We’ve discussed Wittgenstein a fair amount over the years (I quoted him as early as 2002), but I couldn’t resist posting A.W. Moore’s LRB review (1 August 2024; archived) of three new English translations of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus — it’s too full of good things to resist. He starts off with half a dozen paragraphs providing a basic summary of what the book deals with:
Part of the aim of the book is to indicate what it is about the world that makes it possible for us to represent it, in thought or in language. Wittgenstein is led to a vision of crystalline purity. The world is the totality of facts. Facts are determined by states of affairs. States of affairs, each of which is independent of every other, are configurations of objects. These objects would have existed however the facts had been. If the facts had been different, it would have been because the objects had been configured differently, not because there had been different objects. Representation itself consists of facts. Thus a thought or a statement is a fact, determined by a configuration of ‘signs’. In the most elementary case the signs stand for objects, and the fact that they are configured in the way they are represents that the corresponding objects are configured in the same way. The thought or statement in question thereby serves as a ‘picture’ of the corresponding fact. It is true if the objects are configured in that way, and it is false if they are not. In a less elementary case, for example in the case of a conjunction of two statements, truth or falsity is determined by the truth or falsity of its constituents: a conjunction of two statements is true if both its constituents are true, false otherwise.
He continues:
The first English translation appeared in 1922, alongside the original German and again with Russell’s introduction, slightly revised. This was for a series edited by C.K. Ogden, the International Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. The translation appeared under Ogden’s name, though it was mainly undertaken by Frank Ramsey, then still just a precocious mathematics undergraduate. It also included some modifications by Wittgenstein himself. A revised edition, with further modifications by him, appeared in 1933.
Wittgenstein’s changes were prompted by what struck him as excessive faithfulness to the original German. They were designed to preserve, as he put it in a letter to Ogden, ‘the sense (not the words)’. We do well to remind ourselves, however, that Wittgenstein was not a native English speaker. Even with his modifications, the translation is often clunky. Its chief drawback, as Wittgenstein’s remark to Ogden intimates, and as Michael Morris has marvellously put it, is that it is ‘dog-literal’. Moreover, it is insensitive to some philosophically critical features of the German. A well-known example is its failure to heed the distinction that Wittgenstein draws between what is unsinnig (‘nonsensical’) and what is sin[n]los (‘senseless’) – where an empty tautology such as ‘What will be will be’ counts as the latter but not as the former. Brian McGuinness, in his 1988 biography of Wittgenstein, wrote that a ‘whole generation of English-speaking philosophers came to know the [Tractatus] through a translation which seems to have been … shackled by the presence of the German on the opposite page. It reads as if made from a dead language.’
It was McGuinness who, in collaboration with David Pears, produced the second English translation, in 1961. But the correspondence with Ogden, in which Wittgenstein commented on the first draft of the first translation, had not yet come to light (it was published only in 1973), so there was little appreciation at the time of Wittgenstein’s own input, however questionable, into Ogden and Ramsey’s text. After the correspondence emerged, Pears and McGuinness published a revised version of their own translation. It is much more fluent than Ogden/Ramsey, though occasionally the fluency is achieved by adding ideas – not just words – to which nothing corresponds in the original German. And there are places where the original German has a sonorous, almost biblical quality which the fluency fails to capture.
We now have three new English translations: by Michael Beaney for Oxford, Alexander Booth for Penguin and Damion Searls for Norton. (A fourth, by David Stern, Katia Saporiti and Joachim Schulte for Cambridge, is forthcoming.) The book came out of copyright in 2021 (seventy years after Wittgenstein’s death), which is the reason new translation is possible. But it’s another matter whether such a thing is desirable. Do the infelicities of the two older translations perhaps show that there is no way of achieving an appropriate level of fluency that does not involve taking at least as much liberty with the content as Pears and McGuinness do, or of maintaining an appropriate level of respect for the content that does not involve sacrificing at least as much fluency as Ogden and Ramsey do? […]
Unsurprisingly, in view of its concern with language, the Tractatus itself includes some remarks on translation. Might these be relevant here? Not if what we are looking for is a guide to good translation. For one thing, Wittgenstein’s remarks relate solely to preservation of meaning. A good translation typically involves more than that: a rhyming couplet, for instance, may need to be rendered by a rhyming couplet. And in any case, Wittgenstein’s concerns are purely theoretical. If one took them as guidelines, one might get the impression that the art of translation involves nothing more than devising a way of mapping the words of one language onto the words of another, whereafter the analysis of any given text in the source language, followed by application of the mapping, followed by construction of a corresponding text in the target language, do their algorithmic work. This is not a total travesty of his view. But whatever accuracy it harbours concerns operations that apply so far below the surface features of language as to be of no relevance whatsoever to anyone engaged in actual translation. Here we should note the fundamental distinction on which Wittgenstein insists between the outward form of clothing and the form of the clothed body.
Translators of the Tractatus must therefore rely on whatever general principles of good translation they already have at their disposal. They must pursue all the familiar desiderata: preservation of meaning, consistency, sensitivity to the various non-semantic associations of words and so on. Often they will be forced to choose between two or more imperfect renderings of a given piece of text – though, as Beaney’s edition illustrates, the addition of supplementary notes explaining the translator’s choices can go a long way towards mitigating the imperfections.
Where a philosophical work such as the Tractatus is concerned, there is a further, crucial desideratum: fidelity to the author’s philosophical intentions. This has a critical bearing on my comparative assessment of these new translations, but before I turn to it, I want to mention three distinctive challenges that any translator of the Tractatus faces.
First, this book is not just a work of philosophy, it is a work of art. (In a notebook from the early 1930s Wittgenstein wrote: ‘Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry.’) All three translators are sensitive to this. […] But, by the same token, the Tractatus is not just a work of art, it is a work of philosophy. There is a risk that translators will try so hard to preserve its aesthetic merits that they fail to remain faithful to Wittgenstein’s philosophical intentions. I am not so confident that all three translators are sensitive to this. Certainly Zwicky, in her introduction, and Marjorie Perloff, in her foreword to Searls’s translation, seem to betray their own insensitivity to it when they write, respectively, ‘compositions that we intuitively recognise as lyric … are enactive: how they communicate is what they mean,’ and ‘the ideal translator for the Tractatus is perhaps not a professional philosopher at all, but what we call a creative writer. From a literary perspective, what is said is never as important as how it is said in the translating language.’ Whatever truth there may be in these claims, it is of considerably less significance, as far as translating the Tractatus is concerned, than the error in them.
