DALE JACQUETTE
Wittgenstein’s thought, in diametrically opposed ways, was profoundly shaped in both Tractatus and post‐Tractatus periods by Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism. Schopenhauer’s philosophy in highly modified form undergirds many of the most important early distinctions and conclusions in Wittgenstein’s 1922 Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus. In the later Philosophical Investigations, posthumously published in 1953, Wittgenstein identifies rules of philosophical grammar for language‐games in relation to their pragmatic point and purpose, practically grounded in forms of life. The later Wittgensteinian understanding of meaning is anti‐Schopenhauerian in its adamant anti‐transcendentalism.
Sometime during 1929–1930 Wittgenstein came to see the Tractatus as having ultimately failed in its primary purpose of undermining traditional philosophy. Wittgenstein wanted to show that discursive philosophy is exposed as literally meaningless by its own self‐defeating discursive meaning conditions, when called upon to make sense of philosophical discourse. The Tractatus offers the best and perhaps the only possible solution to the problem of discursively explaining the conditions for meaningful linguistic expression. When the Tractatus theory of meaning disappoints its own conditions, it is supposed to take down with it the possibility of any meaningful discursive philosophical language, and thereby the possibility in particular of any meaningful semantic philosophy. Whereupon we can responsibly set aside all pretend propositions, questions, answers, and solutions to the presumed but fictitious problems of traditional philosophy (cf. Chapter 12, METAPHYSICS: FROM INEFFABILITY TO NORMATIVITY).
To play this role, the hypothetical discursive theory of meaning developed in the Tractatus needs to maintain its own initial plausibility until it is finally rejected as meaningless by its own criteria of meaningfulness (cf. Chapter 11, INEFFABILITY AND NONSENSE IN THE TRACTATUS and Chapter 10, RESOLUTE READINGS OF THE TRACTATUS). Later Wittgenstein realizes in the crisis year that the Tractatus explanation of the necessary and sufficient conditions for meaning is logically inconsistent and in related ways inadequate, considered on its own terms and regardless of whether or not it should be thought to imply its own meaninglessness. As a result, Wittgenstein abandons the Tractatus anti‐philosophical project. He accumulates several philosophical debts in mounting the putative discursive explanation of the conditions for discursive meaning in the Tractatus, and might have blamed the argument’s failure on a variety of contributing factors. He seems however to attribute the problem to the Schopenhauerian transcendentalism latent in the indispensable Tractatus distinction between perceptible sign and perception‐transcending symbol.
The primary evidence for Wittgenstein’s implicitly holding Schopenhauerian assumptions responsible for the Tractatus unraveling is the fact that, whereas the Tractatus depends on and revels in Schopenhauerian transcendentalism, in the post‐Tractatus period Wittgenstein renounces transcendentalism in explaining the conditions for meaningful expression in a language (cf. Chapter 45, WITTGENSTEIN AND KANTIANISM). After 1930, he makes no further mention of the Schopenhauerian transcendence of logical form and pictorial relations, the metaphysical subject, the sense of the mystical, or ethical and aesthetic value, that had featured prominently in the Tractatus, or in his 1929 “Lecture on Ethics.” These transcendentalist braveries are all banished after 1930, and Wittgenstein shifts instead toward a pragmatic account of meaning in which there is no need to invoke a distinction between the perceptible sign and perception‐transcending aspects of a linguistic expression (see Chapter 26, LANGUAGES, LANGUAGE‐GAMES, AND FORMS OF LIFE).
Understanding the transition in Wittgenstein’s (anti‐) philosophy requires an appreciation for both the largely unspoken importance of Schopenhauerian transcendentalism in the sign–symbol distinction and other transcendentalia in the Tractatus, and of Wittgenstein’s decisive pragmatic turn away from Schopenhauer and transcendentalism in explaining the conditions for meaningful linguistic expression in the post‐Tractatus period.
There is anecdotal evidence that Wittgenstein, like many other young Austrian intellectuals near the end of the nineteenth century, discovered Schopenhauer and found in his moral pessimism a touchstone for a sense of adolescent Weltschmerz. Wittgenstein, with his more specialized technical interests in philosophical logic and semantics, apparently found something more.
G.H. von Wright, a student of the later Wittgenstein at Cambridge in the 1930s, writes:
If I remember rightly, Wittgenstein told me that he had read Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung in his youth and that his first philosophy was a Schopenhauerian epistemological idealism.
(von Wright, 1982, p.18)
A.J. Ayer, another acquaintance of Wittgenstein’s, though not a member of the inner circle of his students, similarly recounts:
Wittgenstein was not entirely dismissive of the philosophers of the past, but his reading of them was markedly eclectic. As a boy he was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer’s principal work, The World as Will and Representation, and we shall see that this influence persists in the Tractatus, though the only philosophers to whom he acknowledges a debt in the Tractatus are Frege and Russell. The book contains a passing reference to Kant and has been thought by some critics to display a Kantian approach, but there is no evidence that Wittgenstein made any serious study of Kant’s writings and his knowledge of Kant was probably filtered through Schopenhauer.
