From: MATTHEW PAUL KUNDERT (mpkundert@students.wisc.edu)
Date: Mon Sep 22 2003 - 22:14:54 BST
Hi Sam,
Matt said:
Rortyans read Wittgenstein as not saying that the silence we reach says there is a wall with something special on the other side, but that the silence means "mu", it means we've asked a bad question, conducted a bad line of inquiry.
Sam said:
This is something of a debated question in Wittgenstein studies, often referred to by the comment, 'was he trying to whistle it?' - ie, that at the end of the Tractatus, when he says we cannot speak about the mystical/value/ ethical realm, was he holding open the option of there being other ways to express/access that realm?
Some interpreters say that he was, some that he wasn't. I am firmly in the former camp, largely on the basis of various other comments he made, and the integrity between his pattern of life and his thinking. (The reason why I have never felt bothered enough about Heidegger to explore him in depth).
Of course the deep question is whether this attitude (whistling or not whistling) carried through into his mature work. Again this is disputed, but I would say that it was. In other words, that his later understanding of language, although it was much richer than the picture theory of language, was still governed by the inexpressibility of the mystical.
To refer to the point about the wall, Wittgenstein comments that although it is an urge to run up against the boundaries of language, he has a profound respect for that urge. It is not at all that he thinks it (necessarily) a waste of time.
Matt:
I have no doubt you know more about Wittgenstein then I and I take your remarks seriously. If I'm correct, what you are refering to as the "no he wasn't trying to whistle it" camp were the logical positivists, those who loved the Tractatus, but had no idea what the Philosophical Investigations was on about. These were the people who said that morality was emotivism, that ethics had no cognitive value. This isn't what Rorty's saying. He's saying something a little different than that.
What he's saying is a little of both camps. Its weird, but I've been trying to make sense of it myself with some recent comments by David Morey and others about Rorty's love of science and lack of attention to poetry, art, and beauty. I've been arguing that he doesn't leave such things, and the distinction you make in interpreting Wittgenstein I think helps me see how I should pull the two together.
Rorty is saying that we _can_ whistle it and the urge is a poetic urge. This is a good urge, but this isn't an alternate way of expressing or accessing the ineffable. Rorty would definitely say that "access" is a misleading way of explaining what both mystics and poets do. I think Rorty would say that mystics and poets have basically the same function: they say things that don't make sense. Rorty's idea of the poet is of a piece with his Davidsonian distinction between metaphorical and literal, between what is indecipherable and that which is not. On Davidson's view, a metaphor is simply an indecipherable sound, scratch, or movement; a literal word is a decipherable one, it is subsumable in a language game. Linking this with Wittgenstein is very easy then. The wall we reach is the wall of our language game, the end of literalness. Everything beyond that is metaphor, stuff that doesn't make sense, and in a very important sense, whistling. The Davidsonian view of meta
phor says that there is no difference between whistling and saying "garbackua". Neither makes sense, they are said for effect. When a metaphor dies, when it becomes literal, the effect is to expand the language game, push its boundaries.
So what I see Rorty doing is trying to preserve parts of both interpretations of Wittgenstein. Rorty is not saying that ethics is emotivism, that morality has no cognitive function. He's saying that we create the space where things function cognitively, so the great mystics, poets, and moralists, in effect, pushed the logical space where moral propositions existed back to accomadate the new moral proposition, propositions like "Blacks are human" or "Animals should not be treated inhumanely". Those propositions didn't make sense at first because the language games we played in those days were such that they denied them. They carried assumptions like "blacks are animals" and "animals are here to be exploited" (hence slavery).
So, I think it true that there is nothing special on the other side of the wall. I think to say that there is is to hold onto discovery metaphors, that to push back the wall is discover what was already there. I think we should hand in our discovery metaphors and say that we create the space, we don't access it. But (I think) should amend my, "the silence means mu" statement. What the silence means is that we've reached the end of our language game. There are two choices (not this again ;-): you can attempt to continue to try and push the edges of the language game, or you can drop that language game and begin another. In the case of metaphysics, we've been pushing the edges of that language game for a while, pragmatists think its time we laid it to rest.
Matt
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