Second, thanks to the concern that the Tractatus has with language, it is a contribution to its own subject matter. Its translators must therefore ensure that their English version does not stand in overt tension with whatever messages about language Wittgenstein is attempting to convey. One could be forgiven for thinking that this challenge, though important, is not especially difficult to meet – were it not for the fact that it involves facing the third and most blatant of the challenges, which threatens to wreck the entire enterprise.
Here we return to the notorious fact that one of the messages about language Wittgenstein is attempting to convey is that material such as we find in the Tractatus is nonsensical. The third challenge is how to translate a work which, by its own lights and in a quite literal sense, leaves the translator with nothing to translate. (Booth, in his acknowledgments, says that his editor, Donald Futers, has saved him from various errors, among which he lists ‘just plain nonsense’. He then adds the standard caveat that any remaining errors ‘sadly, are entirely my own’. Not if he has done his job properly! Such errors are then largely Wittgenstein’s.) Any translator trying to meet the second challenge must render the original German material with what can ultimately be recognised as English nonsense – if indeed ‘German’ and ‘English’ are appropriate epithets here.
This casting of Wittgenstein’s own work as nonsensical on his part presents all manner of exegetical puzzles, quite apart from its challenge to the translator. What are we to make of a work whose author does that? Not that a text should be dismissed merely on the ground that it is nonsensical. Texts are produced for all sorts of purposes, some of which might well be served by nonsense – entertainment, for example, or parody. Even so, how can it not be an indictment of this text to say that it is nonsensical? Has Wittgenstein not written what he has written in an attempt to communicate something? And how can the text be nonsensical by – as I put it earlier – ‘its own lights’? If it is nonsensical, then surely it has no lights by which anything can be anything.
There is a yet more fundamental issue: what Wittgenstein actually characterises as nonsensical are what he calls ‘my propositions’, but what exactly is the scope of ‘my propositions’? All of them? All but that one? All but that one and a few other similar meta-propositions about what is at stake in the rest of the book? Just whichever are of a metaphysical cast (and not, for example, the references to what other philosophers have said, or the description at 5.5423 of the two ways of seeing the Necker cube)? Does Wittgenstein perhaps mean that there is no way of making sense of the book as a whole, though there may be of any sufficiently small part of it, rather like an Escher drawing? In any case, do we have to accept what Wittgenstein says in that penultimate proposition? Maybe that is the problem. Here we confront one of the great ironies of the Tractatus. Many books include passages which, despite their authors’ best efforts, simply do not make sense. Wittgenstein may be involved in a mirror image of this: that is, the Tractatus may include many passages which, despite its author’s best efforts, do make sense! The effect that the passages in question have on the reader, and that Wittgenstein seems to intend them to have on the reader, may make them, whether he likes it or not, successful acts of communication. Or are we to draw yet another distinction here, between that which succeeds as an act of communication and that which makes sense?
One thing seems clear. To whatever extent it is correct to say that what we are dealing with in the Tractatus is nonsense, it is very carefully crafted nonsense that does whatever philosophical work it does by appearing, initially at least, to make sense. And it is that appearance of sense that is critical for the translator. True, it is entirely possible to translate even blatant nonsense. There are ‘French’ and ‘German’ versions of Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, for example (beginning, respectively, ‘Il brilgue: les tôves lubricilleux …’ and ‘Es brillig war. Die schlichte Toven …’). But a translation of the Tractatus is not like that. However illusory any appearance of sense in the book may be, it is that which the translator must try, first and foremost, to capture. […]
There is an associated issue concerning what Wittgenstein takes himself to be doing with his nonsense. On the more traditional reading, he believes that some things are inexpressible and he takes himself to be conveying some of these things, by putting meaningful words together in suitably evocative non-meaningful ways. On the new reading, Wittgenstein does not believe that anything is inexpressible; what he believes is that there are temptations to see sense where it is lacking and he is using nonsense in a therapeutic role, to expose these temptations, so that the reader will eventually be able to overcome them and recognise the nonsense for what it is, namely gibberish that conveys nothing at all.
There is also an attractive hybrid reading. On the hybrid reading, Wittgenstein does not believe that any truths are inexpressible – the only truths there are being truths about how objects are configured, which are ipso facto susceptible of expression. Nor therefore does Wittgenstein believe that he is conveying any inexpressible truths. But he does take himself to be conveying inexpressible practical insights. These include insights into how to recognise the nonsense that he is using to convey these very insights for the sheer nonsense that it is. But they include more besides. (They had better. Otherwise the nonsense would be like the plinth whose sole purpose is to support a sign reading ‘Mind the plinth.’) Notably, they include insights into how to face the world ethically.
But these issues, critical though they are to an understanding of the Tractatus, are really orthogonal to any questions about how it should be translated. Not so its appearance of sense; nor, therefore, the philosophical issues that inform that appearance of sense. I have laboured this point because a translator should ideally have some basic grasp of these issues, and it is this, above all, that accounts for the comparative merits of these three translations. Only Beaney is a professional philosopher – and it shows. Booth, to his great credit, manages an extremely elegant and successful translation despite his lack of expertise. Nevertheless, he is occasionally led astray in ways Beaney never would be. Searls’s lack of expertise often proves disastrous. […]
Each of the actual translations also has advantages over the other two. Beaney’s may be the best, but Booth’s is the most stylish, and Searls’s has a fluency which sometimes brings the ideas to life in a way that neither of the other two, nor either of the two older translations, does. Of the five different renderings of the book’s opening proposition, only Booth’s – ‘The world is all that happens to be the case’ – uses the construction ‘happens to be’, which captures the connotations of contingency in ‘der Fall’. (Ironically, it is Searls, in his introduction, who does most to highlight these connotations, before nevertheless rejecting any translation of the kind that Booth provides in favour of his own terrible alternative: ‘The world is everything there is.’) Of the five different ways of dealing with the last word of the book, ‘schweigen’, it is Searls’s ‘keep silent’ – in contrast, for example, to Beaney’s ‘be silent’ – that does greatest justice to the degree of effort that the word suggests. […]
There’s a great deal more, and I recommend clicking through if you’re interested in the details of translation; here’s one piquant tidbit:
In 5.62 Wittgenstein emphasises the word ‘der’ in the expression ‘die Grenzen d e r Sprache’. This is an attempt to accentuate the uniqueness of the language whose limits are at issue. Booth, bizarrely, emphasises the preposition in his translation: ‘the limits of language’.
