Post-Analytic Tractatus

Barry Stocker

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138257405
• eBook ISBN: 9781351909730
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Post-Analytic Tractatus establishes Wittgenstein's early work in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as an invaluable source for exploring current debate on analytic philosophy in its origins, history, limits and relations with European philosophy. Drawing together new work from the leading figures in interpretation of the Tractatus - Conant and Diamond - with work by respected Wittgenstein commentators such as Kremer and Hutto, together with a reprint of a relevant and striking text by Brouwer, this timely collection offers a valuable resource for exploring the Tractatus' connections to approaches other than logical positivism, mathematical logic and formal semantics. Examining links with the work of Leibniz, Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, James, Heidegger and others, the contributors consider key themes in twentieth-century philosophy including symbols and expression, language and metaphysics, objects and signs, logical form, structure and syntax, limits of philosophical discourse, Idealism and transcendental arguments, distinguishing sense and nonsense, showing and saying in communication, mysticism and transcendence in experience, ethical and aesthetic value, the worlds of solipsism and religion, philosophy as an activity and as a system. Particularly timely in establishing the Tractatus as a source for comparable debates across Continental and Analytic philosophy, this collection will prove of value to scholars of twentieth-century philosophy, Wittgenstein, and Post-Analytic philosophy.

Chapter 1

Life, Art, and Mysticism¹

Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer

Translation by Walter P. Van Stigt²

I: The Sad World

Holland was created and kept in existence by the sedimentation of the great rivers. There was a natural balance of dunes and deltas, of tides and drainage. Temporary flooding of certain areas of the delta was a part of that balance. And in this land could live and thrive a strong branch of the human race.

But people were not satisfied: in order to regulate or prevent flooding they built dykes along the rivers; they changed the course of rivers to improve drainage or to facilitate travel by water; and they cut down forests. No wonder the subtle balance of Holland became disturbed; the Zuyder Zee was eaten away and the dunes slowly but relentlessly destroyed. No wonder that nowadays even stronger measures and ever more work are needed to save the country from total destruction. What is more surprising: this self-imposed burden is not only accepted as inevitable but has been elevated to a task laid on our shoulders by God or inescapable Fate.

Originally man lived in isolation. Supported by nature, every individual sought to maintain his equilibrium between sinful temptations. That filled the whole of his life; there was no involvement with others, nor was there any worry about the future. As a result hard work did not exist, nor did sorrow, hatred, fear, or lust. But man was not content; he started to assert control over his fellow men and to search for certainty about the future. And so the balance was lost: labour forced on to the oppressed became ever more distressing and the conspiracy of those in power ever more wicked. We have now reached the point where everyone has power but at the same time suffers oppression; the old instinct of separation and isolation now only lives on as pale envy and jealousy.

Animals and human beings originally did not interfere with one another. This happy state ended when these discontented humans started to sponge on the animals which they found useful and tried to exterminate the others. The order of nature was torn apart and turned into misery: the burden and toil of looking after domestic animals; all sorts of disease created by parasitic eating practices; a long and hard battle against the wild animals that had not been exterminated; and an even harder battle against vermin in man’s own home and the bacteria infesting his body. Science takes pride in this battle and even expresses its resignation in God’s will, while it is all the result of rebellion against his will!

It is part of the balance of the eternal and omnipresent life that everyone is called away from this earthly existence when one’s time has come. Until then man suffers in mind and body as befits his evil mood of thrift, his lust for power, his vanity, and fear. In his resentment he starts tampering with his body through medicines and diets and with his mind through hypnosis and make-believe; he disturbs the melting pot of his lusts and destroys the balance of psychical responsibility and physical well-being. There is a bodily and moral degeneration, such that, in the end, man can no longer be held responsible for his crimes, for what he has done during his time on this earth. Science has recently claimed credit for extending the span of human life, which certainly is much too short. But what is that worth? It is equally sad to leave this life after one’s time as before one’s time; and as to death, ‘Nature never destroys anything without putting something better in its place’.

Meanwhile, truth is still around and about. There is, for example, the nursery rhyme of the little fish in the sea, and such sayings as ‘Honesty is the best policy’, ‘Better is the enemy of good’, and ‘Truth will be out’. Educators teach little children ‘always to tell the truth’; they drum it into them that little lies never pay, that one thing leads to another and that, in the end, one becomes entangled and gets caught. And, of course, there are all those novels, illustrating how, in the end, the chickens will come home to roost. One truth therefore definitely comes through:

If reason presents certain actions as likely to improve your condition but your conscience does not approve, then leave them undone. Reason never grasps the world in its entirety and the means it dictates to achieving its limited aim will ultimately and in some inscrutable way only cause damage.

If in this life we always had a mirror in front of us in which we could see things at a glance, grasp everything in one image, acting and knowing would not cause us any problem. But since in our viewing we must turn from one thing to another, we cannot concentrate on one without obstructing the other. (Meister Eckhart)

Truth may be around, but the life of each human being and of people as a whole is nothing but a long string of sins against truth. Aspirations are continually frustrated and new ones take their place; all these castles in the air collapse and new ones are built in their place.

