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Kremer University of Notre Dame NOÛS 35:1 ~2001! 39–73 The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense* Michael Kremer University of Notre Dame “To use a word without a justification does not mean to use it without right.” ~Wittgenstein, 1958, §289! I. Wittgenstein’s closing remarks in the Tractatus have long puzzled his readers. His propositions, he tells us, are nonsense, and to understand him is to recog- nize this. Yet how can recognizing his pronouncements as nonsense count as a kind of understanding? Of what value could this understanding be? We can rec- ognize Jabberwocky as nonsense, and in doing so we can perhaps achieve some sort of understanding of Lewis Carroll. However, Jabberwocky does not open with a claim to deal with the problems of philosophy and to bring them to a definitive resolution. Moreover, Jabberwocky wears its nonsensicality on its sleeve; it is obvious nonsense and we recognize it as such from its first sen- tence. The typical reader of the Tractatus, on the other hand, will begin by sup- posing herself to be reading a book of philosophy, intended as a straightforward communication of intelligible thought. This thought may appear difficult and its expression highly compressed; the reader may struggle to come to an under- standing of the author’s point of view; but if the reader persists and makes it to the end of the book, it may surprise her to learn that she is to dismiss as non- sense what she had taken herself to understand. She may infer that she has un- derstood nothing at all, and throw the book away—yet not in the way seemingly intended by Wittgenstein’s image of the ladder which one throws away after climbing it—for this reader will not have been transformed in any interesting way by the experience, except perhaps in acquiring a distaste for certain kinds of philosophy. I recently encountered an example of such a reaction in a “read- er’s review” of the Tractatus posted by the Internet bookseller Amazon.com. The reviewer1 writes, under the heading “A lot of bloated nonsense”: © 2001 Blackwell Publishers Inc., 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA, and 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK. 39 40 NOÛS Wittgenstein must be the most over rated philosopher who has ever lived. Because of the work ~and marketing! of a few devoted students, the rest of us have been led to believe that he is one of the great ones. The truth is nothing of the sort. He couldn’t write clearly. The result is much undeserved attention has been given to some very ambiguous epigrammatic statements of his. Much of his work is unreadable and of no use or interest to anyone but a few hard core positivist philosophy professors. If you really want to read some good philosophy, do not be unjustifiably taken in by the weird mystique of the Wittgenstein name. It is all P.R. work by some ivy league philosophers who do not even care anymore if philsophy @sic# has anything useful to say to people who live in the real world. As long as they can continue to collect their salaries and analyze their little language puzzles in the privacy of their faculty offices, they are happy-and irrelevant to the lives of anyone who actually works outside of a university. Save yourself the bother of trying to decipher this guy; It isn’t worth your trouble. A more determined reader may, however, wish to hold onto the thought that he has understood something in reading the earlier sections of the Tractatus. He may discern there a theory of metaphysics, or of language, or of the mind, which attracts or repels him. He may see in the work arguments for and against important positions, which can be elaborated, defended or refuted. He may ex- pend great energy on these tasks. He may even conclude that Wittgenstein has shown, through important arguments, that certain views or theories are founded on nonsense and irredeemably confused. Yet in thus concluding, he will take Wittgenstein himself to have presented a philosophical view, which may itself be mistaken in whole or in part, and may even involve various confusions, but is not simply nonsense. Most commentators have implicitly taken this approach to reading the Trac- tatus, in attempting to explain Wittgenstein’s doctrine on this or that philosoph- ical issue. Peter Carruthers is more explicit, claiming that “the doctrine of philosophy as nonsense may simply be excised from @the Tractatus#, without damage to the remainder,” attributing this “doctrine” to Wittgenstein’s having over-generalized a “theory of semantic content...adequate...for factual ~broadly scientific! discourse...to cover discourse of all kinds, including...philosophy.” ~Carruthers 1990, 5!. To read the Tractatus in this way is to take Wittgenstein to have made at least one major error in classifying his own propositions as non- sense, and