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Are all Tautologies idle?

How can a proposition be at once (1) a rule of grammar (convention), and (2) a guide to how man should live his life? Plato's method of using tautologies in ethics, in sum.

Any statement that cannot be logically contradicted (because its contradiction is nonsense, i.e. an undefined combination of words) -- can be called a tautology (tautological). But a statement that cannot be false also cannot be true, and therefore tautologies are neither true nor false.

The only kind of tautology is logical tautology. A tautology is not tested by both Socratic tests, but only by the test of reason (for nonsense or contradiction) and not by the test of public experience (empirical verification).

Logic, in Wittgenstein's later work, is identified with grammar (in Wittgenstein's jargon), and therefore: The only kind of tautology is grammatical tautology: any argument of the kind 'The book is on the table, and therefore it is not on the floor' is tautological (and circular).

[Supplement: in contrast to his later views are Wittgenstein's earlier views about tautology in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.]

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The Method of Tautologies

The method of tautologies in ethics serves to make disguised folly obvious folly (cf. PI § 464: disguised nonsense and obvious nonsense) by contrasting the concepts 'good' and 'bad', when talking about moral virtue (ethics). In other words, Plato's method is to look at the grammars of the antithetical words 'good' and 'bad' in the context of ethics, by asking "If the good man does that, then what does the bad man do?", as e.g. "If the good man harms his enemies (Republic 332a-d), then what does the bad man do -- help them?" To claim that would be absurd because it reverses what we mean by the words 'good' and 'bad' in ethics where 'bad' DEF.= 'not good', and 'good' DEF.= 'not evil', because to do harm is to do evil.

But is the proposition 'The bad man helps his enemies', which contradicts the grammatical rule 'The bad man does harm rather than good', nonsense (meaningless, "mere sound without sense")? Or, instead, is the word 'good' like the word 'excellent' in grammar?

If various theses about "what the good is for man" and "which quality is the excellence both proper and unique to man" were not logically/grammatically possible, then the thesis discussed by Polemarchus and Socrates (in Plato's Republic 332d) -- namely, that "It is good to benefit one's friends and harm one's enemies" -- would be unintelligible (language without meaning). Which it seems not to be -- and indeed isn't. But the thesis is false because it fails to see that the grammars of 'good' and 'does harm' are not consistent, but rather, as Plato argues, contradictory (ibid. 335d).

If, as in Socratic view, moral virtue is knowledge, then vice is ignorance, and 'virtue' and 'vice' are antitheses. (Note that 'knowledge' and 'ignorance', or 'know' and 'not-know', are also antitheses.) The grammars of antithetical terms are inseparable: if one term is discarded, the other is made meaningless (nonsense).

The method of tautologies might also be called the method of antitheses.

Folly and Nonsense

But which are we calling "obvious nonsense" (PI § 464) -- (1) foolishness (unsound judgment), or (2) "mere sound without sense"? It is necessary to ask this question because the word 'nonsense' is commonly used to mean either.

[By "mere sound without sense" Wittgenstein's later logic of language means 'an undefined combination of words' or 'nonsense' = "When a sentence is called meaningless, it is not as it were its meaning that is meaningless" (PI § 500).]

Subtle or very simple?

What is in Plain View can be Perplexing

What is puzzling here is this, that we are talking about tautologies = rules of grammar that nonetheless are used in ethics to guide man's way of life. And that they do this seems very odd, because the common (generally accepted) view is that tautologies are idle -- i.e. that they tell us nothing. But the rules of grammar here are also rules of ethics, and ethical rules ("how to live our life") are not idle but instead tell us how to live.

"The difficulty is not of explaining something complex but of explaining something very simple." (cf. DW p. 69-70)

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Plato's Method is especially Important in Ethics

The thesis of the following discussion is this, that the method of tautologies shows the grammatical interrelationships among concepts, which is especially important in ethics.

In the discussion the word 'tautology' may often be defined as: a rule of grammar that is derived from another rule of grammar (and conversely: If A therefore B, then also B therefore A).

Wittgenstein: a 'tautology' is: a proposition that "cannot be significantly negated", or, in other words: 'not-p' is not false but nonsense. A 'tautology' is: a proposition the negation of which is an undefined combination of words.

Whether all tautologies are rules of grammar, however, is not discussed here.

