Tractatus 2.0

I am just playing around here with the Tractatus. What this really is is an outline for a longer work. Here the first section (ontology).

Tractatus 2.0

Preface

    This work is an experiment in philosophical clarity. I do not intend to prove, but to show; not to build a system, but to trace what sense can be made of the world and our place in it at the most general level. It proceeds not from theory, but from what experience already reveals to anyone (I hope) who pays attention. The method is descriptive, reflective, and logical in spirit, but grounded in the ordinary experience of being a human person in a real world.

     I do not stand outside the world we wish to understand. We speak from within it, from inside the beam of meaning and light that shines through the world, as C. S. Lewis described in his meditation in the toolshed. One can look at the beam, or one can look along it. This work looks along the beam. It asks what reality is, what truth means, what knowledge amounts to, what goodness and beauty disclose – not as abstract problems, but as things we always already live by.

     The form follows the form of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus – a book I love – but inverts the goal. Where Wittgenstein sought to define the limits of meaningful discourse from the outside, this Tractatus begins with the structure of meaning as it appears from within. Where the early Wittgenstein wished to silence what cannot be said, this work listens more carefully to what can be shown – and thus, perhaps, can be said with reverence.

    It is in this spirit that my Tractatus just ignores what I call the Matrix fallacy (after the movie). We do not need a God’s-eye view to know the world. The fact that we cannot step outside our experience to compare it to unexperienced reality (an idea whose very sense I, along with many others, doubt) does not mean we are imprisoned in our minds. This skepticism assumes a false dichotomy between pure subjectivity and perfect objectivity. Our experience is already in touch with reality, albeit in a finite and fallible way; it is a more of less intelligent participation, not an illusion. As Wittgenstein and Heidegger both understood in different ways, the structure of our thinking, speaking, and acting already discloses something real – not exhaustively, but (in potential) truthfully.

      The following propositions are not arbitrary. They are not deductions from axioms. They are attempts to make explicit what is already implicit in experience. They are rooted in what makes sense and in the often-overlooked presuppositions of that sense.

 

Tractatus 2.0: On Reality, Truth, Knowledge, and Understanding

 

Section 1: Reality

1.       'Reality' or 'being' is said in many ways, not univocally, but analogically.

1.1 What is real may be actual, potential, imagined, abstract, or perceived.

 

1.11 A tree is real as a physical substance.

1.12 The color red is real as a quality inhering in something else.

1.13 The number π is real as an abstract, intelligible object.

1.14 A unicorn is real as an object of thought or imagination.

1.15 The square root of –1 is real in mathematics, not in space or time.

 

1.2 To be real is, in each case, to be something — to be present, intelligible, or possible to experience (thought, imagination, etc.). To be thinkable or imaginable.

 

1.21 If you cannot think about or imagine it, then it is not real. A square circle is not real. A unicorn is not real in the sense of being physically present but we can think about and so it is real in some sense.

 

 

1.3 The core of reality is not uniform substance but the capacity to be experienced in some form; must be capable of being present to you, intelligible to some degree; of evoking responses from indifference to wonder and awe; be imaginable; logically possible; perceivable through the senses, etc.

 

 1.31  Reality then presupposes some structured coherence. A unicorn does not exist in the material world but there are limits as to what can count as a unicorn. The limits may be fuzzy; they may shift to some degree over time and between cultures. But a being with a demonic face, bat wings, and three horns cannot be experienced as a unicorn. If anything could be a unicorn then nothing can be. Reality is marked by such conceptual limits. They are the precondition for the possibility of experience and language. A tree is real in a different way than the number π, but both are real in that each has a determinate mode of being i.e., presents themselves to experience in different ways that reflect the kind of things they are.

 

1.32 What is real is bounded – not by absolute borders of the kind Wittgenstein exposed with his family resemblance thought but by limits that make recognition, imagination, and meaning possible.

 

1.33 ‘Nothing’ is not an empty thing, but the absence of any possible mode of presence.

 

1.34 We cannot imagine ‘nothing’ directly, only the absence of some particular thing.

 

1.35 The idea of ‘nothing’ presupposes the idea of ‘something’: we understand nothing only in contrast to being.

 

1.36 Experience, language, and thought require coherence, unity, limits that impress themselves onto our concepts; they require that not everything be everything. Without limits, there is no real; without contrast, there is no meaning. Being imprints itself onto language.

