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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]

I don't see this. I don't see that Bernard's remark need be true philosophically nor that Wittgenstein's remark need be a true account of the grammatical logic of our word 'question'. On the contrary, doesn't there exist a collection of questions for which there are no answers, at least not answers knowable by the natural light of reason, that we haven't any idea how to answer (contra Bernard), and for which we would not accept any answer (contra the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus)? Questions that we cannot answer -- 'cannot' because of the way they are defined, of course -- but which we do not want to define differently. They are questions that go right to the foundations of existence (our life).

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Enigmas and Logical Paradoxes

Questions without answers are often called 'enigmas' or 'mysteries', 'riddles' or 'puzzles without solutions', 'imponderables', or 'conundrums'. The description 'essentially problematical questions' could also be used to classify them. So that the topic of this page could be called The riddle of existence or The philosophical enigma/s of life.

It is also possible to regard these questions as rhetorical: they don't request an answer, but only an awareness of themselves. They assume agreement about the rightness of asking them. "Isn't it puzzling that anything exists?" However, even enigmas or rhetorical questions must not be nonsense (i.e. undefined combinations of words).

The word 'grammar' in Wittgenstein

There are also "logic circles" (paradoxes), questions that it seems 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 is a circle of sorts, a conjuring trick of syntax that sets the intellect chasing its own tail (PI § 109).

But words are tools, and for what work in the language would we use the combination of words 'Everything I say is false'? Words (sounds, marks on paper) do not have meaning in themselves, but only when they are given a use in the language. Note: as Wittgenstein used the word 'grammar' (revised that concept), grammar DEF.= everything needed to describe the use of language, and, because meaning is use in the language rather than form: logic = that part of grammar concerned with language sense and nonsense (in contrast to syntax).

Antithesis and Meaning

Questions without answers ... But there is an immediate objection to this notion: 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 nonsense to say that all language is vague, none clear. Because 'vague' only gets its meaning by being contrasted with 'clear'. Likewise with 'riddle' and 'answer'.

Mysteries or self-mystifications?

On the other hand, there is a difference between saying that Some questions cannot be answered and saying that All questions cannot be answered (Note that this "cannot" must be logical impossibility, not simply practical impossibility). The second statement is nonsense, but is the first statement nonsense as well? Compare the difference between 'Some language is vague' and 'All language is vague'. Is that a valid comparison? But no concept is essentially vague: where boundaries are indefinite, we can always set boundaries that are more definite; and the same is true of the questions without answers -- we can always redefine those questions in a way that makes them answerable ... if that is what we want to do with them.

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

But did we ourselves make them unanswerable -- or does the nature of our existence make them unanswerable? If the following eleven questions (A-H) really are mysteries rather than muddles, they belong to "the eternal questions" of mankind, and 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 are important to know. And maybe there is a "metaphysical use" 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.'

If the word 'void' contrasts with nothing, then the word 'void' means nothing, not 'nothing'. The word 'void' would contrast with 'everything' in this case (Sophist 233e-234a). Viewing "the world as a whole -- a limited whole" [seeing the world as a limited whole, and seeing it vanish] is the way Wittgenstein expressed this 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 anything rather than nothing -- why does anything at all exist rather than nothing?' This is a question without an answer.

"The limits of language"

This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. (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)

Through the Looking Glass, v ('Wool and Water'), the White Queen, 17 KB
God Himself cannot understand nonsense, because there is nothing there to understand

Wittgenstein said that our "running against the limits of language points to something", that it is a tendency which he deeply respects and would never ridicule (LE p. 12), but he went on to say a year later that "language is not a cage" (LE/Notes p. 16). I think Piero Sraffa's criticism was 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").

We can say (I think) that we have various pictures (e.g. "existence as something added to nothing"), some sharper, some cloudier than others, but these pictures are not nonsense. What is the opposite of "anything"? Imagine a sheet of paper on which there are drawings (or writings), and now image 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"? (Can there be a frame of reference if there are no points of reference?)

"Well, if that's what you mean -- why was something drawn or written rather than not. But isn't that asking who or what wrote it? Indeed, didn't Leibniz answer his own question with: God wrote it? And now you will 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 riddle of The Owl and the Egg, a question without an answer. But is it self-mystification when there is not an answer that would be acceptable to us? Are we wrong to be mystified; is our mystification a mistake? [Cf. the word's Isaiah has God speak, "My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are as high above yours as the heavens are above the earth" (55.8-9) -- the picture being that not only are there things we don't understand, but there are things we are without the capacity to understand, things Isaiah [55.9] calls "the thoughts of God" and we call "the eternal questions".]

The picture is there ... But what is its application? (PI § 424)

Maybe we could say that "Why is there anything, not nothing?" assumes "Because God has made it?", and that therefore "Why is there God, not nothing?" is the same question as "Why is there anything, not nothing?"

A "limited whole." Wittgenstein also expressed the idea -- i.e. offered this picture -- this way: "it seems to me too that there is a way of capturing the world sub specie aeterni ... Thought has such a way -- so I believe -- it is as though it flies above the world and leaves it as it is -- observing it from above, in flight." (CV p. 5, remark from 1930)

A picture needn't be directly comparable to reality 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. On the other hand, however, to know that a picture is not a metaphor -- i.e. not comparable to anything -- is to know something essential about its meaning.

'The world exists', 'The world does not exist'. -- "These words may lead me to have all sorts of images; but their usefulness goes no further.... I can also imagine something in connection with the words: 'It was just 5 o'clock in the afternoon on the sun' -- such as a grandfather clock which points to 5." (PI § 351)

Maybe, from the point of view of "logic of language", one might say: It makes sense -- i.e. there is a defined technique of question-and-answer (i.e. of what is the count as a correct or incorrect answer) -- to ask why a specific thing exists -- i.e. to ask "What is its origin?" But it is to follow a false grammatical analogy to ask "Why does anything at all exist?" as if the whole has or must have a common origin (as if there were a class {everything that exists} of which you could ask: what is its origin?) Compare the question 'Does anything at all exist?' A question that can be asked of a part, cannot necessarily also be asked of a whole.