If through ignorance of grammar, someone thinks he is doing good when he is doing evil, that is a very grave mistake. It is an instance of not knowing oneself, thinking one knows what one does not know (which is the original sin in philosophy (Xenophon, Memorabilia iii, 9, 6; Plato, Apology 21c-d)). What the method of tautologies in ethics makes clear is the distinction between good and evil, and the relationship between the concepts 'good' and 'evil'.

In what follows I have collected (and very often rethought) the scattered remarks I have written elsewhere apropos of the subject of tautology.

1. And I read Plato for his many insights, for example, (1) his tautologies about the good man: "If the good man harms his enemies, then what does the bad man do to them?" and (2) that "written words can't defend themselves" (Phaedrus 275c-e), and (3) for the method of Socratic dialectic [or, dialog], which is, as also in Xenophon, to proceed step-by-step until agreement or refutation is reached.

   Grammatical Interconnections

   We could also speak of Saint Augustine's "method of tautologies" -- indeed, the tautological method is the method of all rationalist metaphysics (including natural theology) -- for according to Augustine (De libero arbitrio I am able to know three things independently of sense experience, namely that I exist, that I live, and that I understand. I could not doubt that I exist if I did not exist; the fact that I exist could not be clear to me unless I were alive; and I understand both that I exist and that I am alive. (Note that another thing I cannot be deceived about is that I have ideas.) (Fredrick Copleston, History of Philosophy ii, 4, 3) Note that language is taken for granted, as if Augustine knew language prior to life experience (which in Confessions Book I § 8, he acknowledges that he did not).

   (Source: "The impossibility of being mistaken")

2. Natural theology. Albert Schweitzer asks: "How does thought come to such a meaningless proceeding as making man enter into a spiritual relation with an unreal creation of thought [the Essence of Being, the Absolute, the World-spirit]?" Temperament plus Rationalism (the method of tautologies) is one possibility.

   (Source: "Speculation is not what I want from philosophy" | The limit of metaphysics)

3. Let the proposition's truth conditions show you what is known, what we are calling 'know' here.

   "And we do not call tautologies knowledge." Or so I wrote earlier, but then I asked if this proposition [thesis] is correct: "The type of verification is the type of language game."

   Distinguishing good from bad -- i.e. knowing the rules for opposing the words 'good' and 'bad' is knowledge of grammar; it is knowledge of a concepts. And yet, knowledge of grammar seems to be -- in fact, is -- also knowledge in ethics, which is knowledge of what the good man does and does not do.

   Is there knowledge acquired without experience of the world that is nonetheless knowledge of the world (presuming, as we do in a descriptive logic of language, that 'the world of experience' = 'reality')? Well, are the principles of ethics knowledge of the world or not -- i.e. If you know what the good man does, then don't you have knowledge of the world? Maybe that is the answer: that "the principles of ethics" have their foundation in nothing else but grammar alone. But what is the relation of grammar to the world of our experience?

   At first blush, this is what I want to reply, that grammar and the world are not that independent of one another in the case of ethics, that ethics is not like mathematics (Try to apply arithmetic to adding water drops: 1 + 1 = 1, which is not the rule of maths). But, then again, it does not appear to be knowledge of the world, at least in this way, that even if there is no good man, the grammar of 'good man' would nonetheless guide how man should live his life. The concept is an ideal (like plane geometry).

   Wittgenstein spoke of "concepts that pinch your feet" (Notebooks 1914-1916, 15 June 1915), although maybe he did use that metaphor as I am using it here ; here I mean the comparison this way: there are concepts that need to be revised (extended) just as there are shoes that need to be stretched. Maybe that is the trouble here. Shortly before his death, Wittgenstein wrote of "a big gap in my thinking" (OC between § 470 and § 471).

   Why is not this the answer if I am able absorb it, that the type of knowledge is the type of language game? Maybe it is Kant's concepts that "pinch" here: maybe you should set aside his a priori versus synthetic propositions distinction? It is a conceptual tool that may or may not be useful to the philosophical understanding. The gap in Wittgenstein's thinking in On Certainty may be caused by his not setting that tool aside (Note that 'may' doesn't mean 'is') -- but that is an untested thesis.

   (Source: "What we call grounds", and 'having sufficient grounds to assert that a proposition is true' is what we mean by 'knowledge'.)

4. To hate = to wish harm to come to or to be done to someone. That is not what the good man wishes; it is what the bad man wishes. The good man harms no one; harm is what the bad man does. The version of Plato's ethics in Republic 335e derives valid rules of ethics using tautologies alone; it is purely a conceptual investigation.

   (Source: If vice is ignorance of the good, then why is vice punished?)

