Thought, Truth, and Certainty Reading the Meditations in light of the Tractatus as a work in Logic and First Philosophy

Joseph Zanella Copenhagen © MMXIV

Abstract The aim of this paper is to give a reading of the Meditations that first and foremost takes seriously Descartes’ words regarding his own work as being a work on First Philosophy, that is, metaphysics and not, as is commonly held, a work on epistemology. By reading the Meditations in light of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, supported by the findings of Frege which inspired Wittgenstein, I hope to show that at the root of their philosophies lie the same considerations that occupied Descartes, these being the autonomy of thought and its independence (or transcendence) of the contingent or sensory. Both Wittgenstein (Frege) and Descartes held firmly the idea that thinking (judgment) must be independent and autonomous if science is to be possible: if something is to be said. Their methods of course differed. Descartes isolated thought and distinguished it from the sensory by way of the skeptical method. Wittgenstein drew on Frege’s work on logic and mathematics to formulate a like demarcation between thought (logic) and experience. Their differences in method aside the central insights and aims of their philosophies are shared and common to all who consider these problems and still remain relevant today.

Joseph Zanella © mmxiv

Thought, Truth, and Certainty Reading the Meditations in light of the Tractatus as a work in Logic and First Philosophy

Wenn in dem beständigen Flusse aller Dinge nichts Festes, Ewiges beharrte, würde die Erkennbarkeit der Welt aufhören und Alles in Verwirrung stürzen.

—Frege

Table of Contents Preface 1 1. Metaphysics and the limits of language 10 2. Clarity for its own sake 12 3. The cause of our troubles 18 4. All that is the case 22 5. The substance of the world 28 6. First philosophy 30 7. Away from the senses 36 8. What can be doubted 41 9. What is most true 46 10. Principles and foundations 49 11. Knowledge and certainty 51 12. I is not an object 55 13. We make for ourselves pictures of facts 58 14. The autonomy of thought 61 Conclusion 64 Bibliography 69

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Preface One of the most lucid passages of philosophy ever written is found in The Foundations of Arithmetic by Gottlob Frege. The passage serves as the motto of this paper. In J. L Austin’s workmanlike translation it is rendered thus: “If everything were in continual flux, and nothing maintained itself fixed for all time, there would no longer be any possibility of getting to know anything about the world and everything would be plunged into confusion.”1 It doesn’t quite have the decisive ring of Frege’s German so I have amended it to read: If in the continuous flux of all things nothing fixed, eternal endured, knowledge of the world would cease and all would fall into confusion. What Frege is criticizing as part of his work establishing the foundations of arithmetic is the view that, to his mind, throws everything into a continual flux: that is the genetic, historical or empiricist worldview. In our day it informs or permeates all branches of knowledge, not only philosophy. It is an irony of history and time then that a work by a man widely championed as the father of analytic philosophy should be held in such esteem when it is fundamentally at odds with and quite obviously inimical to the contemporary spirit of inquiry.

A further noteworthy irony is that this valuation of Frege—this death by a thousand cuts of damning praise—parallels the valuation of one of the main subjects of this paper, namely, Descartes, the so-called father of modern philosophy. It is telling that they both sought to counter the impulse towards metaphysical naturalism (or what is more commonly known as scientific explanation), which has nonetheless triumphed despite their hard work, while at the same time laying claim to being the rightful heir to their work. The passage by Frege is bookended by a dismissal of the idea that e.g. “psychology … can contribute anything whatever to the foundation of arithmetic.”2 The upshot of his argument being that to suppose that mathematics is grounded in the senses or in experience and “that concepts sprout in the individual mind like leaves on a tree, and we think to discover their nature by studying their birth … to define them psychologically, in terms of the nature of the human mind [leads to incoherence as it] makes everything subjective, and if we follow it through to the end, [it] does away with truth.”3 It is to destroy knowledge and push the world over the cliff into metaphysical obscurantism and empty verbiage. That is a pretty damning judgment.

Another thing the parallel of interests and the reception of both show is that Frege’s project, like Descartes’ before him, was one more battle in the long war. Frege’s

1 Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic, Second Revised Edition, J.L Austin, transl., (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959) p. viie. 2 Ibid., p. vie. 3 Ibid., p. viie.

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main insight or discovery as some would have it is that the truths of mathematics are independent of the human minds that make use of them. As he says so vividly: “Never let us take the description of the origin of an idea for a definition, or an account of the mental and physical conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for a proof of it. A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never confuse these two things. We must remind ourselves that a proposition no more ceases to be true when I cease to think of it that the sun ceases to exist when I shut my eyes. Otherwise in proving Pythagoras’ theorem we should be reduced to allowing for the phosphorous content of the human brain; and astronomers would hesitate to draw any conclusions about the distant past, for fear of being charged with anachronism;—with reckoning twice two as four regardless of the fact that our idea of number is a product of evolution and has a history behind it.”4 Frege of course does not at all believe that our idea of number is a product of evolution and the “forces” of history, since that involves entertaining the idea that 2 x 2 = 4 may have been false at some point in the past, and indeed may become false at some point in the future. (Or that the truth of it may have been something else in the past and may be something entirely different in the future.)

For Frege, the logical proposition, since it does not express a contingent fact, is independent of space and time or evolution and history. It, or the law that governs its formulation, that is to say, logic, is transcendent and true whatever is the case. Note also the distinction he makes between a proposition being thought and its being true. This is the same distinction Descartes draws attention to with his method of doubt. (Wittgenstein spoke of the possibility of thinking what is not the case.) One could say that the whole point of Descartes’ exercise is to establish this distinction between the thought and what it is about. Indeed, he goes on to show that even if all that which thought can possibly be about—the world in its entirety—is not, thought nevertheless is. The line of demarcation is exact and definite. Often, however, the point seems to be taken to imply that the existence of the world is uncertain or elusive, as if Descartes’ were conceding ground to the skeptic.

The main point Descartes makes is quite different: it is that the existence of thought is certain whatever the world is. The whole point of the skeptical method in the Meditations is to draw a distinction between seemings (not in the sense of private sense data but as perception) or the world and thinking (the I). The latter is distinguishable from the former: Thinking (or logic) is autonomous. When e.g. Wittgenstein says in a like manner that “The world is independent of my will” (6.373)5 we tend to forget that a corollary of that proposition is that the will or thought is autonomous and in a sense independent of the world. This is the basis of Descartes’ so-called dualism. On the side of the soul is not sense data but thinking. Not a veil but a will that makes for itself pictures of the world, forms propositions, hypothesizes; that reasons, imagines, remembers; that judges, revises false judgments, draws inferences; that calculates and counts; that uses language and tries to make sense of experience, and so on. There is thought.

The Cogito is not a proof of the infallibility of inner perception or of perfect access to one’s own mental states. One can, according to Descartes, be wrong about one’s (bodily) states. That is precisely why it makes sense to doubt them. And if the objection is that a doubt that doubts everything would not be a doubt then to this one

4 Ibid., p. vie. 5 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transl., C.K. Ogden (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd., 1922) p. 87. Although I do consult the Pears and McGuiness translation I will quote from Ogden’s unless otherwise stated.

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can only reply: Descartes does not doubt everything. He does not doubt thinking. That it makes no sense at all to doubt.

The Tractatus’s ordering of propositions is, on careful consideration, very Cartesian, very, one might say, ad more geometrico. What he subsequently found fault with, one of the many things he found fault with, was that the presentation of these propositions made them sound like discoveries, and they were widely received as such, despite propositions such as 6.54 and 7. The propositions of the Tractatus, in so far as they can be said to put forward philosophical theses, are of what we all already know. They are elucidations of the logic of the world.

Thought for Descartes, as it was for Wittgenstein, is neither to be identified with consciousness or experience. It is entirely autonomous. This is the central insight in Frege’s work that inspired Wittgenstein’s. He took the insight further, however, and in a direction that was much more radical and more akin to Descartes. For Wittgenstein it was evident that logic is transcendent (i.e. has nothing to do with the contingent) and that it takes care of itself.

Frege said concerning his findings in the Foundations of Arithmetic that: “Their reception by philosophers will be varied, depending on each philosopher’s own position; but presumably those empiricists who recognize induction as the sole process of inference (and even that as a process not actually of inference but of habituation) will like them least. Some one or other, perhaps, will take this opportunity to examine afresh the principles of his theory of knowledge.”6 He clearly identifies empiricism and psychologism, and thought that both were gaining ground in his time and needed to be countered. In hindsight it seems that he failed and they triumphed.

While working on what was to become the Tractatus Wittgenstein said of philosophy that it consists of logic and metaphysics, and that logic is its basis,7 i.e. the basis or foundation of philosophy. To clarify that remark we might say that logic is its element. That is, logic is not merely the subject matter of philosophy; it is what philosophy is done in. It is how it is done. It is the condition of philosophy. And already we have in a sense expressed all that is contained in the Tractatus (if one allows oneself to say, with its author, that it does contain something), e.g. that logic is the scaffolding of the world; that there are no illogical propositions; that a proposition is the expression of a thought; that thought can only be logical; that one cannot think outside of thought; that the limits of language are its limits; that none of this can be said, etc. For philosophy, the activity, is nothing if not thinking. Thinking is done in language. Language is “governed” by logic, or logic is its “essence,” etc.

This is, in a sense, what Frege was getting at, but he went wrong when he spoke of the laws of thought [truth] as if they were laws of nature. This is clearly seen where he says: “Logic has much the same relation to truth as physics has to weight and heat.” He was not talking about the concepts truth, weight, heat, but supposed “phenomena”.8 Wittgenstein is clear in his criticism of this mistake in Frege’s work when he says that: All theories that make a proposition of logic appear to have content are false. One might think, for example, that the words ‘true’ and ‘false’ signified two properties among other properties, and then it would seem to be a remarkable fact that every proposition possessed

6 Ibid., pp. xe-xie. 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Notes on Logic, September 1913”, in Notebooks 1914-1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) p. 93. 8 Gottlob Frege, “Thoughts”, in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. Brian McGuiness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p. 351.

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one of these properties. On this theory it seems to be anything but obvious, just as, for instance, the proposition, ‘All roses are either yellow or red’, would not sound obvious even if it were true. Indeed, the logical proposition acquires all the characteristics of a proposition of natural science and this is the sure sign that it has been construed wrongly (6.111). Of course saying that logic is the foundation of philosophy is nonsense. It is like saying that the world is the foundation of all that goes on in it. (Or do we want to say that the world is all that goes on in it?) That, if it can be said, goes without saying.

But what of that other “part” of philosophy? What of metaphysics? If logic is the foundation is metaphysics the building? Is constructing metaphysical theories the true and proper job of philosophy and logic merely the blocks and mortar with which one does it? If it is not entirely myth: something we all say “they” do without really being able to verify the claim or even feeling the need to do so, then, this is indeed the general notion of what philosophy is all about. In keeping with this myth, if it exists, it is said that Wittgenstein disagreed and came up with a new conception: The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity.

A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct. (4.112) This conception is what is meant when it is said that Wittgenstein, Russell and Frege among others, were part of the “linguistic turn” in philosophy. The passage above, and many others, confirms on the face of it this new conception of what it is to do philosophy. As does this: “All philosophy is ‘Critique of language’” (4.0031). All of which seem to suggest that before this point in time philosophy consisted of anything but the critique of language and the clarification of thought. But that is only one way of reading it.

Another way of reading it would be to say that the all of 4.0031 is inclusive of philosophy from its very beginning (if it makes sense to speak of philosophy as having a beginning). That it is a characterization of philosophical activity as it has always been done when it goes right and bears fruit but also when it goes wrong. This way of reading Wittgenstein is supported by remarks such as the following: People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions…

I read: “…philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of ‘Reality’ than Plato got...” What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?9 Expanding on the idea of the lack of progress in philosophy there is this: “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences” (4.111). This being so it would make no sense to complain of the lack of progress in philosophy, and those who do so have either not understood or have lost sight of the fact that philosophical problems are not solved in

9 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, transl. Peter Winch (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980) p. 15.

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the way that one solves scientific problems. The source of philosophical problems lies elsewhere, namely, in language. Wittgenstein says: “Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language” (4.003).

With this we approach the main problem of this thesis. The question is: Can one read and understand Descarte’s Meditations as a work of philosophical elucidation and not a failed physics? That is, can one read it as having been written in much the same spirit in which the Tractatus and later works of Wittgenstein were written? as a work meant to help the reader get clear about his thoughts, and not as a work in epistemology? To the objection that Descartes clearly meant it as a work of metaphysics and said so; that that is what he meant by first philosophy, we can only say, if it is not science, i.e. empirical, what metaphysics is, is still in question. And our answer to the question: What is metaphysics? is this: conceptual clarification or analysis. In other words: the clarification of the logic of our language, or the grammar of our concepts. It is in this spirit that we read the Meditations in light of the Tractatus. The claim then is that the Meditations does not contain one theory or several theories of physics etc. It does not even contain the sketches of one or more theories. It is neither an ontology nor an epistemology (in the modern sense). It is, in the sense meant by Descartes in choosing its title and by Wittgenstein in the Tractatus: “not a text-book”.10 In general introductions to the Meditations much is made of the fact that its form is based on works in religious praxis and contemplation: that is works written by individuals exemplifying and therefore teaching devotion in act and thought such as Margery Kempe’s Meditations and the better known Cloud of Unknowing. Such works were meant both as an example and a cure, and often took as their model the Confessions of St. Augustine. It is a call to do something.

This is reflected in preface where Descartes says: “I would not urge anyone to read this book except those who are able and willing to meditate seriously with me, and to withdraw their minds from the senses and from all preconceived opinions.” It is obvious that he is not about to impart knowledge ex cathedra. He is not, if we take him at his word, laying down the dogma. (He knows very well that he can’t.) Descartes asks, not three, but only one thing of his readers: that one meditate seriously with him. What this entails11 is spelled out in his saying that one withdraws the mind from the senses and from all preconceived opinions. This is often cast as the basis to the method of doubt. But what is often forgotten or misrepresented is that methodical doubt does not, indeed cannot, doubt everything. It is not a form of super-scepticism. One might even ask whether it is related to scepticism at all? (It could be argued that the work was written in part as a response to the resurgent scepticism of its time, but whether that helps our reading is doubtful.) Indeed, the quotation above says that this is not so. What is not doubted is meditation or contemplation: thinking. If it were, the whole point of the exercise would surely be lost. It would be nonsense, if that were the case. No, again, what is not in doubt is thinking (some say that this is yet to be proven, but to say so is to misread the Meditations and to judge Descartes unfairly). The aim of the exercise—of all philosophy or thinking—is of course sound judgment or clarity of thought. One could say, as a basic reminder, that philosophy begins with thinking, and not before it.

The “experience” which we need to understand logic is not that such and such is the case, but that something is: but that is no experience.

10 Op., cit., p. 23. 11 I do not read the “and” as one of enumeration. Nothing in the original suggests that one should.

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Logic precedes every experience—that something is so. It is before the How, not before the What. (5.552)

Now, the objection that Descartes in fact does doubt everything and that it is only when he gets to the Cogito that he finds something he cannot possibly doubt might be raised. To this our reply is that he does not ask the reader to withdraw his mind from his mind, that is, he does not ask the reader not to think. Another important point with regard to the motto is that it underscores the French title of the work: Meditations on First Philosophy, that is, on metaphysics. Now one can say a great number of things about our predecessors in the business, but if one has done any reading at all it should be clear that they do try to distinguish between physics and metaphysics. They even have a name for each discipline. That they sometimes confuse one with the other is not something that is peculiar to them either, but something all who think on these things are susceptible to, and not always by design. (Even in these great and scientific times.) Wittgenstein spoke of this all too human tendency often enough. Indeed, one could say that he spoke of nothing other than it. But the fact remains and needs to be emphasized again and again: what Descartes is doing in the Meditations is not physics or science, but philosophy—thinking. Descartes, like Wittgenstein, is not putting forth empirical claims.12 That is the point of his call to withdraw from the senses and from all preconceived opinions. We are not about to engage in experiment and explanation, but in analysis and elucidation.