(Ayer, 1985, p.13; concerning Wittgenstein’s familiarity with Kant’s writings see Chapter 45, WITTGENSTEIN AND KANTIANISM; cf. also Monk, 1990, p.158; and McGuinness, 1988, p.39)
The Tractatus embodies a revisionary Schopenhauerian transcendentalism in several ways. The overall structure of Wittgenstein’s reasoning in the first place is best understood as that of a Kantian transcendental inference. It exhibits precisely the style of thinking that Schopenhauer unconditionally accepts in the Transcendental Aesthetic of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). Just as Kant begins a train of transcendental reasoning with something given, a datum, and asks what must be true in order for the given to be possible, so similarly, albeit less methodologically self‐consciously, Wittgenstein in effect begins with the given fact that we can use language to express determinate meaning, or that genuine uses of language are determinately meaningful, and asks transcendentally what must be true in order for such a thing to be possible.
What Wittgenstein discovers in the process are Tractatus conditions for meaningful expression in a language. He concludes, with all the assurance of any of Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s synthetic a priori pronouncements, that in order for the determinate meaningfulness of language to be possible, it must be the case that sentences can be analyzed as concatenations of simple names. Names for simple objects in turn stand in one‐one representing relations with the logically basic corresponding components of truthmaking states of affairs that signs as meaningful sentences symbolically picture. At the most fundamental level of analysis, the logically simple atomic facts pictured by elementary propositions are correspondingly decomposable into juxtapositions of simple objects denoted by simple names, each possessing one of the forms of space, time, and color (TLP 2.0251), and fastened together like the links in a chain (TLP 2.03) (see Chapter 7, LOGICAL ATOMISM AND Chapter 8, THE PICTURE THEORY).
As Stenius (1960, pp.214–26), Janik (1966), Janik and Toulmin (1973, pp.74, 164), and other commentators have maintained, there is perhaps no more insightful way to understand the argument of the Tractatus in presenting its presumed discursive theory of meaning than in these Kantian–Schopenhauerian transcendental reasoning terms.
In the Tractatus period, Wittgenstein believes that he has pulled the rug out from under all discursive philosophy. The theory of discursive meaning that finally excludes without exception the meaningfulness of any discursive theory of meaning depends for its plausibility and interest on a selection of conceptual debts, prominently including a version of Schopenhauerian transcendentalism applied to the problem of understanding the objects of expressive content in language.
The Tractatus explanation of meaning presupposes a modified but easily recognizable Schopenhauerian distinction between the phenomenal appearance of meaningful signs in a language and their perceptually transcendent structures under Wittgenstein’s sign–symbol distinction (TLP 3.32–3.324). Signs conventionally express meaning in a perceptually transcendent symbolic semantic order where symbols upon analysis are in direct one‐one contact with corresponding parts of their truth conditions, construed as existent or nonexistent truthmaking states of affairs. Wittgenstein distinguishes between phenomenal sign and transcendent symbol when he writes: “The sign is the part of the symbol perceptible to the senses” (TLP 3.32). He thereby implies that there is also an imperceptible part of a symbol that transcends the perceptible written or spoken sign, which is all we need mean in speaking of Wittgenstein’s early logical and semantic Schopenhauerian transcendentalism. If the picture theory of meaning is to be plausible, then it must have to do with meaning‐related factors that go beyond what is perceivable in linguistic signs. No one would suppose that the sign “It is raining” is itself a conjunction of concatenations of simple names for all the simple objects that must be correlatively juxtaposed in order for “It is raining” to picture a state of affairs in which it is raining, as the picture theory otherwise seems to require.
Symbols have meaning first and foremost above their perceptible expression in sentence signs in the Tractatus, where the picturing relation is supposed to transcend the perceivable world of facts. Meaning is only secondarily expressed by a symbol’s perceptible sign aspect, conventionally mapped from a convenient repeatable concrete medium onto the possibilities of describing the contingent state of the world, and nothing more. Thought projects meaning from sign to symbol in using language, making a pictorially meaningful expression by thinking the sense of a proposition, appointing a physical mark to symbolically represent the meaning that a philosophically innocent user might otherwise attach only to the sign (TLP 3.11). The possibilities of meaning for the Tractatus are then a purely combinatorial matter. The domain of meaningful expressions is comprehended in its entirety by the generous general form of proposition, from a starter subdomain of contingently true or false elementary propositions. An operation of joint propositional negation is applied to every set and subset taken from the stock of elementary propositions of the Red‐here‐now type. The Elementarsätze provide the semantic raw material of all expressible meaning in the logically contingently true or false description of every logically possible situation (cf. Chapter 17, LOGIC AND THE TRACTATUS).
