Tractarian Pedagogies: Sense and Nonsense

Nicholas C. Burbules

Michael Peters

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s audacious, brilliant, and ultimately tragic masterpiece of philosophical architecture, occupies an ambiguous position in the history of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy and culture. It was, on the one hand, the inspiration for the development of logical empiricism and verificationism by the Vienna Circle of Moritz Schlick, Rudolph Carnap, and others, and for the birth of analytic philosophy as a distinctive endeavor, which ushered in an age of "scientific" philosophy that sought to banish metaphysical "nonsense." The audacity of Wittgenstein’s conception of his own project, endeavoring to create a complete account of the origins of language, truth, and reality in the homologies of logical structure between thoughts, propositions, and the states of affairs in the world – all in less than 150 pages – is remarkable. The fact that in the eyes of many readers he succeeded is even more so. And the very project of seeking (literally) to determine what can and cannot be said cedes to philosophical argument a scope and authority that can be viewed, in turns, as arrogant, magisterial, or absurd.

Yet, at the same time, the Tractatus is the work of which Wittgenstein himself said, "It shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved" (TLP, p. 5). It is a book that was (in his view) fundamentally misunderstood by Russell, his mentor, whose Introduction needed to be appended to the book, as a kind of endorsement, before Wittgenstein could get it published (despite the fact that Russell could not resist such comments as "I confess that it leaves me with a certain sense of intellectual discomfort" (TLP, p. xxi), and despite the fact that Wittgenstein considered it a humiliating and wrong-headed interpretation of his ideas (Monk, p. 183)). It is a book that was read as exactly opposite in intention to Wittgenstein’s actual purpose: whereas the Vienna Circle and others thought that its point was to demarcate the proper from improper scope of philosophical activity, delimiting propositions that could be verified by comparisons against an empirical world, from those that were deemed "nonsense," for Wittgenstein it was precisely those things about which one could not speak propositionally (ethics, aesthetics, religion) that were most important in life. In other words, it was a book whose success at the level of argumentation was a failure at the level of existential value and meaning. There is little doubt in our minds that this was the way in which Wittgenstein himself regarded this project.

Our purpose in this essay is to propose a new conception of the Tractatus as an important work in the philosophy of education. While the verificationist legacy derived from that work has clearly played a central role in twentieth-century philosophy, particularly for the "analytical" school, we want to highlight the importance of the comments Wittgenstein makes about teaching and learning in this work. This creative reappropriation of Wittgenstein as a philosopher of education is part of a larger project arguing for the distinctive value of his remarks about pedagogy, and the centrality of those insights for understanding the meaning and purpose of his broader philosophical endeavor (not only in this earlier, Tractarian, phase, but especially in his later work that culminated in the Philosophical Investigations).

I.

The Tractatus is a strange book. To see this, one needs to view it simultaneously at the level of what it says and at the level of what it shows. This distinction of saying and showing is central to the Tractarian project. For Wittgenstein, what we can say is what can be compared and tested against the world, or as he puts it, "what is the case." The world has a logical structure, and thought and language have a logical structure: when we endeavor to express truths about the world, we create a "picture" in language that has the same logical form as the state of affairs it means to represent; truth resides in the homology of logical form between this "picture" and the structure of reality (just as we judge other pictures, Wittgenstein says, by how well they represent the world). This view clearly privileges the scientific and empirical uses of language, and it is an easy step from this view to the "verificationist" views of Schlick and the Vienna Circle: "The meaning of a proposition is its method of verification."

For the Vienna Circle and others captivated by this radically reductionist view of language, logic provides the regulatory standards for what can properly be said, epistemologically, in much the same way as grammar provides the regulatory standards for what can properly be said, linguistically. About the rest, Wittgenstein says, one must remain silent. Now, we have already noted that for Wittgenstein this insight was expressed with some dismay: it left out of what could be said the most important human concerns and feelings. For his interpreters, however, it was taken as more of a command. Wittgenstein’s response to this interpretation is ambiguous. While he occasionally met with the members of the Vienna Circle, and was at one point engaged in a collaborative project with Friedrich Waismann on a book to be entitled Logik, Sprache, Philosophie, an introduction to the ideas of the Tractatus (Monk, p. 283), his encounters with that group were frequently marked by determined silence or, in other cases, recitations of mystical poetry from the works of Rabindranath Tagore (Monk, p. 243). In other instances, and increasingly over time, he refused to meet with them or to authorize their interpretations at all (and the project with Waismann was eventually abandoned).

We note here in passing, along with Hans Sluga and other contemporary re-interpreters of Wittgenstein, that this account suggests that despite the ordinary bifurcation of philosophy into "Anglo-American" and "Continental" traditions, the actual influence of Wittgenstein, a quintessential Viennese modernist, and his advocates in the Vienna Circle (many of whom left Austria to escape to philosophy departments in the U.S. and Britain, carrying this new analytic and verificationist philosophy with them), shows that there is nothing more "Continental" in philosophy than the breathtaking aspiration to reconstruct the uses of language upon a systematic, logic-driven foundation, and to exclude other uses (the metaphorical, the allusive, the rhetorical) as suspect or even illegitimate.

