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.