Part One
Language
Like Aristotle, Wittgensteinâs leitmotif was action. Wittgenstein saw action (or behaviour) as the root, manifestation and transmitter of language and meaning. He makes clear the regress in viewing the proposition, or any kind of mental representation, as a necessary precursor to thought and action, and points out the superfluity of such shadowy inner precursors when instinct and practices can easily be seen to be at the foundation of all our thoughts and actions: âIn philosophy one is in constant danger of producing a myth of symbolism, or a myth of mental processes. Instead of simply saying what anyone knows and must admitâ (Z 211). Wittgenstein urges us to see the differences in meaning that are often hidden by the uniform appearance of language, famously insisting that meaning is dependent on use or context. Just as Aristotle in the Categories gave Platoâs Forms a linguistic status, so Wittgenstein took a linguistic turn from his predecessors, giving metaphysics a grammatical reading: both showed that concepts are not entities existing in isolated splendour in some metaphysical realm but simply abstractions from our use of language; and as Wittgenstein also makes clear, nor do concepts and grammar exist in the brain. Indeed, we shall see in this section that Wittgenstein gives our grammar and concepts an anthropo-logical and enactive twist: they are conditioned by our form(s) of life and manifest in what we do and in what we say. There is, for Wittgenstein, no âlanguage of thoughtâ or mentalese that then gets verbalized: language is rooted in instinct and behaviour, generated by our practices, and transmitted by enculturation. It can deploy itself in âinner thinkingâ, in âthinking out loudâ or in speech; but it is not a mere âvehicleâ for some ghostly nonlinguistic thought that craves linguistic expression. However, language is the unparalleled vehicle and evolving repository of human culture, finding its finest and most enactive expression in literature â where, through language, is shown what cannot be said.
1
Wittgensteinâs Grammar:
Through Thick and Thin
This chapter clarifies Wittgensteinâs idiosyncratic view of âgrammarâ and traces its evolution from the Tractatus to On Certainty. I distinguish between a âthin grammarâ and an increasingly more fact-linked, âreality-soakedâ, âthick grammarâ. The âhinge certaintiesâ of On Certainty and the âpatterns of lifeâ of his Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology attest to the fact that one of the leitmotifs in the work of the third Wittgenstein is the grammaticalization of experience. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. We shall also see that his conception of the logical as internally linked to the human form of life clashes with traditional conceptions of logical necessity and constrains its limits, thus making possibility anthropo-logical.
1. Defining grammar
The limits of what makes sense and what does not; what can be said and what cannot, is a leitmotif of Wittgensteinâs philosophy. But what determines those limits? Wittgensteinâs astonishing answer, already inscribed in the Tractatus, is: grammar. For him, language â any language â is rule-governed (RC 303); that is, governed by rules of grammar. What Wittgenstein means by âgrammarâ is both similar to and different from what we usually mean by grammar. Ray Monk recounts the following (due to Rush Rhees):
Moore, who attended Wittgensteinâs lectures, insisted that âWittgenstein was using the word âgrammarâ in a rather odd sense. ⊠Thus, he argued, the sentence: âThree men was workingâ is incontrovertibly a misuse of grammar, but it is not clear that: âDifferent colours cannot be in the same place in a visual field at the same timeâ commits a similar transgression. If this latter is also called a misuse of grammar, then âgrammarâ must mean something different in each case.â No, replied Wittgenstein. âThe right expression is âIt does not have sense to say âŠââ Both kinds of rules were rules in the same sense. âIt is just that some have been the subject of philosophical discussion and some have not.â
1991, 322â3
And what Monk importantly adds here is that grammatical mistakes made by philosophers are more âperniciousâ than ordinary grammatical mistakes. Wittgenstein, then, merely expands our ordinary understanding of grammar rather than altering it: he does not see grammar as comprised merely of syntactic rules, but of any rule that governs âthe way we are going to talkâ (MWL 72): âBy grammatical rule I understand every rule that relates to the use of a languageâ (VOW 303). For him, grammar is âa preparation for description, just as fixing a unit of length is a preparation for measuringâ; so that âA rod has a lengthâ is as much a preparation for description (e.g., âThis rod is three feet longâ) as the grammatical rule to use âwereâ and not âwasâ in some cases is a preparation for our intelligible use of language. Wittgenstein is simply more liberal than grammarians as to what he will count as grammar:
Everything thatâs required for comparing the proposition with the facts belongs to grammar. That is, all the requirements for understanding. (All the requirements for sense.)
