"The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.". . .
Thesis 1: Without language there is no occasion for philosophical thought.
1a. Experience contains no paradoxes and no contradictions. These can only occur between statements and propositions—that is, in words. (The word 'contradiction' does well to emphasize my point: contra dicere would roughly translate as "to say against.") The quality of being "true" or "false," likewise, can only apply to propositions.
"The world is all that is the case."
"The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood."
1b. It is possible to perceive problems in a variety of fields without a recourse to language.2 You may be able to express or describe these problems in terms of language, but the language itself is not necessary in order to recognize and address them. In philosophy's case, however, language is the source of its problems and inquiries, and without language there are none.
"For philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday."
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
"People say again and again that philosophy doesn't really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don't understand why it has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking the same questions."
1c. There's no such thing as a "philosophical problem" simply because there are no solutions to be found. All that is available is a dissolution of the problem through a more thorough understanding of what has gone awry.3
1d. The subject of a great deal of traditional philosophy is where concepts intersect with actuality. Actuality is a posteriori (phenomena); philosophy's treatment of it is a priori (in concepts, statements; descriptions and prescriptions).
"It follows from this separation of form and content that logic tells us nothing about the actual world."4
1e. The philosopher has two tools at his or her disposal: language and logic. The methods and results of logic are self-evident, but what language is conveying often isn't, e.g. "All physical objects are extended," "This sentence is false."
"Logic takes care of itself, all we have to do is to look and see how it does it."
1f. Language is essentially a means of description, prescription, or expression5. Individual words and concepts are components of a language-game aimed at any of these. (With regard to inferences, language is not a means of giving substance to or in some way constituting them, but only describing/expressing them.)
"For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word 'meaning' it can be defined as thus: the meaning of a word is its use in language."
1g. Description presents no possibility of transcendence. (Creating a picture6 of something will not grant a greater insight into how it appears than what can already be seen.)
1h. Language can only describe experience through abstraction. It's not as though nouns are proxies for actual objects simply because the very concept of an "object" is itself an abstraction. The question of whether Theseus's ship will endure after exchanging all of its planks originated under ignorance of this process.
1i. It follows that a great many concepts are not referents to any particular aspect of reality. Some would try to transcend it or exist independently of it, but in doing so there is no possibility for mutual intelligibility or mutual understanding of what is meant beyond the intangible-abstract (as in, e.g., soul, Geist, the eternal, the Good). And while the construction of concepts through various component-abstractions is mutually intelligible (for instance, intuiting a centaur through the union of certain features of a horse and certain features of a human), it carries with it no necessity or non-conceptual "reality".
Thesis 2: "Knowledge" and metaphysics are incompatible.
2a. Metaphysics is absolute non-sense. (See 1g, 1i.)
"The essential thing about metaphysics: it obliterates the distinction between factual and conceptual investigations."
"Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since Everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no use to us."
2b. Epistemically, the only incorrigible knowledge of "reality 7" that we have is of the here-and-now (i.e. immediate sense data, qualia).
"I want now to enlarge the point that the idea of 'foundations of knowledge' is a product of the choice of perceptual metaphors. To recapitulate, we can think of knowledge as a relation to propositions, and thus justification as a relation between the propositions in question and other propositions from which the former may be inferred. Or we may think of both knowledge and justification as privileged relations to the objects those propositions are about. If we think in the first way, we will see no need to end the potentially infinite regress of propositions-brought-forward-in-defense-of-other-propositions." —Rorty
2c. The ontological distinction between subject (-ivity) and object (-ivity) is untenable. The subject is at once an object, and the object is only experienced by means of the subject... the subject is at once itself and a feature of the world. It experiences the world by means of the world itself. (See the quote following 1f.)
2d. The mind-body distinction is purely the product of a language-game. It attempts, I suppose, to distinguish thinking from feeling, and internal states (i.e. subjectivity) from external states (objective reality), but the former is really a distinction between language and experience, and the latter is really between a subject's sense-experience and a mutual consensus (between persons) on sense-experience. Again, in metaphysical terms the mind/body distinction has no foundation—for we have no knowledge of this mutual consensus.
