45
Wittgenstein and Kantianism

ROBERT HANNA

The limit of language is shown by its being impossible to describe the fact which corresponds to (is the translation of) a sentence, without simply repeating the sentence. (This has to do with the Kantian solution of the problem of philosophy.) (CV 10)

May God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes. (CV 63)

1 Introduction

In the 1970s, Peter Hacker and Bernard Williams argued that Wittgenstein was a Kantian transcendental idealist (Hacker, 1972; Williams, 1973). In the 1980s, Hacker officially rescinded this interpretation (Hacker, 1972/86, pp.ix and 206–14); and Williams in any case regarded Wittgenstein’s transcendental idealism as a philosophical mistake. And ever since, there has been a lively debate about Wittgenstein’s Kantianism, anti‐Kantianism, or non‐Kantianism. In my opinion, however, this particular line of Wittgenstein‐interpretation and debate was a dead letter from the start: if I am correct, then Hacker and Williams adopted a false, or at least needlessly uncharitable, conception of Kant’s transcendental idealism in particular and also of his Critical philosophy more generally, from the get‐go – hence the gambit of interpreting Wittgenstein as a transcendental idealist or Critical philosopher in that sense was bound to lead to “obscurity and contradictions” (Dunkelheit und Widersprüche) (Kant, [1781/87] 1997, Aviii). But if we revolutionize the way we think about Kant, we can, correspondingly, revolutionize the way we think about Wittgenstein in the light of Kant’s transcendental idealism and Critical philosophy.

No one doubts that throughout his philosophical writings, Wittgenstein saw a fundamental connection between language and human life. But if I am correct, then Wittgenstein’s conception of human language is essentially the same as Kant’s Critical conception of human rationality, and Wittgenstein and Kant are jointly engaged in the self‐same project of what Jonathan Lear aptly dubs transcendental anthropology (Lear, 1982; Lear and Stroud, 1984; and Lear, 1986). What is transcendental anthropology? The short‐and‐sweet answer is that it is a way of doing philosophy that tells us

how the apparent or manifest world must be, in order to conform to the innately specified forms and structures of the basic cognitive and practical capacities of rational human animals;
how rational human animals must choose, act, and try to live, in order to conform to the highest norms, rules, and standards they legislate for themselves, and also, tragically, almost inevitably fail to meet; and
how philosophy must not be, because otherwise it will inevitably, and tragically, fall into logical antinomy, radical skepticism, and cognitive/practical self‐alienation.

In view of (ii) and (iii), we can clearly see how transcendental anthropology is also an intimate fellow‐traveler with existentialism – as expressed, e.g., in Augustine’s Confessions or Pascal’s Pensées (which Kant would have known), and in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling or Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (which Wittgenstein knew) – and shares with existentialism a radically metaphysically anthropocentric, meta‐philosophically critical, morally‐charged, and ultimately tragic sense of human life (see de Unamuno, [1912] 1921; Cavell, 1979, especially parts 1 and 4; and Bearn, 1997). Otherwise put, transcendental anthropology is the philosophy of the rational human condition.

Lear’s critical judgment on the later Wittgenstein’s transcendental anthropology is that it is ultimately a failure, due to an incoherence between the prima‐facie‐opposed “transcendental” (a.k.a. nonempirical) and “anthropological” (a.k.a empirical) levels of reflection (Lear, 1986, especially pp.283–93). As will become evident in the course of this chapter, however, my critical judgment is just the reverse. I think that Lear failed to understand Kant’s transcendental idealism in the right way, and also failed to take into proper account the existential dimensions in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking.

If I am correct, then that is the “big picture” into which we can fit Wittgenstein, Kant, and the existentialists alike. But the specific purpose of this chapter is to explore two central themes in the philosophy of Wittgenstein, as deeply motivated by Kant and also importantly inflected by existential insights:

how the apparent or manifest world necessarily conforms to human mind and life; and
the critique of self‐alienated philosophy.

2 How the World Conforms 1: Kant, Transcendental Idealism, and Empirical Realism

According to Kant, a mental representation is transcendental when it is either part of, or derived from, our nonempirical (hence a priori) innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities (Kant, [1781/87] 1997, A11/B25; Kant, [1783] 1977, 4: 373n.). Then Kant’s transcendental idealism (TI) can be formulated as a two‐part philosophical equation:

Representational Transcendentalism: necessarily, all the forms or structures of rational human cognition are generated a priori by the empirically‐triggered, yet stimulus‐underdetermined, activities of our innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities (i.e., cognitive competences, cognitive faculties, cognitive powers).
Cognitive Idealism: necessarily, all the proper objects of rational human cognition are nothing but sensory appearances or phenomena (i.e., mind‐dependent, spatiotemporal, directly perceivable, apparent or manifest objects) and never things‐in‐themselves or noumena (i.e., mind‐independent, non‐sensible, non‐spatiotemporal, real essences constituted by intrinsic non‐relational properties) (see Kant, [1781/87] 1997, A369; Kant, [1783] 1977, 4: 293–4, 375).