The discussion of nonsense reminded me irresistibly of David Eddyshaw’s 2019 comment:
If your job is, in point of fact, to translate nonsense, you should be paid extra. And also carefully reflect on your life choices.
The stuff about the Tractatus being a conundrum to translate because it’s “nonsense” is needlessly obscurantist. Not to say, just plain silly.
St Ludwig explains perfectly clearly what he means by calling the work “unsinnig”:
I’d go so far as to say that this is one of the least Delphic passages in the entire work.
(W tends to give me – and I suspect, others – problems in understanding, not so much because you can’t understand what he’s saying, but because you can’t see why he’s actually saying it. With Philosophical Investigations, much more so: it’s rather like coming into a movie halfway through and having to guess at how we ever got here in the first place. I suppose the positive spin on this is that he generously assumes that you, the reader, are just as familiar with the problems he is addressing as he is himself, so that it would be discourteous of him to spell them out.)
Er muss diese Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.
So being koans, these sentences are supposed to be just as usefully nonsensical as koans. No more, no less. No Mooring, no Lessing. Zen und Zeit.
I have a friend who in first year of an arts degree wrote a tractate of his own, modelled on Wittgenstein’s with numbering throughout. His lecturer gently advised him that these things really need to be composed in the trenches if they are to gain traction. Decades later both recount the anecdote with glee. The academic is now acknowledged as one of Australia’s great and influential philosophers (we have quite a few of those), and the student as one of our pre-eminent astrologers (them too).
I read somewhere of a member of the Vienna Circle suggesting to Wittgenstein that he (W) had a “mystical streak”; to which he replied, “Like a yellow streak?”
Yellow streak? No, that would be Feigl.
I thought a Vienna circle was a high-class bagel with icing till I discovered Wittgenstein.
The stuff about the Tractatus being a conundrum to translate because it’s “nonsense” is needlessly obscurantist.
Most non-German speakers know the Tractatus via writings from his contemporaries at Cambridge — Anscombe, and Russell’s Introduction — which appears to be about some other Tractatus entirely.
Russell failed to see it as a continuation of a European line of thought; but rather mistook it as somehow a work of Logical Positivism.
TBH I can’t see the point of putting further effort into the work. W himself more or less disavowed it later. The Investigations and later is where it’s at (or not, YMMV).
I think the Tractatus is quite handy as a sort of reductio ad absurdum.
Also, it is very pretty. (I have a soft spot for reductionist Theories of Everything. It’s part of what I like about Lucretius. You’re perfectly safe with that kind of thing unless you start sliding from “if only it were true” to “it’s so beautiful it just must be true.”)
reductionist Theories of Everything
Not Universal Grammar, though, obviously. I like my reductionist Theories of Everything to have some content.
Not Universal Grammar, though, obviously.
I’m intrigued by that first comma. Superfluous? The rational other minimalist program would want just one. Universal Punctuation.
As for Lucretius, yes. Bursting with actual-world content. The polar opposite of minimalism. Pity it’s founded on a physics that is demonstrably wrong, even by means available in antiquity.
reductionist Theories of Everything
Everything can’t be reduced, not even in theory. Because each reduction is still part of everything.
Theories of Some Things are what people usually produce. Such theories are reductionist by nature and definition.
Note that a Theory of Everything would have to give an account of itself. That’s the hard part. Most people are not even aware of this difficulty.
Most people are not even aware of this difficulty.
‘Mind the plinth.’
‘Do not throw stones at this notice’. [Beachcomber/Milligan]
Since DE has mentioned UG, I would just like to share what Google Gemini gave me regarding Chomsky’s theories (I’ve tried, with only some success, to minimise repetitions):
[Merge] proposes a simple operation of combining building blocks (words or phrases) to create more complex structures. The key aspect is that this combining process can happen repeatedly (recursion), allowing for the generation of an infinite number of sentences from a finite set of words.
While the specific mechanisms of Merge are debated, the concept offers a foundational explanation for how human language builds complex expressions. …..
This recursive property is what Chomsky argues sets human language apart from other communication systems.
Imagine [Merge] like building blocks snapping together. Here’s how it works:
Basic Merge: Merge takes two syntactic objects, like a noun and a verb, and combines them into a phrase (e.g., “the cat” or “sleeps”).
Recursion: Merge is recursive, meaning it can be applied repeatedly. You can merge a noun phrase (“the cat”) with a verb phrase (“sleeps”) to form a sentence (“The cat sleeps”). Then, you can merge another phrase (“quickly”) with the sentence to create a more complex one (“The cat sleeps quickly”).
This recursive application of Merge allows you to build increasingly complex syntactic structures, explaining a vast range of sentence formations.
…. the neurolinguistic evidence for Merge is still being explored. While some brain areas show activation patterns consistent with Merge, it’s not definitive proof.
Explanatory Power: Merge offers a concise and elegant principle for explaining a wide range of syntactic phenomena across languages. It can handle basic sentence structures, complex embeddings, and various coordination patterns. This explanatory scope makes Merge an attractive hypothesis.
Cross-Linguistic Applicability: Merge appears to be applicable across different languages, despite their variations. This suggests a core principle underlying syntactic computation in human language, regardless of specific word order or morphology.
While there are alternative explanations for some aspects of Merge, its explanatory power and cross-linguistic applicability remain significant areas of support.
(Following more challenges and prompting on my part)….here are some specifics regarding the empirical support for Chomsky’s Merge hypothesis:
Neurolinguistic Evidence: Studies using brain imaging techniques have shown that certain areas of the brain are activated during tasks involving syntactic processing. These areas may be involved in implementing Merge-like operations.
