02.14.08
A thought that occurred to me on the way to work, that actually has been germinating in my mind for a while now, was that every single proposition from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a tautology. Take, for example, 2.171: "A picture can depict any reality whose form it has. A spatial picture can depict anything spatial, a colored one anything colored, etc." I remember reading this passage the first time, three years ago, and it making me very angry. "Well, of course! That's what it means to be a spatial picture!" Or 2.0233: "If two objects have the same logical form, the only distinction between them, apart from their external properties, is that they are different." Again, all Wittgenstein is doing here is providing definitions. There is no content to his sentences. He could rephrase this proposition into something like, "The definition of 'same logical form' is the property of two objects having all properties in common except for being different objects." And once the equivalence of a definition has been established, then, ideally, you no longer need both of the terms. You can apply Occam's Razor and get rid of one of the terms.
Logic deals entirely with deductive reasoning, which is the substituting of one logically equivalent proposition for another. But here's the rub: The Rule of Conjunction Introduction says that you can infer from "A" and from "B" that "A and B". What I think Wittgenstein is trying to say is that this ought to be apparent a priori. In fact, it so obvious that it is pointless/senseless/useless to even make the step. Nothing is being said - the movement is without content. So get rid of one of the statements. Take another case: The Rule of Disjunction Introduction says that, if you know that it is not true that neither A nor B are true, then you can infer that either A or B are true. This represented as something like: "If ~(~a & ~b) then (a v b)." But again, this is a tautology - it shows its truth immediately and a priori. Furthermore, Occam's Razor, which is not nearly as bad-ass as Joel's Chainsaw, says that you should do away with the disjunction symbol, because everything that it says can also (and is already [?]) said (or shown?) by the negation and the conjunction symbols. And as you continue along this path, so the thought half-thought goes, you can eliminate one proposition after another, over and over again, until you are left with nothing but a set of simple names for objects and two logical relations: "and" and "not". But in doing so you have gotten rid of everything that is literally worth saying.
So how does this apply to the propositions in the Tractatus itself? According to this, by the rules of logic, the propositions of logic cannibalize themselves. And for the author of the Tractatus, philosophy is nothing more than logic. It's not that he doesn't believe in or necessarily disagree with the projects of other areas such as ethics, aesthetics, theology, psychology, epistemology, etc. - it's just that he doesn't see them as being a part of philosophy proper (logic) and he thinks that confusion arises when we try to treat them as if they were. But, if this is the case, then philosophy self-immolates, it vanishes by the force of its own doing. And if this is true, and if it's right that all of the propositions of the Tractatus are either definitions or tautologies, and that definitions of logic are tautologies, then the whole book evaporates itself in writing itself. [The book has no duration] (It reminds me of a Douglass Adams joke, where the man proves the existence of God via the Babel fish, and therefore disproves the existence of God, because He is nothing without faith, and, having accomplished that, he goes on to prove that black is really white and gets killed in the next zebra crossing.)
Moving on, America...
As of now, I am planning on dividing my Kierkegaard paper into three sections. The first is going to describe Johannes de Silentio's formulation of the paradox of faith, and the subsequent paradox of the challenge the reader faces in trying to make sense of Johannes de Silentio's claim that faith is unintelligible. There are two distinct yet related concerns here - the first is that the concept of faith is unintelligible, and the second is that Fear and Trembling as a text is unintelligible.
The second is going to give two 'traditional' readings of Fear and Trembling, one by Kjell Johansen and the other by Stephen Mulhall. I'm going to say that Johansen's reading fails because he does not heed de Silentio's warnings about the incomprehensibility of faith seriously, and that Mulhall's avoids the paradoxes all together by challenging de Silentio's reliability which, in my opinion, takes the teeth out of the book, and the terror out of the paradox. It's very important for me to stress that neither of these readers take the text seriously - they're both, in very different ways, looking for the easy way out.