It is only by distinguishing between two aspects of language, the perceptible sign part of a symbol and its transcendent imperceptible part, that Wittgenstein is able to explain the logic and picture theory semantics of all genuine languages despite their superficial confusions, ambiguities, and equivocations. Whereas colloquial language disguises the meanings of thoughts (TLP 4.011), its sign‐transcending symbolism expresses a definite meaning by virtue of picturing an existent or nonexistent state of affairs. The symbolic picturing of the world is supposed to be accomplished by means of a one‐one correspondence between the fully analyzed elements of a sentence in the linguistic order and the fully reduced logical atomistic elements of a state of affairs in the ontic or metaphysical order. The colloquial sentence “It is raining” does not picture precipitation in its sign aspect at the superficial level of appearance in conventional English. It does so, according to Wittgenstein, only at the imperceptible symbolic level as a truth function of elementary propositions corresponding to the co‐presence of the relevant atomic states of affairs, and in the one‐one alignment of the simple names concatenated in each elementary proposition with the simple objects correspondingly juxtaposed in each pictured atomic state of affairs.
Tautology and contradiction tag along for the ride as genuine propositions by Wittgenstein in a general syntactical amnesty, despite their inability to picture facts. They are ham‐fistedly third‐tracked by Wittgenstein as having neither Sinn nor being unsinnig (nonsensical), but rather as sinnlos (senseless), in what looks to be a makeshift category. Tautology and contradiction are included as genuine propositions for further unexplained reasons of simplicity in syntactical preference, on the unanswerable grounds that they are “part of the symbolism” by analogy with 0 (zero) in arithmetic (4.46–4.463).
The three pillars of the Tractatus, logical atomism, the picture theory of meaning, and general form of proposition, are thus predicated on a uniquely Wittgensteinian application of Schopenhauerian transcendentalism in the best and only possible discursive explanation of the meanings of names and sentences. We begin with the possibility of expressing determinate meaning in a language, which implies the making of an artifact, a picture of a fact (TLP 2.1). Wittgenstein, reasoning transcendentally, as we suppose, wants to know what must be true in order for the picturing of facts to be logically possible. The question can only be answered philosophically by explaining the general conditions for meaningful expression in any language. The meanings of pictures, which are themselves facts, whereby we picture other facts, do not attach merely to those fact‐picturing signs, but to similar uses of signs, and in principle to any set of superficially dissimilar but transcendentally logically isomorphic signs in different colloquial and technical languages. This is young Wittgenstein giving discursive philosophical “prosifying” its best chance of making sense, and watching it fail as literally meaningless on the basis of its own requirements.
A critic unsympathetic to Wittgenstein’s early enthusiasms may question classifying the best and only possible discursive theory of meaning as nonsensical. If tautologies are tolerated as genuine propositions in a correct logical notation by virtue of being part of the symbolism, then why should there not be logically necessarily true propositions in a discursive philosophical explanation of the general conditions for meaningful linguistic expression? The general form of proposition as Wittgenstein simplifies its successive operations of joint negation on a given domain of elementary propositions is powerless to exclude tautologies, despite not picturing any particular logically contingent world‐constituting states of affairs. They are additionally useful for many purposes in logical methods and reasoning, such as proceeding in argument from tertium non datur dilemma assumptions. The Tractatus theory of meaning might equally reasonably be tolerated as useful and necessarily true, possibly in the sense of being tautological itself or logically reducible to a tautology from a conjunction of logically necessary truths. Wittgenstein does not seem to have conducted the sort of inquiry needed to know whether or not the three pillars of the mock‐discursive Tractatus explanation of meaning are really tautologies. Why should they be nonsense, unsinnig, like “Socrates is identical” and worse, gibberish, as 6.54 still brazenly attempts to declare, rather than senseless, sinnlos, like tautologies and contradictions?
The sign–symbol distinction is crucial to Wittgenstein’s efforts to provide a general semantics for the possibility of determinate meaning in any logically possible language. Unlike Frege and Russell, Wittgenstein is unwilling to take refuge from the semantic defects of colloquial language in an ideal language or Begriffsschrift.
Wittgenstein recognizes that, from a historical point of view, formal‐technical and mathematical languages derive from preexistent natural languages in which it is already possible to express determinate meaning. He knows that it does not contribute to the purpose of understanding the meaning conditions of languages generally to turn one’s back especially on colloquial languages (TLP 4.002).
If we think of Wittgenstein’s sign‐aspect of language as a semantic version of Schopenhauer’s concept of the world as representation, perceptible to intuition and represented in thought, and of Wittgenstein’s transcendent symbol‐aspect of language as a semantic version of Schopenhauer’s concept of thing‐in‐itself understood as the transcendent reality underlying the world of appearances or representations, then the application is unmistakable. Wittgenstein does not need to posit the existence of an ideal language if there is already an ideal transcendent aspect of every language by virtue of which it expresses meaning, and similarly, therefore, he has no need to abandon all conventional colloquial language for the sake of limiting semantic theory exclusively to an ideal language.
