Month: November 2020

Kleingeld meine Herren, Kleingeld!

Edmund Husserl used to say that to his seminarians to keep them careful and wissenschaftlich and away from assertions of the high-flying and sweeping sort.  "Small change, gentlemen, small change!" Unfortunately, the philosophical small change doesn't add up.  Specialization, no matter how narrow and protracted, no matter how carefully pursued, fails to put us on the "sure path of science."

Given that plain fact, learned from hard experience, you may as well go for the throat of the Big Questions.  Aren't they what brought you  to philosophy in the first place?

This line of thought is pursued in Fred Sommers Abandons Whitehead and Metaphysics for Logic.

Clarity and Content in Philosophy: Two Principles of Method

A commenter enunciates two principles:

1) The guiding principle of analytic philosophy – not always observed – is that the author has a duty to be maximally clear.

2) The guiding principle of Continental philosophy – always strictly observed – is that the reader has a maximal duty to understand.

Here are my principles:

A) One guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the writers of it have a duty to strive for as much clarity as they can muster and as much clarity as the subject matter allows, but without loss of content and without evading real problems and genuine obscurities. In addition to those two caveats, it needs to be said that clarity is not enough. "Clarity consistent with content" is my motto.

B) A second guiding principle of serious philosophy is that the readers of it have a duty to try to understand the author in a spirit  that is open-minded and charitable. A good-faith effort ought to be made to understand the author in his own terms and from his own tradition despite the hours of effort this typically requires.  Only then is critique and even rejection justifiable.

Commentary on the Principles

Ad (A).  "Reality is messy," a student once said in response to my drawing of distinctions. I replied, "True, but it doesn't follow that our thinking about reality should be messy." Clearly, we ought to strive to be clear. But 'ought' implies 'can.'  There cannot therefore be any legitimate demand that one be "maximally clear." That is unachievable by us. And it may be unachievable in itself.

The subject matter sets a second limit to our quest for clarity.  In his Nicomachean Ethics, Book One, section 3, Aristotle famously writes,

Our discussion will be adequate if it achieves clarity within the limits of the subject matter. For precision cannot be expected in the treatment of all subjects alike . . . .

For a well-schooled man is one who searches for that degree of precision in each kind of study which the nature of the subject at hand admits: it is obviously just as foolish to accept arguments of probability from a mathematician as to demand strict demonstrations from an orator. (1094b 10-25)

Aristotle was discussing ethics and politics, but the principle holds across the board. Consider the philosophy of logic. If  you stick to logic proper, things are very clear indeed. But if you dig beneath the formalisms and schemata, obscurity soon rears its ugly head. No logic without propositions. But what is a proposition? And how are we to understand the unity of a proposition? There are competing theories, none of them "maximally clear." The prosaic pates who cannot tolerate any degree of obscurity had better stay clear of these questions.

But the great philosophers have never done that. They were not put off by the penumbral. They dug deep.  A great logician, second only to Aristotle, if second to anyone, felt moved to write, in one of his seminal papers, "The concept horse is not a concept." Is that clear? It smacks of a contradiction. And yet Gottlob Frege had excellent motivation for saying it.

Ad (B). A mistake many make is to think that what is not immediately intelligible to them is unintelligible, period, or perhaps even a product of willful obfuscation.  One expects this mindset among ordinary folk. Unfortunately one finds it also among philosophers, assuming they deserve that title.

The Australian positivist, David Stove, somewhere takes umbrage at a passage from Heidegger and pronounces it gibberish, when the passage is not gibberish at all. The miserable Stove, unwilling to to do his homework, and with no understanding of Heidegger's intellectual antecedents, dismisses as gibberish what is not immediately intelligible to his shallow positivist pate. He displays this attitude throughout The Plato Cult.

He  polemicizes churlishly against his spiritual superiors in much of his writing, so I am simply giving him, or his shade, a taste of his own medicine.

When it came time to die, however, his empty polemics and miserable positivism left him in the lurch. His son, who, mirabile dictu, converted to Catholicism, caught him reading the Bible near the end.

Apparently, curmudgeon Stove forgot to consider that philosophy might have something to do with wisdom.

Related: Edward Feser, Can Philosophy be Polemical?

Kant’s Letter to Marcus Herz, 21 February 1772

Herz marcusThe brief missive to Herz sheds considerable light on Kant's Critical project.  Herewith, some notes for my edification if not yours.

