Limits to symbolic activity are not the same as limits to thought. As Wittgenstein noted almost a century ago, limits to thought would require us to go beyond thought in order to mark the boundaries, but that would mean we could think the unthinkable, and that is a contradiction in terms.
The “limit,” if there is one, is not one that cannot be exceeded, but rather one that marks the borderline between rational or meaningful talk and nonsensical or absurd talk. Wittgenstein called these outlands of nonsense simply “silence.” It also is a land of mysticism; an other-worldly place.
Wittgenstein thought that all intellectual or philosophical “problems” arose from the misuse of language. Any such “problem” could be “solved” by a logical or grammatical analysis. Then the problems would simply vanish, as if by magic. The business of philosophy was thought to be the logical clarification of thoughts, and no more. In fact, he claimed, in his first work, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” that he had definitively solved all the major outstanding problems in philosophy.
However, that was not all. In writing to a friend, he said there was a Part II of his book that was far more important for life, and that was all he did not write. In Wittgenstein’s words, “My work consists in two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have ‘not’ written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.”
The technical details of Wittgenstein’s achievement in the “Tractatus” demands an appreciation of the major advances in symbolic logic, in regard to which Wittgenstein himself was a major contributor. But suffice it to say, that the general theme of his work was to show that “whatever can be said at all can be said clearly,” and that what cannot be said “we must pass over in silence.”
It is this great silence that shouts to us. In that unwritten book we find the realm of art, poetry, music, ethics, religion, and more. In the realm of non-sense is the non-sensible. Words like “self,” “soul” and “goodness” have no place in the “logical space” of rational discourse, yet they have transformative powers in regard to the way a person lives. There in the silence of science is the voice that calls us to transcend the limits of what we are to become what we could be.
The “world” for us is the “world” that scientific discourse discloses. Science tells us the “facts.” What “makes” sense is what is sensible. Observation is the link in the chain of verification. It tells us that any truth we may utter corresponds to the facts that constitute reality. If we transcend the facts in our talk then we are not making sense. We are using words that have no meaning. But what may not be “said” rationally may be “shown” by our doing.
Feelings, emotions, our hopes and fears and joys loose their subjective quality in the objective discourse of science. But they are rediscovered in the realm of the arts. There the ineffable, the actual life we live is expressed and made evident. After all, why is there painting, poetry, and beauty, if the same experiences could be expressed in propositions that model only the “facts?”
Science and rational discourse does not only delimit the realm of facts but also the realm of possibility. Every fact could have been otherwise than it actually is. The cat on the mat could also have been under the mat. The world is what is the case, but each state of the world is surrounded by a range of possible worlds. Outside the range of possible worlds, outside the world as determined by science is silence; the infinity of the impossible.
Every creature is limited by their sensory equipment. Now imagine a being with hundreds of different sense organs, beyond imagination. Then what would their world be like? What transcends sense for us we call absurd, nonsense, impossible, or even nothing. It is though art and poetry that the nothing becomes something, and that something is really “something else.”
The attempt to talk about what transcends the limits of language is running against those limits, leading only to paradox and confusion. Yet what we cannot speak of may be shown by the way we live every moment of our lives. Only then will we “walk our talk.”
Puzzle
If one and a half hens lay one and a half eggs in one and a half days, how many eggs does one hen lay in one day?
Answer to last week’s puzzle
The number is 9376.