5. Is it nonsense to say that 'The good man harms his enemies'? Polemarchus says that (Plato, Republic 335b), until he is refuted (ibid. 335d-e). And yet the refutation is simply a grammatical investigation (But it is not "simply" -- because Plato shows great insight here). If the refutation concerns facts, it concerns only facts of our language -- i.e. facts about the interrelatedness of our concepts. (But they are facts, because Plato does not redefine 'good' and 'evil', but simply points out what is and what is not grammatically self-consistent.) That is what I have called "Plato's tautological ethics". From the point of view of Wittgenstein's grammatical versus empirical propositions distinction, ethics determined by grammar is perplexing.

   (Source: Is the contradiction of a rule of grammar necessarily nonsense? "You play the game wrong, or not at all" (OC § 446))

6. Not all tautologies are idle, however, for some show the interconnection of grammatical rules, i.e. of concepts, and these tautologies may be useful for pointing out connections that we might overlook; e.g. Plato's 'If the good man does harm, then what does the bad man do?' -- i.e. there are interconnections among the concepts 'good man', 'bad man', and 'do harm', such that it is nonsense to say 'The good man does harm', e.g. to his enemies.

   So I wrote earlier. But is the proposition 'The good man does harm' nonsense (i.e. an undefined combination of words)? Well, we know things to do with the phrases 'does harm' and 'the good man', but we don't normally do anything with the combination of words 'The good man does harm' -- i.e. as we normally use our language that is an undefined combination of words.

   (Source: "Theology as grammar" (PI § 373), a formula for talking about God (Augustine on The Holy Trinity))

7. Again, is this a question of tautologies DEF.= propositions that cannot be false (are necessarily true) -- i.e. of definitions (definitions = grammar = any explanation of the use of language (cf. PI § 560))? Are investigations in ethics conceptual or factual (Z § 458) -- i.e. about things other than logic-grammar -- investigations?

   The question again: are these tautologies mere statements of grammar? Statements of grammatical rules they may well be, but "mere" many certainly are not, for we often have not thought out the interconnections of our concepts; e.g. Plato's propositions "The good man does harm to no one, not even to those who do harm to him, because if the good man does harm to others, then what does the bad man do to them?" and "The good man does not return bad for bad, because the good man only does good; it is the bad man who returns bad for bad" are rhetorical; they are simply grammatical reminders, but not trivial ones.

   (Source: Plato's Gorgias - Selections - Comments)

8. 'Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. (Hume)

   Having recourse to Plato's method of tautologies: If the wise man says that, then what does the foolish man say -- that it is contrary to reason? Is there no way for reasoning to distinguish between wisdom and foolishness (which is what Hume is saying there is not)? (Contrary to Hume)

   Interrelated concepts. We speak of a sense of proportion, and of having no sense of proportion. Having a sense of proportion is wise; having no sense of proportion is foolish. Likewise for the concepts 'common sense' and 'sound judgment'. These concepts are intertwined with the concepts 'reasonable' and 'wise'.

   For the words 'wise' and 'foolish' (like the words 'good' and 'evil') to have meaning, they have (like most words in the language) to be defined by examples. The words 'wisdom' and 'reasonable' have to be defined by examples of wisdom and reasonableness. And their antitheses ('foolish', 'thoughtless', 'illogical', 'unreasonable').

   The word 'illogical' = 'contrary to reason', which means 'self-contradictory', but not every contradiction in meaning is a contradiction in form, and not every contradiction in form is necessarily false (or nonsense). It is not obvious whether the proposition 'It is not illogical to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger' is a contradiction in meaning and therefore false or not. But if we replace 'It is not illogical' with 'It is not unwise, unreasonable, foolish', then what is disguised becomes obvious (PI § 464). (Cf. 'It is wise to be foolish', and so on, which in Russell's philosophical grammar would be 'p and not-p'.)

   Plato's tautologies point out that goodness is not in the eye of the beholder, e.g. the proposition (combination of words) 'The good man does harm' is nonsense (and not possibly false or true). Likewise the proposition 'Reason cannot distinguish between wisdom and folly' is nonsense. If it is not contrary to reason, i.e. if it is not foolish, illogical, "to prefer the destruction of the whole world", then the words 'reasonable' and 'foolish' are without meaning. Plato's method of tautologies shows that it is illogical to say that the wise man has no sense of proportion -- and 'illogical' means 'contrary to reason' (logical = grammatical, illogical = il-grammatical or in contradiction, or contrary, to grammatical rules).

