Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: Section 2 – 2.0141

Having written way too many words about the first few lines of the Tractatus in the last post, I’m just going to shut up and get right to it:

2. What is the case – a fact – is the existence of states of affairs.

2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things).

2.011 It is essential to things that they should be possible constituents of states of affairs. 

So here’s our first fact, according to W: states of affairs exist. Example of a boring state of affairs: the cup is on the table. These sort of things exist, and the very existence of such things is a fact (which in the Tractatus means it is atomically true, i.e that states of affairs exist is properly basic, and cannot be expressed in terms of other truths.)

It’s worth noting that this seems neutral on metaphysics, which is presumably the point. I take it W isn’t interested in questions like whether states of affairs are ‘really’ out there in a mind independent sense, or if they are some sort of Descartes’ demon-style illusion. (Is the cup on the table really there, or is it a virtual cup in the matrix, beamed into my brain by shady robots? Bah!) I suspect we should take his assertion as saying simply that there is something going on – something potentially expressible.

The third proposition is expanded on next, but here let’s just tie it in with the point I made last time that W gives a higher priority to states of affairs than to the objects which constitute them. To state that the basic (atomic) fact is that states of affairs exist, and then that objects are characterised by the roles they do or can play in states of affairs, is an inversion of the way we tend to think about these things intuitively.

2.012 In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.

2.0121 It would seem to be a sort of accident, if it turned out that a situation would fit a thing that could already exist entirely on its own. 

If things occur in states of affairs, this possibility must be in them from the beginning. 

(Nothing in the province of logic can be merely possible. Logic deals with every possibility and all possibilities are its facts.) 

Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so too there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others. 

If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I cannot imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combinations. 

2.0122 Things are independent in so far as they can occur in all possible situations, but this form of independence is a form of connexion with states of affairs, a form of dependence. (It is impossible for words to appear in two different roles: by themselves, and in propositions.)

2.0123 If I know an object I also know all its possible occurrences in states of affairs. 

(Every one of these possibilities must be part of the nature of the object.)

A new possibility cannot be discovered later. 

2.01231 If I am to know an object, though I need not know its external properties, I must know all its internal properties. 

To imagine a thing is to imagine it in a state of affairs. The comparison with spatial/temporal objects is telling: it is simply impossible to conceive a spatial object which is not embedded in some space. It does not make sense to do so – it is entailed in the kind of thing it is. In the same way, W asserts that a thing can only be conceived as embedded in states of affairs.

I’m finding it hard to tell how broadly he is using the word ‘thing’ here, and consequently whether he is saying something trivial or substantial. In the case of something like a cup, the point is easily grasped. I can’t isolate a cup from states of affairs – about the best I can do is imagine it floating in empty space, but then it is still in some state of affairs, namely it is floating in empty space! But this in itself is not saying much more than that spatial objects are spatial, and similarly that temporal objects are temporal.

If we were so inclined we could read W as rejecting Platonism, i.e. that we actually can’t conceive of things existing independently (abstract things, like numbers, circles, centres of gravity). But somehow I doubt that W wants to go anywhere near that sort of metaphysical speculation, and is after something a bit more meta.

Perhaps we can read it like this: if we are going to take numbers as things in the metaphysically independent way that the Platonist does, then all we end up doing is postulating another realm for them to dwell in – Plato’s realm of ideal forms. The long and short of it is, even if we separate these things out from normal states of affairs, we are not separating them from states of affairs as such, we are just changing the kind of states of affairs in which they can occur.

(The bit about ‘external’ and ‘internal’ properties of objects is unclear at this point, but it is something he returns to later in the Tractatus.)

2.0124 If all objects are given, then at the same time all possible states of affairs are also given.

Once you’ve got all the objects (likely a vast infinity), latent in them is all the possible ways they can combine with each other, and this exhausts the logical space of states of affairs. While I do think that he is granting special status to states of affairs as somehow prior to objects, his point here is that while a state of affairs may be expressed in terms of many different combinations of objects, it can never be expressed without any objects at all.

2.013 Each thing is, as it were, in a space of possible states of affairs. This space I can imagine empty, but I cannot imagine the thing without the space. 