1) How is metaphysica specialis possible as science, als Wissenschaft? Having been awakened by David Hume from his "dogmatic slumber," Kant was puzzling over this.  It occurred to him that the key to the riddle lay in raising and answering the question:

On what ground rests the relation of that in us which we call representation to the object?

Representations 'in us,' i.e., 'in' our minds, are of or about objects 'outside of' our minds. What makes the representation of an object about the very object of which it is the representation? For example, what makes my visual awareness of a particular tree an awareness of that very tree?

There are three cases to consider.

2) If the representation in the subject is caused by the object, Kant thinks that an easy answer is forthcoming: the representation is of or about the object in virtue of its being caused by the object.  The tree, or the light reflected by the tree, affects my eyes, thereby causing in me a representation of that very tree.  We set aside for the time being the question whether this easy answer is a good answer.

3) We also have an easy answer to the above question if representations are active with respect to their objects, as opposed to passive as in the case of my seeing a tree. Suppose  the object itself were created by the representation, as in the case of divine representations. In cases like this, Kant tells us, "the conformity of these representations to the object could be understood." (82)

4) Now for the third case, the hard case. What are we to say about the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories? These conceptual representations, being pure, are not caused by sensation. But neither are they creative with respect to their objects. What then gives them objective reference? 

As pure concepts, the categories have their seat in our understanding. They are thus subjective conditions of thinking, not categorial determinations of things.  What gives these subjective conditions of thinking and judging — to think is to judge — objective validity?  That is the problem which Kant sets forth in his letter to Herz.  But he does not in that letter propose a solution.

5) He gives his solution in 1781 in the Critique of Pure Reason. Can I sketch it in a few sentences?

I touch a stone. I receive a sensation of hardness and warmth. No judgment is involved.  Judgment enters if I say, "Whenever the sun shines on the stone, it becomes warm." But this is a mere Wahrnehmungsurteil, a subjective judgment of perception. It lacks objective validity. It records one perception following another in a subjective unity of consciousness, as opposed to a consciousness in general.  The judgment does not record causation, assuming that causation involves necessitation, as Kant does assume. All we have at the level of perception are Hume's spatiotemporal contiguity of perceived events and their regular succession: the sun's shining on the stone followed by the stone's becoming warm.  Kant is of course convinced that there has to be more to causation than regular succession.

But if I say, "The sun warms the stone," then I make an Erfahrungsurteil, a judgment of experience which is objectively valid.  I am not merely recording a succession of perceptions, but an instance of causation in which the cause necessitates the effect.  The necessary connection is not out there among the things; it enters via the understanding's imposition of the category of cause on the sequence of perceptions.  The objective or transcendental unity of apperception, as the vehicle of the categories does the job. Just don't ask me how exactly. Here is where things get murky. This is what I wrote my dissertation on.

6) I am now in a position to answer in a rough way the question  of how the pure concepts of the understanding have objective validity. They have objective validity because the objects of experience are products of the categorial formation of the sensory manifold within a "consciousness in general," a transcendental, not psychological, unity of apperception.  It follows that the world of experience is an intersubjectively valid but merely phenomenal world and not a world of things in themselves.  The "highest principle of all synthetic judgments" is that "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience themselves, and thus possess objective validity in a synthetical judgment a priori."

Since "the understanding is the lawgiver of nature,"  Human skepticism bites the dust, but so also does Leibnizian-Wolffian rationalism. This is because the Copernican revolution, at the same time that it validates  synthetic a priori  judgments in mathematics and physics for phenomena, restricts them to phenomena and disallows them for noumena such as God, the soul, and the world as a whole, the objects of the three disciplines of metaphysica specialis.

Unfortunately, Kant's system raises as many questions as it answers. But that is the fate of every philosophy in my humble opinion.  The dialectical nature of reason, which gives rise to dialectical illusion with respect to noumena, unfortunately infects everything we do in philosophy even when we draw in our horns and stick to phenomena.

Can Kant Refer to God?

This is a re-working of an entry from 19 September 2016.  It relates to present concerns about limit concepts and whether and to what extent God can be subsumed under our concepts.

……………………….

Ed Buckner raises the title question, and he wants my help with it.  How can I refuse?  I'll say a little now, and perhaps more later.

