Abstract
The intention of this article is to show that the Tractatus deals with the problem of the relation between reality, possibility, and necessity as traditionally considered in the ontological argument, that is, in relation to the idea of limit, and that in Section 5.5521, we find an especially clarifying formulation of this question; the formulation itself, however, is not at all clear, so that a lengthy commentary of it is justified.
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Notes
Cf. on this William Kneale, “Leibniz and the Picture Theory of Language”, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 76-77, 1966, pp. 204–215.
Notebooks, G. H. von Wright and G .E. M. Anscombe (eds.), Basil Blakwell, Oxford, 2nd ed., 1979, Appendix I, p. 106.
See TLP 5.53 and ff., as well as 6.23 and ff., especially 6.233–6.2331, where it is said that the intuition we need «for the solution of mathematical problems» is procurred by language itself: «The process of calculation brings about just this intuition» (Ogden’s trans.). Cf. the notes corresponding to 29-XI-14 in the Notebooks, cit. ed., p. 34, from where it has passed, as is, into the Tractatus, Section 4.1212, taken out of a context in which the thesis that the sign of equality is optional in notation is developed. From this point on, the references to the Tractatus will be made in parentheses in the body of the text, followed by initials indicating the translation used in each case: O, for C. K. Ogden’s; and P-M, for D. F. Pears’ and B. F. McGuinness’s. If the translation is my own I will not add any initials.
See Spinoza, Ethics, I, prop. 11 and Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, § 1, as well as “Quod Ens Perfectissimum existit”, Die Philosophischen Schriften, ed. By C. I. Gerhardt, reprinted by G. Olms, Hildesheim, 1960-61, t. VII, pp. 271-262.
Summa Theologica I, q. 3, a. 4, Ad sec.
“...das Wörtchen: ist, ist nicht noch ein Prädikat obenein, sondern nur das, was das Prädikat beziehungsweise aufs Subjekt setzt”. “...setzte ich kein neues Prädikat zum Begriffe von Gott, sondern nur das Subjekt an sich selbst mit allen seinen Prädikaten...”, Critique of Pure Reason, A 598/B 626 and f.
See, for example, Arnauld’s perspicacious formulation, Fourth Objections to the Metaphysical Meditations, ed. by Adam-Tannery, Vrin, Paris, 1957-58, t. IX, p. 166.
See “Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideiis”, Die Philosophischen Schriften, C. I. Gerhardt’s ed., reprint G. Olms, Hildesheim, 1960-61, t. IV, p. 424 and “Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Cartesianorum”, ibid., p. 359.
See “Meditationes de Cognitione, Veritate et Ideiis”, Die Philosophischen Schriften, ed. By C. I. Gerhardt’s, reprint G. Olms, Hildesheim, 1960-61, t. IV, p. 424 and “Animadversiones in partem generalem Principiorum Cartesianorum”, ibid., p. 359.
Miseria de la razón. El primer Wittgenstein, Taurus, Madrid, 1980, p. 123.
See 4.112 and 6.54. I cannot involve myself now in a discussion of the nature of these propositions of philosophy, whose purpose is as a gloss or commentary and which pursue the logical clarification of thought, something which to my notion belongs to a conception of philosophy formally understood as a transcendental method. The justification of these assertions remains, then, for another moment; it will have a place, moreover, in the debate of recent years about what P. M. S. Hacker called “a postmodernist interpretation” of Wittgenstein, which finds that the Tractatus puts into practice what James Conant, for his part, has called a «therapeutic strategy». Cf., for the former, “Was he Trying to Whistle it?” in A. M. Crary and R. Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, Routledge, London, 2000, pp. 353–388; and, for the latter, “Must We Show What We Cannot Say?”, in R. Flemming and M. Payne (eds.), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Bucknell University Press, Lewisburg, 1989, p. 262. In this article I try to stick to the matter of the ontological argument, without entering in other questions that are without doubt intimately connected to it, but whose discussion would make the article too long.
This means that things – those things of whose effective conduct and arrangement the world consists – end up becoming, by exigencies of the analysis, something that is in a way exactly the opposite of a thing: a pure object.
This proposition has come to the Tractatus from the notes corresponding to August 2, 1916 in the Notebooks, which ends by saying the following: “My work has extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world”, G. E. M. Anscombe’s trans., ed. cit, p. 79. On January 22, 1915, he had written: “My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition [...] in giving the nature of all being”, op. cit. p. 39.
Logical propositions or propositions of logic “describe the scaffolding of the world” (6.124, O); therefore logic, like metaphysics, is neither a science nor a doctrine, but rather “a mirror-image of the world” (6.13, P-M). Logic and metaphysics compose that speculative activity we call philosophy.
It is important here not to understand Vertretung as if it meant Vorstellung or Darstellung. Signs “represent” insomuch as they replace something else, insomuch as they act in another’s place; as ambassadors represent their chiefs of state.
Notebooks, July, 8 1916 entry, op. cit., p. 74.
Cf. B. F. McGuinness, “The Mysticism of the Tractatus”, The Philosophical Review, 75, 1966, pp. 305-328, who, in spite of insisting on his relation to a strange, infrequent “mystical feeling”, admits that the experience needed in order to understand logic “is something implicit in all of a man’s thought” (p. 313). I cannot agree, however, with the importance he gives, with respect to the interpretation of the Tractatus, to the question of whether or not Wittgenstein himself ever had a mystical experience. It should not be forgotten that Wittgenstein does not mention mystical experiences, mystical feelings, or any mysticism at all. He purely and simply speaks of the mystical.
It is worth noting that Norman Malcolm has ignored the solution to the Leibnizian problem that Wittgenstein gives in the Tractatus, and he instead suggests a connection between the ontological argument and the guilt feeling. V. “Anselm’s Ontological Argument”, The Philosophical Review, 69, 1960, pp. 59 and 60; also Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Oxford University Press, London, 1962. Cf. Lewis S. Feuer, “God, Guilt and Logic: The Psychological Basis of the Ontological Argument”, Inquiry, 11, 1968, pp. 257–281.
Nor would Leibniz have accepted the Kantian conclusion that the idea of an absolute or unconditionally necessary being does not broaden the understanding by making new objects intelligible, but rather fixes its limits. The unconditional is no object, but rather the very force of the conditions on which the possibility of something depends. Cf. Critique of Pure Reason, A 592/B620-A 593/B621.
In this sense, but only in this sense, I believe that one can accept what Eddy Zemach asserts in his art. “Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of the Mystical”, The Review of Metaphysics, 18, 1964, pp. 38–57 and included in Irwing M. Copi and Robert W. Beard (eds.), Essays on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1966, pp. 359–375, where he says that “the general propositional form [...] is the proper sign for the pseudo-concept God” (p. 366).
Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. Lasson, F. Meiner, Hamburg, reprint, 1975, t. II, p. 88.
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Ledesma, F. The Ontological Argument in the Tractatus . Int Ontology Metaphysics 8, 179–201 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-007-0015-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-007-0015-6