Kant and Post-Tractarian Wittgenstein

Transcendentalism, Idealism, Illusion

Bernhard Ritter

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783030446345
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

This book suggests that to know how Wittgenstein's post-Tractarian philosophy could have developed from the work of Kant is to know how they relate to each other. The development from the latter to the former is invoked heuristically as a means of interpretation, rather than a historical process or direct influence of Kant on Wittgenstein. Ritter provides a detailed treatment of transcendentalism, idealism, and the concept of illusion in Kant's and Wittgenstein's criticism of metaphysics. Notably, it is through the conceptions of transcendentalism and idealism that Wittgenstein's philosophy can be viewed as a transformation of Kantianism. This transformation involves a deflationary conception of transcendental idealism along with the abandonment of both the idea that there can be a priori 'conditions of possibility' logically detachable from what they condition, and the appeal to an original 'constitution' of experience.

The closeness of Kant and post-Tractarian Wittgenstein does not exist between their arguments or the views they upheld, but rather in their affiliation against forms of transcendental realism and empirical idealism. Ritter skilfully challenges several dominant views on the relationship of Kant and Wittgenstein, especially concerning the cogency of Wittgenstein-inspired criticism focusing on the role of language in the first Critique, and Kant's alleged commitment to a representationalist conception of empirical intuition.

Part IPart I

Mirages of Metaphysical Language

Introduction

A study of the present type and concern will have to introduce some basic concepts pertaining to the philosophers it sets out to relate to one another. This will be done, on the one hand, with an eye to certain obstacles that might be seen as preventing the thoughts of Kant and Wittgenstein to make proper contact; and on the other, to certain questionable attempts of approaching them too closely, or in the wrong way, to each other. Part I has three thematic emphases: the role of language in Kant and Wittgenstein; their conceptions of philosophical illusion; and the question of whether, or in what sense, they can or cannot be viewed as transcendental idealists. There will be three chapters each.

The first chapter is concerned with introducing some concepts and ideas that will reappear in several of the later chapters. The notion of a grammatical proposition, for one thing, is introduced in preparation of a point that will be made in the second, which addresses the question of whether there might be a form of transcendental idealism present in Wittgenstein’s post-Tractarian writings. A viable account of grammatical propositions should cast doubt on any proposal that toys with the idea that they could play the role of transcendental conditions. As a consequence, they cannot be exploited in reconstructions, or constructions, of a linguistic form of transcendental idealism in Wittgenstein.

Some commentators have thought themselves able to find such idealism even in Wittgenstein’s later writings. The main defect of this proposal, it will be argued in the second chapter, is that the extant literature almost uniformly fails to answer even the most basic questions as to what a linguistic form of transcendental idealism is supposed to be, let alone one that could be plausibly attributed to the later Wittgenstein. The fact that this literature has paid scant attention to the debate about Kant’s idealism has not helped either. I shall eventually draw a different conclusion regarding a conception of transcendental idealism that receives determination by its opposite, transcendental realism. This will happen only at the end of this study with the benefit of hindsight (cf. chapter 19).

The third chapter is a methodological supplement to the first two. It examines the nature of Wittgenstein’s appeal to what we can say and in what sense his philosophy is hostile to theorizing.

The fourth chapter, the first on Kant, is preparatory in that it attempts to clear away what appears to be another obstacle to any substantial way of relating Kant and Wittgenstein to each other. Kant and Wittgenstein are often viewed as working within different philosophical paradigms. This is believed to come to the fore in their respective attitudes towards language. It is true that there is no in-depth examination of the relation of thought and language in the first Critique. Kant’s respective views, however, can be gleaned from his logic lectures from the early 1780s, which makes the extent to which they are operative in the Critique more easily discernible.

The fifth chapter deals with Kant’s conception of transcendental illusion in the context of the first antinomial conflict. Kant’s respective criticism of dogmatic metaphysics emerges to be essentially directed against the concepts underlying the first antinomial conflict, as he takes the metaphysician to define them. The question is how to interpret this result. Kant thinks that the antinomial conflicts of rational cosmology yield an indirect argument for transcendental idealism. Some remarks by Wittgenstein on the same problem suggest that he thinks that the outcome has no metaphysically interesting implications. Any such conclusion, however, is premature without having further examined the nature of Kant’s transcendental idealism.

This happens in the concluding chapter of Part I. The two interpretations that are currently considered to be the most promising candidates will be singled out for discussion. My aim is to expose, as clearly and succinctly as possible, what I take to be irremediable weaknesses in one of them. According to this interpretation, transcendental idealism turns on a distinction between ‘appearances’ and ‘things in themselves’ that is, after all, metaphysical. If this interpretation were to be as good as its supporters believe, there would be nothing but disparity in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophical outlooks and thus probably no narrative worth telling about their relationship.