Kant Sapere AudeKant was brought up a rationalist within the Wolffian school, but then along came David Hume who awoke him from his dogmatic slumber.  This awakening began his Critical period in which he struggles mightily to find a via media between rationalism and empiricism.  The result of his struggle, the Critical philosophy, is of great historical significance but it is also an unstable  tissue of apparently irresolvable tensions. As a result there are competing interpretations of his doctrines.

I will propose  two readings relevant to Ed's question.  But first a reformulation and clarification of the question.  

Can one think about God and meaningfully predicate properties of him?  For example, can one meaningfully say of God that he exists, is omnipotent, and is the cause of the existence of the natural world?  Or is it rather the case that such assertions are meaningless and that the category of causality, for example, has a meaningful application only within  the realm of phenomena but not between the phenomenal realm as a whole and  a putative transcendent causa prima?  Are the bounds of sensibility (Sinnlichkeit) also the bounds of sense (Sinn), or are there senseful, meaningful assertions that transgress the bounds of sensibility?

Weak or Moderate Reading.  On this reading, we can think about God and meaningfully make predications of him, but we cannot have any knowledge of God and his attributes. We cannot have knowledge of God because knowledge necessarily involves the interplay of two very different factors, conceptual interpretation via the categories of the understanding, and sensory givenness.  God, however, is not given to the senses, outer or inner.  In Kantian jargon, there is no intuition, keine Anschauung, of God.  For intellects of our type, all intuition is sensible intuition.  The Sage of Koenigsberg will not countenance any mystical intuition, any Platonic or Plotinian visio intellectualis, at least not in this life.  That sort of thing he dismisses in the Enlightenment manner as Schwaermerei, 'enthusiasm' in an obsolete  18th century sense of the English term.

But while Kant denies that there is knowledge of God here below whether  by pure reason or by mystical intuition, he aims to secure a 'safe space' for faith:  "I have found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith." (Preface to 2nd ed. of Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1787, B xxx.)  Now if God and the soul are objects of faith, this would imply that we can think of them and thus refer to them even if we cannot have knowledge of them.

As for the soul, it is the object of the branch of metaphysica specialis called rational psychology. Since all our intuition is sensible, there is no sensible intuition of the soul.  As is well-known, Kant denies that special metaphysics in all three branches (psychology, cosmology, and theology) is possible as science, als Wissenschaft.  To be science it would have to include synthetic a priori judgments, but these are possible only with respect to phenomena.

Kant's key question is: How are synthetic a priori judgments possible?  He believes that they are actual in mathematics and physics, and would have to be actual in metaphysics if the latter were a science.  Kant concludes that  synthetic a priori judgments are possible in mathematics and physics only because the world of experience (Erfahrung) is not a world of things in themselves whose existence, nature, and law-like regularity are independent of our mental contribution, but a merely phenomenal world to whose construction (transcendental) mind makes an indispensable contribution. 

The dignity and necessity of the synthetic causal principle — every event has a cause — is rescued from the jaws of Humean skepticism, but the price is high: the only world we can know is the world of phenomena.  This is not a world of illusions, but a world of intersubjectively valid objects of experience. But while objective in the sense of intersubjectively valid, these objects do not exist in themselves. Things in themselves (noumena in the negative sense) are beyond our ken.  Yet we must posit them since the appearances are appearances of something (obj. gen.).  And it is presumably the affection of our sense organs by these things in themselves that gives rise to the sensory manifold that is then organized by a priori forms (categories and forms of sensibility) on the side of the subject.  The restriction of human knowledge to phenomena secures the objectivity (intersubjective validity) of our knowledge, but by the same stroke rules out any knowledge of the objects of special metaphysics (God, the soul, the world as a whole). 

On the moderate reading, then, Kant restricts the cognitive employment of the categories of the understanding to phenomena but not their thinking employment. We can think about and refer to the positive noumena, God, the soul, and the world as a whole, but we cannot have any knowledge of them. (And the same goes for the negative noumena that correspond to sensible appearances.)  We can talk sense about God and the soul, and predicate properties of these entities, but we cannot come to have knowledge of them.  Thus we can meaningfully speak of the soul as a simple substance which remains numerically self-same over time and through its changing states, but we cannot know that it has these properties.  

The weak reading is represented by the following argument:

1) A necessary condition of knowledge is intuition (Anschauung).

