Mysticism and Nonsense in the Tractatus

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2007.00268.x Mysticism and Nonsense in the Tractatus Michael Morris and Julian Dodd 1. The Paradox of the Tractatus Upon reading Wittgenstein’s Preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that the book is in a similar line of business to any other work of analytical philosophy. True enough, Wittgenstein’s professed aim of drawing a limit to the expression of thoughts is exceptionally ambitious; and one could not fail to be struck by the immodesty of the claim that the pro- blems of philosophy—that is, all of them—’have in essentials been finally solved’ (TLP: p. 29).1 But be this as it may, the Preface seems to welcome the reader onto familiar methodological territory, for it would seem to be the case that: (A) The purpose of the Tractatus is to communicate truths. Wittgenstein states both that one aspect of the work’s value consists in the fact that ‘thoughts are expressed’ in it (TLP: p. 29), and that ‘the truth of the thoughts communicated . here seems to me unassailable and definitive’ (TLP: p. 29).2 Infamously, however, it seems that if (A) were correct, then the book could never succeed in what we are assuming its purpose to be. And the reason for this would seem to lie in the fact that the Tractatus is incoherent, and in the Tractatus’s particular brand of incoherence. For in laying out its theory of meaning, the book draws a limit to the expression of thoughts that entails the meaninglessness of any attempt to elaborate this very theory of meaning. More specifically, if the theory of meaning it elaborates—the so-called ‘picture theory’—is correct, then to try to say how the world, and language, must be for meaning to be possible is to try to say something about the logical form that sentences share with reality (TLP: 2.16–2.18); but, according to that very theory, the attempt to do such a thing can only issue in nonsense, since logical form cannot be represented (TLP: 4.12). Consequently, if one holds true all that has gone before in the text, then, at the text’s end, one is compelled to say, with Wittgenstein, that what went before is nonsense (TLP: 6.54). Here, then, is the paradox of the Tractatus: if its constituent sentences are true, then they are nonsense. One response to all this is to follow P. M. S. Hacker (2000: 356) in regarding the incoherence of the Tractatus as demonstrating the falsity of its central doctrines. And we, as philosophers of language, view things in just this way. To our minds, the incoherence of the picture theory is just one more reason for denying that sentences can only be meaningful if they share reality’s logical form. But it is one thing for a contemporary reader—quite rightly, in our view—to treat the European Journal of Philosophy ]]]:]] ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 1–30 r 2007 The Authors. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA. 2 Michael Morris and Julian Dodd Tractatus’s incoherence as a reason for rejecting its theory of meaning; it is quite another to explain just what Wittgenstein thought he was doing in producing a text whose incoherence seems both so obvious and so easy to diagnose. After all, Wittgenstein suggests that reading the Tractatus may, nonetheless, bring us some enlightenment of a kind; that is, do us some good. As he himself, puts it: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly. (TLP: 6.54) One way of putting the problem with which this paper is concerned is this: given that the text looks for all the world to be incoherent, what could Wittgenstein have been up to in writing it? Finding a solution to this problem—which, of course, requires us to come up with a plausible treatment of Wittgenstein’s way with the paradox—has some claim to be the basic problem facing an interpreter of the Tractatus. It is certainly not the only problem; perhaps not even the deepest problem; but it is a problem that shapes every other aspect of an interpretation as no other problem does. And, as it happens, we think that we may well have solved it once and for all. 2. Two Interpretations Based on a Shared Assumption How can we make sense of what is going on in the Tractatus, given its apparently incoherent nature? Much depends on the attitude we take towards (A). Our favoured solution has it that (A) should, in fact, be rejected: a move that enables us to interpret Wittgenstein as self-consciously producing an incoherent text with a view to doing something other than communicating truths. But as long as (A) remains in place—as long as we think that the good Wittgenstein thought the text could do us could only lie in its being a source of propositional knowledge—our only hope lies in portraying Wittgenstein as regarding the Tractatus as incoherent in appearance only; and there would seem to be two ways of doing this. According to the first such reading, Wittgenstein avoids incoherence because he does not, in fact, assert (i.e. present as true) any of the sentences of the Tractatus. On the contrary, the truths to be communicated are treated as inexpressible but somehow capable of being transmitted to the book’s readership via the production of a text consisting entirely of nonsense. Wittgenstein, on this view, occupies a stable position behind the text, where a coherent set of ineffable truths can be acknowledged. Certain items from this realm—namely, those constituting Wittgenstein’s general conception of the nature of language— explain why the text itself is meaningless. On the alternative reading, incoherence is avoided by interpreting Wittgen- stein as regarding certain of the sentences in the Tractatus as straightforwardly r The Authors 2007. Journal compilation r Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2007 Mysticism and Nonsense in the Tractatus 3 meaningful, and by taking these, and these alone, to communicate truths and convey arguments. On such a reading, those portions of the text that are nonsensical are not taken by Wittgenstein to be so on the strength of the philosophical theory they supposedly help to elaborate; and those parts of the text that are true do not bring their own meaningfulness into question. Here Wittgenstein’s claimed stable resting-place lies, not behind the text, but within a part of it. Let us call the first option ‘The Ineffable Truths View’.3 This way of reading the text seeks to explain how the Tractatus can communicate truths by virtue of appealing to Wittgenstein’s distinction between saying and showing. In order to see how this might work, consider the remarks on solipsism, and especially the claim that ‘what solipsism means, is quite correct, only it cannot be said,butit shows itself’ (TLP: 5.62). Taken at face value, the claim is that solipsism is true, but cannot be put into words: it is an ineffable truth that is manifest in the fact that the limits of what I can say are the very same as the limits of the possible combinations of objects in facts.4 But, nonetheless, the idea is that Wittgenstein’s failed attempt to put into words such ineffable truths is intended to bring enlightenment to the reader. His nonsense sentences can lead readers to see what he tried—and failed— to say: such sentences are, supposedly, illuminating in the sense that the reader’s appreciation that they are nonsense may help her come to see the ineffable truths that Wittgenstein tried, and failed, to put into words.5 The leading idea behind The Ineffable Truths View is that this form of explanation characterises the text as a whole. If this way of reading the Tractatus is correct, the sentences of the Tractatus, though nonsensical, are used by Wittgenstein to bring us to see the ineffable truths which explain why this is so. Such nonsense sentences communicate truths by getting the reader to grasp the truths lying behind his words. So much for the appeal to ineffable truths. Someone sceptical, as we are, about attributing to Wittgenstein both the belief that there exist ineffable truths and the thesis that nonsense can be used to communicate truths, and yet convinced of correctness of (A), will want to consider the second option. This involves radically restricting the scope of the phrase ‘my propositions’ in Tractatus 6.54. According to this alternative way of reading the Tractatus—which we shall call ‘The Not-All-Nonsense View’—not every sentence of the text is nonsense. Whilst the text’s main body is, indeed, nonsensical, other parts of it—which we might call ‘the frame’6—will be regarded as Wittgenstein’s instructions to his readers on how to approach the book, and will be taken to have sense unproblematically. The end result will be a reading of Wittgenstein according to which the doctrines traditionally associated with the Tractatus are not his. We may then take the book’s point to be therapeutic:7 its purpose will be to help readers to see that the main body of the text is nonsensical and, hence, that the philosophical pretensions it represents are nonsensical too.8 Clearly, if such a reading is correct, then the Tractatus has truth-telling aspirations that are not at once thwarted by incoherence.

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