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Questions without Answers

If a question can be put into words, then it can also be answered in words. A question can only exist where there is an answer.

The riddle does not exist. (TLP 6.5, 6.51)

We never conceive a question without an idea that invites an answer, no matter if the idea be not very clear or well defined. (Claude Bernard) [Note 1]

Bernard's remark is not true about philosophy nor is Wittgenstein's remark true about the grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon) of the word 'question'. Because there exist questions (1) that are not nonsense (meaningless marks on paper or sand), and (2) for which we have no idea what an answer would look like, and (3) for which there are no answers knowable by the natural light of reason (which is the limit of Socratic philosophy). They are the eternal questions about the foundations of our life, questions to which the name 'metaphysics' is given.

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Enigmas, Rhetoric and Logical Paradoxes

Synonyms for 'questions without answers' are 'enigmas' or 'mysteries', 'insoluble riddles' or 'puzzles', and 'imponderables'. What is not synonymous is 'logical paradox', because the logical paradoxes are confusions about language, which can be resolved; they are not the eternal questions of mankind.

Rhetorical Questions

It is also possible to see these questions as rhetorical: they don't ask for an answer, but only for an awareness of themselves. Assent is assumed, and therefore 'Is it not astonishing that anything exists?' = 'It is astonishing that anything exists.'

What would be the point of this awareness? If you see the limits of knowing and understanding, you won't think you are wise when you are not, or that you know what you don't know (Plato, Apology 21d, 22e, Theaetetus 210b-c). And you won't become dead to the wonders of existence (M. O'C. Drury) and "the riddle" that, after all, does exist.

However, even rhetorical questions must not be nonsense, i.e. mere undefined combinations of words (PI § 500), "mere sound without sense" (Aristotle).

Logic Paradoxes

Very different from philosophical questions without answers are "logic circles" (paradoxes), questions that cannot be answered correctly, such as the question of whether the statement of the ancient Cretan who said 'All Cretans are liars' is true or false (Diog. L. ii, 108), because: If it is true, it is false, and if it is false it is true, and so on and on. That circle is a conjuring trick made possible by the rules of syntax that set the intellect chasing its own tail (PI § 109).

But words are tools, and for what work would we use the combination of words 'Everything I say is false'? Words (spoken sounds, marks on paper) do not have meaning in themselves -- and so the question is: what gives words meaning?

The words 'logic' and 'grammar' in Wittgenstein

Note: as Wittgenstein used the words 'logic' and 'grammar', logic DEF.= that part of grammar concerned with language meaning. And grammar DEF.= any description of the use of language, including the definitions of words.

Antitheses and Meaning

But there is an immediate objection to the notion of questions without answers: doesn't the word 'question', if it is to have meaning, require the word 'answer' -- that is, isn't the word 'question' without meaning if we try to use it without its antithesis?

In their everyday use 'vagueness' is opposed to 'clearness', 'flux' to 'stability', 'inaccuracy' to 'accuracy', and 'problem' to 'solution'. (Cf. BB p. 46)

For example: it is without meaning (nonsense) to say that all language is vague, none clear. Because 'vague' only gets its meaning by being contrasted with 'clear'. Isn't that also true of 'riddle' and 'answer'?

Mysteries or Self-mystifications?

But on the other hand, there is a difference between saying that some questions cannot be answered and saying that all questions cannot be answered. The "all" statement is nonsense, but is the "some" statement nonsense as well? Compare the difference between 'some language is vague' and 'all language is vague'.

Nonetheless, no language is essentially vague in meaning: where meaning is indefinite, we can always invent rules to make it more definite. But could we redefine our questions without answers to make them answerable? But why are they unanswerable?

Because we ourselves made them unanswerable. (Z § 259)

But did we make them unanswerable -- or does the nature of our existence make them unanswerable?

If the following nine questions really are mysteries rather than muddles, the answers to them are, in Plato's words, "important to know", not "worthless" (Apology 23b, Euthydemus 293b), and even if there are no answers, the questions themselves may be important to know. If there is a "metaphysical use" (PI § 116) of the word 'question'.

A.  Why is there anything rather than nothing?

Why does anything at all exist? We don't regard existence as something, as it were, added to an already existent thing. But we do regard the existence of anything at all as something added to nothing. Such that we are perplexed that absolute nonexistence is not, as it were, reality. 'The world should not exist. There really ought to be nothing.'

Here the word 'nothing' contrasts with 'everything' (Sophist 233e-234a). Seeing "the world as a whole -- a limited whole [and seeing it vanish]" is the way Wittgenstein expressed the idea (TLP 6.45).

Seeing the existence of anything at all as a "plus" (Z § 128), "something positive", leads us to ask the question: 'Why is there something rather than nothing -- why does anything at all exist rather than nothing at all?' That is truly a question without an answer.

"The limits of language"

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (Wittgenstein, Lecture on Ethics p. 12)

What is this "cage" we try to go beyond? According to Wittgenstein's views at that time (1929-1930), the cage is the world of statements of perceptible fact; and whenever we try to make statements (ask questions) about anything except that world, we instead talk nonsense. Therefore, "I wonder at the existence of the world" (ibid. p. 8) is nonsense, because the existence of the world is not a fact (It is only within the world that there are facts); if it were a fact, it would be possible for me to describe what it would be like if the world did not exist (ibid. p. 9), but 'The world exists' is not a statement that can be "significantly negated".

"Astonishment that cannot be put into words"

Man has the urge to thrust against the limits of language (gegen die Grenzen der Sprache anzurennen). Think for instance about one's astonishment that anything exists. This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and there is no answer to it. Anything we can say must, a priori, be only nonsense. Nevertheless we thrust against the limits of language.... But the tendency, the thrust (das Anrennen), points to something. (LE/Notes p. 12-13)

The trouble is that if we use the word 'meaning' as we normally use that word, then language that conveys meaning is not meaningless. "This astonishment cannot be expressed in the form of a question and there is no answer to it," Wittgenstein says, and yet we have above expressed it as a question, albeit one there is no answer to.

Through the Looking Glass, v ('Wool and Water'), the White Queen, 17 KB
God Himself cannot answer nonsensical questions, because they are nothing but words without meaning

Wittgenstein said that our "thrusting against the limits of language points to something", that it is a tendency which he deeply respects and would never ridicule (LE p. 12) despite it being "perfectly, absolutely hopeless". A year later, however, he said that "language is not a cage" (LE/Notes p. 16). I think the criticism is that those two statements cannot both be correct: because "nonsense" that conveys meaning is after all not nonsense ("When a sentence is called meaningless, it is not as it were its meaning that is meaningless"). If "one's astonishment that anything exists" cannot be put into words that are not nonsense, then how is it that Wittgenstein has put it into words that are not nonsense?

Is there anything that cannot be put into words, anything imperceptible that can only be alluded to? Or does whatever "cannot be put into words" (TLP 6.522) not exist, or in other words, is Wittgenstein's "the mystical" simply self-mystification (PI § 109)?

"Generally, nothing explains the meaning of words so well as a picture" (LC p. 63)

We have various pictures, e.g. "existence as something added to nothing", and these pictures are not without meaning. What is the opposite of "anything"? Imagine a sheet of paper on which there are drawings (or writings), and now imagine that we erase all of that. What remains is void space. And now it must be asked what would we mean by saying that "nothing but void space exists"? Isn't saying that "There is nothing but void space" the same as saying "There is nothing"?

If there were nothing, there would be nothing. The word 'nothing' or 'no thing' is not the name of something.

We ask, "Why was something drawn or written rather than not?" But isn't that asking who wrote it? Indeed, doesn't Leibniz answer his own question by saying that God is its author? And now we ask, "Why is there God rather than nothing, and why did God write rather than not?"

And in this way we create through grammar, as with the riddle of the owl and the egg, a question without an answer. But is it mere self-mystification whenever there is not an answer that would be acceptable to us? Are we wrong to be mystified by the riddle of existence; is our mystification a mistake?

Isaiah has God say, "My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are as high above yours as the heavens are above the earth" [55.8-9] -- the idea being that not only are there things man doesn't understand, but that there are things we are without the capacity to understand, things Isaiah calls "the thoughts of God" and I think we call "the eternal questions".