2.0131 A spatial object must be situated in infinite space. (A spatial point is an argument-place.)

A speck in the visual field, though it need not be red, must have some colour: it is, so to speak, surrounded by colour-space. Notes must have some pitch, objects of the sense of touch some degree of hardness, and so on. 

2.014 Objects contain the possibility of all situations.

2.0141 The possibility of its occurring in states of affairs is the form of an object. 

In the first section, W put out the idea that what there is (in the first place) is not objects, but states of affairs. This was an inversion of the perhaps more intuitive way of looking at the world as objects first and foremost, which then combine into states of affairs.

In this section he maps out how we should think of objects if we take this inversion seriously: objects are what you get when you decompose states of affairs. Certainly, some states of affairs might share components, and hence we can have objects occurring in more than one. But this independence that objects have from appearing in particular states of affairs should not be confused with objects being independent from states of affairs as such – i.e from the possibility of occurring in states of affairs. This possibility, W is urging, is exactly what it is to be a thing.

Peter Sloterdijk – Spheres I: Bubbles

The modern world can be a lonely place. Global market forces have dispersed families over wide geographical areas, tight-knit communities have been replaced by frenetic urban environments, while faster travel has allowed people to find employment further from their homes, removing the need to maintain social bonds with work colleagues. The patterns of life that emerged in the 19th and 20th centuries have left many people uprooted.

As well as the myriad opportunities for isolation afforded by our social geometry, critics of modernity have claimed that modern loneliness stems from dysfunctional elements in our fundamental philosophy. The various stories leading to this conclusion are long and often complex, full of twists and subplots, but one thread common to all is a criticism of the Cartesian notion of the self, which they argue is as misguided as it is endemic.

Cartesianism is the idea that the world can be split fundamentally into subject and object, or more accurately, that each one of us can take it as a given that reality divides into what is called ‘I’ and everything else. Once this is granted a host of philosophical problems fall out: disparity between the certainty I can have of my own existence and of the outside world’s, mind-body dualism, solipsism, brains in vats, inverted spectrums, zombies – you name it. The picture is of points of subjectivity peering out into external reality, and this sets the stage for a philosophy that takes as its business properties of entities and the relations between them.

That Cartesianism is really endemic (i.e. that it is lodged in the worldview even of those who have not considered it explicitly) is not without some justification. There is a reason why Descartes’ Meditations is often treated as an entry point for Western philosophy. You can explain the cogito (I think, therefore I am) to just about anyone – the problem is easy to grasp, its terms familiar, its conclusion intuitive. The Cartesian mode is so tempting because in a sense we already occupy it, and to philosophise within it is to scrutinise the familiar.

One criticism of Cartesianism attacks the status of the subject/object distinction itself. The challenge is not that it is a false or meaningless dichotomy, but that it is not basic as assumed – rather than being fundamental to consciousness it lies on top of it. Consider infants before they are able to recognise themselves in the mirror, or our distant ancestors who experienced the first stirrings of awareness, or even regular adults engaged in non-reflective activity. Before there can be self-consciousness, so the reasoning goes, there must be consciousness from which it can arise. Teasing out the logical structure of this pre-subjective consciousness has been a major theme in the philosophies of Hegel, Heidegger, and Sartre, all of whom concluded (in their various ways) that what resides there reveals the Cartesian problems as either badly formulated or irrelevant. The programme is summarised by Alexandre Kojève [1]:

Before analysing the “I think,” before proceeding to the Kantian theory of knowledge – i.e., of the relation between the (conscious) subject and the (conceived) object, one must ask what this subject is that is revealed in and by the I of “I think.” One must ask when, why, and how man is led to say “I. . . .”

A more recent attempt to excavate the pre-subjective realm comes from the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, whose three-part work Spheres is currently being translated into English (the first book Bubbles was published in 2011, and is considered here). Uniquely among those who think about such things, Sloterdijk is concerned with the spatial aspect of consciousness, and presents his philosophy as a response to the prevalence of temporal themes in many 20th Century works, and to Heidegger’s Being and Time in particular.