Explanation of Long-Distance Dependencies: Merge can elegantly explain how languages handle long-distance dependencies, where words influence each other even though they are not next to each other in a sentence. An example is the relationship between a wh-question word (like “who”) and its answer in a sentence like “Who did Mary see?”
Generative Capacity: Merge provides a mechanism for generating the vast number of sentences possible in human language. By iteratively merging words and phrases, Merge can create an infinite number of well-formed sentences.
AI is obviously not capable of making judgements on the credibility of Chomsky’s blathering. All it can do is pour forth what it’s picked up.
W tends to give me – and I suspect, others – problems in understanding, not so much because you can’t understand what he’s saying, but because you can’t see why he’s actually saying it.
Something that might also be said about some (other) modern poets. I don’t want to mention John Ashbery’s name.
Poetry is not philosophy, and Ashbery can be magnificent.
I am struck by the claim that “Of the five different renderings of the book’s opening proposition, only Booth’s – ‘The world is all that happens to be the case’ – uses the construction ‘happens to be’, which captures the connotations of contingency in ‘der Fall’.” Is it really the case that “Fall” in German connotes more contingency than the relevant sense of “case” does in English? Surely all Anglophones are familiar with its usage in explicitly conditional constructions like “in case of X, do Y.” It’s not that it’s not perfectly possible for the semantic scope or connotative “vibes” of the German word to be different, it’s that I wonder whether there’s actually affirmative evidence for that or it’s just a random bit of pop-Whorfian speculation. English “is,” like German “ist,” can cover both “contingently happens to be” situations and “could not conceivably be otherwise” situations. I don’t know that there’s any difference between the languages in which reading is more prominent/default.
I wondered about that too and hope one of our resident Germanophones will comment about it.
Is it really the case that “Fall” in German connotes more contingency than the relevant sense of “case” does in English ?
Nope, das ist nicht der Fall. I probably know more about this than any person in history, believe me.
I wonder about the conversations of Wittgenstein and Chuang Tzu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhuangzi_(book)
on the tea porch at infinity, and recall the multilingual conversations of Al Swearengen and Mr Wu on
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadwood_(TV_series)
[Season 1 episode 10]
I wonder about the conversations of Wittgenstein and Chuang Tzu
I would imagine that they sit together in amicable silence. (Which is as multilingual as one might wish.)
indeed
I would imagine that they sit together in amicable silence
Near Alice Roosevelt Longworth?
Let me be one of the big, strong men who come up to Stu with tears in their eyes and tell him “Sir, you are the rightest in the history of ever, I didn’t know anyone could be so right” and so on.
The way to say “the world is all that happens to be the case” is die Welt ist alles, was zufällig der Fall ist – and, as in English, would exclude anything that is necessarily the case from being part of “the world”.
I’ve remarked on the poetry before.
dafuq? …Ah, it turns out there are three translations. Here’s the very different one I’ve seen before. Note the unremarkable German grammar in particular.
Not even. This is s o u t h e r n German, remember? In the dialects, der/die/das has split in two: on the one hand not just unstressed but reduced forms – the article –, and on the other hand (however slightly) stressed, unreduced forms – the demonstrative pronoun. The only one. Not only have we lost jener, we’ve lost dieser. This creeps into the standard every so often; der/die/das then becomes demonstrative if stressed enough. The stress is spelled out here. It’s about “the limits of that language” – the one whose limits are at issue, however unremarkable it may be in comparison.
Near Alice Roosevelt Longworth?
“If you can’t say something good about someone, sit right here by me.”
@ Alice Roosevelt L, cf the negotiations of Messrs Swearengen & Wu cited above ?
Adding to DM: Northern German has dieser, but I don’t think I have ever heard jener from anyone speaking colloquially; to me it’s a purely literary pronoun. So we also use stressed der as a demonstrative pronoun.
the word ‘der’ in the expression ‘die Grenzen d e r Sprache’.
The stress is spelled out here.
Rather, spaced out (gesperrt).
This is s o u t h e r n German, remember? … Not only have we lost jener, we’ve lost dieser. This creeps into the standard every so often; der/die/das then becomes demonstrative if stressed enough.
In Cologne we’re far from Bavaria. Such locutions with jener are not part of everyday speech, not even among educated people. They definitely are used in works by sociologists, philosophers etc – the Suhrkamp Menge, in der ich bade.
der is given extra stress in speech, equivalent in effect to the printed Sperrung.
Poetry is not philosophy, and Ashbery can be magnificent.
I brought poetry in because of the paragraph you quoted beginning “First, this book is not just a work of philosophy, it is a work of art.
Leaving personal taste aside, I feel that I’ve seen a note on an Ashbery poem, maybe “Mixed Feelings” (where’s my copy of The Harper Anthology?) that despite Ashbery’s reputation for difficulty it’s really not hard to follow. That led me to suspect that many readers’ difficulty with him is the same as David Eddyshaw’s difficulty with Wittgenstein. I could summarize it as “Why are you saying this? Why do you think people would be interested?” As I just learned and I’m sure you know, he has answered that question; he wants to provide pleasant surprises, but that may not help readers who don’t find the surprises pleasant.
Aha. John Frederick Nims’s “Additional Note” on “The Instruction Manual” in The Harper Anthology of Poetry begins “John Ashbery is celebrated for being a ‘difficult’ poet, but there is no difficulty in this early poem.” I think he overlooked the difficulty.
Ludwig Wittgenstein – the John Ashbery of philosophy.
I like this. Must track down my copy of Flow Chart …
(I think that these two poets display considerable differences of tone, however. I can’t really see Ashbery as a scary mediaeval Irish saint, unlike W.)
Ashbery, like Mark Rothko and Cecil Taylor, takes getting used to, but they all reward the effort.
David M:
The way to say “the world is all that happens to be the case” is die Welt ist alles, was zufällig der Fall ist – and, as in English, would exclude anything that is necessarily the case from being part of “the world”.
