World, Thing, Case, Is, The

"The world is all that is the case." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

With one deceptively simple sentence, a proposition really, Wittgenstein sets the course for much of Twentieth Century philosophy. What does he accomplish here? Let's take a look.

The form of Wittgenstein's proposition is this: {x is P}, where 'x' is 'the world', and 'P' is the entire set of things that are the case. Of the things that are the case, the world is all of them. In such a formulation, P is predicated of x. For there to be a world, there must first be at least one thing that is the case. And if we find something to be the case, then it is necessarily included in that world.

But what is the meaning of this statement? What sort of world does Wittgenstein envision here? What can we glean from an analysis of these eight single-syllable words? There's really nothing in this sentence that a rudimentary reader of the English language would have trouble reading. And at first face, upon reading it, most readers might very well think they understand it and move on to the next sentence.

Before moving on, it will pay to analyze this statement. What assumptions does it entail, what conclusions does it imply? We can learn quite a great deal about the young Wittgenstein's philosophy by taking this one proposition apart and, in the process, get a taste of how philosophers read and think about things.

You wouldn't know it from a cursory reading, but Wittgenstein essentially gives the game away with his very first word: 'the'. He doesn't say 'A world is all that is the case.' or 'One of many worlds...' He says 'THE world'. Implying there is one unitary reality which he then proceeds to name 'world'. There is A reality. One reality. Not many and not none. There is something out there which just is THE world. It is something around which philosophers, or at least readers of his treatise, can unify.

A world is a thing, and there is one and, by implication, only one of them. We shall have to read on to see how he defines and delimits this world, for this is the aim of the proposition. To wit: to indicate how, in philosophy at least, this 'world' can be formed. If there is a world (and Witttgenstein asserts there is so long as something is the case), it is comprised of the entirety of things that are the case. If something is indeed determined to be the case, everything that is the case therefore constitutes the world.

There is no 'my world' and 'your world' nor is there some lesser world subordinate to a greater world. In science, for example, the most powerful theoretical view is the one that comprises the greatest number of verifiable statements about the reality under observation. More powerful theories supersede lesser explanatory theories. For Wittgenstein, by contrast, THE world exists. It is independent of our knowledge of it, and it contains everything that can possibly be the case. If we discover something to be the case that previously we did not know to be the case, this does not alter THE world. It merely increases our knowledge of THE world.

The 'is' in Wittgenstein's statement is formally a copulative and a powerful one at that, inextricably linking the subject with its predicate. Identifying them for once and for all.

But it accomplishes far more than this. It insists not only that this unitary world exists but that it has substance. The world IS. It exists as the totality of everything that is the case. And then he proposes to tell us of what that world is constituted.

What, then, is the substance of this Wittgensteinian world? Why, of the things that are the case, it is all of them. Now, what can we infer from his use of this locution 'is the case'?

The predicate 'is the case' is philosophical jargon meaning 'true', or more specifically 'logically true'. If you ever studied symbolic logic, you learned about truth tables—variables, operations, connectors, etc. Logical propositions are always either true or false.

If we say that it is the case that 'grass is green', then we mean that if we go out an look at a patch of grass we will all agree that it is green. Or, technically, 'grass is green' is true if and only if grass is green.

[There is not space here to discuss 'greenness', nor is it implied in Wittgenstein's seminal proposition. I'll save that for another day.]

Truth and is-the-caseness, though, are values ascribed to propositions. This is very important in philosophy. Truth is not something that exists in reality. Rather it is a value we give to propositions.

Technically speaking, truth does not exist in Wittgenstein's 'world'. Rather, it is the qualifying quality of the things ('is-the-caseness') that ultimately go to make up THE world. But what exactly are the sorts of things that make up this world? This is where it gets interesting (for philosophers, at least).

Things like grass and greenness do not exist in Wittgenstein's world if we read him aright.