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4) God is unknowable by us. (1, 2, 3)

Nevertheless

5) God is thinkable by us. (3)

Strong or Extreme Reading.  On this reading,  we cannot talk sense about positive or negative noumena: such categories as substance and causality cannot be meaningfully applied beyond the bounds of sensibility to God, the soul, angels, libertarianly free noumena agents, the world as a whole, or even things in themselves. Riffing on P. F. Strawson one could say that on the strong reading the bounds of sensibility are the bounds of sense.  This reading wins the day in post-Kantian philosophy.  Fichte liquidates the Ding an sich, the neo-Kantians reduce the transcendental ego to a mere concept (Rickert, e.g.), the categories which for Kant were ahistorical and fixed become historicized and relativized, and we end up with a conceptual relativism which fuels a lot of the nonsense of the present day, e.g., race and sex as social constructs, etc.

The strong reading is represented by the following argument:

1*) A necessary condition of meaningful objective reference is intuition.

2) In us, the only mode of intuition is sensible. We have no faculty of intellectual intuition.

3) The concept of God is the concept of an entity that cannot be an object of the senses.

Therefore

4*) God cannot be meaningfully referred to by us.

So my answer to Ed Buckner's title question is:  It depends.  It depends on whether we read Kant in the weak way or in the strong way.  Read in the weak way, Kant is saying that the categories of the understanding  have no cognitive employment in the absence of sensory input, but they do have an empty logical employment and objective reference/meaning.  Read in the strong way, the categories are devoid of objective reference/meaning in the absence of sensory givenness.  If so, the concept of God is a limit concept in the negative sense: it merely marks a limit to our understanding, but does not point beyond that limit. At best, the concept of God is a regulative Idea whose employment is purely immanent.

An Important Issue in Political Philosophy: Robert Barron versus George Will

For many of us who reject leftism, and embrace a version of conservatism, there remains a choice between what I call American conservatism, which accepts key tenets of classical liberalism, and a more robust conservatism.  This more robust conservatism inclines toward the reactionary and anti-liberal. The difference emerges in an essay by Bishop Robert Barron entitled One Cheer for George Will's The Conservative Sensibility. The bolded passages below throw the difference into relief.

And so it was with great interest that I turned to Will’s latest offering, a massive volume called The Conservative Sensibility, a book that both in size and scope certainly qualifies as the author’s opus magnum. Will’s central argument is crucially important. The American experiment in democracy rests, he says, upon the epistemological [sic] conviction that there are political rights, grounded in a relatively stable human nature, that precede the actions and decisions of government. These rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are not the gifts of the state; rather, the state exists to guarantee them, or to use the word that Will considers the most important in the entire prologue to the Declaration of Independence, to “secure” them. Thus is government properly and severely limited and tyranny kept, at least in principle, at bay. In accord with both Hobbes and Locke, Will holds that the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. [. . .]

With much of this I found myself in profound agreement. It is indeed a pivotal feature of Catholic social teaching that an objective human nature exists and that the rights associated with it are inherent and not artificial constructs of the culture or the state. Accordingly, it is certainly good that government’s tendency toward imperial expansion be constrained. But as George Will’s presentation unfolded, I found myself far less sympathetic with his vision. What becomes clear is that Will shares, with Hobbes and Locke and their disciple Thomas Jefferson, a morally minimalistic understanding of the arena of freedom that government exists to protect. All three of those modern political theorists denied that we can know with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life—and hence they left the determination of those matters up to the individual. Jefferson expressed this famously as the right to pursue happiness as one sees fit. The government’s role, on this interpretation, is to assure the least conflict among the myriad individuals seeking their particular version of fulfillment. The only moral bedrock in this scenario is the life and freedom of each actor.

Catholic social teaching has long been suspicious of just this sort of morally minimalist individualism. Central to the Church’s thinking on politics is the conviction that ethical principles, available to the searching intellect of any person of good will, ought to govern the moves [sic] of individuals within the society, and moreover, that the nation as a whole ought to be informed by a clear sense of the common good—that is to say, some shared social value that goes beyond simply what individuals might seek for themselves. Pace Will, the government itself plays a role in the application of this moral framework precisely in the measure that law has both a protective and directive function. It both holds off threats to human flourishing and, since it is, to a degree, a teacher of what the society morally approves and disapproves, also actively guides the desires of citizens.

I applaud the idea that the law have both a protective and a directive function.  But to what should the law direct us? 