There it lingers, however, the idea that metaphysics is a super-physics: that on the analogy of how physics deals with objects and facts in the world, metaphysics must deal with super-objects and super-facts in the super-world. From this it follows that in so far as our predecessors dealt in metaphysics they were all dealing in gas and confusing it with science. All too often it happens that the most strident moderns of any time treat their predecessors in much the same way Wittgenstein says Frazer treated his primitives: with a complete lack of understanding and a vision skewed by prejudice (with a great amount of self-flattery thrown in the mix). Descartes has often been on the end of this: damned with faint praise.

The aim of this paper is to right this.

1. Metaphysics and the limits of language. Why would anyone think to compare the work of Descartes and Wittgenstein: two philosophers so diametrically opposed? What good could possibly come of it? One reason is that the presentation of their work as handed down is in both cases misleading and based on the same source of misunderstandings: the empirical worldview. A common misunderstanding is that the Meditations and the

12 A point of contention might be based on the assumption the he thought he was doing this and just didn’t know better, i.e. couldn’t distinguish between physical and metaphysical propositions. That, in our view, would be to assign to him a degree of stupidity we no longer find plausible.

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Tractatus both deal with epistemology in the main. As far as the latter is goes, Rush Rhees has stressed, repeatedly and rightly in my view, that the so-called philosophies of Wittgenstein are one and this is so for a very good reason, i.e. that both works deal with the philosophy of logic, and as Rhees said to Drury: “The idea that the Investigations is just an essay in philosophical psychology is one of the easiest and most short-sighted”.13 He makes this central point quite clear in his discussion of George Pitcher’s book, The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. He says: “Wittgenstein wanted the two books read together. But this has not helped people see that the Investigations is a book on the philosophy of logic; it has led many, like Pitcher, to read the Tractatus as a theory of knowledge.”14 To which he adds the mildly exasperated parenthetical: “(The Latin title is generally truncated, and no one remembers what Wittgenstein called it.)” He called it Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and at 4.1121 he says: Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy, than is any other natural science.

The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology. Does not my study of sign-language correspond to the study of thought-processes which

philosophers held to be so essential to the philosophy of logic? Only they got entangled for the most part in unessential psychological investigations, and there is an analogous danger for my method. There is much to remark on, but first, the point that needs to be made is that theory of knowledge or epistemology is not a concern of his. In the first proposition of 4.1121 Wittgenstein groups psychology among the sciences, that is to say, it has nothing to do with philosophy, or no more to do with it than, say, physics or biology.15 As he goes on, in a very compressed remark, to ask whether his work might be confused with the empirical and pseudo-empirical studies of thought processes that occupied earlier philosophers of logic, which he says led them into confusion, he admits that there is a like risk with his method. The risk being that one might, due to prior indoctrination or prejudice, think that he is speaking of mental processes or psychology when he is speaking of signs and their use and, just as Pitcher et al. have, mistake his work for something it is not and therefore misrepresent it completely. It is noteworthy that one if Wittgenstein’s criticism’s of the Tractatus is aimed at its method of presentation. On the surface of it one might think this a mere stylistic quibble, but upon closer inspection one realizes that the effect of the presentation can be detrimental to understanding. It is on this note that Wittgenstein said: “In my earlier book the solution of the problems is not presented in a sufficiently common-or-garden way; it makes it seem as though discoveries were needed in order to solve our problems; and not enough has been done to bring everything into the form of the grammatically obvious in ordinary ways of speaking. Everything gives too much the appearance of discoveries.”16 Here he identifies the source of many misunderstandings of that work, an illustrative example of which would be the logical-positivist reading of it, with the fact that the language can lead one to believe that it is presenting facts and hypotheses, and not logical truths. In relation to this it is ironic that the point of the Tractatus is to combat misunderstandings of the sort that lead one to take the propositions of philosophy to be empirical, i.e. precisely the sort of understanding of philosophy that is emblematic of the logical-positivists,

13 Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein and the Possibility of Discourse (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) p. 257. 14 Rush Rhees, “The Philosophy of Wittgenstein” in Discussions of Wittgenstein (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1996) p. 37. 15 Cf., Tractatus 4.1122: “The Darwinian theory has no more to with philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural science.” 16 Quoted and discussed in Rhees, Op., cit., p. 258.

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who are, in essence, empiricists of a logical bent. Where the logical-positivist (empricist of a logical bent) says: We want to strip away the veil and uncover reality, Wittgenstein says: The veil is precisely this idea that something needs to be stripped away.

What is also contained in 4.1121 although not brought to the fore is that it expresses in compressed form much of what Frege had to say about psychology and experience in The Foundations of Arithmetic: e.g. in his discussion of Mill’s views in sections seven to ten, already preempted in his Introduction where he says: [I]f everyone had the right to understand by this name [‘one’] whatever he pleased, then the same proposition about one would mean different things for different people,—such propositions would have no common content.”17

What Frege is dismissing here, as it relates to Wittgenstein’s philosophy as a whole, is the idea that number is not defined by relating a word to an image in the mind or to an object outside it, that is, neither by private nor public ostension. In Frege’s terms and by way of his solution we might say that sense is not determined by or dependent on (physical) reference (a name is not to be confused with its bearer). This, of course, is like saying that “Logic is transcendental” (6.13). That is to say, on the one hand, that if logic were in fact psychological, as the empiricists claim (which is why they take such an interest in epistemology), every individual would have his own private language and nothing at all could possibly be said (skepticism and the impossibility of knowing what another person thinks). There would, on this view, if one can call it a view, be no science or knowledge, or rather, there would be no sense in speaking of science or knowledge as a common or shared human undertaking since there would be, strictly speaking, only one individual and hence no world (other than my world in the solipsist sense, which of course, has no sense) and no logic, and so nothing we would call language. On the other hand, if logic were an empirical science it would no longer be logic, but something like an incomplete and immature form of e.g. psychology or linguistics (Quine). Not only that, given the necessity of autonomous thought, there would still be a need for logic, only it would go by some other name, perhaps. 2. Clarity for its own sake. The goal of elucidation is clarity of thought (4.111 and 4.112). Clarity of thought is won upon the dissolution of the problems of philosophy: problems or questions that, according to Wittgenstein, arise when “we do not understand the logic of our language” (4.003). There are several things involved in these remarks that we need to bring out so as to get a fuller understanding of the idea of philosophy that informs all that Wittgenstein does from beginning to end, that is, even beyond the Tractatus. Fortunately, all that we need in order to get this surview is either found in the Tractatus itself or in the preparatory work that laid the grounds for it. The fundamental theme, however, even when he seemed exclusively focussed on formal logic, is Wittgenstein’s continued emphasis on our language. We draw this somewhat misleading distinction between logic and language in order to make it clear that Wittgenstein thought of a concept-script or truth-tables as a way of bringing out salient aspects and properties of our everyday language, and not as the foundation for the construction of a language more perfect than ours. He, unlike Russell and Frege, did not think of our language as being in any way deficient. He says: “All propositions

17 Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1959) p. i.

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of our colloquial language are actually, just as they are, logically completely in order” (5.5563), which is as much as to say that our language as it stands is in perfect logical order. One should note that when Wittgenstein speaks of “our language” or “the language which only I understand” (5.62) he is not speaking of any particular language used at a given time and place, but of any possible language, or of what one might call language as such. Compare this to Russell who said: “Actual languages are not logically perfect … and they cannot possibly be, if they are to serve the purposes of daily life”18 and that “The language set forth in the Principia Mathematica is intended to be a language of that sort,”19 i.e. logically perfect.

So, where one might be led to think that there is an affinity between them based on the view that everyday language in some sense or other “disguises the thought; so that from the external form of the clothes one cannot infer the form of the thought they clothe, because the external for of the clothes is constructed with quite another object than to let the form of the body be recognized” (4.002), there is in actual fact a conflict of views given that both Russell and Frege in their various ways believed that our everyday language was not in perfect logical order and therefore that the solution or key to the solution of all our philosophical problems was to be found not in the logic of our language but in a perfectly constructed language that is truly logical: a Lingua Characteristica. Frege writes: “In contrast [to Boole’s symbolic logic] we may now set out the aim of my concept-script. Right from the start I had in mind the expression of a content. What I am striving after is a lingua characterica in the first instance for mathematics, not a calculus restricted to pure logic. But the content is to be rendered more exactly than is done by verbal language.”20 In his preface to the Begriffsschrift he speaks of his concept-script or ideography as a partial but central step towards the completion of Leibniz’s gigantic enterprise.21 Odd as it may sound, one central feature of Frege’s conception, as opposed to Wittgenstein’s, is that the propositions of this logic actually say something.

As for Russell, in his introduction to the Tractatus he says that: “Mr Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language—not that any language is logically perfect, or that we believe ourselves capable, here and now, of constructing a logically perfect language, but that the whole function of language is to have meaning, and it only fulfils this function in proportion as it approaches to the ideal language which we postulate.”22 Now this may be an accurate expression of Russell’s project and the one he hoped Wittgenstein would take up and carry to fruition—something in which he seems to have been severely disappointed—but it is clearly at odds with what Wittgenstein expressly set out to do, and expressly says he set out to do. Russell, like Frege, sought a pure logical symbolism that would in a sense reform or our thinking by bringing our everyday language into conformity with it. Wittgenstein on the other hand rightly saw that our language is logically perfect, and only sought to make this plain. Russell and Frege provided him with the tools, symbolic logic, and part of the impetus.

One reason why Russell and Frege mistook what Wittgenstein was doing can be traced back to the way in which their view of philosophy, its problems and its purpose,

18 This remark is characteristic of a philosopher trying to look deeper, to explain.—Think, how can one in our logically imperfect language say that our language is not and indeed cannot be logically perfect? Do you say it, cross your fingers, and hope to get the point across illogically? 19 Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (London: Routledge, 2010) p. 25. 20 Gottlob Frege, “Boole’s logical Calculus and the Concept-script”, Posthumous Writings (1979) p. 12. 21 Gottlob Frege, “Begriffsschrift”, From Frege to Gödel (1977) p. 6. 22 Op. cit., p. x.

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differed fundamentally from his (which, in my view, lies closer to Descartes’, what I hope to show).23 For Wittgenstein, logical analysis could help make clear the logic already there in our language: the logic that, figuratively speaking, is “concealed” or “distorted” by language’s apparent form, such that one e.g. thinks that “all” and “some” function in a sentence in the same way as “blue” and “room”. And I say figuratively only because he makes it clear that the root of the problem is our own failure to grasp the logic of our language and not that our language fools or hides something from us, for as he would come to say later on, “nothing is hidden”, not if you look.

Recall that the problems of philosophy arise from our misunderstanding of the logic of our language, not from its being concealed from us, its incompleteness, or its imperfections. What is to be uncovered then is not really hidden behind the outer form—colorful analogy aside—but hidden in plain sight as is noted in passing at the very beginning of 4.002: “Man possesses the capacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means—just as one speaks without knowing how the single sounds are produced”. We use and construct propositions readily, and do so without even knowing the meaning of certain signs (e.g. when asking for the meaning of a word), nor the rules of syntax, nor the general form of the proposition, nor the modus ponens, and so on. Part of our ability—let us, without shifting great metaphysical boulders in the process, call it our tacit grasp of the logic of our language—can be seen in e.g. our “nose for nonsense”. Another aspect of this is that we did not lay down the rules: the logic of our language, at the outset. Say, at the dawn of time or some such moment. Logic is very much the way we found it; very much the same way we found our world (cf., 5.631). This is why one feels, as Frege clearly did, it makes some sense to speak of discoveries in logic.

This point is also reflected in Wittgenstein’s saying that “Logic must take care of itself” (5.473) which is not meant to be a condition we lay down for the construction of a pure logical language, but an insight as to the nature of the logic of our language (or the nature of our thought). One could say the fundamental idea is that whatever it is that “governs” logic, or more broadly speaking, language and gives its propositions sense is internal to it. If logic determines the workings of language, an understanding of logic must amount to an understanding of how logic functions and this can be described or made perspicuous, but to go on from there and say that logic determines by itself being determined is to invite confusion or infinite regress, since one is either forced to stop at self-evidentiary pseudo-propositions that are meant to explain how logic determines the workings of language, or one is left with deeper underlying propositions that are themselves in need of explanation. This, I believe, is the main point of the show-say distinction. The requirement, if one can call it that, that logic must look after itself, is an expression of the view that in logic there are no fundamental propositions or axioms. One must always keep in mind that the general form of a proposition says nothing. It is not a meaningful expression, not a proposition with sense. This is part of what is meant by the hell that is logic—language: it is impossible to step outside it. That impossibility is clearly not physical, but logical in that when it comes to language it makes no sense to speak of an outside. What one can do can only be done in language, and that is to describe and elucidate and, so to speak, to let the logic of language show itself. To hold back from explanation, to offer only description: to construct a model or Begriffsschrift

23 The other reason would be that they both conceived of the project differently from Wittgenstein and from each other, i.e. they (all) had different metaphysics. Russell’s, being British, was of the empiricist sort and Frege’s clearly German idealist. Both are in their ways mistaken attempts to deal with solipsism (psychologism, or idiocy as the ancient Greeks would have it), which in itself is a mistake.

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and let the internal relations show themselves, and when someone asks what it is that determines and controls these internal relations, all one can say is e.g. Look! or gesture toward the sign, or clarify the concept. And if this does not help, nothing will.

How this relates to the clarification of thought as the task of philosophy is clearly expressed in Wittgenstein’s own introduction, i.e. his preface to the Tractatus: The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts: for in order to be able to draw a limit to thinking, we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought).

The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language and what lies on the other side of the limit will be simply nonsense.24 Of course, what lies on the other side of that limit cannot even be said. Drawing a limit to thought without trying to think what cannot be thought (trying to say what cannot be said) is done by careful scrutiny of the expression of thought, i.e. of propositions, i.e. of language. This obviously cannot be done outside language (just as thinking cannot be done outside thought). One must, however, not be led by figures of speech into thinking that e.g. there are two domains or realms of language: sense and nonsense, and that there is a clear line of demarcation between them, or that there is language (sense) and what is not language (nonsense). It is important to understand that it is only in language that the limit between sense and nonsense can be drawn or, better yet, shown. So, what is, so to speak, on the other side of the limit of sense—what is nonsense—is not outside of language. This is a crucial point. To think what cannot be thought is obviously impossible, but not in the sense that it cannot be done because we as of yet lack the requisite means or knowhow. In other words, it is to say that the proposition “Think what cannot be thought” has no sense. This is supported by e.g. 3.032: “To present in language anything which ‘contradicts logic’ is as impossible as in geometry to present by its co-ordinates a figure that contradicts the laws of space; or to give the co-ordinates of a point which does not exist.” Now take that phrase “a point that does not exist”—does it have sense? What sort of question is that? Well, it can be taken as one about the actual existence of non-existent points. What can that possibly mean? Say it means points outside of Euclidian space. Say we have constructed our geometry such that Euclidian space is enveloped in non-Euclidian space of some sort. Suddenly the question has sense, which is to say it has a use in what we shall call the new geometry. We can now say there are points that do not exist (in Euclidian space) and that their coordinates can be given. Say that we have further developed this our geometry in such a way that for every point in Euclidian space there is one and only one corresponding point in the enveloping non-Euclidian space. We can now say that for every existent point there is a non-existent point paired to it. All of this, we say, is something that we know with a certainty that admits of no doubt: it is necessarily true. In saying so we have laid down the law as to what sort of propositions we are dealing with: what it makes sense to say and what it does not make sense to say. Whatever happens to be the case in the world is of no significance. We have determined that the questions and answers in this new geometry, their truth and falsehood, are written into them. That is to say, to ask a question here is to make a move within a system of propositions that generate the answer, and whatever the answer may be, it comes as no surprise, i.e. it is not a discovery. We could choose to call a particular answer a discovery but it is of a different sort from e.g. discovering the nth planet of our