For example, we don't say 'grass is the case', or 'grass is true'. Nor do we say 'green is the case', or 'green is true'. Those plant blade thingies that sprout up from the ground and are often found in people's yards and have appearance of greenness (except maybe in winter or in drought) are not the sort of thing that goes to make up Wittgenstein's world.

Moreover, we don't say grass is green is the case, rather we say 'grass is green' is the case. Is-the-caseness, in this instance, has nothing to do with grass or greenness; it has to do with the mapping of the proposition 'grass is green' to the color of the grass. If the proposition can be demonstrated to map onto things, then it is case and it goes to make up the world.

We might, thus, say there is some grass over there and it has the aspect of greenness. Thus, 'the grass is green' is one of things of which we might say that it is the case. 'The grass is green' gives us, to use Wittgenstein's term, a picture of reality.

The Tractarian world comprises all and only those statements that are true. It is, in a sense, a picture world. A linguistic, or languaged, model of the world. This seems to be what Wittgenstein is saying here. He is not making an assertion about the rocks and seas and stars and people in what we normally think of as the physical reality we all inhabit.

Rather, he is making an assertion about a technical, philosophical world, a picture world of true propositions which, ideally, in the best of all possible worlds, map precisely and completely onto the normal world of rocks and birds and plants and things, etc. And, according to him, there is only one such world, the one which contains ALL of these true propositions.

In other words, we cannot make any headway in making complete and coherent systems of philosophy if we are dealing with the so-called real world, the sensory world of things. We must make ourselves a picture, a precisely circumscribed and accurate model that we can deal with linguistically, that is to say whose axioms and rules we can delineate, a model that contains all and only those propositions we can demonstrate to be true. A complete picture of reality.

Thus, to know the world is to know all possible true propositional statements about that world. To understand it is to be able to generate all true propositions from a given set of axioms and rules. This is what we can glean from an analysis of this one simple statement. Esoteric enough for you? Ready to move on to the second sentence of the book?

It's fair to say that Wittgenstein achieves here what novelists, poets, and other artists seek to accomplish via their works, namely the creation of a world. Here, he takes the opportunity in this prefatory statement to his Tractatus to define the precise parameters of this world.

This is what we can take away from that first sentence. It is, of course, subject to correction, and if Wittgenstein is any sort of philosopher (which he is!), he will address and explain everything we've inferred from it.

This is how philosophers think. They set up precise, technical definitions of the terms they use and operate within those limits. Terms like 'being', 'reality', 'existence', 'world', 'mind', 'knowledge', 'meaning', 'truth', 'beauty', 'freedom', and etc., and etc. all have very circumscribed meanings in philosophical discourse, quite unlike the sort of loosey-goosey way we throw terms about in our day-to-day discussions. In fact, much of philosophical dialogue revolves around making sure the conversants are not talking past each other. Making sure they are agreed on the precise technical meanings, limits, and uses of the terms they are bandying about and about which they are debating. In this, philosophy is different from other forms of discourse.

Wittgenstein's world-making, of course, raises a whole set of problems, some of which he is at pains to decide in the Tractatus. For example, such a proposition begs the question whether there is a real world independent of our knowledge of it—or, our statements about it. That is to say, we have the ontology of the world, everything included in it (i.e., everything that is the case), but we simply lack the foundational wherewithal to determine whether Wittgenstein's Tractarian world completely and coherently captures reality.

The Wittgensteinian world seems set, fixed. This is signaled by the power of 'is'. In his world, can a proposition that was once true cease being true? Can a proposition that once was not-the-case ever become the case? Do new true propositions emerge? Do old true propositions ever fade away?

How do we know that the Tractarian world contains every possible true proposition? If this world includes all and only those propositions that are true, then, by implication, it excludes all and only those propositions that are not true. But can we conceive of propositions that are neither true nor false, and in such an instance should they be included in this world or excluded from it? Are there propositions that are both the case and not the case, and does the world include or exclude them?