But Wittgenstein’s view of this matter was far more complex. As he says, the Tractatus is composed of two parts: what is written there and what is not written ("And precisely the second part is the important one"). Beyond his account of what can be said, he repeatedly notes, there is what can only be shown. He was acutely aware that drawing an outline demarcating the limits of language defined both a positive and a negative space; and rather like his later use of Jastrow’s "duck/rabbit" drawing, this outline can be viewed either in terms of what it contains, or in terms of what stands outside it. In fact, the word "limits" (Grenzen) recurs frequently in the Tractatus, particularly toward the end, and often with a note of constraint: "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world" (TLP, proposition 5.6). This mood, along with the peculiarly diffident tone of Wittgenstein’s Preface, gives the text less a feeling of accomplishment than of regret – as if one invented a fool-proof formula for moves that would win every possible game of chess, but in the process of doing so eliminated the very uncertainty and mystery of the game, and in so the pleasures of playing it at all. This came to be Wittgenstein’s view of philosophy itself (and it explains in large measure his self-imposed exile from Cambridge and his peripatetic middle career, as gardener, architect, and elementary school-teacher).

And so this great work of logic is based upon a series of antinomies and paradoxes: of how to articulate and argue for a pure, formal conception of language, in an ordinary language; of how to point to the realm of what cannot be said, in a language that one is insisting cannot express such things; and of how to engage readers in a radically new point of view, when one assumes that no direct argument can be given for that view. These three paradoxes bedevil the Tractatus, and they help shape, we believe, a distinctive view of education.

II.

First, it is rather incredible, when you reflect upon it, that this rigorous and austere view of language, logic, and reality rests fundamentally upon a metaphor: the picture theory of language. Wittgenstein’s writings were full of metaphors, thought-experiments, examples, and puzzles, throughout his career (indeed, he said of himself, "I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking….What I invent are new similes" (CV, p. 19)). But it is noteworthy that in a book which by design was meant to express the minimal, irreducible number of propositions necessary to make its case; which Wittgenstein revised repeatedly to hone into the same sort of ornamentation-free structure that Adolf Loos was advocating in Viennese modernist architecture; which attempts to express by its rigorous decimal notation a crystalline structure of deductive steps; that in all this Wittgenstein came up to the self-imposed limit of his language and discovered that to explain the crucial relation of language to reality, he had to resort to a figurative allusion – the picture. In short, even within the domain of articulating all that can be said, he had to rely on the very type of linguistic move that his own account was forbidding!

Wittgenstein was certainly aware of this paradox. He attempts to justify it (amazingly) with yet another metaphor: he says that his account in this book is like a ladder which is necessary to reach a higher level of understanding that, once attained, provides a vantage point from which such ladders can be seen as flawed and unnecessary – once it has served its purpose the ladder can (must) be thrown away (TLP, proposition 6.54). We want to highlight that this can be regarded as an educational argument: that it is exploring the question of how understandings are changed. It has affinities with (among other things) Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development. But most significant, it suggests that the means of argument and cognitive change are, must be, extra-rational at key junctures: that catching someone up within an alternative way of thinking about things (a new "picture," if you will) is not something that itself can be argued for. It cannot be said, but only shown. And this, in turn, suggests a limit to the determinacy of direct instruction: that certain connections can only be hinted at, indicated obliquely, and the learner will (as we say today) either "get it," or not. Nothing more can be said.

The second paradox, touched upon earlier, is Wittgenstein’s conviction that the most important human concerns (ethics, aesthetics, religion) are of the domain that cannot be discussed explicitly (that is, propositionally). To paraphrase, perhaps, they are things that we cannot speak about, but which we must talk about. Indeed, as J. M. Keynes and others noted with irony, Wittgenstein never ceased talking about such matters (and invariably quite prescriptively, with a tone that brooked no contradiction). No doubt this was part of the charm and the exasperation of having Wittgenstein for a friend. Philosophically, this clearly reflected on Wittgenstein’s part a conviction that such concerns were a matter primarily of deeds, not of discourse; that if they meant anything, they depended on how one lived one’s life, as an ethical agent, as an appreciator or creator of art, and as a believing soul. He seemed to hold quite strongly that no one could be convinced or persuaded to embrace such a life if one was not by upbringing and experience already predisposed to do so. And this was not only a restatement of the traditional call for a faith beyond reason, but an actual claim about the limits of language and – again significant for our purposes here – the limits of education.