According to Wittgenstein, such problems cannot be solved, but instead only "dissolved" -- i.e. shown not be problems at all.

"It is there -- like our life"

... those who speak of things as being "gratuitous", de trop or "just there" [cf. OC § 559] 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 C. Copleston, Religion and Philosophy (1974), p. 177)

Nor with an "infinite thing" just there. But from the grammatical point of view, our life is just there, because that's 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 do so because they want nothing to do with the concept 'God' (Leibniz asked the question 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' in the context of his picture of God the Creator), which is the tautological answer to the question. But God is not an explanation, for the answer must not 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 it is nonsense). But proving that the 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 anything instead of nothing? If anything exists, then something must always have existed. The principle: 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". Spontaneous existence out of nothing is at least picturable and in that sense intelligible (logically possible).

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

Frederick Copleston asked this question (or as I mis-recalled Fr. Copleston asked that question, for he did not quite do that) with regard to the Logical Positivist claim that, because religious statements are not verifiable, they are without meaning (the "verification principle").

In this context the question would be -- not whether "To be is to be perceived", which asks what is actual -- but whether "To be is to be perceptible", which asks what is possible and impossible.

But which kind of possibility is being asked about? It is not "real possibility" because it is unverifiable, and it is not "logical possibility" because it cannot be described beyond the proposition 'There is an x that it is impossible for man to perceive' or 'There are xs that are not detectable by the senses'. Is the kind of possibility, then, "metaphysical possibility"?

The proposition 'Things don't just vanish into thin air' is not a statement of fact, for we don't count it as evidence against the truth of that proposition if we sometimes look and don't find what we were looking for. Rather, the proposition states a rule that directs our investigations; cf. "Everything that exists is perceptible to the senses, and therefore every event has a natural explanation (cause)."

To roughly adapt a distinction made in Wittgenstein's TLP -- because that book uses the word 'nonsense' eccentrically (We don't normally say that language that can convey meaning -- i.e. that has meaning -- is meaningless) -- the Logical Positivists not only divorced the language of "saying" -- i.e. propositions about the perceptible world and thus verifiable and falsifiable by sense perception -- from the language of "showing" -- i.e. language about anything else -- but they also denied that the language of "showing" has any meaning. (This was their "verification principle of meaning".)

Wittgenstein called Logical Positivism's demand for universal verification a dogma, saying that, on the contrary, if you know that a proposition is unverifiable, you know something important about its use in the language (i.e. about its "grammar"), not that the proposition must be meaningless.

Father Copleston asked: is it necessarily the case that human beings are able to perceive everything real (the whole of reality)?

[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 such things as Plato's Forms, which are not perceptible to the senses.)

If I correctly remember, 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 (How else was natural science to free itself from what Newton called "hypotheses"?) If surgeons before Pasteur had discovered a positive correlation between washing hands and lower mortality rates, which is in fact what Semmelweis (1818-1865) did, they would have found a technique to reduce deaths following births and surgery -- but they would not have known why this technique worked. If microbes were essentially imperceptible to man, that would answer Fr. Copleston's question -- but we would not know that they were essentially imperceptible (only the eye of God would). 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.

If we wanted to make a prosthetic eye for a blind man and if the essential elements needed to do this are perceptible, then we might succeed. But if some of those elements are not perceptible, then we could only succeed by accident, in which case we would have a prosthetic eye, but we would not know how it worked.

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 dimension, then a creature that perceives only three dimensions, namely man, cannot know the cause of the phenomenon. (This does not, of course, prove that there is a fourth dimension and therefore that reality is not confined to what is in principle perceptible to the human senses. Whether there really are only three dimensions is the question without an answer.)

Scientific theories and Reality itself

The description of the perception of a rain-shower in two dimensions suggests 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 -- into maps, models, or pictures), but (2) because theories are not about reality in itself, but only about a reality perceptible to our senses. (There is no single reality, no free of any conceptions reality, but there are only theories.)

The limits of an individual's world

We perceive three dimension with five senses ... but ex hypothesi it might be otherwise. Indeed there might be many more dimensions than three for a being possessed of the senses necessary to perceive them.

The blind man's perception of reality 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? That is an analogy, but the analogy's idea is also of something completely undetectable by someone with only five senses.

Absolute pitch

Consider 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 the born-blind people of my fable ever 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 ask if the blind man understands what the sighted mean by 'light' or the deaf man what the hearing mean 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' story, everything that was invisible to the blind did not exist. All that was not visible to their four remaining senses, that is. E.g. there was no daylight, and there were no stars at night, and there was no night. Since there were no colors their houses were "parti-coloured with extraordinary irregularity, smeared with a sort of plaster that was sometimes grey, sometimes drab, sometimes slate-coloured or dark brown" such that the sighted explorer who suddenly came upon these houses said to himself, "The good man who did that must have been as blind as a bat." (H.G. Wells, The Country of the Blind)

The Deepest Skepticism

It may be that only human beings can perceive things the way human beings do (forms of life and life forms). And perhaps no two human beings perceive them the same way (This is skepticism at a deeper level). Of course for this conjecture to have a meaning, again we must imagine a god who sees what we cannot see, namely: all the differences between species and between individual human beings.

What the solipsist means is quite correct. (TLP 5.62)

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

Perceptible but not Perceived

One possible answer is that there is no "inexpressible", that "what cannot be put into words" (TLP 6.522) does not exist, that Wittgenstein's "the mystical" is simply self-mystification.

But even were it the case that all things could be perceived by human beings ("caught in the net of our five senses"), 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 not ever have been invented. We should not take them for granted, nor ever presume that all of perceptible reality -- much less all of what is most fundamental to reality -- is now available to us (or necessarily ever will be).

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

"Percepts without concepts are blind"

"There is nothing in the mind that was not first in the senses." How do you know, for that is the very question we are asking now? According to Plato, and in a quite different way Kant and Fichte, the truth of that proposition is doubtful. Why not "There is nothing in the senses that was not first in the mind" instead or as well? (Rationalism, Empiricism, Idealism)

If only what can be conceived can be perceived, then "The limit of empiricism is concept formation". And that means that even if everything is perceptible, we may not perceive all of it, if we are poor in concepts (and is it plausible that we are not?) And it also means that our concepts of today may not be our concepts of tomorrow.

