Moral Powers

Normative Necessity in Language and History

Anthony Holiday

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000055290
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Originally published in 1986, this book subverts an attitude towards the moral dimension of life which the author terms 'ethical cynicism'. It discusses a theory of moral powers – a theory which shows that moral values are immensely potent sources of power. The author argues that there is a conceptual affinity between the Wittgensteinian account of language and the Marxist theory of history such that the two complement and even require one another in various aspects.

1

Necessity in Wittgensteinian Semantics

1.0 Introduction

What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of language? If this very Kantian question makes sense, then who ever does make sense of it will see some hope of making sense of the term ‘semantic necessity’, apart from the trivial sense it makes to say that semantic necessity is the necessity governing the possibility of meaning or meaningful language. We shall get no further with the question until we know what conception of language in general is before us; for the notion of ‘semantic necessity’ must evidently be tied to some or other philosophical, scientific or pseudo-scientific picture of what language is, and will alter as and if the picture changes. The present chapter is an account of the changing picture of language, entertained by Ludwig Wittgenstein, and of the metamorphosis his concept of semantic necessity underwent as his perspective shifted. Beginning with some remarks on the nature of, and relations between, the Wittgensteinian texts, the chapter goes on to describe the intellectual context in which they were produced and critically explore both the Tractarian and post-Tractarian accounts of language. It concludes with a discussion of the vexed topic of depth grammar.

In conducting this survey, I have accentuated (although, I hope, not exaggerated) the role which Wittgenstein’s ethical and religious concerns played, from the very first, in shaping his images of language and the world. I have also tried to bring out the ironic dimension of his writing, which is a key not only to his own method of doing philosophy, but to the way it connects with a dialectical tradition which culminates in Marx’s theory of history. All this is designed to introduce the thesis that the necessity which governs language is of a moral, not of a logical, kind. It will be the task of the succeeding chapter to elaborate a theory which supports this claim. My immediate aim, however, is to indicate that the thesis is consonant with the spirit of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and that the germs of the theory are, despite his own stringent efforts to guard against theorising, present in at least some of the things he wrote. In the Preface to the Philosophical investigations, Wittgenstein expressed a hope that his writing might ‘stimulate someone to thoughts of his own’ (PI, p. viii).¹ The ensuing account of his doctrine is intended to show that thoughts expressed in subsequent chapters have indeed been stimulated by Wittgenstein’s writings and not by some fanciful misreading of them.

1.1 Wittgenstein’s texts

Excepting the Blue and Brown Books, which are duplicated notes, dictated to students, Wittgenstein saw the publication in his lifetime of only one book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which appeared in 1921, and fully intended (as far as we know) the publication of only one other. This was the Philosophical investigations, which appeared in 1953, two years after his death. Notwithstanding the undoubted importance of much of the material subsequently released by his executors, these two great works must be regarded as the main keys to his philosophy of language, and a proper appreciation of the relation in which they stand to one another is a prerequisite for a correct approach to the thoughts they express. However, because the later work explicitly repudiates doctrines set forth in the first, it is tempting to think of Wittgenstein’s philosophy as an essentially fissured product, the halves of which bear only the relation of contrast to each other. This impression is sustained by the striking differences in style and structure which distinguish the two texts. It is lent further credibility by the fact that the Investigations ranges over a broader subject area than does the Tractatus, being far more concerned with what is now called the philosophy of mind than was the first book. Indeed, as we shall see, Wittgenstein’s own convictions concerning the mistakes of his Tractarian period prompted him to favour broader surveys, as against in-depth excavations, in the later period of his life.

Like most half-truths, however, this tale of the ‘two Wittgensteins’ obscures more than it explains. It fails, notably, to explain why he should have wished to publish both texts between the covers of a single volume in the belief that his new thoughts ‘could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my old way of thinking’ (PI, p. x).² Two modes of thought which are different toto mundi are not set in the right light by being placed in the closest possible spatial proximity to one another. To think that they are is like supposing that works by, say, Constable and Van Gogh are best understood by being seen together in the same room. We know, moreover, that the Tractarian and post-Tractarian doctrines are not irreconcilably at odds on every point, and that Wittgenstein did not think them to be so. ‘Wittgenstein’, Anscombe recalls, ‘used to say that the Tractatus was not all wrong: it was not like a bag of junk professing to be a clock, but like a clock that did not tell you the right time.’³ The project of presenting his old and new perspectives as Wittgenstein once wished to do must, therefore, have been inspired by some motive more subtle than the crude impulse to rebuke and expose past mistakes. When the later author speaks of the interest of comparing the multiplicity of our linguistic tools with what logicians have said about the structure of language, and adds elliptically, ‘including the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus՝ (PI, i, para. 23), we are being invited to remember, among other things, that the author is the same man in both cases.