24 Op. cit., p. 23.

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solar system. What might have been called a discovery at the “birth” of this “science” is the method of proof of correlation between existent and non-existent points made by some fellow NN. It is clear, however, that just as in the old geometry the propositions of this new geometry have sense, which is not to say that they picture facts, but that it is possible to ask and answer questions within this new geometry. There is a clear “method of investigation”. There is even room for nonsense propositions. We could say that the basis for a complete ontology and metaphysics is in place should we be so inclined. Only in light of a requirement like that of the Tractatus, i.e. that the sense of a proposition must involve bipolarity and the picturing of facts, however, do we see immediately that all the propositions of this geometry are nonsense. This still does not mean geometry is of no use. Even the pseudo-propositions of mathematics have an application. The sense of a proposition precedes its truth or falsehood. If one understands a proposition one knows what has to be the case for it to be true. If a proposition had no sense one could not decide whether it is true or false. But if one sees that a proposition has no sense has one not understood it? Must a proposition have sense for it to be understood?—The sense of a proposition is connected with its bipolarity. The sense of a proposition is its having direction (rule of application).25 “Names resemble points; propositions resemble arrows—they have sense” (3.144). So we say that unlike a proposition with sense a tautology (true whatever is the case) or contradiction (false whatever is the case) is senseless: the arrows point in both directions, say: →← (for tautology) and ←→ (for contradiction). “Tautology leaves to reality the whole infinite logical space; contradiction fills the whole logical space and leaves no point to reality. Neither of them, therefore, can in any way determine reality” (4.463). So, the senseless and the nonsense are distinct. Yet precisely in propositions such as 4.463 it becomes clear that what is said in order to elucidate e.g. the senseless, once it is understood, is nonsense. 3. The cause of our troubles. Part of our problem, in Wittgenstein’s view, is that when faced with certain facts we are tempted to say things like: (1) Despite accidental appearances the logic or essence of our language is everywhere the same. Others might want to say: (2) In reality there is only one true language of which all particular languages are merely imperfect instantiations. Yet others might say: (3) All languages that are and have been are mere steps, in evolution and history, along the necessary path toward the emergence of a truly scientific language. Notice that all these views are expressed in language, that is, in the form of propositions. Now imagine if, in a discussion of some everyday object, say a chair, we were to come across people who say: (1*) “Despite accidental appearances the logic or essence of our chair is everywhere the same,” or (2*) “In reality there is only one true chair of which all particular chairs are mere imperfect instantiations, or (3*) “All the chairs that are and have been are mere steps, in evolution and human history, along the path toward the construction of a truly scientific chair.” This exercise brings out one way in which philosophical talk can lead us astray. On one view it looks as if these propositions are attempts to say something about chairs in general, e.g. as if being a chair is a property of an object. On another view it looks as

25 “If a point move without changing its direction it will describe a right line. The direction in which a point moves is called its sense.” Casey’s note on [I.IV] of The Elements of Euclid (London: Longman’s, Green & Co, 1885; p. 2); original emphasis.

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if they express something deeply metaphysical about chairs or what a chair really is that is only imperfectly glimpsed in the chairs around us. Suddenly we find ourselves saying things like: Why is there not a Euclidian ontology or metaphysics? Has anyone ever questioned the existence of geometric space? Is it because Euclid dealt with objects in the real world, i.e. in physical space?—With this question we already feel the ground slipping beneath our feet, for what do we mean by “world” and “real” and “object”? The sort of question we need to ask is this: What do we say to one who protests that all of this is nonsense and that e.g. Euclid’s points do not really exist? Do we tell him to sharpen his intuition and look further with better instruments, or try to make it clear to him that he has misunderstood the concept? Now, to complicate matters somewhat, the obvious objection to our claim in the Preface, concerning Frege’s conception of the laws of thought as laws of nature is to point out that (1) Frege, in his logicist program, if not in geometry then as far as arithmetic was concerned, went against Kant’s transcendental program and its legacy. He says, “I must also protest against the generality of Kant’s dictum: without sensibility no object would be given to us. Nought and one are objects which cannot be given to us in sensation … Perhaps Kant used the word ‘object’ in a rather different sense; but in that case he omits altogether to allow for nought or one, or for our ∞1,—for these are not concepts either, and even of a concept Kant requires that we should attach its object to it in intuition” reading intuition as sense-perception, understood as the inner seeing of sense data;26 (2) he explicitly says “I hope .. to have made it probable that the laws of arithmetic are analytic judgments and consequently a priori… [they] are not really applicable to external things; they are not laws of nature. They are, however, applicable to judgments holding good of things in the external world: they are laws of the laws of nature. They assert not connexions between phenomena, but connexions between judgments…”27 The alert reader will notice that his views on arithmetic as expressed parallel his views concerning the Satz in that he divorces the accidental, perceptible sign from the thought-sense it expresses, the latter of which cannot be perceived by the senses. Indeed, Frege’s article “Thought” is an attempt to tease out the implications of this. There he says that “a thought belongs neither to my inner world as an idea, nor yet to the external world, the world of things perceptible by the senses”.28 This was partly driven by his anti-psychologistic stance as he saw that the “laws” of thought (truth), if they were to be laws, had to be autonomous, i.e. independent of the vagaries of any particular mind.

Here is where the complication arises which led to the mentioned claim in the Preface: there I said that Frege went wrong when he spoke of the laws of thought [truth] as if they were laws of nature governing certain entities, which on the surface flies in the face of his own words: “People may very well interpret the expression ‘law of thought’ by analogy with ‘law of nature’ and then have in mind general features of thinking as a mental occurrence. A law of thought in this sense would be a

26 Gottlob Frege, The Foundations of Arithmetic (1959) §89, p. 101. Cf., Kant: “Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us” (Critique of Pure Reason, A19;B33). The idea can be traced from Kant through Hume to Aristotle, and will prove relevant as it is the main target of Descartes’ critique in the Meditations. 27 Ibid., §87, p. 99, (added emphasis). 28 Gottlob Frege, “Thoughts” in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed. Brian McGuiness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p. 369.

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psychological law.”29 This, he stresses repeatedly, is not what he is getting at. He is not concerned with psychological laws, or with what happens and is the case. Yet he does say: “Laws of nature are general features of what happens in nature, and occurrences in nature are always in conformity with them. It is rather in this sense that I speak of the laws of truth.”30 This is mightily, but of its time characteristically, confused. Here, again, is Wittgenstein’s admonition: “Theories which make a proposition of logic appear substantial are always false … Indeed, [when] our proposition now gets quite the character of a proposition of natural science … this is a certain symptom of it being falsely understood” (6.111). For it is characteristic of the propositions of logic that they have nothing to do with what happens and is the case. They have nothing to do with what is said, but with what it is to say anything. “It is the characteristic mark of logical propositions that one can perceive in the symbol alone that they are true, and this fact contains in itself the whole philosophy of logic. And so also it is one of the most important facts that the truth or falsehood of non-logical propositions can not be recognized from the propositions alone” (6.113). The confusion arises where laws of nature, laws that express accidental generality, such as e.g. “The laws of physics, with all their logical apparatus, still speak, however indirectly, about the objects of the world” (6.3431) are confused with the laws of logic. It is clear that the propositions of logic are not like that, i.e. that are not laws in that sense. They do not speak about the objects of the world, nor are they forms of laws (cf., 6.32). “The exploration of logic means the exploration of everything that is subject to law. And outside logic everything is accidental” (6.3). What is subject to law, the necessary, is a priori.

Wittgenstein, steering clear of commitment to the ontological or physical nature of thought, held on to this logical insight and expressed it in his dictum: “Logic must take care of itself” (5.473). It has no foundation, so to speak. It is foundation. At 6.124 Wittgenstein says: “The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they present it. They ‘treat’ of nothing. They presuppose that names have meaning, and that elementary propositions have sense. And this is their connexion with the world. It is clear that it must show something about the world that certain combinations of symbols—which essentially have a definite character—are tautologies. Herein lies the decisive point. We said that in the symbols which we use much is arbitrary, much not. In logic only this expresses: but this means that in logic it is not we who express, by means of signs, what we want, but in logic the nature of the essentially necessary signs itself asserts. That is to say, if we know the logical syntax of any sign-language, then all the propositions of logic are already given.”

To paraphrase 6.124 for the sake of elucidation one could say the propositions of logic trace the physiognomy of the world in a way that these lines

29 Ibid., p. 351. 30 Ibid., p. 351.

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trace the physiognomy of the face, that is, any face whatsoever. If someone were to ask whose face this is what would be the correct or true answer? If we follow what is said in 6.124 then the answer would be something like: “It is no one’s face.” One could also say that it is what is common to every possible face. Now if this drawing were analogous to a proposition, would it have sense? Would it picture a fact? The obvious answer is no. We are not stating a fact. So, taken as a proposition, it is nonsense. It does not picture any face. Well then, what is its point? We could say: It shows what is necessary for any possible face.

Someone says: “This is nobody’s face!” in the sense that one would say “This is plain nonsense”. Well, it is clear that we have not gone out in the world with this picture in one hand comparing it to each and every face we come across in order to determine its truth or falsehood, or asking: “Have you seen this man?” We did not even consider it. Do we accept it as true a priori? You could say that. It would be just another way of saying that this is not that sort of proposition. We accept that it says nothing. In this it is like a proposition of logic: it is empty of content. Well, what does it do then?—It expresses the logical form: “This is (the essence of) a face.”—And that, of course, is a bit of dogma with a purpose. One could say: if we know this is a face, then we know what any face must look like. But that would be both right and wrong, for one might object and say that if you recognize this as a face then you already know it for what it is. What comes first? And are we not coming close to saying that it says something after all?—Yes. That danger is ever present. And if there is one thing that is grievously wrong with the Tractatus or its reception it is the idea, and this can perhaps be traced to the influence of Frege and Russell, that that danger can be eliminated once and for all. To return to 6.124 what must be emphasized is that the propositions of logic, i.e. the senseless propositions that exhibit the scaffolding of the world “presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connexion with the world” (emphasis added). That is yet one more way of saying that the propositions of logic do not explain anything; that they do not form a testable theory of language; they are not hypotheses. One could say that for logic language is a necessary given. From this perspective it can be seen that to say that names go proxy for objects is to say that e.g. “book”, “door”, “cathedral”, “Green”, and the like can take the place of x in a propositional sign of the form fx. 4. All that is the case. The Tractatus proper opens with the proposition: “The world is everything that is the case” (1). It goes on to say: “The world is the totality of facts, not of things” (1.1). The ones further unfold the opening proposition, saying that the world divides into facts; that it is the totality of facts in logical space; that all the facts determine what is the case and what is not the case; that all the facts, all that is the case is the world.31 They are elucidations by way of which the “meanings of primitive signs can be explained ... Elucidations are propositions which contain the primitive signs. They can, therefore, only be understood when the meanings of these [primitive] signs are already known” (3.263). Another way of putting this point across would be to say: If someone were to ask: What is the world?—“If I wrote a book ‘The world as I found it’ …” (5.631),—our answer would consist of propositions, and not a list of names.

31 On this, an entry for 28.5.15: “Is it a tautology to say: Language consists of sentences?/ It seems it is”, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961) p. 52).

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And what if he meant to ask for the meaning the word “world”, or the object to which the name is attached as some would have it? The only proper answer would again consist of propositions in which the word was made use of, as this would be the only way of making clear the word’s role in propositions. Immediately following 3.263 is says: “Only propositions have sense; only in the nexus of a proposition does a name have meaning” (3.3). It is clear from this that the meaning of a name is not the bearer of it: not a definite physical object in space and that to give the meaning is not done by way of e.g. ostensive definition, or not always. For if that were the case and one were asked to give the meaning of the word “world” all one could do was to point in its general direction, which is nonsense. This is to say as much as that the world as a whole, not as a logical sum or product, not all that is the case, is not a possible object of experience. (To feel the world as a limited whole.)

The upshot of this is that “world”, like logic, is a concept under which no object falls, i.e. “world” is not the name of a thing. So in “The world is everything that is the case” the term, which is not a name of a thing, has no determinate reference. If it has meaning then it has it only in the nexus of the elucidatory proposition and its meaning must already be known for it to be understood. As for the phrase: “…is all that is the case”, it says no more than “…is…” and, as has been said, it is predicated of no object. In a sense the proposition reduces to “is” or to the general propositional form: “This is how things stand”, which tells us nothing because it says nothing. That is if we take the proposition in its Aristotelean or Fregean sense as saying something about the world. If we take it in its Tractatrian sense, i.e. from the internal point of view of language and logic, it says nothing, but the fact that we understand it, which is to say that we can assign a use to it, shows that we speak in propositions and that if we were to give meaning to the term “world” the correct way to do so would be by listing all true propositions, exclusive of a rider which says: “And these are all the facts”, as it is not a proposition, i.e. does not picture a fact, since there is no fact: “And these are all the facts”.32 (The world—all the facts—is not a fact.) This shows that the proposition “The world is all that is the case” has the same or like status, since, in a list of all true propositions (with sense), i.e. a complete description of the world, it would not appear. Saying what the world is, is not part of picturing the world, but part of what it is to picture a world. These remarks have a bearing on Wittgenstein’s discussion of solipsism and the metaphysical subject in the Tractatus. If we are to understand what Wittgenstein has to say about the metaphysical subject and what solipsism or the solipsist means we have to come to grips with phrases like “my language” and “my world”. The phrases, or rather the use of my in it, is more akin to the use in “my pain” than it is to the use in e.g. “my book”. In Wittgenstein’s use of language in the Tractatus it is clear, as we have said earlier, that he means language as such. There is an analogy in the use of my here that can be elucidated by his remarks on pain in the Investigations in that if e.g. I imagine that I feel pain in NN’s finger then it is not his pain that I feel. I cannot feel his pain (other than as a way of saying I understand or feel for or with him). In this sense one

32 There is an odd slip at 4.26 where Wittgenstein talks about the elementary propositions. There he says: “If all true elementary propositions are given, the result is a complete description of the world” which is alright, but then he says: “The world is completely described by giving all elementary propositions, and adding which of them are true and which false” which is not the same thing at all. In the first remark it seems that e.g. “It is true that p” says no more than “p” whereas the follow-up seems to suggest that “It is true that p” does say something more.

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might say that in so far as I speak it doesn’t much matter which mouth my words come out of.33 In the 5.6s Wittgenstein comes back to the term “world” with which he opened the Tractatus, only it seemingly has changed in meaning. He says: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (5.6)

Logic fills the world: the limits of the world are also its limits.

We cannot therefore say in logic, ‘This and this there is in the world, that there is not.’ For that would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be

the case since otherwise logic must get outside the limits of the world: that is, if it could consider these limits from the other side also.

What we cannot think, that we cannot think: we cannot therefore say what we cannot think. (5.61)

This remark provides the key to the question, to what extent solipsism is a truth.

In fact what solipsism means, is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but it shows itself. That the world is my world: shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language

which only I understand) mean the limits of my world. (5.62)

The world and life are one. (5.621)

I am my world. (The microcosm.) (5.63) I stress that the change is only seeming in that, strictly speaking, “the world” and “my world”, if they can be said to have meaning, can only mean the same, which is to say that a distinction cannot be drawn between the world and my world, just as it cannot be drawn between the visual field and my visual field.34 In other words when we read in 5.62 that “The world is my world”, the “is” expresses an identity of signs. In the original German we read: Dass die Welt m e i n e Welt ist, das zeigt sich darin, dass die Grenzen d e r Sprache (der Sprache die allein ich verstehe) die Grenze m e i n e r Welt bedeuten.” Pears and McGuiness have The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.35 Both are problematic. Two common reasons are that, firstly, the parenthetical remark speaks of the only language that I (as in any I, not Wittgenstein specifically) understand and not the language that only I (any I) understand; and secondly that nowhere in the German does it say that this is a fact. The passage could be rendered thus: “That the world is my world shows itself in that the limits of the language (the only language I understand) mean the limits of my world.” This, however, makes it sound as if Wittgenstein is conflating the subjective and the objective: which again would mean that there is in some sense a difference in essence, say, between the world and my world. That e.g. the former is public and shared and the latter is private and known only to the

33 Investigations IIxi pp. 221-222. 34 Cf., 5.633 and 5.6331. 35 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, transll., D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 2002) p. 68.