Now (i) + (ii) also = Kant’s “Copernican revolution” in metaphysics (Kant, [1781/87] 1997, Bxvi), which I will rationally reconstruct as

The Conformity Thesis: it is not the case that rational human minds passively conform to the objects they cognize, as in classical rationalism and classical empiricism. On the contrary, necessarily, all the proper objects of rational human cognition conform to – i.e., they have the same form or structure as, or are isomorphic to – the forms or structures that are nonempirically generated by our innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities. So necessarily the essential forms or structures of the apparent or manifest world we cognize are mind‐dependent.

In this way, all versions of Kant’s TI hold that the apparent or manifest real world we cognize conforms to the nonempirical forms or structures of our innately specified cognitive capacities in some modally robust sense. Correspondingly, many Kantians are committed to what I call strong transcendental idealism (STI), which says:

Things‐in‐themselves (a.k.a. noumena, or really‐real things, i.e., things as they could exist in a “lonely” way, altogether independently of rational human minds or anything else, by virtue of their intrinsic non‐relational properties) really exist and cause our perceptions, although rational human cognizers only ever perceive mere appearances or subjective phenomena.
Rational human cognizers actually impose the nonempirical forms or structures of their innate cognitive capacities onto the apparent or manifest world they cognize – i.e., necessarily, all the essential forms or structures of the proper objects of human cognition are literally type‐identical to the a priori forms or structures that are nonempirically generated by our innately specified spontaneous cognitive capacities.
Necessarily, if all rational human cognizers went out of existence, then so would the apparent or manifest world they cognize.

But some other Kantians think that Kant’s STI is objectively false and are committed instead only to the objective truth of what I call weak or counterfactual transcendental idealism (WCTI), which says:

Things‐in‐themselves are logically possible, but at the same time it is knowably unknowable and unprovable whether things‐in‐themselves exist or not, hence for the purposes of an adequate anthropocentric or “human‐faced” metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, they can be ignored (radical agnosticism and methodological eliminativism about things‐in‐themselves).
Necessarily, all the proper objects of rational human cognition have the same forms or structures as – i.e., they are isomorphic to – the forms or structures that are nonempirically generated by our innately‐specified spontaneous cognitive capacities, but at the same time those apparent or manifest worldly forms or structures are not literally type‐identical to those a priori cognitive forms or structures (the isomorphism‐without‐type‐identity thesis).
It is a necessary condition of the existence of the apparent or manifest world that if some rational human animals were to exist in that world, then they would veridically cognize that world, via either essentially nonconceptual (i.e., intuitional) content or conceptual content, at least to some extent (the counterfactual cognizability thesis).
The apparent or manifest world has at some earlier times existed without rational human animals to cognize it veridically, and could exist even if no rational human animals existed to cognize it veridically, even though some rational human animals now actually exist in that world – e.g., I (R.H.) now actually exist in the manifestly real world – who do in fact cognize it veridically, at least to some extent (the existential thesis).

Otherwise put, Kant’s WCTI says that, necessarily, the manifestly real world we really cognize is pre‐formatted for our cognition – but it exists outside our heads, not inside our heads.

Whether one accepts STI or WCTI, it remains importantly true that Kant’s TI is sharply distinct from Berkeley’s subjective or phenomenal idealism and also from Cartesian skeptical idealism. TI entails that necessarily some directly knowable material things actually exist outside my conscious states (i.e., inner sense) in space; in other words, it entails the falsity of both Berkeleyan subjective or phenomenal idealism and Cartesian skeptical idealism alike, and also the truth of empirical realism:

[The empirical realist] grants to matter, as appearance, a reality which need not be inferred, but is immediately perceived [unmittelbar wahrgenommen].

(Kant, [1781/87] 1997, A371)

Every outer perception […] immediately proves [beweiset unmittelbar] something real in space, or rather is itself the real; to that extent, empirical realism is beyond doubt, i.e., to our outer intuitions there corresponds something real in space.

(Kant, [1781/87] 1997, A375)

And this empirical realism is in fact the explicit two‐part conclusion of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism”:

The consciousness of my existence is at the same time [zugleich] an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me.

