Russell. Their influence on the Tractatus, however, has been painstakingly recounted in the past and need not be repeated here. Our starting point is instead what Magee confidently refers to as the fact that the philosophy of the young Wittgenstein was to an important degree an attempt to revise and correct Schopenhauer (Magee 1983, p. 288). In keeping with Anscombe s remark that Schopenhauer then struck him (Wittgenstein) as fundamentally right, if only a few adjustments and clarifications were made (Anscombe 1971, pp ) We may add that these revisions were not as extensive as Magee seems to suggest. Like Phillips Griffiths, Magee fails to see that the philosophy of the young 5

6 Wittgenstein was to a greater extent a straightforward acceptance of the philosophy of Schopenhauer, with corrections largely confined to incidentals as opposed to fundamentals. In exploring just one aspect of this influence here, I confine myself to the last class of objects that can be subject to necessity in Schopenhauer s Principle of Sufficient Reason: Motivation, giving rise to moral necessity. This ought to suffice to diffuse the traditional assumption that Wittgenstein accepts only that form of necessity which derives from objects of Knowledge, that is to say, logical necessity. That Wittgenstein accepts logical necessity is not at issue. On this fact commentators are unanimous. Tractatus 6.375, quoted above, assures us that they are right. What does remain at issue, however, is precisely to what Wittgenstein is referring when he speaks of logical necessity. The confusion arises due to Phillips Griffiths exaggerated attempt to explain the Tractatus always within the confines of Schopenhauer s Four-Fold Root of theprinciple of Sufficient Reason. Phillips Griffiths reason for suggesting that Wittgenstein had encountered this work at all is extremely tenuous. At the beginning of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer recommends that one has read his former treatise. Phillips Griffiths continues, I cannot believe that Wittgenstein could have read these words and then ignored the implied injunction (Phillips Griffiths 1976, p. 4). Assuming that Wittgenstein had ignored the implied injunction, the fact would amount to little. The a priori nature of the various forms of causality is equally evident in The World as Will and Representation. They are not, however, presented in so systematic a format as to imply that Wittgenstein, when considering the possibility of an a priori order at the time of the Tractatus, had Schopenhauer s four classes of objects subject to necessity specifically in mind. It is this unsubstantiated premise that causes Phillips Griffiths to construe Wittgenstein s declaration that the only necessity that exists is logical necessity as a rebuttal of the other forms of necessity, as found in the Four-fold Root and equally in The World as Will and Representation. The argument breaks down when we consider that Wittgenstein uses the term logic in at least three distinct senses. Tractatus 6.22 serves to illustrate our point: The logic of the world, which is shown in tautologies by the propositions of logic, is shown in equations by mathematics (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 79). The logic that is presented in propositions is a form of expression for the logic of the world. It is the logic of the world that is referred to in 6.13 when Wittgenstein says that Logic is not a body of doctrine, but a mirror-image of the world. Logic is transcendental (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 78). 6

7 Wittgenstein s early views on logic are perhaps best expressed by the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations, who makes it clear again that at the time of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not construe logic primarily as comprising the study of deductive logic. These considerations bring us up to the problem: In what sense is logic something sublime? For there seemed to pertain to logic a peculiar depth a universal significance. Logic lay, it seemed, at the bottom of all the sciences. For logical investigation explores the nature of all things. It seeks to see to the bottom of things and is not meant to concern itself whether what actually happens is this or that. It takes its rise, not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connexions: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical (Wittgenstein 1967, p. 42). Logic, for Schopenhauer, remained what Wittgenstein terms a body of doctrine. He is concerned with logic as the study of deductive arguments and as such, the logic of his logical necessity is not comparable to logic as the transcendental mirrorimage of the world accounted in the Investigations above. Tractatus the statement that the only necessity is logical necessity no longer appears as a rebuttal of Schopenhauer s other forms of necessity, not at least without further investigation. Continuing then with Wittgenstein s Tractarian conception of logic, its description in the Investigations above makes it clear that it is not comparable to Schopenhauer s conception of logic as a body of doctrine. Wittgenstein is thus not so easily aligned to the thematic confines of Schopenhauer s Four-fold Root. Tractatus ought not to be construed then as a rejection of the other forms of necessity as they appear in the philosophy of Schopenhauer. In fact, in this instance, Wittgenstein is utilising logic in a third and more causal sense of the word (the previous two being the logic of the proposition and logic as the mirror image of the world), to mean the inescapable relationship between two objects is a part of the discussion on the relationship between the will and the world. It uses the term logical in the same sense as 6.374, which precedes it immediately: Even if all that we wish for were to happen, still this would only be a favour granted by fate, so to speak: for there is no logical connexion between the will and the world, which would guarantee it, and the supposed physical connexion itself is surely not something that we could will (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 85). 7