Within the German logic and semantic tradition, to which Wittgenstein’s early thought also belongs, Bolzano in his Wissenschaftslehre ([1837] 1972, esp. pp.20–31, 171–80) had previously distinguished in similar fashion between sentences (Sätze) and sentences‐in‐themselves (Sätze an sich). Bolzano’s propositions are sometimes taken to be the linguistic counterpart of Kant’s or Schopenhauer’s perception‐transcending reality. It is an evident even if only coincidental terminological echoing of Kant’s Ding an sich, by an otherwise staunchly anti‐Kantian nineteenth‐century philosopher. The Kantian thing‐in‐itself is further interpreted by Schopenhauer as will (der Wille), transcending the principle of identity and individuation. This means effectively that the world as will transcends space and time, although Schopenhauer prefers to arrive at metaphysics only secondarily through epistemology, as something we can know at least about the limits of knowledge, rather than the other way around. He locates Wille as Kantian thing‐in‐itself beyond the explanatory reach of the fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason (see Schopenhauer, [1818/59] 1966, vol.1, pp.127–8). Wittgenstein appears to endorse much the same division of factual world and transcendental logic and arithmetical form, in maintaining that the cardinality of simple names, simple objects, and logical forms is anumerical (TLP 4.1272–4.128). The simple names, simple objects, and logical forms collectively – because they cannot be numbered, univocally counted as individual entities – are situated as much beyond any Schopenhauerian principium individuationis as the noumenal Kantian Ding an sich. Schopenhauerian Wille is nevertheless a will, and Schopenhauer chooses his terminology carefully in this regard, something at least metaphorically psychological. Wittgenstein invokes a similar Schopenhauerian concept again when he describes the transcendent thinking metaphysical subject or philosophical I as constituting a will to represent, establishing the picturing lines of projection from symbol to fact, rather than logically isomorphic fact to symbol in the opposite direction, to make meaningful expression possible in the fact‐transcending symbolic aspect of language (cf. Chapter 30, WITTGENSTEIN ON “I” AND THE SELF and Chapter 9, WITTGENSTEIN ON SOLIPSISM).
Wittgenstein accordingly writes: “Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. Logic is transcendental” (TLP 6.13). The perceptible part of language and the states of affairs in logical space that constitute a world for early Wittgenstein are the equivalent of Schopenhauer’s world as representation. Logical form, pictorial and representational form, among other items of interest, in turn transcend the world of facts, where they cannot be described, but only show themselves in the identical structures of pictured and picturing facts. They do not exist as objects or states of affairs, but stand outside of all facts and objects by virtue of which there is a transcendent logical structure of the world through which pictorial meaning functions. It is possible in this light to understand Wittgenstein’s early (picture) theory of meaning in the Tractatus as a Schopenhauerian semantics in which the distinction between the world as representation and as thing‐in‐itself is applied on a limited scale to the linguistic order, for the sake of interpreting the meanings expressed by sentences in their similarly dual perceptible sign and transcendent symbolic attributes (see especially TLP 2.151, 2.172, 2.18, 4.12–4.1212, 4.461, 5.541–5.5422, 5.631–5.641, 6.22, 6.432–6.45, 6.522).
It is not only logical, pictorial, and representational form that transcends the empirical world of facts according to the Tractatus. Wittgenstein places value, ethics, and aesthetics identified as one outside the world, by which all attempts to express value are relegated extra‐semantically to the category of literal nonsense. Value thereby joins representational form, logical form, the metaphysical subject, and whatever cannot be said but only shown.
Moral and aesthetic value transcends the world. The elimination of value from the world implies that ethics, including attempts at ethical judgment in theory and practice, is nonsensical. According to the general form of proposition in the Tractatus, only logically contingent statements of fact convey meaning. Wittgenstein maintains:
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value.
If there is a value which is of value, it must lie outside all happening and being‐so. For all happening and being‐so is accidental.
What makes it non‐accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental.
It must lie outside the world.
[…]
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one.) (TLP 6.41–6.421)
Wittgenstein locates undifferentiated value outside the world. He explains the semantic implications of transcendence for the ineffability of ethics and the pseudo‐propositional status of efforts to express ethical value. Finally, he concludes with the intriguing identification of ethics and aesthetics as one. The semantic dimensions of transcendent value are implicit in the Notebooks 1914–16, but clearly spelled out in the Tractatus transcendence passages (see e.g., NB 24.7.16 and 21.10.16; cf. Barrett, 1991, pp.30, 60–3). Wittgenstein elaborates on the insight in a Spinozistic entry that complements his Schopenhauerian transcendentalism in the Notebooks: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics” (NB 7.10.16).
The Tractatus discussion of transcendence, on the other hand, does not draw directly on the transcendence of the metaphysical subject as conferring transcendence on value by constituting the transcendental ground of subjective valuation, as in the second of two Notebooks arguments on the same topic where Wittgenstein in distinctively Schopenhauerian terms writes:
Good and evil only enter through the subject. And the subject is not part of the world, but a boundary of the world.
It would be possible to say (à la Schopenhauer): It is not the world of Idea that is either good or evil; but the willing subject.
(NB 2.8.16)
The Tractatus develops Wittgenstein’s concept of the subject’s transcendence even more fully than the Notebooks, but leaves the connection between the subject’s transcendence and the transcendence of value unstated. It is the world seen in a certain way, but not literally describable as such in a factual predication of properties to objects (see Jacquette, 1997).