These comments on his own work suggest what a closer examination will confirm. They insinuate that, in the last decade of his life, Wittgenstein hoped that the Tractatus and the Investigations would be read as ironic commentaries upon one another, such that new thoughts often mock old ones, although old thoughts, too, are capable of echoing derisively amidst the new — which, in any case, require them in order to be understood. In the end the single-volume plan was never realised: instead, the dialectical character of the Investigations was produced very largely by the introduction of an interlocutor, who presents Wittgenstein’s earlier positions, thus creating a somewhat Hegelian impression of an old ‘Self striving to rediscover itself in a ‘Self that is new. It may well be that these efforts to recreate his own self-criticisms sometimes have the effect that Kenny⁴ discerns of masking the considerable continuity between Wittgenstein’s earlier and later views. What is certain is that continuities are present, often where we least expect to find them. Conjunctures and disjunctures coexist within the body of these texts and only attention to both will reveal the character of the whole.

1.11 Conjunctures

Three connecting strands tend to unify Wittgenstein’s ideas about language and the philosophy of language, namely:

(1) his conviction that meaning is tied to use;

(2) his sense of language as a relatively autonomous ongoing concern which requires to be investigated in its own right; and

(3) his anti-theoreticism.

These are only the main bonds of continuity, but they are the ones least shrouded in ambiguity.

(1) It is usual and correct to contrast the Russellian and Tractarian tendency to identify the meaning of a name with its bearer with the post-Tractarian slogan that: ‘The meaning of a word is its use in the language.’ (PI, i, para. 43) Yet already in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is committed to the notion that the meaning of a name cannot be determined apart from its use. He says there, for instance, that a sign does not determine logical form unless it is taken together with its logico-syntactical employment and that ‘if a sign is useless, it is meaningless’ (TLP, 3.327—3.328, original emphasis). An elliptical remark in his discussion of the pseudo-propositional status of mathematical equations is even more explicit: ‘In philosophy the question, “What do we actually use this word or this proposition for?” repeatedly leads to valuable insights.’ (TLP, 6.211) These dicta, of course, derive from the Fregean stipulation that a word has meaning only in the context of a sentence. In the Investigations, the doctrine is much more pervasive, and is connected with the focus on practice which is a central feature of that work. It is worth noticing, however, that the so-called ‘use-theory’ is Fregean and Tractarian in origin, and coexists with a denotational theory which features in the Tractatus and with the criticisms of Frege which occur in both books.

(2) Throughout his work, Wittgenstein attempts to remain faithful to the notion that language is a medium in which human creatures inescapably dwell, so that philosophical perplexity about language is really only a special form of a general sense of wonder at the human condition. Language and world are seen as part of a single, inseparable reality, not as two distinct realms which must somehow be held together by a conceptual glue. This realist intuition is easier to descry in the post-Tractarian writings than in the Tractatus, because the metaphysical atomism we find there is liable to obscure it. The Tractarian atoms must indeed be thought of as extra-linguistic things. For the early Wittgenstein, however, the form of any one of these simple objects is the bare possibility of its occurrence in some state of affairs (TLP, 2.0141), and the totality, not of things, but of facts, is what the world is (TLP, 1.1). A fact, for Wittgenstein, is a statement in language that something is or is not the case. He is saying that our factual talk — such talk as is genuinely propositional — is certainly talk about an objective world, although our meta-linguistic talk about facts is, nonetheless, talk about talk. The same brand of realism is on offer in the Investigations: ‘When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we — and our meaning does not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean; this — is — so.’ (PI, i, para. 95, author’s emphasis)

