129. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox, London, Oxford, New York, 1967, addition to para. 2, p. 225.
130. Wegmarken, p. 19.
131. Nicomachean Ethics, 1175al2.
132. Tractatus, 401. It seems to me obvious that Wittgenstein's early language theory is solidly rooted in the old metaphysical axiom of truth as adequatio rei et intellectus; the trouble with this definition has always been that such an equation is possible only as intuition, namely, as an internal image that copies the sensorially given visible object. "The logical picture of a fact," which according to Wittgenstein is a "thought" (I am following Bertrand Russell's Introduction to the Tractatus in the bilingual edition, London, 1961, p. xii), is a contradiction in terms unless one takes "picture" as a metaphorical expression. There certainly exists a "relation which holds between language and the world," but whatever this relation may be, it is certainly not a "pictorial" one. If it were a pictorial relation, every proposition; unless it renders and repeats an accidental error in sensory perception (something looks like a tree but turns out to be a man on closer inspection), would be true; however, I can make a great many propositions about a "fact" that say something quite meaningful without being necessarily true: "the sun turns about the earth" or "in September 1939 Poland invaded Germany"—the one being an error, the other being a lie. There are, on the other hand, propositions that are inherently unacceptable, as for instance "the triangle laughs," cited in the text, which is neither a true nor a false statement, but a meaningless one. The only internal linguistic criterion for propositions is sense or nonsense.
In view of these rather obvious difficulties and in view of the fact that Wittgenstein himself later rejected his "picture theory of propositions," it is rather interesting to find out how it occurred to him in the first place. There are, I think, two versions of this. He had been "reading a magazine in which there was a schematic picture depicting the possible sequence of events in an automobile accident. The picture there served as a proposition; that is, as a description of a possible state of affairs. It had this function owing to a correspondence between the parts of the picture and things in reality. It now occurred to Wittgenstein that one might reverse the analogy and say that a proposition serves as a picture, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the structure of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality." (See G. H. von Wright's "Biographical Sketch" in Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, London, 1958, pp. 7–8.) What seems decisive here is that he did not take off from reality but from a schematic reconstruction of some event which itself had already been subjected to a process of thought, that is, he started from an illustration of a thought. In the Philosophical Investigations (663), there is an observation that reads like a refutation of this theory: "If I say 'I meant him,' very likely a picture comes to my mind ... but the picture is only like an illustration to a story. From it alone it would mostly be impossible to conclude anything at all; only when one knows the story does one know the significance of the picture."
The second version of the origin of the "picture theory of propositions" is to be found in the Tractatus itself (4.0311) and sounds even more plausible. Wittgenstein, who replaced his earlier theory with the theory of language-games, seems to have been influenced by another game, frequently played in his time in society, the game of tableaux vivants: the rules demanded that somebody had to guess what proposition was expressed by the tableau vivant enacted by a number of persons. "One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs"; it actually is supposed to spell out a certain proposition.
I mention these things to indicate Wittgenstein's style of thinking. They may help explain "the puzzling thing about his later philosophy ... that it is so piecemeal" and "has no master plan." (See the excellent presentation of David Pears, Ludwig Wittgenstein, New York, 1970, pp. 4 f.) The Tractatus also starts from a haphazard observation, from which, however, its author was able to develop a consistent theory that saved him from further haphazard observations and enabled him to write a continuous work. In spite of its frequent abruptness, the Tractatus is entirely consistent. The Philosophical Investigations shows how this ceaselessly active mind actually functioned, if it was not, almost accidentally, guided by a single assumption, for instance, by the thesis that "there must ... be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact." (Russell, op. cit., p. x, rightly calls this "the most fundamental thesis of Mr Wittgenstein's theory.") The most conspicuous property of the Philosophical Investigations is its breathlessness: it is as though somebody had actualized the stop-and-think inherent in thought to the point where it halted the whole thinking process and interrupted every thought-train by recoiling on itself. The English translation somehow mitigates this by rendering the ever-repeated "Denk dir" by a variety of words, such as "suppose," "imagine."