Hmm. I’m not an expert on Wittgenstein, and my German is frail. Still … that may indeed be W’s intended meaning, which he attempted to express with less redundancy and with greater respect for die Urbedeutungen (taking Fall as a calque of casus, with its accidentia fully preserved). Let’s see:
A little later W’s world is revealed as an assemblage of contingencies, excluding anything necessary:
I’m supposing we are to understand 1.21 like this:
If this reading is correct (essentially treating 1.21 as capturing the core of logical atomism), then all that is necessary is excluded as a feature of the world – because for nothing necessary is it true that it could be the case or not be the case. The assertion of anything necessary is either constrained to be true or constrained to be false. To develop this thought further would require an excursus on the various flavours of modality (“logical”, “metaphysical”, “epistemic”, and all the others that are typically ill-characterised – and frequently muddled in off-hand discourse).
I have heard the whole W corpus described as a kind of Rorschach blot: a happy hypothesising ground for all who are in search of ultimate meaning, impressively impenetrable obscurity, or a quick promotion – but incapable of originating anything so trenchantly apophthegmatic on their own.
David Eddyshaw: Heck, Ashbery by himself displays considerable differences in tone.
languagehat: In the ’80s I read and reread Ashbery, mostly Houseboat Days, spending a fair amount of time for someone who was supposed to be doing physics. I’ve given a shot at other poems again now and then, including the one you linked to above. I don’t think I’m going to find the rewards that you and other people find in his work.
Rothko takes getting used to? I fell in love with Rothko at first sight!
…so, Hans and Stu, are you saying that the dieser – jener distinction has been replaced by dieser – der? Up South we’ve lost the distinction (I had to learn the English this – that distinction from scratch), so it didn’t occur to me the distinction had survived farther north despite the loss of jener (which I knew about).
Perhaps the goal was to provide a complete system of philosophy, so he felt obliged to spell everything out?
Phew.
Yes, your reading is correct except perhaps for the first bracket.
I found the text here. Some of the sentences are clearly supposed to be read as connected text (1.12 is a subordinate clause that begins with “Because”, evidently attached to the main clause that is 1.11, even though that’s not how the numbering system is supposed to work according to footnote 1!).
1.21 is a comment on 1.2, Die Welt zerfällt in Tatsachen. – “The world falls apart into facts”, “is split into facts”, “consists of facts”. However, eines at the beginning of 1.21 does not explicitly mean “one fact”, because it is neuter, while Sache and therefore Tatsache is feminine, requiring eine. Funnily enough, Ding is neuter. The scary Irish saint is being vague here, and I have to suppose that’s deliberate.
Then there is 2.012: In der Logik ist nichts zufällig: Wenn das Ding im Sachverhalt vorkommen k a n n , so muss die Möglichkeit des Sachverhaltes im Ding bereits präjudiziert sein. “In logic nothing is random or coincidental: If the thing can occur in how-two-or-more-things-are-in-relation-to-each-other [2.01], then the possibility of how-these-two-or-more-things-are-in-relation-to-each-other has to be predetermined in the thing.” So… did he deny the existence of random?
2.0121 hints at that: Es erschiene gleichsam als Zufall, wenn […] “It would seem like random or coincidence if […]”; (Etwas Logisches kann nicht nur-möglich sein. Die Logik handelt von jeder Möglichkeit und alle Möglichkeiten sind ihre Tatsachen.) “(Something logical cannot be merely possible. Logic is about every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.)”
And then there’s 2.04: Die Gesamtheit der bestehenden Sachverhalte ist die Welt. “The totality of the extant relations of things to each other is the world.” Whether they’re random is irrelevant.
Putting all of 1 (1.0 through 1.21) together, it seems that Tatsache is defined as was der Fall ist, which is indeed how the word is commonly used. The world is thus the totality of facts (1.1).
Another gender mismatch in 1.11, which seems to mean that the world is uniquely characterized by being determined by all facts and not just some of them.
which seems to mean that the world is uniquely characterized by being determined by all facts and not just some of them.
Well, what else than that FFS ?
@dm
1.11 Die Welt ist durch die Tatsachen bestimmt und dadurch, dass es alle Tatsachen sind.
I would see this as identical to a formulation:
1.11* Die Welt ist durch die Tatsachen bestimmt und zwar, durch [die Zusammensetzung von ] a l l e [n] Tatsachen.
The * form would have no “gender mismatch”.
@stu
This restriction is significant; it appears to remove all supernatural aspects from the “world” and restrict such aspects to “things” (obviously I have to read the whole thing (not “thing”).
@dm
1.11 Die Welt ist durch die Tatsachen bestimmt und dadurch, dass es alle Tatsachen sind.
I would see this as identical to a formulation:
1.11* Die Welt ist durch die Tatsachen bestimmt, und zwar, durch [die Zusammensetzung von ] a l l e [n] Tatsachen.
The * form would have no “gender mismatch”.
@stu
This restriction is significant; it appears to remove all supernatural aspects from the “world” and restrict such aspects to “things” (obviously I have to read the whole thing (not “thing”)).
Most likely, but the original is either incompetent writing or (less likely) some kind of deliberate vagueness.
That’s more evidence that the Tractatus aims to spell out everything, including the obvious.
…so, Hans and Stu, are you saying that the dieser – jener distinction has been replaced by dieser – der? Up South we’ve lost the distinction
Basically, yes; at least you can contrast, say, Dieser Mann vs. der Mann. But for contrast I’m more likely to use der Mann hier vs. der Mann da.
But for contrast I’m more likely to use der Mann hier vs. der Mann da.
Yes, me too.
I see.
(As it happens, we’ve lost hier as well, and divided the entire span of hier – da – dort in two for da “here or within pointing range” and dort.)
Vgl. aquí/acá, ahí, allí/allá.
In Cologne I’ve heard mothers say to their child ven acá, which seemed to mean “come over here” (not right up to her). So I have generalized: acá is not a point in space-time, but a vicinity.
But this is teutonic country, and my knowledge is strongly constrained by my having to rely on home-made generalizations.
Stu, any guesses where the Spanish speakers might be from? I was under the impression that not all varieties of Spanish use acá.
@Y: I have no idea in general. Most people I’ve talked with here were from Mexico, Argentina and Peru. What I reported was what I’ve heard in passing on the sidewalk, viz. mothers trying to rein in their children (that seems to be a universal constant, since it occurs just as frequently with German mothers). I’m pretty sure I know acá from Texas back when.
