The Philosophy Book
Page 32
The ancient Egyptians arranged symbols and stylized images of objects in the world, known as hieroglyphs, into logically structured sequences to create a form of written language.
A digital image, although not the same sort of object as the one it depicts, has the same “logical form.” Words only represent reality for Wittgenstein if, again, both have the same logical form.
"Logic is not a body of doctrine but a mirror-image of the world."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Beyond words
Some readers of Wittgenstein, at this point, claim that he is a champion of the sciences, driving out vague concepts involved in talk of ethics, religion, and the like. But something more complex is going on. Wittgenstein does not think that the “problems of life” are nonsensical. Instead, he believes that these are the most important problems of all. It is simply that they cannot be put into words, and because of this, they cannot become a part of philosophy. Wittgenstein writes that these things, even though we cannot speak of them, nevertheless make themselves manifest, adding that “they are what is mystical.”
All of this, however, has serious repercussions for the propositions that lie within the Tractatus itself. After all, these are not propositions that picture the world. Even logic, one of Wittgenstein’s major tools, does not say anything about the world. Is the Tractatus, therefore, nonsense? Wittgenstein himself was fearless in following his argument to its conclusion, ultimately recognizing that the answer to such a question must be yes. Anybody who understands the Tractatus properly, he claims, will eventually see that the propositions used in it are nonsense, too. They are like the steps of a philosophical ladder that helps us to climb altogether beyond the problems of philosophy, but which we can kick away once we have ascended.
"What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence."
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy demands logical, unambiguous language. Wittgenstein concludes, therefore, that it can only be made up of propositions, or statements of fact, such as “the cat sat on the mat”, which can be clearly divided into their component parts.
Change of direction
After completing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein concluded that there were no more philosophical problems left to resolve, and so abandoned the discipline. However, over the course of the 1920s and 1930s, he began to question his earlier thinking, becoming one of its fiercest critics. In particular, he questioned his once firmly held belief that language consists solely of propositions, a view that ignores much of what we do in our everyday speech—from telling jokes, to cajoling, to scolding.
Nevertheless, despite all of its problems, the Tractatus remains one of the most challenging and compelling works of Western philosophy—and ultimately one of the most mysterious.
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
Born into a wealthy Viennese family in 1889, Wittgenstein first studied engineering and in 1908 traveled to England to continue his education in Manchester. However, he soon developed an interest in logic, and by 1911 had moved to Cambridge to study under the philosopher Bertrand Russell.
During World War I, he served on the Russian front and in Italy, where he was taken prisoner. Around this time, he began the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which was published in 1921.
Believing that the Tractatus resolved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein now embarked on an itinerant career as a schoolteacher, gardener, and architect. But after developing criticisms of his earlier ideas, he resumed his work at Cambridge in 1929, becoming a professor there in 1939. He died in 1951.
Key works
1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
1953 Philosophical Investigations
1958 The Blue and Brown Books
1977 Remarks on Colour
See also: Aristotle • Immanuel Kant • Gottlob Frege • Bertrand Russell • Rudolf Carnap
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ontology
APPROACH
Phenomenology
BEFORE
c.350 BCE Diogenes of Sinope uses a plucked chicken to parody Plato’s followers’ claim that a human being is a “featherless biped.”
1900–13 Edmund Husserl proposes his phenomenological theories and method in Logical Investigations and Ideas I.
AFTER
1940s Jean-Paul Sartre publishes Being and Nothingness, which looks at the connection between “being” and human freedom.
1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method, inspired by Heidegger, explores the nature of human understanding.
It is said that in ancient Athens the followers of Plato gathered one day to ask themselves the following question: “What is a human being?” After a great deal of thought, they came up with the following answer: “a human being is a featherless biped.” Everybody seemed content with this definition until Diogenes the Cynic burst into the lecture hall with a live plucked chicken, shouting, “Behold! I present you with a human being.” After the commotion had died down, the philosophers reconvened and refined their definition. A human being, they said, is a featherless biped with broad nails.
This curious story from the history of early philosophy shows the kinds of difficulties philosophers have sometimes been faced with when attempting to give abstract, general definitions of what it is to be human. Even without the intervention of Diogenes, it seems clear that describing ourselves as featherless bipeds does not really capture much of what it means to be human.