The limit of the empirical -- is concept-formation. (RFM iv § 29, p. 237)

That is the answer to the question "Why investigate words rather than the phenomena they name?" Because the concept says what the phenomenon is -- and if there is a "vice versa", it's not one we can know: "percepts without concepts are blind" (unconceptualized phenomena are invisible) means that 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).

Conceptualized phenomenon DEF.= conceived fact.

The "conceived facts", and the Questions without Answers

About Wittgenstein's account of language ("grammar", in his jargon): "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.

Spirits and Ghosts

If by the word 'spirit' we mean 'something without extension', then the word 'spirit' is not the name of anything. But if by 'spirit' is meant 'an imperceptible being', 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 hypothesis (i.e. no fact counts either for or against "the existence of spirits"). It is a "picture" to which, by definition, there is no object to compare, but one which may be important in some contexts.

Can a ghost see itself, its face at it were, in a mirror?

If by 'ghost' we mean an object that is invisible to our senses but not invisible to its own, then surely a ghost can. But is that what we mean by 'spirit' or 'ghost' -- or do we mean by those words "something non-material", something "as intangible as a thought or idea". But is this a metaphor: "A spirit is an object of zero dimensions, an existent that occupies no space" -- or is it nonsense?

When the spirit of God hovers over the waters (Genesis 1.2), does it see its reflection in the waters? Can the invisible spirit of God cast an invisible shadow?

The discussion thus wanders off into metaphysical pictures -- and not a little nonsense (undefined language) as well. But the fundamental question without answer simply is whether everything real is also perceptible or whether there may not be things that are essentially imperceptible to man (their imperceptibility belonging to man's essence, not as it were to theirs).

Are the limits of human sense perception also the limits of reality? That is not of course a question natural science can answer. Not that philosophy can answer it either. It is a question without an answer.

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

Related question: Is reality confined to what is conceivable? This question tells us at least as much about natural science as the other does.

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

This was Kant's notion, and why he believed metaphysics to be impossible, because reality can be known only within the innate [innate by any other name] categories man is limited by -- man cannot know absolute reality (which is what metaphysics seeks to know), things in themselves apart from man's conception/perception of them.

Are there categories that we cannot think without making use of? Examples might be 'object' and 'space', 'cause and effect', 'sense and nonsense', 'one and more-than-one', 'true and false', 'sound and silence'. (Note: save 'causality', those are not Kant's own categories, and those I have listed may all be disputed.) The notion of necessary-if-man-is-to-think-at-all categories of thought is found in Thomas Aquinas, who called these "first principles".

C.  'Do things happen for a supernatural reason (divine providence)? Is there a point or meaning to our life?'

Does what happens in the world -- that is, does what happens to each of us as individuals -- have a reason, a purpose for happening ... or is "the truth is much graver than this fiction", i.e. that it is only nature's blind laws (or random quanta) that rule our life?

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

The how-ness of the world is no less perplexing than the that-ness of it.  (The allusion is to TLP 6.44.) Indeed, the how-ness of the world is even 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.

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)? If God is benevolent (which if he is intelligent he will be -- since the rational seeks only the good) rather than malevolent, should we expect to find a world in which there is life but no death, health but no illness, goodness but no evil, virtue but no vice, indeed Christianity's kingdom of God?

But this world is not that kingdom -- and therefore does the existence of evil, both natural and man-made prove that Providence does not exist? 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. (This idea may commit the fallacy of "God as working-hypothesis".) On the other hand, it may be that man prefers to see himself as the victim of a malevolent intellect rather than of insensate forces of nature.

Each life, even despite the acknowledged facts, thinks itself the center of the universe, existing for a reason, its life and death not without meaning (even if that meaning is unknown or unknowable). (Religion cannot, of course, answer philosophical questions, because philosophy is seeking to know by the natural light of reason alone, which religious faith is not. What religion can offer philosophy is pictures, models, of what solutions to particular metaphysical problems might look like.)

It seems that either the answer to this question is that there is no Providence (because Providence is counter-factual -- i.e. it cannot be described in such a way as to fit the world of our experience), or that this is not an empirical question. As a non-empirical question it is without answer, and unanswered it makes our existence a quandary, a riddle without solution.

Note that there are at least two general pictures of Providence, for it is possible that our life may have an overall meaning without every particular event in our life itself having a meaning. Of course, another possibility is that "The whole affair is utterly senseless ... There is no meaning to it."

'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 a common 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 inclination is a "thinking oneself wise when one is not, thinking one knows what one does not know" (Plato, Apology 29a), for note that material-ism ("All of reality is perceptible to the senses") is just as much metaphysics as "spirit-ism" 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 others. "For in that sleep of death what dreams may come".

What is the essence of man -- is man essentially mind (Plato) or essentially mind and body (Aristotle)? Does the answer to that question affect the answer to the question of life after death? (This is a metaphysical, not a scientific question. -- Why?)

Note.--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. (Cf. "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 life/world is verification possible. And that is why neither picture of the outcome of death is an hypothesis.)

We use what we do know to find answers to what we don't know, namely what lies beyond what we can see. But only in this world (We don't say of a corpse that it perceives). We can't do that for death: l'au-delà 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. Here all things vanish into death. From the point of view of our life in this world, all things vanish into sleep, the unknown, the mystery. (Wittgenstein and Plato: the riddle and the afterlife.)

D.  '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"? 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: How must man live his life if there is good and evil?

Socrates and Kant

Historically there have been two basic responses: To ask if there are "absolute values" is to cast this question in the non-rational light Wittgenstein saw it in (cf. Kant's light of categorical conscience). But the question looks very different when cast in a Socratic light, where the thoroughgoing use of natural reason responds to the Delphic precept "Know thyself" by discovering what the specific excellence proper and unique to man is.

Ethics and Psychology

It was Socrates who first made ethics part of philosophy (Diog. L. i, 14), for, like metaphysics, ethics is thoroughgoingly rational (as 'rational' is defined by logic or "the art of reasoning"). Ethics is about the justifications for actions. The beginning of Book One of Plato's Republic is a model of ethics.