Remember that my generalizations are home-made. I don’t actually cook that well.
my Chilena Spanish tutor has me puzzled sometimes using acá like the mother above.
In German and French, English here in the sense of “he’ll be here soon” comes out as wird bald da sein and sera bientõt là resp.
@pg
Can you say *”er ist fast da” / “il est presque là”? In Italian you have to say “é quasi arrivato”.
@PlasticPaddy
I’m not a native speaker in either DE or FR: I stick to familiar (to me) usages. Your phrases seem to suggest to me that you can already see him coming, but there might be nuances that escape me.
David M:
Going back to 1.21 (“Eines kann der Fall sein oder nicht der Fall sein und alles übrige gleich bleiben”), you wrote this about my reading of it (“[Any] one [feature of the world] could be the case or not be the case, while all others remain the same [that is, either the case or not the case]”):
I wonder why you hesitate over my bracketed any. Let me explain my thinking. I was aware of the gender mismatch and therefore did not write “[Any] one [fact] could be …”. We cannot be certain why W used the neuter pronoun eines, but he was a sophisticated native speaker of German and took extreme care (soliciting comments from those around him) in forming these deeply problematic sentences.
I proposed “[any] one [feature of the world]” for two reasons:
Turning to whether W’s facts (Tatsachen) include some that are necessary (necessarily true or false), there is good reason to think they do not. In typical philosophical discourse about worlds, mathematical propositions (as paradigmatically true or false of necessity) are considered not to have their truth value “at” all worlds except in a trivial and non-determinative sense. A world is typically taken to be a maximal causal nexus, and the truths of mathematics never cause (or are caused by) anything. Most world-theorists take the contents of each world’s history to be a matter of contingency through and through. (Heh. I favour a different account, but that’s another story.)
OED reminds us that classical Latin factum had this well-settled primary meaning: “deed, action, event, occurrence, achievement, misdeed, real happening, result of doing, something done.” And only in post-classical Latin: “also thing that has really occurred or is actually the case, thing known to be true (11th cent.; from 13th cent. in British sources), case, legal dispute (from 13th cent. in British sources), use as noun of neuter past participle of facere to make, do.”
This primary causality or contingency of facts is reinforced in the history of French fait, Italian fatto, and so on. Much is made in existentialist thought of facticity: a sheer arbitrariness we encounter in all the world and all our lives. Heidegger used Faktizität to mean “contingency”, and Sartre followed him with talk of facticité.
In the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy hardcore metaphysicians Kevin Mulligan and Fabrice Correia offer an exhaustive treatments of facts in modern philosophy. They allow that facts are sometimes considered equivalent to (or mappable onto) truths tout court, and sometimes as contingent truths only. And they take facts in W’s Tractatus to be meant in the second way:
Their citation of just 1.1 is clearly inadequate; but we can sympathise because they have enough cans of worms to deal with beyond Tractarian exegesis – and where would adequate citation stop?
What we are to make of W’s 2.0121 and other adversions to die Logik is even more complex; but under the 1 umbrella he says only this:
“The facts in logical space are the world” does not imply that some facts are non-contingent, any more than it implies that all facts are non-contingent.
Finally, note that I used could rather than can in my own translation of 1.21. This is partly because at any given world (the actual world for example) a “candidate fact” might not be a genuine (“true”) fact, so it would not then be an atomic feature of that world in the sense W intends. The requisite kind of modal variability is more lucidly captured, in English at least, by could than by can. A fact that is constitutive of the actual world must be a genuine (“true”) fact, but it could have been a “failed fact”. That is to say, at other (possible) worlds it is not a fact at all.
Going back to 1.21
The within-Philosophy take-away here is _not_ that this is a statement about the world. Rather, it’s a prescription/methodology for our descriptions of the world: the description must design ‘atomic’ facts (facts-deemed-as-atomic) such that each is orthogonal to/independent of each other.
It’s a key reason why the Logical Positivists thought the TL-P was aligned with them.
as a complete non sequitur from 1.2
No, 1.21 is a methodology for how to implement 1.2. Again 1.2 is not making any claim about the world.
W turned violently against this atomism in later works, with for example the duck-rabbit in the Investigations.
I think others here are correct in thinking we shouldn’t sweat over the translation; but read TL-P as a kind of transcendental poetry. ‘I know I do.’ [Quoting Dame Edna]
(Heh. Good to see something resembling the Wittgenstinian tradition of nonsense perpetuated here, I suppose. Translation is a main topic of the post and the comments.)
@ Plastic Paddy
I was interested to hear speakers of French tell me they’d be here/there soon by saying “J’arrive bientôt”.
In German and French, English here in the sense of “he’ll be here soon” comes out as wird bald da sein and sera bientõt là resp.
J’arrive bientôt
Also just er ist gleich da / er kommt gleich. In the first person: ich komme ja!
And just j’arrive! is “I’m coming!”.
In any language there are usually many ways to say the same thing in slightly different ways in slightly different contexts. This will not make the 6 o’clock news.
Microanalysis won’t kill the cat, but it will torment it unnecessarily.
Another amusing detail of no significance: reading Maigret et la jeune morte, I just came across an expression I had forgotten, in a telephone conversation between Maigret and Féret. The latter is reporting from Nice.
After Féret has spoken for quite a while, not yet getting to the point, Maigret asks: Elle ne s’est jamais mariée ?
Féret replies: J’y arrive. Elle avait une trentaine d’années … .
“I’m coming to that”, “I was coming to that”. They’re speaking of the j.m.’s mother.
…because I was tired enough to misremember and not scroll back up. I meant the second bracket, “feature of the world”. “Any” is fine.
Not bad.
I had no idea, and Wittgenstein probably did; but there’s no way alles, was der Fall ist describes anything causal – or any nexus, any connection. It’s just a list of facts that may or may not be connected in causal or any other ways.
More perhaps later, I have to go to bed 🙂
David M:
I meant the second bracket, “feature of the world”. “Any” is fine.