"Not comparable to anything"

A picture needn't be directly comparable to something in the world in order to have a sense; otherwise e.g. the Greek myths would be nonsense. It is not always the case that sense and nonsense are a function of a method of verification, nor that a proposition must be true or false. [Note 2]

"It is there -- like our life"

... those who speak of things as being "gratuitous", de trop or "just there" betray by the very phrases which they use the fact that their reason is not satisfied with the idea of a finite thing as "just there". (Frederick Copleston, Religion and Philosophy (1974), p. 177)

Nor with an "infinite thing" just there. But if we do no more than describe the facts in plain view, then our existence is just there (OC § 559) , because that is all we know about it. But of course metaphysics isn't about what we know but about what we wish to know but seem unable to know. I think those who deny or avoid the ontological question ("Why does anything exist?") do so because they want nothing to do with the concept 'God', which is the tautological answer to the question. But God is not an explanation, if the answer mustn't be less clear than the question. The significant difference is between saying that there is no answer to the question and saying that there is no question at all (because the question itself is nonsense). But proving that the ontological question is an undefined combination of words, i.e. nonsense, does not seem possible (i.e. I see no way to do it).

"It exists because it must exist"

What is Aristotle's answer to why there is something instead of nothing? "If anything exists, then something must always have existed." The principle is: ex nihilo nihil or "Out of nothing there comes nothing". How do you know? Not because the opposite cannot be imagined.

"Since nothing can come from nothing, if anything exists, something must always have existed; otherwise nothing would ever have existed" is merely a logical deduction from an undemonstrable principle.

There is nothing that cannot be imagined not to exist, and therefore to say of anything that it must exist is simply to play with words, for we have no experience of a "necessary being". Springing into existence out of nothing is at least picturable and in that sense not nonsense.

Metaphysics doesn't ask whether spontaneous existence is a "real possibility"; real possibility is a natural science question (although here science does not ask it), but only whether the existential question has meaning (which is what logical possibility is) or not.

"And its negative doctrines unfounded"

Although I don't think Wittgenstein chose the logic of language (the selected meaning of 'meaning') he later chose in order to make metaphysics impossible, he tries to use it to that end. Notwithstanding, as this discussion has (or appears to have) shown, 'Why is there anything rather than nothing?' is not an undefined combination of words; it is not nonsense. As was Bertrand Russell's opinion, Wittgenstein's later "negative doctrines" are unfounded (My Philosophical Development (1959), xviii, 1, p. 216). Not all questions without answers are nonsense.

B.  Is reality confined to what is in principle perceptible to the senses?

Frederick Copleston asked this question (or as I mis-recalled Copleston asked this question, for he did not quite do that) with regard to the Logical Positivist claim that, because the propositions of religion are not verifiable, they are without meaning.

But the "verification principle of language meaning" is not itself verifiable, and, as Wittgenstein defined the word 'meaning', if you know that a proposition is unverifiable you know something important about its grammar = use in the language, not that must be nonsense.

[Aristotle devotes] the whole book [Metaphysics Β] to the setting out of some fourteen major problems, for instance: ... "Does anything exist apart from sensible objects?" [997a34-35] (Guthrie, Aristotle (1981), p. 90; W.D. Ross' translation: "... must we say that sensible substances alone exist, or that there are others besides these?" [As to the "others" Aristotle means things like Plato's Forms, which are not perceptible to the senses.])

Copleston asked if it is necessarily the case that man is able to perceive everything real (the whole of reality). Is it possible for a thing both to exist and to be under any and all conditions and in every way imperceptible to the senses?

The question would be whether to be possible is to be perceptible. But which kind of possibility would that be? It is not real possibility because the proposition is not verifiable or falsifiable. And it does not appear to be logical possibility, because can the imperceptible be described or can it only be alluded to: 'There is an x that both exists and is impossible to perceive'?

Or would 'logically possible' here mean only: not self-contradictory? Is the proposition 'X exists but is impossible to perceive' a contradiction? Or is it nonsense?

The Unperceived World

If I remember rightly, before Pasteur's discovery of harmful microbes, doctors killed countless patients because they did not wash their hands: they would go directly from the mortuary to the operating theater and the maternity ward: If you cannot perceive something, then it must be that it does not exist (for how else was natural science to free itself from what Newton called "hypotheses"? Science needs first principles.)

If surgeons before Pasteur had discovered a positive correlation between hand washing and lower mortality, which is in fact what Semmelweis (1818-1865) did, they would have found a technique to reduce deaths -- but they would not have known why this technique worked.

Before the invention in the last century of instruments that made the discovery of the existence of viruses possible, the cause of the influenza pandemic of 1918 was not only unknown but unknowable.

But not yet perceived ≠ unconditionally imperceptible.

The limit of dimensions

Imagine a creature that exists only in the geometrical plane: it perceives only two dimensions, as James Jeans describes. From time to time the creature perceives that the plane becomes wet, but because it cannot perceive the third dimension, it does not know that the wet patches are raindrops. Similarly, by analogy, if knowledge of a phenomenon requires perception of a fourth spatial dimension, then a creature that perceives only three dimensions, namely man, cannot know the cause of the phenomenon.

Scientific theories and Reality itself

The description of the perception of a rain-shower in two dimensions shows that scientific theories are and ever will be only theories, (1) not only because they are a selection of the conceived facts plus human imagination (i.e. a selection of data organized or arranged -- i.e. conceived, as there is no perception independent of any and all conceptions -- into maps, models, or pictures), but (2) because theories are not about reality in itself (if there is such a thing), but only about a reality perceptible to our senses.

It was modesty invented the word 'philosophy', and that should not be lost sight of, even in, or even especially in, what Isaac Newton called natural philosophy.

The limits of an individual's world

The blind man's perception differs from that of a man with five senses. By analogy we ask: suppose a man had six or more senses? We mean: might not a man with six senses perceive something that a man with five senses does not perceive at all?

Absolute pitch

The man with absolute pitch in music: most people do not hear what he hears; contrast that with the tone-deaf man: most people do hear what he doesn't hear. Would a born-blind people have created mirrors, or a born-deaf people musical instruments? The language in The Country of the Blind would have no color-words, as The Country of the Deaf would have no sound-words. Drury asks if the blind man understands what the sighted man means by 'light' or the deaf man what the hearing man means by 'sound'?

The color-blind man does not see any gaps in his color system (Z § 257). Nonetheless, compared to the system of the man who is not color-blind, the gaps are there. And so may there not be many gaps in the picture of reality of the man of only five senses?

In H.G. Wells' The Country of the Blind, everything that was imperceptible to the blind did not exist. All that was not perceptible to their four remaining senses, that is. There was no daylight, and there were no stars at night, and there was no night.

The Deepest Skepticism

It may be that only human beings, in contrast to life forms with different sense perceptors, can perceive things the way human beings do. And perhaps the sense experiences of no two human beings are exactly alike. This is skepticism at a deeper level. Of course for this conjecture to have meaning, we must imagine a god who sees what we cannot see.

All we know is that there is agreement -- and here is meant coincidental, not contractual, agreement -- in the language we use, in the way we act (PI § 241). The rest is a question without answer, a question at the "deeper level" of metaphysics.

It is difficult to imagine the life of another human being, to recreate for very long in imagination their thoughts and feelings when not with us. The inner life of another human being is hardly knowable. The individual dwells in a small ring of light (knowledge) surrounded by limitless darkness (ignorance).

Perceptible but not Perceived

Even if it were or is the case that man can perceive ("catch in the net of his five senses") all things, it does not follow that all things are now perceived or that they ever will be perceived. The telescope and microscope are recent inventions, and they might never have been invented. They cannot be taken for granted, nor should it ever be presumed that all of perceptible reality -- much less all of what is most fundamental to reality -- is now perceived by man, or necessarily ever will be.

"Percepts without concepts are blind"

"There is nothing in the senses that is not receivable by the mind" (Criticism, Kant). The limit of the empirical is the need for concepts. "The limit of the empirical -- is concept-formation (RFM iv § 29, p. 237).

If only what can be conceived can be perceived, then the limit of perception is concept formation. And that means that even if everything were or is perceptible, we may not perceive all of it if we are poor in concepts (a word to which I often assign the meaning the rules for the use of a word, but which may also mean a frame of reference or a conception, i.e. a "picture" of what something is or of how it works).

That is the answer to the question "Why investigate words rather than the phenomena they name?" Because the concept says what the phenomenon is, not vice versa: "percepts without concepts are blind" (unconceptualized phenomena are invisible). And that means we can't explain concept-formation (PI II, xii, p. 230) by "the percept in itself" (if there is such a thing, and if there is, we certainly don't know that there is).