(Kant, [1781/87] 1997, B276)

3 How the World Conforms 2: Wittgenstein, Transcendental Solipsism, and Pure Realism

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus offers a radically new conception of philosophical logic (cf. Chapter 17, LOGIC AND THE TRACTATUS), according to which:

(1) Not only mathematics but also metaphysics reduces to the propositions of logic (including both the truth‐functional tautologies and the logico‐philosophical truths of the Tractatus itself) together with factual propositions (see Chapter 12, METAPHYSICS: FROM INEFFABILITY TO NORMATIVITY).
(2) Factual propositions and facts alike reduce to logically‐structured complexes of ontologically neutral “objects,” which can variously play the structural roles of both particulars and universals (including both properties and relations).
(3) Factual propositions are nothing but linguistic facts that “picture” other facts according to one‐to‐one isomorphic correspondence relations (cf. Chapter 8, THE PICTURE THEORY and Chapter 32, WITTGENSTEIN ON INTENTIONALITY).
(4) All nonfactual propositions are either (a) “senseless” (sinnlos) truth‐functional tautologies expressing nothing but the formal meanings and deductive implications of the logical constants, (b) the logico‐philosophical propositions of the Tractatus itself, or (c) “nonsensical” (unsinnig) pseudo‐propositions that violate logico‐syntactic rules and logico‐semantic categories, especially including all the synthetic a priori claims of traditional metaphysics.
(5) The logical constants do not represent facts or refer to objects of any sort (TLP 4.0312) but instead merely “display” (darstellen) the a priori logical “scaffolding of the world” (TLP 6.124), which is also “the limits of my language” (TLP 5.6), and can only be “shown” (zeigen) or non‐propositionally indicated, not “said” (sagen) or propositionally described.
(6) The logical form of the world is therefore “transcendental”: “Logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world. Logic is transcendental” (TLP 6.13).
(7) The logical form of the world reduces to the language‐using metaphysical subject or ego, who is not in any way part of the world but in fact solipsistically identical to the form of the world itself (cf. Chapter 9, WITTGENSTEIN ON SOLIPSISM):
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.) […]
5.632 The subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world. (TLP 5.63–5.632)

Looking at theses (5), (6), and (7), we can clearly see that Wittgenstein’s radically new conception of philosophical logic is correspondingly radically ontologically ascetic, since everything logically reduces to one simple thing: the language‐using metaphysical subject or ego. Indeed, it is by means of theses (5) and (6) that Wittgenstein directly expresses the surprising and often‐overlooked but quite indisputable fact that the Tractatus is every bit as much a neo‐Kantian idealistic metaphysical treatise inspired by Schopenhauer’s neo‐Kantian World as Will and Representation (see also Brockhaus, 1991) as it is a logico‐philosophical treatise inspired by Frege’s Begriffsschrift, Frege’s attack on psychologism, Moore’s and Russell’s attacks on idealism, and Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica (cf. Chapter 4, WITTGENSTEIN AND FREGE; Chapter 5, WITTGENSTEIN AND RUSSELL; Chapter 3, WITTGENSTEIN AND SCHOPENHAUER; Chapter 6, WITTGENSTEIN, HERTZ, AND BOLTZMANN).

Wittgenstein also carefully read The Critique of Pure Reason along with Ludwig Hänsel in 1918, three years before the publication of the Tractatus. I do not think that Wittgenstein’s reading of the first Critique in 1918 directly or substantially influenced the Tractatus itself, since in fact virtually no changes were made to the manuscript of the Tractatus between 1918 and its publication in 1921 (see e.g., Potter, 2009; forthcoming). But I do think that Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is essentially the result of his indirect engagement with Kant’s Critical philosophy, via Schopenhauer, prior to 1918, and also that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is essentially, although mostly implicitly and without fanfare, the result of Wittgenstein’s direct engagement with Kant’s Critical philosophy after 1918 (but cf. Chapter 1, WITTGENSTEIN’S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT). So whereas Moore and Russell explicitly abandoned and rejected Kant’s Critical epistemology and metaphysics, Wittgenstein, both early and late, creatively absorbed and sublimated them.

From this standpoint, we can see that the Tractatus is basically an essay in transcendental logic in the Kantian sense. As Wittgenstein stresses in the preface of the Tractatus, he “makes no claim to novelty in points of detail” and does not care whether he is borrowing ideas from other philosophers, especially Frege and Russell. It is also very clear from the Notebooks 1914–16 that Wittgenstein was heavily influenced by Schopenhauer. Indeed Wittgenstein told von Wright 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” (WAM 6). And in 1931, Wittgenstein wrote that “Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, [and] Sraffa have influenced me” (CV 19). It is notable that Kant’s name does not appear on this list. But as the first epigraph of this chapter shows, in 1931 Wittgenstein also saw a fundamental parallel between his own work and “the Kantian solution to the problem of philosophy.”

More precisely, if I am correct, then:

(i) In the Tractatus Wittgenstein accepts the basic framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism/empirical realism and theory of cognition, and in particular Wittgenstein accepts a version of strong transcendental idealism or STI, but rejects Kant’s “modal dualism” of analytic and synthetic a priori necessary truths and opts for a “modal monism” of logically necessary truths.
(ii) In the Tractatus Wittgenstein accepts Schopenhauer’s reduction of both the metaphysical subject and the metaphysical object (or “thing‐in‐itself”) of Kant’s transcendental idealism, to the will.
(iii) In the Tractatus Wittgenstein accepts the Frege–Russell idea that logic is first philosophy, but rejects both of their conceptions of logic: for Wittgenstein, logic is neither the science of laws of truth nor the absolutely general science of deduction; instead, for Wittgenstein, logic is transcendental in the Kantian sense.