The product of an aristocratic upbringing, in a household infused with a pervasive (if not obsessive) concern with appreciating, sponsoring, and creating artistic work of the most excellent order, and with an entirely rigid, uncompromising sense of moral order and propriety, Wittgenstein was utterly intolerant of anything less than rightness in himself and in others. His comments on ethics and art, both in personal interchange and (even more so) in his private notebooks, consistently expressed contempt for the compromised, the derivative, and the conventional. Here too he was following the spirit of Viennese modernism, especially through the influence of such writers as Karl Kraus and Otto Weininger (see Monk, pp. 16-25); and one corollary of this tradition, which Wittgenstein absorbed entirely, is a measure of anti-Semitism, as he associated "Jewishness" with many deficiencies ("The Jew is a desert region….Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented." (CV, pp. 13, 18)). That Wittgenstein’s own family background was Jewish, despite a series of somewhat ad hoc conversions to Catholicism in some branches of his family, tells us something important about the way that Wittgenstein’s sharpest rebukes about mediocrity or a lack of conviction in ethics, art, or religion pertained most uncompromisingly to himself (to the claim about the limits of Jewish talent, above, he adds, "Myself for instance." (CV, pp. 18)).

The third paradox, closely related to the previous two, is Wittgenstein’s puzzling comment in the Preface that the Tractatus would only succeed in being understood by those who "already had the thoughts that are expressed in it" (TLP, p. 3). This surprising bit of philosophical pessimism follows rather directly from his beliefs about what cannot be said, about what it means for someone to "get it," and about the nature of radical conceptual change. It is, again, an educational claim. It suggests that the purpose of philosophical writing of a fundamental nature is not to convince or persuade, but to create a picture of things that others, given the right sorts of pre-intuitions, might apprehend. It may succeed in giving shape to thoughts or ideas that have not yet congealed, or may serve as the "ladder" by which others come to reconsider their own assumptions from a new vantage point. Beyond this, a philosophical work, very much like an artistic creation, must express with conviction a personally compelling and uncompromising version of things – and then it stands alone. The last thing the creator should try to do is to explain it or persuade others of how to appreciate it. This stance accounts for Wittgenstein’s own insistence that the Tractatus should contain no explanations, and for his almost perverse refusal to try to correct the misunderstandings of Russell (in the very Introduction to his own book!) and of the Vienna Circle philosophers, each of whom selected from the Tractatus those elements that reinforced their own preconceptions, leaving behind or ignoring just those elements that Wittgenstein himself believed were most central to his purpose. But feeling constrained both by his inflexible personality – one wants to call it the stance of a very young man, which confuses stubbornness with integrity and absolutism with principled conduct – and by his own philosophical conclusions about what cannot (must not) be said, he felt constrained to watch as a text that he regarded as an absolutely conclusive and unambiguous statement of his view of philosophy was taken, beyond his control, as a manifesto of principles that he only partly believed. Hence its very success represented a tragic, Sisyphean, victory.

III.

These three paradoxes, in our view, underwrite a distinctively Tractarian pedagogy – or, more precisely, two rather different, contradictory pedagogies. The first could be termed a "pedagogy of sense"; the second, a "pedagogy of nonsense."

A pedagogy of sense can be summarized well by an assertion from The Oxford Companion to Philosophy:

There is something rather Platonic (meant in distinction to the Socratic) about this view of education. One of the central, compelling aspects of the vision of education in the Republic is its assumption that little or nothing can be done to move the understandings of ordinary people ("cave-men" and women, one might say), already burdened with the illusions of doxa and the conventional ways of thinking typical of the "common sense," into the light of understanding Truth. Even the extraordinary person, the philosopher, can only glimpse it partially and intermittently (in this lifetime). To bring up a future generation with the proper sense of the order of things, it is necessary to begin with a fresh start, building up truths (as well as "noble lies") from scratch, with a strong system of censorship to prevent corrupting ideas, falsehoods, or controversies from complicating the issue. There is, strictly speaking, no way of translating the terms of correct understanding into the flawed, clumsy, lumpish terms of ordinary discourse.

There is clearly something of this vision to the Tractatus, in one of its aspects. A pure Tractarian language could not be introduced into ordinary usage, either by persuasion or by fiat. Revealingly, Wittgenstein addresses this problem as a point about teaching:

This picture of teaching is, of course, more than not "satisfying"; it is patently impossible in practice and, furthermore, self-contradictory (since one would need to utter more than the propositions of natural science in order to demonstrate the lack of sense in certain propositions). Hence one could never achieve the end of teaching a pure Tractarian language to an ordinary speaker by using only a pure Tractarian language. Instead, as with Plato, one could only establish such a regime by beginning with a generation of children and teaching them nothing but a Tractarian language (assuming, of course, that any actual human being could live a life entirely bounded by such restrictions). This utopian prospect invites us to speculate about Wittgenstein’s motives in taking up the teaching of elementary school children in the next phase of his career; a vocation at which he was strikingly unsuccessful (Monk, ch. 9; Bartley, pp. 94-116).