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individual. But to think that this sort of conflation makes sense, is to think that there is a sharp distinction to be had between the (objective) world and my (subjective) world: that e.g. the solipsist denies one part of that dichotomy. But that, again, can only be done on the assumption that there is in fact a dichotomy, that there are two worlds: my and the world, each completely distinct from the another. If however we return to 5.62 we see that the fit of language and world works both ways, in a manner of speaking, so that it would make as little or as much sense to say: “That the language is my language shows itself in that the limits of the world (the only world I inhabit) mean the limits of my language.” That is, of what can be said or thought.

What is also clear is that there can be no talk of a private language, just as there can be no talk of a private world—of either the world or language as a private object of experience—and that is why one can say that the phrases my world and the world, if they have meaning, must coincide. There is no language that only I understand, as there is no world that only I inhabit. Further considerations in this matter are that the world, that is to say, my world, divides into facts (1.2); the world, my world, is all that is the case (1); the world, my world, is the sum-total of reality (2.063); that is to say, the world is not the sum-total of reality and a (psychological) surplus, which is nonsense—“my” is the mark of the metaphysical subject—for no subject thinks or entertains ideas (5.631); this is also seen in the fact “that ‘A believes that p’, ‘A thinks p’, ‘A says p’ are of the form ‘ “p” says p’: and here we have no co-ordination of a fact and an object, but a co-ordination of facts by means of a co-ordination of their objects” (5.542); “This shows that there is no such thing as the soul—the subject, etc.—as it is conceived contemporary superficial psychology./ A composite soul would no be a soul any longer (5.5421);36 “If I wrote a book ‘The world as I found it’ … [of] it [the I] alone in this book mention could not be made (5.631); “The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (5.632); the metaphysical subject is not to be found in the world (5.633); since “The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world” (5.641). Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it. (5.64)

“The world [that is to say, my world: the world as I found it: all that is the case] is independent of my will” (6.373). Here is the crux of the matter. Again, Wittgenstein says that what the solipsist means, i.e. what the solipsist is trying to say, is quite correct, only it cannot be said. He does not say that solipsism is quite correct. To draw from his remarks concerning the eye and the visual field at 5.6331:

36 It is often said that Wittgenstein is channeling Hume here but that is mistaken. The self of “the superficial psychology of the present day” is Hume’s empiricist self of discrete sense data, a bundle of impressions, with no owner. What one forgets, Hume included, is that by saying the self is not an object of introspection it does not follow that there is no self or that the self is a bundle of impressions. Furthermore, as Descartes made clear, if there is no self then introspection has no sense as the source of knowledge, least at all of a bundled self.

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There he makes it clear that the conception of the self as an object within the visual field analogous to the eye in this drawing is a misconception. It is a picture of what is not the case. It shows that the self as an object of experience is nonsense. Whether one conceives of the visual field as outer or inner, no self is present in it. One can think of it in this way: a teacher of philosophy shows this diagram to a student and asks: Is this how things stand? The answer upon reflection is of course in the negative. The student might e.g. say: I am not part of the picture that I see. Whether one conceives of the picture (visual field) as outer or inner makes no difference here. Whichever it is the self has no place in it.

This brings us back to 5.552:

The ‘experience’ that we need in order to understand logic is not that something or other is the state of things, but that something is: that, however, is not an experience. The world, like the metaphysical subject, is not an object of experience. Logic, which pervades the world, that logic which mirrors the world, which fills it, the limits of which are also the limits of language, is not an object of experience. 5. The substance of the world. That which makes experience possible, which makes saying something possible, which goes before experiencing or saying something is not something one can experience or say. It is not part of the world or language. This does not, indeed cannot mean, logically, that there is no language or no world. When we speak of that which goes before the world or language we do not speak on the analogy of the foundations of the building, we want to draw attention to the possibility of building.

The solipsist, like the empiricist, holds that the visual field is inner or mental (that there is no such thing, or that it is, so to speak, behind the eye), but in opposition to the empiricist, he does not believe that the mental, ideas or impressions or sense data, are the possible theoretical marks or correlates of external objects the sense have left upon the mind, whatever the mechanism. Indeed, for the solipsist, “sense data” has no meaning. The world is in a sense something dreamed up by the solipsist: which is to say that there is no world, or that “world” has no meaning. There is no relation between an inner datum and some outer object, just as there is no relation between subject and world, as there is for the empiricist e.g. Russell. Note that for an empiricist as well as for the transcendental idealist the object that “corresponds” to the impression or sense data is a hypothetical that can never be tested.

What the solipsist says is that “There is only my world (my language), or “Only that which is inside me is real, is language, is the world”, and it is here he flounders in that he, by attempting to draw a sharp distinction between my and the world, is left with private experience and discrete sense data (the supposed theoretical explanation) and no world or language in which to express it. What the sceptic, empiricist and solipsist share is the assumption that there is a sharp distinction between appearance and reality, one might call it a hard headed view of metaphysics. The problem with this assumption

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that often goes unmentioned is that they—sceptics, empiricists and solipsists—believe that there is only appearance, and absolutely no reality to be had by us. An illustration: when someone brings up sceptical problem it happens that in order to illustrate the position they mention the case of the stick in water that looks crooked but is not. What is forgotten is that the position claims that the straight stick out of water is not straight either. It is not even a stick that is inside or outside of anything at all that we can possibly know or even make sense of because reality is beyond all appearance. To say: “My impression is of a stick that is straight” makes no sense. What impression? What can the words impression, stick, straight, and possibly mean? What can e.g. an empiricist or solipsist mean when he says: “It seems to me that I see a crooked stick in water”? What seeing can there possibly be if there is only the appearance of seeing things inside one’s mind?

What the solipsist means is simply: The world is my world. There is a sense in which it would be right to say that the signs on both sides of the copula are equivalent. What one must understand here is not that there is a coincidence or identity of the subjective and the objective, or that one collapses or reduces into the other. Recall that in “The world as I found it” a great part of what I write down has to do with things that are beyond my control, that are not subject to my will, and this includes things that belong to me essentially, such as certain limbs and organs, certain thoughts and dreams, etc. And that there is not, contrary to what some would like to maintain, a clear line of demarcation between the inner and the outer. (What part of the body belongs to me: is subject to my will, and what not?)

“Only facts can express a sense, a set of names cannot” (3.142). This remark is relevant to what has been discussed so far. What it means is that if we imagine two sets that are identical in number and type of objects (two lists in which the exact same items appear) as two worlds the sets alone would not tell us which is which, i.e. if we were given this information about two worlds we would not be able to tell one from the other, for according to the lists they would seemingly be identical. Note that even if we can tell the lists apart (e.g. they are no two different types of paper or the objects are given in different orders) we would still not be able to tell one world (one list of items) from the other (list of items). What does set the two worlds apart, i.e. what would make it possible for us to distinguish them, would be the configuration of the objects that make up either. If the list of objects in both worlds are identical, but the configuration of objects in either differ, then the facts or propositions stating the facts about each would enable us to tell them apart. This means that two identical systems the elements of which are differently configured can be distinguished from each other. Absent the systems themselves it is the complete description of them in the form of propositions that enables us to do so. Note that these considerations or “laws” if you will are not are not known by or through the senses. They are not empirical but logical. They are known with certainty.

What you are meant to take from this is that the philosophy of Wittgenstein is concerned with what it is to say something, with what makes saying something possible, and that is logic. Now, what does this have to do with Descartes? 6. First philosophy. Descartes’ conception of philosophy or metaphysics is reflected in Wittgenstein’s remark in the Investigations I §126: “One might also give the name

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‘philosophy’ to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.”37 This is written in the same spirit as found in 4.1121 and the surrounding remarks, such as 4.111: “Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences.)” It is an activity the aim of which is “the logical clarification of thoughts” (4.112, emphasis mine); that is, the logical clarification of propositions, of what it is to say something, of what it is to think.38 The task of philosophy is to “make clear and delimit sharply [our] thoughts” (4.112). It “limits the disputable sphere of natural science” (4.113); “It should limit the thinkable and thereby the unthinkable” (4.114). This is why Wittgenstein says—and this is a very important point one should not conflate with Locke’s notion of philosophy as a handmaiden—that philosophical work does not result in theories or “in a number of ‘philosophical propositions’, but to make propositions clear” being that a work of philosophy “consists essentially of elucidations” (4.112) of propositions. It is in this sense that one might say the Meditations is a work on first science or what is necessary for science to be possible, that is to say, a work on what can be said, i.e. philosophical logic. If at first glance this view seems to present difficulties then we need to remember that Descartes’ main concern in the Meditations is thought and not, as is commonly held, experience. Another way of putting this, in the argot of the tradition, would be to say that if physics is the science of what is constantly changing: becoming or the contingent, then metaphysics is the science of what is constant and unchanging: being or the necessary. In other words it is about what everyone accepts as true—what is not, what cannot possibly be subject to doubt. This also brings to mind Wittgenstein’s remark to the effect that if he were to put forth philosophical theories everyone would readily agree to them.

O. K. Bouwsma in a conversation with Wittgenstein brought up the question of the Cogito.39 Wittgenstein’s reply consisted in the main of two things. Firstly he asked, “How did Descartes come to do this?” He clarified this remark by saying that it was not a matter of what lead up to it in Descartes’ own thinking, but that “One must do this for oneself,” which is much the same as asking: What image, what preconceived picture lead Descartes to formulate the Cogito? Secondly, he gave an illustrative model of what now can safely be called the canonical reading of the Cogito. He says: “I always think of it as like the cinema. You see before you the picture on the screen, but behind you is the operator, and he has a roll here on this side from which he is winding and another on that side into which he is winding. The present is the picture before the light, but the future is still on this roll to pass, and the past is on that roll. It’s gone through already. Now imagine that there is only the present, there is no future roll and no past roll. And now further imagine what language there could be in such a situation. One could just gape. This!” Bouwsma remarks that this is to be taken as an interpretation that shows how it is that Descartes might have thought what he was saying made sense. This is a basic account of what later came to be known as the private language argument. In the Investigations Wittgenstein say it is the idea of a language in which “The individual

37 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., transl., G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986) I §126, p. 50e. 38 From Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell, 19 August 1919 where he says “The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by propositions—i.e. by language (and, what comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by propositions, but only shown (gezeigt)” it is clear that he equates the clarification of propositions with the clarification of thought.—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. von Wright with the assistance of Brian McGuiness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p. 71. 39 O.K. Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986) pp. 12-15.

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words … are to refer to what can only be known to the person speaking; to his immediate private sensations. So another person cannot understand the language.”40 One might call it a language of the immediate private present. Thus far it squares perfectly with the received view of Descartes as can be seen from the following assessment by M. F. Burnyeat: “[I]t was Descartes who put subjective knowledge at the center of epistemology—and thereby made idealism a possible position for a modern philosopher to take.”41 From his remark we gather that subjective knowledge is precisely knowledge of the sort in which the name of a thing is connected to the image or impression of it in the mind of the one to whom the name is used with meaning. That every word that is known to a person has its meaning from being the label attached to the object for which it is a name, and that object is not, indeed cannot be, external to the individual, given that no individual has experience of anything external to the mind. What we have here is the language of sense data. This is what subjective knowledge comes to. Indeed, on this view, knowledge is subjective. It cannot be otherwise. It is characteristic of the language of sense data that the existence of external objects, which resemble wholly or in part the impressions they leave upon the mind, is hypothetical. They cannot possibly be known. Their existence is inferred or assumed on the basis of said impressions. The only form or sense of certainty, if there is such a thing, is subjective certainty. Hume gives this account of it: “The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it: But the real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration: It was, therefore, nothing but its image, which was present to the mind. These are the obvious dictates of reason; and no man, who reflects, ever doubted, that the existences, which we consider, when we say, this house and that tree, are nothing, but perceptions in the mind, and fleeting copies or representations of other existences, which remain uniform and independent.”42 (Does this empiricist account not smack of disappointed Platonism?) Note that Hume’s real table is not something that we experience ever no matter what distance we might have to it. If we pressed our face against the table it would still only be the image of the table “in the mind’s eye” that we pressed up against, a perception of it. One could say that no one can ever get that close to any table, or any object at all, in itself. (This also means that the real table’s real distance from us is not something we can ever determine, or that talk of distance in relation to it has no sense.) Only if one is thoroughly committed to an empiricist metaphysics is it the case that to doubt the proposition: “All that I hold as most certain I have got by or through the senses,” is tantamount to universal doubt. This is at the root of the problem as to why he has been misread for so long the so-called common-sense empiricists just did not get it. Their question was: How can one possibly doubt that principle? This, we might say, is where Descartes begins, by asking: How can one even make sense of it?

From this it should be clear that Hume’s use of the word “see” refers not to the perception of an object external to oneself but to the experience of an impression of a “visual” object within oneself: that all seeing is mental seeing. If all seeing is nothing but the “seeing” of internal and mind-dependent objects, then, not only does one not know whether the objects one “sees” have their counterpart in the real world, but one cannot possibly know this. The internal logic of an empiricist metaphysics makes it impossible.

40 Op. cit., p. 89. 41 M. F. Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and What Berkeley Missed”, in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 3-40 (p. 33). 42 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) XII 1, p. 201 (original emphases).

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(It seems odd to think that Hume is willing to infer the existence of an external world on the basis of his discrete sense impressions but not to infer the existence of an I on that very same basis. As if the one were more likely than the other.) But if we in spite of it all go ahead and assume that there are objects out there that impress their images upon our minds it follows from this that one cannot know whether the objects one “sees” with the mind’s eye, not the physical eye, resemble what it is assumed they are images of in any way.43

Oddly enough, Descartes discusses precisely this conception of seeing in his Optics. Not only that, he dismisses it as being based on a misleading analogy. He says: “We must take care not to assume—as our philosophers commonly do—that in order to have sensory perceptions the soul must contemplate certain images transmitted by objects to the brain … Their sole reason for positing such images was that they saw how easily a picture can stimulate our mind to conceive the objects depicted in it [i.e. that a picture can spur thought], and so it seemed to them that, in the same way, the mind must be stimulated, by little pictures formed in our head, to conceive the objects that effect our senses.”44

It is clear Descartes does not share Hume’s conception of seeing or perception, which means that he, similarly, does not share Hume’s conception of knowledge (and its sources). That is to say, the empiricist idea: what Burnyeat calls subjective (private) knowledge. This also means that Burnyeat’s attribution of it to Descartes, which is the accepted view, is mistaken. Now where does this leave Wittgenstein’s model of the Cogito? In my view, and I think this is evident, Wittgenstein’s model fits Hume’s conception of knowledge or experience perfectly. Indeed, it is Hume’s conception, or something very much like it, and it is precisely this conception that Descartes sees as wrongheaded. Furthermore, Wittgenstein’s treatment of the Cogito is mistaken. It is mistaken on two counts: 1) the model he gives of the Cogito is wrong, or not a model of the Cogito, and that is because of 2) Wittgenstein’s idea of the preconceived picture he thinks lead Descartes to the Cogito is the clearly wrong picture as can be seen from Descartes remarks in the Optics. What Wittgenstein thinks is the picture that makes Descartes go wrong is a picture Descartes dismisses as being wrong and misleading. This preconceived picture is the basis for Wittgenstein’s model of the Cogito, and because the picture is wrong the model on which it is based on is so, too. But is it not a model of something? Yes, it is just not a model of the Cogito. Bouwsma, coming to grips with Wittgenstein’s model, says this: If you begin as Descartes does, eliminating everything which his arguments are supposed to render doubtful, then see what goes. There is nothing, no sun, no earth, no fire, no dressing-gown, etc. Of course, these seem to be, there would be seemings. So too there would be no past things, no past earth, no past fire, friends, etc. And no future. Now there is nothing. But there is now something which is comparable to the pictures on the screen. Now a scrupulously honest Descartes will not say: “There goes my horse. Ah! A bird singing up in a tree, etc. There’s a woman holding an umbrella.” Neither is there of course, any screen, or man with a machine. So Descartes can present nothing. One can say that he might say: ‘Ah’ or ‘This!’ or ‘Awareness!’ But if he now said anything of this sort, his

43 It is worth noting because it is often forgotten that leading up to working out the full private language argument Wittgenstein gave lectures under a title which connects empiricist metaphysics to the impossibility of communication and hence logic, namely, the “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” in Philosophical Occasions 1912-1951 (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett, 1993) pp. 202-288. My argument here is that he is mistaken in making an empiricist of Descartes, and that is probably due to tradition. 44 AT VI 112; CSM I 165.