An insider’s perspective
It is this question—how we might go about analyzing what it is to be human—that concerned the philosopher Martin Heidegger. When Heidegger came to answer the question, he did so in a way that was strikingly different from many of his predecessors. Instead of attempting an abstract definition that looks at human life from the outside, he attempts to provide a much more concrete analysis of “being” from what could be called an insider’s position. He says that since we exist in the thick of things—in the midst of life—if we want to understand what it is to be human, we have to do so by looking at human life from within this life.
Heidegger was a student of Husserl, and he followed Husserl’s method of phenomenology. This is a philosophical approach that looks at phenomena—how things appear—through examining our experience of them. For example, phenomenology would not look directly at the question “what is a human being?” but would instead look at the question “what is it like to be human?”
"The question of existence never gets straightened out except through existing itself."
Martin Heidegger
The human existence
For Heidegger, this constitutes the fundamental question of philosophy. He was most interested in the philosophical subject of ontology (from the Greek word ontos, meaning “being”), which looks at questions about being or existence. Examples of ontological questions might be: “what does it mean to say that something exists?” and “what are the different kinds of things that exist?” Heidegger wanted use the question “what is it like to be human?” as a way of answering deeper questions about existence in general.
In his book, Being and Time, Heidegger claims that when other philosophers have asked ontological questions, they have tended to use approaches that are too abstract and shallow. If we want to know what it means to say that something exists, we need to start looking at the question from the perspective of those beings for whom being is an issue. We can assume that although cats, dogs, and toadstools are beings, they do not wonder about their being: they do not fret over ontological questions; they do not ask “what does
it mean to say that something exists?” But there is, Heidegger points out, one being that does wonder about these things, and that is the human being. In saying that we are ourselves the entities to be analyzed, Heidegger is saying that we if we want to explore questions of being, we have to start with ourselves, by looking at what it means for us to exist.
We try to make sense of the world by engaging with projects and tasks that lend life a unity. Being human, Heidegger says, means to be immersed in the day-to-day world.
Being and time
When Heidegger asks about the meaning of being, he is not asking about abstract ideas, but about something very direct and immediate. In the opening pages of his book, he says that the meaning of our being must be tied up with time; we are essentially temporal beings. When we are born, we find ourselves in the world as if we had been thrown here on a trajectory we have not chosen. We simply find that we have come to exist, in an ongoing world that pre-existed us, so that at our birth we are presented with a particular historical, material, and spiritual environment. We attempt to make sense of this world by engaging in various pastimes—for example, we might learn Latin, or attempt to find true love, or decide to build ourselves a house. Through these time-consuming projects we literally project ourselves toward different possible futures; we define our existence. However, sometimes we become aware that there is an outermost limit to all our projects, a point at which everything we plan will come to an end, whether finished or unfinished. This point is the point of our death. Death, Heidegger says, is the outermost horizon of our being: everything we can do or see or think takes place within this horizon. We cannot see beyond it.
Heidegger’s technical vocabulary is famously difficult to understand, but this is largely because he is attempting to explore complex philosophical questions in a concrete or non-abstract way; he wants to relate to our actual experience. To say that “the furthest horizon of our being is death” is to say something about what it is like to live a human life, and it captures some idea of what we are in a way that many philosophical definitions—“featherless biped” or “political animal”, for example—overlook.
"We should raise anew the question of the meaning of being."
Martin Heidegger
Living authentically
It is to Heidegger that we owe the philosophical distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence. Most of the time we are wrapped up in various ongoing projects, and forget about death. But in seeing our life purely in terms of the projects in which we are engaged, we miss a more fundamental dimension of our existence, and to that extent, Heidegger says, we are existing inauthentically. When we become aware of death as the ultimate limit of our possibilities, we start to reach a deeper understanding of what it means to exist.
For example, when a good friend dies, we may look at our own lives and realize that the various projects which absorb us from day to day feel meaningless, and that there is a deeper dimension to life that is missing. And so we may find ourselves changing our priorities and projecting ourselves toward different futures.
All being is a “being-towards-death”, but only humans recognize this. Our lives are temporal, and it is only once we realize this that we can live a meaningful and authentic life.
"Dying is not an event; it is a phenomenon to be understood existentially."