The concept throws its net over a cloud and catches what its mesh allows. A conceptualized phenomenon is a conceived fact.

Note that 'percepts without concepts' (or 'things in themselves' or 'absolute reality') is not meant to suggest something bizarre, a disorderly kaleidoscope or phantasm, but that even to say of a thing that e.g. it is solid and extended requires the concepts 'solid' and 'extended' (and maybe 'proposition' as well). Without these concepts the "thing" is as good as imperceptible (Man is not "a beast wanting discourse of reason" if "discourse" = language; human thought is linguistic; thus "without these concepts ... as good as imperceptible").

What we perceive it seems must be conditioned by our five senses, and there is a relation between our concepts and that, but the concepts we use -- even our most basic ones -- are presumably not the only possible ones.

The "conceived facts", and the Questions without Answers

About Wittgenstein's account of language meaning ("grammar", in his jargon), I thought: "If I am happy to go no farther than the public facts of our language use ..." But the facts in plain view do not answer philosophy's deepest questions, and this is why Plato and many others have sought insight through metaphysical speculation, to cure their perplexity -- i.e. ignorance of what they want to know or understand but recognize that they do not.

(Speculative philosophies are speculation by the natural light of reason; that is their limit. Thus although they too are works of the imagination, they are distinct from religious myth and divine revelation.)

Ghosts and nonexistence

If by the word 'spirit' we mean 'a thing without extension', then the word 'spirit' is not the name of anything. But if by 'spirit' is meant 'an imperceptible thing', then asking whether or not spirits exist is an unanswerable question. But our concept 'spirit' or 'ghost' is not a hypothetical object; it has no role in any empirical hypothesis. It is a "picture" to which, "by definition" (a rule of grammar is a definition), there is no object to compare.

If to exist is to be perceptible, then imperceptible = nonexistent. Does our question suggest that there may be another kind of existence (different also from the sense in which mathematics exists), a kind of existence about which we know nothing?

What do we mean by the word 'ghost' -- a thing invisible to our senses, as intangible as a thought or idea? Or do we mean a non-physical object, of no mass, of zero dimensions, occupying no space? Isn't that either nonsense or another way of saying that the word 'ghost' is not the name of an object? Neither is the word 'soul' the name of an object of any kind. The combination of words 'Can a ghost see itself in a mirror? Does it cast an invisible shadow?' follows a false grammatical analogy to create nonsense.

The imperceptible Ether. Concepts without percepts.

Are the limits of human sense perception also the limits of reality? That is not a question philosophy can answer. And it is not a question natural science can ask, because natural science theorizes within the limits of the perceptible. That is its remit.

But belief in "the ether" is belief that reality is not confined to what is perceptible to the senses. Were Newton and Einstein metaphysicians as well as natural scientists, then? It seems so.

First principles of science

The proposition 'Things don't just vanish into thin air' is not a statement of fact, because we don't count it as evidence against the truth of the proposition if we sometimes look and don't find what we are looking for. Rather, the proposition states a rule that directs our investigations. The general rule of natural science: "Every event has a knowable natural (i.e. ultimately perceptible to the senses) explanation."

"A cause is known by its effect." What does an imperceptible (ghostly) cause look like? Were a billiard ball to fly across the velvet table for no perceptible reason, we might speculate why. Collision with an ghostly billiard ball; a ghostly explosion; a ghostly door slammed shut; a ghostly gust of wind? We may imagine countless things like this by making the visible invisible, but this gets us no farther than the visible. We have no idea what a ghost looks like, because it does not look like anything.

'Are there inescapable categories of thought that limit man's concepts as man's five senses limit his percepts?'

Is reality confined to what is conceivable? This rhetorical question says at least as much about natural science as does the question of whether reality is confined to what is perceptible to the senses.

Besides sensory limitations, are there also categorical limitations that account for the imperceptibility of imperceptible things, if there are imperceptible things. Immanuel Kant's idea was that reality can be known only within the categories man's own mind imposes on it. Man cannot know the absolute reality which metaphysics seeks to know, i.e. reality in itself, outside the limits of man's conception-perceptions.

What is essentially imperceptible is also unpicturable, indescribable, inconceivable (Of course, the essential imperceptibility of the imperceptible thing belongs to man's nature, not as it were to the imperceptible thing itself).

C.  Do we exist and do things happen to us for supernatural reasons? Is there a point or meaning to our life?

Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is. (TLP 6.44)

"The riddle" does not exist in the world? That is simply not true. The how-ness of the world is no less perplexing than its that-ness. Indeed, the how-ness of the world is more perplexing than its that-ness, because we look to the world's how-ness for an explanation of its that-ness, but when we look we find only a phantasm -- nothing makes sense from man's moral point of view.

Blessed, almighty Zeus! in deep amaze, I gaze upon the world, and marvel at thy ways. (Theognis of Megara)

Does what happens in the world -- that is, does what happens to each of us as individuals as well as to the world -- have a reason, a purpose for happening ... or is "the truth much graver than this fiction", i.e. that it is only nature's blind laws (or random quanta) that rule our life (when reason does not)? "For the moon controls the tides ..."

What do we mean by 'Providence' -- that the world is intelligently guided by a divinity? Is the question 'Is there Providence?' an empirical question (hypothesis)? Since God -- as philosophy normally uses the word 'God' (Pascal's "God of the philosophers and schoolmen") -- is rational and since the rational seeks only the good, should we not expect to find a world in which there is good but not evil?

Like the proofs of deductive geometry, mustn't the proofs of natural theology face the test of sense experience? And therefore doesn't the existence of evil, both natural and man-made, prove that Providence does not exist -- i.e. logic accepts that God is all-powerful and all-good, but experience does not.

But men have always known of the existence of evil -- yet nonetheless they have believed in Providence -- and this seems to be because their belief presumes a supernatural explanation, that God understands what man cannot understand (Isaiah 55.8-9), as indeed man cannot understand "the God of Nature" from man's ethical point of view.

But religion accepts without proof or even understanding, something philosophy cannot do. (Natural theology, like all other metaphysics and theology, is speculative. Religion is not.)

It seems that either the answer to the question is that there is no Providence, or that this is not an empirical question. As it is, existence is incomprehensible, a riddle, both if God doesn't exist, and if He does.

Every life thinks itself the center of the universe, existing for a reason, its life and death not without meaning. But what that meaning is, if any, is, for philosophy, a question without answer. Our life is full of unanswered questions.

D.  Is there life after death?

Death is one of two things. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have only a dreamless sleep, or, as we are told, it is really a change -- a transfer of the soul from this place to some other. But which it is, God alone knows. (Plato, Apology 40c-41c, 42a, tr. Tredennick abridged; the Greek word rendered here as 'soul' is 'psyche'.)

The picture of an afterlife is not an hypothesis. But neither is the picture of a sleep without dreams. Both show only logical, not real, possibility. And that is why the outcome of death is a question without an answer.

Materialism is metaphysics

There is an inclination towards belief in the picture of death as a dreamless sleep (oblivion), which seems to be founded in a stubborn materialism (Plato, Sophist 246a-b, 247c). But that presumption is "thinking oneself wise when one is not, thinking one knows what one does not know" (Plato, Apology 29a), for note that materialism ("all of reality is perceptible to the senses") is just as much metaphysics as its negation is.

The Homeric picture of the shades in Hades (Od. 11, tr. Fitzgerald: "the region of the Men of Winter", figures as "impalpable as shadows, wavering like a dream") would be an example of "a transfer from this place to some other". Of course there are many other pictures. "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come."

What is the essence of man -- is man essentially mind (Plato) or can the mind not exist without a living body (Aristotle)? That is a metaphysical, not a scientific question. Why is it not a question for natural science? Because the metaphysical presumption of natural science would be materialism.

Death is a limit, not an event of one's life

The picture of an afterlife is not an hypothesis because by 'hypothesis' I mean: a picture that can be compared with what it is imagined to be a picture of, and, therefore, by that comparison, be verified or falsified by experience. It is characteristic of metaphysical pictures that they are not hypotheses. "Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through" (TLP 6.4311, tr. Ogden) -- i.e. only where both sides of an event occur in this world is verification possible. And that is why neither picture of the outcome of death is an hypothesis.

We use what we know to deduce answers to what we don't know, namely what lies beyond what we can see. But we can't do that for death: the "beyond" here is "the beyond sense perception" (if there is anything beyond what can be perceived by the senses).