8 Tractatus 6.375, which Phillips Griffiths confidently cites as the answer to the question of what, for Wittgenstein, does the a priori order consist in, is not a commentary on logic, in Schopenhauer s sense. It points rather to the fact that, for Wittgenstein, a logical fact is that which excludes the possibility of its contradictory. Logical impossibility is elaborated on in as follows: For example, the simultaneous presence of two colours at the same place in the visual field is impossible, in fact logically impossible, since it is ruled out by the logical structure of colour (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 85). That this explanation of the impossibility of any necessity bar the logical kind does not in fact exclude the possibility of moral necessity will become more apparent later. For now, let it suffice to say that Wittgenstein, because he is not consciously tied to the rigid consideration of the a priori as they appear in Schopenhauer s Fourfold Root, refers to logical necessity in a much broader sense than Phillips Griffiths supposes. If applied to the classes of objects which Schopenhauer deems subject to necessity, then Wittgenstein s logical necessity does not serve to permit only logical necessity as this appears in Schopenhauer. It acts rather as a blanket term under the rubric of which all of Schopenhauer s forms may be placed. Within the narrow confines of this paper, however, I will focus exclusively on how the moral necessity of the Tractatus serves to dismantle the empirically grounded, analytic conception of Tractarian necessity. There has been large disagreement between commentators as to the location (if any) of Wittgenstein s early ethical remarks within a Western philosophical tradition. For Phillips Griffiths, discussion of Wittgenstein and ethics requires the stipulation that Wittgenstein s conception of ethics is far removed from what tradition would normally associate with the word. Diane Collinson, in a paper entitled Ethics and Aesthetics are One, aligns herself with the opposing strand which conceives of Wittgenstein s ethics as belonging to the mainstream (Collinson 1985, p. 266). John Churchill is one who agrees with Phillips Griffiths that there is some peculiarity in the Tractatus as to what Wittgenstein takes ethics to be about (Churchill 1983, p. 493). He goes on however to point at a possible bridge to Collinson s position by adding the following, This peculiarity is soon explained, as Russell Goodman has further shown, by comparing the conception of ethics in Schopenhauer with Wittgenstein s thoughts (Churchill 1983, p. 493). Russell Goodman himself concludes the paper in question, Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Ethics, by stating that Wittgenstein is an ethical writer whose views place him firmly within the Western ethical tradition (Goodmann 1979, p. 447). As 8