Martin Heidegger
A deeper language
Heidegger’s later philosophy continues to tackle questions of being, but it turns away from his earlier, exacting approach to take a more poetic look at the same kinds of questions. Philosophy, he comes to suspect, simply cannot reflect this deeply on our own being. In order to ask questions about human existence, we must use the richer, deeper language of poetry, which engages us in a way that goes far beyond the mere exchange of information.
Heidegger was one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. His early attempt to analyze what it means to be human, and how one might live an authentic life, inspired philosophers such as Sartre, Levinas, and Gadamer, and contributed to the birth of existentialism. His later, more poetic, thinking has also had a powerful influence on ecological philosophers, who believe it offers a way of thinking about what it means to be a human being within a world under threat of environmental destruction.
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
Heidegger is acknowledged to be one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century. He was born in 1889 in Messkirch, Germany, and had early aspirations to be a priest, but after coming across the writings of Husserl he took up philosophy instead. He quickly became well known as an inspirational lecturer, and was nicknamed “the magician of Messkirch.” In the 1930s he became rector of Freiburg University and a member of the Nazi party. The extent and nature of his involvement with Nazism remains controversial, as is the question of how far his philosophy is implicated in the ideologies of Nazism.
Heidegger spent the last 30 years of his life traveling and writing, exchanging ideas with friends such as Hannah Arendt and the physicist Werner Heisenberg. He died in Freiburg in 1976, aged 86.
Key works
1927 Being and Time
1936–46 Overcoming Metaphyics
1955–56 The Principle of Reason
1955–57 Identity and Difference
See also: Plato • Diogenes of Sinope • Edmund Husserl • Hans-Georg Gadamer • Ernst Cassirer • Jean-Paul Sartre • Hannah Arendt • Richard Rorty
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Ethics
APPROACH
Existentialism
BEFORE
13th century Japanese philosopher D¯ogen writes about “forgetting the self.”
Late 19th century Friedrich Nietzsche writes about the influence of “climate” on philosophy; this idea becomes important to Watsuji’s thought.
1927 Martin Heidegger publishes Being and Time. Watsuji goes on to rethink Heidegger’s book in the light of his ideas on “climate.”
AFTER
Late 20th century Japanese philosopher Yuasa Yasuo further develops Watsuji’s ethics of community.
Tetsuro Watsuji was one of the leading philosophers in Japan in the early part of the 20th century, and he wrote on both Eastern and Western philosophy. He studied in Japan and Europe, and like many Japanese philosophers of his time, his work shows a creative synthesis of these two very different traditions.
Forgetting the self
Watsuji’s studies of Western approaches to ethics convinced him that thinkers in the West tend to take an individualistic approach to human nature, and so also to ethics. But for Watsuji, individuals can only be understood as expressions of their particular times, relationships, and social contexts, which together constitute a “climate.” He explores the idea of human nature in terms of our relationships with the wider community, which form a network within which we exist; Watsuji calls this “betweenness.” For Watsuji ethics is a matter not of individual action, but of the forgetting or sacrifice of one’s self, so that the individual can work for the benefit of the wider community.
Watsuji’s nationalist ethics and insistence on the superiority of the Japanese race led to his fall from favor following World War II, although he later distanced himself from these views.
Samurai warriors often sacrificed their own lives in battle in order to save the state, in an act of extreme loyalty and self-negation that Watsuji called kenshin, or “absolute self-sacrifice.”
See also: Søren Kierkegaard • Friedrich Nietzsche • Nishida Kitaro • Hajime Tanabe • Martin Heidegger
IN CONTEXT
BRANCH
Philosophy of science
APPROACH
Logical positivism
BEFORE
1890 Gottlob Frege starts to explore the logical structures of language.
1921 Ludwig Wittgenstein writes that philosophy is the study of the limits of language.
AFTER
1930s Karl Popper proposes that science works by means of falsifiability: no amount of positive proofs can prove something to be true, whereas one negative result confirms that a theory is incorrect.
1960s Thomas Kuhn explores the social dimensions of scientific progress, undermining some of the tenets of logical positivism.
One of the problems for 20th-century philosophy is determining a role for philosophy given the success of the natural sciences. This is one of the main concerns of German-born Rudolf Carnap in The Physical Language as the Universal Language of Science (1934), which suggests that philosophy’s proper function—and its primary contribution to science—is the logical analysis and clarification of scientific concepts.