Speculation about the causes or motives of man's moral sense (of his "knowing good and evil") -- whether it be selfishness and altruism (preserving the individual and the species respectively), like-mindedness (sympathy), compassion (pity, fellow-feeling), fear, fame (good reputation), &c. -- belongs to natural history or psychology, not to ethics.

E.  'Am I awake or am I dreaming?'

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

'Am I awake?' is the kind of question (or apparent question) the verification principle was thought to do away with. But the question remains or seems to remain. It expresses -- or seems to express -- an insight into the fundamental uncertainty of human knowing.

[Add to this that without memory there is no time -- and that memory is often of things for which there is no evidence beyond memory -- and everything one knows may begin to appear uncertain.]

Am I awake? If I say 'I doubt' in this case, then either I am playing the "language game" wrong, or I am not playing it at all (OC § 446). Because I am introducing -- or trying to introduce -- a doubt where none is defined. For in the normal "language game" -- i.e. "use of language defined by rules, as a game is defined by rules" -- with the word 'awake', I don't know, and I don't not know either whether I am awake: the question 'Am I awake?' is merely an undefined combination of words, or, in other words, the question is not a move in the language game.

'Am I awake or am I only dreaming?' -- One reply is to ask: by what method of verification? But can we then go on to say that the method of verification is the meaning of that combination of words -- and that if there is no method, then that combination of words is nonsense? What we can say is that without such a method, we have nothing more than an "unverifiable picture", a picture that could only be verified by a god who sees what we cannot see.

We call such unverifiable pictures metaphysics -- i.e. "speculation about the reality behind reality". Metaphysics is "not playing the [normal language] game" (OC § 446). Or according to Wittgenstein, it is "playing the game wrong", i.e. it is nonsense. It makes sense for me to say that someone else is awake, but it is nonsense for me to say that about myself. But then why do we want to call -- indeed, why do we call -- such expressions of doubt (or apparent expressions of doubt) fundamental insights into human consciousness and knowledge?

Our language game presupposes that I am not asleep (Of course I cannot deduce from this that I am not asleep).

According to Wittgenstein it is only when we regard ourselves as individuals divorced from the community in which our language is used to do some work (as tools are used to do some work) that these first-person doubts arise (or appear to arise), . (Descartes' method uses such first-person doubt.)

Are these not real doubts? Is Wittgenstein's thesis that language has meaning only when it is a tool of a community's ways of life a theory about "what language meaning really is" or a (selected) definition of the word 'meaning'? If it is the latter, then what? (And if it is the former?)

Can I doubt that I am doubting? What I cannot doubt Saint Augustine says is that, if I am doubting, then I exist. Can I doubt whether I am awake, or has language meaning only if it is not doubted that I am awake?

Doubt can go down to what rests directly on the foundations, but below the foundations it cannot go (because there is no such place: the foundations do not themselves have foundations). Nevertheless, that is what metaphysics wants to do when it tries to undermine those foundations with its questions without answer.

Death and Sleep

What is the difference between death and sleep, that you don't awake from death? If someone said sleep is a form of death, that would a metaphor: what comparison is being made between sleep and death, between sleeping and being dead (being conscious and being alive, and the body: is the body essential to life and death)? Again, this is not a grammatical question, a question about language meaning, but a question at the "deeper level" (cf. CV p. 48, 62) of metaphysics.

"Am I dreaming?"

If I am dreaming, then I am surrounded by unreality, so that even if I say to myself that I am dreaming, the words 'I am dreaming' are part of the dream. (If I say 'I am deceiving myself' what is the normal consequence of that?) Asking whether or not I am dreaming undermines the foundations of all my thinking, because if I am dreaming then our language games with the words 'truth', 'reality', 'knowledge' cannot be played, because the first rule of those games is: that I am awake. (Sleep-walking and language.)

Is the combination of words 'I am dreaming' (like 'I am sleeping') without meaning? In Wittgenstein's narrow sense of 'meaning' that proposition is not a move in a language game and therefore is nonsense. But in the present context it does point out to us the ultimate foundationlessness of believing: bedrock does not itself have bedrock. If I really am unable to know whether I am awake or dreaming ... If I cannot count on objects retaining their weight, it is meaningless to weigh them (cf. PI § 142).

F.  'Do wasps have souls?'

My father finds me killing flies because I'm bored. He becomes angry and tells me that I must not do this. He does not say why, but I am a child and must obey him. When I myself become a man I discover a cricket in the house; I gently capture it and put it out the front door. Is this wise or foolish?

Why do we apply the word 'life' to insects -- for we did that long before any biologist had a say in this? 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.

'Wasps are living creatures' is not an hypothesis, but only a rule of grammar. Its negation is a combination of words that tries to use a rule of grammar to ask a question of fact (PP iii, p. 312). According to Wittgenstein, our normal, naive way of speaking does not state an hypothesis, but only a concept, i.e. a rule for using a word (language) (Z § 223).

But I am not asking about linguistic conventions (nor about thoughtless instinct), but about the attitude of a reflective adult. Should my attitude toward a wasp -- or toward a plant or to an amoeba -- be an attitude towards a soul (PI II, iv, p. 178), in contrast to an attitude toward a lifeless thing or automaton?

Is the question 'do wasps have souls?' hypothetical-verifiable -- i.e. is it a question that can be resolved by an investigation of facts? Or is it a question without an answer?

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 'fear' are undefined if applied to a life form that is so different from our own (PI §§ 357, 360). Yet, nonetheless, we do feel a kinship to all life, animal, plant, insect. We may even feel compassion, as Albert Schweitzer did.

G.  'What was the origin of human language?'

Note: I am wary of scientific puzzles because, as far as I can see, the only limit to scientific explanation is concept-formation, the imagination of genius. Of course, that suspicion is not an hypothesis, and maybe we could say the same thing about philosophical explanation. Plato himself was puzzled by the origin of names (Cratylus 439b-440c), however, and so I will consider the related, apparently unanswerable, question of the origin of natural language in man.