BT 38
Another way of putting this is that grammar consists of the conditions of intelligibility of a language. It is the conventionally established basis on which we can make sense: âGrammar consists of conventionsâ (PG 138), keeping in mind that conventions here are not due to a concerted consensus, but to an unconcerted agreement in practice.
Now if grammar includes â[a]ll the requirements for senseâ, it must then also include rules such as âThere exist people other than myselfâ. For isnât that a requisite underpinning of sense â a preparation for such descriptions as âThere are twenty of us in this roomâ or âVietnamâs population is 96.5 millionâ? Moreover, following Wittgensteinâs criterion for the misuse of grammar in his reply to Moore above (âIt does not have sense to say âŠâ), it has at least as little sense to say âI canât be sure that anyone exists but meâ as to say âThree men was workingâ. In fact, people are more likely not to understand what you are saying in the first case than in the second. In both cases, theyâll understand all the words, but as Monk noted, violations of grammar can be more or less pernicious â so that whereas âThree men was workingâ is laughable at worst, âI canât be sure that anyone exists but meâ smacks of the pathological. Weâll come back to this.
Grammar, then, is a normatively sanctioned system or method of representation / description; it allows us to use words in order to intelligibly represent, describe, express, misrepresent, misdescribe, imagine, pretend, lie about, etc. how things are. I would say that one of the continuous tracks of Wittgensteinâs philosophy is the discernment and elucidation of grammar â its nature and its limits. This chapter traces Wittgensteinâs evolving notion of grammar from the Tractatus to On Certainty. We can distinguish in Wittgenstein what I will call a âthin grammarâ â a grammar that governs our use of words independently of facts about the world â from a âthick grammarâ â a grammar that is âreality-soakedâ1 or fact dependent. It seems to me that Wittgensteinâs thick grammar grows increasingly thick; so much so that there occurs in âthe third Wittgensteinâ2 what I call a grammaticalization of experience. This is particularly notable in his notion of âpatterns of lifeâ in Last Writings in the Philosophy of Psychology and of hinge certainty in On Certainty3; and it reflects his growing realization that grammar can be anthropo-logical, as it were, and that it can manifest itself as a way of acting. In moves that exceed anything in Philosophical Investigations, the third Wittgenstein makes grammar enactive. However, we shall see that his unrelenting, albeit at times hesitant, connection of grammar to the stream of life in no way infringes on the âautonomy of grammarâ. I will now briefly retrace Wittgensteinâs drawing of the limits of language in the Tractatus as it relates to nonsense and ineffability; for it remains, in this, essentially unchanged and informs what the later Wittgenstein will call grammar.
2. Drawing the limits of language
In âOn Heidegger on Being and Dreadâ, written in 1929, Wittgenstein writes:
Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of language. Think for example of the astonishment that anything at all exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question, and there is also no answer whatsoever. Anything we might say is a priori bound to be nonsense. Nevertheless we do run up against the limits of language. ⊠This running-up against the limits of language is ethics.
WVC 68
Why is anything we might say in explanation of the astonishment that anything at all exists, nonsense? Why would such an attempt constitute a ârunning-up against the limits of language? And how is that ethics? In his âLecture on Ethicsâ (written in the same year), Wittgenstein writes:
I see now that these nonsensical expressions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and, I believe, the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, ca...