© The Author(s) 2020

B. RitterKant and Post-Tractarian Wittgensteinhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-44634-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Wittgenstein on ‘Grammatical’ and ‘Metaphysical’ Propositions

Bernhard Ritter¹

(1)

Institute of Philosophy, University of Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

Bernhard Ritter

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

A main source of philosophical puzzlement, according to Wittgenstein, is that we do not command a clear view of the ways in which we use language: ‘A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. – Our grammar is deficient in surveyability.’ (PI §122) This is not to say that language, as such, is in need of greater surveyability. Wittgenstein’s grammatical reminders are directed at those who attempt to move around reflectively in language, people in philosophy, for the most part. He reacts to what struck him as peculiar in what philosophers say. They say things that in his view are born of a misconception about philosophical discourse itself. He approaches philosophical problems in the way he does after having found that he had said such things himself. Wittgenstein is, in this respect, very much a philosopher of philosophy, struck by what philosophers say and what may tempt them to say it. One expression of this misconception is the ‘metaphysical use of words’, or the use of ‘metaphysical propositions’, as he calls it (cf. PG: 128, 130, BB: 55, PI §58b).

In Wittgenstein, metaphysical propositions are distinguished from both grammatical and empirical propositions. Their relation is best approached with the help of a remark on the third group, empirical propositions:

[P]ropositions turn out to be even more like yardsticks than I previously believed. The fact that one measurement is right automatically excludes all others. I say automatically: just as all the graduation marks are on one rod, the propositions corresponding to the graduation marks similarly belong together, and we can’t measure with one of them without simultaneously measuring with all the others. – It isn’t a proposition which I put against reality as a yardstick, it’s a system of propositions. (PR: 109f.)

Any proposition belonging to the system represents a way things may or may not be with regard to colour, which is their assertible content (cf. Hanks 2014: 2). If any of these propositions is true, it is contingently true (cf. WVC: 77, LWL: 93). If any of them is false, then not only is its negation true, but there will also be something assertible by a positive proposition of the same system that is true. ¹Propositions like ‘Black and white cannot be simultaneously in the same place’, in contrast, represent nothing that may or may not be the case. They lack assertible content. In uttering them, one can only be talking of the yardstick, not making an application of it, according to Wittgenstein. These are what he calls ‘grammatical propositions’: statements about our way of representing how things are, rather than about how things are. His view is not that the negation of a grammatical proposition expresses a contradiction and its affirmation a necessary truth. According to Wittgenstein, we should rather say that if the component words are taken to mean what they actually mean, no possible fact corresponds to either.

This might lead one to interpret Wittgenstein as holding that all metaphysical propositions are nonsensical. A passage from a 1934–35 lecture, which says that ‘it is very important to see that philosophy always turns upon nonsensical questions’, might suggest such a view (AWL: 106, cf. 23). Accordingly, a ‘metaphysical use’ of language would be a deviant way of using a grammatical proposition that is not recognized as such. In this way, there would be an intimate connection between grammatical propositions and metaphysical uses. However, the view that all metaphysical propositions are nonsensical is difficult to reconcile with several of Wittgenstein’s later remarks, one of which follows here:²

Don’t we understand it, when Strachey makes surmises about what Queen Victoria may have seen in her mind’s eye just before her death? Of course – but didn’t people also understand the question how many souls there was room for on the point of a needle? That is to say: the question whether one understands this does not help us here; we must ask what we can do with such a sentence. – That we use the sentence is clear; how we use it is the question. (RPP I §366 = vW 131: 187f., 3 September 1946.)

Wittgenstein concedes here that we have some understanding of this kind of proposition, though it lacks a clear relation to criteria for something’s being so. Surmises about Queen Victoria’s dying thoughts are in this respect like sceptical hypotheses, which are ‘metaphysical’ for Wittgenstein (cf. PG: 136). If these hypotheses are problematic in a way that affects their sceptical force, this will have to derive from their lack of connection with ordinary factual claims and ordinary ways to settle them. This suggestion will be examined later on (cf. chapter 15).

There are two further difficulties with the view under consideration that I only wish to mention briefly. First, it may be tolerably clear what Wittgenstein means by a ‘metaphysical proposition’ in some preferred contexts, but he hardly says enough to support a classification for any philosophical proposition one may be interested in. To assert that all, and not only some, metaphysical propositions are nonsensical assumes a more determinate notion than is likely to exist in Wittgenstein. Second, language allows for countless ways in which the use of a word may...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Part I. Part I
• Part II. Part II
• Part III. Part III
• Part IV. Part IV
• Back Matter