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words would have no meaning. There would be nothing to provide a contrast. “I think” would be like “Ah!” uttered by W[ittgenstein] leaning forward.45

What this means is: If knowledge is based on experience, and experience is sense data, and sense data are private, then knowledge is private. And if you eliminate sense data, then…? Then it makes no sense, on this account, to talk of an external world. But on further thought one should see that it made no sense for the sense data theorist to talk of an external world to begin with. One might ask, external to what? And if that makes no sense, neither does the concept (physical) “object”. The entire theory of sense data as the private mental representations of external objects falls apart because our language falls apart. It cannot bridge the gap. Language cannot reach out beyond sense data. One cannot say anything. Here in this Aristotelian-empiricist picture we find the source of idealism, skepticism, mind-body dualism, solipsism and like theoretical conundrums: in the idea of private experience as the root of knowledge. As far as it goes, Bouwsma’s explication of the private language argument is correct, according to the received view, but, as I have said, it does not represent Descartes’ view for the very simple reason that Descartes does not think that “seemings” or sense data are all that there is, i.e. that once they are eliminated, nothing is left. He does not even think that seemings (sense data) make sense. Of course Bouwsma’s gloss and expansion is based on this central passage in the Second Meditation: But I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.46

Now this is clearly a piece of reasoning. Is it, however, as straightforwardly nonsensical as Bouwsma makes it out to be? The question is whether Bouwsma is right in saying that what remains when the method of doubt is carried out, when everything eliminable is gone, is “something which is comparable to the pictures on the screen” which he says clearly are without neighbor. (To sharpen this image one might say that the succession of pictures can be likened to e.g. a succession of paintings by various artists that pass one by one, frame by frame, before the eyes of the I, so as to bring out the void between them.)47 That is, each picture stands on its own with no relation to what precedes or succeeds it. That is the point of saying there is no future, nor past: that there is only the immediate present, to which one can only “say” Ah!—The point to be made at this juncture is not to determine which metaphysics is the correct one, but rather to ask whether the one assumed to be Descartes’ is the one he adheres to.—That “something which is comparable to the pictures on the screen” is private and more importantly discrete sense data. It is not even a fact, atomic or complex. It is, in Tractarian terms, a

45 O. K. Bouwsma Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951 (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986) p. 13. 46 AT VII 25; CSM II 16-17. 47 Indeed, following this section on “I think” Wittgenstein takes up “I exist” separately. And illustrates it with a lamp as the I through which “a steady succession of lights pass”, citing William James’ stream of consciousness as the underlying motif (basically a reworking of Hume’s bundle), and concludes by saying: “This is something like what Descartes might have imagined.” This conclusion on his part is wrong, not because Descartes’ did not give expression to this view of consciousness or mind, but because Descartes, in so far as he criticized the empirical view, criticized it.

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succession of sense impressions and not facts that form the substance of the world. This shows that the point of departure in Bouwsma’s and hence Wittgenstein’s rendering of Descartes is empiricist and mistaken. That is not Descartes’ point of departure. What makes the private language argument work is precisely the assumption that Descartes is working on the basis of an empiricist metaphysics and epistemology.48 That is to say, that his argument, his “theory of knowledge,” is based on the idea that our primary source of knowledge is private sense data (images of some sort projected onto the screen of the mind) that represent objects in an outer world. That is the empiricist model. That is what we are left with in Wittgenstein’s model of the Cogito.

It is only if the latter is in place that Wittgenstein’s argument holds. It should be clear, for anyone who has read Descartes, that the latter assumption is not one that he holds, even though it is the widely received view of the Cogito—of its failings even. Go back to the above-quoted passage from the Meditations. Note well that he says “I have convinced myself…” and see that what is left after are not discrete private nows of experience, not sense data, but propositions: thoughts.49 Thinking is what has been isolated in the form of propositions such as: There is no world; There is no sky; There is no earth; There are no minds; There are no bodies, etc. The central point of Descartes’ argument is that despite all experience, despite all appearances to the contrary and more importantly, independent of what is or is not, or seems to be or does not seem to be the case, there is the negation of all propositions, there is doubt and doubt is thinking. 7. Away from the senses. One crucial thing to bear in mind when reading Descartes is that he explicitly says he uses sceptical arguments (which no right minded human holds) in order to help withdraw the mind from the senses. Now why would he want to do this? It is clearly not because he wants to concentrate on sense data. Note also that the truths he has hitherto been taught to believe are not sense data but propositions, i.e. thoughts. That is to say: thinking. The whole point, then, of the retirement from the senses is so as not to be misled by them or by our prejudices concerning them. He is trying, in short, to isolate thought in order to clarify thinking, not experience. (Experience is not in need of clarification: it is what it is. Our thoughts however...)

In his Synopsis of the First Meditation Descartes says: “[A]lthough the usefulness of such extensive doubt [about what is known by or through the senses] is not apparent at first sight, its greatest benefit lies in freeing us from all our preconceived opinions, and providing the easiest route by which the mind may be led away from the senses.”50 Now the question is why would he want to lead the mind away from the senses? To answer that one must look again at the sort of thing that can be called into doubt. From the general examples he gives it is clear that they are empirical propositions, i.e. what is know by or through the senses. In the First Meditation he says: “although the senses occasionally deceive us with respect to objects which are very small or in the

48 This point becomes very clear when one reads the Third Objections and Replies, where Hobbes struggles to grasp what Descartes is getting at as he assumes that they are on common empiricist (Aristotelian) ground. That is not the case. 49 A sense data theory only complicates matters in that it introduces entities that need explaining and disappears the world, and that too needs explaining. In Descartes’ simpler model there are no third set of entities to account for, there is thought and it is directly about the world, not about sense data that go between thought and a hypothetical world. Representation in Descartes’ work as in Wittgenstein’s is symbolic in that the thought (proposition, picture) represents. 50 AT VII 12; CSM 9.

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distance, there are many other beliefs about which doubt is quite impossible.”51What those other beliefs are and whether doubt about them is quite impossible is a point I will return to, but first let us look at his point about “objects which are very small or in the distance”. The recurring examples he gives throughout the work are of e.g. sticks in water, the earth, the sun, the stars, or of towers seen up close or from a distance. It is understood that the general point pertains to the existence and appearance of external objects and the judgments made of them, e.g. “The tower is round” or “The stick is crooked” etc, but that the emphasized aspect which he is discussing changes according to whether he is discussing e.g. existence or appearance or some third thing.

When it comes to philosophy, i.e. to thinking, to say that knowledge is possible is to say that there are propositions with sense, or really, it is just to say that there are propositions, full stop, for it is within reason to say that the term “proposition without sense” has no reference or meaning. Equally, to deny that knowledge is possible is to say that no propositions have sense—that nothing at all meaningful can ever be said. And that is self-defeating. These are not statements about empirical discoveries.52 (Who can we meaningfully say discovered that propositions have sense, or that there is something and not nothing?) They are what Wittgenstein would call logical or grammatical remarks. And, read closely, one can see that this is what the Meditations consist of in the main. It is a commonplace to say that Descartes’ project was epistemological in nature, the aim of which was to establish what can be known with certainty, and that his chief adversary was the sceptic, who he aims to refute. This supposedly explains among other things the nature and purpose of his method of doubt: that Descartes turns the sceptic’s tools against him. Our problem with this story is that it only makes sense if it were the case that the sort of doubt we imagine troubles a sceptic troubled Descartes or that he felt it as a threat. In the First Meditation Descartes states the reasoning behind his project: Some years ago I was struck by the large number of falsehoods that I had accepted as true in my childhood, and by the highly doubtful nature of the whole edifice that I had subsequently based on them. I realized that it was necessary, once in the course of my life, to demolish everything completely and start right again from the foundations if I wanted to establish anything at all in the sciences that was likely to last.53 Here, with a bare minimum of words, laid down in the most homely of terms, we have a complete expression of the impetus, means and desired outcome of the investigation that is to follow. What is in question for Descartes seems to be a great deal of what is accepted as true in his time in the sciences. The sciences of his time were of course, as are the sciences of our time, built on a foundation of metaphysics: on basic principles or assumptions that go unquestioned and often, even among its greatest practitioners and champions, unacknowledged. It follows—not naturally for few would have thought to do what Descartes sets out to do in the Meditations—then that upon seeing the edifice that is the sciences of his time begin to quaver and shift at the very foundations that he

51 AT VII 18; CSM 12. 52 Just as “I am” is not a discovery. (Descartes is correct to say it is a necessary truth. To say “I am not” is not false but nonsense. So, yes, “I am” is equally nonsense, but not because, as Hume would say, it is false precisely because it is not known by or through the senses. In Wittgenstein’s terms we might say that “I am” is not an empirical proposition. And on reflection we realize that Descartes agrees with this. He was never so stupid as to say that the I can be known by or though the senses.) A necessary truth is not a statement of fact. 53 AT VII 17; CSM II 12.

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should come to feel that a new beginning was called for: that a new foundation must needs be established if science is at all to be possible or legitimate.

An example of the shift that brings out what is a stake is the crumbling of the Ptolemaic model of the universe and its subsequent replacement by the Copernican. What work on and the history of the Copernican model shows us, in hindsight, is that mere recorded observation does not suffice—that is to say observation alone does not guarantee understanding or truth. That it is correct reasoning from observation, indeed, from observations that clearly contradict basic intuitions about how things must be, is a prerequisite if any headway in the sciences is to be made. From this it follows that basic intuitions about how things must be are often guided by those unquestioned principles that make up the foundations of our practice of inquiry, and if our intuitions are led astray by faulty principles and assumptions then our observations are worthless. What one can see here, having read Kuhn, is that Descartes is an example of someone who has come to acknowledge that the anomalies are too many to be reconciled, that the caveats and revisions are no longer feasible or defensible, and ultimately that the entire edifice cannot be saved. The very foundations of inquiry are in question and must necessarily be addressed first.

The passage with which we are concerned is clearly not a statement of scepticism about the possibility of knowledge. To recognize that something is false means there is a method of adjudication between true and false statements: that the false can be known as false and the true as true, a method that itself is not susceptible to doubt, something which even the (classical) sceptic recognizes. The “large number of falsehoods” that Descartes held as true were ones he accepted as such without reflection or having tested them himself: they were “received truths”, i.e. statements that subsequently and upon closer scrutiny turned out to be false. This is clearly spelt out in the Seventh Replies, where he draws an everyday analogy as an illustration of his procedure and the rationale behind it. He says: “Suppose he [the critic] had a basket full of apples and, being worried that some of the apples were rotten, wanted to take the rotten ones to prevent the rot spreading. How would he proceed? Would he not begin by tipping the whole lot out of the basket? And would not the next step be to cast his eye over each apple in turn, and pick up and put back in the basket only those he saw to be sound, leaving the others?”54 What is central to the analogy is that good and bad apples can be told apart. Descartes draws a line between thought and what it is about, whether sense data or real objects out there. He rejects sense data (the homunculus view) because it introduces unnecessary entities: that is to say he is a realist when it comes to objects.The apples are likened to a set of thoughts or propositions, some true, some false, all present in one basket, or mind. They are distinguishable individually and they can be judged independently. They are what we might call “units of sense”. This is not in doubt. Nor are the faculties necessary to examine thought and make judgments upon them.

It is clear from the above illustration that to set out to rectify the situation by demolishing these received truths and the edifice built upon them shows that he believes that judgment is possible, and not just in principle, otherwise there would be no point to the exercise. What is more, the exercise of thought necessary for these meditations rests upon what some would call an “untested assumption” which all parties to the discussion do not question on pain of incoherence, namely, that propositions have sense and names have meaning. Descartes in his replies to the Third Objections by Hobbes is

54 AT VII 481; CSM II 324.

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very much aware of this. He shows admirable restraint and a great sense of humour in reminding Hobbes of the fact. He writes: “As for the linking together that occurs when we reason, this is not [as Hobbes absurdly claims] a mere linking of names but of things that are signified by the names, and I am surprised that the opposite view [that it is merely the mechanical linking of names by arbitrary convention independently of whatever is the case which ultimately can be reduced to “nothing more than the motion occurring in various parts of the organic body”,55 whatever that means] should occur to anyone. Who doubts that a Frenchman and a German can reason about the same things, despite the fact that the words that they think of are completely different? And surely the philosopher refutes his own position when he talks of the arbitrary conventions that we have laid down concerning the meaning of words. For if he admits that the words signify something, why will he not allow that our reasoning deals with this something which is signified, rather than merely with words? And surely on his account, when he concludes that the mind is a motion he might just as well conclude that the earth is the sky, or anything else he likes.”56 In none of this does the sceptic’s doubts play a role. It is not even mentioned. The truly committed philosophical sceptic, if one such can be said to exist, does not recognize some things as false and others as true, i.e. that they can be known or said to be respectively false or true, but that nothing at all can be known or said to be false or true. This, if one can call it a position, if it even makes sense to do so, is clearly not Descartes’. Nor is it something he feels threatened by. As he himself says in his Synopsis of the Sixth Meditation: The point is that in considering these arguments [which enable the existence of material things to be inferred] we come to realize that they are not as solid or as transparent as the arguments which lead us to knowledge of our own minds and of God, so that the latter are the most certain and evident of all possible objects of knowledge for the human intellect.57 There are several things to take in here. First of all, Descartes says that no sane person has ever doubted the existence of the world and so on, not even the sceptic, at least not the classical sceptic who, being an empiricist of a sort, merely suspends judgment on metaphysical answers to what it is that lies behind the appearance of the existence of the world etc. Secondly, one thing we should note about Descartes is that he never offers anything of that sort either. In a sense we could say that Descartes is a direct realist in that his physics work with what an empiricist and-or a sceptic would call mere appearance, and not reality, given that the latter assume a deeper reality behind appearance, or sense data. (Cf., the passage by Hume above.) Thirdly, he expressly says that the arguments by which the existence of the world, bodies etc. are inferred are not as clear and distinct as “the arguments which lead to the knowledge of our minds and of God,” but that does not entail that he is sceptical where the former are concerned, or that his project is a failure. Fifthly, by saying so he is not conceding the point to the sceptic but saying that yes, there is no absolute certainty in the realm of the contingent or logically possible, but nor is there a problem in accepting that the senses sometimes “deceive” and that they do not afford certain knowledge. Not everything falls or stands with the senses. Sixthly, his project is to establish what can be known with certainty, i.e. what is necessarily true, which means (a) that knowledge as the sceptics and empiricists

55 AT VII 178; CSM II 126. 56 AT VII 179; CSM II 126. In other words, either Hobbes is saying something in laying down his mechanical theory of language and nothing has sense, thereby making hash of his own theory, or he is talking errant nonsense. 57 AT VII 15-16; CSM II 11 (added emphasis).