Omnia exeunt in mysterium: all things vanish into mystery. For philosophy, all things vanish into what one is ignorant of. Life vanishes into death.

To think you know what death is, is to think you know what you do not know. (Apology 29a)

E.  Do good and evil exist?

Are good and evil the same for all human beings at all times and in all places, as Sophocles' Antigone says, "not of today nor yesterday, but fixed from everlasting to eternity" (tr. C.E. Robinson)? Or is it as in Euripides, "What is shameful but thinking makes it so?"

The question is not about what human beings may have said or done here or there, now or then, for that is a question belonging to anthropology, and ethics is not concerned with describing various human customs but with answering the question: What is the good for man?

Socrates and Kant

Historically there are two answers: one answer talks about "values", casting the question in the light Wittgenstein saw it in when he spoke of "absolute value", which, like Kant's ethics of the categorical conscience, is non-rational. But the answer looks very different when cast in the Socratic light, where the thoroughgoing use of reason responds to the Delphic precept "Know thyself" by discovering what the specific excellence proper and unique to man is, because life in accord with that excellence is the good for man. (Cf. Socrates versus Hume.)

Ethics, Authority and Psychology

It was Socrates who first made ethics part of philosophy (Diog. L. i, 14), which it is because Socratic ethics is from beginning to end rational (although reason is always kept in check by experience). Ethics is reasoning about the justification for living or acting one way rather than another. (The discussion of the poet Simonides that begins Book One of Plato's Republic is a model of ethics.)

Thus submission to authority, whether to the laws of the state or to the will of God, is not ethics. It is not philosophy, because Socratic ethics is guided to the good by the natural light of reason alone and answerable only to that. (The natural light may be "perfected by the divine light" (Aquinas), but that is not Socratic philosophy.)

Likewise speculation about the instinctive or psychological causes of man's moral awareness (his "knowing good and evil") -- whether preserving the individual (selfishness) or the species (altruism), like-mindedness (sympathy), compassion (pity, fellow-feeling), fear, good reputation, likes and dislikes, pleasure and pain, &c. -- is not ethics.

F.  Am I awake or am I dreaming?

The kind of doubt is the kind of language game. (PI ii, xi, p. 224)

That the question 'Am I awake?' is nonsense is shown by the question "How do I know?" The answer is that I don't know -- or not know -- that I am awake. No language game (DEF.= a use of language where meaning is defined by rules, as a game is defined by rules (ibid. §§ 7, 23)) is normally played with the combination of words 'Am I awake?'

Nonetheless, the metaphysical question 'How do I know that I am not asleep and dreaming?' remains. It expresses -- or seems to express -- an insight into the fundamental uncertainty of human knowing. And it is metaphysical, because normally if I asked 'Am I awake?', I would be trying to introduce a doubt where none is defined and so I would be talking nonsense.

The words 'Am I awake or only dreaming?' suggest an unverifiable picture, i.e. a picture that only has sense if we imagine a god who sees what we cannot see. It belongs to metaphysics = speculation about "the reality behind reality".

According to Wittgenstein, metaphysics is not playing the game (OC § 446), which makes it nonsense. It makes sense -- i.e. it is a move in the language game (Z § 294, as a chessman is moved in chess) -- for me to ask if someone else is awake, but it is nonsense -- i.e. either an invalid move or no move at all in the game (OC § 446) -- for me to ask that about myself. And nonsense (words without meaning) is not a fundamental insight into human consciousness and knowledge.

According to Wittgenstein, it is only when we regard ourselves as individuals divorced from the community or "tribe" in which we learned to use language, the tribe in which language is used to do some defined work, that these first-person doubts arise or appear to arise.

Descartes' method, in contrast, makes use of such first-person doubt, which Descartes calls "hyperbolic doubt". It is not that anyone doubts these things, but that it is not possible to know (prove) them: I have no grounds for believing that I am awake.

The difficulty is to realize the groundlessness of our believing. (OC § 166)

That is the philosophical work of metaphysics, and it is not nonsense ("mere sound without sense"). It is what these questions without answers are for.

What gives language meaning?

Is Wittgenstein's thesis that language has meaning only in its "original home" (PI § 116), where it is a tool belonging to a tribe's ways of life, a theory about what language meaning "really is" -- or is it a selected definition of the word 'meaning'? If it is the latter, then what? (And if it is the former?) Logic's eternal question: what gives language meaning?

(Wittgenstein's analogy between playing games and using language should not be overstated, but the comparison does in many cases provide a standard by which to distinguish sense from nonsense.)

The Limit of Doubt

Is there anything I cannot doubt? What I cannot doubt, Augustine said, is that if I doubt, then I exist. (Here even hyperbolic or metaphysical doubt is impossible.) Can I doubt whether I am awake, or has language meaning only if it is not doubted that I am awake? Our language games presuppose that I am not asleep (Of course I cannot deduce from this that I am not asleep).

Doubt can go down to the foundations, but below the foundations it cannot go (because there is no such place: foundations do not themselves have foundations). Nevertheless, that is where metaphysics wants to go with its questions without answers.

Without certainty or doubt

For A to serve as grounds (proof or evidence) for B, A must be more certain than B. (OC § 250)

Individual identity: How do I know that the Robert of now is the same Robert as the Robert of an hour ago or of a year ago? (A question of this kind is asked by Joseph Butler (Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume V, ix, 3).) But is there anything of which I am more certain than of the continuity of my personal identity? But my certainty is not based on grounds, because I have none. (Only Descartes' hyperbolic doubt is possible, the hypothesis of an evil deceiver with god-like power over my mind.) At the same time, the individual who is Robert is an object in the world, one I can detachedly observe and describe (Schopenhauer); so it both is and is not me. But "the metaphysical-I, the I that is always subject, never object" alone is not me either, although I cannot deny its existence without self-contradiction (Augustine). (TLP 5.631-5.6331)

Add to this that memory is involved in every mental step, and that even to test the certainty or uncertainty of memory requires memory -- and then everything one believes may begin to appear uncertain.

G.  Is a wasp a soul? (What is and isn't life?)

When my father finds me killing flies because I've nothing else to do, he becomes angry and tells me not to do this. He doesn't say why, but as a small child I obey him. When I myself become a man I rescue worms that have been washed onto the pavement by the rain and now face death in the sunlight. Is this compassion wise or foolish?

Why do we apply the word 'life' to insects -- because we did this long before any natural scientist had a say? As children, when we learn language, we learn to classify animals and also plants as living things, to say that they are alive or dead.

What we learn is a rule of grammar. Or, more clearly: an indefinite concept. When exactly is a flower dead? Is an apple alive? when on the tree? when fallen? or never? A tree is a living thing, but is a branch cut from a tree? There is no rule (of grammar) for answering this question.

That wasps are living things is not a theory about wasps (Z § 223), but a concept (i.e. rule for the use of the words 'living thing'). Its negation 'Wasps are not living things' mistakes a rule of grammar for a statement of fact; it is a combination of words that tries to negate a rule of grammar to ask a question of fact (PP iii, p. 312). However, is the question 'Is a wasp a living thing?' a question of fact -- i.e. a proposition that can be proved or disproved by an investigation of facts?

The metaphysical question is not about linguistic conventions (or about thoughtless instinct), but about the attitude of a reflective adult. Should my attitude towards a wasp -- or towards a plant or microbe -- be an attitude towards a soul (PI II, iv, p. 178) in contrast to an attitude toward a lifeless thing or automaton? According to Albert Schweitzer, it is wrongful to harm rather than do good to living things. So this is a question for both metaphysics and ethics.

To conceive a wasp's "soul" by analogy to our own, that is, to a human soul, is not easy, if at all possible, because the resemblance between man and wasp is so slight. Words such as 'hope', 'reverence', 'sorrow' and 'love' are undefined if applied to a life form so different from our own (PI §§ 357, 360).

H.  What was the origin of natural language?

Note: If the only limit to scientific explanation is concept-formation (hypothesis- or theory-formation), i.e. empirical data plus the imagination of genius, wouldn't it be unwise to call a scientific riddle, which may be solvable if the needed mind is applied to it, an unanswerable question? But on the other hand, may not whether it is possible to solve a riddle depend on the exact riddle that is set.

The hypotheses of experimental science can be verified by being reproduced without exception. Thus I think the scientific question is: "What is the origin of natural language, e.g. how does an infant acquire its native language?" In contrast, the question "What was the origin of natural language?" is answered by natural history hypotheses, which are essentially speculative.