Wittgenstein discerns no meaningful difference between ethics and aesthetics, because they are merely different ways of emphasizing what persons choose to do or not to do. We are good or bad artists in every action we undertake. In some cases, the actions for which ethics and aesthetics are one involve the making of art and artifacts as narrowly conceived, in painting, sculpting, writing or reciting poetry, drafting a novel, or designing a work of architecture or composing or whistling a song. In other cases, the actions are diapering a baby, having a conversation with a friend, negotiating a treaty, serving in the military, or deciding whether or not violently to avenge a perceived wrong. The ethical terms we use in judging the merits of such behavior are equally aesthetic, and the aesthetic vocabulary by which we assess the merits of artistic endeavors is equally a pronouncement of the artist’s morality. To be a good or bad conductor of an orchestra is no different in principle, although the applicable criteria are specialized, than to be a good or bad soldier, husband, mother, or prime minister (see Chapter 39, WITTGENSTEIN AND ETHICS).
The Tractatus reaches its denouement when Wittgenstein denies the previously unquestioned intelligibility of the preceding discursive explanation of the conditions for meaning:
My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as [nonsensical (unsinnig)], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
(TLP 6.54)
Schopenhauer expresses similar ideas in the second volume of the third edition of The World as Will and Representation, in the course of contrasting shallow discursive learning with a more searching philosophical inquiry that uses discursive texts as a means to the higher end of attaining transcendental understanding:
However, for the man who studies to gain insight, books and studies are mere rungs of the ladder on which he climbs to the summit of knowledge. As soon as a rung has raised him one step, he leaves it behind.
(Schopenhauer, [1818/59] 1966, vol.2, p.80)
The strands of Wittgenstein’s 1929–1930 rejection of Schopenhauerian transcendentalism are as tightly interwoven with the failure of the Tractatus as the success of the Tractatus was expected to depend on the book’s Kantian–Schopenhauerian transcendental reasoning, and on the Kantian–Schopenhauerian duality of perceivable and transcendental aspects of all meaningful expression. To explain Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, we must accordingly look from the pro‐Schopenhauerian transcendentalism of the Tractatus period to the later anti‐Schopenhauerianism and more generally anti‐transcendentalism of the post‐Tractatus period.
The chronology of Wittgenstein’s early distinctive pro‐Schopenhauerian transcendentalism and later anti‐Schopenhauerian anti‐transcendentalism marks exactly the main division in the two major periods of Wittgenstein’s thought, from the time including the Tractatus and related documents, leading up to his writing and then disowning the 1929 paper, “Some Remarks on Logical Form” (see Jacquette, 1998a, especially pp.160–92; 1998b; 2002).
Wittgenstein makes a valiant but ultimately ineffectual effort to rescue the Tractatus logic from the color incompatibility problem. This is the difficulty Ramsey emphasized in his 1923 Mind review of the Tractatus. TLP 6.375–6.3751 commits the three pillars of the Tractatus, its logic, semantics, and ontology, to the necessity of reducing presumably impossible predications of the form “RPT and BPT” (“Red here now and blue here now, at the same place P and time T”) to an explicit logical inconsistency of the form “RPT and not‐RPT,” or “BPT and not‐BPT.” Wittgenstein says that color incompatibility must be reducible to logical inconsistency, but he offers no deductively valid transformation schema from the syntax of supposedly mutually independent predicationally incompatible Elementarsätze to the syntax of explicit logical contradictions (Jacquette, 1990; 1998a, pp.172–89; 2010a; 2010b). He attempts but does not produce the needed reduction in TLP 6.371 and NB 16.8.16 and 11.9.16.
The Tractatus presents an account of meaning for purposes of reductio ad absurdum as philosophy’s best hope of discursively explaining discursive meaning. The language of such an explanation must itself be incapable of having discursive meaning according to its own theory of meaningfulness. For the strategy to succeed, Wittgenstein’s at first hypothetically meaningful Tractatus account of meaning must hold together well enough not only to be taken as an assumption for reductio reasoning, but as the only possible discursive explanation of discursive meaning. When Wittgenstein in the final passages of the Tractatus rejects all the propositions of the Tractatus as nonsensical according to the presumedly meaningful discursive theory of meaning presented in Tractatus, he expects thereby to have shown that even the best possible account of meaningfulness makes no adequate provision for the meaningfulness of philosophical discourse. That would be a monumental anti‐traditional‐discursive‐philosophical conclusion. If the theory of meaning in the Tractatus turns out on its own terms to be hopelessly incompetent, then it is not even a plausible candidate for advancing a possible discursive explanation of discursive meaning. In developing an orthogonally opposed new pragmatic direction in the explanation of meaning, Wittgenstein in the later period rejects the Tractatus presentation of the only possible conditions for the meaningfulness of language, and with them the Schopenhauerian transcendentalism that the Tractatus presupposes.