9 the title of Goodman s paper indicates, we find with ethics as we find with his treatment of solipsism and the subject that it is through his familiarity with the writings of Schopenhauer (who is in turn so influenced by Kant) that Wittgenstein finds himself as inheritor of a long philosophical lineage. Goodman, in comparing Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein, focuses on three of Wittgenstein s claims. Considered broadly, it is within these three themes that commentators are limited in the attempt to affirm or deny a link between Wittgenstein, via Schopenhauer, to a wider ethical tradition. As such, the Tractarian claims on which Goodman chooses to focus will serve loosely enough to provide us with a working structure. (1) Ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the usual sense of the terms, but there is rather a kind of ethical reward and punishment that reside in the action itself (6.422); (2) The good or bad exercise of the will alters the world s limits, not the world, so that it can be said to wax and wane (6.43); (3) If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present (6.4311) (Goodmann 1979, p. 437). Firstly then, we find in Schopenhauer the notion that any ethical action is its own reward. His starting point in ethics is a sense of disillusionment with what he believed to be the loss of ethics in a philosophical climate so influenced by Hegel. For Schopenhauer, the time in which he lived was marked by a renewed Spinozism, and with it an acceptance of the world itself as a theophany. The difference between good and evil becomes merely conventional, given that every action is to be considered equally divine. Ethics had thus been largely ignored and had, under the guidance of Hegel, sunk to the point where it was nothing more than a set of instructions for proper public life. It is against this possibility of an objective ethical code that Schopenhauer rebels in his rejection of Hegel s conception of ethics, which asserted that ethics ought to have for its material not the conduct of individuals, but that of masses of people, and that this alone was a theme worthy of it (Schopenhauer 1966b, p. 590). For a fuller account of Schopenhauer s ethics, and in order to locate the proposed source of Wittgenstein s assertion that ethical reward resides in the action itself, we must return to Die Welt alswille und Vorstellung, Volume 1, Chapter 63. Here we find, firstly, that Schopenhauer draws a distinction between temporal justice and eternal 9

10 justice. Temporal justice is concerned with the requiting or punishing of a past outrage. This form of justice has its seat in the State, and acquires its name from the fact that justice is reached only upon punishment at some future time. While temporal justice is required for the ruling of a State, eternal justice is responsible for the ruling of the world. Furthermore, eternal justice exists always in the present, and so does not require any lapse of time in order to take effect: Here the punishment must be so linked with the offence that the two are one (Schopenhauer 1966a, pp ). Whether the punishment and the offence can be viewed as one seems to rest upon whether one accepts Schopenhauer s metaphysical belief in the single world Will. If one does, then every act of injustice becomes an offence of the Will upon itself. The egoistic man has failed to see beyond the principium individuationis, and remains unaware that the forms of phenomena space, time and causality do not apply to the thing-in-itself. The thing-in-itself, (for Schopenhauer) the Will, is indivisible and is not subject to the form of time. What appears to the person who has failed to grasp this as the conflict between one man and another, is, in actuality, the conflict of Will with itself, as it buries its teeth in its own flesh, not knowing that it injures always only itself (Schopenhauer 1966a, pp ). For Schopenhauer, then, ethics is not concerned with reward or punishment, it is concerned always with the individual, and furthermore with the individual as will rather than the individual as idea. The seeming disparity between the claims that ethics is concerned always with the individual and furthermore, that knowledge of eternal justice requires the complete elevation above individuality is explicable as follows. Where ethics resides is, in fact, in the will. That is, will as it is known in the individual and again as the metaphysical Will that permeates all nature. As will is recognizable firstly in oneself, it is with the individual that ethics is concerned. The recognition that this will is synonymous with the world Will requires elevation above the principium individuationis, and consequently, above individuality. Ethics, concerned with the will, is thus equally concerned with the individual and the elevation above individuality. Neither instance of the will (individual will and world Will) caters for the social ethics of Hegel. For Wittgenstein too, the Notebooks make clear, ethics is not concerned with reward or punishment as events that take place in time. Rather, as with Schopenhauer, we will see again that Der Quäler und der Gequälte sind Eines (Schopenhauer 1988a, p. 459). It is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment and reward.there must be a kind of ethical reward and of ethical punishment but these must be involved in the action itself (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 78e). 10