 

1.37 That we can even ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” reveals that nothingness, though thinkable in contrast, is not a domain of knowledge. It can evoke wonder and perplexity (as with Heidegger).

 

1.4 All the different ways we use the word “real” have something in common: they point toward something that is in some way actual. Even when we speak of things that don’t exist physically –  like fictional characters, possibilities, ideals, or mental images – we treat them as if they have some kind of being or presence. They are not pure nothing; they have a form, a content, a place in our experience or thought.

1.41  A tree is real in a straightforward way: it exists physically in space and time.

1.42  Ivan Karamazov is not real in that way. At the same time, he’s also not nothing. To me in some ways more real than people I know. I could imagine having a lovely conversation with him over a cup of coffee. He has a defined character, a history, a setting. He is real as a literary character.

1.43  The Pythagorean theorem is not real as a thing you can touch, but it is real as a mathematical truth, applicable to every right-angled triangle, whether or not anyone draws one.

1.44  A dream I had last night is not a physical object, but it was real as a mental event. It featured people I know and had an emotional effect.

1.45  All these examples point toward some kind of presence or awareness of something as the something it is, whether sensory, intellectual, emotional, or imaginative. They are not arbitrary: they have structure, and we can be right or wrong about them. That’s what marks them as real in their way, even if not in every way.

 

1.5 Therefore, the concept of reality includes many layers, but it is not arbitrary: the many senses of ‘real’ point back to the most fundamental sense: what is in itself, what can be present to us as the thing it is.

1.6 Philosophy begins by attending to these differences, not by collapsing them into a single meaning.

 

1.61  To attend to the differences in how things are real is to begin within experience, not above or outside it. Modern and some postmodern philosophy begin by seeking to impose a theory (e.g., ‘truth’ is a mask for power’). I follow those who understand we think well by noticing, by allowing the full variety of ways things appear to us to speak for themselves. I seek to follow the testimony of experience: my love for my children. I do not seek to fit experience into a preconstructed frame, a Procrustean bed of logical, scientific, or ideological possibility: for example, my love is nothing but an offshoot of evolution. Why? Because, according to my metaphysical theory, all emotions must be explained (away) in such terms.

 

1.62  Philosophies that insist that only what can be measured or explained by science is real end up denying the obvious reality of love, beauty, meaning, and moral responsibility. They absolutize a method that is powerful within its own limits, and then retroactively declare anything outside those limits illusory or unintelligible. The result is not insight but distortion.

 

1.63  Such theories often present themselves as neutral or objective, but in truth they smuggle in metaphysical assumptions that are often hidden, but decisive. The assumption that only what is quantifiable is real is not a scientific finding; it is a philosophical dogma.

 

1.64  To begin philosophy by collapsing all senses of ‘real’ into one – whether physical, logical, linguistic, or cultural – is to lose philosophy itself. For philosophy is not the reduction of being to theory, but the unfolding of thought from within being.

 

1.7 Every act of knowing, speaking, deciding, or valuing already presupposes some conception of what is real and what is not.

1.71 Even skepticism presupposes that there is a reality to doubt, and some standard by which claims are judged.

1.72  When Galileo looked through his telescope and argued that Jupiter had moons orbiting it, he was not just reporting observations; he was operating on a conception of reality as ordered, intelligible, and discoverable through mathematics and observation. His scientific knowing presupposed that nature has a structure that is there to be known, not imposed by the observer.

1.721  Implied ontology: The universe is lawful and knowable; sense perception, carefully disciplined, can reveal real features of the cosmos.

1.73   When Martin Luther King spoke of justice rolling down like waters, he presupposed that justice is not merely a human convention, but something real and something toward which human society ought to conform. His words were not just persuasive but appealed to a shared moral reality.

1.731 Implied ontology: Human dignity is real. Justice is grounded in the structure of what persons are.

1.74   When Socrates chose to accept the death sentence rather than flee Athens, he presupposed that living in truth and obeying a justly ordered law was more real and valuable than biological survival. His decision revealed what he took to be ultimately real and binding.

1.741  Implied ontology: The soul and its integrity are more real and enduring than the body and its safety.

1.75    When Weil refused to eat more than the people she served in wartime France, she presupposed that solidarity and sacrifice are responses to a moral reality. That value is not subjective or socially constructed, but something seen and obeyed.