133. Philosophical Investigations, nos. 466–471.
Chapter III
1. Timaeus, 90c (see n. 35 below).
2. See the very instructive Theory and Practice, by Nicholas Lobkowicz, p. 7n.
3. Symposium, 204a.
4. Pindar, Nemea, 6; The Odes of Pindar, trans. Richmond Lattimore, Chicago, 1947, p. 111.
5. I,131.
6. Sophist, 219b.
7. Republic, 518c.
8. The Discourses, bk. II, Introduction.
9. Bruno Snell, "Pindar's Hymn to Zeus," op. cit., pp. 77–79.
10. Nemea, 4, Isthmia, 4, both Lattimore trans.
11. Isthmia, 4, Lattimore trans.
12. Thucydides, II, 41.
13. Protreptikos, Düring ed., B19 and B110. Cf. Eudemian Ethics, 1216all.
14. Protreptikos, Düring ed., B109.
15. De Finibus Bonorum et Malorum, II, 13.
16. Heraclitus, B29.
17. Symposium, 208c.
18. Ibid., 208d.
19. Anaximander seems to have been the first to equate the divine with the apeiron, the Non-Limited, whose nature it was to be forever—ageless, immortal, and imperishable.
20. Frag. 8.
21. Charles H. Kahn, in his fascinating study "The Greek Verb 'to be' and the Concept of Being," examines "the pre-philosophical use of this verb which ... serves to express the concept of Being in Greek" (p. 245). In Foundations of Language, vol. 2,1966, p. 255.
22. B30.
23. Snell, op. cit., p. 40.
24. Kahn, op. cit, p. 260.
25. Frag. 3.
26. Protreptikos, Düring ed., B110.
27. PhÜebus, 28c.
28. Symposium, 212a.
29. Nicomachean Ethics, 1178b3, 1178b22, 1177b33 (the last from Martin Ostwald trans., Indianapolis, New York, 1962).
30. Timaeus, 90d, a.
31.Quoted from Jeremy Bernstein's "The Secrets of the Old One—II," The New Yorker, March 17,1973.
32. Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato and Parmenides, New York, 1957, Introduction, p. 27.
33. Protreptikos, Düring ed., B65.
34. Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, p. 189.
35. Timaeus, 90c.
36. Philebus, 59b, c.
37. "Philosophie der Weltgeschichte," Hegel Studienausgabe, vol. I, p. 291.
38. De Rerum Natura, bk. II, first lines; On the Nature of the Universe, trans. Ronald Latham, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1951, p. 60.
39. I owe the quotations from Herder and Goethe to the interesting study of navigation, shipwreck, and spectator as "existential metaphors" in Hans Blumenberg, "Beobachtungen an Metaphern," in Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte, vol. XV, Heft 2, 1971, pp. 171 ff. For Voltaire, see his article "Curiosité" in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. For Herder, see also Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität, 1792,17th Letter; for Goethe, Goethes Gespräche, Artemis ed., Zürich, 1949, vol. 22, no. 725, p
. 454.
40. 1177b27–33.
41. Theaetetus, 155d.
42. Cratylus, 408b.
43. B21a.
44. B54.
45. B123.
46. B93.
47. B107.
48. B32.
49. B108.
50. The Friend, III, 192, as quoted by Herbert Read in Coleridge as Critic, London, 1949, p. 30.
51. Now together with two later explications, an Introduction and an Epilogue, in Wegmarken, pp. 19 and 210.
52. 1714, no. 7.
53. Critique of Pure Reason, B641.
54. Werke, 6. Ergänzungsband, ed. M. Schröter, München, 1954, p. 242.
55. Ibid., p. 7.
56. See the posthumously published System der gesammten Philosophie of 1804, in Sämtliche Werke, Abt. I, Stuttgart and Augsburg, 1860, vol. VI, p. 155.
57. Sämtliche Werke, Abt. I, vol. VII, p. 174.
58. Ibid., Abt. II, vol. III, p. 163. Cf. also Karl Jaspers, Schelling, München, 1955, pp. 124–130.
59. Paris, 1958, pp. 161–171.
60. See the Preisschrift "Uber die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral" (1764), 4th Consideration, no. 1, Werke, vol. I, pp. 768–769.
61. "Uber den Optimismus," Werke, vol. I, p. 594.
62. Ecce Homo, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," 1.
63. The Gay Science, bk. IV, no. 341.
64. 130d, e.
65. Tusculanae Disputationes, III, iii, 6.
66. Ibid., III, xiv, 30. Cf. Horace, Epistolae, I, vi, 1. Plutarch (in his De recta Ratione, 13) mentions the Stoic maxim and ascribes it—in Greek translation, mê thaumazein—to Pythagoras. Democritus is supposed to have praised athaumastia and athambia as Stoic wisdom, but seems to have had no more in mind than the "wise man's" imperturbability and fearlessness.
