"And now for something completely different...."

or, "Boupohonia forces me to consider my sins...."

"I ought to be no more than a mirror, in which my reader can see his own thinking with all its deformities so that, helped in this way, he can put it right."--Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philalethes again piques my interest, although this time with something wholly original (no links to links this time!). And he puts me in mind of the famous anecdote about Ludwig Wittgenstein, often called the "greatest philosopher of the 20th century" (itself, in this context, an ironic labelling, as we shall see). Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein's one time mentor, came upon W. deep in thought, and knowing his former students predilection for ethical and metaphysical issues (which Russell eschewed both in his life and his thought), asked: "What are you thinking about, logic, or your sins?" To which Wittgenstein replied: "Both."

Wittgenstein is an interesting thinker, and a powerful counterpoint to the pseudo-science Philalethes (rightly) rails against. Mathematicians (Kurt Godel being the current "hot" example, with two books out now on his life and work; both books note Godel's strong Platonist streak), for example, love to say that mathematics reflects reality, because they claim that much of reality is reflected in mathematics. Wittgenstein argued, on the contrary, that mathematics simply reflects reality. In a world of different physical laws, Wittgenstein pointed out, mathematics would change, too. The "permanence" of mathematics, in other words, is no such thing: it is simply a reflection of our perceptions, nothing more (which locks us back into the world David Hume left us in, and from which Kant did not exactly extract us). The argument is a subtle but exacting one: Plato (going back at least to the Phaedo, and made explicit in parts of The Republic), argued for an external reality completely separate from our perceptions. In fact reality, says Platonism, exists whether we perceive it or not, but our highest and best task is to pursue the right perception and contemplation of that ultimate reality. Here, frankly, is the context and the vocabulary for much of Western mystical tradition. Which is not to say such traditions are the product of an illusion caused by Plato; as Wittgenstein and others pointed out (following Hume), language does not limit our reality, but it determines how we describe that reality. Whether Plato was right or wrong, then, it is the language he bequeathed us that we still use.

But when that language is confused for reality...well, that's when the problems start. Modernism in philosophy actually started in the 17th century, with Rene Descartes. It was Descartes, through his radical skepticism, who established for the West the principle that our relationship to "reality" is based entirely on our perceptions. From Descartes, essentially, springs empiricism, and from empiricism, again essentially, springs the philosophy of modern science.

Now the problem is, of course, that perception is all about error. Descartes recognized this immediately, and Hume pushed it to such an extreme that Kant had to come up with a scheme that allowed us to accept our perceptions despite our inability to establish a standard outside our perceptions to prove our perception's accuracy. Wittgenstein pushed the issue even further, pointing out that even our perceptions are a product of language, because they do not exist outside of language, nor outside our attempts to communicate them to one another, which communication is done only through: language. As Wittgenstein said in his preface to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: "what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about must be passed over in silence." We should pause to note here that Plato never defined the "good" which he said was the source of all reality. As exacting as he was with language, and as critical as Socrates is in the dialogues of vague and ill-defined concepts, the heart of Plato's metaphysic is the vaguest and most ill-defined concept of all. For Plato, the "Good" is simply inaccessible to language. Wittgensten limits the conversation entirely to language: "It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit will simply be nonsense." Which means that by now we have proceeded to the opposite conclusion from Plato: reality only exists in our perception of it. Whether or not it exists apart from our perception is irrelevant, because all we can ever know of it, is what we perceive of it. The question for modern philosophers such as Wittgenstein is simply: how do we perceive it? And behind that question is a more important one: how, in fact, do we talk about what we perceive?

In other words, when I look in the mirror, what do I see? And how do I describe it?

So what does this have to do with logic, and sin?

Wittgenstein ended his Tractatus with these words:

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used
them--as steps--to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the
ladder after he has climbed up it.)
He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

So clarity of expression applies only to that which can be clearly expressed (something of a tautology, no?) But it does not mean that what cannot be expressed, has no reality. This is the error of the sloppy use of reason Philalethes is pointing out, and also the reason Wittgenstein could contemplate, quite seriously, both logic and his sins. But also why logic could neither address, nor explain, nor even apply to, his sins.

Our propositions about reality, in other words, are not the entirety of the universe. Nor do they even take in all that the "universe" contains ("universe" being not merely the physical place cosmologists are concerned about). We must, says Wittgenstein, reason rightly; but when we do, we, as it were, ascend a ladder, which we then discard. Having discarded it, we reach the place of that of which we cannot speak, and rather than try to fit it into our discourse (it won't go), we must pass over it in silence. Because while it is real, it is not shared. At least, not in our language.