The life of the individual is an illusion, an anxious and laborious pursuit of ends – disillusionment. At the time of death, which he has awaited unprepared and in complete ignorance, he is either startled by the realization that he has wasted his life, or his reason is dulled by the comforting thought that without illusions life would have been nothing at all, or that on balance at least he will take with him into his grave a large measure of experience.

Oh yes, these ‘wise’ old people, who kid themselves that experience, old age, a long life of sin which has left its mark on their faces, rigid and long deprived of all naiveté and which stares out of their lifeless eyes, that all this and this alone leads to wisdom! And then, when things come to a head, they challenge the younger generation to tell them what human life is all about.

The life of mankind as a whole is an arrogant tearing up and devouring of its nest on this pure earth, messing up its mothering growth, gnawing and mutilating her and making her rich creative power sterile, until all life has been swallowed up and the human cancer has withered on the barren planet.

The sickness of mind which has caused this, and which has turned men into madmen, they call ‘understanding the world’.

II: Turning into Oneself

Having contemplated the sadness of this world, look into yourself. Within you there is a consciousness, a consciousness which continually changes its content. Are you master of these changes? You will probably say ‘no’, for you find yourself placed in a world which you have not created yourself, and you are bewildered by the unforeseen change and adversity you meet there. But isn’t the content of your consciousness in part determined by your own moods and aren’t these within your power? Or is the motto ‘Control your passions’ only an empty phrase? No doubt you sometimes have this religious sensation, when you feel as if you have withdrawn from your passions, from fear and desire, from time and space, and from the whole of this perceptional world. And, finally, you do know that very meaningful phrase ‘turning-into-oneself’. You therefore seem to be capable of some kind of attention which centres round yourself and which to some extent is within your power. What this self is, you cannot further say, nor can you reason about it, for you know full well that all speaking and reasoning is an attention at a great distance from the self; that you cannot get closer to the self by means of words or reasoning, but only by this turning-into-yourself as it is given to you.

This turning-into-oneself requires an effort; it seems that some inertia must be overcome, that your attention is strongly inclined to linger where it is, and that the resistance felt in the move toward the self is much greater than in the move away from it.

If, however, you succeed in overcoming all inertia and proceed, you will find that passions will be silenced, you will feel dead to the old world of perception, of time and space, and all other forms of plurality; and your eyes, no longer blindfolded, will be opened to a scene of joyful quiescence.

When all images have been removed from the soul, and she beholds the Only One, then the naked essence of the soul finds the naked formless Essence of Divine Unity, the presence of the Superior Being waiting in the self. (Meister Eckhart)

If only for one moment you abandon yourself there where no creatures live you will hear God speak.

It is within you. If only you can be silent for one hour and forget all your desires and feelings, you will hear the unspeakable words of God.

When you keep still and let go of the feelings and desires of your self, then eternal hearing, seeing, and speaking will be revealed and God will hear and see in you. Your own hearing, willing, and seeing is a hindrance, stopping you from seeing and hearing God.

When you are silent you are like God before He formed nature and creatures, including yours; you will then hear and see with what God saw and heard in you before your own willing, seeing, and hearing had begun. (Jakob Boehme)

Then you will understand the content of all your previous awareness, and you will also understand that until then it had to remain incomprehensible to you; you will understand in the sense of being reconciled with it; you will accept it as self-evident. It will make you feel as if you live through it all at once and yet do not live through it in the sense that you do not feel at all bound by it. At the same time, you are also aware of an infinite wealth of fantasies, a mixture of all kinds of worlds, which now claim as much, and also as little, right to existence as those you previously considered to be real. And in this confluent sea of colours, without separation, without firmness and yet without movement, this chaos without disorder, you see a direction, which you follow automatically, yet not of necessity.

You will recognize your free will, free insofar that it can withdraw from the world of causality and remain free; it is only then that your will finds a definite direction, which it follows freely and reversibly. Indeed, the self follows its direction steadily and reversibly, and all the fantasies emanating from it have a direction in parallel and they follow it, steadily and reversibly. You will feel free to return when you so wish to the shackles of plurality, separation, time, space, and bodily consciousness. But you do not return, or rather, you do and you do not at the same time. Freely staying outside, at the same time you live your imprisoned bodily life in this human world, live with your shackles, but you are fully aware that you have accepted them in freedom and that they bind you only as long as you wish.

The phenomena succeed each other in time, bound by causality because your coloured view wills this regularity; but through the walls of causality ‘miracles’ continue to glide and flow, visible only to the free, the enlightened. You will see how, in this imprisoned world, miracles continually break through and how an invisible avenging hand manifestly administers eternal justice. You will also find that over and above physical causality you can see a clear direction in your own life’s course, determined by the self and parallel with the direction of the self:

How this so-called chance is in fact ruled by a firm, wise and wonderful hand; how through your greater wisdom you will live your life in this sad world in lasting joyfulness, knowing that:

‘There is no evil, and no danger, nothing can happen to me.’

‘I am a child, loved of God, and born to happiness.’