2e. Whatever the findings of the philosophy of mind, they will be of no practical or functional significance. There can be no a priori mutual consensus regarding internal states simply because there is no object or observable process.
Thesis 3: Certainty in the domain of philosophy is only possible insofar as it has no pertinence to the world.
3a. "Objectivity" in the domain of any given topic stands for little more than the possibility for universal agreement. This can only be achieved in a priori terms through prescription, and in a posteriori terms through the (accurate, scientific) description of the world. (The a priori sort can possess apodictic "objectivity", e.g. 1+1=2; the problem of induction prevents this in a posteriori cases.)
3b. Knowledge in practical terms (e.g. that there is gravity) isn't absolute, but it doesn't need to be in order to be of use. Mutual consensus is only beneficial insofar as it suits our practical interests. In this regard, we have no need for universal commensuration.
3c. It follows from philosophy's dependence on language that the only certainty it can proffer lies in matters that either have no pertinence to the world or that describe what is already known.
3d. Logic can inform us that, under certain rules and given certain rule-following components, one proposition will follow from another, but these rules cannot be constituted a priori without losing relevance to the world. Practical inquiries (ethics, social/political philosophy), conversely, can have relevance to the pre-existing ways we perceive and describe, but they are independent of certainty simply because philosophy is incapable of constructing a first principle that has a direct link to the world [as something independent of what is described].
3e. In this sense philosophy cannot say anything constructive. The above points illustrate the impossibility of system-building while maintaining relevance.
3f. Bertrand Russell once said:
"The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."While this may be a "traditional" conception of the footholds and aims of philosophical inquiries, it does not inform a philosophy that strives to be anything but impractical and esoteric.
Instead of having faith that our descriptions will transpose the world... instead of viewing "knowledge" as an ultimatum rather than a means to various ends, we should see philosophy for what it really is: the obvious or the dogmatic.
3g. Philosophy without certainty can, however, be productive in at least two areas: heuristics and hermeneutics. Heuristics embodies wisdom in the most conventional sense and hermeneutics represents an effort to deconstruct and interpret.
To this end, it is my hope that Russell's conception of philosophy is replaced by Wittgenstein's:
"Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
1 All too often works in philosophy are strictly reactionary, and interdependent on other works for their (often unstated) presuppositions. Frequently, too, they're written in such esoteric terms that their significance to the world is limited to the few that can actually understand them. I've made an effort to avoid partaking in either tradition.
What follows is not intended to provide an absolute answer to philosophy as a study, but rather an attempt to frame it in such a way that it is robbed of its incongruities. It is an attempt at stating my current views to the best of my ability, and, in my mind, is free of controversy.
2 I've had some difficulty in finding an appropriate example to illustrate this. Let's suppose you are fixing something, thinking of ways to improve it, or identifying problems inherent in it. While language may assist you (as a heuristic device for instance), it is not necessary for you to carry on.
The idea that I'm trying to get across is that, when doing philosophy, language is not only removed from experience, but from other appropriate sources of reference (as in history, literature, mathematics). At this level the subject of inquiry becomes dubious.
3 This is a harsh way of saying that philosophical problems are completely artificial constructions. There may still be a "problem" so-to-speak, but it has no relevance to the world.
4 I admit that this quotation doesn't quite support my point, but I do feel it serves a purpose. As with all of the quotes, I am not trying to provide any interpretation of Wittgenstein, but rather show certain eloquent statements of his that are tied to my disposition.
5 This point is somewhat clumsy. Language can do a great variety of things, and it is in my opinion that these three encompass them, albeit if somewhat obscurely. The point is not to define three simple categories that neatly envelope all of its functions, but to give a basic idea of those functions.
6 A "picture" may tell you more about your frame of reference, but nothing further about what you are depicting.
7 The concept of "reality" is a troublesome. In practice, it describes a mutually perceived world (see 3a), but the idea that there is such a thing as "valid" and "invalid" experience doesn't make sense. Experiences are as they are, and short of some recourse to a higher being, we cannot say that one experience (experienced subjectively) is faulty while another is true.
Also, my use of the word "knowledge" shifts from meaning something like "absolute knowledge" to "corrigible" knowledge (e.g. experiences, available information, etc.) depending on the context of how it is used.
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