Are there aspects of the world that are not susceptible to languaged propositions? That is to say, is the language of propositions all powerful? Is it capable of determining all possible worlds?

What do we do about undecidable propositions? For example, does the Tractarian world contain the statement 'The world is all that is the case'? That is to say, in the Tractarian world is there any way ever to know whether this proposition is or is not the case? Is "'The world is all that is the case' is the case" determinably true or false? There seems to be no way to decide this question in the Tractarian world.

Why do we need these sorts of specialized, technical terminologies and models? What about everyday language and speech? Don't carpenters and business people and politicians and others effectively communicate without resort to all this recursive, semantic, meta-linguistic nit-picking?

Some of these intractable problems (and, of course, others) ultimately caused Wittgenstein to abandon this attempt at articulating the basic principles of a systematic philosophy. This came about in his later book, the only other book he completed and published during his lifetime, Philosophical Investigations.

Confused? Welcome to the world of Philosophy where sometimes being wrong can be a very valuable exercise. It's not that you're wrong that matters, it's how you're wrong.

Witt and Wisdom

“I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction or your life)

It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

The point is that a sound doctrine need not take hold of you; you can follow it as you would a doctor’s prescription. – But here you need something to move you and turn you in a new direction. – (I.e. this is how I understand it.) Once you have been turned round, you must stay turned round.

Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion.

Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value

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"If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud." Conversation with Rush Rhees

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'Wisdom is grey.' Life, on the other hand, and religion are full of color."  Culture and Value.

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"Wisdom is something I never would expect from Freud. Cleverness, certainly; but not wisdom" (Lectures and Conversations, p. 41).

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"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed 'Wisdom.' And then I know exactly what is going to follow: 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'" Conversation with Rush Rhees

Realisms

Mainly because I'm dense—a slow-learner, if you will—I want to try to get my head around a term that gets thrown around in discussing fiction and literary criticism (and in other contexts, too, but they're not the ones that concern me just now). And that term? Realism.

In his now infamous broadside against Zadie Smith's White Teeth, James Wood called out a trend he called 'hysterical realism.' By that, he seemed to indict the sort of fiction that allows too much of the noise of the world into its cocoon. You find it, presumably, in William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Nicholson Baker, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, William Vollmann, and others of its chief offenders. One thinks, too, of Tom Wolfe and his ilk. It's a 'the world is too much with us' sort of concept where the 'news of the world' takes precedence over the 'news of the soul.'

Smith riposted in the NYRB, in an article comparing two recent novels, Netherland and Remainder (both of which I've reviewed here), with a stab at something she labeled 'lyrical realism'.

Once you start qualifying a term like 'realism' you begin splitting into factions and you start losing focus on the substantive issue. Both Wood and Smith are arguing FOR realism, they just differ over which flavor of realism they prefer. Realism is a sort of catch-all term that can mean so many different things it has become virtually meaningless. Arguments shoot by each in the night without ever really touching because the antagonists hold two different views of realism. The debate often is really over what kind of realism or what meaning to give it.

Below, I've tried to sort out some of the things that go by the name 'realism'. The following is by way of anatomy, then, rather than polemic.

First, the term realism is used to describe a period or genre of literature. Thus, we might describe the works of Balzac or Dickens and their ilk as realism—19th Century, French, English, whatever. This category is generally for literary historians. On the genre view, realism is opposed to fantasy or allegory or myth. Or, we might say how much we admire Raymond Chandler's gritty noir realism, referring, for example, to the seaminess of the world he depicts and the sordidness of his characters. On this view, realism is opposed to a presumed sugarcoating of things in, for example, bourgeois fiction.

Another use of the term realism has to do with with the traditional view stemming from the work of Aristotle. It goes by other names such as Mimesis or verisimilitude. On this view, it is the world to which the text points that alone is real. This is the most obvious, most common usage of the term. It is analogous to what philosophers call the correspondence theory of truth, or the propositional form we find in Tractarian Wittgenstein. I believe the term 'hysterical realism' refers to an extreme adherence to this form: the perceptual world of table and chairs intrudes too noisily on the novel.