The third part is going to propose a new reading of F & T based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the idea that as language-games change, so too do the meanings of our word-concepts change. I believe that I can give a reading of F & T that respects what Kierkegaard/ de Silentio says about faith, while still looking at it in a way that makes it possible for us to co-exist, in a manner of speaking, with the paradox of faith.
(Paradoxes are not supposed to be solved. They are like warning flares that alert us that something has gone wrong with our thinking, that our language is broken here.)
Logic deals entirely with deductive reasoning, which is the substituting of one logically equivalent proposition for another. But here's the rub: The Rule of Conjunction Introduction says that you can infer from "A" and from "B" that "A and B". What I think Wittgenstein is trying to say is that this ought to be apparent a priori. In fact, it so obvious that it is pointless/senseless/useless to even make the step. Nothing is being said - the movement is without content. So get rid of one of the statements. Take another case: The Rule of Disjunction Introduction says that, if you know that it is not true that neither A nor B are true, then you can infer that either A or B are true. This represented as something like: "If ~(~a & ~b) then (a v b)." But again, this is a tautology - it shows its truth immediately and a priori. Furthermore, Occam's Razor, which is not nearly as bad-ass as Joel's Chainsaw, says that you should do away with the disjunction symbol, because everything that it says can also (and is already [?]) said (or shown?) by the negation and the conjunction symbols. And as you continue along this path, so the thought half-thought goes, you can eliminate one proposition after another, over and over again, until you are left with nothing but a set of simple names for objects and two logical relations: "and" and "not". But in doing so you have gotten rid of everything that is literally worth saying.
So how does this apply to the propositions in the Tractatus itself? According to this, by the rules of logic, the propositions of logic cannibalize themselves. And for the author of the Tractatus, philosophy is nothing more than logic. It's not that he doesn't believe in or necessarily disagree with the projects of other areas such as ethics, aesthetics, theology, psychology, epistemology, etc. - it's just that he doesn't see them as being a part of philosophy proper (logic) and he thinks that confusion arises when we try to treat them as if they were. But, if this is the case, then philosophy self-immolates, it vanishes by the force of its own doing. And if this is true, and if it's right that all of the propositions of the Tractatus are either definitions or tautologies, and that definitions of logic are tautologies, then the whole book evaporates itself in writing itself. [The book has no duration] (It reminds me of a Douglass Adams joke, where the man proves the existence of God via the Babel fish, and therefore disproves the existence of God, because He is nothing without faith, and, having accomplished that, he goes on to prove that black is really white and gets killed in the next zebra crossing.)
Moving on, America...
As of now, I am planning on dividing my Kierkegaard paper into three sections. The first is going to describe Johannes de Silentio's formulation of the paradox of faith, and the subsequent paradox of the challenge the reader faces in trying to make sense of Johannes de Silentio's claim that faith is unintelligible. There are two distinct yet related concerns here - the first is that the concept of faith is unintelligible, and the second is that Fear and Trembling as a text is unintelligible.
The second is going to give two 'traditional' readings of Fear and Trembling, one by Kjell Johansen and the other by Stephen Mulhall. I'm going to say that Johansen's reading fails because he does not heed de Silentio's warnings about the incomprehensibility of faith seriously, and that Mulhall's avoids the paradoxes all together by challenging de Silentio's reliability which, in my opinion, takes the teeth out of the book, and the terror out of the paradox. It's very important for me to stress that neither of these readers take the text seriously - they're both, in very different ways, looking for the easy way out.
The third part is going to propose a new reading of F & T based on Wittgenstein's later philosophy and the idea that as language-games change, so too do the meanings of our word-concepts change. I believe that I can give a reading of F & T that respects what Kierkegaard/ de Silentio says about faith, while still looking at it in a way that makes it possible for us to co-exist, in a manner of speaking, with the paradox of faith.
(Paradoxes are not supposed to be solved. They are like warning flares that alert us that something has gone wrong with our thinking, that our language is broken here.)
posted by Joel | 2:45 PM
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