The elementary propositions are supposed to be logically independent (5.134), in the sense that they cannot imply or contradict one another (2.11). To infer RPT and not‐RPT from RPT and BPT, BPT would have to logically imply not‐RPT, which is to say that BPT would have to logically contradict RPT. If, on the other hand, the inference is disallowed within the Tractatus, then there are logically false propositions that are not syntactically reducible to logical contradictions. The embarrassment in that case is not merely that the Tractatus has no inferential mechanism by which to negotiate such a syntactical reduction, but that with equal justification it requires both logically incompatible possibilities that the Red‐here‐now elementary propositions are logically independent of and logically dependent on one another, and that some logically contradict others. These objections with their implications must have dawned on Wittgenstein, and may have played a part in his decision to return to philosophy upon realizing that the Tractatus had not accomplished its anti‐philosophical purpose.
The Tractatus project quickly unravels along these lines in the later part of the intervening seven years. If the elementary propositions Red‐here‐now and Blue‐here‐now are both logically independent and not logically independent of one another, then what the Tractatus touts as the best and only possible discursive account of meaningfulness is confused. It is internally contradictory for more fundamental reasons than the fact that the theory is required impossibly to validate its own meaningfulness. If the model in its entirety is nonsensical on more pedestrian theory‐building grounds anyway by virtue of incorporating a whopping albeit previously unnoticed internal contradiction of the sort Ramsey emphasizes, then there is no anti‐philosophical mileage to be gained by revealing as Wittgenstein does with a certain theatrical flourish that the entire model of meaning painstakingly revealed in the previous roughly 70 pages of the Tractatus is on its own terms literally unsinnig (6.54–7). Equally, then, Wittgenstein offers no adequate justification for setting aside traditional discursive philosophy on the grounds that discursive meaning, logical form, the self or subject, and with them conflated ethical and aesthetic value, transcend the sensible world of logically contingent facts.
Wittgenstein’s empathy for Schopenhauer undergoes a similar reversal from his early‐ to later‐period (anti‐) philosophy. As a consequence, we can only hope to understand Wittgenstein’s intellectual development spanning both major periods of his thought by bringing Schopenhauer prominently into the story – first, pro‐Schopenhauerian, as Wittgenstein transforms Schopenhauerian transcendental idealism in the service of a different set of purposes in the Tractatus, and second, as anti‐Schopenhauerian, when he forcefully rejects transcendentalism after judging the Tractatus to have failed. He does so when he decisively lays down the conceptual framework for a relatively transparent pragmatism to explain the meaning conditions of language use that seek again from a very different direction to discredit the meaningfulness of conventional philosophy. There are many possible pragmatically justified language‐games for the later Wittgenstein, but traditional philosophy, in any of its content or methods, is not one of them (cf. however Chapter 13, PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD; see also Chapter 47, WITTGENSTEIN AND ORDINARY LANGUAGE PHILOSOPHY). Schopenhauer in contrast is far more old‐fashioned, following in his own estimation the great thinkers of Western philosophy from Plato through Kant, as their next heir apparent.
After seven years of taking comfort in the Tractatus denunciation of discursive philosophy, with the support of its unquestioned semantic Schopenhauerian transcendentalism, Wittgenstein makes a dramatic volte‐face. Sometime during 1929–1930, Wittgenstein begins to reject the three tightly interwoven Tractatus pseudo‐theories, and with them the transcendence of logical and pictorial representational form, the thinking metaphysical subject, mystical awe at the world grasped as a unity, and combined ethical‐aesthetic value. When it becomes clear that the Tractatus must be discarded, Wittgenstein significantly does not seek to develop an alternative revisionary Schopenhauerian concept of transcendence by which to explain the conditions for the meaningfulness of language. Instead, he goes back to his engineering drawing board and retrenches with an entirely different strategy. He sets up his anti‐philosophy shop again under new management. He charts an un‐game‐like un‐rule‐governed inquiry into the philosophical grammars of pragmatically warranted language‐games integrated into a form of life. Once again, though now for very different reasons, philosophy is excluded as meaningful discourse. Philosophy lacks meaning in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, not because it fails to picture facts, but because it lacks the external pragmatic point and purpose of a genuine language‐game whose rule‐governed moves are rooted in human practice, rather than in an infinite regress of interpretive rules. Language‐games for the later Wittgenstein involve linguistic tokens whose legitimate uses are established by pragmatically determined point‐and‐purpose‐driven rules. These Wittgenstein considers to be transparent rather than transcendent. There is no distinction invoked between the transcendent symbolic meaning of signs, or perception‐transcending logical or picturing relations (see also Chapter 14, GRAMMAR AND GRAMMATICAL STATEMENTS). Schopenhauer, in contrast with the Tractatus, is conspicuously absent from Wittgenstein’s later pragmatic explanation of meaning. As such, Schopenhauer provides an interesting pivot of reversal for the transition in Wittgenstein’s thought, given the complex internal structure of the Tractatus and the many opportunities that its variety of commitments seems to afford.
