Essay 06

This essay is due Thursday, 10/11. The rest of the instructions are as before. That is, the following maximums and minimums must be scrupulously observed:

• No less than 10pt font.
• No less than 1.5 line spacing.
• No less than 1 inch margins on all sides.
• No more than 1 side of 1 page for this problem set.

Recall the fifth question from our Thursday (10/4) discussion:

At 6.54 Wittgenstein famously asserts,

My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

What point is Wittgenstein making about the Tractatus itself? Is he right? Is the project of the Tractatus successful in your view, or not?

I think this is a fine place to start from on the sixth essay, but let us add to it by revisiting a paragraph from Russell's introduction--which, hopefully, makes a great deal more sense than it did when we first read it:

More interesting than such questions of comparative detail is Mr. Wittgenstein’s attitude towards the mystical. His attitude upon this grows naturally out of his doctrine in pure logic, according to which the logical proposition is a picture (true or false) of the fact, and has in common with the fact a certain structure. It is this common structure which makes it capable of being a picture of the fact, but the structure cannot itself be put into words, since it is a structure of words, as well as of the fact to which they refer. Everything, therefore, which is involved in the very idea of the expressiveness of language must remain incapable of being expressed in language, and is, therefore, inexpressible in a perfectly precise sense. This inexpressible contains, according to Mr. Wittgenstein, the whole of logic and philosophy. The right method of teaching philosophy, he says, would be to confine oneself to propositions of the sciences, stated with all possible clearness and exactness, leaving philosophical assertions to the learner, and proving to him, whenever he made them, that they are meaningless. It is true that the fate of Socrates might befall a man who attempted this method of teaching, but we are not to be deterred by that fear, if it is the only right method. It is not this that causes some hesitation in accepting Mr. Wittgenstein’s position, in spite of the very powerful arguments which he brings to its support. What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said, thus suggesting to the sceptical reader that possibly there may be some loophole through a hierarchy of languages, or by some other exit. The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr. Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region. Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinions. His defence would be that what he calls the mystical can be shown, although it cannot be said. It may be that this defence is adequate, but, for my part, I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort.

Russell understates matters. The Tractatus lays out the early Wittgenstein's argument that, properly understood, language has stern limits which must be strictly observed to refrain from straying into meaninglessness, which argument itself necessarily and perhaps gleefully traipses over the very limits it is supposed to have established. To be sure, Wittgenstein admonishes us to kick away the ladder once we grasp his point, realizing that the argument itself must be meaningless by dint of the argument's own conclusion.

Yet how can an argument be itself meaningless while having a meaningful conclusion, namely that the argument itself is meaningless? Explain your answer.