Ah. And I’ve explained my bracketed “feature of the world” also. It clarifies that the domain for “[any] one” is the whole world, yet it avoids a too-hasty identification of “the ones” and “the facts”. All of this puzzled W’s eminent contemporaries such as Frege and Russell, so why should we be spared?
I had no idea, and Wittgenstein probably did; but there’s no way alles, was der Fall ist describes anything causal – or any nexus, any connection. It’s just a list of facts that may or may not be connected in causal or any other ways.
W himself later uses the term Kausalnexus:
D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness offer this translation:
And I had written this, remember:
W’s asseverations in 5.136 and 5.1361 are motivated by the prevalence in others of a certain belief: that the world is some kind of a causal nexus – a realm of causality and “matters of fact” as David Hume called them, as opposed to a realm of immutable necessary propositions and “relations of ideas” (Hume’s expression, again). James Klagge quotes one of the several passages that are relevant from Hume, in explicating another of W’s gnomic deliverances (5.223). Notoriously, Hume held that causality must not be a matter of necessary connexions; in speaking of a causal nexus we can be agnostic as to whether causality involves connexions that are necessary at least in an attenuated sense, or whether it’s just “one thing after another” to which we wrongly ascribe necessity (as Hume said we do). That’s a huge issue in the history of modern philosophy, and still a matter of discussion in our own time – both for working out exactly what Hume intended, and what is the true status of physical laws, etc., with regard to necessity or contingency.
Reporting back from the tea porch at infinity, I just stumbled onto this fascinating account
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goblet_word
[The Daoist classic Zhuangzi first recorded this term … which is generally interpreted to mean fluid language that maintains its equilibrium through shifting meanings and viewpoints, thus enabling one to spontaneously go along with all sides of an argument..]
of something I think I’ve never seen before, a kind of meta-analysis that sounds like Flann O’Brien based on data from Victor Mair. It fills a badly needed gap in the literature, I think.
Rather: “Belief in the causal nexus is what superstition is.”
Awesome.
fluid language that maintains its equilibrium through shifting meanings and viewpoints, thus enabling one to spontaneously go along with all sides of an argument.
Yeah, right: “impromptu words pour forth every day and harmonize within the framework of nature”, “Consequently, there is effusive elaboration [mànyǎn (曼衍, “spread out far and wide”)] so that they may live out their years”. Nothing new here.
This is the language in which managers discuss things with each other, and in which articles are written for managers. I have occasionally listened in to such discussions, and I skim CIO journalism. As far as I can figure out from what actually transpires later, each of these manager types subsequently goes off and does damn well what he/she pleases. No one unmistakeably disagreed, after all.
The polite, suggestive but non-committal kind of text that people suck out of “generative AI” on cellphones will soon make it possible to employ “fluid language” in all situations. There are a lot of surprises down the road there, but not for me.
GitHub Copilot: Productivity boost or DORA metrics disaster?
More from the linked WiPe article:
Quotations are effective seven times out of ten because their purpose is to stop speech. They are from our elders, those who precede us in years.
Generalizations are effective for the same reason. Unfortunately, most of the people I deal with every day apparently haven’t read anything published farther back than 10-20 years. I can quote Wittgenstein or Mae West, and nobody gets it.
Quotations are effective seven times out of ten because their purpose is to stop speech.
And few more effective in that regard than Wovon man nicht sprechen kann …
I think one can say that there is no obvious comeback to this line.
But I suspect that the speech-stopping power of quotations lies chiefly in the fact that most people don’t want to talk to someone who keeps dropping quotations into their conversation. However, this is, I suppose, more elegant than the commoner strategy of simply telling people to bugger off and leave you in peace.
most people don’t want to talk to someone who keeps dropping quotations into their conversation.
I myself don’t. When I say “quotations”, I mean repeating things _without_ identifying them as quotes. As we did recently with A in W. That would be elegant if effective, but it is so only with old geezers who are not going to make a difference anyway.
The Ship of Fools can’t be worse than the Luxury Liner of Geezers, which I find myself booked on against my will.
Quotations are effective seven times out of ten because their purpose is to stop speech.
“As a great man once said, quotations are effective…”
“This quotation is effective.”
fluid language that maintains its equilibrium through shifting meanings and viewpoints, thus enabling one to spontaneously go along with all sides of an argument.
i know i’ve pointed before to uwe pörksen’s excellent Plastic Words: The Tyranny of a Modular Language / Plastikwörter: Die Sprache einer Internationalen Diktatur (inspired by pörksen’s colleague ivan illich, and retitled from “Lego-words” to avoid a potential lawsuit) – but how can i resist gesturing in that direction again?
it’s new to me, thanks
David M, concerning this:
For the second sentence you favoured “Belief in the causal nexus is what superstition is” over “Superstition is nothing but belief in the causal nexus” (the Pears and McGuinness rendering). Do you take these to differ merely in style or emphasis, or do you intend that the two versions diverge in meaning? It seems to me that when either is asserted the other would do just as well.
One more expected continuation, after the first sentence (meaning “We cannot infer [the]* events of the future from those of the present”), would avoid a strict identity of belief in the causal nexus and superstition:
Or it is “sheer superstition” (“reiner Aberglaube”?), we might say. Such a belief is then just one manifestation of superstition, which could of course take other forms also. How might my proposed statement be expressed in German? Could this be achieved by simply substituting Aberglaube for der Aberglaube? Like this:
Ngrams of interest.
* I take the bracketed “the” to be redundant, for what W wants to say.
@N
I think what DM is getting at is that the word order “A ist B” is not typically used to give a definition of B; usage is overwhelmingly as an elaboration or characterisation of A. You can say “Ich bin Philosoph” or “Philosoph bin ich”, but the second is the same, except emphasis is placed on the word Philosoph, which could also be achieved by placing extra stress on the word without reversing the order. I suppose the translator was imagining W replying to a question “Was ist der Aberglaube”?, in which case his translation would be plausible.
Depending on how W understood the word Glaube here, and if you wanted to dial down the rhetoric, you could also translate “faith in a/the causal nexus is misplaced”.
I can’t speak for DM, but I’d say the “nothing but” in its exclusivity is over the top; if W would have wanted to write “nichts als Aberglauben” or “reiner Aberglauben”, he could have done so, but he didn’t.