Post‐Tractatus Wittgenstein finds a desired release from philosophical concerns and dispelling of philosophical confusions in the self‐satisfying activity of working out the philosophical grammars of key words in what passes for philosophical discourse. These are terms that seem to present both philosophical problems and possibilities when they are lifted from their native genuine language‐game habitats and made to play an entirely non‐game‐like role in the essentially different applications of traditional discursive philosophy. Such language‐related activity ironically has no philosophical grammar, because there are no point‐and‐purpose‐driven rules for philosophical discourse as moves in a legitimate, pragmatically motivated language‐game. By definition, there can be no philosophically grammatical or ungrammatical philosophical language‐game. There is no genuine pragmatic form of life underwriting the doing of conventional philosophy. The therapeutic effort of working out the philosophical grammars of rule‐governed language‐games belongs to a family of therapies targeted to assuage specific philosophical anxieties (PI §133). Unfortunately, the few examples Wittgenstein offers do not comfortably generalize (see Jacquette, 2014). Philosophy in Wittgenstein’s later period is not controverted by its meaninglessness under picture theory requirements, but as a consequence of an anti‐transcendental pragmatism that excludes philosophy on entirely different grounds as grammatical investigations that of necessity stand outside of any practically grounded language‐game (cf. Chapter 48, WITTGENSTEIN AND PRAGMATISM). Since only practically grounded language‐games contain meaningful rule‐governed expressions and exchanges, philosophy in Wittgenstein’s later thought is again rendered literally meaningless. Philosophical discourse is uniquely beyond the pale of rule‐regulated linguistic activities, lacking in the rules of a philosophical grammar pragmatically determined for genuine language‐games in each case by a particular practical point and purpose (PI §§62, 108, 562–8). What sense would it make, Wittgenstein hints but does not explicitly ask, for an investigation into the rules of philosophical grammar to follow the rules of philosophical grammar? The relevant rules would then need to be presupposed rather than discovered in the course of inquiry.
Wittgenstein thereby achieves a precisely parallel anti‐philosophical conclusion when compared with that attempted in the Tractatus. There we could not speak philosophy because we could only meaningfully express the contingent descriptive propositions truth‐functionally built out of “Red‐here‐now”‐type elementary propositions available within a language, all else being literal nonsense. In Philosophical Investigations and later writings, Wittgenstein holds that we cannot speak philosophy because there are no pragmatically supported philosophy language‐games, because there are no point‐and‐purpose‐determined rules to provide a philosophical grammar applicable to philosophical discourse. For the later Wittgenstein, this is to say that there is no pragmatic justification for anything that traditional philosophy tries to say. The difference extensionally is that from the early to the later philosophy, Wittgenstein enormously enlarges the domain of meaningful expression, from whatever we can build out of Red‐here‐now to unlimitedly many continuously evolving different kinds of uses for different parts of language.
The early passages of the Investigations attack all three Tractatus pillars. The general form of proposition is defeated by candid appeal to the multiple uses of language by analogy with the variegated tools in a toolbox and the variety of handles in a locomotive cabin (PI §§11–15, 23–4). Description of contingent facts is not all that language can and needs to do for the roles it plays in our practical lives. There are many things to be done with language‐game tokens. We generally communicate when we need or want something like five red apples or a slab or beam to be brought to a worksite (PI §§1–2, 8–10, 19–21). Logical atomism is refuted by the commonsense consideration that there is no single way in which things like chessboards or the broom in the corner can be univocally analyzed into their ultimately simple components, offering little encouragement to suppose that there could be a single univocally correct analysis of a proposition’s logical structure (PI §§47–50, 59–63). The propositions to be analyzed are supposed to be transcendent in logical structure, and in that sense unavailable for scrutiny as to their actual form. The picture theory of meaning, finally, presupposes precise isomorphisms between transcendent aspects of elementary language use and the atomic facts of the world. With the failure of logical atomism, the required isomorphisms cannot be established when they are called into challenge by the problem of reducing color incompatibility to logical contradiction.
Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and other post‐Tractatus writings undermine the meaningfulness of philosophical problems, questions, and answers in a different way than the Tractatus. After 1929, Wittgenstein knows that whatever is salvageable from the objectives of the original project must proceed without the benefit of the three Tractatus pillars. In the later period, references to language‐games emphasize the forms of life that pragmatically explain how it is possible for language to function in lieu of insupportable infinite regresses of discursive rules for following other discursive rules. If we want to know how all of language works, then we cannot make exceptions for discursive rules themselves. The regress can only be avoided by breaking out of the circle of rules through the appeal to something extra‐semantic, something that is external to all particular rules, that enables us to play any particular game, involving the way we live and what Wittgenstein calls our form of life as it has evolved. Arrows mean what they mean because as a species we have needed to be successful bow hunters and we know without appeal to a system of rules that the pointy end is supposed to indicate a forward direction. We do not need a book of instructions to explain this, and another book to explain each of the explanations in previous books in an endless sequence, which would be incompatible anyway with our manifest rapid‐fire, real‐time language use (PI §§217–19). (See Chapter 24, RULES AND RULE‐FOLLOWING.)