67. Heget's Philosophy of Right, p. 13.
68. L'Oeuvre de Pascal, Pléiade ed., Bruges, 1950, 294, p. 901.
69. Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie (1801), Meiner ed., 1962, pp. 12 ff.
70. Trans. J. Sibree, New York, 1956, p. 318.
71. Ibid., p.26.
72. This transformation is especially telling when the borrowing from Greek philosophy is most obvious, as when Cicero says man is destined ad mundum contemplandum and then immediately adds: et imitandum (De Natura Deorum, II, xiv, 37), which he understands in a strictly moral-political sense, and not scientifically as, centuries later, Francis Bacon would have understood it: "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed; and that which in contemplation is as the cause, in operation is as the rule..." (Novum Organon, Oxford ed., 1889, p. 192).
73. De Rerum Natura, bk. II, 1174; On the Nature of the Universe, Latham trans., p. 95.
74. Discourses, bk. I, chap. 17.
75. Ibid., bk. I, chap. 15.
76. The Manual, 49; The Stoic and Epicurean Philosophers, ed. Whitney J. Oates, New York, 1940, p. 482.
77. Discourses, bk. I, chap. 1.
78. The Manual, 8, Oates ed., p. 470; Fragments, 8, Oates ed., p. 460.
79. Op. cit., V, 7 ff. Author's translation.
80. De Republica, I, 7.
81. Ibid., III, 23.
82. Ibid., V, 1.
83. Modeled, of course, on the myth of Er that concludes Plato's Republic. For the important differences, see the analysis of Richard Harder, the late eminent German philologist, "Uber Ciceros Somnium Scipionis," in Kleine Schriften, München, 1960, pp. 354–395.
84. "Discourses on Davila," The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles Francis Adams, Boston, 1850–1856, vol. VI, p. 242.
85. Oedipus at Colonnus.
86. Politics, 1267a 12.
87. Nicomachean Ethics, 1178a29–30.
88. Frag. 146.
89. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Modem Library, New York, n.d., vol. II, p. 471.
90. I, 30; my translation of hōs philosopheōn gēn pollēn theōriēs heineken epelēlythas.
91. I, 32.
92. The thought content of that saying was fully explicated only in Heidegger's death-analyses in Being and Time, which take their methodological cue from the fact that human life—as distinguished from "things," which start their worldly existence when they are complete and finished—is complete only when it is no more. Hence, only by anticipating its own death can it "appear" as a whole and be subjected to analysis.
93. E. Diehl, ed., Anthologia Lyrica Graeca, Leipzig, 1936, frag. 16.
94. Ibid., frag. 13,11. 63–70.
95. Ibid., frag. 14.
96. Charmides, 175b.
97. Hegel's Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, Lasson ed., Leipzig, 1923, 23: "Das Denken ... sich als abstraktes Ich als von aller Partikularität sonstiger Eigenschaf-ten, Zustände, usf. befreites verhält und nur das Allgemeine tut, in welchem es mit allen Individuen identisch ist."
98. It is surprising, in examining the literature, often very learned, to see how very little all this erudition has been able to contribute to an understanding of the man. The only exception I have been able to unearth is a kind of inspired profile by the classicist and philosopher Gregory Vlastos, "The Paradox of Socrates." See the Introduction to his carefully selected The Philosophy of Socrates: A Collection of Critical Essays, Anchor Books, New York, 1971.
99. 173d.
100. On the Socratic problem, see the short, reasonable account given by Laszlo Versényi as an Appendix to his Socratic Humanism, New Haven, London, 1963.
101. Dante and Philosophy, trans. David Moore, Harper Torchbooks, New York, Evanston, London, 1963, p. 267.
102. Ibid., p. 273.
103. Thus in Theaetetus and Charmides.
104. Ueno, 80e.
105. The frequent notion that Socrates tries to lead his interlocutor with his questions to certain results of which he is convinced in advance—like a clever professor with his students—seems to me entirely mistaken even if it is as ingeniously qualified as in Vlastos' essay mentioned above, in which he suggests (p. 13) that Socrates wanted the other "to find ... out for himself," as in the Meno, which however is not aporetic. The most one could say is that Socrates wanted his partners in the dialogues to be as perplexed as he was. He was sincere when he said that he taught nothing. Thus he told Critias in the Charmides: "Critias, you act as though I professed to know the answers to the questions I ask you and could give them to you if I wished. It is not so. I inquire with you ... because I don't myself have knowledge" (165b; cf. 166c–d).