[Maybe the scientific question would be: What is the origin of natural language? because the question "What was the origin?" may be answered by natural history hypotheses, which are speculative, in contrast to propositions of experimental science which can be verified by being reproduced without exception in the laboratory. "Without exception", because otherwise mightn't language have been an accident, rather than a biological necessity, in human development? Is the scientific question, "If an identical species of man emerges, how must natural language arise and develop in it?" But what is "biological necessity" when it's at home? So simply calling the origin of natural language a "scientific" riddle doesn't make anything clearer, for to say that every question about the natural world is a scientific question is to say nothing at all.]

Mystery of Natural history

In the context of the natural world's how-ness there are also questions that are not so much mysterious as just baffling, questions to which it seems the answers cannot be known because they concern natural events of very long ago. Again, what would count as "knowing the answer" here is undefined, because although speculative scientific theories can of course be invented to account for things, we need never find those accounts satisfying and therefore the phenomena remain unexplained from that point of view.

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. [Note 2]

The origins of natural language. Is this a case where we have all the evidence that we are ever going to have, but the evidence is inadequate for the construction of a satisfying theory? Because that is the type of case I have in mind. Cf. "Why don't human beings all speak the same language" as a single species of birds does (if birds from a single species all do speak the same language), because human beings worldwide have, it seems by nature, countless other things in common?

Or did all human beings begin speaking a single language, but as they scattered about the earth, dialects developed and from this distinct languages? -- I.e. did man's language have a single origin? and if so what was that Ursprache (protolanguage)? The existence of the myth of the tower of Babel may show that this is another question that has long puzzled mankind and which is also a question without an answer.

Why simpler forms of expression?

The textbook-grammar of ancient Latin is very complicated -- i.e. there are many, many rules to learn, whereas a modern language like Spanish 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 (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) are also the oldest.

That textbook-grammar should become simpler as human beings become less primitive is baffling. Because: Why was it so complicated in the first place? Did primitive human beings invent this grammar? A scholarly class? Or did man once upon a time sing as the birds sing -- but "with meaning", i.e. distinguishing sense from nonsense? But it appears, from what Jacob Bronowski wrote, that if a human being does not learn a language in childhood, it will never learn one. (So that to speak of instinct here would not be a simple matter.)

Learning versus Endowment

Thus remember that we acquire language in childhood from those we live among; man is not endowed with language (as he is endowed e.g. with hearing and sight), but must learn language. That being so makes the origin of language even more puzzling, for who, then, did the earliest human beings learn language from? (Are birds endowed with song, or must they learn from other birds? The riddle, non-riddle of the owl and the egg.)

Are the origins of language lost in our natural history, such that only a god who can see things long past could know the origins of human language? Or is there work yet for anthropology to do among the living? (Studies are made of developing children, but these seem to suggest only how a language is acquired or learned, not the origin of language.)

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

But why presume that "human song", if we want to imagine such a thing (by analogy to "birdsong"), was simpler in its beginnings than it is now? In the case of human language, we do not imagine that grammar started out simple, became complicated, and now is becoming simpler again, although that presumably is possible.

Birds and Man

"Or did we sing as birds sing, but with meaning?" Wittgenstein: "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him" (ibid. II, xi, p. 223), nor would he understand us. And birds do talk (if indeed that is what they do), and we don't understand them. (The universal loss of language can be described.)

If we pictured a step-by-step build up of language as in Wittgenstein's primitive language games (PI §§ 7, 23), each arising naturally in answer to the particular needs of a community, would that be a plausible picture of the origin of language? But if it is plausible, it is nothing more than plausible; plausible = plausible, nothing more.

[Note that when Wittgenstein invents "primitive language games", it is not to speculate about the origins of language, even when the games describe ways in which a child learns its native language. Wittgenstein's games are objects of comparison (PI § 130) -- i.e. models to be compared with our actual use of language, to make that use clear, for the sake of resolving philosophical problems (ibid. § 109).]

But on the other hand Wittgenstein's model of primitive language games does seem to show that a primitive language need not consist of squawks and screeches, to which human language has no resemblance. (Did man's earliest speech discuss our Questions without Answers? Those discussions are not primitive language games.)

The question of the origin of language is not impossible to answer if we are looking for a scientific theory -- because the only limit of 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 its basis is natural phenomena plus imagination: imagination creates the way of looking at and organizing phenomena. But imagination can create other ways as well. And that is why a theory should never be mistaken for the phenomenon it seeks to understand. It is the phenomenon itself that poses a "question without answer".

Companionship is a human concept

Only of a human being and what resembles one do we say that it thinks. (PI § 360)

Late one evening as I went outside to the chair on the steps, I saw a rabbit on the lawn a few yards away. It did not move, not when I went out, not as I sat there, but after a while it went back to eating the grass of the lawn. And I wondered if the rabbit was as happy for my company as I was for its company. It might easily have moved away: there were many other lawns, more protected spots. But it did not. Why? That is an impenetrable mystery (There is no scientific answer to this question), the thoughts of that rabbit, of whether a wild rabbit can be happy for companionship, even if it is only of a man sitting quietly nearby. And what of the moth flying around my lamp this evening?

Animal appearance or behavior that resembles human appearance and behavior. Do rabbits think? What do their thoughts look like? Thoughts without language. All we know is that their appearance and behavior resemble human being appearance and behavior -- nothing more.

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.

What is the origin of our thoughts?

Another question that appears to be a scientific question, but is instead a question without answer, is: 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. "Out of the blue?" Where else would it have come from (i.e. does the combination of words 'Where did the idea come from?' have an application here if its answer isn't e.g. so-and-so writer or such-and-such book)? It's true that I have been thinking about these things for more than forty years -- but is that the cause of my idea, 'cause' in the mechanical sense?

What would a scientific explanation look like -- tracing a mechanism? What would that mechanism look like in this case? For creative thoughts, could a mechanism be traced in the brain? "Here are the words 'lassoing a nebulosity' written in the atoms and molecules of brain cells --."

