Wittgenstein and Meaning in Life

In Search of the Human Voice

R. Hosseini

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137440914
• Topic: Filosofia
• Subtopic: Filosofia delle religioni

What could Wittgenstein's work contribute to the rapidly growing literature on life's meaning? This book not only examines Wittgenstein's scattered remarks about value and 'sense of life' but also argues that his philosophy and 'way of seeing' has far reaching implications for the ways theorists approach an ancient question: 'How shall one live?'.

1

Book of Facts, Book of Values

‘It is difficult not to exaggerate in philosophy’.

Wittgenstein, The Big Typescript

Introduction

In the literature a distinction has been made between ‘individualist’ and ‘holist’ or ‘personal’ and ‘cosmic’ questions about life’s meaning (Wong 2008: 123; Metz 2013: 3). Holist or cosmic questions about life’s meaning enquire about life as a whole; in this line of enquiry you would like to define yourself and your role or your purpose in the world. For a large portion of the history of philosophy, cosmic or holistic questions were the gateway through which we would arrive at an answer to the individualist or personal questions. That is, the assumption was that an individual’s life’s meaning is defined primarily by its role in the larger schemes of things.

But currently, as Metz has noted, most works in the literature have individualist concerns and questions. In other words, the question is ‘What makes my life meaningful?’ and not, for example, ‘What is the point of existence’ or ‘Where do we go from here?’ However, it is worth pausing for a moment to ask whether cosmic and personal questions about life’s meaning can be as easily separated as indicated in the literature. It seems to me that this division overlooks the interlocking connection between the two, because, in a sense, cosmic questions can be ‘personal’ questions as well since a specific person might find it to be of significance in her appraisal of life. Pascal, for example, didn’t have the notion that life’s meaning can be separated as having two senses, and the source of his individual agony was realising that a universal meaning might be absent. In our quest for the meaning of life, one’s remembrance of stealing fruit from the neighbour’s tree or one’s ‘Rosebud’, as in the film Citizen Cane, can be as significant as the purpose of the emergence of life on a tiny portion of Milky Way Galaxy. Saint Augustine’s recollection of his innocent mischiefs in his youth is a good example:

Yet I lusted to thieve, and did it, compelled by no hunger, no poverty ... A pear tree there was near our vineyard, laden with fruit ... To shake and rub this, some lewd young fellows of us went, late one night ... and took huge loads. Behold my heart, O God, behold my heart. ... It was foul and I loved it. ... Fair were the pears we stole, because they were Thy creation, Thou fairest of all, creator of all. ([398] 1966: Book II)

Add to this Augustine’s intense affairs with his concubines (Book VI), the significance of his mother in his life, his restless heart and his ‘destructive pleasures’.¹ Every single human being, one might say, begins the question of the meaning of life with the vicissitudes of her life at the background, like the way Augustine did. We want to know what, if anything, confers value on the things we consider to be of value. In other words, it seems that a different version of the question of life’s meaning is the relation between facts and values, and our judgement about this relation has an impact on our understanding of the meaning of life. For example, a subjectivist who claims that the meaning of life is only a matter of obtaining what one wishes is already denying that there are things in life that are objectively valuable and meaning-conferring. On the other hand, a supernaturalist would say what confers value on facts is defined in terms of their relations to a Supreme Being who is the source of all values.

In this chapter, I examine a radical answer in the history of modern philosophy to the question of the relation between fact and value, and then I discuss the implications of this answer on one’s understanding of the meaning of life. I am referring to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Tractatus can be seen as a treatise on the meaning of life in that it takes propositions of value to be the manifestation of our tendency to say something about the ‘sense of life’ (1966: § 6.5). I should mention that a critical understanding of the Tractatus’s account of life’s meaning needs an analysis of its arguments the large portion of which might appear to be of remote relevance to the issues of life’s meaning. That is, first I have to discuss the premises that led to the book’s conclusions about value. My aim in this chapter is to provide a Tractarian picture of meaning in life. It is against the background of this picture that in the next chapter I examine some theories of life’s meaning. And although, in Chapter 2, I ultimately reject the Tractarian view itself, the aim is to judge what we can take away from it.