1.751  Implied ontology: Value is objective; to recognize suffering is to recognize an obligation rooted in the nature of being.

1.76    When Nietzsche declared that “God is dead,” he was not making a metaphysical claim in the usual sense, but articulating a shift in the presupposed ontology of modern Western culture: that the highest values had lost their grounding, and therefore everything once anchored in them was cast into question.

1.761  Implied ontology: What is real is what we will into being; values have no metaphysical foundation. They are human projections.

1.77  When the Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards warned his congregation in “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” he did so from a conception of reality in which eternal destinies were fixed by one’s standing before God, and divine justice was more real and ultimate than temporal experience.

1.771  Implied ontology: The soul is immortal, God is real, and eternal judgment is more real than earthly comfort or human opinion.

1.78  When Russell critiqued religion in Why I Am Not a Christian, he presupposed that only what is empirically observable or logically demonstrable is real, and that belief in God is a projection or survival of pre-rational myth. He judged religious devotion to be not only mistaken but a waste of finite human life.

1.781   Implied ontology: Reality is exhausted by natural phenomena; the spiritual realm is a human construction with no independent being.

1.79 Each of these examples shows how even the most concrete act (speaking in public, obeying a law, refusing food) is laden with assumptions about what is.

 

1.8 We never encounter Being (reality views as a limited whole, sub specie aeternitatis), only from within some perspective. Thus we can only reply on experience ‘in the beam of sunlight’ rather than looking at the beam from the outside. As a horizon, the experience of humanity.

1.81 Our experience of Being is always situated: embodied, biological, temporal, historical, linguistic, cultural, sociological, economic, biographical. i.e., partial, limited to aspects.

1.82 Within local experience, we often justify beliefs with high confidence, whether through perception, science, memory, testimony, etc..

1.83 But such justifications always rest, silently, on a background sense of Being as a whole: that is, of what is ultimately real and possible.

1.84 We cannot explore or test this background in the same way we verify local truths, because it is the condition for anything being testable or explorable at all. It is the light in which local reality appears.

1.85 Thus our belief in reality as a whole – Being – is not directly knowable in the scientific or observational sense.

1.86 It can only be grasped, intuited, conceptualized, apprehended, interpreted, explained, etc. from within experience, not deduced from outside it.

1.861 Local worlds and world-versions arise within this horizon.

1.862 As Nelson Goodman observed, we do not live in one world, but in many “world-versions” i.e., more of less coherent ways of experiencing and interpreting reality.

1.863 Each version highlights certain features and suppresses others: empirical science, mythic narrative, religious vision, poetic intuition.

1.864 These are not wrong (‘incorrect’) because they differ. There can be no ‘fact of the matter’ that can be decisive (cf. Quine). However, they may disclose more or less of reality, illuminate or darken our deepest, purest experiences or indeed everyday common sense.

1.8641 The belief that physical objects (tables, trees, planets) exist independently of our perceptions is central to everyday common sense and to science. But Quine apprehended that, from a purely logical, metaphysical standpoint, this belief is not more strictly “justified” by the sensory data than belief in the Greek gods, who were once invoked to explain storms, illness, and war. As Quine wrote in “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”:

Both beliefs are theoretical constructions that organize experience. Both posit unseen realities to make sense of what is seen. What distinguishes them is not logical proof, but explanatory power, coherence with other beliefs, and resonance with lived experience.

So while believing in everyday objects is compelling to me, its superiority is not proven in the abstract by a logical-metaphysical theory. It is “shown” in how it illumines and works within my experience, which is different from the Greeks of the 9th century B.C., in some respect deeper, perhaps in others less so. The belief in enduring objects and natural laws discloses more of reality as I, we, live and study it not because it's logically more certain but because it deepens and unifies what we already experience. But there is no ‘fact of the matter’ that can metaphysically, logically decisively justify my belief in objects because anything that could count as a fact of the matter depends on the belief it is supposed to prove.

 

1.8642  A Stoic might look at a devastating fire and say, “This too is part of the rational order of nature; I will respond with courage and dignity.” An existentialist like Camus might say, “There is no reason; this is absurd. My only dignity is to face the void without illusion.” Neither view is logically compelled by the facts. The fire is what it is. The interpretation of its meaning – whether it reveals order or chaos – arises from a world-version grounded in different metaphysical commitments. These interpretations condition different responses. One may deepen our capacity for moral endurance, another may drain it. One may resonate with the inner structure of our experience, the other may estrange us from it. It depends on no fact of the matter which view makes more sense to a given person.