One of the initially most puzzling features of the Tractatus is its background metaphysics of solipsism and pure realism (cf. Chapter 9, WITTGENSTEIN ON SOLIPSISM):

5.64 Here we see that solipsism strictly carried out coincides with pure realism. The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co‐ordinated with it.

5.641 There is therefore really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non‐psychological I.

The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that “the world is my world”.

The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit – not a part of the world.

These propositions compactly express Wittgenstein’s creative absorption and sublimation of Kant’s transcendental idealism, in the specific sense of strong transcendental idealism or STI, and also Kant’s empirical realism, in the first Critique. In the Notebooks 1914–16, Wittgenstein even more explicitly presents this line of thinking:

This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

(NB 15.10.16)

What plays the specific ontological and epistemic roles of things‐in‐themselves or noumena in STI are Wittgenstein’s objects (TLP 2.014–2.0232). Correspondingly, what plays the specific ontological and epistemic roles of empirically real appearances, objective real phenomena, or objects of experience in STI are Wittgenstein’s atomic facts (TLP 1–2.11; see Chapter 7, LOGICAL ATOMISM). So in these ways, according to Wittgenstein, I am my world (TLP 5.63) and the world is my world (TLP 5.641), the subject does not belong to the world but is a limit of the world (TLP 5.631–5.632), and the metaphysical subject is a nonpsychological ego (TLP 5.633, 5.641).

What basic reasons does Wittgenstein have for holding this specifically Schopenhauerian and solipsistic version of Kant’s STI? The answer is that they follow directly from

the Tractarian thesis that the world of facts is constructed by the language‐using subject; together with
the Tractarian thesis that the objects, or Wittgensteinian things‐in‐themselves, are given as an independent constraint on language and thought; together with
the Tractarian thesis that language is fundamentally a language of thought.

In short, Wittgenstein’s specifically Schopenhauerian and solipsistic version of Kant’s STI in the Tractatus is linguistic STI (LSTI):

5.6 The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. (TLP 5.6)

Strikingly, Wittgenstein’s transcendental solipsism, i.e., his LSTI, has two importantly distinct although fully complementary dimensions:

a transcendental solipsism/LSTI of the representing subject; and
a transcendental solipsism/LSTI of the willing subject.

Or, as he puts it:

6.373 The world is independent of my will.

[…]

6.43 If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.

In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must wax or wane as a whole.

The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. (TLP 6.373–6.43)

Wittgenstein’s transcendental solipsism/LSTI of the representing subject says that all worldly facts are metaphysically dependent on my mind in the double sense that linguistic form (and its a priori essence, logical form) enters directly into the constitution of every fact, and that language itself is constructed by the individual subject. But Wittgenstein’s solipsism/LSTI of the willing subject, by sharp contrast, says that the specific internal nature of the objects is metaphysically dependent on my attitudes, desires, and volitions – on my willing. The world of facts is independent of my will, but the form and limits of the world, i.e., the global a priori structure of the world, which is partially constituted by the specific internal nature of the objects, is dependent on my will. Now the world and my life are the same thing (TLP 5.621–5.63). Thus the world can “wax or wane” as a whole, depending on my acts of willing, just as all the events of my life depend on my will. They do not however depend on my will in the sense that I can actually change any facts – I cannot—but in the sense that I can control the personal meaning or value of those facts, which is bound up essentially with the world’s global structure. So my will determines how I value the world and my life, which in turn partially determines the “substance” of the world by partially determining the nature of the objects, and thereby partially determining the global a priori structure of the world. In this way, the world of the happy person, say, is metaphysically distinct from the world of the unhappy person. Here we can see that although the constitution of the facts is dual (with language on the one side, and the objects on the other) the metaphysical subject ultimately grounds both of the dual inputs by acting both as the language‐user and also as the partial determiner of the specific character of the objects and of the world’s global a priori structure, i.e., of its transcendental structure. In that sense, whether I live in “the world of the happy,” or not, is solely up to me, and something for which I am alone fully responsible, no matter what the natural facts may be. This is obviously a doctrine that Wittgenstein shares with the existentialists, and this elective affinity shows up again in his later reflections on Christianity and Kierkegaard (CV 53).

This existential up‐to‐me‐ness of world‐structuring, in turn, is directly reflected in the dependence of the world on the individual representing subject. Wittgenstein wants to argue that his transcendental solipsism/LSTI, when properly understood, is in fact a “pure realism.” In order to make sense of this, we must remember that the classical philosophical thesis of realism comes in two very different versions:

Noumenal Realism: things in the world have an essentially mind‐independent existence and nature – i.e., they are things‐in‐themselves.
Empirical Realism: things in the apparent or manifest world are directly knowable by means of veridical human cognition, at least to some extent.