On a purely procedural liberalism, "the purpose of the government finally is to provide an arena for the fullest possible expression of individual freedom. " This won't do, obviously. If people are allowed the fullest possible expression of individual freedom, then anything goes: looting, arson, bestiality, paedophilia, voter fraud, lying under oath, destruction of public and private property, etc.  Liberty is a high value but not when it becomes license. Indisputably, ethical principles ought to govern the behavior of individuals. But which principles exactly? Therein lies the rub. We will presumably agree that there must be some, but this agreement gets us nowhere unless we can specify the principles.

If we knew "with certitude the true nature of human happiness or the proper goal of the moral life" then we could derive the principles. Now there are those who are subjectively certain about the nature of happiness and the goal of life.   But this merely subjective certainty is worth little or nothing given that different people and groups are 'certain' about different things.  Subjective certainty is no guarantee of objective certainty, which is what knowledge requires.  This is especially so if the putative knowledge will be used to justify ethical prescriptions and proscriptions that will be imposed upon people by law.

For example, there are atheists and there are theists in almost every society. No atheist could possibly believe that the purpose of human life is to know, love, and serve God in this world and be happy with him in the next.  From this Catechism answer one can derive very specific ethical prescriptions and proscriptions, some of which will be rejected by atheists as a violation of their liberty. Now if one could KNOW that the Catechism answer is true, then those specific ethical principles would be objectively grounded in a manner that would justify imposing them on all members of a society for their own good whether they like it or not.

But is it known, as opposed to reasonably believed, that there is a God, etc.?  Most atheists would deny that the proposition in question is even reasonably believed.  Bishop Barron's Catholicism is to their minds just so much medieval superstition. Suppose, however, that the good bishop's worldview is simply true.  That does us no good unless we can know that it is true. Suppose some know (with objective certainty) that it is true. That also does us no good, politically speaking, unless a large majority in a society can agree that we know that it is true. 

So while it cannot be denied that the law must have some directive, as opposed to merely protective, function, the question remains as to what precisely it ought to direct us to.  The directions cannot come from any religion, but neither can they come from any ersatz religion such as leftism.  No theocracy, but also no 'leftocracy'!  Separation of church and state, but also separation of leftism and state.

This leaves us with the problem of finding the via media between a purely procedural liberalism and the tyrannical imposition of  prescriptions and proscriptions that derive from some dogmatically held, but strictly unknowable, set of metaphysical assumptions about man and world.  It is a dilemma inasmuch as both options are unacceptable.  

I'll end by noting that the main threats to our liberty at the present time do not emanate from a Roman Catholicism that has become a shell of its former self bereft of the cultural relevance it enjoyed for millennia until losing it in the mid-1960s; they proceed from leftism and Islam, and the Unholy Alliance of the two.

And so while the dilemma lately noted remains in force, a partial solution must take the form of retaining elements of the Judeo-Christian worldview, the Ten Commandments chiefly,  and by a restoration of the values of the American founding. Practically, this will require vigorous opposition to the parties of the unholy alliance.

First and Second Intentions: Buckner on Zabarella, Kant, Frege, and Wittgenstein

The following two quotations are from the Facebook Medieval Logic forum.
 
Giacomo Zabarella (1533 – 1589). “Now first intentions are names immediately signifying realities by means of a concept in the soul, for instance, animal and human being, or those concepts of which these names are signs. But second intentions are other names imposed on these names, for instance, genus, species, name, verb, proposition, syllogism, and others of that sort, or the concepts themselves that are signified through these names.”
Edward Buckner comments:
 
The distinction [between first and second intentions] is rediscovered in various ways by subsequent philosophers. I see something like it in Kant’s distinction between concepts which are ‘pure’, and concepts which are not, in Frege’s distinction between concept and object words, and possibly in Wittgenstein, who viewed logic as a sort of scaffolding through which we conceive the world, a scaffolding which cannot be described in words. (4121 “Propositions cannot represent logical form: it is mirrored in them”). If I understand Wittgenstein, it is that there can be no science of second intentions in Zabarella’s sense, for such a science would be a futile attempt to represent logical form. The Tractatus of course is such an attempt, which is why he says (654) his propositions, while nonsensical, can be used as steps [in a ladder] to climb up beyond them, then throw away the ladder.
 