106. Diehl, frag. 16.
107. Meno, 80c. Cf. the above-mentioned passage, n. 105.
108. Memorabilia, IV, vi, 15 and IV, iv, 9.
109. Sophist, 226–231.
110. Apology, 23b.
111. Ibid., 30a.
112. Xenophon, Memorabilia, IV, iii, 14.
113. Antigone, 353.
114. The German text, from Was Heisst Denken?, Tübingen, 1954, p. 52, reads as follows: "Sokrates hat zeit seines Lebens, bis in seinen Tod hinein, nichts anderes getan, als sich in den Zugwind dieses Zuges zu stellen und darin sich zu halten. Darum ist er der reinste Denker des Abendlandes. Deshalb hat er nichts geschrieben. Denn wer aus dem Denken zu schreiben beginnt, muss unweigerlich den Menschen gleichen, die vor allzu starkem Zugwind in den Windschatten flüchten. Es bleibt das Geheimnis einer noch verborgenen Geschichte, dass alle Denker des Abendlandes nach Sokrates, unbeschadet ihrer Grösse, solche Flüchtlinge sein mussten. Das Denken ging in die Literatur ein."
115. G. Humphrey, Thinking: An Introduction to Its Experimental Psychology, London and New York, 1951, p. 312.
116. Thucydides, II, 40.
117. Lysis, 204b–c.
118. Frags. 145,190.
119. Gorgias, 474b, 483a, b.
120. Ibid., 482c.
121. Ibid., 482c, 484c, d.
122. Aristode frequently insisted that thinking "produces" happiness, but if so, not in the way that medicine produces health but in the way that health makes a man healthy. Nicoma
chean Ethics, 1144a.
123. Diels and Kranz, B45.
124. 254d.
125. Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, New York, Evanston, London, 1969, pp. 24–25.
126. 255d.
127. Sophist, 255e; Cornford, Plato's Theory of Knowledge, p. 282.
128. Heidegger, Sophist lecture transcript, p. 382.
129. Theaetetus, 189e; Sophist, 263e.
130. Sophist, 253b.
131. Protagoras, 339c.
132. Ibid., 339b, 340b.
133. Posterior Analytics, 76b22–25.
134. 1005b23–1008a2.
135. No. 36, Werke, vol. VI, p. 500.
136. No. 56, ibid., p. 549.
137. "Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten," Werke, vol. 4, pp. 51–55.
138. 304d.
139. Nicomachean Ethics, 1166a30.
140. Ibid., 1166b5–25.
141. Ethics, IV, 52; III, 25.
142. Philosophy (1932), trans. E. B. Ashton, Chicago, London, 1970, vol. 2, pp. 178–179.
Chapter IV
1. Symposium, 174–175.
2. Merleau-Ponty, Signs, "The Philosopher and His Shadow," p. 174.
3. Quoted from Sebastian de Grazia, "About Chuang Tzu," Dalhousie Review, Summer 1974.
4. Hegel, Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, 465n
5. Ross, Aristotle, p. 14.
6. Protreptikos, Düring ed., B56.
7. Physics, VI, viii, 189a5.
8. Nicomachean Ethics, 1141b24–1142a30. Cf. 1147al–10.
9. Critique of Pure Reason, B49, B50.
10. Gesammelte Schriften, New York, 1946, vol. V, p. 287. English translation by Willa and Edwin Muir, The Great Wall of China, New York, 1946, p. 276–277.
11. Pt. III, "On the Vision and the Riddle," sect. 2.
12. Vol. I, pp. 311 f.
13. Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense I, dist. 40, q. 1, n. 3. Quoted from Walter Hoeres, Der Wille als reine Vollkommenheit nach Duns Scotus, München, 1962, p. 111, n. 72.
14. Critique of Pure Reason, B294 f.
15. "As I Walked Out One Evening," Collected Poems, p. 115.
16. W. H. Auden, The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays, Vintage Books, New York, 1968.
17. Time and Free Will (1910), trans. F. L. Pogson, Harper Torchbooks, New York, Evanston, 1960, pp. 158,167,240.
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