Your journey through this sad world will be a steady passage in a light and colourful cloud, full of love for all that is clear in it, love even for your erring and covetous fellow men, for in your eyes it is no longer a reality separated from the self, but directed from within the self and with the self. You will feel all-powerful, for you desire only that which follows the direction, and mountains will give way to you. You will feel endowed with an all-embracing knowledge; as in all emanations you feel the timeless direction, a unison of past, present, and future within yourself. You will no longer ask what to do, you will do the right thing without any prompting; therefore you will no longer ask for understanding – all will be clear of its own.

Behind everything you shall feel a painless dissatisfaction with yourself, a conviction that all past misery was self-inflicted: you will see how you abandoned the self, and how your shackled consciousness lost its direction; that it had acquired mass and inertia, and that wandering, it followed an irreversible path, driven hither and thither by desire and fear. You will then see how fear and an obsession with saving, born from the illusion of time, and how desire and lust for power, born from the illusion of space, made you attach intrinsic importance to what should only be a fleeting emanation of the self without any reality of its own. And you will see how the false trails of desire and fear led the wanderer to labour, sweat, and toil, to ever new, irreversible changes and to ever greater misery.

With a smile you will look back on the reality of the sad world, a past illusion, and within it your own fear and desire, your labour and pain. But your happiness is no longer disturbed; that, too, is a fantasy without reality, a fantasy of sadness and remembrance.

III: Man’S Downfall, Caused by the Intellect

Without pain you now see mankind, cast down by fear and desire, by avarice and lust for power, by time and space, wandering without wings, incapable of lifting itself in self-reflection, chained to the intellect, the spawn of time and space and fossilized in the form of the human head, the symbol of man’s fall. Primitive tribes consider headhunting to be a process of cleansing, and took the greatest pleasure in practising it on the most developed people. This is based on the deep philosophical insight that in nature greater differentiation goes hand-in-hand with graver damnation; this insight resides in their hearts, not in their heads.

This highly valued intellect has enabled man, and forced him, to go on living in desire and fear, rather than from a salutary sense of bewilderment take refuge in self-reflection. Intellect has made him forfeit the amazing independence and directness of his rambling images by connecting them with each other rather than with the self. In this way, the intellect made him persist with apparent security in the conviction of a ‘reality’, which man in his arrogance has made himself and has tied to causality, but in which ultimately he must feel totally powerless.

In this life of lust and desire the intellect renders man the devilish service of linking two images of the imagination as means and end. Once in the grip of desire for one thing he is made to strive after another as a means to that end: for example, in order to change the course of rivers, he builds dams; indulging his jealousy of his neighbour he sets fire to his house; to protect himself against wild animals he builds his house on stilts; to let the sun shine on his house he cuts down trees. Switching attention from ends to means is accompanied by a change in bodily feelings; there is apparently a noticeable change in the bloodstream, which starts in the head. Here too one feels the close connection between head and intellect.

The act aimed at the means, however, always overshoots the mark to some extent; the means has a direction of its own, diverted at an angle, however small, from that of the end. It acts, therefore, not only in the direction of the end, but also in other dimensions. Man’s blinkered view prevents him from recognizing the sometimes very detrimental effects of such action but, worse, gradually the end is lost sight of and only the means remains. In this sad world where a clear view of all human activity is no longer possible, a world dominated by drill and imitation – the other offspring of fear and desire – many recognize as an end what was originally only a means. They seek what we might call an end of second order; they perhaps again discover a means to this end and again out of line with that end. If this deceptive jump from end to means is repeated several times, it may happen that a direction is pursued which not only deviates into other dimensions but opposes the direction of the original end and therefore counteracts it.

Industry originally supplied its products in order to create in nature the most favourable conditions for human life. But man ignored the fact that in manufacturing these products from nature’s resources he interfered with and upset the balance of nature and the human condition, thereby causing damage greater than the advantages these products could ever bring. For example, to meet the demand for timber, man has razed or ruined so many forests that in the temperate climates hardly any edible plants grow in the wild.

And, worse, manufacturing these goods became an end in itself; new industries were called into existence merely to supply the tools to facilitate production, another blow to the balance of nature. Raw materials were recklessly seized from faraway lands, spawning commercial and naval enterprises, which in turn led to moral and physical misery and to the oppression of one people by another.

As the self was left abandoned, the self that knows all about the past and the future, man grew more and more anxious about the future and began to crave for the power to predict its course: thus, science came into being.

Science, which in its original form was wholly subservient to industry, has made up all kinds of general assertions in and about the world of perception. These come true as long as it pleases God; but one day they will suddenly be contradicted by facts and then our scientists will claim ‘Oh yes, of course, we always made this or that tacit assumption’. In their incompetence they then set abou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Life, Art, and Mysticism
• 2 Logic and Ethics as the Limits of the World
• 3 To What Extent is Solipsism a Truth?
• 4 Frege at Therapy
• 5 ‘Making Sense’ of Nonsense: Conant and Diamond Read Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
• 6 IMore Making Sense of Nonsense: From Logical Form to Forms of Life
• 7 Saying and Showing: An Example from Anscombe
• 8 Why Worry about the Tractatus?
• 9 Transcendence and Contradiction in the Tractatus
• 10 Wittgenstein’s Onto-Logic
• Bibliography
• Index