Foreword: Part Four

I do not want to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed what I have written here makes no particular claim to novelty; and therefore I give no sources, because it is all the same to me if what I have thought has already been thought by another before me.

I will mention only that I owe a large part of the stimulus to my thoughts to the great works of Frege and to the work of my friend Mr. Bertrand Russell.

If this effort has a value then it consists in two things. First in that thoughts are expressed in it, and this value will be the greater the better the thoughts are expressed. The more the nail has been hit on the head. – Here I am aware of falling far short of what is possible. Simply because my ability to accomplish the task is too slight. – May others come and do it better.

On the other hand the truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am therefore of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not wrong in this, then the value of this work now consists secondly in that it shows how little has been achieved by the solving of these problems.

L. W.

Vienna, 1918.

Cf. Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. A xiii: “In this enquiry I have made completeness my chief aim, and I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied.” (Metaphysics is the battlefield of the (till now) endless controversies concerning questions that human reason can neither ignore nor solve.)

A xiii-xiv: “While I am saying this I can fancy that I detect in the face of the reader an expression of indignation, mingled with contempt, at pretensions seemingly so arrogant and vain-glorious. Yet they are incomparably more moderate than the claims of all those writers who on the lines of the usual programme profess to prove the simple nature of the soul or the necessity of a first beginning of the world. For while such writers pledge themselves to extend human knowledge beyond all limits of possible experience, I humbly confess that this is entirely beyond my power.”

Kant's task is to see what reason can achieve without help from experience. For such an enquiry, certainty and clearness are essential (see A xv). For the sake of certainty, there must be no opinions or hypotheses. For the sake of clarity, everything must be quite logical and there must be examples given. But Kant has not given as many examples as the reader might like, because that would make the book too long, and then it would take too long to get a sense of the overall system. A xviii-xix: “Abbot Terrasson has remarked that if the size of a volume be measured not by the number of its pages but by the time required for mastering it, it can be said of many a book, that it would be much shorter if it were not so short.” On the other hand, a book might be much clearer if it had not tried so hard to be clear. Wittgenstein’s book is short in the literal sense, but possibly very long indeed in terms of how long it takes to master it. It is written as if it contains no opinions or hypotheses, and its use of examples is about the same as Kant’s. Wittgenstein’s “modesty” is the same as Kant’s, or parallel with it at least, we are presumably meant to think, although whether it is possible to compare oneself, however implicitly, with Kant and remain modest is, shall we say, open to debate. Kant’s motivation was moral, and perhaps we are expected to think of something similar in Wittgenstein’s case. See Kant at B xxiv: “On a cursory view of the present work it may seem that its results are merely negative, warning us that we must never venture with speculative reason beyond the limits of experience. Such is in fact its primary use. But such teaching at once acquires a positive value when we recognize that the principles with which speculative reason ventures out beyond its proper limits do not in effect extend the employment of reason, but, as we find in closer scrutiny, inevitably narrow it.” Kant aims to limit speculative reason and thereby to remove an obstacle that threatens to destroy (see B xxv) the employment of practical reason. The positive value of his work becomes clear once we agree with him “that there is an absolutely necessary practical employment of pure reason—the moral—in which it inevitably goes beyond the limits of sensibility.” [B xxv] According to Kant, people should stop speculating about things they can never understand (God, etc.) and instead focus on the possible sciences, i.e. areas where real knowledge is possible. TLP 6.53 is reminiscent of this ideal.

Wittgenstein might be understood as sharing Kant’s goal, but as taking, with Martin Heidegger, a more metaphysical view of ethics. I.e., for them, ethics is more about how we conceive of/react to the world than of anything like the categorical imperative. It is not, for instance, that Hobbes’ materialist metaphysics leads to bad morals. It is a morally bad metaphysics to begin with. At A ix Kant mocks Locke’s metaphysics by comparing it with the fictional line of inheritance supposed to justify the divine right of kings which Locke takes apart in his first treatise on government. So Kant already sees empiricism as false and pernicious, but what is untrue and dangerous is not thereby intrinsically bad, in the way that, I think, Wittgenstein and Heidegger saw it.