   Rather than "Plato's method of tautologies", we could say "Plato's method of grammatical investigations" (or "conceptual investigations", remembering that the most serviceable definition of 'concept' for philosophy, in my opinion, is 'rules for the use of a word').

   Bertrand Russell's thesis: "If you say that x is good, that means no more than that you like x". Compare "If you say that x is wise, that means no more than that you esteem x". Russell thinks he is saying what ethics really is, not describing the use of the word 'good' in the language (as such it would be a false description).

   (Source: The distinction between 'wisdom' and 'foolishness' and David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature II, iii, 3)

9. There are tautologies that point out the interconnection (or intersection) of grammatical rules. For example, to say that everything man says is nonsense -- i.e. to try to use the word 'nonsense' without its antithesis (namely, 'sense') -- is nonsense. (If a word is divorced from its antithesis ...). But that is a grammatical, not a metaphysical (ontological) remark; it states a fact about our language, nothing more, certainly not a claim (thesis) about what the eye of God sees when it looks at man.

   (Source: "Is it an illusion that man is endowed with [discourse of] reason?")

10. Socrates and Polemarchus have had a long discussion that concludes with a tautology; what they have made is a conceptual investigation, but Plato does not think that he is examining concepts, but instead that he has demonstrated a fact about the just man. And yet Plato's conceptual investigation that derives rules of ethics from tautologies [grammatical rules] is not at all idle -- rather, very useful to ethics is "Plato's tautological ethics" (I will call it that, because it is not the only account of ethics Plato gives). For if e.g. we say, "If the good man does harm, then what does the bad man do?" this bit of rhetoric (or, "grammatical remark" in Wittgenstein's jargon) shows us what we mean by the words 'good man'. And so this is a very important insight of Plato's.

    If the good man harms no one, then he never returns wrong for wrong, bad for bad (Socrates says in Plato's Crito 49b-d, and in Republic 335d-e), and so then how can Plato say that to delight in one's enemies' misfortunes is not harmful to one's soul? (Philebus 49d: "Is it wrongful to delight in our enemies' misfortunes?") The good man does not hate ('to hate' = 'to wish harm to come to another'); to hate is what the bad man does. (Yes, the last proposition is a tautology: it only shows a way our concepts are grammatically inter-related. But to point out that inter-relationship is important, and, further, it shows that tautologies are not all necessarily idle.)

    (Sources: Plato's Tautological Ethics in Republic Book One)

11. And so you can see that we are talking in grammatical tautologies.

    (Source: And that is what happens when a concept is allowed to be infinitely plastic: the application of a thesis can be extended to cover any and every imaginable case.)

12. How to replace the reality before our eyes with "an abstract picture which we have ourselves created" (DW p. 100)? Thus: by saying that "If only we knew all the facts surrounding an apparently anomalous phenomenon, then our theory could account for that phenomenon". Because that presumes the abstract picture presented by the theory to be the "reality behind the phenomena", rather than what it is: a model used to organize a selection [abstraction] of facts -- i.e. a theory is facts plus imagination: it is imagination that makes the "selection of facts" and the "model based on that selection".

    Neither the selection nor the model belongs to the facts; both belong to the theory; they are not as it were naturally given -- i.e. they are not themselves additional facts. (Although that men have created just this selection and just this model is, of course, a fact.)

    The presumption would be a tautology -- i.e. a proposition that cannot be falsified ("significantly negated"). But tautologies, empiricists say, can tell us nothing about reality, only about the way we look at it. ('If we could' means that we don't know whether or not we could.)

    The philosophical grammar (Russell) of a tautology is: If p, then 'not-p' is nonsense. (The distinction between a sign and its meaning; the difference between 'x' and x.) The proposition 'A triangle has three sides' is a tautology (definition, rule of grammar), and therefore the combination of words 'A triangle does not have three sides' is nonsense; if it were a false proposition, it would be possible to draw a triangle that did not have three sides (In this instance, logically possible = drawable, illustratable). Contrast 'A triangle has three sides' with 'An elephant has two ears', which is not a tautology.

    "... only about the way we look at it." Is a grammar a way of looking at things? Any "part of speech" is a classification scheme; and, thus, so it appears, at least some rules of grammar are ways of looking at things. But that does not answer the question of whether the following proposition is true or not, that: 'Nothing is in itself good or bad, but grammar makes it so' -- i.e. that proposition intended not in Stoicism's sense, but in which sense, then -- ontology? Of course not. But as a fact about the relation of ethics to grammar, at least in Plato's "tautological ethics".