"But might it not happen that some unheard of biological mechanism is discovered that can explain the origin of natural language, for many things once unheard of are heard of today?" That question is what Newton called an "hypothesis", and it should not be used to evade the conclusions that can be drawn from the facts now known to us. Every theory is subject to revision; something not to be forgotten.

Plato was puzzled by the origin of names (and speculated about it in the Cratylus [439b-440c]). This is part of the question of what the origin of natural language is.

What was the beginning, the early days, of language use: what is a description of the way man began using this new tool (or collection of tools)?

Mystery of Natural history

In the context of the how-ness of the world there are questions to which it seems the answers cannot be known -- because the answers require knowledge of events of very long ago. And although theories ("models, pictures, maps") can be invented to account for (or recreate in imagination) past events, we needn't find those accounts persuasive, and therefore the phenomenon may always remain unexplained in our view. At most we might find an account plausible: "it may have been that way", but nothing more.

About the origins of natural language, are all the facts known that are ever going to be known? What further facts would be needed to construct a persuasive picture of language's origins? What would such a picture look like? One model is Wittgenstein's primitive language games. That is one model, but it is a logic only model; biology is left out, although maybe that is wanted too (although what might a biological model look like?)

The cries of animals and human language

... the languages of all primitive peoples studied so far show extreme complexities of grammar, declension, conjugation, and syntax. There are no primitive languages, if by 'primitive' we mean something between the cries of animals and human language. (S.I. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action, 2nd ed. (1964), p. 22)

Why simpler forms of expression?

The grammar of the Latin language is very complicated, i.e. there are many, many rules to learn, whereas a modern romance language is comparatively uncomplicated. The evidence, as I remember it from school, is that as individual languages develop they become less rather than more complicated; the most grammatically complicated languages (Greek, Latin) are also the oldest.

Did primitive human reason or did primitive human instinct invent this complicated grammar? Did man once upon a time sing as unselfconsciously as birds seem to sing, but "with meaning"? In which sense of the word 'meaning' -- in the primitive language game sense of games with rules, or in some other? (But which other? It is possible to be poor in models of language meaning, too.)

Learning versus Endowment

It appears that if a human being does not learn a language in childhood, it will never learn one. Thus remember that we acquire language in childhood from those we live among -- i.e. man is not endowed with language (as he is endowed e.g. with hearing and sight), but must learn language. Which makes the origin of language even more puzzling, for who then, did the earliest human beings learn language from? (Are birds born singing, or must they learn to sing from other birds?)

Hence the question of how language developed from its presumably simple beginnings to its present complexity remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. (Hayakawa, op. cit.)

But why presume that "human song", if we want to imagine a comparison to birdsong, was simpler in its beginnings than it is now? Do we imagine that grammar started out simple, became complicated, and now is becoming simpler again? (Is that possible but not plausible? It is something that can be described, e.g. a scholarly class that wrote in language that the vulgar never spoke; so that the over-complexity of ancient language was not a natural development and in that sense wasn't real. If the only records of ancient language we had were poetry, would we conclude that the original language of man was poetry?)

Birds and Man

Or did man sing as birds sing, but "with meaning"? Wittgenstein says that if another species could talk, we would not understand it (PI II, xi, p. 223), but wouldn't it be more that it would not understand us? Birds talk (if indeed that is what they do), and we mostly don't understand them, but e.g. crows are thought to have a vocabulary of twenty-four words, including 'farmer' and 'farmer with gun'. And that would be an example of a "primitive language game". But do birds use language to philosophize -- are they "bewitched" by their own language, as Wittgenstein says that man is (ibid. § 109)? Does "the riddle" exist in their minds? How do we know that it does not, for we do know that (ibid. § 360)?

Language games

If we imagine a step-by-step building up of language as in Wittgenstein's primitive language games, each arising naturally in answer to the particular needs of human beings, would that be a plausible picture of the origin of language? But if it is plausible, it is nothing more than plausible; plausible = what we are inclined to accept, nothing more. Nonetheless, Wittgenstein's models of primitive language games do seem to show that a primitive language need not consist of "squawks and screeches" to which human language has no resemblance.

Theory, phenomenon, imagination

The only limit of natural science is hypothesis-formation (and, it appears, the net of human perception). But any scientific theory shares this quality with all other kinds of myths, namely that it is selected facts plus imagination: imagination creates the way of looking at a phenomenon: it selects the facts it judges relevant and organizes them in a particular way. But imagination can create other ways as well. And that is why a theory should never be mistaken for the explanation of the phenomenon it seeks to understand.

A possible origin for human language

An example of an answer, not to the question of the original form, but to the question of the original source of human language, is suggested by Helen Keller's story of how she herself learned language.

It is not only language but also curiosity that separates man from the other animals: the desire to know and understand, namely philosophy, of which there is none without language. (Our questions without answers are not primitive language games, however. Indeed, that is why we have to talk about languages so much, precisely because philosophy is not a game played according to strict rules.) Things that drive the creation of language.

What is the origin of our creative thoughts?

About a metaphor I used -- had I invented it myself? If asked, I could only answer that the idea suggested itself to me. Where would it have come from if the answer isn't so-and-so writer or such-and-such book? It's true that I have been thinking about these things for fifty years -- but is that the cause of the metaphor, 'cause' in the mechanical sense?

What would a mechanical explanation look like -- tracing a mechanism in the brain? "Here are the words 'trawling a cloud' or 'lassoing a nebulosity' written in the atoms and molecules of brain cells." The picture is absurd. Since we can't even say what an explanation would look like, the question is without answer; is it also without meaning?

I haven't a clue how it is biologically or ghostily possible for man to think. What matters to philosophy is that he does think and that his thoughts are words that can be examined and discussed. Logic is independent of both natural science and metaphysics if it uses the language facts in plain view as its test of meaning, excluding everything occult and speculative ("hypotheses").

I.  Why does man want to live? What is life aiming at?

Existence is superfluous to need. Nothing need exist. If it did, it would not be possible to imagine the contrary, because the contrary would be nonsense. Because what's a "necessary being" when it's at home (PI § 116)? And if existence is unnecessary, then the essential relationship is between existence and -- not need (necessity) -- but want (wanting to exist).

The background of this question is Albert Schweitzer's discussion of ethics, but, beyond that, it asks why man wants (or "wills") to live, which Schweitzer does not ask.

One philosophical enquiry begins by asking about the world (nature, the universe), the other begins by asking about life. We may think that we must look to the answer to the first question ("existence of the world") to give us the answer to the second question ("how to live our life" or ethics). But in Schweitzer's view that is not possible: ethics cannot be derived from knowledge of the world but only from will to live.

If looked at from the point of view of ethics, which is the human point of view, in the universe we find no overall purposiveness, because nature both creates and destroys what it creates (and we can discern no ethics behind this creation and destruction), and in the midst of this creation and destruction mankind's continued existence is not at all assured. (Schweitzer, Civilization and Ethics, 2nd rev. ed. (1929), xvii, and "Religion in Modern Civilization" (1934)).

Is it not, therefore, perplexing that man, when reason tells him that existence as such (both in its how-ness and that-ness) is morally unintelligible, nonetheless chooses to go on living without reasons (without a resolution to his perplexity)? Why does he not, as a rational being, refuse to act until he has an answer? Why is man willing to exist in the mist of this most fundamental of all fundamental mysteries ("the riddle")?

The body, source of endless trouble that it is to man (Plato, Phaedo 66c-d), forces man to live: "Hunger drives even the wolf from its cave." But man is not simply an animal: man is rational: he is not "a beast wanting discourse of reason". He can reason his way to self-destruction, to which "the door is always open" (Epictetus).

Thus Albert Camus thought the first question in life is "Should I kill myself?" Because if existence is superfluous and meaningless, then why not, because don't we discard superfluous and meaningless things? But Beethoven's instrumental music is superfluous and meaningless ("sounds without sense"), and we don't discard that. It seems that a thing may be unnecessary without being unimportant or uninteresting to us.

What would an answer look like to the question of why man wills to live? It appears that the animal impulse is the stronger part of the rational animal here, but how can instinct be stronger than reason? Well, but does reason tell man that it is immoral to exist? or only that existence is a mystery?

"The universal will-to-live"

To understand the meaning of the whole -- and that is what a world-view demands -- is for us an impossibility.