The picture is absurd. Will it always be? Will the origin of natural language always be unanswerable? If we cannot even say what a plausible or logically possible explanation would look like, that may be an indication that we are asking a question essentially without an answer.

[Wittgenstein said to Drury, "Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel as if my pen was being guided" (Recollections p. 153). Compare: Plato and the poets: "inspiration" versus discourse of reason.]

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

Existence is superfluous to need. Nothing need exist. It if did, it would not be possible to imagine [picture] the contrary. And if existence is unnecessary, then the essential relationship is between existence and -- not need -- but want. And that is the basis of Schweitzer's question.

The first riddle of existence for Albert Schweitzer is not the existence of anything at all ("the world") but instead of our "will to live" (although my discussion is different from Schweitzer's, because Schweitzer does not ask why man wants ("wills") to live at all).

One philosophical enquiry begins by asking about the world, the other begins by asking about our life: What is life's meaning? We may think that we must look to the answer to the first question ("the world") to give us the answer to the second question ("life's meaning"). But in Schweitzer's view it is just the reverse: Life's meaning is not to be found in knowledge of the universe (the world) but only in our will-to-live. World-view will follow, if a world-view can be found at all, from Life-view, not vice versa.

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 -- as a very general fact -- 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 on earth is not at all assured. (Cf. Schweitzer's Civilization and Ethics xvii, and "Religion in Modern Civilization" (1934)).

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

Rather than a willing to live, there is an inner compulsion to live. The word 'will' suggests a choice, but that choice isn't chosen, except by nature itself for man. And so it appears that I am a compulsion to live in the midst of other compulsions to live.

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 half-rational: he is not "a beast wanting discourse of reason". He can reason his way to self-destruction: "The door is always open" (Epictetus).

Albert Camus thought the first question in philosophy is "Should I kill myself?" Well, if life is "meaningless" -- and what else does 'unintelligible as such' mean? -- then why not, because don't we discard meaningless things? But Beethoven's instrumental music is meaningless (metaphysically), and we don't discard that. (Here the word 'meaningless' ≠ 'undesired'.)

What would an answer look like to the question of why man wills to live? That here the animal impulse is the stronger part of the rational animal is apparent, but how it can be stronger is not. That is what "astonishes" -- and in that sense the question is "a question without an answer".

"The universal will-to-live"

The only advance in [our] knowledge [of the world] that we can make is to describe more and more minutely the phenomena which make up the world and their course. 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, 2nd rev. ed. (1929), tr. C.T. Campion, p. x)

Not every thinker about ethics has sought to root ethics in a world-view. Thinkers as different as Socrates and Kant have not. But although such an ethics can exist, does it provide the necessary motive force to make one want to affirm both the worth of life and of the world and contribute to their perfecting (which is what Schweitzer thought an ethics must aim to do)?

Even [in my childhood], it became clear to me that which we label Force or "Life" remains in its own essential nature for ever inexplicable. (Memoirs of Childhood and Youth, tr. Campion (1924), p. 52-53)

"... in every way mysterious of the will to live." This shows that metaphysics is, or is always, "on a deeper level". Because a botanist might say in response, There is no mystery about it that natural science has not solved or will not solve: we can show how this flower develops from a seed; we can describe its whole life and death cycle. There is nothing mysterious here. And if you ask "Yes, but why all this?" then the answer is that the question you are trying to pose is merely an undefined combination of words, the result of following a false grammatical analogy: man acts with purpose, assigning reasons for what he chooses to do -- and therefore life itself must have a purpose, a reason for being as well. But there is no "therefore" here; language-meaning is not created by syntax alone (cf. "Where is the brain?" In the head. "Where is the mind?"). "Nonetheless!" metaphysics proclaims.

Schweitzer: 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, p. 156). "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 of existence. Descartes' irreducible "I think, therefore I exist", he wrote, leads "irretrievably on the road to the abstract" and away from living life: "It never finds the entrance to ethics" (Civilization and Ethics, xxi, p. 246), to "we are discussing no small matter, but how to live" (Plato, Republic 352d). "That the world is life, and that in life lies the riddle of riddles [not in the relation of mind to body] never enters" its head (ibid. xii, p. 137).

Where we begin in philosophy affects where we end up, and what our philosophy amounts to. Descartes begins "in the mind" (from which there is no exit), Schweitzer in the will to live, Wittgenstein in the distinction between sense and nonsense.

But how are we to discover life's meaning in our desire to live? Whether we approach "the riddle of existence" from the question of world-view or from the question of life-view, do we not find an insoluble puzzle?

Schweitzer found the answer to that question in the ethical principle of "reverence for life", by which he meant my solidarity with all other life, all forms of which are sacred, and therefore whatever is beneficial to life is good, and whatever harms life is bad (although that general principle may be impossible to apply in the particular case). Life's meaning is life itself, i.e. the will to live itself (as such).

Due to the principle of Reverence for Life, Schweitzer wrote, we "are no longer obliged to derive our ethical world-view from knowledge of the universe", a derivation which we cannot, in any case, make because -- both with respect to trying to understand the universe ethically and from the point of view of natural science -- whichever "our point of view the [universe] will remain for us an enigma" (Out of My Life and Thought, xviii, p. 204).

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 nonrational" (ibid).

Comment: The final step is non-rational because it is the acceptance [adoption] of a point of view, a 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 "Give me a fulcrum, and I shall move the world!" in answer to Archimedes -- or, in other words, there is no bedrock beneath the bedrock.)

As to the first question above or Why is there something rather than nothing? Schweitzer's reply was:

Whatever way we look at it, existence will remain for us a riddle. (cf. Out of my Life and Thought in C.T. Campion's 1933 translation; The riddle in TLP 6.5)

From the point of view of ethics, are the questions of our life's meaning and of the meaning of the world the same question? It was Albert Schweitzer's thought that although the second question (Nature-philosophy) cannot be answered, the first question (Life-philosophy) can.