11 Goodman s second Tractarian reference, 6.43, follows 6.423, which itself has as its immediate predecessor the restatement of the above excerpt from the Notebooks. Having stated then that ethics is not about consequences as temporally sequential to action, Wittgenstein continues: (6.423) It is impossible to speak about the will in so far as it is the subject of ethical attributes. And the will as a phenomenon is of interest only to psychology. (6.43) If the good or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts not what can be expressed by means of language. In short the effect must be that it becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to speak wax and wane as whole. The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 87). Goodman invites us to consider 6.43 above in the light of Schopenhauer s description, in The World as Will and Representation, of the good conscience, which arises with every disinterested deed: It springs from the fact that such a deed, as arising from the direct recognition of our own inner being-in-itself in the phenomenon of another, again affords us the verification of this knowledge, of the knowledge that our true self exists not only in our own person, in this particular phenomenon, but in everything that lives. In this way the heart feels itself enlarged, just as by egoism it feels contracted (Goodman 1979, p. 444). The metaphors of expansion and contraction, Goodman points out, parallel Wittgenstein s use of waxing and waning Sie muβ sozusagen als Ganzes abnehmen oder zunehmen (Wittgenstein 1971, p. 146). Schopenhauer s passage, Goodman continues, provides a means of understanding Wittgenstein s claim that it is the world s limits (Grenzen), and not the facts (Tatsachen), which are altered by virtue of the good or bad exercise of the will: Egoists and altruists are still, for Schopenhauer, phenomenal; the latter are more or less ordinary human beings, not sages who have completely escaped the world of space, time, and the principle of sufficient reason. Facts such as that one s home is at a given location, that one ate this or that for breakfast, that an acquaintance insulted one, do not change when one adopts either an egoic or an altruistic attitude. Rather, one s attitude towards those facts changes (Goodmann 1979, p. 444). 11

12 The claim that we cannot speak about the will in so far as it is the bearer of ethical attributes, of course implies that this is precisely what the philosophical will, for Wittgenstein, is. Notebooks ( ) offers confirmation of this. What really is the situation of the human will? I will call will first and foremost the bearer of good and evil (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 76). It is the subject of willing (a la Schopenhauer) which is the bearer of good and evil. Like Kant s unity of apperception, we cannot speak about Wittgenstein s willing subject, we can stipulate only that it does exist. The will as a phenomenon, that is, the will as an empirically knowable object, is of no philosophical worth. The willing subject for Wittgenstein is still the transcendental subject of the Kantian tradition. Like Kant s subject, it is to be located at the limits of the world, never as an object in the world. And so ethics (good and evil), while not belonging to the empirical world of facts, nonetheless possess grounding in the Kantian, unknown subject that acts as its bearer. Diane Collinson cites the aforementioned fact that ethics, for Wittgenstein, is not about ends or goals, as one route to the further identification of ethics and aesthetics (Collinson 1985, p. 267). This identification finds its place in Tractatus 6.421: It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same) (Wittgenstein 1974, p.86). The idea that Ethik und Ästhetik sind Eins first appeared in the Notebooks on , presented together with the notion that ethics is not concerned with the facts of the world: The World and Life are one. Physiological life is of course not Life. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world. Ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic. Ethics and aesthetics are one (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 77). We could not, for example, make an analogy between an ethical system such as utilitarianism, which places the value of an action in its eventual consequence, and the traditional view of aesthetic enjoyment as its own reward. It is because Wittgenstein s conception of ethics is now located in the Kantian strand (Schopenhauer, again, providing the link between the two) that Collinson finds fault with Phillips removal of Wittgenstein from the ethical tradition. In her paper Ethics and Aesthetics are One, Collinson proceeds to link Wittgenstein s ethics with a mainstream on the following accounts. (1) It is concerned with the contemplative apprehension of the Good. (2) It requires a metaphysical, nonempirical subject as the logical condition of this apprehension. (3) A certain necessity 12