Kant
 
I think Ed is wrong above about Kant.  For Kant, the pure is the opposite of the empirical. Every concept is either pure or empirical and no concept is both. A pure concept is one that is not drawn from experience, ein solcher der nicht von der Erfahrung abgezogen ist, but originates from the understanding in respect of both form and content, sondern auch dem Inhalte nach aus dem Verstande entspringt. The form of all concepts, including pure concepts, arises from reflexion Reflexion, and thus from the understanding. Empirical concepts arise from the senses, entspringen aus den Sinnen,  by comparison of the objects of experience. Their content comes from the senses, and their form of universality, Form der Allgemeinheit, alone from the understanding.
 
If Buckner is telling us that Kant's pure-empirical distinction runs parallel to Zabarella's first intention-second intention distinction, then that can't be right. For Zabarella's animal and human being, which are first intentions for him, count as empirical concepts for Kant. 
 
Any comparison of Zabarella (1533-1589) the Aristotelian and Kant is bound to be fraught with difficulty because of the transcendental-subjective turn of modern philosophy commencing with Descartes (1596-1650).  For Aristotle, the categories are categories of a real world independent of  our understanding; for Kant, the categories are precisely categories of the understanding (Verstandeskategorien) grounded in the understanding both in their form and in their content.  The categories of Aristotle are thus objective, categories belonging to a world to be understood, and not subjective, categories whereby a mind understands the world.
 
Pure Concepts of Reason as Limit Concepts
 
Kant also speaks in his Logic and elsewhere of Ideas which are pure concepts of reason, Vernunft, and not of understanding, Verstand. Die Idee ist ein Vernunftbegriff deren Gegenstand gar nicht in der Erfahrug kann angetroffen werden. (Logik, sec. 3)  The objects of these pure concepts of reason cannot be known by us because our form of intuition, Anschauung, is sensible, not intellectual. We can know only phenomena, not noumena. Among these Ideas, which are plainly limit concepts, are God, the soul, the world-whole, and freedom. And they are not merely negative limit concepts. Free will, for example, is objectively real despite its not being obejctively knowable. But more on this later.
 
Frege
 
I also think Ed is wrong about Frege.  But I'll leave that for later. Wifey wants to go out to dinner. Philosophy before bread, but happy wife, happy life!
 
As for Wittgenstein, I think Ed is on the right track. 
 
 

Why are Lawyers so Unhappy?

Martin P. Seligman explains. 'Seligman'! Now there's an aptronym for you. Selig is German for happy, blessed, blissful, although it can also mean late (verstorben) and tipsy (betrunken). So Seligman is the happy man or happy one. Nomen est omen?

Give some careful thought to what you name your kid. 'Chastity' may have an anti-aptronymic effect.  As for anti-aptronyms, I was introduced a while back to a hulking biker who rejoiced under the name of 'Tiny.'  A student of mine's name for me was 'Smiley' to underscore my serious-as-cancer demeanor.

The Concept of the Metaphysical Self in Wittgenstein as Limit Concept

WittgensteinI continue my investigation of limit concepts. So far I have discussed the concepts of God, prime matter, bare particulars, and particularity. We now turn to the Tractarian Wittgenstein.

As I read him, Wittgenstein accepts Hume's famous rejection of the self as an object of experience or as a part of the world.  "There is no such thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas." (5.631)  The reason Wittgenstein gives is that, if he were to write a book called The World as I Found it in which he inventories the objects of experience, he would make mention of his body and its parts, but not of the subject of experience: "for it alone could not be mentioned in that book." (ibid.) The argument is similar to the one we find in Hume: the subject that thinks is not encountered as an object of experience.

But why not?  Is it because it doesn't exist, or is it because the subject of experience, by its very nature as subject, cannot be an actual or possible object of experience?  It has to be the latter for Wittgenstein since he goes on to say at 5.632 that "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the world."  So he is not denying that there is a subject; he is telling us what it is, namely, the limit of the world.

Wittgenstein eye visual fieldFrom the fact that the metaphysical subject is nowhere in the world, it does not follow that it does not exist.  If, however, you think that this is a valid inference, then you would also have to think that from the non-appearance of one's eyes in one's visual field one could validly infer the nonexistence of one's eyes.

As 5.6331 asserts, one's eyes are not in one's visual field.  If you say that they can be brought into one's visual field by the use of a mirror, I will point out that seen eyes are not the same as seeing eyes. The eyes I see in the mirror are objects of visual consciousness; they are not what do the seeing.