The watershed dividing the early from the later period is marked by Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge University beginning in 1930. There he dictated a series of remarks on language and mind that became the locally circulated, posthumously published Blue and Brown Books, the material of which evolved into the much‐rethought revolutionary Philosophical Investigations. From this time forward, Wittgenstein’s later philosophical anti‐Schopenhauerianism is severe and unequivocal. A relevant historical analogy involving early magnetic attraction for Schopenhauer’s ideas and later equally forceful diametrically reactive repulsion is seen in the polar development of Nietzsche’s ethics and aesthetics, from the markedly Schopenhauerian Birth of Tragedy (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872) to his diametrically anti‐Schopenhauerian On the Genealogy of Morals (Zur Genealogie der Moral, 1887). The latter work Nietzsche self‐consciously describes in its subtitle as A Polemic (Eine Streitschrift); which, indeed, it is, directed specifically against what Nietzsche denounces as Schopenhauer’s life‐denying “European Buddhism” ([1887] 1998, p.4). As for Nietzsche beginning with Genealogie, Schopenhauer becomes Wittgenstein’s unloved antipode in the post‐Tractatus period.
Wittgenstein later denies any strong impact of Schopenhauer on his own early thinking. In conversation with M.O’C. Drury, Wittgenstein reportedly said the following:
WITTGENSTEIN: My fundamental ideas came to me very early in life. DRURY: Schopenhauer? WITTGENSTEIN: No; I think I see quite clearly what Schopenhauer got out of his philosophy – but when I read Schopenhauer I seem to see to the bottom very easily. He is not deep in the sense that Kant and Berkeley are deep.
(WAM 158)
The passage quoted further above from Wittgenstein’s Notebooks is the only place in the surviving early writings where he mentions Schopenhauer by name. In the preface to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein offers effusive praise to Frege, extended with somewhat less enthusiasm to Russell. Schopenhauer is not mentioned. If the proposed reading of the Tractatus is correct, then Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is nevertheless run through with Schopenhauer’s influence, an almost palpable presence in the semantic theory that depends on the distinction between sign and symbol, the theory of aesthetics and ethics as one, transcendence of logic, mathematics, and all semantic form, Form der Darstellung, Form der Abbildung, and in the theory of the metaphysical subject or philosophical I. Limited and idiosyncratic as all of Wittgenstein’s Schopenhauerianism seems to be in the early philosophy of logic and semantics, in their implications for philosophy generally, the parallel concept in Wittgenstein is not quite Schopenhauer’s “der Wille,” but what might be characterized instead as the individual psychology transcending metaphysical subject’s will to represent.
Wittgenstein in the later philosophy denies and distances himself from any Schopenhauerian transcendentalism in the theory of meaning. In the Investigations, he declares that meaning can be understood in terms of the imminently observable features of language‐games with grammatical rules determined in each case by their pragmatic point and purpose. As contrasted with the Tractatus commitment to a kind of Schopenhauerian semantic transcendentalism, Wittgenstein in the post‐Tractatus period roundly insists that nothing is hidden in the workings of language. In explaining meaning we need to offer a perspicuous articulation of the way the rules for language‐games are praxeologically grounded in a complex network of linguistic and extra‐linguistic activities that constitute a form of life. Wittgenstein explains:
If it is asked: “How do sentences manage to represent?” – the answer might be: “Don’t you know? You certainly see it, when you use them. For nothing is concealed.”
How do sentences do it? – Don’t you know? For nothing is hidden.
But given this answer: “But you know how sentences do it, for nothing is concealed” one would like to retort, “Yes, but it all goes by so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view.”
(PI §435)
With the firm conviction that in understanding sentential meaning nothing is hidden, the later Wittgenstein turns away from Schopenhauerian semantic transcendentalism. Whether and to what extent, if any, Wittgenstein remains influenced in more subtle ways by his early immersion in Schopenhauer’s idealism is as interesting and important a question in coming to terms with Wittgenstein’s valuable contributions to philosophy as it is in trying to understand Nietzsche’s early devotion to and later rejection of Schopenhauerianism.
The movement constitutes a philosophical reversal that in some ways, in a very different sphere of application and with very different results, anticipates Wittgenstein’s similar experience almost a century later. Wittgenstein’s second philosophy, like Nietzsche’s, after losing affection for Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, would not have been what it became if it had not first been seasoned in a system of thought that emphasized a transcendental reality, of thing‐in‐itself characterized as pure willing. The Tractatus hypothesis of the best possible explanation of meaning comes apart at the seams during the transitional period over the color incompatibility problem in Wittgenstein’s post‐Tractatus deliberations. Wittgenstein attributes the failure of the Tractatus to its Schopenhauerian semantic transcendentalism, and in rejecting it he renounces as well anything that the model might be understood as implying for the transcendence of logic and theory of meaning, of the self or subject, and of judgments and attitudes reflected in the language of ethics and aesthetics, no longer considered as transcendentally one.