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including Aristotelian scholastics construe it, that is to say, what is known by or through the senses, is not what is at issue here, and (b) that what is certain makes knowledge of the contingent possible—that is to say, workable—it does not make it certain, nor need it do so, as that is not our requirement. And that, we might say, is just as it should be. 8. What can be doubted. Part of the reason why Descartes is misread is because he gives clear and extended expression to the view he is arguing against, and he does this because it is the dominant view, and indeed, and he himself admits, it was his view as it is expressed in the principle of knowledge by or through the senses. Exemplary of this is a curious remark by Burnyeat. He says “it was Descartes who put subjective knowledge at the center of epistemology—and thereby made idealism a possible position for a modern philosopher to take.”58 It is only if you take Descartes to be some sort of sense data theorist that you can come to the conclusion that he is interested in establishing the primacy of subjective knowledge. Nowhere in the Meditations does one get the impression that Descartes is after that which only he knows, what Wittgenstein might have called private knowledge. It is clear that what Descartes aims to establish as the foundation of inquiry is what everyone knows with absolute certainty. And by everyone I mean the metaphysical subject.59

It is with this realization in mind, that in order to accomplish his task of clearing away all false opinions and making firm the foundations of science, that Descartes can with good reason say [I]t will not be necessary for me to show that all my opinions are false, which is something I could perhaps never manage … it will be enough if I find in each of them at least some reason for doubt. And to do this I will not need to run through them all individually, which would be an endless task. Once the foundations of a building are undermined, anything built on them collapses of its own accord; so I will go straight for the basic principles on which all my former beliefs rested.

Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses.60

First of all there is the acknowledgement of his false opinions and their overwhelming number. Second, he thinks it will suffice to find some reason to doubt each of them. Third, his recognition of the idea that there is no need to take them down one by one seeing that they all can be sourced back to certain basic principles from which they can be said to be derived. And in the final sentence is summation of those basic principles into the fundamental metaphysical principle that holds up the entire edifice Descartes aims to bring down, i.e. that sensory perception is the sole source of all our knowledge. Here is that reason to doubt each of them that he seeks: the Archimedean point from which he can topple the whole structure of the sciences as they are known and practiced in his time. What is fundamental to his insight into the problem is his recognition of the fact that the issue is not one of physics but of metaphysics, for bear in mind that this basic principle of knowledge is not itself an expression of knowledge, i.e. the picture or statement of a fact, that is to say, it is not something known by or through the

58 M. F. Burnyeat, “Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and What Berkeley Missed”, in The Philosophical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 3-40 (p. 33). 59 Logic is transcendental means that it is not private. What is private does not belong to logic but psychology. Logic is not subjective. This does not mean that logic is outside the world, no, it fills it. (Remember that the world is not a thing, but all that is the case.) 60 AT VII 18; CSM II 12.

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senses. (Here again is that readily made distinction between certainty and knowledge.) Another thing is that apart from the question of the source of knowledge, there is also that of the sort. What Descartes is saying here, in effect, is that what he held as most certain and indubitable, had the senses as its source, and that it is this proposition that he finds trouble with.

The distinction is to be drawn between what is known with certainty and what is known by or through the senses. Of the latter we can say that propositions concerning them have sense and are bipolar: they can be true or false. In other words nothing known by or through the senses is known a priori or with certainty. Of the former we can say that they are true no matter what happens to be the case: whether there is a world or not; whether I have a body or not etc., “For as long as I am thinking…”61 What is certain for Descartes, what is clearly and distinctly perceived, is what we now might call the a priori or what is necessarily true. Wittgenstein expresses something strongly reminiscent of the Cogito when he says: “‘I have consciousness’—that is a statement about which no doubt is possible.” Why should that not say the same as: “I have consciousness” is not a proposition?62 That he expresses it in the form of a question is partly due to the fact that it is meant to spur thought, partly in order to avoid what he later came to call the dogmatism of the Tractatus. That Descartes draws the distinction is what is important and not whether he considers the certain and a priori to be nonsensical or tautological in e.g. Wittgenstein’s sense of these terms. That he does not have the same “theory” of logic or the same views on language is more of an accident of time and jargon than it is a lapse in insight or wisdom. Then again, by calling the sort of knowledge he is after in the Meditations metaphysics, he is in fact emphasizing the point of the distinction between the necessary and the contingent: what is necessarily true is very different from what is contingently true, and that the former is not dependent on or derived from empirical knowledge, or as Descartes would have it: it is not “known by or through the senses”. One does not experience logical necessity (cf., Tractatus 5.552). It is not a fact.

What Descartes seeks, he says, is demonstrative proof: proof that is clear and evident in itself. One might call it surveyable in the sense that if it were given as an image or illustration or model—and, given the nature of logic or thought, it is always possible to do so—one could read off its truth directly. A relevant example of this is the visual proof of Pythagoras’ theorem. (The proofs given in the Meditations are informal, and raise the question of whether formal proofs are more certain, or whether they are merely models or illustrations of a more perspicacious, but ultimately equivalent sort.) He says in his Letter to the Sorbonne: “What I have done is to take merely the principal and most important arguments and develop them in such a way that I would now venture to put them forward as very certain and evident demonstrations.”63 We have to keep this fact firmly in mind when dealing with the propositions Descartes means to establish by way of the Cogito, that is to say, independently of whatever is the case. He says for instance about the possible expectation of a proof for the immortality of the soul in the Second Meditation: “I have tried [in this section] not to put down anything which I could not perfectly demonstrate. Hence the only order which I could follow was

61 AT VII 26-27; CSM II 17-18. 62 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970) §401, p. 72e. 63 AT VII 4; CSM II 4.

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that normally employed by the geometers, namely to set out all the premises on which a desired proposition [e.g. the soul’s immortality or the existence of God], before drawing any conclusions about it.”64 Again, it is of utmost importance that one understands that Descartes is trying to establish what must be the case before anything can be known. (One can hear Wittgenstein say that philosophy: i.e. logic and metaphysics, is not one of the sciences, and with very good reason.) This can in no sense be a proposition of experience. Of course, if one is committed to the idea that knowledge only comes by or through the senses, one either misunderstands what he is trying to do, or misconstrues from the root according to what is inimical and foreign to it. If that happens then it is certain that one will fail to grasp the work in its entirety. And it is imperative that it be grasped in its entirety. As Descartes himself says: “[A]lthough the proofs I employ here are in my view as certain and evident as the proofs of geometry, if not more so [for without them there would be no geometry], it will, I fear, be impossible for many people to achieve an adequate perception of them, both because [1] they are rather long and some depend on others, and also [2], because they require a mind which is completely free from preconceived opinions and which can easily detach itself from involvement with the senses.”65

To get to what is clear and distinct one must first undermine biases and detach from the senses, and principles which hold that all knowledge derives from the senses. It is only then that one can begin to deal rightly with what we might call pure thought, or logic (not syllogistic). From this it can be seen that the so-called method of doubt is a preliminary move in the game of thinking, a propaedeutic. Remember, the purpose of methodical doubt according to Descartes is to lead the mind away from the senses by freeing us from our preconceived opinions. On what is clear and distinct Descartes says this: All self-contradictoriness or impossibility resides solely in our thought, when we make the mistake of joining together mutually inconsistent ideas; it cannot occur in anything which is outside the intellect.66 Basically what he is saying is that the only contradiction is logical contradiction and hence the only impossibility logical impossibility and the only necessity logical necessity. There are no contradictory facts: no one fact that contradicts itself, and no two facts that contradict each other. (If we say a proposition pictures a fact, a contradiction, although a proposition, does not picture any fact.) Burman objects: “But our ideas depend on real things. So if there is a contradiction in our ideas, there will also be one in the things themselves.” Descartes says: “Our ideas do depend on things, in so far as they represent them. But none the less, there is no contradiction in things, but in our ideas alone. For it is ideas alone that we join together in such a way that they are inconsistent one with another. Things, by contrast, are not inconsistent with any other. With ideas, the opposite is the case: in our ideas we join together and unite separate things, which taken on their own are not inconsistent. This is the origin of contradiction.”67 The key passage is at the beginning where Descartes, qualifying Burman’s remark, says that it is only in the relation of representation that our ideas depend on things, which is as much as saying that not all our ideas are thing-dependent in that not all our ideas represent things. An obvious example of that is our idea of contradiction, as contradiction is very

64 AT VII 13; CSM II 9. 65 AT VII 4; CSM II 5. 66 AT VII 152; CSM II 108. 67 Conversation with Burman, transl. John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 25.

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clearly not a thing our idea of it cannot have been informed by any thing or fact or state of affairs. A contradiction occurs in thinking, i.e. in the operations of the mind and is the result of what one might call a confused and inconsistent handling of propositions or thoughts, not in the experience of confused and inconsistent facts, which is nonsense. This reflects back upon the entire issue of being deceived by the senses in that the facts are what they are and it is our handling of them that is at issue when it comes to knowledge.

There is an anecdotal exchange between Wittgenstein and Elisabeth Anscombe that is perfectly illustrative of this.68 Anscombe says to Wittgenstein: It is obvious why people once believed that the sun goes round the earth. Wittgenstein says: Why is that? Anscombe replies: It looks that way. To which Wittgenstein says: And how would it look if the earth went round the sun?

This anecdote also sums up the entire point of philosophy, something I believe Descartes and Wittgenstein shared, and that is the clarification of thought. It is with this in mind that one can say: Seeing the world aright is not a question of getting better glasses or adjusting one’s eyes. It is a question of thinking clearly.

The method of doubt is a logical sorting mechanism: what it does is it separates the necessary wheat from the contingent chaff. 9. What is most true. It is with these certainties that thinking begins. They are the result of Descartes prescribed method. In the Principles he elaborates on the method by saying, first that at some point in one’s life one must “doubt everything, as far as is possible.”69 This qualification, I believe, is not one of personal inclination, i.e. a question of one doubting as far as one thinks it fine or reasonable to doubt, but rather a question of doubting as far as is logically possible. He goes on to say: “Indeed, it will even prove useful, once we have doubted these things [propositions], to consider them as false [i.e. negate them], so that our discovery of what is most certain and easy to know is made all the clearer.”70

What one must remember at all times when considering what Descartes deems clearly and distinctly perceived is that at the point when this is brought forth we are dealing entirely in the realm of thoughts (in judgments and propositions). We have completely withdrawn from the senses. So what we have to understand is that what is clearly and distinctly perceived in no way pertains to the senses. To give an example: I see a stick in water and it seems bent. The visual perception is distinct from the thought or proposition: The stick in the water seems bent. Now even if we grant the possibility that the sensory perception is false—a trick of the malin genie—there is still the true thought, not its content (if that distinction can be made) but its existence as a thought. It may be that the content of the thought or proposition is false (because the sensory perception is an illusion) but the thought itself (that I have it, i.e. I think…) nonetheless is not. Now the thought in this example is based on or relies upon a sensory perception for its content so it is in effect an example of what is not and what cannot in principle ever be clear and distinct. On the other hand a thought such as “A=A” is not in any way dependent on sensory perception, and once seen and-or understood cannot be other than clearly and distinctly perceived (by the mind) and impossible to doubt because

68 There is a different version of this with an entirely different outcome in G.E.M Anscombe’s An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (London: Hutchinson University Library, 1959). 69 AT VIIIA 5; CSM I 193. 70 AT VIIIA 5; CSM I 193.

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doubt, such doubts that arise when the senses are the basis of thought, cannot find purchase. No question concerning the truth or falsehood of “A=A” can possibly be meaningfully asked. Note that “A=A” is not equivalent to “These two objects (one here and one there) are one and the same” which is plainly false. This is to say that “A=A” is not an empirical proposition.

Descartes says: “When I said that the proposition I think, therefore I exist is the first and most certain of all those which occur to anyone who philosophizes in an orderly way, I did not thereby deny that one must first know what thought is, what existence is, and what certainty is, and that it cannot happen that what thinks does not exist. But because these are very simple notions, and ones which on their own provide us with no knowledge of anything which exists, I did not think they needed to be listed.”71

This passage is tightly argued and easily misunderstood. It looks at first as though Descartes is faltering because the objection to “I think, I exist” is the simple and overwhelming question: Must one not first know what thought, existence, certainty are and know the proposition “What thinks cannot not exist” before one can know that “I think, I exist”? Descartes says he does not deny this. (Note that it would make no sense to do so.) That does not mean that he affirms it. What it does mean is that it makes no sense to say or imagine that there is a necessary temporal succession of events that must take place (certain things must be known) before “I think, I exist” can be known.

What Descartes is getting at is the fact that “I think, I exist” is equivalent to “what thought is, what existence is, and what certainty is, and that it cannot happen that what thinks does not exist”—they are one and the same. For what can it possibly mean to say: You must know what existence is before you can know that you exist?

This is in direct contradiction to the Cogito. Indeed it is outright nonsense. (It is in fact outright nonsense to say it is in direct contradiction to the Cogito because the latter cannot be contradicted or negated with sense). This is why Descartes says: “these are very simple notions, and ones which on their own provide us with no knowledge of anything which exists” (added emphasis). Why? Precisely because they are fundamental since without them there would not be knowledge at all, much less knowledge of what they mean. Without them we would not be able to say anything.

Simple, in this context, does not mean easily known or not worth bothering with. It means rock bottom, fundamental, unquestioned. As Wittgenstein and every right thinking human being will know and say: “Explanations have to end somewhere.” They also have to begin somewhere. And usually they do so in the same place. What goes unquestioned in our schemes and models and language games is of utmost importance, is more often that not overlooked or forgotten, and is in no need of justification. It often looks as if what is shunted to the side, what is taken for granted, does no work. Reminded of these notions we tend to ask what it is that they do. This all too human tendency is the source of many a philosophical problem. (Think of the question: What is being?72)

What is certain is not the fact pictured by proposition “There is a world” but the thought “There is a world” whatever the facts may or may not be, for the my hacign this thoguht does not say anything about the world. (Just as the “equivalent proposition: The world is all that is the case” says nothing about the world, i.e. about what is the case.) It

71 AT VIIIA 8; CSM I 196. 72 Kant’s rather notorious and rather humorous solution was to shunt it definitively to the side by saying: Existence is not a predicate.

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amounts to saying: “There is something and not nothing”, which, again, is no more and no less than saying: “I think, I exist.”

The title of this section is of course nonsensical in that there are not degrees of truth. But what it is meant to bring out is the distinction between what we might call, for the sake of heuristics, types of truth, as it might have been said at one time in history, or that between uses of the word truth, as we might say it today. None of this is of course laid down in stone but we can still operate with the distinction. What is most true then is what is true whatever else is the case, or what is true in all possible worlds.73

In the last section we came to the conclusion that the aim of philosophy is thinking clearly or clarity of thought. For there to be clarity of thought there must be thinking. The must is logical. That there is thought, that there is something and not nothing, is not a discovery. (In the title “The world as I found it…” “the world” is not, does not name, an object. To think (to say) that there is thought there must already be thinking (language, propositions). That is of course not an argument worth making. It is circular. It says itself. That is to say, it is a tautology.

Yet another way of putting it, of posing the problem so to speak, is to say that we cannot begin before the beginning. That, of course, is one of the things Wittgenstein recognized as a source of philosophical problems, the temptation that we have to begin before the beginning. Thinking is where our spade is turned. It is the Cartesian bedrock. It is what is not in doubt: what cannot be doubted. We say one test of a proposition is its negation. What we mean is that for something to be a proposition its negation must have sense. In other words, it must be possible to doubt it. Now if the negation of a proposition has no sense it follows that the proposition itself is either necessarily true or necessarily false, either a tautology or a contradiction.

Once again, one perfect example of such a proposition is: “The world is all that is the case.” Another is: “I am, I exist.” Their negations have no sense. They cannot be doubted. They are the sorts of propositions that, strictly speaking, “cannot be said.” 10. Principles and foundations. Frege and Russell agree in the aim of constructing a logically perfect language, an exact language for all the sciences. They differ in their metaphysics in that Frege, being anti-psychologist, is anti-empiricist through and through. This is seen in his entire treatment of J. S. Mill in the Foundations. Russell was an empiricist through and through. When they spoke, then, of logical objects or truths they were speaking of what one might say were entirely different universes. That is to say, they were speaking past each other. In respect of this latter difference of worldviews Wittgenstein, I feel, stood wholly on the side of Frege, and Hertz, for that matter, and hence, Descartes. What most spurred Wittgenstein in Russell’s work was precisely his metaphysics: the metaphysics of the English parson (Ramsey). He argues against it all throughout his life.

