SOUTHERN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY FALL, 1964

A Note on Harrison's Notes on Das MystischeGEORGE KIMBALL PLOCHMANNSouthern Illinois University

Professor Harrison's paper' on to complete his picture of that ex-the final entries of Wittgenstein's traordinary sunset of the closingTractatus Logico-Philosophicus and pages of the Tractatus. After all,what leads up to them seems more the book contains the word "philos-clear-headed than most accounts ophy" in its title, and this leads oneof that book and indeed I think to suspect that a summary of thehis sketch o~e of the best short contents in terms solely of logicalintroductions to its subject. What sema.ntics and syntactics is a littleI have to say supplements his treat- restricted."ment, nearly all of which I endorse My editing of Harrison's account,wholeheartedly, so far as it goes. therefore, begins with a survey ofHis essay, not counting an intro- what Wittgenstein means by "theductory paragraph, consists of two world." It has a structure, to beparts, the first being a review of sure, and it consists of facts, not ofsome of the most important doc- things (1.1). These things (whichtrines connected with the theory of Wittgenstein also calls "objects"meaning and the theory of construe- and "entities," Sachent are perfect-tion of propositions in the Tract- ly simple (2.02), and they can onlytatus. After this, he concludes with be named (3.221). Any attempts,a brief discussion of the three--the however, to declare their simplicityonly three--remarks about the mys- would involve us in asserting some-tical made by Wittgenstein in the thing of them, which would destroytext. their simplicity. A proposition, it

Emphasis upon Wittgenstein's fol,1ows, is always of a complex, andpronouncements on the mystical, this comple~. IS, as marked out bywhich was sometimes out of all pro- that pro~osltI<!n,a fact, Fact~ them-portion to their importance, crept selves differ m their relative ~e-into the critical literature quite ~ees. of complexitv," but the dis-early; certainly Ogden and Rich- tinction.betwe~n all facts of any sortards (in The Meaning of Meaning) and ob]~ts IS absolu.te (2.024).7were biased when they referred to The totahty of facts IS the worldit as a "curtain and background of (1.1; 1.13).mysticism."! Even further back a From the other side, the totalityreview of the Tractatus, signed by of propositions is the languagea cryptic S., was entitled "A Logical (4.001), and the limits-qualita-Mystic."! This misplaced emphasis tively speaking-of the languageProfessor Harrison manages to mean the limits of my world (5.6).avoid; yet I think that in his eager- By "qualitatively" I mean thatness to stick to the logical problems these limits are not simply the ex-in the book, he leaves out some of treme ends of a series, but arethe context which would help show rather the boundary-conditions setthe mystical to be rather more for any given candidate to bemeaningful, even though it were allowed in as a part of the world, anot made to loom much larger in complex (a fact), imageable by an-Wittgenstein's scheme of things.' other complex (a proposition). AtMy present purpose, therefore, will any rate, Wittgenstein says that thebe to amend Mr. Harrison, not by world and life are one (5.621), andmeans of an eraser, but by adding a I think that he would find no realtouch or two of red to his oranges, and permanent distinction between

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the world and my world (5.62).If, in other words, it is a closed sys­tem, the principle of closure mustreside in some thing or things whichare outside the world, and the bestsupposal--easily verifiable, it hap­pens, in the text-is that the self isat least one of these things bound­ing the world. This self, says Witt­genstein, is external to the world(5.633; 5.641), it is like the eyestanding outside the field of vision(5.6331), and hence it is not whatmight be called the empirical self,but rather (to use Kantian lan­guage) a transcendental self, a mereI-ness not further analyzable. Thisis something of a different sort fromany fact in the world, and it is dif­ferent from the objects that giveform and content to the world(2.021; 2.025; 2.026). While the lat­ter enter into the facts in a syn­thesis achieved when a true or falseproposition is formulated, the for­mer, the self, can admit of no syn­thesis whatever. Logical relations ofsameness, otherness, etc., obtain be­tween objects, but not within theself (for then it would be a com­plex) and not between the self andthe -its-world (for then the selfwould be complex as having externalrelations) .