13 of action is connected with the apprehension of the Good. It is this third point that is paramount to our attempted demarcation of Tractarian necessity from the tautological necessity of Logical Positivism. And as a belief in moral necessity may not be particularly obvious in Wittgenstein s case, it is worth following Collinson in quoting his Lecture on Ethics where this receives its clearest expression. Of the absolutely right road, Wittgenstein there says, I think it would be a road which everybody on seeing it would, with logical necessity, have to go, or be ashamed for not going (Collinson 1985, p. 270). Here we can see Wittgenstein s acceptance of the fourth form of The Four-Fold Root, namely, Motivation, giving rise to moral necessity. This offers further confirmation, if such was needed, that ethics, like logic, remains for Wittgenstein a necessary condition of the world and not merely a category devoid of any cognitive content. Phillips Griffiths, it will be recalled, allowed only that Wittgenstein accepted logical necessity. In a certain sense, this is true. The moral high road, once seen, would, with logical necessity, be taken. Now, if we are to say that Wittgenstein allows only logical necessity, then we must stipulate that logical necessity, for Wittgenstein, is not to be contrasted with moral necessity. As moral necessity, for Wittgenstein, is clearly one form of logical necessity, his consideration of the a priori simply cannot be so readily forced into the categories of Schopenhauer s Four-Fold Root namely, Knowledge, Change, Being and Motivation. Wittgenstein has been previously quoted to the effect that it is logically impossible for two colours to be present at the same time in the same place, as this is ruled out by the logical structure of colour. Now, we are forced to concede that ethics too may have its own logical necessity. As it was for Plato, so it seems to be for Wittgenstein, that to know the good is to do the good. That ethics should exhibit logical necessity is hardly surprising given the characterisation of what logical necessity is not in Tractatus 6.37, of which the remark regarding the simultaneous presence of two colours is an elaboration: There is no compulsion making one thing happen because another has happened. The only necessity that exists is logical necessity (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 84) , immediately preceding this reads, It is an hypothesis that the sun will rise tomorrow: and this means that we do not know whether it will rise (Wittgenstein 1974, p. 84). There is no logical necessity in the sun s not rising tomorrow, as it does not violate the logical structure of the sun for this to be the case. Although we may with certainty say that the sun will rise, it is not inconceivable that it would not. The 13

14 presence of two colours in the same place at the same time is, by contrast, logically inconceivable contrasts logical necessity with the compulsion which one thing happening causes another thing to happen. That this paves the way for a logical necessity with regards to morality is evident in that first Tractarian reference (6.422) which Russell Goodman had foreseen as indicative of Schopenhauer s influence on the ethics of the Tractatus. This stated that ethical reward and punishment are not correctly considered in the usual sense of the terms but instead, must have a reward and punishment that reside in the action itself. Reward and punishment, as normally understood, are in the sense of Schopenhauer s temporal justice reward and punishment at a future date. Because, however, there is no compulsion making one thing happen because another thing has happened (6.37), thus understood, moral necessity cannot be of the logical variety. In accepting Schopenhauer s eternal justice, in which reward or punishment reside in the action itself, Wittgenstein has already paved the way for the belief, not explicitly asserted until his Lecture on Ethics, that the absolutely right road, once seen, must, of logical necessity, be taken. Thus, in Wittgenstein s case, citing his belief that the only necessity that exists is logical necessity is not reason at all to exclude him from proposing necessity under the form of Motivation. This is to break with an account of logical necessity that is a staple of traditional Wittgenstein scholarship. But it is not to subvert the methodology of traditional scholarship after the fashion of the Diamond-Conant inspired New Wittgenstein movement. The central assumptions of Old scholarship, both the positive metaphysical doctrine of the Tractatus and its subsequent rejection by the therapeutic Wittgenstein of the Investigations period, are hereby upheld. What is altered in this reading is precisely what such metaphysical doctrine consists in, on this account a Schopenhauerian ethics (and mysticism) in addition to a somewhat modified New Logic. The transcendence of the realist/idealist dichotomy that Wittgenstein encountered in Schopenhauer is here applicable, more pointedly, to the question of ethical truths. Wittgenstein, on this account, belongs neither to the realist camp exemplified by the ethical non-naturalism of Moore, nor with anti-realist counterpoints such as Ayer s emotivism and the prescriptivism of Hare. In the case of the latter non-cognitivists, their moral anti-realism is evidenced in the belief that ethical sentences, because they do not assert genuine propositions, cannot be classified as true or false. While the same attribution might be made of Wittgenstein, this does not negate the possibility that, for him, ethical attitudes can yet be wrong or right, or that there can be an absolutely right road. The New movement presents a picture of the Tractatus which is effectively identical to Neurath s contention that in 14