    No object bears a name unless man gives it one; no object belongs to a class of objects unless man has created a class and classified the object as belonging to it (Goethe: "There are no facts independent of theory; all fact is already theory"). Our categories may seem obvious to us, and it would be very easy to presume that therefore "very general facts of nature" are compelling, that those "facts" create the class (category). But how do we demonstrate that those facts are the explanation of any particular concept formation (PI II, xii, p. 230a)? Wittgenstein gives the example of weighing cheese on a scale (PI § 142), i.e. an example where there are indeed grounds for the language game, namely the repeatability of an experiment [experience]; the relation between the facts and grammar [but all facts are already the "conceived facts" (Kant, Goethe)]. What is compelling here is the temptation to Circular Argument: "There is a concept 'cat' because there are cats. Concept-formation is a response to the facts." The argument is circular because it assumes that facts -- in this case the category 'cats' -- are not the conceived facts but are raw percepts, the very thing it claims to prove. Concept-formation is the conceived facts; that is why the conceived facts cannot explain concept-formation.

    Suppose we said: there would be good and evil even without language, i.e. that the concepts 'good' and 'evil' would still somehow, I don't know how, exist. Is language necessary for man to feel shame? (Is the question an enigma or undefined language?) "Percepts without concepts are blind" versus "very general facts of nature".

    (Source: A scientific theory is not "the reality behind" observable phenomena)

13. In philosophy it seems that the word 'theory' (or 'hypothesis') = 'thesis' or 'account', or sometimes 'classification scheme' or sometimes 'way of looking at things'. I don't know what else the word 'theory' would be used to mean there.

    A way of looking at things, a "theory", may indeed affect the way man thinks about and therefore lives his life (ethics: "we are discussing no small matter, but how to live" (Republic 352d)) -- even if the "theory", i.e. account of what you think you know, consists of nothing but tautologies showing the inter-relationships of rules of grammar.

    I am alluding here to Plato's argument about what the good man does, and does not do, in Republic 335e. We would say that the propositions of that argument (which we would call a tautological argument) are obviously "rules of grammar" (or, verbal definitions of words). And so why was this not obvious -- if it is obvious -- to Plato; why does he treat these statements as if they concerned non-linguistic facts?

    I think because in some cases things are obvious only after someone has shown them to us (what now seems obvious was once genius), because the understanding of language that we now have -- if we have such an understanding and not simply another misunderstanding of the logic of our language -- is not of our making but of a philosopher's (sc. Wittgenstein), who, in my account, pointed out an objective way to make a distinction between sense and nonsense in philosophy (which, according to me, is philosophy's very first task), a particular way of making that distinction without which philosophy would (or maybe would not be, because there may be other ways to make an objective distinction besides Wittgenstein's) "mere sound without sense" -- although sound without sense will serve just as well as sound with sense if there is no way to tell them apart. And the questions of philosophy are too important to our life to be answered with mere air.

    (Source: Plato and the immortality of the soul, or, passing from a hidden rule of grammar to one in plain view)

14. The distinction Kant makes with the words 'percept' and 'concept': he says that percepts without concepts are blind. His statement is a rule of grammar, because: is there anything we would call a "bare percept" -- i.e. a percept (1) for which there is no concept, but (2) which is not without meaning? The question is rhetorical, because unconceptualized = meaningless.

    (Source: "Is sense perception the same as knowledge?" Theaetetus 163b)

15. Query: the word 'rational' is the best synonym for which branch of philosophy?

    If it isn't rational -- is it philosophy at all? Guided by verifiable experience and reason (i.e. logic) -- but nevertheless judged by reason alone; that is philosophy as we have it from Socrates. But contrast rational with Rationalism or Metaphysics (i.e. guidance by reason alone, entirely independent of experience). Is "Plato's tautological ethics" an example of Rationalism?

    (Source: Rationalism versus rationalism: the words 'Rationalism' and 'rationalism' are similar signs but have different grammars or verbal definitions)

16. After the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein came to regard philosophy as being no more than logic of language (or grammatical) investigations, its aim being nothing more than to make hidden nonsense evident nonsense by describing how we actually use or might use our language -- and thus, in Bertrand Russell's view, the project in philosophy of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, as well as the remarks written in the book itself, might well seem "trivial" -- i.e. of little or no importance.

