Wittgenstein and Hegel

Reevaluation of Difference

Jakub Mácha, Alexander Berg, Jakub Mácha, Alexander Berg

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110571967
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

This book brings together for the first time two philosophers from different traditions and different centuries. While Wittgenstein was a focal point of 20th century analytic philosophy, it was Hegel's philosophy that brought the essential discourses of the 19th century together and developed into the continental tradition in 20th century. This now-outdated conflict took for granted Hegel's and Wittgenstein's opposing positions and is being replaced by a continuous progression and differentiation of several authors, schools, and philosophical traditions. The development is already evident in the tendency to identify a progression from a 'Kantian' to a 'Hegelian phase' of analytical philosophy as well as in the extension of right and left Hegelian approaches by modern and postmodern concepts. Assessing the difference between Wittgenstein and Hegel can outline intersections of contemporary thinking.?????

Part 1General Introduction, the Analytic-Continental Split

Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer

On Metaphysical Images in Analytic Philosophy: Overcoming Empiricism by Logical Analysis of Language

Abstract Overcoming metaphysics by logical analysis of language had been Carnap’s slogan in the spirit of Bertrand Russell and the younger Wittgenstein, directed mainly against Heidegger’s philosophical phenomenology as a paradigm of what later got the label ‘Continental’ philosophy. After we realise that formalist conceptual analysis heavily works with counterfactual mathematical metaphors and metaphysical world images of the 17th and 18th century, developed in Hobbes’s materialism, Locke’s physiology of cognition and Hume’s sensualism, it is about time to undo these insular moves of Logical Positivism and other forms of Empiricism and Naturalism. Any real linguistic turn in critical philosophy has at least to take up Kant’s constitutional analysis and Hegel’s insights into historically developed norms of differentially conditioned inferences. Such generic rules, canonized as conceptual truths, always already lie at the ground of meaningful empirical Konstatierungen in a synthetic a priori way.

1The method of logical analysis vs. the movement of Analytic Philosophy

In this paper I propose to distinguish philosophy that uses all available methods of logico-linguistic analysis from Analytic Philosophy in upper case letters. This means distinguishing the philosophical movement with the word “Analytic” in its name from philosophy that has, since its inception, developed conceptual analysis as a basis for critical reflections on the very meaning of empirical, theoretical and reflective sentences in everyday language, scientific texts and logical commentaries. An especially important case is the “speculative” form of sentences used in philosophical “geographies” of knowledge and science, and in all kinds of figurative articulations of attitudes towards the world as a whole.

The movement of Analytic Philosophy was, so the story goes,23 founded by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, with Bernard Bolzano, Gottlob Frege and some Neo-Kantians as grandfathers. Its opposition to Hegelianism—or rather what was held to be Hegelianism—seems to have been the main unifying bond at the beginning. The movement’s real roots, however, lie in the tradition of (British) Empiricism stretching from Thomas Hobbes to John Stuart Mill and, in Vienna, to Ernst Mach. The basic ideas were taken up, in Vienna, by the Circle around Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap, strongly influenced by the younger Ludwig Wittgenstein, in Berlin by the school around Hans Reichenbach and Carl Gustav (“Peter”) Hempel. From the 1930s on, Analytic Philosophy turned into a self-declared anti-continental movement, with Edmund Husserl’s post-Kantian philosophical phenomenology, Martin Heidegger’s post-Hegelian philosophical hermeneutics and the post-Marxian dialectics of Leftist circles (including many French philosophers) as its main opponents. From a “continental” point of view, Analytic Philosophy seems to restore “scientific enlightenment” of 17th and 18th-century debates on the ground of a gross overestimation of logical formalism in semantical analysis. Despite its international success, it appears as an insular movement mainly because of its abandoning the Kantian task of understanding science as a special region in our life-world, thus falling back even behind Neo-Kantians such as Rudolf Cohen, Paul Natorp and Ernst Cassirer.