In this sense, to say “Logic must take care of itself” is not to lay down a principle or foundation of logic. Nor is it an arbitrary dogmatic stricture. Rather it is to say, pace Russell and mainly Frege, that there is no need to search for a foundation in order to preserve logic because there is no need for one. This is internally related to the remark that “Our everyday language is in perfect logical order”. On the surface this may seem to contradict his statement that “Language disguises logic” and that our problems arise

73 I assume that even Quine would not claim, in opposition to Descartes, that the tautological is found in nature. It is not gavagaiable or gavagaied.

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from a misunderstandings of the logic of our language, but that is not so. There is no contradiction. What the Begriffsschrift does is not to erect a logically perfect language but to lay bare the inherently perfect logic that is already there in our language: to make it perspicuous. There is no illogical language or illogical thought: both are logically impossible, i.e. they cannot even be thought. “Is an illogical language possible?” is a question one cannot ask. This means that when one is gripped by the fear of that “possibility” one has misunderstood the nature of logic. Once one’s understanding is put aright the problem (and accompanying fear) dissipates, dissolves, disappears. No logical principles, such as the theory of types, are necessary. What is more, they don’t do the work they’re meant to do anyway.

The question we need to ask here is this: If logic were in need of foundations how have we managed to think until now? Illogically? Have we been guessing all along? Have we been speaking in the hope of being understood, that is, as if every utterance of ours were a singular experiment? (The causal explanation.) Now it looks as if Frege was influenced by some form of genetic (historical or evolutionary) conception of arithmetic without knowing it. Whatever the case it seems clear that Wittgenstein took the transcendental conception of logic that Frege promoted rather more seriously. And by transcendental we mean ahistorical in the sense that Frege spoke of truth as being ahistorical: not part of the world, but its limits. Logic and truth, as Frege would say repeatedly throughout his life, are internally related. “So, contrary to widespread views we find certainty in the inner world [the necessary], while doubt never altogether leaves us in our excursions into the external world [the contingent].”74

11. Knowledge and certainty. The idea that Descartes thinks that the mind is transparent to itself is anathema to him. There is no mental relation between observer and observed (analogous to the empirical or physical relation), and hence no need to refute the idea that the observer is never observed (Hume) or not an object of observation (sense data). There is no meta-thinking. What must repeatedly be made clear is that the Meditations is not a work on philosophical psychology a la Hume but Metaphysics. The certainty of the Meditations is not the certainty of infallible access to private sense-data but the certainty of the a priori. It is not about sense and data. It is about sense and nonsense. There is no attempt to build a bridge of justifications from foundational propositions about inner sense data to the probable existence of an outer world. He says: “The fact that I exist so long as I am thinking. Or that what is done cannot be undone, are examples the truth in respect of which we manifestly possess this kind of certainty. For we cannot doubt them unless we think of them; but we cannot think of them without at the same time believing they are true; that is, we can never doubt them.”75

Descartes’ seeing or perceiving in respect of clear and distinct perceptions is not a form of inward “observation” analogous to the empiricist conception of access to Bouwsma’s “seemings” or private sense-data. It is closer to Frege’s conception of thought in that its core is what we all can agree upon: e.g. 2 + 2 = 4 or Pythagoras’ theorem or that space, time and color are the forms of objects (extension). Cf., “In metaphysics … there is nothing which causes so much effort as making our perception of the primary notions clear and distinct. Admittedly, they are by their nature as evident

74 Gottlob Frege, “Thoughts”, in Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, ed., Brian McGuiness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984) p. 367. 75 AT VII 145-146: CSM II 104.

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as, or even more evident than, the primary notions which the geometers study; but they conflict with many preconceived opinions derived from the senses which we have got into the habit of holding from our earliest years, and so only those who really concentrate and meditate and withdraw their minds from corporeal things, so far as possible, will achieve perfect knowledge of them.”76 Concerning Descartes’ talk of the perception of primary notions (after having withdrawn from the senses) he is clearly not speaking about the seeing of objects, but rather the understanding of concepts. This is yet another point against the epistemological reading.

He says: “[I]f there is any certainty to be had, the only remaining alternative is that it occurs in the clear perceptions of the intellect.”77 It is worth noting, at this juncture, that the truths with which Descartes is concerned are not Kant’s analytical truths of definition or synonymy, nor are they empirical or contingent truths that can be subject to doubt or questioning. The Merkmal of an empirical proposition—as opposed to the clear and distinct propositions, thoughts or perceptions of the intellect Descartes is after—is that its negation has sense. One might say that it is only with empirical propositions the game of doubt and inquiry can be played. Again and again one is forced to recognize that Descartes in his search for certain knowledge is looking for clear and distinct propositions to which he can assent without having the slightest doubt about them. Doubt is not possible here. And wherever doubt is excluded we are not dealing with the empirical or scientific. These propositions must be, indeed prove to be, necessarily true. The fact that they are necessarily true tells what type of propositions we are dealing with. They say nothing about the world. They are not empirical propositions, not something that can be known by or through the senses. They are not about contingent facts. They are in this sense what must necessarily be the case for knowledge to be at all possible, for propositions to have sense. Here one can say with Wittgenstein that I do not know that I am a thinking thing or that I exist in much the same way as that I do not know that I am in pain. What does Descartes say? Not I know that I think therefore I am. In the Conversations with Burman Descartes comments on the distinction he draws in the Principles between empirical (contingent) and logical (necessary) truths: Whatever objects fall within the sphere of our knowledge I regard either as things, or affections of things, or as eternal truths which have no existence outside of our thought. [AT viii 22; HR i 238] [O.] But what becomes of contingent truths, like ‘the dog is running’ and so on? [R.] By ‘eternal truths’ the author here means what are called common notions, such as ‘it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be’, and so on. As for contingent truths, these relate to existing things. Contingent truths involve existent things, and vice versa.78 Further on he elucidates his critique of the empiricist principle in the First Meditation, that all we know is either by or through the senses,79 saying that here one cannot raise the objection that it “leaves out the common principles [what he calls “common

76 AT VII 157: CSM II 111. 77 AT VII 145; CSM II 104. 78 Descartes, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 34. 79 It is however this principle that allows for the doubts entertained, since it is taken as established that what is doubted is gotten by or through the senses. So, even though Descartes is not of that view, he proceeds as if he were because that is the view, principle, he is out to undermine. And it is by way of this undermining that the correct view is brought to light. (See above.)

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notions” in the above cited passage] and ideas of God and of ourselves, which were never in the senses” and that this is perfectly alright at this juncture (where one is beginning to philosophize) since “here we are dealing primarily with the question of whether anything has real existence”, to which Cottingham, in his commentary adds that “the implied continuation of Descartes’ point must be: ‘but of course the common principles are not relevant to this issue [of whether anything has real and not merely formal or objective existence], since they do not assert anything about real existence in the world’.”80

They are not, in Wittgenstein’s sense, propositions. They do not picture facts. They say nothing. Returning to the passage from the Principles Descartes says there are two objects of knowledge, i.e. two sorts of thing one can have knowledge of. Of course the word object as used in this context does not have the same meaning as when used in the context of physics, that is, physical objects. The same holds then for the use of the word perception. Descartes says: “All the objects of our perception we regard either as things, or as affections of things, [depending on one’s metaphysics] or else as eternal truths which have no existence outside our thought.”81 It is clear that with the distinction between types of objects in mind the word perception must mean something other than sensory perception. He says:

I am now seeing light, hearing a noise, feeling heat. But I am asleep, so all this is false. Yet I certainly seem to see, to hear, and to be warmed. This cannot be false; what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ is strictly just this, and in this restricted sense of the term it is simply thinking.”82 The point of saying he is asleep so all this is false is not so as to bring up doubts about his sensory perceptions as much as it is to draw a more important distinction for his purposes, the one he draws at the end of the passage, between sensory perception and thought, that “what is called ‘having a sensory perception’ … is simply thinking.” Here the common notions and things of the world, the two sorts of object mentioned, are on a level, i.e. they belong to the things one can know. One sort has real existence in the world and the other does not. Among the things that belong to the second sort are, as noted above, “the common principles and ideas of God and of ourselves, which were never in the senses.”83 To further bring out the notion of thought Descartes is operating with here are two more passages: By the term “thought”, I understand everything which we are aware of as happening within us, in so far as we have an awareness of it. Hence, thinking is to be identified here not merely with understanding, willing, imagining, but also with sensory awareness. For if I say “I am seeing, or I am walking, therefore I exist,” and take this as applying to vision or walking as bodily activities, then the conclusion is not absolutely certain. This is because, as often happens during sleep, it is possible for me to think I am seeing or walking, though my eyes are closed and I am not moving about; such thoughts might even be possible if I had no body at all. But if I take “seeing” or “walking” to apply to the actual sense or awareness of seeing or walking, then the conclusion is quite certain, since it relates to the mind, which alone has the sensation or thought that it is seeing or walking.84

80 Ibid., p. 55. 81 AT VIIIA 22; CSM I 208. 82 AT VII 29; CSM II 19. 83 Op., cit., my emphasis. Here it should be clear that Descartes, like Hume and Wittgenstein, does not find the I in the world: as it is not an object of sensory perception it cannot be found among the sense data. This surely must make hash of Hume’s critique? 84 AT VIIIA 7-8; CSM I 195.

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But what then am I? A thing that thinks. What is that? A thing that doubts, understands, affirms, denies, is willing, is unwilling, and also imagines and has sensory perceptions.85

How can he say sensory perception is thinking? It does seem a bit of a conundrum and it has caused a great deal of confusion but the simple answer is that seeing always involves judgement. There is more to seeing than sensory perception. That is why he can see that in sleep he is thinking even though there are no sensory perceptions. For in the example he gives of being asleep what is false is that he is having sensory perceptions of objects outside himself, what is not false is that he seems to have sensory perceptions, i.e. he is thinking. Frege, struggling to get the same point across, says: “Perhaps, there is a being that has sense-impressions without seeing or touching things [e.g. Descartes’ dreamer or victim of the malin genie]. To have a visual impression is not to see things … Having a visual impression is certainly necessary for seeing things but not sufficient. What must still be added is non-sensible [and that is the thought which] admittedly is not something which it is usual to call real.”86

This brings out the fact that Descartes, like Frege, is not caught up in sense data. He makes the distinction between the sense impression p and the thought that p. This is the basis of the malin genie. It is by or through false sense impressions (smoke and mirrors) that the demon is able to make the I falsely think or judge that p. For even if what I think is false (due to what I believe to be sense impressions) it is true that I think. This autonomy argument is important because, although it undermines the certainty of sense experience, it gives the mind room to judge the sense impression for what it is, despite appearances. That I can judge what I see a mirage, hallucination or dream, even as I see it. Even though p is false it is still the case that “p”.

Now we return to the question of the body. What can be known with certainty about the body, all bodies, is not known by or through the senses. It is not certain (it can be doubted) whether the I (thinking) has a body. A wedge can be placed between them. From this Descartes shows that the I (or thinking) is independent of the body.

Thinking is autonomous, independent of what is the case. That is to say, even if the thought that p is false, it is true that p is thought. There is thinking. Necessarily. 12. I is not an object. Frege in considering the distinction between thought and sense impression also took up the question of the I. “A certain idea in my consciousness may be associated with the idea of the word ‘I’. But then this is one idea among other ideas, and I am its owner as I am the owner of the other ideas. I have an idea of myself, but I am not identical with this idea. What is a content of my consciousness, my idea, should be sharply distinguished from what is an object of my thought. Therefore the thesis that only what belongs to the content of my consciousness [sense data] can be object of my awareness, of my thought, is false.”87 This is the mataphyscial (logical) subject.

The subject that shrinks to an extentionless point is of course the subject of experience, not a part of it. It is not Hume’s bundle of impressions. It is altogether not an object of experience at all. This is what it means when Wittgenstein says that the I is not a part of the world but its limit. Now this I, this limit, is coordinated with another non-object that is also not part of experience, i.e. The World, in so far as “The World” is not the proper name of a thing.

85 AT VII 28; CSM II 19. 86 Frege (1984) p. 369. 87 Ibid., p. 366.

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The reality or existence of both is not determined in the same way one determines the existence of objects of experience (empirically). One does not ask of and test for the reality of “the chair” in the same way that one does with “the world”. One might say that the existence of the world is a priori in that without the assumption, if you will, of its existence there is no point or way and manner in which to ask about the existence of this chair or this hand or ... etc. (“There is a world” is not a hypothesis. It does not express a fact to say that “The world exists.”)

The assumption that the world exists is on a par with the assumption that words have meaning and propositions have sense, or that there is language (thought). They go unquestioned because they constitute the grounds of inquiry. “Am I saying something?” construed as a philosophical question (as applied to itself, as some would say) has no sense. We don’t know what to do with it. (All the second-, third-, fourth- ... order tomfoolery is nothing we have truck with.)

There is an extended sequence of remarks in the Tractatus worth quoting in full that is generally thought of as being or affirming Hume’s empiricist conception of the I that we must return to. It runs as follows: The thinking, presenting subject, there is no such thing.

If I wrote a book “The world as I found it”, I should have therein to report on my body and say which members obey me and which do not, etc. This then would be a method of isolating the subject or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject: of it alone in this book mention could not be made. (5.631) The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. (5.632) Where in the world is a metaphysical subject to be noted?

You will say that this case is altogether like that of the eye and the field of sight. But you do not really see the eye.

And from nothing in the field of sight can it be concluded that it is seen from an eye. (5.633) For the field of sight has not a form like this:

(5.6331)

This is connected with the fact that no part of our experience is also a priori. Everything we see could also be otherwise. Everything we describe at all could also be otherwise. There is no order of things a priori. (5.634)

Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it. (5.64) There is therefore really a sense in which philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”. The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which

psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world. (5.641) Superficially read this seems to suggest that Wittgenstein, like Hume, conceives of the self as a bundle of impressions. The only problem is that it seems to be at odds with the rest of the Tractatus as can be seen in his remark that “there is no such thing as the soul—the subject, etc.—as it is conceived in contemporary superficial psychology.” (5.5421). As we saw in the analysis of “A thinks p” that if the object A is a complex of

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thoughts and experiences it is composite and not simple and “would not be a soul any longer” (5.5421). It seems, however, that Wittgenstein probably never read Hume, and that if he was influenced by Hume it must have been through peers who championed empiricism in some form or other, e.g. Ramsey, Russell and Moore. We also know that he was influenced by Schopenhauer and that the latter’s conception of the self reflected in the title of his major work: The World as Will and Representation. One could well imagine as subtitle to The World as I Found It that read: The World as Thought and Proposition. The conception being that of a self that is not an object of experience and not found in the world. If this latter conception is the correct understanding of Wittgenstein’s idea of the self it follows that Wittgenstein, unlike Hume, is not bound by the strictures of an empiricist metaphysics. That is to say, his philosophy is not founded on empiricist epistemology: on an analysis of experience.

In the brief remark on “modern epistemology (Russell, Moore, etc.)” (5.541) Wittgenstein discusses propositions of the form “A believes that p”, “A thinks p” or “A says p” etc., and says of them that they really “are of the form ‘ “p” says p’: and here we have no co-ordination of a fact [p] and an object [the subject of experience] but a co-ordination of facts [the proposition and the fact that it pictures] by means of the co-ordination of their objects” (5.542). That is to say that the thought that finds expression in the proposition “p” mirrors the fact p that it pictures: they have the same multiplicity and share the same logical form. The relation is not an external one between an object and a fact, as Russell and Moore would have it, but rather an internal one between a proposition and what it pictures.