For Heidegger it all begins with being-in-the-world. Consciousness is first of all consciousness within an environment, and Being and Time grapples with all the questions that flow from this.  The question that Sloterdijk wants to answer – and claims Heidegger has missed – is how we can make sense of this existential ‘being-in’ that underpins ‘being-in-the-world’? It can’t be some spatial relation between objects, as with the screw in the jar, because this object metaphysics is exactly what Heidegger wants to reach beneath. Sloterdijk writes [2]:

[…] Heidegger already discloses the crux of the existential analysis of spatiality early on in his investigation; what he calls being-in-the-world is nothing other than the world “inside” in a verbal-transitive sense: living in it and benefitting from it already have been explored in prior acts of attunement and reaching out. Because existence is always a completed act of habitation – the result of a primal leap into inhabitation – spatiality is an essential part of it.

So according to Sloterdijk, Heidegger’s project rests on an unexplored notion of interiority. The task he sets himself is to go back to the start of the ‘existential analytic’ and take it in the direction he thinks Heidegger should have in the first place.

It’s important to keep in mind that the aim here is to explore structures deep down in the guts of perception. Sharing with the psychoanalysts a penchant for digging up material in unexpected places, Sloterdijk scours history for spatial motifs, veering off into lengthy diversions on the mythology of eggs, Trinitarian theology, early Renaissance painting, the discredited science of animal magnetism, Freud’s analysis of melancholy, and the Homeric tale of Odysseus and the Sirens, among others.

At times Bubbles can seem like a huge exercise in metaphor mining, and it’s easy to forget that the end goal of all the poetic manoeuvring and peculiar asides is a genealogy of self-consciousness. We often talk about our ‘inner’ selves, in contrast with the ‘outer’ world. Under Sloterdijk’s view, our use of the words ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is not a metaphorical shorthand for some deeper concept of selfhood, but actually reveals the crux of what we mean when we use the word ‘I’. (What we call ‘the self’ is nothing more than the innermost interior.) The shift in perspective that allows Sloterdijk to treat selves as interiors gives him the basis of his whole positive project, linking selfhood with the consciousness of social interaction: being in love, having a circle of friends, occupying an in-group, participating in a nation. All of these – Cartesian subjects included – share the same experiential structure: they are interiors, protected from exterior contaminants by porous walls.

Provocatively re-imagining the whole of history as a kind of immunological project, Sloterdijk offers his diagnosis of modernity. The defining moment came when the Copernican revolution forced humankind to face the fact that it was surrounded by an empty space of inconceivable magnitude [3]:

Living in the Modern Age means paying the price for shellessness. The peeled human being acts out its epochal psychosis by replying to external cooling with warming technologies and climate policies – or with climate technologies and warming policies. But now that God’s shimmering bubbles, the celestial domes, have burst, who could have the power to create prosthetic husks around those who have been exposed?

The Cartesian self is a bungled attempt to immunise ourselves from the cold, cosmic exterior the scientific age has given us no choice but to acknowledge. What makes it bungled is that it has overreached – before we were located in the shared interior of God (however illusory that may have been), but now we have contracted the inside so tightly that we have each ended up in our own bubble, left to communicate at a distance through the membranes of our subjective spheres. By adopting a Cartesian paradigm, we immunised ourselves from each other.

To be sure, there are shades of the common anti-Enlightenment presumption that modern Westerners are all miserable and alienated, whether we admit it or not. But Sloterdijk’s project is a positive one, to his credit, and he has as many middle fingers for those who dwell in a haze of post-everything snark as he does for the Cartesianism he sees as bound in with the Enlightenment. Where his vision really comes to life as a productive philosophy is in the concept of ‘transference’, which is simply the idea that interiors are things which can be moved between. The implication is that selves (and other spheres) are not fixed but changeable, and can be moulded, shattered, and built afresh. The extent of what we consider or, more importantly, feel as the boundaries of our selves is flexible.

Building on this idea, Sloterdijk devotes numerous pages to exploring the phenomenology of strong relationships. What began as a push back against an obscure passage in Being and Time ends up becoming a rather un-Heideggerian study of intimacy. What distinguishes an intimate relationship from a normal social exchange is that it is a true merging of selves: a transference of each individual into a shared interior. The problem for Sloterdijk to solve is what it means for an interior to be cohabited, i.e. what it is that distinguishes an intimate sphere from a lonely sphere with a sole inhabitant (i.e. a Cartesian subject). To this end he deploys yet another homegrown concept: dyadic resonance, in which the two inhabitants of a sphere – the co-subjects – are thought of as being the stable points or ‘poles’ of a unity, something like the nodes of a standing wave. The metaphor of acoustics is one that Sloterdijk uses often, portraying spheres of intimacy as dynamic, oscillating unities, and implicitly characterising Cartesian subjects as static single-polarities.