Therefore is Schweitzer's answer really an answer to the question of life's meaning ... although the question of "life's meaning" is so vague that it is hard to know what a satisfactory answer would look like. But given our religious traditions, it would seem that for us the only satisfactory answer would have to reference God and divine providence, beginning with ethics and Plato's myth of a last judgment (Gorgias 522e-524b). Which is anthropomorphic, demanding ethics of a Nature which is wholly amoral. But is a non-anthropological nature philosophy -- a nature philosophy which attributes to nature neither intelligence nor purpose -- possible or satisfying?

In the philosophy of Socrates ethics and the meaning of life and of the world are independent of one another; indeed Socrates does not ask about anything other than what the good for man is. Like Schweitzer, Socrates does not ascribe an ethical meaning to the world, but derives ethics ("no small matter, but how to live") solely from the natural condition of man himself.

Socrates held 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 our life and the world refuses to be silenced. These questions without answers and their like are the expression of that desire. Philosophy has ever been more than ethics and logic.

Four catechism questions

"A simple story in words of one syllable", as they must be if they are to be 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 answer them. The author says these are simple catechism "questions posed rather naïvely", but they don't seem naïve to me. What are the equivalents to the questions I have asked? The "most important things" is the question of ethics (What is the good for man? Of course in Christianity there is a metaphysical world-picture behind this, answering that question; but in Socratic ethics there is not). Both "why we are born" and "the meaning of suffering" seem questions of whether there is divine providence (of whether there is a plan), and "what lies beyond death" seems equivalent to is there an afterlife?

Was the firmament that he once thought so beautiful just a never-ending void of meaninglessness? (ibid.)

To Kant's "the starry sky above" (Newton's laws of physics) may be added "and the atoms below", their distances from man well beyond vast [The size of an apple relative to the earth is the size of an atom relative to an apple (ibid. xvi)], because, like "the moral law within", both fill us with awe. But also with puzzlement ("Philosophy begins in wonder," Plato said). Why is there anything? we ask, to what end?

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, as apparently the eternal questions without answers do, for just this purpose?

Socratic questions without answer (Plato)

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).

General Discussion

What is the grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon) of these Questions without Answers?

What is the source of the unanswerability of the eternal questions? Has it any relationship to "general facts of nature that can explain concept-formation" (PI II, xii, p. 230)? But if it has, are those facts about the nature of the world -- or only about the nature of man?

Do we not want answers to the eternal questions? That you can't say. What you can say is that we are in a queer place here, away from our normal language games of question and answer: These questions "rob us of our orientation" (Z § 259); "A philosophical problem has the form: I don't know my way about" (PI § 123).

The questions recast as propositions

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).

Variation. 'I am profoundly troubled and disturbed that anything at all exists.'

But is it nonsense if instead of that I ask 'Why is there something rather than nothing?' -- or do those words have a different meaning? 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 a reason for its existence is irrational, whereas philosophy demands rational explanations: if it is possible for the world not to exist, then there must be a reason why it does exist. That is philosophy's question, regardless of whether there is an answer to it. [Note 3]

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

'Why is there anything rather than nothing?' and 'I am astonished that anything exists' are forms of language. Have they the same or different meanings (uses in the language = uses in our life)?

Use whichever form you choose, so long as it does not prevent you from seeing the facts. (Cf. PI § 79)

The facts in plain view (no less difficult to see despite their being before our eyes) about what is being done with language here

My aim is to pass from something that is disguised nonsense to something that is patent nonsense. (Cf. ibid. § 464)

The form we give these "questions without answers" does not determine their meaning, because meaning is not a function of form. Wittgenstein's logic of language compares words with tools: "Look at the sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment" (ibid. § 421). Do these tools do any work in our life, or are they idle, like gears that do not engage (ibid. § 132), language that is no more than hot air (ibid. § 118)?

What is our aim with these questions?

What we should have asked is: What use do 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 not only the words on this page, but also the ideas the words on this page express, including the idea of God, would not exist. "Discourse of reason" really is discourse (i.e. language).

Or does the mystery of existence not exist, as Wittgenstein claimed it does not (TLP 6.5)?

Are these questions reminders to ourselves of the fundamental mysteries of our existence? Is that their meaning = use in the language? Isn't the meaning, not only of a word, but also of a combination of words, its use in the language? But is there a grammatical category "reminders", such a proposition type, one that can be distinguished from other types?

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 if there is no answer?

There is a difference between saying that, although it is unknowable, there is an answer, and saying that there is no answer to know. There is a difference between saying that existence is a mystery and saying that existence is without meaning. The difference is not that wasting time, which is a moral fault, is possible only in the first case.

The question returns to the distinction between "meaning of the world" (Nature-philosophy) and "no small matter, but how to live" (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 -- and that knowledge is the criterion by which to decide what is and what isn't wasting time.

For Socrates and Schweitzer that is possible, but for someone who demands an answer to the riddle of existence before he can know how we should live our life, it is not. If the demand is made that Life-philosophy follow from Nature-philosophy, then is aimless wandering through life the only path that will be 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?

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

Statement of logic versus Statement of fact

What do we mean by calling something imponderable? The words 'We can never know' state a perspective (way of seeing, attitude), not a testable hypothesis. That is a distinction for logic to make. Ways of looking at things do not change the facts -- or do they?

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

Are the unanswered questions religious questions, if set answers are given to them in a catechism? In contrast philosophy only asks these questions; it does not answer them, and in its eyes revelation is like the fairy tales of the metaphysical thinker who thinks he can see the source of the light that casts the shadows on our cave's walls (Republic 515c). (The shadows, however, are cast by our concepts, concepts without which we are blind; about suprasensible facts, we know nothing, not even whether there are any.)

But we mustn't allow ourselves to be limited only to the categories -- 'religion', 'philosophy' -- that are at present common currency (RPP ii § 690), for that is to be "poor in categories" (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil § 58).

New Categories

Drury: Kierkegaard seems to me to be always making one aware of new categories.

Wittgenstein: That is exactly what Kierkegaard does, he introduces new categories. (Recollections p. 88)

The expression 'questions without answers' or 'eternal questions' is a category name, one possible classification. Different categories might be invented to replace it, and each new category (conceptual scheme) may suggest different directions for our thinking to take. Not being "poor in categories" means: not being limited to a few fixed categories, as if those were the only, the true way, to divide up reality (There is no such a way.)