The last fact which knowledge can discover is that the world is a manifestation in every way puzzling, of the universal will to live. (Civilization and Ethics, tr. C.T. Campion, "Preface" )

But although ethics can exist without a world-view, does such an ethics provide the necessary motive force or love to make someone want to live and to contribute to the moral and material perfecting of the individual and of society (which is what Schweitzer thought an ethical person must do)?

"All we know"

One cannot explain life. Everything is a mystery to us. All we know is that there is one thing -- to be alive. And another state: not being alive.... All we do know is that life is a great mystery and that we ought to be filled with awe and reverence for this mystery. (The Schweitzer Album (1965), p. 161 [Copenhagen, 1959, tr. Anderson])

"I am life that wills to live in the midst of [other] life that wills to live" (Out of my Life and Thought (1931), tr. Lemke, xiii). "I am life which wants to live, and all around me is life that wants to live" (The Problem of Ethics in the Evolution of Human Thought (1952), tr. John Russell). That for Schweitzer was the one irreducible fact for ethics, in this respect like Descartes' first principle. But do we discover "life's meaning" in our will (or wanting) to live?

Whatever our point of view the whole will remain for us an enigma. Whatever way we look at it, existence will remain for us a riddle. (Out of my Life and Thought, xviii)

If we look to the natural world for the answer to "the meaning of life", is there a point at which 'insoluble' becomes nonsense, and philosophy must say that the riddle is resolved, i.e. that our existence has no meaning?

"Reverence for Life"

Schweitzer found the answer to the question of ethics or how man should live his life, in the principle of "reverence for life", by which he meant solidarity with all life in all its forms, and therefore that whatever is beneficial to life is good, and whatever harms life is bad. Due to the principle of reverence for life, Schweitzer wrote, we are no longer obliged to derive ethics from "an understanding of the meaning of the whole" = world-view.

The final step is the acceptance of a point of view

But Schweitzer's answer was as he said, and as he thought it must be, in the final step a subjective answer: "What is rational reaches eventually the non-rational" (ibid).

The final step is non-rational because it is the acceptance or adoption of a point of view or way of looking at things, a reference point treated as if it were absolute. A philosopher says: "Look at things this way!" But there are other ways. (There is no absolute reference point no absolute Cartesian origin, no answer to Archimedes' "Give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world!" -- or in other words, there is no bedrock beneath the bedrock.)

"Answer to the meaning of life"

The expression 'meaning of life' is very vague, but I think we mean by it "an understanding of the whole from the human point of view", an account in which "it all makes sense", in which "it all falls into place" (like the final scene of a detective story). But given our religious tradition, it would seem that for us the only satisfactory account would have to reference God, ethics and divine providence. All of which is anthropomorphic and none of which can be proved by the natural light of reason, as it demands ethics of a natural world which is to every appearance amoral.

But could a non-anthropological nature-metaphysics which attributes to Nature neither intelligence nor purpose, be an answer to the question of life's meaning rather than a denial that life has a meaning?

Rather simple people say things like "My philosophy of life is: live and let live". And that is a rudimentary ethics. But they know that is not an answer to the universal catechism questions. Ethics cannot take the place of metaphysics. An ethical answer to a metaphysical question falls short of the mark.

Socratic ethics versus the meaning of existence

In the philosophy of Socrates (1) the question of ethics ("no small matter, but how to live", in Plato's words) and (2) the question of the meaning of the world and of life are independent of one another. Indeed, Socrates asks only about what the good for man is, and answers that the good for a thing is existence in accord with (or according to) the specific excellence that is proper and unique to that thing, which for man is: rational moral virtue.

But the desire to know non-ethical things (i.e. things besides what the good for man is) about the world and our life will not be silenced. Our questions without answers are an expression of that desire. Philosophy cannot be only ethics and logic or logic alone (Wittgenstein's later thought notwithstanding), but must include metaphysics.

Four catechism questions

"A simple story in words of one syllable", as they must be if they are to be the eternal questions of all mankind.

"What are the most important things in life?"  "Why are we born?"  "What is the meaning of suffering?"  "What lies beyond death?" (Glynn, A Song for Nagasaki (1988), xi)

Clearly these questions are not asked as if man by himself could necessarily answer them. The author says these are simple catechism "questions posed rather naïvely", but they don't seem naïve to me. What are their equivalents to the questions I have asked? The "most important things" is the question of ethics (What is the good for man? How should we live our life?) which is related to the question of "why we are born", and here philosophy and religion will be in agreement, if, that is, the answer is that we are born "to love and serve God, where 'God' of course doesn't mean an arbitrary and monstrous will, but rather everything true and good". As to "the meaning of suffering" this seems to be the question of whether there is divine providence (of whether there is an aim or plan and why there is evil), and "what lies beyond death" seems equivalent to Is there an afterlife?

"Why does God exist?"

That is, why does the concept 'God' exist? "Why is there anything?", we ask, "to what end?" And the tautological (i.e. "by definition") answer is God. But if the word 'God' is somehow (I don't know how) a name, then it certainly is not the name of anything comprehensible to man. A strange, singular tool. But why shouldn't a concept exist for just this purpose, to be an answer to the eternal questions without answers? God is no longer used as a "working hypothesis" in physics (Bonhoeffer), but metaphysics is not speculation about the unknown but about the unknowable. But do we ourselves, or does the nature of existence itself, make it unknowable? That is the question.

"God is the absolute point of reference, the Origin." Of course that is nonsense, but it does suggest what man is groping his way towards (Acts 17.27).

Socrates' unanswered questions versus Plato's unanswerable questions

Socrates looked for the essences named by moral terms, Plato says in order to find standards of measurement for all circumstances in which ethical judgments must be made (Euthyphro 6d-e). Thus: What is piety? ("correct conduct or doing one's duty towards God") What is justness? ("correct conduct towards men") (Gorgias 507a-b, 522c). What is courage? What is self-control? But these are not necessarily unanswerable questions. We have, instead, to look to see whether or not there is some quality "in which they do not differ but are all alike" (Meno 72c). That is the Socratic method of induction, which is very different from Plato's method of preconceptions, e.g. "the meaning of a common name must be a common nature", preconceptions that make Plato's questions unanswerable (Z § 259).

General Discussion

What is the grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon) of philosophy's questions without answers?

Why are the eternal questions unanswerable? Is it because of their relationship to "some very general facts of nature that can explain concept-formation" (PI II, xii, p. 230), where concept formation = question formation? But if it is, are those general facts (1) about the nature of existence -- or only (2) about the species man's way thinking about existence -- i.e. about the language he uses or tries to use?

We seem in a queer place here, far away from the primitive language games -- i.e. games played according to strict rules where how to go on and what counts as playing the game wrong is clear to all -- that serve as models of question and answer. Then rather than just wishing for an insight, shouldn't we be seeking a method, as Descartes did?

General Method in Philosophy

To describe our method: it has three parts: (1) to distinguish between sense and nonsense in language, (2) to distinguish between what one knows and what one doesn't know, and (3) to love wisdom. With respect to the questions without answers, however, the first part may seem shaky, and the second part can only come after the first. (The third part sees the discussion through to the end.)

The questions recast as propositions

As well as a rhetorical form, these questions can be given a non-question form. Wittgenstein: "When I suddenly have an experience of being struck by the fact that the world exists, I want to say, 'I wonder at the existence of the world' (LE p. 8: astonishment that anything exists).

But is it nonsense to use instead the form of expression 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' -- or do those two forms of expression have meanings different from one another? For if I ask why, is it not because I think there must be a because?

If someone says "There really should be nothing", that is not a moral judgment. The world should not exist because a thing that exists without sufficient reason for its existence is irrational. [Note 3] That is, the rational or philosophical mind -- i.e. the mind of someone who reasons -- wants rational answers -- i.e. reasons. The answer "it just is" is irrational and unacceptable to it. So that if it is possible for the world not to exist, then there "must" be a reason why it does exist. This is of course a preconception; it is a rational or philosophical riddle.

"Not the form of language, but the meaning of the language regardless of its form"

'Why is there something rather than nothing?' and 'I am astonished that anything exists' are forms of language. Have they the same or different meanings?

The form we give these "questions without answers" does not determine their meaning, because meaning is not a function of form but of use. Wittgenstein's logic of language compares words with tools: "Look at the sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment" (PI § 421).

Have these two forms of language the same meaning, i.e. do they do the same work? Not if one asks for an answer while the other does not. But on the other hand, if the questioner presumes there is no answer, then is it a question?