A first problem of Analytic Philosophy lies in the ideal image of language, developed by Frege, and the corresponding mathematical picture of ideal knowledge and perfect truth. The adherence to a prototypical ideal of a mathematical concept script and mathematical truth distinguishes the formalist approach in Analytic Philosophy from linguistic phenomenology (Gilbert Ryle, John L. Austin and many others). The formalist approach takes deductive rules defined for canonical notations in mathematical “language” directly as a model for norms of good inference in its attempt to make the inferential form of content in the use of expressions in ordinary language explicit. The problem is that ordinary language does not allow for the same merely syntactic rules of recursive definition for well-formed complex expression. It also does not fulfil the same semantic conditions of mathematical notations, for example, the bivalence principle in elementary arithmetic according to which every syntactically well-formed “sentence” already has one of two truth-values attached, namely, true or false, tertium non datur. A further crucial point is that the mainstream of Analytic Philosophy defends an empiricist world-picture.

Empiricism always comes in one of two versions. The first version suggests a logical analysis of the content of meaningful propositions (and its syntactic parts) on the ground of presupposed sense data. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, for example, talks about elementary states of affairs corresponding to logically basic or elementary sentences without being able to give robust examples, neither for elementary sentences nor for their counterparts in my perceptual access to the world. Sentences are viewed under the guidance of a “deep structure,” a canonical notation. The projections between sentences in ordinary language and sentences in a canonical formal notation have, at best, the form of a useful analogy—such that the very method of formal logical analysis is metaphorical. I talk of metaphors here in the very general sense of figurative tropes, including analogies.

The second version of empiricism is physical atomism. Because of the instability of the first version, due to the obvious obscurity of talk about immediate sensations or qualia and elementary facts, it tends to collapse into the second. The development from Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World (colloquially called “Aufbau”) to Otto Neurath’s physicalism and Quine’s postulates of stimulus meanings shows this quite nicely. The Aufbau appeals to a formally solipsistic basis. The move to Quine’s naturalized epistemology corresponds, so to speak, to a move that leads us from the radical empiricism of David Hume, informed by George Berkeley, back to John Locke and Thomas Hobbes.

Quine’s behavioural theory of “sense-impressions” corresponds to Locke’s “ideas.” It forms, as such, a “physiology of the understanding”, as Kant critically labelled Locke’s version. The problem is that theories about physiology and physical forces are uncritically presupposed. Neurath, Quine and their followers ignore or do not grasp the “transcendental” arguments in the continental tradition—from Descartes, Kant and Hegel to Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenology—that warn us against presupposing a whole system of science and “explaining” human understanding and cognition by embedding it into neurophysiological theories. Neurath’s famous simile, according to which the way we reconstruct a holistic system of science is like the way sailors repair a ship on the high seas, is a dangerous rhetorical device to support dogmatic scientism. Despite the problems of Humean empiricism, the turn back to Locke and Hobbes forsakes any critical impulse of radical empiricism and results in a merely dogmatic worldview.

A third problem lies in a far-too-narrow concept of logic and logical analysis. Frege’s logic holds only for purely sortal domains or classes of entities. Such domains and classes presuppose sharp boundaries between different classes and between their individual members. However, such sharp borders of identity and inequality exist only in purely mathematical domains of higher arithmetic, i. e., in pure set theory. (I ignore here the peculiar status of the ideal points, lines and forms of pure geometry.) In other words, Frege’s logic is only mathematical logic. All “application” of it in actual languages, with which we refer to the actual world of experience, is highly metaphorical. We cannot understand it “literally” at all. This fact relativizes Analytic Philosophy’s criticism of the use of metaphors in philosophy and the humanities. Such a criticism stands in the tradition of Thomas Hobbes—who defended a purportedly precise and rigorous literal meaning against any figurative speech, despite the fact that the basic method of all sciences consists in finding good enough analogies. Literal meaning exists then, ironically, only if we do not leave the domain of a mathematical Urbild or model at all.

In any case, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus ranks, alongside with Russell’s Philosophy of Logical Atomism, as the foundational text of logical positivism and logical empiricism in the starting phase of Analytic Philosophy. In the following, I will attempt to show that the Tractatus contains at least as much speculative metaphysics as it contributes to critical philosophy.