Classical rationalists and classical empiricists hold (i) – with sharply different degrees of epistemic confidence about the knowability of things‐in‐themselves, to be sure – and reject (ii). By sharp contrast, both Kant and Wittgenstein hold (ii) and firmly reject any version of (i), and also hold that in order to be an empirical realist/pure realist, one must also be a transcendental idealist/transcendental solipsist.

More precisely, Wittgenstein’s pure realism is that nothing mediates between our correct use of language and the facts we thereby know: we cognize facts directly through the correct use of complete propositional symbols, and we cognize objects directly through the correct use of names. Then, provided that our judgments are true, we know the facts directly. This does not, however, in and of itself tell us how transcendental solipsism/LSTI leads to pure realism. Here Wittgenstein wants to say that his transcendental solipsism/LSTI is not a solipsism/LSTI of the psychologically individual subject, who is individuated by her body and her own personal history, but rather a solipsism/LSTI of the individual subject considered as an anonymous or generic representer and language‐user. This anonymous or generic subject is an “extensionless point” precisely because she functions only as the means of representing the world. Here Wittgenstein uses the striking analogy of the visual field and the eye: the seeing eye is the necessary vehicle or means of vision, but it is not itself part of the visual field or its contents; rather the seeing eye is presupposed by the visual field and its contents. Similarly, the world contains all the facts, including the facts about my psychologically individual subject. But when all of these facts have been recorded, there is still something left over, namely, the anonymous or generic representing language‐using subject as such, which is contentless, yet presupposed by all the facts. Then when we consider the world of facts from the standpoint of that anonymous or generic representing language‐using subject as such, we recognize that this entire world (my world, my life, the totality of facts) is directly presented to me and also fully knowable by me just insofar as I linguistically represent it.

4 How the World Conforms 3: To Forms of Life

For Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, and also throughout his later philosophy, including for instance the writings published as On Certainty, language is ultimately a kind of rational human action, indeed the fundamental kind of rational human action. To twist Goethe’s famous line from Faust (“In the beginning was the Deed”; Wittgenstein quotes this, see e.g., OC §402), we can say that for the later Wittgenstein meaningful utterances just are human deeds, and the language‐practices made up of meaningful words, a.k.a. “language‐games,” just are living collections of human deeds:

Words are deeds [Taten]. (CV §46)

In this way, I should like to say the words “Oh, let him come!” are charged with my desire. And words can be wrung from us, – like a cry. Words can be hard to say: such, for example, as are used to effect a renunciation, or to confess a weakness. (Words are also deeds [Taten].)
(PI §546)

Rational human animals are essentially linguistic agents, and our use of language is essentially the mastery of a skill (PI §20). In turn, this opens up the very idea of meaning to every conceivable role that language can play in rational human activity (PI §23). What I want to propose now is that although in the Investigations, via the private language argument (PI §§ 243–315; see Chapter 28, PRIVACY AND PRIVATE LANGUAGE), the later Wittgenstein clearly, explicitly, and specifically rejects the solipsism of LSTI in the Tractatus, he never rejects and in fact permanently continues to hold onto the transcendental idealism of LSTI – only in later writings he does so in a communitarian or social‐practical version that is essentially equivalent to Kant’s weak or counterfactual transcendental idealism, WCTI (see also Lear, 1982).

The basic connection here relies on the notion of rational human life, i.e., the individual and social biological, conscious, and cognitive life of language‐using creatures like us. Now Kant essentially identifies rational human mind and rational human life:

Life is the subjective condition of all our possible experience.
(Kant, [1783] 1977, 4: 335)

The mind for itself is entirely life (the principle of life itself).
(Kant, [1790] 2000, 5: 278)

In the Tractatus, exactly the same essential identification is made, in two explicit steps and an implicit conclusion: (1) the world is life, and (2) I am my world, therefore (3) I am life:

5.621 The world and life are one.

5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
(TLP 5.621–5.63)

In the Investigations, this two‐part essential identification between rational human mind and life is extended to a four‐part essential identification that includes the intentional activity of judging and also the social language‐using practices – language‐games – in which rational human mind, life, and judging are ineluctably embedded:

The term “language‐game” is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of a language is part of an activity [Tätigkeit], or a form of life [Lebensform].
(PI §23)

So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false? – It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.
(PI §241)

If language is to be a means of communication there must be agreement not only in definitions but also (queer as this may sound) in judgments. This seems to abolish logic, but does not do so.
(PI §242)

And in On Certainty, the fourfold essential identification of rational human mind, life, judging, and language‐games is extended to an explicit acknowledgment of the cognitive‐practical apriority and certainty that naturally flow from our membership in language‐games:

We just can’t investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put. My life consists in my being content to accept many things.
(OC §§343–4)

You must bear in mind that the language‐game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds […]. It is there – like our life. (OC §559; cf. Chapter 35, WITTGENSTEIN ON KNOWLEDGE AND CERTAINTY and Chapter 36, WITTGENSTEIN ON SKEPTICISM)

If rational human mind, life, judging, and language‐games are all essentially the same, and if these naturally yield cognitive‐practical apriority and certainty for the members of language‐games, then it follows that the a priori forms and structures of rational human mind are essentially the same as the a priori forms and structures of life, judging, and language‐using. And if the manifestly real world necessarily conforms to the former, as The Conformity Thesis requires, then it necessarily conforms to the latter too. So the manifestly real world in which we live, move, and have our being necessarily conforms to our forms of life: “what has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say, forms of life” (PPF §345).