Is the meaning, not only of a word (PI § 43), but also of a combination of words, its use in the language? Then what would be the meaning = use in the language of philosophy's questions? Is it as reminders "to have the good sense not to fancy that you know what you do not know" (Theaetetus 210b-c)) about the mystery of our existence?

But is there a grammatical category "reminders", a proposition type that can be distinguished from other types? (Categories are tools.) It would not be distinguished by form (Contrast the TLP's "the general form of a proposition: This is how things stand" [4.5]).

What is our aim with these questions?

Maybe we should ask what use we want to make of this language.

Karol Wojtyła called language a mystery, related to "the inscrutable mystery of God himself". And indeed without language the ideas on this page, including the idea of God, would not exist. "Discourse of reason" really is discourse (i.e. language).

As to those like Hobbes who say that words are merely the "signs or marks" of thoughts --

The general use of speech is to transfer our mental discourse into verbal; or the train of our thoughts into a train of words. (Leviathan I, 4, in Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume V, i, 5)

-- the reply is: Show me your thoughts without your words. Maybe a carpenter or a dog can do this, but can someone who philosophizes?

Work or Wandering

"I think you might do something better with the time," she said, "than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answers." (Alice in Wonderland vii)

Alice takes it for granted that even though they have no answers, they are nevertheless riddles. But aren't you playing the game wrong (OC § 446) if you know there is no answer?

It is different saying that, although it is unknowable, there is an answer from saying that there is no answer to know. And it is different saying that existence is a mystery from saying that existence is without meaning. Nonetheless, regardless of which is said, how to live our life is knowable if we distinguish between "meaning of the world" (Nature-philosophy) and "no small matter, but how to live" or ethics (Life-philosophy).

As Socrates and the Greeks looked at things (and also, although very differently, Albert Schweitzer did), even if we cannot explain either the "that-ness" nor ethically account for the "how-ness" of existence, we can know how we should live our life.

For Socrates (and Schweitzer) that is possible, but for someone who holds that how we should live our life is knowable only when the answer to the riddle of "the existence of anything rather than nothing" is known, it is not possible. If the demand is made that Life-philosophy follow from Nature-philosophy, then it seems that wandering through a meaningless existence will be the only path open to man.

If asking unanswerable riddles is wasting time, then philosophy is wasted time, since posing unanswerable questions is what most of philosophy is (Plato, Apology 37e-38a).

"A question must have an answer"?

Questions that we ourselves have made unanswerable (Z § 259)? What is the value of PI (π = C/2r)? If this can only be answered: "To which decimal place?" why is that? Because of ourselves (mathematics is a human invention) -- or because of the nature of things? If we can always redefine questions to make them answerable, then why don't geometers redefine 'the value of PI'?

Is the origin of the questions without answers (otherwise known as philosophy) conceptual confusion or the nature of our existence itself?

General propositions that are falsifiable and general propositions that are not

What do we mean by calling an idea imponderable -- do the words 'We can never know' state a way of seeing our existence rather than an hypothesis falsifiable by reason and experience? Compare the proposition 'Things don't just vanish into thin air', because that proposition is not treated as an hypothesis either.

Ways of seeing things don't change the facts -- or do they? I am certain I left my writing pen on my desk, but I look and look and cannot find it. If I do not say 'the pen has forever vanished' but instead 'the pen is missing and will show up someday' -- aren't those different facts? Contrast too 'It is impossible to know' with Socrates' "I will never give up until I know" (Plato, Euthyphro 15c).

Categories 'Religion' and 'Philosophy' and 'Questions without answers'

If set answers are given to the eternal questions in a catechism, then as religious questions the eternal questions are not unanswerable or unanswered. In contrast, philosophy asks the eternal questions, but does not answer them, and in its eyes religious revelation is like the tales -- since metaphysical reasons cannot be put to the test of experience -- told by the metaphysical thinker who thinks he can see the reality that casts the shadows on our cave's walls (Republic 515c), i.e. the percepts or "things in themselves" which are unknowable without concepts (if percepts without concepts are indeed invisible).

New categories - New directions of thought

The expressions 'questions without answers' and 'eternal questions' are category names. Different categories might be invented to replace them -- although this invention might be the work of genius. Different categories could suggest different directions for our thinking to take.

Being limited to the few categories that are at present common currency (RPP ii § 690), as if those were the only, the true way, to divide up reality (there is no such way) is to be "poor in categories" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § 58).

"Important nonsense" (Ramsey) is not nonsense

The riddle does not exist (TLP 6.5). Because a question can only exist where there is an answer (6.51).

And there is no answer to the riddle.

Philosophy only asks; it cannot answer the deepest questions of existence. But to claim that philosophy's questions are therefore nonsense, as Wittgenstein does, to say "And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems" (TLP 4.003c, tr. Ogden), is to misdescribe the logic of our language. For like the theorems of deductive geometry, the conclusions of deductive philosophy (Rationalism, of which the TLP is an example) must be put to the test of experience in the natural world, a test the TLP's description fails, because language that conveys meaning is not nonsense (i.e. without meaning), and that applies to philosophy's questions without answers.

The TLP's categories

The TLP's model of language is far too simple: the book is poor in categories -- in categories of proposition types. Its account of the logic or grammar of our language is thereby false.

Philosophical theses must pass both Socratic tests (namely reason and experience), not reason only. Thus regardless of what the TLP claims to demonstrate, there in fact arises for every thoughtful human being the questions of how and why to live our life, which are questions of ethics, which despite the TLP's denial can be put into words that are not meaningless and rationally discussed.

Although some "important nonsense" is nonsense

The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time. (6.4312) God does not reveal himself in the world. (6.432)

But there is no "outside space and time" (i.e. that combination of words is undefined), and if God is to reveal himself at all, it must be in a perceptible place. However poetic the words "the other side of the sky" may sound, they are without meaning.

Who, or is it what, creates the riddles?

"Have you guessed the riddle yet?"

"No, I give it up," Alice replied. "What's the answer?"

"I haven't the slightest idea," said the Hatter.

"I think you might do something better ... than ... asking riddles that have no answers."

Philosophy cannot agree with Alice, because neither all tautologies nor all riddles without solutions are idle. Asking them is the difference between man and beast, between philosophy and an eternal childhood.

Or does the mystery of existence not exist, as Wittgenstein claimed it does not (TLP 6.5)? Is the Garden of Eden the original and proper home (PI § 116) of man's language and of man himself? Who was the serpent in the Garden?

Explanations of Meaning

By 'riddle' we normally mean a challenging but playful question of the form: Why is A like B? e.g. "Why is a king like a yardstick?" Because both are rulers. But should the combination of words 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?' be called a riddle if it has no solution?

In practice, i.e. normally, the limits of the concept 'riddle' are not so well-defined. Often we use the word 'riddle' as a synonym for 'puzzle', and of puzzles there are many kinds. Generally, anything perplexing can be called a 'riddle'.

If Alice is talking nonsense when she refers to "riddles that have no answers", then why do we understand her? Or don't we understand her? What does the word 'understand' mean here? Often, or always, whether the meaning is clear to us -- i.e. whether we understand -- or not is shown by what we go on to do, as e.g. when we explain "adding and take away" to a child. Is there something corresponding to that here?

Does Wittgenstein's "moves in a language game" metaphor make the meaning of 'understand' clear? But what game are we playing if there is no solution to a riddle? There is no "next move in the game". Or it might be: "Why do you ask a question if you don't expect an answer (because there is no answer)?" And then you give your reasons -- that might be the next move in a question and answer game.

Then 'to understand' means to be able to make the next move, to "know how to go on" (PI § 151) -- or to be able to give someone an explanation of meaning. (Note that Wittgenstein used the word 'game' very broadly.)

The general definition, 'riddle' = 'something perplexing', does not give us much guidance. So we have to explain our meaning. And sometimes we can do that only by making rules. But at other times, and normally, we clarify the meaning of language by giving examples. Are the examples presented here of questions without answers, true examples of riddles or not?

If someone says he doesn't understand, you can ask what part he doesn't understand. If he says he doesn't understand any of it, that is not true. Explanations of meaning are given to those who do not understand, or by those who want to assure themselves that they understand. "If a man knows anything, he can explain what he knows to others" (Xenophon, Memorabilia iv, 6, 1).

The Socratic ideal is to insist on a strict distinction between sense and nonsense, as a corollary to the distinction between what you know and what you only think you know (but do not). We want to put an end to vagueness and confusion in philosophy. Where can this begin if not with language, with words such as 'understand' and 'clear in meaning'?

