BOOKS
The Tractatus
By ANTONY FLEW
THE Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is both one of the most important and one of the most difficult philosophical works of this cen- tury. It is difficult because Wittgenstein insisted on expressing his wide-ranging and original meta- physical vision in a pemmican volume of some 20,000 often cryptic, elliptical, dogmatic and technical words. It is important because of the appeal of that vision, and because of the insights embraced within it. For instance: it is probably to the Tractatus, more than to any other single work, that we owe the great shift of philosophi- cal emphasis from thought to language. Wittgen- stein, like Frege before him, demanded that philosophy attend to the logical as opposed to the psychological. By always considering thoughts only as embodied in 'the significant proposition' Wittgenstein transformed the ambiguous question of the relation of thought to reality into a more promising and precise inquiry about language. It therefore, as Professor Black suggests in his new study,* represents a grave failure in both sympathy and understanding when Miss Ans- combe's Introduction to Wittgenstein's 'Tractatus' (Hutchinson, 1959) sees `the principal theme of the book' as `the connection between language, or thought, and reality,' and its main thesis as `that sentences, or their mental counterparts, are pic- tures of facts' (p. 19). There is, I think, no warrant in the text for the introduction of these putative 'mental counterparts' of sentences.
Black's own book is a massive section-by- section commentary, the shorter notes and re- marks being interspersed with ninety rather longer essays, and the whole furnished with a general introduction, a German concordance, a bibliography, three indexes, and other smaller pieces of scholarly apparatus. The entire produc- tion is an achievement for its author, and a credit to its publishers. Black's Companion to the Tractatus' deserves to become inseparable from it, and for all but the most specialist scholars it should replace most of the previous literature. Certainly the beginner would be much better ad- vised to consult this rather than to struggle with Anscombe's Introduction. Nor is there much to be found in the books by Stenius and Maslow which cannot be got now more easily from Black. The exception, perhaps, is Griffin's Wittgenstein's Logical Atomism (0.U.P., 1964), which unfortu- nately appeared too late to be noticed by Black.
It is one of Black's contentions, and surely true, that Wittgenstein's first investigations led him from initial Russellian questions about the nature of logic and mathematics, on first to con- tentions about the essence of language, and finally up to metaphysical claims about the struc- ture of reality. But these initial questions about the nature of logic and mathematics are not in the Tractatus, and certainly for Wittgenstein *A COMPANION TO WITTGENSTEIN'S TRACTATUS.' By Max Black. (C.U.P., £2 15s.)
never became, `merely peripheral' (Stenius, p. ix). Black's comment is fair: 'This is about as plausible as saying that the hope of salvation is peripheral to religion' (p. 6).
The results of these developing inquiries are in the Tractatus expounded in roughly the re- verse order; and welded together into a single 'and enormously persuasive way of looking at language, logic, and reality' (p. 19). `Reality ("the world") is a mosaic of independent items --the "atomic facts"; each of these is like a chain in which "objects" (logical simples) "hang in one another"; the objects are connected in a network of logical possibilities ("logical space"); the simplest "elementary" propositions are pic- tures of atomic facts, themselves facts in which names are concatenated, and all other proposi- tions are truth-functions of elementary ones; language is the great mirror in which the logical network is reflected, "shown," manifested' (p. 3).
This strange yet strangely fascinating system contains in its development a range of seminal ideas, most of which are capable of surviving the ruin of the system as a system. These ideas include the picture theory of meaning, the notion of `logical syntax,' the interpretation of logically necessary truths as tautologies, as well as the new conception of philosophy as a particular sort of `critique of language.' The whole per- formance is rounded off with memorably oracu- lar pronouncements about the mystical, and about the meaning of life and death : The world of the happy is quite another from the world of the unhappy . . . in death too the world does not change, but ceases. Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through. If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present. Our life is endless in the way that the visual field is without limit. . . If a question can be put at all, then it can also be answered. . . . We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course there is then no question left, and just this is the answer. The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. (Is not this the reason why men to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?) There is indeed the inexpressible. . . . Whereof one can- not speak, thereof one must be silent.' (Somehow it seems appropriate that there should now be two translations from the orginal German, an AV by C. K. Ogden and an RV by D. F. Pears and B. McGuiness; and it is all too typical of what might almost be a positively anti-literary policy that the revisers here render the original Volum man nicht sprechen kann, dariiber muss man schweigen' by the dully plonking `What we can- not speak about we must consign to silence.') The curious mixture of the logical technician
and the lay prophet pervades the whole book. It can provide the clue to some of the curiosities of its reception. There was, indeed, much in the Tractatus to inspire and attract the intellectual hard men of the Vienna Circle, the old original Logical Positivists. But they were bound to be correspondingly repelled by the genuflexions to the mystical. One of them offered to render down Wittgenstein's gnomic: 'There is indeed the inex- pressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical'; into the brutally brief : 'There are also sentences which are not sentences.' (Perhaps this analysis is the reason why Wittgenstein is said to have snarled that the offender was 'my stupidest pupil.' This is one of several possibly apocryphal judgments popularly attributed to Wittgenstein. Another, which is very hard to forget once you have heard it, is: 'G. E. Moore doing philosophy is like a man dancing in treacle! ') There was, of course, a lot both in the Tractatus and still more in the character of the man, to encourage the growth of an esoteric cult; and the inter- pretation and the discussion of Wittgenstein's doctrines have often been—they still are—ob- structed and distorted by a certain amount of anticking and cliquery.
The title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is far more fitting than is usually realised. It was, apparently, suggested by G. E. Moore, to point an analogy with Spinoza. This was an inspira- tion. For the ideas of the saintly, the ascetic, 'the God-intoxicated' Spinoza have been, with reason, seen also as one of the sources of modern scientific materialism. Similarly, Wittgenstein, who was personally the sort of unbeliever whom some people want, nevertheless, to describe as truly religious, seems to have had a special appeal to those who were, or were to or might become, Roman Catholic converts : notwithstanding that his actual philosophical ideas at both stages of his thinking were in their implications radically secular and this-worldly. The analogy can be extended to many points of detail. Thus Witt- genstein, as Black points out, still cherished a rationalist ideal of explanation, though insisting that it must be unattainable (pp. 365-6). The uncompromising ambition of Wittgenstein's pre- fatory claim that 'the truth of the thoughts com- municated here seems to me unassailable and definitive' parallels the pride of Spinoza in Letter LXXVI: 'I do not presume to have dis- covered the best philosophy; but I know that I understand the true one.' The sort of eternity of timelessness contemplated in the Tractatus may be compared with Spinoza's perplexing doctrine of the eternity of the human mind; at least in so far as it would seem that neither involves endless temporal duration. And so on.
Yet none of this must be mistaken to imply any actual influence. Unfortunately, Black several times points such historical analogies in a way which suggests that Wittgenstein knew and was influenced by classics, when there is no evidence that he did. Sometimes there is even evidence that he did not. Thus Black tells us that Wittgenstein's rejection of any logical connection between par- ticular causes and effects is in 'the spirit of Hume'; and elsewhere that 'he may be thinking of the familiar position of the "autonomy of ethics" argued by Hume' (pp. 243 and 370). But Miss Anscombe, a personal friend, assures us that 'he never read more than a few pages of Hume' (p. 12). So any influence was presumably indirect, mediated perhaps through Schopenhauer, Russell, and the air of Cambridge. Incidentally, Black is at fault in making no mention of Tolstoy, whom we do know that Wittgenstein actually read, and admired. Generally he was no scholar. He was, nevertheless, a philosopher of genius.
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