5 The Critique of Self‐Alienated Philosophy 1: Kant’s Critical Meta‐Philosophy

The 1781 edition (A) of the Critique of Pure Reason does not include a motto. But the 1787 edition (B) includes a Latin quotation from the preface of Francis Bacon’s Great Instauration of 1620. Now, given that “instauration” means “restoration” or “renewal,” the point of the Motto, then, is just to establish the following analogy:

As The Great Instauration is to scholastic metaphysics, so the Critique of Pure Reason is to classical rationalist metaphysics.

Both are proposing a restorative, renewing, and indeed revolutionary anthropocentric turn in philosophy. But Kant’s revolutionary turn goes well beyond Bacon’s, and has three sources:

the self‐annihilating character of classical rationalist metaphysics, demonstrated by the antinomy of pure reason, evident in the fact that contradictory claims seem to be equally supported by metaphysical reasoning; this demonstrated the need for a critique of pure reason, discovered by Kant in 1766, and beautifully captured by the first few sentences of the A edition preface:
Human reason has this peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the very nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason […]. The battlefield of these endless controversies is called metaphysics.

(Kant, [1781/87] 1997, Avii–viii)
Hume’s skeptical empiricism about the content, truth, and justification of human cognition, especially as applied to the classical rationalist metaphysical concepts of causation and causal necessity, remembered by Kant in 1771 or 1772; and
Kant’s own revolutionary idealistic thesis about the necessary conformity of the ontic structure of space and time to the mentalistic structure of rational human sensible cognition, discovered and formulated by him between “the year of great light,” 1769, and 1772.

These three philosophical sources combined to produce the three‐part critical meta‐philosophy of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is

the rejection of classical rationalist metaphysics,
the rejection of the equal and opposite destructive and self‐alienating radical skepticism that follows from the self‐annihilating character of classical rationalist metaphysical reasoning, and
the revolutionary replacement of classical rationalist metaphysics by a new, inherently anthropocentric, and mitigated kind of rationalist metaphysics: transcendental idealism.

6 The Critique of Self‐Alienated Philosophy 2: Wittgensteinian Analysis as Critique

According to what I call the logico‐decompositional theory of philosophical analysis, dominant in the writings of Frege, Moore, Russell, and early Wittgenstein, from the late 1870s to the mid‐1920s, philosophical analysis is the process of logically decomposing propositions into conceptual or metaphysical simples that are mind‐independently real yet immediately and infallibly apprehended with self‐evidence, and then rigorously logically reconstructing those propositions by formal deduction from general logical laws and premises that express logical definitional knowledge in terms of the simple constituents (Hanna, 2007). But in the Investigations, the later Wittgenstein’s devastating critique of the semantic and logical doctrines of his own earlier philosophical self in the Tractatus motivates a radically wider and more open‐textured conception of philosophical analysis. At the same time, his self‐critique of Tractarian solipsism – the private language argument – further radicalizes his conception of philosophical analysis by rejecting several of the fundamental assumptions of classical rationalist Cartesian epistemology and metaphysics that had been explicitly or implicitly retained by Frege, Moore, Russell, and “the author of the Tractatus Logico‐Philosophicus” (PI §23). Indeed, Wittgenstein’s radical transformation of philosophical analysis goes significantly and seriously beyond the analytic tradition, and also returns us full‐circle to Kantian transcendental Critical meta‐philosophy.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein extends the Frege–Moore–Russell conception of logical‐decompositional analysis. According to the Tractarian account, the proper targets of this analysis are propositions. Logical analysis consists in completely and uniquely decomposing propositional symbols into their constituent simple symbols, whether names of objects or logical constants (TLP 3.23–3.261). Objects are known by direct cognitive acquaintance (TLP 2.0123–2.01231), and logical constants are known “transcendentally,” or by means of a priori showing (TLP 4.12–4.1213). Every proposition has a unique and complete decomposition (TLP 3.25). The way in which those names are configured into a propositional structure is made manifest through the process of analysis itself. Logical analysis is thus essentially a series of logical “elucidations” (Erläuterungen). Indeed, logical analysis is essentially the activity (Tätigkeit) but not the theory (Lehre) of decomposing a proposition into its simple constituent symbols (TLP 4.112).

More precisely, the Tractarian activist conception of logical analysis has two basic parts, and correspondingly two basic aims.

