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Wittgenstein, World and Wonder
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2024
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This paper offers an account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of ‘the world’. As will be seen, this requires explanation of his view of religious attitudes in general, and of wonder at the world in particular. His religious position may appear to be unsystematic, or even inconsistent. Contrary to this impression, this paper will show that the same view of the world underlies his religious position, which manifests itself in different forms at different stages of his philosophy. For the world, as the logical limit to the expression of the human will, is a unifying idea in his philosophy. We shall be concerned with his early endeavour to express himself to the limit of the world and then with his later analysis of religious thought and action which construe as real that which lies beyond the world.
The world has always been a limiting concept in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. According to him, the world as reality presents itself to us as an unquestioned and necessary experiential fact. All of us believe in the world that has been handed down to us. It is the condition that makes possible every questioning and doubting. It is the background against which we judge in general between true and false. Its existence is so selfevident that it is even unnoticed, and its nonexistence is inconceivable. Language means only the world and can mean only it. In his endeavour to understand the world and man in it, Wittgenstein always holds on to the view that we should be concerned with things and events and situations in the world, and investigate it from within, taking the world as unquestioned and necessary.
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- Copyright © 1991 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 See e.g. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914—1916 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 81: ‘If the will did not exist, neither would there be that centre of the world, which we call the I, and which is the bearer of ethics.’
2 This paper agrees with and reinforces the thesis that there is a basic unity in Wittgenstein’s philosophy. See e.g. Peter Winch (ed.), Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1969), an anthology of papers on different aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, emphasizing its inner unity.
3 See e.g. Wittgenstein, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969), para. 280, 281, 288, 289. Citations from Wittgenstein are not enclosed within quotation marks in this paper. However, references are given to the appropriate texts.
4 See e.g. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Remarks (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1975), para. 168, cp. 34, 47, 152, 253.
5 See e.g. On Certainty, para. 94.
6 See e.g. ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, Philosophical Review (1965), LXXIV, pp. 8—9.
7 See e.g. Philosophical Remarks, para. 47.
8 ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, pp. 3—12, esp. 11 —12.
9 Cp. e.g. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914—1916, pp. 75—79, esp. 75.
10 Cp. ibid., pp. 75—79.
11 Cp Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 6.4—7, esp. 6.45.
12 Cp On Certainty, para. 35—36, that it is nonsense to say that there are physical objects; because the purported proposition belongs to our ‘frame of reference’ (83), which is ‘the substratum of all (our) inquiring and asserting’ (162) or ‘the scaffolding of our thoughts’ (211).
13 See e.g. Tractatus, 6.41.
14 See esp. 6.42, 6.421.
15 ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, pp. 9—10.
16 For Wittgenstein, logic deals with the conditions which make talking about the world possible, and ethics or religion deals with the conditions which make it possible to live meaningfully in the world. See e.g. ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture of Ethics’, pp. 3—5; and Notebooks 1914—1916, p. 77.
17 ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, p. 10.
18 Ibid., pp. 11 —12.
19 Cp. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1953), para. 38: ‘For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday.’
20 Tractatus, 6.45.
21 Tractatus, 1.1, 1.13, see also 2.013.
22 Tractatus, 5.5151.
23 Tractatus, 2.1—2.225.
24 Tractatus, 2.151.
25 Tractatus, 2.0201.
26 Tractatus, 2.173.
27 The Tractatus is abundant with sentences of this category, its opening snetence being the most notable. One must transcend them in order to see the world aright (6.45).
28 Cp. Philosophical Investigations, para. 60, on the analysis of propositions like ‘My broom is in the corner.’
29 Tractatus, 2.022, 2.023.
30 Tractatus, 6.375.
31 Tractatus, 3.42. It may be said further that an empirical proposition is necessarily interpreted in a system i.e. the world. Cp. Philosophical Remarks, para. 152, 157.
32 Tractatus, 5.5151, 4.061—4.1, esp. 4.0641. Cp. Notebooks 1914—16, pp. 25—26, 94, on the suggestion that a proposition completes its sense in its negation.
33 Note that existent states of affairs combine in logical space to constitute the world and an existent state of affairs necessarily occupies a place in logical space. Tractatus, 1.13, 2.11, 2.202, 3.4, 3.42, 4.463. See also 6.341 on logical space by analogy of a co-ordinate system of points.
34 Cp. Tractatus, 6.45: ‘To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole.’
35 Tractatus, 6.45—7.
36 See e.g. P.F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), p. 44.
37 As suggested in his conversations with Friedrich Waismann and Moritz Schlick, as reported in the appendix to ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’, p. 13.
38 Cyril Barrett (ed.), Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), pp. 53—72, which contains students’ notess of his lectures on religious belief in 1938.
39 Ibid., esp. pp. 53—54.
40 Ibid., esp. p. 55.
41 Cp. Charles Taylor, ‘Interpretation and the Sciences of Man’, The Review of Metaphysics (1971), XXV, pp. 3—51, on the operation of notional objects in a subject’s notional world as he interacts with his environment, as attested by his responses to certain forms of words, and/or in his non-verbal behaviour. Daniel Dennett calls this approach to determining the notional world of another from the outside hetero-phenomenology, as distinct from auto-phenomenology in the tradition of Brentano and Husserl, which proposes ‘to get to one’s own notional world by some special somewhat introspectionist bit of mental gymnastics.’ Daniel Dennett, ‘Beyond Belief’, in Thought and Object, Andrew Woodfield (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), pp. 1—90; see pp. 36—60 on notional objects, esp. pp. 39—40.
42 Cyril Barrett, ibid., pp. 69—70.
43 See e.g. Rush Rhees (ed.), Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford: O.U.P., 1984).
44 The Oxford Dictionary defines the sublime as an object of wondrous awe of the most exalted kind. In ‘Wittgenstein’s Lecture on Ethics’ (pp. 6—7), sentences expressing existential wonder and related experiences are regarded as sublime.
45 I am indebted to C.A. Davies, Erik Kvan, Basil Mitchell, C.G. New, Stephen Palmquist and, especially, F.C.T. Moore, for useful comments on earlier drafts.
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