It has been noted before (by Anscombe and Diamond, for instance) that Frege seems to be praised much more highly than Russell in Wittgenstein's foreword, although Russell really was a friend, so why would Wittgenstein deliberately slight him? On p. 173 of Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root he complains about references to “the works of ‘Hegel’s gigantic mind,’ of the ‘great Schleiermacher,’ and of the ‘sagacious and discerning Herbart.’” The effect, he says, is that people go off and waste their time studying these people when they could and should be studying Kant instead. Perhaps Wittgenstein's reference to the great works of Frege was simply an attempt to encourage more people to read Frege.

What is so great about Frege? Joan Weiner: “What Frege has to offer us is a model of philosophical virtue. Almost everyone who has grappled with Frege’s writings has been moved by Frege’s intellectual honesty.” (“Frege in Perspective,” p. 12 ) Michael Beaney: “Frege’s account in the Begriffsschrift is a model of clarity, economy, and elegance, achieved with none of the effort or tortured philosophical excursions that seemed to mark Russell’s path to the same point.”[1] Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into his acknowledgements.

Proops argues that Russell was more influential than is often thought, both on Wittgenstein’s own ideas and on his understanding of Frege’s. Like Anscombe, Proops thinks that Wittgenstein misunderstood Frege on some points, and sees Russell’s influence at work in these cases. On p. xix Proops quotes several instances of Wittgenstein’s writing in 1912 of “our problems,” “our theory,” and so on, meaning his and Russell’s. This, he thinks, is significant, because it was only in the next year that Wittgenstein wrote his Notes on Logic, much of which was copied directly into the Tractatus. He referred to that work as a summary of what he had done at Cambridge up to that point. However, as Proops notes, even as early as 1913 Wittgenstein wrote about his work in a noticeably less collaborative way. He now criticizes Russell’s theories. In 1919 he referred to the problems dealt with in the TLP as “our problems” (i.e. his and Russell’s), but the solutions are his alone.[2] In Letters p. 111 (dated March 1919), he says that the TLP “upsets all our theory of truth, of classes, of numbers and all the rest.” There is also 6.54, of course. Proops emphasizes the importance of the Notes on Logic (1913) and Notes Dictated to G. E. Moore (1914) largely because Wittgenstein referred (in May 1915) to the latter as “essentially … definitive” only a few months, if Brian McGuinness is correct, before he began work on what was later called the Prototractatus.[3] And the Prototractatus is quite close to the Tractatus proper. But this is not much to go on, especially given that in the same letter in which he said that he regarded the Moore notes “essentially as definitive,” he also wrote that his problems were changing, becoming “more and more lapidary and general” and that his method for dealing with them had “changed dramatically.” As Monk notes (see p. 130), Wittgenstein’s work changed more drastically in the next two years, moving from logic to ethics and philosophy in general. Since these are the subjects that he presented the book as being all about (ethics to Ludwig von Ficker, philosophy in general to the readers of the Tractatus’ foreword), we should keep an open mind as to whether remarks copied from the Prototractatus or Notes on Logic have the same point, serve the same function, in the Tractatus as in those earlier works. On p. 173 of Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root he complains about references to “the works of ‘Hegel’s gigantic mind,’ of the ‘great Schleiermacher,’ and of the ‘sagacious and discerning Herbart.’” The effect, he says, is that people go off and waste their time studying these people when they could and should be studying Kant instead. Perhaps Wittgenstein's reference to the great works of Frege was simply an attempt to encourage more people to read Frege.