First, the activity of analysis is a “critique of language” (TLP 4.0031) in that it displays the fact that most propositions and questions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but nonsensical (unsinnig) (TLP 4.003), recognizes that truths of logic are tautologous and non‐pictorial, hence “say nothing” (sagen nichts) (TLP 6.11), then asserts as fully significant only the propositions of natural science (TLP 6.53), then recognizes its own propositions as nonsensical, and finally ends in mystical silence (TLP 6.54). (On this latter point see especially Chapter 12, METAPHYSICS: FROM INEFFABILITY TO NORMATIVITY and Chapter 10, RESOLUTE READINGS OF THE TRACTATUS.) Thus the first basic aim of Tractarian logical analysis is to articulate the difference between sense (factual meaningfulness) and nonsense. Here we must remember that “nonsense” for early Wittgenstein is literally what is other than sense, i.e., everything of a cognitive or semantic nature that is other than what is described or pictured or “said” by atomic propositions. Thus it can be either sheer absurdity, or meaninglessness, e.g., Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky, or else it can be illuminatingly what is other than sense in some other nonatomic‐fact‐representing, but still logically, semantically, aesthetically, or ethically important way.

Second, the activity of logical analysis is the process of logically clarifying thoughts, consisting in a series of propositional elucidations that “make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are […] opaque and blurred” (TLP 4.112). Thus the second basic aim of Tractarian logical analysis is to reveal the deep or logico‐grammatical structure of natural language and thought, as opposed to its merely surface or psychologico‐grammatical structure. In order to reveal the deep structure of language, Tractarian philosophers must construct and study symbolic logical systems, such as those developed in Frege’s Begriffsschrift and Whitehead and Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Such symbolic systems are “ideal” in the sense that the syntax of a Begriffsschrift‐type notational system itself displays, encodes, or mirrors the deep structure of natural language and thought, and thereby also the deep structure of the world of facts that language and thought represent. Even so, Tractarian analysis does not aim at the prescriptive reform of natural language or thought. On the contrary, everything in natural language and thought is perfectly in order, just as it is (TLP 5.5563).

In the Investigations there is a radical turn in Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy from logical analysis or the “logical clarification of thoughts” (TLP 4.112), to what I will call the critique of pure logic, or CPL, which says that logic is not anything “sublime” but instead is really nothing but grammar. Here is a rational reconstruction of CPL:

Frege, Moore, Russell, the author of the Tractatus, Carnap, the members of the Vienna Circle, and others, all explicitly or implicitly hold the thesis that logic is something “sublime”: universal, a priori, necessary, and noumenally essential (PI §89).
Furthermore, logic is required to carry out any complete or partial decompositional analysis of our forms of language, propositions, and thoughts, which reveals their “hidden” “simple” structures and constituents, that is, their decomposable essences (PI §§91–6).
But in fact,
1. (3i) every sentence in our language is in order just as it is;
2. (3ii) vagueness is a constitutive feature of meaning;
3. (3iii) language is essentially a spatiotemporal phenomenon, not something abstract; and
4. (3iv) the essence of language, proposition, thought, and the world is something that “already lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement” (PI §92; see §§98–100, 108–9).
So neither language, nor propositions, nor thought, nor the world have hidden decomposable noumenal essences, and therefore the thesis that logic is sublime is false.
Furthermore the thesis that logic is sublime turns out to be only a methodological assumption we have unintentionally imposed upon the phenomena, indeed nothing but an artifact of an idealized metaphysical “picture” that lay hidden in our language and held us captive (PI §§101–8, 110–15).
Now,
the philosophy of logic speaks of sentences and words in exactly the sense in which we speak of them in ordinary life when we say, e.g., “Here is a Chinese sentence,” or “No, that only looks like writing; it is actually an ornament” and so on. (PI §108)
That is: we can regard logic as purely descriptive, not noumenally essential; and “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical use to their everyday use” by asking “is the word ever actually used in this way in the language which is its original home” (PI §116).
Therefore we should adopt the thesis that logic is really nothing but “grammar,” the latter
shedding light on our problem by clearing misunderstandings away […]. […] misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language […]. […] [And] some of them can be removed by substituting one form of expression for another; this may be called an “analysis” of our forms of expression, for the process is sometimes like one of taking things apart. (PI §90)
Furthermore, the goal of logic‐as‐grammar is to produce a “perspicuous representation” of language, propositions, thought, and the world, which produces “that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (PI §122).
So logic is not sublime, and logical‐decompositional analysis is impossible, but logic‐as‐grammar is possible, and grammar in this sense is the descriptive logic of our language‐games, i.e., what represents a priori forms of life, which are transcendentally embedded in our communal practices.
Therefore to the extent that logic as a theory of valid reasoning still exists in the form of logic‐as‐grammar, this logic is fully transcendental in the Kantian and also Tractarian sense.

Now let us suppose that CPL is sound. What does philosophy become after the collapse of logical analysis? Here are the three essential texts:

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose. (PI §127)

If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to question them, because everyone would agree to them. (PI §128)

It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of words in unheard‐of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But that simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question […]. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies. (PI §133)

And here is the two‐part answer to that question – “what does philosophy become after the collapse of logical analysis?”