    But Wittgenstein's aim in philosophy had already been stated in his first book (TLP 4.112), and so Russell should -- which does not mean that he was -- have already been familiar with that aim.

    Of Wittgenstein's later work Russell wrote that its "positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded". As examples of its "positive doctrines", I don't know, maybe "If you want to understand the use of the word 'meaning', look for what are called 'explanations of meaning'" and "For a large class of cases ... the meaning of a word is its use in the language" or "It is not a something, but not a nothing either ... We have only rejected the grammar that tries to force itself on us here" or "The kind of certainty is the kind of language game"(PI §§ 560, 430, 304, and II, xi, p. 224) or "... for we ourselves made it unverifiable" (Z § 259). As to its "negative doctrines", maybe "What makes you think that a grammatical joke is deep? And that is the depth of philosophy" and "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" is an example (ibid. §§ 111, 109; cf. §§ 123-128).

    As I wrote elsewhere, I believe that Wittgenstein commits the "Fallacy of some, therefore all", because from some philosophical problems are language (conceptual) misunderstandings it does not follow that all philosophical problems are language misunderstandings. And I do not believe that ethics and the eternal "questions without answers" are mere linguistic illusions; they are problems man must face if he is to live an examined life. Wittgenstein might say that those are non-rational rather than philosophical, but I would not follow him in this.

    Was Wittgenstein trying to state what the essence of philosophy is -- which would be either a verbal definition of the word 'philosophy' (cf. PI § 373), which it is not (even if "essence belongs to grammar" (ibid. § 371)), or metaphysics: a claim (hypothesis) about reality, a "real definition" of philosophy? It seems so.

    Russell says that Wittgenstein's "negative doctrines" as "unfounded". But remember that examples are the true masters to follow in philosophy: they are the foundation. Is Wittgenstein's thesis consistent with the examples he has selected?

    Because they offer a way to distinguish language with meaning from nonsense, Wittgenstein's logic of language or grammatical remarks are helpful to someone seeking to escape the vagueness and confusion that surrounds man. But it is mistaken to thoughtlessly extend the limits of Wittgenstein's thesis about the essence of philosophy (Z § 458) beyond the kind of examples that justifies it.

    One thing lying beyond those limits is what I have called "Plato's tautological ethics", or, "conceptual tautologies in ethics" (as found in Republic 331e-335e). It's true that Plato's "theses" are nothing more than remarks that make the interconnections of our concepts (or, grammatical intersections) clear, but seeing those interconnections is vital to Socratic ethics (hence the importance, rightly understood, of definitions in philosophy, i.e. in philosophy 'definition' = 'rule of grammar'. In philosophy we define words not things).

    (Source: "Either Unfounded or Trivial" | Wittgenstein and philosophy as mutual antidotes)

17. Tautologies are important because (1) they are very often mistaken for statements of fact ("conceptual versus factual investigations" (Z § 458)) -- i.e. "grammatical" (How Wittgenstein extended the concept 'grammar' to include any description of the use of language) versus non-grammatical investigations, but also because (2) they may point out grammatical-conceptual connections we have overlooked.

    By identifying logic with grammar -- i.e. as being concerned with use in the language (meaning) rather than with form (syntax) -- Wittgenstein broke with mathematical logic. It was very Socratic to identify logic (logos) with definition.

    There are propositions that are not merely tautologies -- but that are also useful tautologies, such e.g. as the rhetorical question: "If it is good to do x, then what is it evil to do!" -- which is simply a grammatical question, but one that may be life or death to knowing what the ethical excellence proper to man is.

    Contrary to Hume. Rather than ''Tis is not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world ...' Hume could have said ''Tis not unreasonable to prefer ...' But if the reasonable man -- i.e. the man who is guided by reason -- says that, then what does the unreasonable man say?

    And if the unreasonable man -- the man who is not guided by reason -- says the same thing as the reasonable man, then there is no distinction made here between reason and unreason, and therefore the words 'reasonable' and 'unreasonable' are undefined words, "mere sounds without meaning".

    But on the other hand, if it is the unreasonable man who says "It is contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world ...", then everything is turned back-to-front. (Fair is foul, and foul is fair.) And so we can see that Hume is not using the word 'reason' as we normally use that word.

    The foundations of our life do not themselves have foundations; there is no bedrock (PI § 217) beneath the bedrock -- which is the position Hume wishes to place "the passions" -- i.e. as the bedrock beneath the bedrock, an unassailable place, but one that does not exist.