As may be apparent, Sloterdijk doesn’t really argue for his ideas so much as sling them at you all at once. Bubbles is a rambling, preposterous book – disarmingly insightful at times and downright silly at others. Many philosophical links are left tenuous, and psychoanalytical handwaving is rife. But underneath all this is a simple message. Read charitably, Sloterdijk’s ‘spherological poetics’ is a way of provoking us to recognise that the human experience is primarily a shared experience. Sloterdijk wants us to worry less about the limits of subjectivity, and to channel our energies into opening up the intersubjective space. Bubbles may not amount to a convincing philosophical system, but what it does offer – at times with great panache – is a new language for talking about something which we already understand is deeply important to us, and in this the potential for seeing it in a new way.

Refs:

[1] Alexandre Kojève – Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (p36)

[2] Peter Sloterdijk – Bubbles (p334-335)

[3] Ibid. (p24)

A Criticism of Fodor on Natural Selection and Intentionality

Do frogs snap at flies or black dots? In the early part of a paper called Against Darwinism, Jerry Fodor argues that natural selection cannot account for intentional qualities of mind, i.e the way in which mental states can be about something. I find this argument intriguing in its substance but misguided in its conclusions.

It goes like this. Since natural selection is only concerned with behaviour, it can’t distinguish between different intentional states that cause identical behaviour (different in the sense that they have different content). So if, for example, having beliefs about A and having beliefs about B both result in the same fitness-enhancing behavior, it doesn’t make any sense to ask which of these beliefs is selected for. Frog-snapping is the example Fodor gives:

A mechanism that’s selected for catching flies is not ipso facto a mechanism that’s selected for catching ambient black nuisances; not even if, either in this part of the woods or in general, all and only the ambient black nuisances are flies. This logical quirk distinguishes `selection for’ from mere selection. If you select a mechanism that catches Xs, and if the Xs are Ys, then you thereby, select a mechanism that catches Ys.

Whether or not frogs really do possess fully-fledged intentional states is beside the point. The point Fodor wishes to make is that natural selection underdetermines intentional content, and hence that an account of intentionality cannot be framed solely in terms of natural selection. He thinks there really is something which needs accounting for here:

Now, intentions-to-act have intentional objects, which may serve to distinguish among them. A frog’s intention to catch a fly, for example, is an intention to catch a fly, and is ipso facto distinct from, say, the frog’s intention to sun itself on the leaf of a lily.

Fodor wants to say that there is a fact of the matter about what the frog is snapping at (where this is meant as a statement about the frog’s mental state, as opposed to its behaviour), and hence that there are features of the frog’s mind which cannot be explained by natural selection alone.

It’s hard to argue with the underdeterminism of intentional states by natural selection (aka the ‘disjunction problem’), and I see no reason why we would want to. Fodor is right to point out that natural selection is not itself intentional, and that it can’t ‘choose’ between different intentional states which show up no behavioural variation.

What I do find odd is Fodor’s insistence that there must always be a clear-cut answer to the question of what the intentional object of an intentional state is. In the frog’s intention-to-act, I see no reason why we should have to say it’s snapping at flies, or snapping at black dots specifically. It may make more sense to just say it is snapping at some abstract variable which makes no particular referential commitments – something like potential food here.

Following this line of thought does have some alarming consequences, and this is what makes the disjunction problem interesting. We’re used to talking in terms of clear intentional content – we have beliefs about Xs, fears about Ys, etc. – but the present considerations warn us that there may be situations in which this sort of talk is inherently ambiguous.

The lesson to take from Fodor’s argument is not that there is some mysterious aspect of mind whose presence natural selection cannot explain, but that we should be careful about interpreting this aspect naïvely. In this sense the disjunction problem is not a ‘problem’ for evolutionary accounts of mind at all – it is another piece in the infernal jigsaw of working out what this thing we’re trying to account for even is in the first place.