First, the later Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy in fact shares some fundamental features in common with his activist conception of logical analysis in the Tractatus (cf. Chapter 13, PHILOSOPHY AND PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD). But this activist conception of logical analysis is now minus the “sublimity” or “noumenal essentialism” of logic, that is to say, minus the comprehensive noumenal essentialist metaphysical picture of logic, language, thought, and the world that would justify the logical‐decompositional theory of analysis, but still accepting the transcendental character of logic, now understood to be logic‐as‐grammar. Logic is not sublime, but logic is transcendental, even in the Investigations. In short, the later Wittgenstein’s radical turn in philosophy towards logic‐as‐grammar is simply a radical return to Kant’s Critical meta‐philosophy, that is, a radical return to transcendental logic understood as transcendental dialectic, which is the meta‐philosophical critique of metaphysical illusion in philosophy, as a form of rational self‐knowledge (Kant, [1781/87] 1997, A61–2/B85–6, A293–8/B349–54). The main idea is that, as a logical grammarian, one

displays and diagnoses the dialectical structure of philosophical problems, i.e., displays and diagnoses “the civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life” (PI §125);
describes, unpacks, compares, and contrasts the concepts implicit in our various ordinary uses of language and states a priori truisms about them (PI §§123–6); and then
stops doing philosophy when one wants to, in order to change one’s life, or the direction of one’s life, and in order to achieve “insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes” (PI §133).

Second, and as a direct consequence of this, the other crucial thing about the later Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy is that it is fundamentally noncognitive, that is, fundamentally desire‐based, emotive, normative, and practical. On this view, philosophy is neither a natural science nor a mere source of factual knowledge but rather essentially a self‐conscious and deliberative activity – that of “doing philosophy.” In turn, doing philosophy means achieving perspicuous insight into what already is completely there in front of us: rational human animals and their language, fully embedded in their apparent or manifest world, intentionally acting according to the normatively guiding a priori structures of their living, shared social practices, i.e., according to the forms of rational human life (PI §241). In the light of this, we can now also say that the aim of philosophy for the later Wittgenstein is precisely to achieve a Kant‐style Critical insight into what lies before everyone’s eyes, i.e., into the cognitive and practical capacities of creatures like us, and into the nature of our apparent or manifest world.

7 Conclusion

As Quine (see, e.g., Hylton, 2007, especially chs 9 and 12), Reichenbach (1951), and Sellars so clearly saw in the 1950s, after the successive downfalls of logicism and logical empiricism/positivism during the first half of the twentieth century, analytic philosophy became, essentially, a series of minor variations on the theme of scientific philosophy:

In the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not.

(Sellars, 1963, p.173)

This is philosophy in Sellars’s scientific image. But the later Wittgenstein, following Kant’s lead, radically challenges and rejects this essentially scientistic conception of philosophy:

I had to deny scientific knowledge [Wissen] in order to make room for faith [Glauben].

(Kant, [1781/87] 1997, Bxxix–xxx)

It was true to say that our considerations could not be scientific ones [wissenschaftlich]. It was not of any possible interest to us to find out empirically ‘that, contrary to our preconceived ideas, it is possible think such‐and‐such’ – whatever that may mean […]. And we may not advance any kind of theory […]. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. These are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. (PI §109)

In this way, transcendental anthropology as practiced by Kant and Wittgenstein does not either seek a humanly impossible, absolutely justifying, pure rational insight into things‐in‐themselves, or draw Pyrrhonian skeptical conclusions from our inevitable and tragic failure to achieve a godlike “intellectual intuition” of ourselves and the world (Kant, [1781/87] 1997, B72), or fall into scientism. For all three of these philosophical projects, whether dogmatically rationalistic, destructively skeptical, or reductively naturalistic, are equally inherently self‐alienating and “inauthentic” in the existentialists’ sense. Indeed, it is significant that even when, in 1986, Hacker officially rescinds his earlier Kant‐oriented interpretation of Wittgenstein from 1972, he still admits that

more than any other philosophers, Kant and Wittgenstein were concerned with the nature of philosophy itself and sought to curb its metaphysical pretensions by clarifying its status and circumscribing what one may rationally hope for in philosophical investigation. Both saw philosophical and metaphysical pretensions of reason as at least a large part of the subject, and the eradication of such illusions as a major goal of their work.

(Hacker, 1972/86, p.207)

Otherwise put, with a tragic sense of life, Kant and Wittgenstein both fully recognize that we must renounce every variety of the bad faith of reason in order to make room for an authentic, autonomous, rational human life, and in turn, in order to make room for an anthropocentric rationalist version of Kierkegaard’s “knighthood of faith,” as it were, the knighthood of rational faith, whereby you can radically change your life, or change the direction of your life – and this is the deepest lesson of transcendental anthropology.

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