Is the source of the eternal questions language or nature?

For we ourselves made these riddles unanswerable. (Z § 259)

Or did we? Or does the nature of existence make the riddles of philosophy unanswerable?

Wittgenstein wants to say there is no riddle, even though he recognizes there is, for he says that not to recognize that life is problematic would be "blindness to the most important thing". Indeed in the TLP [6.4312] he acknowledges that our existence is "enigmatic" in itself, although it is not a natural science enigma. But, strangely, according to Wittgenstein, it is not a philosophical enigma either, not a riddle for philosophy to discuss.

"Theory like mist on eyeglasses: obscures facts." (Warner Oland, Charlie Chan in Egypt, 1935)

Eyeglasses (PI § 103) are themselves mist in the sense that all fact is already "conceived fact" or in other words "percepts without concepts are blind" (Goethe, Kant). The conceived facts are the acknowledged facts in plain view (the acknowledgement is co-incidental, not contractual; it is what Wittgenstein calls "agreement in way of life"). But that is not the "mist" the quotation alludes to. Rather, the allusion is to theories about the meaning of the conceived facts, speculations that, if allowed to harden into preconceptions, may obscure both the facts and their meaning.

Wittgenstein's theories about the origins of philosophy are misted eyeglasses. Wittgenstein doesn't want to solve philosophical problems; he wants to explain them away as not problems at all: he says that a philosopher is a man bewitched or mystified and misled in various ways by his own language. There can be no philosophical problems. In contrast to this is the the classical view about philosophy's origin (Theaetetus 155c-d), that philosophical perplexity is caused by the nature of man's and the world's existence. Philosophy is about the things words name, not about the words.

Both these views can be prejudices to which all facts are forced to conform (PI § 131), theories into which every fact must be force-fitted, obscuring the facts as they are. The only thing to do about this is to use Wittgenstein as a cure for philosophy and philosophy as a cure for Wittgenstein. The facts must be looked at from both points of view, both as possibly conceptual confusion and as possibly questions about reality.

But not everything that looks like an unanswerable question is. Some questions are nonsense

"Look at it this way: to exist is not necessarily to exist as an object for an hypothesis." That is a grammatical remark -- if it is not nonsense (language without meaning).

It is not a something, but not a nothing either ... We have only rejected the grammar that tries to force itself on us here. (PI § 304)

But doesn't that language suggest the question: If something both is, i.e. of course thought, like pain, is real, and isn't, i.e. but neither 'thought' nor 'pain' is the name of an object -- then what is it?

But that is precisely what Wittgenstein did not want to suggest. Both the propositions 'The word 'mind' is not the name of an object' and 'Mental phenomena are real' are rules of grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon), i.e. rules for the use of words in the language (in contrast to statements of extra-linguistic fact or hypotheses).

That seems to deny, however, even the possibility that mind may be something other than material (matter), namely spirit. But all that is denied is that the word 'mind' -- as we normally use that word -- is the name an object of any kind (solid, liquid, gas, ghost), because that would not be a true description of that word's use in the language.

Compare the words 'conscience' and 'imagination' -- not every noun is the name of an object, although our language's forms of expression lure us into presuming it is.

Here 'normal' contrasts with 'metaphysical', because we are trying to describe the facts in plain view about our use of language, not to speculate about the nature of anything, e.g. the medium of mental phenomena, as Plato did.

'What do you have in mind?' 'I am troubled in my mind' &c. A noun with a different use in the language from name of object is often mistaken for the name of an object (hypostatization). Misleading grammatical analogies govern our thoughts about nouns. And this is what happens with the word 'mind': the facts in plain view are ignored and imagination takes over.

Grammar, not hypothesis

The question 'What kind of object is the mind?' is normally not unanswerable but merely an undefined combination of words. But pointing that out is not to support a particular view e.g. about the possibility of an afterlife, whether the metaphysics of materialism or the metaphysical dualism of Plato and Descartes, because 'The word 'mind' is not the name of an object' is not a "theory of mind" but a description of the public rules for the use of a word. It is grammar, not hypothesis.

The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations. (Z § 458)

Conceptual investigations are grammatical investigations (although if we are going to define 'concept' as 'rules for using a word', that proposition is a tautology). When we philosophize it is often unclear to us whether we are trying to "define phenomena" (factual investigation) or to define words (conceptual investigation). I wrote that "in philosophy we define words, not things", but someone else may think philosophy's limits lie elsewhere.

Incomparable Pictures

Some philosophical questions without answers might better be called "pictures that are not hypotheses", if by 'hypothesis' we mean a proposition that can be put to the test of experience (not only to the test of reason).

Bertrand Russell asked questions like: How do you know that the world and all your memories of it did not spring into existence five minutes ago (PP iii, p. 319-320)? What Russell does is to suggest a picture, namely "The world and all your memories sprang into existence five minutes ago", a picture impossible to verify or falsify.

The common characteristic of these pictures is that they depend for their meaning -- if they are to have meaning -- on the inclusion of a god who sees what we do not or cannot see (cf. PI § 346).

Unverifiability and Grammar

The reason these unverifiable pictures are unverifiable is that we ourselves have made them unverifiable (Z § 259). For example, Russell said there was a hippopotamus in the room, but that it could not be seen or touched, heard or smelled -- in a word, the hippopotamus was in every way imperceptible. Thereby Russell made the proposition 'There is an hippopotamus in the room' impossible to verify -- but he also thereby did the same for the proposition 'There is no hippopotamus in the room'. (Mind, July 1951)

Russell's description negates the language-meaning grounds for stating that a hippopotamus is or is not in the room. Again, as with 'The world and all your memories sprang into existence five minutes ago', the impossibility of verification belongs to the grammar -- i.e. to the rules of the game -- of this language (or language game). Russell's descriptions play the game wrong (OC § 446).

The "invisible hippopotamus" is an example of "grammar stripping", i.e. the "reduction of an essence" by discarding rules that are essential to a word's meaning. The bare sign (word) remains, but its meaning is lost. For example, the word 'hippopotamus' is the name of a physical object and the word 'physical object' is partly defined as a perceptible thing. So that if Russell says there is an imperceptible hippopotamus, he breaks the rules and the result is nonsense. (Of course in a fairy tale many things are logically possible, e.g. a cat's face that fades in and out of perception. But Russell is not discussing language as it is used in fairy tales.)

To draw is to imagine

Picture an elephant with no legs, no tail, no trunk, no ears, no head, no body. It is impossible to make such a drawing because there would be no difference between such a drawing and a blank page (A blank page cannot be drawn; that is not what we mean by the word 'draw'). There is no difference between the elephant being there and not being there -- and therefore the elephant is not there. (That is grammar, not metaphysics.)

Logical Possibility and Self-mystification

If someone asks for the location of the mind, this shows that person has not yet mastered the use in the language of the word 'mind', because he naively follows a false grammatical analogy to place the word 'mind' in the grammatical category "name of object". But we don't explain the meaning of the word 'mind' the way we do names of objects (PI § 43). To see that is to begin to understand the logical grammar of our language, by not being poor in grammatical categories. [Note 4]

Note 1: Quoted in DW p. 7-8.

About this page: it is mostly written from the point of view of "Wittgenstein's logic of language", and it may not be understood without first understanding that way of thinking about language. [BACK]

Note 2: S.I. Hayakawa quotes his teacher Alfred Korzybski's statement "The map is not the territory". No, the map is not the territory. But neither is the meaning of the map the territory. Because if the territory were the meaning of the map, it would be impossible to say what the meaning of a map that did not correspond to any territory was -- i.e. such a picture would be without meaning. (But that would not be a true description of how we normally use the word 'meaning', because language that conveys meaning is not meaningless.) [BACK]

Note 3:

"The great foundation of mathematics is the principle of contradiction ... This single principle is sufficient to demonstrate ... all mathematical principles. But in order to proceed from mathematics to natural philosophy another principle is required ... I mean the principle of sufficient reason, that is, that nothing happens without a reason why it should be so rather than otherwise." (Leibniz, Second letter to Samuel Clarke, in Copleston, A History of Philosophy, Volume IV, xvi, 2)

[BACK]

Note 4: That is the only point or purpose of Wittgenstein's jargon: to make different rules for the use of words explicit; because it is Wittgenstein's jargon: we wouldn't naturally call the proposition 'The word 'mind' is not the name of an object' a rule of grammar, nor say that whenever someone is talking he is playing a game with words. [BACK]

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