    Because axioms are not blindly (thoughtlessly) accepted. Like everything else in philosophy they must be put to the test of reason -- specifically to see if they are unreasonable, which an axiom posited by "the passions" (i.e. the antithesis of "reason" or in other words, unreason) may well be. Another word for 'axiom' is 'assumption'.

    (Source: Plato's Tautologies: If the wise man says that the foundation of reason is unreason, or, as Hume calls it "the passions", then what does his antithesis, the fool, say?)

18. Plato's tautological ethics is a method of philosophical reflection. By 'Socratic ethics' we mean, not an instinctive acceptance of the standard of good and evil given by one's sense of fairness, but the philosophical questioning of what the good is for man and therefore which way of life man should follow.

    Albert Schweitzer characterized world-views ["theories of reality"] as either "world and life affirmation" or "world and life negation". Plato's tautological method, which seeks to uncover the interconnections of our concepts, specifically by examining the grammars of our ethical terms, results in an ethics ("no small matter, but how to live") that is world and life affirming.

    According to the Greek philosophers, the good for a thing is the specific excellence that is proper and unique to that thing. According to Socrates and Plato, that excellence for man is rational moral virtue. Socrates' search for the good for man -- as in Plato's "The good man harms no one, and makes even his enemies better" (Republic 335b-e) -- is life and world affirming, whereas the withdraw (sheltering behind a wall) of Republic 496c-d is not. (The everyman Socrates of Plato's Apology and the aristocrat Socrates of Plato's Republic (after 335e) are (thought) worlds apart.)

    Schweitzer's standard in ethics: Whatever is beneficial to life is good and whatever is harmful to life is evil. The good man seeks to benefit (rather than harm) both his friends and his enemies, improving both their ethical and the material conditions. And because the good man's goodness is active (and not merely the passive "mind your own business; do no self-harm" of Plato's Republic 496c-d), it is life and world affirming.

    Schweitzer defines "life and world negation" as the rejection of all activity directed toward the ethical and material perfecting of mankind, even if it is only directed at one's companions. Rather, "world and life negation" regards this world as "meaningless and sorrowful" and anyone holding that view "resolves to mortify his will-to-live" and to renounce "all activity which aims at improvement of the conditions of life in this world" (Indian Thought and its Development [1935], tr. 1956, p. 1-2).

    (Source: "World and Life Affirmation" in Albert Schweitzer)

19. To the later Greek mind/way of thinking, a god who demanded the sacrifice of a child's life (as of Iphigenia at Aulis by the goddess Artemis) was "thereby proved to be evil". Euripides said, "If gods do evil then they are not gods." (E. Hamilton, Mythology (1942), v, i, p. 363) But Artemis is a god and therefore she did not and would not demand that Agamemnon kill his daughter. "If good demands that evil be done, then what does evil demand -- that good be done?" is rhetorical-tautological, as is "If a god would demand that, then what would a demon demand?" (Abraham and Socrates contrasted)

    (Source: The Greek gods are fully rational, unlike man who is both a rational and an irrational animal, and therefore knowing the good the gods do only good.)

20. The method of tautologies in ethics serves to show disguised foolishness to be obvious foolishness. "If the good man does that, then what does the bad man do?" Note that 'good' and 'bad' are antithetical: if 'good' = 'bad', then both words are nonsense -- i.e. "words whereby we conceive nothing but the sound" (Aristotle's "mere sound without sense").

    Of the notions that God demands physical and cultural genocide (Deuteronomy 7.1-6) and creates some creatures simply to condemn them (Mark 14.24: "for many"), it should be said: "If God demands that, then what does the devil command?" ["If that is good, then what is evil?"] The question is (1) rhetorical, but belongs to both (2) grammar, and (3) ethics. Which is quite puzzling, for how can that one proposition play those three roles at the same time! And yet it does. So we have Plato's tautological method (or, "method of tautologies": Plato's method of using tautologies in argument or as arguments), e.g. of contrasting 'the morally good' with 'the morally bad'.

    "My ways are not your ways. My thoughts are as high above your thoughts as the heavens are above the earth" (Isaiah 55.8-9) is contrary to the Greek philosophical view of the gods as fully rational and therefore doers only of good: "The good pleases God because it is good." The good is both independent of the gods and knowable by man independently of God. Opposed to the rational view is Wittgenstein's view that the good is whatever God commands, regardless of what God commands and regardless of the judgment of man. (Thus we are talking about two different concepts 'God', which means different rules of grammar, although they are both called by the same name for good reason: the concepts overlap -- but not completely. This can be compared to Russell's "theory of descriptions".)