1.865 This state of affairs does not imply that ‘anything goes.’ Then Being would ironically have no reality. Some world-versions are coherent but shallow; others stretch us toward depths we cannot fully name.

1.8651 Thus worldviews or metaphysical philosophies are like interpretations of a poem written by an angel, or translations of the pure angelic language into the diverse human languages. i.e. not all worldviews are as translations equally plausible. We can’t read the original but still we can make judgements about translations and interpretation, just as I can in a lower dimension about translations of Dante without being able to read the original. Certain ‘translators’ can merit trust and thus come to have a kind of authority.

1.866 The illusion that we can compare world-versions from outside all of them is the Matrix fallacy: the idea that we could stand outside the beam of experience and test our world like a simulation.

1.867 But we are always already in the light. ‘In the world’ as Heidegger put it, to make a contrast with Descartes’ radical doubt, which imagined it could put us outside experience and understand and justify experience as from no point in it. Therefore, we must judge from within the world of experience, not from an imaginary (illusory) point outside of it.

 

1.87 The contrast between part and whole is unavoidable.

1.871 Our condition is like reading one scene in a vast novel or gazing at a corner of a large painting.

1.872 We grasp the local details – texture, tone, plot – but we cannot see the whole.

1.873 Yet we cannot stop trying to imagine the whole: What is the meaning of it all? What kind of story are we in?

1.874 Beliefs about Being – about what ultimately is – condition how we interpret even the smallest moments.

1.875 These beliefs are not testable like scientific hypotheses, yet they are not arbitrary. They are disclosed in how the world strikes us, shakes us, steadies us.

1.876 Some experiences call us beyond the local, temporal. Moments of joy, grief, awe, love, and moral clarity seem to speak with the voice of the whole.

1.877 They do not prove a worldview, but they reveal something that resists reduction.

1.878 In such moments, we sense that Being is not absurd – or if it is, that even absurdity has weight.

1.879 To trust that these experiences disclose more, not less, of reality is not naïve; it is a form of faithfulness to what is most real in experience.

1.88 In this light, philosophy becomes not an escape from experience into abstract certainty, but a deepening of wonder (or horror) from within it.

1.9 Therefore, a world-version cannot be justified by appeal to a decisive “fact of the matter.”

1.91 The facts are always interpreted within a worldview; they do not impose one.

1.92 A worldview can only be justified in the sense that it makes sense of experience — not in the abstract, but in life.

1.93 This making-sense is personal, but not private — it is shaped by history, culture, conversation, and reflection.

1.94 But in the end, no worldview can be meaningfully adopted without individual recognition — it must make sense to me, not just to others.

1.95 Yet this does not reduce truth to subjectivity or relativity.

1.96 That something must make sense to me does not mean it is about me. It means only that the light must reach my eyes, that sense must dawn in my own experience.

1.961 This is like hearing a fugue: I may not grasp its structure in the way Bach did, and Bach’s grasp of the fugue is superior to mine. But if it never makes sense to me at all, it remains a beautiful mystery, i.e., not yet truth for me. The way Bach understood it must make sense to me but if it doesn’t or can’t, it does not follow that my understanding is as good as Bach’s. The same logic applies to world-versions.

1.962 The fugue (world-version) is not mine to invent. Its beauty (or lack thereof) is there whether I see it or not. But I must see it for it to transform me, or move me.

1.963   Being also discloses itself not by force; it discloses itself to me by it fittingness, i.e., by how it resonates with my mind and life.

 

1.97 Teaching a worldview is not like teaching geometry.

1.971 I can teach what Kant believed, or what relativity predicts, as propositional content.

1.972 But I cannot hand over my vision of the world. The student must live into it. (Anthropologists doing fieldwork live with the people they want to understand, learn their language and history, so that they can understand them from the inside. They live into the culture.)

1.973 To grasp a world-version is not just to know its claims, but to see the world through it, to apply it to experience or rather allow experience to be illuminated (or darkened – e.g. the culture of the SS) by it.

1.974 The role of the teacher is to point, not to impose; to open the window, not to substitute the view. There is no factual correctness at stake here.