Wittgenstein’s first main thesis is this: only statements that can be understood as true or false Konstatierungen defined by truth-conditions on the ground of elementary statements are meaningful. His second thesis is that the sentences of the natural sciences are of this sort. These claims are, however, utterly wrong. The first thesis is wrong since there are no pure Konstatierungen at all. The second thesis is wrong because the scientific sentences codified in science textbooks do not have the logical form of empirical propositions or Konstatierungen at all. Rather, they express general, i. e., generic, rules of conditioned inferences. To the credit of Wittgenstein and his genius, however, he did ultimately recognize the problem and tried to save the critical impulse of his truly analytic philosophy from hidden metaphysical dogmatisms and, more importantly, from Russell’s philosophical movement. Philosophers such as Friedrich Kambartel and John McDowell who take up these insights of the middle and later Wittgenstein in a radical way are ironically “excommunicated” by ardent followers of Analytic Philosophy.

However, the world-picture of Russell and the early Wittgenstein ultimately assumed two forms. The first form is empiricist in the sense of starting with subjective sense data or qualia, which, as I have already said, do not exist at all in the sense of well-determined states of affairs. There are no well-defined entities because there are no meaningful identities that can be defined. The second form is the picture of scientism or, what amounts to the same thing, physicalism. This naturalistic “materialism” views the world as a holistic system of relative movements of atomic substances, without reflecting enough on what it means to do so. In an ideal mathematical model, lines as extensions of functions represent movements of point-like (centres of) bodily atoms. Mathematically, the functions take (real) numbers representing time as arguments and points in space as values. This picture goes back to Descartes, the first and greatest of all theorists to reflect on the very form of modern mathematical science.

In Wittgenstein’s formal empiricism, the world is a kind of four-dimensional colour movie with “space, time and colour […] as forms of the objects” (TLP: 2.0251). Contemporary Analytic Philosophy remains limited in its views by this ambivalent metaphysical image. This diagnosis is nicely supported by a remark about David Lewis:

Lewis makes a profound Realist assumption: the world is, fundamentally, a four-dimensional space-time mosaic of instantiations of point-size categorical properties […]. You, me, tables, and chairs are ultimately composed of such pixels, too. (Schrenk 2016: p.136)

It is interesting that empiricism overlooks from the beginning its own crypto-religious metaphysics, as made explicit in the following remark:

Suppose you knew everything about the past, present, or future, all facts, all events, just everything (ibid.).

It is impossible to “assume” anything like this. It is as misleading as assuming an ideal God-like perspective. In contrast to theology, which at least makes its anthropomorphic metaphors explicit, metaphysical empiricism does not know what it is doing linguistically and logically or how to understand its own reflective and speculative commentaries on “my world” and “the world”. Any such mathematical model of a metaphysics of science produces at best an eidolon, as Plato would have said. Such an eidolon is a linguistic toy-model; it would remain only a linguistic toy, an artificial Sprachspiel, if it did not show us some features of our real use of language in world-related language-games—as the double meaning in the use of this term by the later Wittgenstein shows.

If one imagines the “movie” of the world as already shot—which seems to be possible in either version of empiricism, sensation-based or physicalist—then there is, for example, no place left for free will. Nevertheless, in the Humean picture of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the belief in a given causal nexus is also called superstition (TLP: 5.1361). Wittgenstein seems to think it wrong to deny contingencies in the real world. In the empiricist version of the pixel picture, natural laws are just attempts to represent some or many facts about the past, present or future in an axiomatically and inferentially “thick” way, i. e., in such a way that we can predict some future facts or prove that some past facts “must have” occurred. There is, of course, no solution to Hume’s induction problem. Steps from relative frequencies to probabilities always rest on some free decisions. There is no general logic of induction beyond some rules of thumb for relatively reliable statistical methods. Probability judgements are in the same way generic as any other concrete law of nature. Genericity means that we have to take possible exceptions to ...