On yet a third view, it is capturing the character's consciousness of his or her own world that alone is real. The 'form of life' (to borrow and perhaps bastardize yet another Wittgensteinian term) the text embodies or portrays alone is real. The perceptual/psychological/emotional/ethical/social being whose expression just is the text alone is real. Stated another way, the form of life inside of whose head/being the text transpires is what is realistic. We may liken this to the philosophical coherentist view of truth. The character, on this view, has no purchase on any truth about the world. In fact, s/he may misperceive his/her world and that is what is realistic about the work. The character's attitude, or stance, with respect to the world is what matters. This is what is behind the privileging of 'free indirect style' by such public critics as James Wood.

It is between these two views that a significant polarity has arisen: the 'world is too much with us' school (The Recognitions is ur-text here, with a little 'u') vs. the 'navel [sic] observatory' school (contemplative narrative where everything takes place in the head, so to speak, of the character(s); the 'yes, Virginia, there is a soul or the remnants thereof' school; Augie March is the ur-text here).

These three views are not the only ones, however; though to hear some of the proponents you would think they had exhausted the richness of the term realism.

In an earlier post, I cited Maurice Shroder's view that the novel alone is the most realistic literary art form because "protagonists succeed only because they have let fall their illusions and their pride. Such a fall, in a novel, is a happy one, since it represents the completion of that educational process with which the novel deals, an education into the realities of the material world and of human life in society." Thus, realism is an essential characteristic, perhaps the essential characteristic, of the novel and describes the arc of the character's (whatever his attitude) coming to grips/terms with his/her world (however conceived).

A further view of realism holds that it is the reader's response to the text that alone is real. Roland Barthes exploded the myth of Balzacian realism in his monumental S/Z. As Barthes says, the reader is no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text. There are many versions of reader response theory, but the point is that it is what the text implies alone that is real. Thus, all men are mortal; Gatsby is quite a man, but a man nonetheless; so, draw your own conclusions. Realism relates strictly to the communicative effect of the text. Philosophically, this flows from the deconstructionists' notion that the text is an empty signifier [where signifier + signified = sign]. It is, in effect, a sociological realism: what is real is the way the text is emblematic of [feminist, queer, Marxist, Darwinian, (insert your pet theory here)] theory, for theory alone is real.

A more analytic view is that it is the text alone that is real. William Gass is the most vocal proponent of this view. The reality of the text just is the words on the page. The text thinks the world. Once published, the text becomes a historical object capable of not only being acted upon (as in reader response theory) but in acting upon the world. One thinks here of feedback loops in cybernetic theory. Not only does art imitate life, life, too, at times imitates art. It is not the world which the text depicts, nor the character's attitude toward that world that is real; to get at what is real, don't focus on what is represented, rather focus on the picture itself and its aspects. I'd better let Gass speak for himself:

"..the consciousness contained in any text is not an actual functioning consciousness; it is a constructed one, improved, pared, paced, enriched by endless retrospections, irrelevancies removed, so that into the ideal awareness which I imagined for the poet, who possesses passion, perception, thought, imagination, and desire and has them present in amounts appropriate to the circumstances—just as, in the lab, we need more observation than fervor, more imagination than lust—there is introduced patterns of disclosure, hierarchies of value, chains of inference, orders of images, natures of things. ...It remains for the reader to realize the text, not only by reachieving the consciousness some works create (since not all books are bent on that result), but by appreciating the unity of book/body and book/mind that the best books bring about..."[Wm. H. Gass, "The Book as a Container of Consciousness," in Finding a Form, pp. 348,351]

"[T]he philosophical analysis of fiction has scarcely taken its first steps, Philosophers continue to interpret novels as if they were philosophies themselves, platforms to speak from, middens from which may be scratched important messages for mankind; they have predictably looked for content, not form; they have regarded fictions as ways of viewing reality and not as additions to it. There are many ways of refusing experience. This is one of them.