    (Source: "And if anyone takes your coat" (Albert Schweitzer)

In Sum: Plato's Method of Tautologies in Ethics

What Plato reasoned his way to, although it is not what he mistook it to be, is a brilliant insight in my view, because it shows that simply through conceptual investigation -- i.e. examination of the grammar of antithetical terms -- it is possible to uncover ethical truths, e.g. to refute the proposition (i.e. thesis) that "The good man helps his friends and harms his enemies" (Republic 332d). And this is rightfully titled in my view "Plato's Method of Tautologies in Ethics".

Note though that tautologies are not the only proposition type in ethics, e.g. propositions that are proposed answers to the question 'What is the good for man?' can be put to the tests of reason and experience in Socratic question and answer, although those propositions belong to ethics.

[Is the end of a tautology also its beginning?]

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Supplement

'Tautology' in Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Query: Wittgenstein. Tautologies are circular.

A cloud of vagueness: what are we calling 'tautology', what 'circular'? Does 'circular' mean that an argument assumes to be true what it claims it proves to be true? For example, Tautology: (either p or not-p) is not an argument and therefore it is not circular.

By 'tautology' the TLP appears to mean: 'any complex proposition [i.e. connection of two elementary propositions] that is "unconditionally true"' (4.461, tr. Ogden). At its simplest, a 'tautology' is 'the logical connection [Logical connectors: 'either/or', 'and', 'if then'] of two elementary propositions [an 'elementary proposition states an atomic fact: it is the names of objects in a defined relationship to one another', as e.g. 'The book is on the table', but not 'Book is table on the' (cf. 3.21, 3.1431)] which is true independently of anything else, as e.g. 'Either (The book is on the table) or (The book is not on the table)'.

Words are names

The simplest proposition, the elementary proposition, asserts the existence of an atomic fact. (4.21) An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things). (2.01) The simple signs employed in propositions are called names. (3.202) The name means the object. The object is its meaning. (3.203)

A tautology can have only the truth value of true, never false: when "the proposition is true for all the truth-possibilities of the elementary propositions. We say that the truth-conditions are tautological." (TLP 4.46)

The tautology has no truth-conditions, for it is unconditionally true. (4.461) Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of the reality ["A proposition is a picture of a fact"]. [Tautology and contradiction] present no possible state of affairs. For the one allows every possible state of affairs, the other none. (4.462) A tautology follows from all propositions: it says ["puts into words that are not nonsense"] nothing. (5.142)

The propositions of logic are tautologies. (6.1) The propositions of logic therefore say nothing. (They are the analytical propositions.) (6.11) That e.g. the propositions 'p' and '~p' ['not-p'] in the connection '~(p . ~p)' ['not (p and not-p)'] give a tautology shows that they contradict one another. (6.1201) The logical propositions describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they present ["show" = "do not put into words that are not nonsense"] it. They "treat" of nothing. They presuppose that names have meaning, and that elementary propositions have sense. And this is their connection with the world. (6.124)

In other words, they have no a connection to the world, but only to the propositions presupposed not to be nonsense.

Now, as to circular: "the propositions, from which the proof starts, must show without proof that they are tautologies." (6.126) "Proof in logic is only a mechanical expedient to facilitate the recognition of tautology, where it is complicated" (6.1262), alludes to the formal proofs of mathematical logic (cf. the proofs of theorems in geometry). Now, what does Wittgenstein mean by 'must show without proof that they are tautologies' -- e.g. that 'p or not-p' shows itself without proof to be a tautology? (This is why I wrote that examples are the true masters in philosophy.)

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About Philosophy (From the original preface to this page)

(Of course that the expression "logic of language" is taken from Wittgenstein's work is not an accident.)

Something else that is important: When a new philosophical idea occurs to me, I often don't understand the idea, and because of this I often give a mistaken account of my idea. And I may have done this -- and may still be doing this -- with what I have written here about Plato's method of using tautologies in ethics.

But maybe philosophy is that way, and it's not just that I am philosophically stupid.

"But see, I write one thing, then another just the opposite. And which shall stand?" (Wittgenstein, about his present thinking, in 1951, a few months before his death)

Or maybe philosophy just is this way, acceptance today, refutation tomorrow. You mustn't underestimate just how perplexed someone who thinks about philosophical questions is. Or how often lost.

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