Along with the self there is God­although to be sure Wittgenstein inhis early sketches for the Tractatuswrote that there are two godheads(Gottheiten) the world and my in­dependent self." How the world is,the facts as carved out of the listsof objects and their logical relations,is a matter of indifference to whatis higher (6.432), which means thatthe factual world, structured bypropositions which have an explicitstructure in some sense identical

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with the implicit structure of thefacts they image (bilden), is a pri­vate one: I alone limit it, I aloneunderstand the language that repre­sents it." Berkeley's God may verywell be about in the Quad, but notas a faithful observer and sustainerof factual existence, of actuality(Wirklichkeit). (In this regard Ishould say that if God has anymeaning in the Tractatus, it is asconnected with good and beauty,not truth).

Thus we come to the crux of thematter, the real reason for my wish­ing to introduce alterations into Mr.Harrison's account. The mystical isneither a mere asylum of ignorancenor a mere place where for somereason logic leaves off so that wehave to keep quiet, though both ofthese characterizations are correctas far as they RO. Rather the mys­tical is positively the sphere of theself, God, and value. Literal propo­sitions could not in the nature of thecase deal with what is by definitionbeyond propositions; and I thinkWittgenstein would also be dis­trustful of any "desoriptions'v"smuggled in by the help of figura­tive language intended as a stopgapuntil we can develop better, moreprecise, means of expressing our­selves. But the great difference be­tween these three "transcenden­tals" and the world is that while thisworld, the actuality, is in some fash­ion dependent upon language, theseothers are not. And it is just be­cause of their independence that noamount of talking about them willmake them clearer, more evident,more real. It is their nature, rathermore than the limits of logic, thatforces us to keep silence.

1 Frank R. Harrison, III, "Notes on Whittgenstein's use of 'das Mystische," SouthernJournal of Philosophy, Vol. I, No.3 (Fall 1963), pp. 3-9.

• London: Kegan Paul, 1925, p. 188.• The New Nation and the Athenaeum (January '1:7, 1923).• I am talking only about the Tractatus. How important religion was to Wittgenstein

in his lifetime will remain for his first good biographer to settle. So far, all therehas been published is scattered reminiscences and just as scattered retorts.

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• lowe it to the essay on which I am commenting, however, to quote its last lines, whichare right but all too brief: "Thus in the final sections of the Tractatus Wittgensteinmentions several traditional notions of the mystical, and indicates that he sees themas resulting from attempts to express in language inexpressible aspects of thelogical character of language; and that perhaps some of them result from attemptsto put into language inexpressible things of other kinds-perhaps not just about thelogical character of language" (p. 9).

• They are Sachverhalten, which the Ogden translation calls "atomic facts," thePears-McGuinness, "states of affairs," which I think misleading; and Tatsachen,called by Ogden and the others "facts." The whole problem of the right translationand interpretation of these two terms, along with der Fall and die Sachlagen, goesfar beyond the scope of Harrison's paper or mine.

T "Substance [i.e. objects] is what exists independently of what is the case [i.e. offacts]."

• Notebooks, 1914·1916, edited and translated by G. E. M. Anscombe, (New York:Harper and Bros., 1961), entry for 8.7.16.

• 5.62. This is a ticklish point. See Jaakko Hintikka, "On Wittgenstein's 'Solipsism,"Mind, Vol. LXVII, No. 265 (January 1958), pp. 88-91. He raises the issue whether"[die GrenzenJ der Sprache, die allein ich verstehe" ought not rather to be translated"the only language that I understand," and he has told me privately that newmanuscript evidence (I believe still unpublished) has come to light buttressing hispoint. Miss Anscombe has objected, on grounds that this would be awkward German.My offhand response to this is that inasmuch as Wittgenstein does speak of "mylanguage" (5.6), language could easily be that which I am the only one to under­stand; yet inasmuch as language is not a separate entity but a set of propositionsthat I frame (3.5; 4.001), it could also tum out that all that I understand is lan­gauge, and moreover that the plural languages all resolve themselves into one, onewhich contains what is common to the many sets of signs. Either way, I think myinterpretation is not seriously wrong, and that, with parts of the Tractatus, isthe most we can hope for.

" See G. K. Plochmann and J. B. Lawson, Terms in Their Propositional Contexts inWittgenstein's Tractatus An Index (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,1962), under "describe" and "description"; these are both technical words in Witt·genstein's employment here.

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