So little is known of the power of the gods in the worlds of fiction, or of the form of cause, or of the nature of soul, or of the influence of evil, or of the essence of good. No distinction is presently made between laws and rules of inference and conventions of embodiment, or their kinds. The role of chance or of assumption, the recreative power of the skillful reader, the mastery of the sense of internal life, the forms of space and time: how much is known of these? ... No search is made for first principles, none for rules, and in fact all capacity for thought in the face of fiction is so regularly abandoned as to reduce it to another form of passive and mechanical amusement. The novelist has, by this ineptitude, been driven out of healthy contact with his audience, and the supreme values of fiction sentimentalized. William Gass, "Philosophy and the Form of Fiction," in Fiction and the Figures of Life, pp. 25-26

"To see the world through words means more than merely grasping it through gossipacious talk or amiable description. Language, unlike any other medium, I think, is the very instrument and organ of the mind. It is not the representation of thought, as Plato believed, and hence only an inadequate copy; but it is thought itself. ...Literature is mostly made of mind; and unless that is understood about it, little is understood about it." William Gass, "Finding a Form" pp. 34-36 in Finding A Form.

Finally, there is something we might call the Platonic view: it is the ideal Form to which the text aspires (call it the Good, the Beautiful, the Just, the True) and which it attempts to embody that alone is real. Realism (often mislabeled 'idealism') is seeing through the text to the Ideal Form it seeks to embody. To the extent the text liberates us from the world of the senses (i.e, shows us the way out of the Cave) and leads us into the ideal world of Forms, it is Realistic.

Well, that pretty much exhausts my anatomy of the uses of the term realism. There may be more. I suppose there are any number of hybrid types—ethical realism, theological realism, moral realism, journalistic realism, etc., etc. If so, as they relate to fiction and literary criticism, please enlighten me.

From this brief foray, I think we can safely say that what the various views of realism have in common is an attempt to describe the complex relation/interaction between the text and the world.

My own view of realism, however non-practical for the practice of criticism, is probably closer to, though not coextensive, with Gass's: It is reality alone which is real and it is this reality which produces the text, just as nature somehow produces consciousness. The text is a model of consciousness, linguistic in form. It not only represents an awareness of the reality that produced it, it is an awareness of the reality that produced it. The evolution of consciousness is aligned with the continual perceptual probing of the world and retreating from it: it is adaptive. Texts are, likewise, an adaptational form. Texts are evolving probings of and retreats from the reality from which they flow—whether it is the human agent that pens them and the humanity of which s/he is a part or the noisy, intrusive physical world they are made to mirror. The text is part and parcel of reality, a feature of it that must be taken into account—especially to the extent that it is 'aware of' reality—by all subsequent texts. For Gass, the text thinks the world. To my mind, it is the self-reflexive world that thinks the text, and any realism about texts must take this into account. The text is Foam.

Of course, my view is relatively unformed (and possibly unprecedented—I don't know) and will require much further thought and research to articulate. As I continue to review novels on this site, I plan to try to apply it—if possible.

I am left, however, with one last question: if these views are the forms of realism, what, we might ask, is its opposite? That, as they say, is a question for another day.

Wittgensteinian Wednesday

281. ...It comes to this: only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees, is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.

282. "But in a fairy tale the pot too can see and hear!" (Certainly; but it can also talk.)

"But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."—It is not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in which we should say of a pot that it talked? (Even a nonsense-poem is not nonsense in the same way as the babbling of a child.)

We do indeed say of an inanimate thing that it is in pain: when playing with dolls for example.

But this use of the concept of pain is a secondary one. Imagine a case in which people ascribed pain only to inanimate things; pitied only dolls. ...