Making a case for fact/Value dichotomy

During the course of World War I, Wittgenstein, a young soldier by then, used to write down his thoughts in his notebooks. His notes were mainly on logic and its relation to our language, but one could also find notes of a personal nature that would reflect his existential concerns, from fear of death to the implications of ‘living in agreement with the world’. It was based on these notes that Wittgenstein published his first book, the only one he published in his lifetime.² The book’s main aim is to show that the problems of philosophy arise because we misunderstand the ‘logic of our language’. In order for us to avoid this misunderstanding, Wittgenstein suggests, we have to draw a sharp line between what could be meaningfully said within the boundaries of language and what cannot be said but can only be ‘shown’.

But how are we to determine what is sayable and what is not? By logical analysis of the structure of our language, Wittgenstein thought. He starts his book by claiming that the world consists of the ‘totality of facts’. For example, it is a fact that it is raining now, that the cat is by the window now and the earth revolves around the sun. Facts are ‘existent states of affairs’ (§ 2), and states of affairs are made of combinations of objects. Objects, in turn, combine with one another based on their internal and logical properties. The logical form of an object is all the possibilities that it has in virtue of its internal properties. These properties make states of affairs either actual or possible. In other words, the states of affairs that do exist could have been otherwise. For example, in our world the earth is approximately 8.20 light-minutes away from the sun, but it is possible to imagine a world in which the distance is shorter or longer. According to the Tractatus’s ontology, the totality of states of affairs makes up the whole of reality. The world is precisely the combination of all the states of affairs that do exist.

Wittgenstein tried to explain this by introducing his famous picture theory of language. Imagine in a court the judge is presented with a miniature model of a car accident which describes how it has happened. Now each of these elements in the model (cars, trees, houses, etc.) have a function; they are picturing a states of affairs. Wittgenstein took this model as an analogy to the way language functions and suggested that the whole language is in a sense a picture model of reality. That is, a proposition shows how things stand in the world. A proposition offers a picture of reality. If the states of affairs, pictured by the proposition, actually exist, then we say the proposition is true. Once again, reality is the totality of all the states of affairs that do exist. And, as Alfred Nordmann puts it, ‘a complete list of all those possible states of affairs that actually obtain would provide a complete description of the world’ (2005: 39). That is, a complete description of the world provides the ‘totality of facts’ but not more. Think of that miniature model of a car accident as a picture of language again. What Wittgenstein wants to say is that you can think of all sorts of things that can be put in a miniature model, things like objects and states of affairs, but there is not any place for value in such a picture of reality and of the world. When you talk about ‘natural sciences’, the cat on the couch, a general snow in Ireland, and so on, there is a way to find out whether these sentences correspond with the reality out there. In this view there is a limit to what language can convey, and the limits of language is seen as ‘the limits of my world’ (1966: § 5.6).

In a sense, what Wittgenstein does in the Tractatus is similar to a thought experiment introduced by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience. The difference is that James and Wittgenstein arrive at two quite different conclusions by the same thought experiment. James wants to demonstrate the impossibility of abstracting oneself from the attitudes and emotions that colour our experience of the world and asks to

Conceive yourself, if possible, suddenly stripped of all the emotion with which your world now inspires you, and try to imagine it as it exists, purely by itself, without your favourable, hopeful or apprehensive comment. It will be almost impossible for you to realise such a condition of negativity and deadness. No one portion of the universe would then have importance beyond another; and the whole collection of its things and series of events would be without significance, character, expression, or perspective. ([1902]1987: 141)