(3) Finally, and far less controversially, Wittgenstein is consistent throughout his writings in presenting philosophy as being a non-theoretical — in the sense of being a non-scientific (although by no means anti-scientific) — practice. He was emphatic on the point from the very first: ‘Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences.’ It was not ‘a body of doctrine’ but an ‘activity’, consisting essentially of ‘elucidations’ (TLP, 4.11֊ 4.112). In the Blue Book, he warned his students that the tendency among philosophers to ask and answer questions as science does leads ‘into complete darkness’ (BB, p. 18). The same methodological precepts are operative in the Investigations: ‘And we may not advance any kind of a theory. There must be nothing hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place.’ (PI, i, para. 109, original emphasis) By these lights the philosopher’s researches are of an entirely logico-conceptual sort. He makes no discoveries about what occurs in the world in the sense that a scientist or even an explorer does. Nor is he a reformer of any aspect of the world. Philosophy may not ‘interfere with the actual use of language’, not try to give it a foundation. ‘It leaves everything as it is.’ (PI, i, para. 124) As we shall see, Wittgenstein himself failed to conform to these anti-theoretic provisos, and it is debatable whether he truly believed any philosopher could conform to them. What is not debatable is that they represented for him an ideal of the kind of philosophy he wanted to do and see done, and that they are the source of his claim to be doing philosophy in a new key, using these strictures as criteria for the assessment of philosophical artistry or skill.

1.12 Disjunctures

To emphasise these constant features is not at all to deny the very real and radical departures and innovations which segregate the post-Tractarian from the Tractarian texts. Indeed, one such difference concerns just this last-mentioned matter of philosophical method, and is illustrative of how closely unity may approximate to diversity within the totality of the Wittgensteinian fabric. For while both the earlier and the later writings stress the non-explanatory character of philosophical work, the Tractatus sees that work’s goal as a clarificatory one in the sense that the activity is supposed to give ‘sharp boundaries’ to our thoughts (TLP, 4.112). The Investigations, in contrast, deals in concepts with blurred edges, draws fuzzy boundaries or refuses to draw them at all. (PI, i, paras. 71, 76 and 77) The style and texture of the later writings reflect this change in Wittgenstein’s appreciation of what is appropriate to his new aim of providing an overview of the surface-scape of language, rather than an analytical account of its logical depths. The later writings have a sketch-book-like appearance which contrasts sharply with the rigidly programmatic character of the first great book. They give a sometimes misleading impression of being highly diffused pieces of conceptual cartography, the intersecting nodes of which are not readily perceptible. These features are connected with crucial doctrinal changes. The early calculus model of semantic necessity has been replaced, firstly by the notion of a system of sentences, and then by the image of a network of language-games. Metaphysical and logical atomism have been abandoned, and logicist essentialism — the theory that language is determined by an inner logical essence — has given way before Wittgenstein’s determination to restrict himself to a fine-grained description of what lies open to view.

1.13 Frayed strands

The sheer range and complexity of the matters covered in the Wittgensteinian corpus — especially if account is taken of the mass of material that has appeared since the publication of the Investigations — makes a neat division into conjunctive and disjunctive themes both undesirable and probably impossible. Some tendrils of the earlier thought seem to reach tantalisingly close to threads in the later texts, although it is impossible to say with any certainty whether contact has been made. A trilogy of related matters deserves mention in this regard. They are: the picture theory of the proposition, the saying/showing distinction, and the status of logic.

The picture theory. In his first book, Wittgenstein held that the Tatsachen of which the world consisted were pictured by us to ourselves (TLP, 2.1), that the elements of such pictures represented objects (TLP, 2.131), and that a proposition was a picture of reality (TLP, 4.01). It has been a matter of some controversy whether this theory, or any form of it, survived the demolition of so many other Tractarian doctrines. Kenny held that the theory was later thought by Wittgenstein to need supplementing rather than as being straightforwardly false, and that ‘the theory of meaning as use is a complement rather than a rival to the picture theory.’⁵ A similar view, together with an attempted refurbishment of the theory, designed to disambiguate Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘representation’ and related concepts, has been defended by Stenius.⁶ Indeed, if we focus attention on certain remarks in the Investigations, such as the observation that comparisons between a proposition and a portrait or a genre-picture ‘have point’ (PI, i, para. 522), it is very tempting to think that some or other version of the original picture theory must be salvageable. On the other hand, if we are attending to the exceptionally powerful cohesion that exists between the various elements of the Tractarian philosophy, we shall find ourselves in sympathy with Hacker’s⁷ staunch refusal to countenance the idea tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Necessity in Wittgensteinian Semantics
• 2. Semantic Necessity as Moral Necessity
• 3. Historical Necessity
• 4. Values in History
• Bibliography
• Index