What Hans said. The two versions probably end up meaning the same thing in practice, but the emphasis is different.
Interestingly, for that one you need the article: Ein Philosoph bin ich.
@dm
Oops, thanks. I suppose the point is that A ist B would not be taken to be a definition of B unless prompted by the question “Was ist B?”.
The title/subtitle/alternative-title of Poerksen’s book seems to me a case of seriously muddled metaphors, although for all I know maybe this is a translation issue and the semantics are different in German. At least from the publisher’s blurb it sounds like the “plastic” in “Plastic Words” is supposed to evoke the “malleable, flexible, pliant” adjectival sense of “plastic.” But legos (or Legos(tm), if you insist) are not the least bit “plastic” in that sense – the “plastic” (relevant sense of the noun) from which they are made had ceased to be malleable,flexible,pliant at the end of the manufacturing process, and the resultant legos sold to end users are thus *not* “plastic” in the aforementioned adjectival sense. To the contrary, they are hard, brittle/breakable under sufficient force, and quite painful to step on unawares if barefooted. Legos do fit with the “modular” theme of the subtitle, because the individually non-malleable legos can be assembled into a very wide range of different ad hoc configurations. But I think it would be wrong to think of an unassembled pile of legos as “plastic” in the malleable/flexible/pliant sense because of that range of potential configuraions — if nothing else I think that sense of the adjective probably needs to be applied to something that’s a mass noun, but legos are a count noun.
German distinguishes the noun Plastik n.*, also Kunststoff m., from the adjective plastisch, which is a rather technical term. I’d have interpreted Plastikwörter as cheap, artificial, mass-produced and such, but neither as malleable (plastische Wörter) nor as modular.
* In East Germany that was Plaste f., now dying out.
I think that’s correct. “In fact, such a belief in a causal nexus – that’s what superstition is, actually. Fun fact!”
I appreciate David M.’s native-speaker input, yet given that _Plastikwörter_ was apparently the title the man gave to his book, he presumably assumed that *someone* in his potential readership-in-German would get the implicature of modular-and-or-malleable? Maybe he assumed wrongly, of course. People speaking any number of languages have been known to overestimate how funny or clever their wordplay will in fact be found to be by an actual audience.
Story by ?John Wyndham. Man is brought from ca. 1900 to the mid-20th century.
“What’s this ashtray made of?”
“That? Oh, that’s plastic.”
*Picks it up* “No it isn’t, it’s perfectly rigid.”
A story now dated by the ubiquity of ashtrays …
I think he just got completely desperate when he found he couldn’t use Lego®.
Baustein or Bauklotz “building block, especially as a toy” might have worked, but those tend to be made of wood and have smooth surfaces (so only gravity holds them together), presumably destroying other parts of the intended metaphor(s).
I appreciate David M.’s native-speaker input, yet given that _Plastikwörter_ was apparently the title the man gave to his book, he presumably assumed that *someone* in his potential readership-in-German would get the implicature of modular-and-or-malleable?
As David says, and as I remember, in East-Germany-that-was the words used for “plastic” were almost always Plast or Plaste. In the corresponding West-Germany-that-was, the stuff has always been called Kunststoff.
Curiously, any 3-D sculpture/artwork is eine Plastik in West Germany that was and is – even when the work is not made of “malleable” material(s). Big ones like Napoleon on a horse can also be called Standbilder (either Napoleon or the horse has to be standing…)
Plastik is also used in cosmetic surgery (see Eng. “plastic surgery”), and (as plastisch) formerly was used to characterize prose as “supple and vivid”. Malleable and 3-dimensional.
The West German connotation of Plastikwörter, for me, is “malleable”. Play-Doh words. Perhaps, for others who can ignore the influence of English “plastic”, it suggests “Napoleon-on-a-horse words”.
No, plastisch is (plastische Chirurgie, especially for reconstructive surgery after accidents), unless you’re including silicone…
Doch.
Lappenplastik.
Unter einer Plastik versteht man in der Medizin einen operativen Eingriff, bei dem Organe, Gewebe oder Gewebeteile ersetzt, wiederhergestellt, korrigiert oder rekonstruiert werden. Plastik heißt hier nicht, dass irgendein Fremdmaterial verwendet wird, es wird körpereigenes Material verwendet, um damit Defekte zu ersetzen oder zu überbrücken.
I must side with DM here – Plastik has no association of malleability for me, only of cheapness and artificiality. I assume that most native speakers are like me and learn the meaning Kunststoff before the arts term (I remember finding it confusing when I came across it, being used for objects made of all kinds of materials, not just plastic). The cosmetic sense is quite obscure, and even in Stu’s quotation it is clarified that this doesn’t have anything to do with plastic as a material.
There’s nothing obscure about the terminology used in plastic surgery. Of course ordinary people use plastisch, not the noun Plastik in the sense of a type of surgical procedure. They also are unlikely to refer to a statue as a Plastik, but there’s nothing obscure about art terminology.
formbar/weich is not exclusively a property of plastics. Surgeons use meat flaps because these can be shaped.
Most people have never heard of “s-mobile”, but only of T-Mobile.
There’s nothing obscure about the terminology used in plastic surgery. Of course ordinary people use plastisch, not the noun Plastik in the sense of a type of surgical procedure.
Well, maybe I use “obscure” in a different way than you, but that’s what I meant – Plastik in the surgery sense is a term of art that most people never encounter; my first reaction when you named it was that I never heard that, but after some reflection I think I’ve encountered it before, but only a couple of times. (And what is obscure is in the eye of the beholder – there is a nice xkcd about that, I think it was linked here before, about what kind of mineral names “everybody knows”).
Dolomite ! Catamite !
I think the stress in Da plastik-kirurgi has moved from the second to the first syllable within my lifetime, as the noun plastik for the procedure fell out of use. The petrochemical product always had first-syllable stress. I never saw it in reference to sculpture. (But the ODS has quotations up to 1926).
The adjective plastisk can be used in many areas, from ballet to the extrusion of Lego blocks, but it’s always a term of art. Colloquially, I think I’d use blød = ‘soft’ in most contexts.