to suggest that at a certain fundamental level Wittgenstein did not properly understand his own activity or accomplishment. For interpreters such as Carruthers, we can best appreciate Wittgenstein’s achievement by simply dis- missing the self-destructive climax of the Tractatus. In contrast, the “resolute” interpretation of the Tractatus, so-called by War- ren Goldfarb and Thomas Ricketts, forcefully developed by Cora Diamond and James Conant, insists that we take seriously Wittgenstein’s claim that his prop- ositions are nonsense, that they constitute a ladder that we are to throw away.2 Diamond suggests, following Wittgenstein’s advice to Ficker ~Wittgenstein 1979a, 95!, that we look to the Preface and closing sections of the book, which The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense 41 she calls its “frame,” for indications as to how to read the work. ~Diamond 1991, 55!. The Preface tells us that the book will draw a limit not to thought, but to the expression of thought, in language. What lies on the other side of the limit will be “einfach Unsinn”—simply nonsense. ~Wittgenstein 1933, p. 27!.3 The penultimate section of the work itself tells us that to understand Wittgenstein, we must recognize his propositions to be nonsense, so that we can climb through them, on them, over them, in the end discarding them entirely. ~6.54!. The book is not a textbook, according to the Preface ~p. 27!; the philosophy that it teaches us is not a doctrine, but an activity of clarification in which we make explicit the content that is already completely present and in order in the propositions of ordinary language. ~4.112, 5.5563!. At the same time, this activity of clari- fication can help us to see how ordinary language makes possible various am- biguities and confusions, ~3.323! which allow, through what Wittgenstein calls “the misunderstanding of the logic of our language” the formulation of the ap- parent but unreal “problems of philosophy.” ~p. 27, 3.324, 4.003!. In becoming aware of these confusions and the illusions they generate, we unmask the prob- lems of philosophy as consisting not of errors but nonsense. Thus we “solve” them in a way more definitive than any philosophical argument could provide. Diamond initially introduces the idea of the “frame” of the book, in accor- dance with the implicit spatial metaphor, as comprising the Preface and final propositions of the Tractatus. However, as the above summary makes clear, the resolute interpretation also takes its cue from propositions occurring in the rest of the work. Conant explains that “the distinction between what is part of the frame and what is part of the body of the work is not, as some commentators have thought, simply a function of where in the work a remark occurs ~say, in the beginning or near the end of the book!. Rather, it is a function of how it occurs.” The place of a proposition in the frame or the body is determined by “its role in the work.” ~Conant forthcoming, 151, fn. 195!. Thus Conant counts several passages from the middle of the work as parts of the frame rather than the body.4 While such “framing” propositions are not among those proclaimed in the end to be nonsense, they are also not part of an elaborate philosophical theory that the book sets forward. They are instructions for reading the book. Our abil- ity to understand these instructions does not depend on our grasp of a complex theoretical reconstruction of such notions as sense and nonsense, thought and truth. Rather, it is based on our ordinary understanding of these notions, our ordinary use of these words. On the resolute reading, as I understand it, Wittgenstein’s view of meaning, sense and nonsense in the Tractatus is simply this: meaningful linguistic expressions are those that have a use in the lan- guage.5 The most basic use which we make of language is to say something; expressions that have the same use, or can be used to say the same things, have the same meaning, while expressions that have no use in saying things are mean- ingless. ~3.328, 5.47321!. Nonsense arises when we construct apparent sen- tences containing meaningless words—words for which we have failed to make 42 NOÛS a determination of meaning. ~5.473!. When we come to recognize the proposi- tions of the Tractatus as nonsense, we realize that these propositions have not been given a use in which they say anything, because they contain words that have not been given a determinate meaning, a use in combinations of signs that say something. This realization is not the conclusion of an elaborate argument based on a theory of meaning. It is the result of the attempt to grasp the mean- ing that the sentences purport to have, and of the disintegration of any sense that there is such a meaning, in the process of trying to think through what that would involve.
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