THINKING WITH WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE

THINKING WITH WITTGENSTEIN ON LANGUAGE

D. R. Khashaba

In the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus Wittgenstein was very much concerned with language. That should be a platitude since already in the preface we read that “the aim of the book is to draw a limit to thought, or rather—not to thought, but to the expression of thoughts … It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense” (tr. Pears/McGuinness). But in this paper it is not my intention to follow Wittgenstein’s treatment of language throughout the Tractatus but to focus on one key passage where he says:

“Man possesses the ability to construct languages capable of expressing every sense, without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is—just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced.

“Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.

“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.

Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.

“The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.” (4002, tr. Pears/McGuinness)

In “The Other Wittgenstein” (Plato’s Universe of Discourse, 2o15) I wrote apropos of this passage:

“In 4.002 we have what might have been the substance of the Philosophical Investigations. Unfortunately there Wittgenstein trapped himself in a maze of fictional language-game puzzles. Had he instead cared to elucidate and develop this passage, that would have been a more valuable contribution to the study of language. I was tempted to comment on many of the thoughts contained in this passage; I refrained, thinking there would be opportunity for that when examining the Investigations; unfortunately the Investigations took a different course.”

It occurred to me to go back to it and do now what I had meant to do then. On reflection I found that Wittgenstein’s text gives rise to extremely puzzling questions.

Can we properly speak of constructing “languages capable of expressing every sense”? Are we not putting the cart before the horse here? Does not ‘sense’ (meaning, idea) first spring spontaneously then finds expression in spoken word or sign or gesture? Or maybe it is better to say that any separation of thought and expression is a theoretical fiction that necessarily breeds absurdities if taken seriously or regarded as final. For me, mind, intelligence, is the primary reality, the only reality of which we have immediate awareness since it is our own inner reality. That is the inescapable mystery of consciousness for which there is no explanation. That primary intelligence is creative, ever breeding ideas, ideas objectified in one mode of expression or another. Thus the first question takes us beyond language and beyond epistemology to metaphysics.

After speaking of languages “capable of expressing every sense” Wittgenstein continues: “without having any idea how each word has meaning or what its meaning is”. Here we face once more the artificial splitting of what is one into a duality. The word is its meaning, the meaning is the reality of the word. It is by creating the fiction of a meaning that is other than the word that analysts, from Frege to Moore to the latest of the brood, have condemned themselves to going round and round in vacuous circles. Wittgenstein then adds: “just as people speak without knowing how the individual sounds are produced”. I think this is not the same. How each word has meaning is a pseudo problem, an empty conundrum, but how the sounds are produced is a physico-physiological problem.

“Everyday language is a part of the human organism and is no less complicated than it.

“It is not humanly possible to gather immediately from it what the logic of language is.”

I am not quite sure what Wittgenstein has in mind when he speaks of the logic of language, but here once again we are liable to having a problem of inverted priorities. Language is not formed in conformity to a prior logic any more than thought proceeds in compliance with Aristotelian logic or any formal logic. Wittgenstein may have been thinking of the impossibility of deriving the “perfect language” of Logical Symbolism immediately from common language. That is impossible simply because that logic is an artificial, arbitrary, product. I think my suggestion is confirmed by the next paragraph in Wittgenstein’s text:

“Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes.”

Language does not disguise thought. Even muddled language gives true expression to the muddled thought that gave it birth. That is what the Socratic elenchus sought to remedy.

“The tacit conventions on which the understanding of everyday language depends are enormously complicated.”

That is so true. Not only are the conventions (Wittgenstein’s stillschweigenden Abmachungen) embedded in common language complicated, but the simplest utterance is rooted in circles within circles of contexts that can never be exhaustively delineated, so that rather than saying that the conventions “are enormously complicated” we should say that the presupposed conditions for the understanding of any articulate statement are truly infinite. That sufficiently shows that the scheme of a “perfect language” is intrinsically flawed. No wonder Wittgenstein in the end found logic saying nothing.

Cairo, October 19, 2015.