"Important nonsense" 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 existence's deepest questions; it does not answer them. But to claim that these are not questions at all, because questions have answers and problems have solutions (antithesis and language meaning), 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 describe a logic of language that contradicts experience. It is a false description because existence is problematical in the many ways philosophy's questions without answers suggest.

Philosophical theses must pass both Socratic tests (namely reason and experience), not one alone. Thus regardless of what Wittgenstein's TLP says the logic of our language is, there arises for every human being the questions of why and how we should live our life, which is "the riddle" of life. And that is experience refuting Rationalism (or the deduction of linguistic reality from axioms alone).

But 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 there is no place for God to reveal himself except in the world, because there is no other place. (It can be argued and counter-argued whether the that-ness of the world shows there is a God.)

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 does not agree with Alice. Neither all tautologies nor all riddles without solutions are idle. Asking them is the difference between man and beast.

We don't say that a riddle that has no solution is therefore not really a riddle. Or do we? Concept-fluidity: the indefinite limits of concepts. But then are we going to talk about "the indefiniteness of meaning"? Against that is the Socratic ideal of a strict distinction between sense and nonsense, between what you know and what you only think you do (but do not). (We want to put an end to "vagueness and confusion" -- not foster it.)

"For we ourselves made them unanswerable" (Z § 259). Or did we? Or does the nature of our existence make them unanswerable? (Wittgenstein always wants to say there is no problem, even though he recognizes there is one, whereas we recognize and say that there is an unanswerable riddle.)

"Theory like mist on eyeglasses: obscures facts" (Charlie Chan in Egypt, 1935). The mists of preconception ... although "all fact is already theory" (Goethe), i.e. all fact is conceived fact (preconception); there are no unmisted facts. Eyeglasses are themselves theories = points of view, but is it not possible to see without eyeglasses (PI § 103). Wittgenstein's theories about the origins of philosophy are 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 with a confused mind, bewitched or mystified and misled in various ways by his own language, not by existence itself) -- but so is the classical view of philosophy's origin (Theaetetus 155c-d), that philosophical perplexity is caused by the nature of things, not by linguistic confusion. (Preconceptions, ibid. § 107. Pretensions, OC § 549. Thinking you know what you don't know.)

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

"Look at it this way: to exist is not necessarily to exist as an object for an hypothesis." This is a grammatical remark -- if it is anything (i.e. if it is not nonsense).

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 is that the "only" thing we have done? Doesn't this 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 not the name of an object) -- then what is it?

But this is precisely what Wittgenstein did not want to suggest. Both 'The word 'mind' is not a name-of-object word' 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 fact or hypotheses).

It may be objected: "You refuse to admit even the possibility that mind may be something other than matter, for example, spirit." What we refuse to say is that the word 'mind' -- as we normally use that word -- is the name an object of any kind, because that would not be a true description of that word's use in the language. Normally the question 'What kind of object is the mind?' is not unanswerable, but instead an undefined combination of words. (And by noting this, we are not supporting any particular view of life after death, whether the metaphysics of materialism or the metaphysical dualism of Plato and Descartes, because that is not a "theory of mind" but a description of the public rules for the use of a word.)

'What do you have in mind?' 'I am troubled in my mind' and 'Bear in mind', &c. A word with a different use in the language is often mistaken for the name of an object (hypostatization) by following misleading grammatical analogies. And this is what happens with the word 'mind': imagination takes over.

Incomparable Pictures

Some "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.

Bertrand Russell posed 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 such pictures is that they are dependent 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) by means of the rules we have invented for this language game type.

Russell told Wittgenstein that there was a hippopotamus in the room, but it 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'.

Russell's proposition negates the language-meaning grounds for stating that a hippopotamus is or is not in the room. Again, as in the first example, the impossibility of verification belongs to the "grammar" (i.e. to the rules of the game, as in "language game") of the language used. Russell's propositions play the game wrong (OC § 446).

The "invisible hippopotamus" is an example of "grammar stripping", i.e. the "reduction of an essence" by taking away rules that are essential to a word's meaning. The word remains, but its meaning is lost. For example, the word 'hippopotamus' is the name of an object and the word 'object' is defined as a perceptible thing. So that if Russell says there is an imperceptible hippopotamus --.

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 draw such a thing 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).

Self-mystification and Logical Possibility

Naively following a grammatical model, we talk about imperceptible objects as if they were perceptible objects, mystifying ourselves. We talk about spirits or souls and say that it can't be proved that they don't exist. But the word 'prove' is defined by a method of proof, and no method is defined (Z § 259) for this grammatical category of words. We don't use those words the way we use names of objects (PI § 43). The impossibility of proof is logical impossibility. That there are no material proofs of immaterial objects is a rule of grammar: "we ourselves made it unverifiable" (Z § 259), i.e. we make the rules of this (language) game -- or don't we?

The TLP's model of language is likewise far too simple: that book is poor in categories -- in grammatical categories of proposition types.

If someone asks whether elves exist, this shows that person does not know the meaning -- has not yet mastered the use in the language -- of the word 'elf'. Asking that question is to follow a false grammatical analogy (like asking for the location of the mind). And to recognize that is to understand the logic of our language -- i.e. the "logical grammar" of our language. [Note 4]

Note 1: Quoted by M. O'C. Drury, "Words and Transgressions" in The Danger of Words (1973), p. 7-8.

This page was originally written from the point of view of "Wittgenstein's logic of language" and may not be understood without first understanding that way of thinking. [BACK]

Note 2: S.I. Hayakawa. Language in Thought and Action, 2nd ed. New York: 1964. Page 22.

Notes about Hayakawa's General Semantics. Hayakawa quotes his teacher Alfred Korzybski's statement "The map is not the territory" (p. 31). 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 of would be without meaning. (But that would not be a true description of how we normally use the word 'meaning': 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, p. 276)

[BACK]

Note 4: That is the only point or purpose of Wittgenstein's jargon ("We wouldn't naturally call this a 'rule of grammar' ... we would be using his "jargon""), to make grammatical differences -- i.e. different rules for the use of words -- explicit. [BACK]

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