283. What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?

Is it that my education has led me to it by drawing my attention to feelings in myself, and now I transfer the idea to objects outside myself? That I recognize that there is something there (in me) which I can call "pain" without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word?—I do not transfer my idea to stones, plants, etc.

Couldn't I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted? Well, how do I know, if I shut my eyes, whether I have not turned into a stone? And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains? In what sense will they be ascribable to the stone? And why need the pain have a bearer at all here?!

And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone?

Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.

For one has to say it of a body, or, if you like of a soul which some body has. And how can a body have a soul?

284. Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations.—One says to oneself: How could one so much as get the idea of ascribing a sensation to a thing? One might as well ascribe it to a number!—And now look at a wriggling fly and at once these difficulties vanish and pain seems able to get a foothold here, where before everything was, so to speak, too smooth for it. ...

297. Of course, if water boils in a pot, steam comes out of the pot and also pictured steam comes out of the pictured pot. But what if one insisted on saying that there must also be something boiling in the picture pot? ...

300. It is—we would like to say—not merely the picture of the behaviour that plays a part in the language-game with the words "he is in pain", but also the picture of the pain. Or, not merely the paradigm of the behaviour, but also that of the pain. ...

301. An image is not a picture, but a picture can correspond to it. ...

309. What is your aim in philosophy?—To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Différance

Sameness: e pluribus unum. From the many, one. This is the project of the Enlightenment. Reason —> Empire.

It seems, in the battle between faith and reason, reason has led us into the same sort of political cul de sac that faith led us into earlier; there is a tendency in the political arts toward totalitarianism, whether it is faith-based or rational.

Into this breach steps a French philosopher named Jacques Derrida. He wrote a virtually unreadable paper called "Differance". With an 'a'. The gist of it is a challenge to these constructivist programs.

Others, of course, picked up the flaws in this totalizing tendency of Western thought beginning with Gödel's "On Formally Undecidable Propositions" and picking up with Wittgenstein's own self-critical Philosophical Investigations. How you get from a critique of the completeness of axiom-driven mathematical systems (Gödel) and a critique of linguistic philosophy in terms of "language games" and "forms of life" (Wittgenstein) to the fractiousness of deconstructionism and from there to any kind of statement about Western wisdom and contemporary politics is beyond the scope of a simple blog post.

The point is these are the origins of what is often called 'post-modernism' in academics: that is, the breakdown of totalizing systems and the emphasis on interest-based critiques such as Marxism (classism), feminism, racialism, queer theory, Freudian analysis, etc.

Bottom line: The situation we find ourselves in, nowadays, is more a celebration of differences, than of our sameness. Out of the many, MANY. Not unity, but diversity.

Silence

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." Wittgentstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Let's see, that's the quote we left you with last time. You want to know who really understood silence? Sure, I would accept the Buddha as an answer, or even Lao Tsu—good answers both; but those aren't quite the ones I had in mind. No. Someone who really understood the concept of silence in all its full ramifications was Stalin! Yes. If you did not agree with Stalin, you were silenced (exiled, sent to a gulag, disappeared, humiliated, assassinated, executed, etc.). And, thus, he did not have to speak about you. Perfectly rational.

Surely, that isn't what Wittgenstein meant (and, of course, subsequently repudiated) in the Tractatus, though, at the time, he felt it was the answer to (or at least the correct approach to answering) all the intractable questions of philosophy.

Is monomanical ideology (a/k/a sameness, conformity, totalitarianism) necessarily the natural outcome of reason and rationality? Its desideratum? When philosophy searches its soul, this is a question it must confront—especially in light of the brutal history of the mid-20th Century.

Maybe John Cage intuitively sensed this problem: "There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot." — John Cage, from Silence. See also 4'33" here and here.

Reason

Reason? You want reason? Go here. Read. Go on. Take your time. Think about it. Read it again. Then get back to me for further investigations.

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Or, What's Worse, A Relativist!

No, no. Not that kind of relativist.




THAT kind!