15 order to avoid the metaphysical attitude entirely, we must indeed remain silent, but not about anything. However, where Neurath s remark was intended as a criticism of Wittgenstein s metaphysical endeavours, proponents of the Diamond-Conant reading view Wittgenstein himself as espousing this very anti-metaphysical attitude. Despite Ramsey, Ayer, Engelmann and Russell all upholding Neurath s picture of a Tractarian ineffable realm, New Wittgensteinians maintain that this separate stratum of ineffable truth also pertains to the philosophical confusions from which Wittgenstein is attempting to extricate us. Consequently, for them there can be no ethical doctrine of the early Wittgenstein. One aim of this Continental reading of the Tractatus is to preclude the New Wittgenstein movement from capitalising upon the inability of excessively analytic interpretations to explain from whence Wittgenstein derives his metaphysical tendencies. This author not only upholds the ineffability readings that New scholarship rejects, but views Wittgenstein s ethical ineffable as fundamental to his philosophical enterprise, and a pre-requisite for the possibility of any genuinely holistic account of the seemingly disparate elements of the Tractatus (Crary 2007, p. 8). This thesis does not, however, take the New reading as its sole or even primary target. Nor is its significance to traditional scholarship restricted to a commentary on the single commentator who has featured most heavily above. For Phillips Griffiths account of necessity is functionally identical to the account propagated by Russell, the Logical Positivists and innumerable commentators since who would consider the Tractatus exclusively against the background of the analytic tradition. An exploration of his continental inheritance, however, exposes a certain necessity of moral action in the thought of the early Wittgenstein. It was natural for Ayer to confuse Wittgenstein s metaphysical silence about something with his own committal of metaphysics to the flames. From the standpoint of a staunchly analytic empiricism, it has been equally easy to confuse statements denying that ethics can be put into words with an outright denial of all ethical value. For Wittgenstein, it remains the case that the point of the Tractatus is an ethical one. And far from ridding us of the last vestiges of Kant s synthetic a priori, the Tractatus, in removing ethical value from the world of facts, was rather involved in the attempt to salvage a place for ethics in the transcendental plane. It is an attempt that is also consistent with the Kantian enterprise of limiting the understanding in the interests of faith, and entirely at odds with the positivist denial of all forms of necessity but the empty tautologies of logic. Steven.Bond@mic.ul.ie 15

16 REFERENCES Anscombe, Gertrude, 1971: An Introduction to Wittgenstein s Tractatus. London: Hutchinson University Library. Ayer, Alfred, 1971: Language, Truth and Logic. London: Penguin Books. Ayer, Alfred, 1985: Wittgenstein. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Churchill, John, 1983: Wittgenstein s adaptation of Schopenhauer in Southern Journal of Philosophy, 21, pp Collinson, Diane, 1985: Ethics and Aesthetics are One in British Journal of Aesthetics, 25(3), pp Crary, Alice, 2007: Introduction in Crary, Alice (ed.), Wittgenstein and the Moral Life. London: MIT Press, pp Goodman, Russell, 1979: Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Ethics in Journal of the History of Philosophy, 17(4), pp Hacker, Peter, 1996: Wittgenstein s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy. Oxford: Blackwell. Magee, Bryan, 2000: The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press. Monk, Ray, 1991: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius. London: Vintage Books. Neurath, Otto, 1959: Sociology and Physicalism in Ayer, Alfred (ed.), Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, pp Phillips Griffiths, A., 1976: Wittgenstein and the Four-Fold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in Aristotelian Society, 50, pp Ramsey, Frank, 1959: Philosophy in Ayer, Alfred (ed.), Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, pp Schlick, Moritz, 1959: The Turning Point in Philosophy in Ayer, Alfred (ed.), Logical Positivism. New York: The Free Press, pp

17 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1966a: The World as Will and Representation I. Tr. Payne, Eric. New York: Dover Publications. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1966b: The World as Will and Representation II. Tr. Payne, Eric. New York: Dover Publications. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1988a: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I. Ulm: Haffmans Verlag. Schopenhauer, Arthur, 1988b: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II. Ulm: Haffmans Verlag. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1967: Philosophical Investigations. Tr. Anscombe, Gertrude. Oxford: Blackwell. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1971: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1974: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Tr. David Pears and Brian McGuinness. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1979: Notebooks Tr. Anscombe, Gertrude. Oxford: Blackwell. 17