Whereas James denies the psychological possibility of a value-stripped world, the Tractatus claims that not only is it possible to ‘conceive’ a value-stripped world but also that, ontologically, this is how the world is. The world that the Tractatus tries to describe is ‘stripped of all the emotion’ and ‘purely by itself’ – a world where only the ‘law of causality’ decides what we can describe. As Wittgenstein says, ‘what can be described can also happen: and what the law of causality is meant to exclude cannot even be described’ (§ 6.362). Wittgenstein claims,

In the world everything is at it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists – and if it did exist, it would have no value. If there is any value that does have value, it must lie outside the whole sphere of what happens and is the case. For all that happens and is the case is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie within the world, since if it did it would itself be accidental. It must lie outside the world. (§ 6.41)

The claim that ‘in the world everything is as it is’ is crucial in understanding the Tractarian account of value and the meaning of life. The Tractatus is about an individual who faces the world and tries to see it as it is. In such view, the fact of human life is something that ‘belongs with the rest of the world’. When we read in the Tractatus that ‘Death is not an event in life’ (§ 6.4311), we can see its relation to a view that considers human beings to be part of the world like a ‘beast’ or ‘stone’ or tree. However, as we will see in the next section, the raison d’être of ethics is precisely our deepest tendency to deny that human beings belong with the rest of the world; it is to deny that the only things we have are facts and not values.

The Tractarian account of the ‘sense of life’

The last four pages of the Tractatus address the implications of the Tractarian worldview for Wittgenstein’s understanding of the sense of life. These pages contain a number of concise claims about the unsayabilty of ethics, the nature of the will, death, the insufficiency of our temporal immortality to solve the problem of life, the mystical, and silence. And there is a reason for the brevity of these statements. For the author of the Tractatus, the ‘correct method’ of doing philosophy was ‘to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science ... and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions’ (§ 6.53). Ironically, however, as Russell noted, Wittgenstein managed to say ‘a good deal’ about the unsayable.³

One might say the gist of Wittgenstein’s propositions concerning ethics is that in the world the only thing we have is ‘facts, facts, facts, but no Ethics’ (Wittgenstein 1965: 7). There is a limit, in this view, to what can be said, and all the propositions that can be said are of ‘equal value’ (1966: § 6.4). The common characteristic of all the facts in the world is only one thing: They are all ‘accidental’ (§ 6.41), and what is accidental cannot convey value. Wittgenstein’s argument can be restructured as follows:

•Facts of the world are accidental.

•All propositions concerning facts are contingent.

•Ethics is concerned with value.

•If there were propositions of value in the world, they would be contingent.

•This would make propositions of value accidental.

•Value cannot be accidental since if it were accidental, it wouldn’t be value; it would, then, be a fact. Therefore,

in the world, it is impossible to have propositions of ethics;

value must lie outside the world.

If the answer to the question of value cannot be put into words, as Wittgenstein claims, then one might begin to ask whether the question itself can be meaningfully expressed. Thus, Wittgenstein claims that the unsayability of an answer would render the question itself unsayable as well (§ 6.5). Put differently, when a question can be expressed meaningfully, it is ‘possible to answer it’, and the only questions that can be asked are the questions of ‘natural sciences’. However, even if we answer all the questions of science, we won’t be able to answer the problem of life:

We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problem of life remains completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer. (§ 6.52)

One feels that the chain of thoughts in the Tractatus, expressed in a numeric order, has a domino effect. That is, what has been started with the first proposition of the book, which claims the world to be ‘all that is the case’ (§ 1), reaches a mystifying end in one of the key points of the book:

The riddle does not exist. (§ 6.5)

The point is that the only way to solve the problem of life is to make it disappear – to see that the riddle of life, for which an answer was supposed to be found, does not exist.⁴ The problem will vanish when one realises that it cannot be framed into a question, and thus no meaningful answer can be found for it (§ 6.521). In a sense, the only solution to the problem of life is taken to be changing one’s way of seeing the world. The craving to find an ultimate answer to the problem of life will fade away once we come to realise that there is no such thing as ‘the riddle of life’. In the penultimate section of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously writes:

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, th...