What is the aim of the book generally? Its aim is variously described: it is show not only that it is a mistake to pose philosophical questions but that this mistake is caused by misunderstanding the logic of our language. The possessive pronoun could be important here. It certainly seems to be in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Such misunderstanding can perhaps be characterized as a failure to appreciate that what can be said at all can be said clearly (or: that whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent). At whom might this be aimed? Frege? At all philosophers, presumably. That is, at anyone who poses or formulates a philosophical question. These, again presumably, are questions that somehow require us to speak whereof we cannot speak, to speak in a way that is inherently or essentially unclear. The essence of philosophy, it seems, is nonsense. (So how much for the great works of Frege after all?) The book wants to set out the limits of thought. Or rather, it wants to set out the limits of the expression of thought. Because there is a contradiction involved in the idea of the limit of thinking. So, there is no such thing as “the limit of thinking” but the book wants to draw, as a substitute, a limit to the expression of thoughts. If we cannot think of a limit of thought, can we speak of a limit of speaking? Meaningfully? If there is no thought limit but there is a speaking limit, mustn’t there be un-sayable thoughts? Some people think so, but surely Wittgenstein is not one of them. The limit of thought is not contingently non-existent but inconceivable, according to him. So to say “there is no limit to thought” is to say something of a very different kind than “there is no limit to the expression of thought”. The limit to what can be said can only be contingent. Only “the unthinkable” (i.e. sheer nonsense) and the unpronounceable are un-sayable. Indeed Wittgenstein says that what lies beyond the boundary he would draw is simply nonsense. Not ineffable truth. The limit of thought cannot be thought because one cannot think the unthinkable, so the only way to draw the limit would be by going right up to it from the side of the thinkable. But one would need to know that this was the limit, and how could you ever think that you had gone as far as thoughts can go without thinking about going farther (and thereby getting into some sort of trouble)? With saying, though, one can ‘go beyond’ the limit in the sense that one can indeed pass over into nonsense. This is what it means to speak the unsayable. So if the aim of the book is to draw a limit to the expression of thought we should expect it to pass from sense to nonsense, and to do so in such a way that the passage is quite clear. This does not mean that we will see Wittgenstein talk clear sense and then clear nonsense, because this would not take us through the limit. Rather, we will have to pay careful attention so that when we come across nonsense we will recognize it for what it is. But this will be done, we can expect, in as precise or clean a way as possible. I think we might also expect the transition to be made several times, in case we miss it once or twice. So the aim of the book is to show that philosophy is all just a lot of nonsense. No wonder he avoids giving “credit” to other philosophers, except those who have helped him realize this. How then can part of the value lie in thoughts’ being expressed in it? Well, why should it matter how well these are expressed? Because they need to be captured. The wrong-headed philosophers must recognize their own mistakes. The victim must not be a straw man. Hence the false modesty of Wittgenstein’s confession of his inability to write such nonsense. And the irony of his expectation that others may come and be more perfectly nonsensical.

What, finally, of the truth of the thoughts communicated by the book? These must be other thoughts, such as the thought that philosophy is all nonsense. Proops (p. xv, note 3) says” “An advocate of a Diamond-style reading might claim that the only thoughts communicated in the Tractatus are the critical statements made against other authors, together, perhaps, with the general thoughts about the nonsensical status of philosophical pronouncements.” But I think we can read the foreword closely and thereby see quite clearly what he means. For one thing, in the second paragraph he tells us that the whole meaning or point [Sinn] of the book could be put thus: “What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” These thoughts must be taken as true by Wittgenstein, but not necessarily any others. It is, he says, because of the truth of his thoughts being unassailable and definitive that he believes that the problems of philosophy with which the book deals have essentially been solved. So whatever thoughts it is that he takes to be so certainly true, they are ones that he considers to be uncontestable, and pertaining to the essence of philosophy. We should not expect these to be this truth and that truth, but a small number of essential and undeniable truths. This expectation might be disappointed, of course, and what counts as a small number is vague, but the truths just quoted above fit the bill. They also fit with the idea that Wittgenstein connects with these truths, that they show how little solving these problems achieves. So we should expect a degree of banality about the truths, and again “What can be said at all, can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” suits. In other words, the Diamond-style advocate need not go as far as Proops presents here, even though he might think that this is a pretty minimal claim in the first place.

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[1] “Russell and Frege” p. 138, in Nicholas Griffin (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell (CUP, 2003).

[2] See Ian Proops Logic and Language in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Garland Publishing, Inc., New York and London, 2000, p. xix.

[3] See Proops p. xxi, and McGuinness pp. 35-47.