That is not to say that the eyes I see in my visual field, whether the eyes of another person or my own eyes seen in a mirror, are dead eyes or non-functioning eyes.  They are living eyes functioning as they should, supplied with blood, properly connected via the neural pathways to the visual cortex, etc.  The point is that they are not seeing eyes, subjects of visual consciousness.

 

Eyediagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

If you insist that seeing eyes are indeed objects of outer perception and empirical study, then I will challenge you to show me where the seeing occurs in the eye or where in the entire visual apparatus, which includes eyeglasses, contact lenses, the neural pathways leading from the optic nerve to the visual cortex — the whole system which serves as the causal basis of vision. Where is the seeing?  In the pupil?  In the retina?  In the optic nerve?  Somewhere between the optic nerve and the brain?  In the visual cortex? Where exactly?  Will you say that it is in no particular place but in the whole system?  But this is a very big system including as it does such instruments of vision as sunglasses and night goggles. And let's not leave out the external physical things that are causing certain wavelengths of light to impinge on the eye.  And the light itself, and its source whether natural or artificial. Will you tell me that the SEEING is spread out in space over and through all of these items? But then how do you explain the unity of visual consciousness over time or at a time?  And how do you explain the intentionality of visual consciousness? Does it make any sense to say that a state of the eyeball is of or about anything?  If you say that the SEEING is in the eye or in the brain, then I will demand to know its electro-chemical properties.

I could go on, but perhaps you get the point:  the seeing, the visual consciousness-of, is not itself seen or see-able.  It is not an object of actual or possible experience.  It is not in the world.  It is not a part of the eye, or a state of the eye, or a property of the eye, or a relation in which the eye stands, or an activity of the eye.  The same goes for the whole visual system.  And yet there is seeing.  There is visual consciousness, consciousness of visual objects.  

Who or what does the seeing?  Who or what is the subject of visual consciousness?  Should we posit a self or I or ego that uses the eye as an instrument of vision, so that it is the I that sees and not the eye? No one will say that his eyeglasses do the seeing when he sees something.  No one says, "My eyeglasses saw a beautiful sunset last night." We no more say that than we say, "My optic nerve registered a beautiful sunset last night," or "My visual cortex saw a beautiful sunset last night."*   We say, "I saw a beautiful sunset last night."  

But then who or what is this I?  It is no more in the world than the seeing eye is in the visual field. Wittgenstein's little balloon above depicts the visual field.  Imagine a Big Balloon that depicts the 'consciousness field,' the totality of objects of consciousness.  It does not matter if we think of it as a totality of facts or a totality of things. The I is not in it any more than the eye qua seeing is in the visual field.

So far I am agreeing with Wittgenstein.  There is a subject, but it is not in the world.  So it is somewhat appropriate to call it a metaphysical subject, although 'transcendental subject' would be a better choice of terms, especially since Wittgenstein says that it is the limit of the world.  'Transcendental' is here being used in roughly the Kantian way. 'Transcendental' does not mean transcendent in the phenomenological sense deriving from Husserl, nor does it mean transcendent in the absolute sense of classical metaphysics as when we say that God is a transcendent being.  (That is why you should never say that God is a transcendental being.)

But Wittgenstein also maintains that the transcendental subject is the limit of the world.  This implies, first, that it is not nothing, and second, that it is no thing or fact in the world.  "The world is all that is the case." (1) "The world is the totality of facts, not of things." (1.1)  It follows that the subject is not a thing or fact outside the world.  So all the self can be is the limit of the world.

We have to distinguish the world from worldly things/facts.  The world is a totality of things or of facts, and a totality is distinct from its members both distributively and collectively.  So we shouldn't conflate the world-as-totality with its membership (the world taken in extension).  So if the metaphysical or rather transcendental subject is the limit of the world  as per 5.632, then what this means is that the subject is the limit of worldly things/facts, and as such is the world-as-totality.  

This is why Wittgenstein says "I am my world." (5.63) 

The analogy is clear to me.  Just as one's eyes are not in one's visual field, visual consciousness of objects in the world is not itself in the world.  Visual consciousness, and consciousness generally, is of the world, not in it, to reverse the New Testament verse in which we are enjoined to be in the world, but not of it. (Needless to say, I am reversing the words, not the sense of the NT saying. And note that the first 'of' is a genitivus objectivus while the second is a genitivus subjectivus.)  