More importantly, in this reading there is no “propositional content” that mediates between the propositional sign and what it signifies. If it (the proposition) has sense it is a sign. In other words, there is no propositional sign without sense: the term “propositional sign with no sense” does not signify. 13. We make for ourselves pictures of facts. One thing that is central to my thesis and hence worthy of special notice is the title of the First Meditation, viz., “What can be called into doubt”. The word “can” expresses, to my view, logical possibility. Descartes, if he had wanted to stress a point about our language, might as well have said: What it makes sense to doubt. Seen in this way it raises many questions concerning the traditional critique of Descartes method as formulated by e.g. Hobbes and Hume, that it is universal in scope becomes questionable. One even suspects that this characteristic of it is itself incoherent, for indeed what can universal doubt possibly mean? As Wittgenstein would later say, on the same mistaken point: “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty” and “A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt.”88 It presupposes first and foremost that something can be thought, that it can be said. This makes nonsense of the common claim that “universal doubt is not a genuine doubt” when put forth as a critique of what is taken to be Descartes’ method. The point is that the command “Doubt everything!” has no sense and cannot possibly be the foundation of any method in anything resembling a science, or in any other form of human inquiry. It is an empty slogan and to attribute it to Descartes in order to knock

88 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969) §115, p. 18e, and §450, p. 59e. Both of which, if one is prepared to think about it, perfectly express Descartes’ main point that without certainty there can be no inquiry and therefore no knowledge, and more importantly no science.

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it down subsequently, thereby dismissing his work in its entirety without even having understood it or trying to, is wanton neglect. This brings us back to the title just mentioned: “What can be called into doubt”. Does one need to be reminded that “I think therefore I am” is not an empirical claim? It seems so. Hume’s experiential objection is a case in point. Nowhere does Descartes’ claim that he perceives the (his) I: that the (my) I is an object of its (my) perception. To say: “What must necessarily be the case…” is already to step beyond what is or is not the case, beyond what is possible, beyond the realm of facts.

It is not the facts that give a proposition sense. If it is a proposition, then it has sense independently of what is the case. (Consider the fact that e.g. a map can disagree with reality.) Now, note that the unassailable truths of the Tractatus do not have sense. Take our earlier example: “The world is all that is the case”. One might as well have said: “Propositions have sense.” And this is in fact a good sample for the sake of comparison since its negation, just like the negation of “The world is all that is the case”, does not turn out false but nonsensical. What this shows us but does not say is that propositions such as these are nonsensical. Well, are they then tautologies or contradictions? No. Here’s what we might say: “The truth of a proposition with sense (an empirical proposition) is not certain. The proposition whose truth is certain is not a proposition with sense.”

To say that some bit of nonsense has “the form of a proposition” can be misleading because it now seems as if there are two types propositions that are distinguished by either having or not having the property sense. As if there were the marks on the paper, here, and the gas of meaning, there. And whenever a set of marks is not surrounded by gas we immediately know it for what it is. This way of thinking makes logic seem like an empirical science that is in its infancy. There are of course many who think the latter even when their ideas of how sense comes about differ. This is in part why Wittgenstein came to perhaps regret the way in which the Tractatus was written. He said the style made it look too much like discoveries were being or had been made when in fact they were merely one way of spelling out what anyone who masters our everyday language already knows. The phrase “I think…” adds nothing to a proposition. When one says e.g. “I think the chairs are in the next room” it is rarely because one is being mentally examined. What is tested here is “…the chairs are in the next room”.

For Wittgenstein, remember, propositions do not have reference. Sense is an internal “property”. What has sense is a proposition. If you understand the proposition then you know what must be the case for it to be true. It is not, indeed, it cannot be the fact that is pictured by the proposition that gives it sense. This tells of the autonomy of thought and this is what Descartes is getting at when he says that whether or not the thoughts one has correlate or capture or agree with a reality or not they still have sense, i.e. they are still thoughts—I am still thinking. One follows a set of verbal directions and comes to a point where one looks up and says “I think … is around the next bend”—it is clear that the proposition has sense whether or not it turns out true, whether or not that … is in fact around the next bend.

In the Tractatus (6.51) Wittgenstein says: Scepticism is not irrefutable, but palpably senseless, if it would doubt where a questions cannot be asked.

For doubt can exist only where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said.

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One might think that in its context this is meant to follow from e.g. the picture theory of the proposition. That is, that this is true if and only if the picture theory of the proposition is true. This is not the case. What is the case is that 6.51 is true a priori wherever there is language. One could say that 6.51 supports itself: that it is its own proof. This also means that 6.51 is not part of a discovery made or theory constructed by Wittgenstein, but is as old as philosophy itself. It has to do with what it makes sense to say: what questions can be meaningfully asked.

The difference between philosophical and scientific description is this: Logic is not a thing one can describe scientifically as one e.g. describes the life cycle of fruit flies. The description of logic, of the workings of language, can only be done in the oblique so to speak, never directly. To steal an analogy, it can only be done by criss-crossing the landscape of our ordinary language again and again until recognition and familiarity are achieved. Logic shows itself in language as it is. It takes care of itself. It is autonomous. It is seen in use. It is there before the sciences.

For instance “Objects are colorless” does not mean there are colorless objects. It is a remark about the use of color words or the logic (grammar) of color. One could also say in the same sense that objects have no extension in and of themselves which is to say that an object can have any possible extension. What we do is merely to point out an internal relation between concepts. It can also be expressed thus: “If there are objects then necessarily there is extension” or “For objects to exist there must be extension (space)” as long as we are wary of the fact that expressed in this way it seems as if one were conditional upon or prior to the other. That is not the case. 14. The autonomy of thought. Science depends on judgment. Judgment as we know from Descartes is a mode of thought. Thinking then is the foundation of science. It is founded on judging, on thought’s weighing of the facts. Now if thought was the mere fruit of causal factors and not autonomous we would not call it thought. What we mean when we say that thought is autonomous is that it is independent of the senses (of sense impressions) indeed it can reject them as false despite their seeming verity. There is, on this understanding, no causal connection between a sense impression and thought (and certainly not a necessary one), as there is between e.g. a sense impression and a blush or rush of blood to the head. Indeed, there cannot possibly be. This is not to say that we deny any causal connection.

The empiricist critique of Descartes as someone who engages fruitlessly in “armchair philosophy” who ought to leave his office and engage with the “real world” (of the senses) is misguided in so far as Descartes object of study is thinking and to say that one needs to go out into the world in order to think about thinking or that thinking is reducible to experience (sense data) is nonsense. Thinking can be done in an armchair. It can be done anywhere.89

The sense data theory on the other hand rests on the idea of there being a distinct difference between appearance and reality, and that our experience is always of appearance and therefore completely blocked off from reality. Here is the root of scepticism and of idealism (empiricism is the Manichean idealism of the completely hopeless). If you look closely you will see that this is the point of Descartes’ attack.

89 Strict metaphysical naturalism, the conflation of experience and thought, a la Hume destroys autonomy and hence destroys independent thought. This confused reading also lies behind the contemporary idea that Descartes was talking about consciousness, viz., Geach and Anscombe’s translations. Descartes does not say: I am conscious therefore I am.

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What he does is basically say: Grant that the assumption is true and all experience is merely of appearance and what is more, grant that all that we know is either by or through the senses, now given this the question remains: Is there thought? Existentially the question would be: Is there a will, or is there moral judgment?

What sense can the sense data theorist possibly give to the concept “physical object”? Once thought through one realizes that there can be no such thing. That words which name that which only I can see, words whose meanings are the objects that are present to my mind only, are not the words of anything we might call a language.

Whereas, what is known necessarily is not known by or through the senses. Where certainty (certain knowledge) is concerned the feeling of certainty cannot guide us. This is Descartes point in the passage where he imagines that “there may be some who would prefer to deny the existence of so powerful a God rather than believe that everything else is uncertain. Let us not argue with them, but grant them that everything said about God is a fiction. According to their supposition, then, I have arrived at my present state by fate or chance or a continuous chain of events, or by some other means; yet since deception and error seem to be imperfections, the less powerful they make my original cause, the more likely it is that I am so imperfect as to be deceived all the time.”

Now consider this: the negation of Descartes’ principle proposition “Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have acquired either from the senses or through the senses” has sense. (Cf., “…and whatever a man knows, whatever is not mere rumbling and roaring that he has heard, can be said in three words”.) This tells us that it is not a necessary truth of the sort that is clear and distinct, i.e. certain, not subject to doubt. In explaining his objection to the principle propositions about knowledge from or through the senses, Descartes gives an example of the latter: “…’it is impossible that one and the same thing should both be and not be’, [and goes on to say] men who are creatures of the senses, as we all are at a pre-philosophical level [as Descartes “was” prior to the Meditations], do not think about these or pay attention to them.

On the contrary, since they are present in us from birth with such clarity, and since we experience them inside ourselves, we neglect them and think about them only in a confused manner, but never in the abstract, or apart from material things and particular instances. Indeed, if people were to think about these principles in the abstract, no one would have any doubt about them; and if the Sceptics had done this, no one would ever have been a Sceptic; for they cannot be denied by anyone who carefully focuses his attention on them.”90

Descartes goes deeper in a sense than merely setting new foundations if by that we mean new principles of inquiry. What he does is clear away the common prejudices, the strictures on thought, on reasoning. By making “I think” central he guarantees the autonomy of thinking and hence of formulating the very principles of inquiry by guaranteeing independent agency on the part of the thinker. This does not only have practical implications in the sciences but also, perhaps more importantly, in ethics.

90 Descartes, Descartes’ Conversation with Burman: Translated with an Introduction and Commentary by John Cottingham (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976) p. 3.

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Conclusion Descartes, as we know, is considered the father of modern philosophy, even though his philosophy, more often than not, as we have seen, is used as an example of how not to do it. He is also remembered for having been one of the men who, along with Galileo et al., ushered in the scientific revolution. The fact that these two events, the beginnings of modern philosophy and the scientific revolution, coincide is no mere coincidence. What I have tried to do here is to show that it is with good reason he is called the father of modern philosophy, and that upon consideration, he is quite a bit more modern than tradition and the spread of empiricism, broadly speaking, would have us believe.

It is true that Descartes is mostly known for his philosophical work, and that much of, if not all of, his scientific work has been superseded and bettered. What is often forgotten is that the thrust of his work in philosophy was aimed at establishing a foundation for knowledge, and by that we mean the sciences such as physics, optics, and so on. As we have seen his metaphysics took as its foil the common prejudices of the Aristotelian empiricist and/or skeptic. What the latter share is the by now familiar dictum: “Whatever I have accepted as most true I have acquired from the senses or through the senses.”91 Only they interpret it slightly differently. Their interpretations naturally form their metaphysics and epistemology.

“All philosophy [says Descartes] is like a tree, whose roots are metaphysics, whose trunk is physics, and whose branches, which grow from this trunk, are all of the other sciences, namely medicine, mechanics, and morals”.92 Read traditionally this seems to express the notion that there is a hierarchy of what one might loosely call the sciences. What one overlooks in this metaphor is that philosophy is not part of that supposed hierarchy; rather it encompasses or contains it. Philosophy (thinking) is the entire organism: it is the tree whose parts are metaphysics etc. A tree is not hierarchically ordered. It is an organic whole. Who in his right mind would say that e.g. a leaf is of greater importance than a root?

Descartes’ aim was to establish that there is something which so to speak precedes knowledge of the contingent, something that guides and structures it, something that is necessary for knowledge of that sort to be possible at all. That something is thinking. In this, I believe and hope to have shown, he succeeded by the very simple means he had at his disposal. That is the logical part of the project, showing thought to be autonomous and foundational. The metaphysics are meant to explain why it is so or how it can be. This is in keeping with Wittgenstein’s remark regarding the nature of philosophy: that it consists of logic and metaphysics, and that logic is its basis.

91 AT VII 18; CSM II 12. 92 AT IXB 14.

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With Frege, although the means and methods have changed and in fact become much more sophisticated, the aim, and in some ways the problems, remain the same. Even though the distinction or dualism is already in place he still balks at the empiricist reduction (or conflation, as it were). He says: “Sense-perception is thought to be the most certain, even the sole, source of knowledge about everything that does not belong to the inner world. But with what right? For sense-perception has as necessary constituents our sense-impressions [sense data or ideas] and these are part of the inner world. In any case two men do not have the same sense impressions though they may have similar ones. Sense impressions alone do not reveal the external world to us. Perhaps there is a being who that only has sense impressions without seeing or touching things. To have visual impressions is not to see things.”93 In short, he is saying that without thought, without judgment independent of the senses, there is no knowledge, there is no science. There is nothing.

Frege, believing he was following Kant, “set out to show that not all knowledge is empirical, that human thinking is not just a subjective, psychological process, that it consists in the grasping of objective thoughts, that empiricism and naturalism are untenable … The views Frege attacks have one, and only one, feature in common. Inductivism, physicalism, psychologism, and formalism are all different forms of empiricism.”94

It is hard to know what Kant would have made of Frege’s metaphysics of a Third Realm although his transcendental idealism does seem to leave room for it. And again, we see that the logical insights and discoveries that seem to stand in need of explanation are buttressed by metaphysical speculations that seem to follow logically, but crumble as they evolve in complexity and lose their charm. It therefore comes as no surprise to see that his tools, methods and insights have survived in use and have been developed and strengthened, while his metaphysics have become mere oddities.

What Frege and Descartes have in common, however, is their unspoken, perhaps because not clearly recognized by either, grasp of intuition as a form of understanding or seeing (perception is Descartes’ term) that does not necessarily involve images or sense data, if they do at all, but is grounded in logic or thinking. It is this aspect of philosophy that Wittgenstein truly brings out by conceiving of logic in a different and more inclusive sense compared to Frege. He says: To the question whether we need intuition for the solution of mathematical problems it must be answered that language itself here supplies the necessary intuition. (6.233) The process of calculation brings about just this intuition. Calculation is not an experiment. (6.2331) Mathematics is a method of logic. (6.234) Note that says that mathematic is a method of logic and not, as Frege tried so hard to prove, reducible to (some one conception of) it. It is but one calculus among many. It is of course right of Frege to say that: “Thought is in essentials the same everywhere: it is not true that there are different kinds of laws of thought for different kinds of objects thought about.”95And no doubt if pressed Wittgenstein (who in the main remained a Fregean all his life) would assent to this.

93 Frege (1984) p. 369. 94 Sluga (1999) p. 102. 95 Frege (1959) p. iii.

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What he would not have assented to, I believe, is the idea that all of logic (all its methods, mathematics being one) is reducible to one set of logical principles and axioms, or laws, as Frege says, that can be established (or discovered), and sometimes, from the language it seems that they are in desperate need of discovery and or constructive development (the ways in which thee things are spoken of vacillate extremely) as their continued absence threatens thinking, all thinking, now and forever.

The metaphysics of the Tractatus follows directly from the logical insights and considerations. The minimal unit of sense—a thought in Descartes’ and Wittgensteins’ views—of what can be said is a proposition then the minimum unit of being is what the proposition pictures, that is, a fact. One cannot think less than a proposition, hence, one cannot express or picture less than a fact. Logic (language) with its multiplicity makes it possible to express all possible facts, this constitutes logical space.

The tree of knowledge—the world: all that is the case. What makes the edifice is not only the content but also the structure. Logical space is more than the propositions that picture or do not. Logical space is the space of all that can possibly be (or not be) the case. It represents what can be thought or said. That said, logical space does not mirror or represent anything, it is not a picture or complex that is or can be co-ordinated with some other entity. What holds it together is, so to speak, internal to it.

The condition of knowledge of the possible, what can be known, is the necessary, what is always known, even before one knows it. It is as old as thinking. The story of Socrates and the slave-boy who “learns” geometry96 is the story of logic and how it fills the world. It is a picture, a reminder for a specific purpose. The explanations of how this knowledge can be and how it comes about is at the root of metaphysics. Plato’s choice of anamnesis is but one example: one explanation. One attempt to understand how it is that one can know what one hasn’t learned, seen, heard or otherwise experienced: logic.

And metaphysics, as Wittgenstein rightly said, is built on logic. But if that is the case and metaphysics is to be shunned, if that is the case and logic is rock bottom, then, logic cannot be explained: it must take care of itself.

This does away with metaphysics, logically, but it does not necessarily put an end to questioning. That is a matter of will and not intellect. How hard is it not to stop at “I think, I am”? There you have, in a nutshell, the history of philosophy. Not being able to stop, or to begin at the beginning and not before it.

Logic must take care of itself? It does. Itself and everything it comes into contact with.

96 Plato, Meno and Other Dialogues, transl. Robin Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) §§80-86.

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