Of course, this is not to say that there is a substantial self, a Cartesian res cogitans outside the world. "The world is all that is the case."  There is nothing outside it.  And of course Wittgenstein is not saying that there are soul substances or substantial selves in the world.  Nor is he saying that there is a substantial self at the limit of the world. He is saying that there is a metaphysical (better: transcendental) self  and that it is the limit of world.  He is stretching the notion of self about as far as it can be stretched, in the direction of a radically externalist, anti-substantialist notion of consciousness, which is later developed by Sartre and Butchvarov.

What we have here is the hyper-attenuation of the Kantian transcendental ego, which is itself an attenuation of substantialist notions of the ego.  The Tractarian Wittgenstein is a transcendental philosopher.  He may not have read much or any Kant, but he knew the works of the Kantian, Schopenhauer, and was much influenced by them.  According to P. M. S. Hacker,

Of the five main philosophical influences on Wittgenstein, Hertz, Frege, Russell, Schopenhauer, and perhaps Brouwer, at least three were deeply indebted to Kant.  It is therefore not surprising that Wittgenstein's philosophy bears deepest affinities to Kant's, despite the fact he never studied Kant . . . ." (Insight and Illusion, 139)

Spot on.

So what sort of concept is the concept of the metaphysical self in Wittgenstein?  It is clearly a limit concept, and indeed a negative one inasmuch as it marks a limit without pointing beyond that limit. The upshot seems to be that the metaphysical or rather transcendental self just is a concept.  The neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert maintained something similar.  But how could the ultimate subject or self be a mere concept? And whose is it?  Concepts are in minds. There is pressure to move in the direction of a substantial self . . .

Is the Concept of Particularity a Limit Concept?

That depends.

The term is ambiguous. 'Particularity' can be taken to refer to a category common to all particulars, whether concrete or abstract.  (Tropes are abstract particulars using 'abstract' in the old, not the Quinean, way.) The concept of particularity in this sense is not a limit concept.  We have no trouble conceptualizing the category of particulars.   We grasp this concept by grasping the concept of unrepeatability and we grasp it in tandem with the concept of repeatability which is the mark of universals.

'Particularity' can also be used to refer to that which makes a particular particular be the very particular that it is!  Socrates, for example, is a particular concrete particular, and so is Plato.  Categorially, they are the same, but numerically they are different.  'Particularity' in the second sense refers, not to a categorial feature, but to a particular's haecceity (haecceitas) or thisness. 

The concept of particularity in this second sense is a limit concept.  This is because our minds cannot conceptualize the haecceity of a thing. We cannot form a concept that captures the Socrateity of Socrates, that 'property,' if his haecceity is a property, that he alone actually has and nothing else could possibly have. Individuum ineffabile est.  That is, the particular qua particular is ineffable.  It cannot be conceptually 'effed.' This why Aristotle says that there can be no science of the particular as such.  A sensible particular is knowable, but only in terms of its repeatable features.  It is the suchness of a this-such that is knowable, not its thisness.  And of course every concrete particular is a this-such.

So the concept of particularity in the sense of haecceity is a limit concept.  We have a concept of that which we cannot conceive in propria persona. So there is no incoherence in the claim that haecceity is inconceivable, just as there is no incoherence in the claim that God is inconceivable. There is no incoherence due to the distinction between limit and non-limit concepts. But is haecceity a positive or a negative limit concept? 

If positive, then  the concept points beyond itself to something that is real. That is, it points to something  mind-independently in the thing  that makes it be that very thing.  If negative, then the concept merely marks a limit to our understanding.  If positive, there is something we cannot understand; if negative, there is nothing there to understand. 

Let us use 'ipseity' to refer to the haecceity of a person.  I cannot grasp the alter ego in its otherness. The concept of ipseity, then, is a limit concept. Now suppose you said that this concept is negative. You would then be saying that there is nothing there in the other person to conceptualize as opposed to saying that there is something there that cannot be conceptualized.  But surely I know that a person I love is an other mind, an other I, an other subject despite my inability to objectify this other subject as I would have to in order to conceptualize it.  I know this whether or not I have any clue as to how I know it.  So in this case we would have to say that the concept of ipseity is a positive limit concept.  It points to an unfathomable reality in the other person that is presumably the locus of his free will, moral worth, and spirituality. 

If God exists, then the concept of God is a limit concept in the positive sense.  If you maintain that the concept of God is a negative limit concept, then, at best, you reduce God to a regulative Ideal in Kant's sense which is tantamount to denying the existence of God. 

We will have to discuss Kant.