This is a decidedly non-Socratic view of pedagogy, if by the Socratic method one means a dialectical interchange that leads a learner into a new understanding. One cannot be led from ordinary language into an understanding of its limitations; into a grasp of the demarcation of sense and nonsense; or into the discipline of leaving unsaid "what we cannot speak about" (TLP, proposition 7.0). The pedagogy of sense, in short, fails as a pedagogy on its own terms.

IV.

To appreciate the educational significance of a "pedagogy of nonsense," one must begin with the idea that "nonsense" does not hold the same meaning for Wittgenstein that it may have acquired in other contexts. "Nonsense" does not necessarily mean silly, absurd, or worthless: it is for Wittgenstein a rather technical term for areas of language and understanding to which the category of "sense" simply does not apply. For Wittgenstein, the sense (Sinn) of a proposition is what enables it to represent a state of affairs, a fact. Statements that do not attempt to represent reality, therefore, lack sense. The propositions of logic, for example, which are of such central importance to the Tractatus, are "nonsense." So are those many concerns of ethics, aesthetics, and religion, discussed earlier. And, so, indeed, are many of Wittgenstein’s own statements throughout the book:

And so we see that there can be useful – indeed, indispensable – nonsense.

These issues, as with those about the limits of a pure Tractarian language, become more clear when the arguments are transposed into reflections about pedagogy. "Useful nonsense" is a pedagogical notion. It is from the teaching/learning standpoint that we can recognize the usefulness of "nonsense," as in the wonderful texts of Lewis Carroll: nonsense you can learn from. With this we return to the three paradoxes discussed earlier in this essay.

One way in which nonsense is pedagogically useful can be seen in the "ladder" metaphor discussed previously: it is often necessary to use in the process of teaching various means, including types of statements, that are strictly speaking inconsistent with the aims one is trying to achieve. There is no direct route, no perfectly, internally consistent route, to getting there. In Wittgenstein’s case, this means among other things the value of using metaphors and similes to elucidate and justify a language that (supposedly) can exist without such elements. More generally, this can mean that one must resort to oversimplifcations that are, strictly speaking, not true; or to allusions that merely point to the idea one is trying to get across; or to rhetorical devices that, in other contexts, might be regarded as misleading or inappropriate. Within the confines of a pure Tractarian language, it is impossible to account for such uses of language or their necessity. It is part of the wisdom of Wittgenstein’s book that it recognizes the incompleteness of this picture. Yet this is an insight not grasped by some fans of the Tractatus.

A second way in which nonsense is pedagogically useful pertains to the import of what Wittgenstein means when he says, above, "He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright." There is a pervasive mysticism that infuses and informs the closing propositions of the Tractatus. In this passage and elsewhere there is often an affinity in this text with Zen Buddhism, whose teaching relies upon koans: brief, paradoxical questions ("What is the sound of one hand clapping?" is the best known) or obscure anecdotes and aphorisms which, upon the hearing, allow the initiate to break suddenly into a new, higher plane of understanding. It is the recognition of nonsense as such, and of the futility of imposing a certain type of understanding on every utterance, that allows for this transcendence. Wittgenstein, we believe, alludes to something similar here.

We do not share Wittgenstein’s view of the mystical (das Mystische); but there is something to be learned from reflection on the domain of what cannot be said. In any communicative exchange, there is much that cannot be said: one has not the words to say or explain; or one’s language is different from that of the other; or one is silenced or incapable of speaking of the matter. If we allow the domain of sense, of what can be understood, to entirely demarcate such exchanges, then much of import will simply be left unsaid (and unlearned). The pedagogy of nonsense asks us to consider the pedagogical value of aphorisms, puzzles, paradoxes, and aporias; the very moments when something strange brings us up short and we must consider, not only that we do not understand, but why we do not understand.

Pushing this idea one step further, one might reflect on the pedagogical value of silence itself: of the question not answered (or not asked), of the word not translated, of the participant who does not speak, of the interstices, the spaces between what is said. Here we have truly the realm of no-sense, where sense (in Wittgenstein’s sense) is impossible because language itself disappears. Of course, this silence can be taken to mean almost anything, or nothing: it can be seen or experienced as a failure, or as a waste of time. How then can it constitute a teaching/learning moment? (Silence.)

A third way in which nonsense can be pedagogically useful is reflected by the other side of Wittgenstein’s aphorism: of what cannot be said, but can only be shown. An underestimated dimension of Wittgenstein’s writing is his lifelong preoccupation with matters of form, not only as an aesthetic standard, but as an indispensable medium of articulating his ideas by representing them in a particular manner. There are more examples of this than can be discussed here, but one example that has already been mentioned is the decimal structure of the Tractatus. At an immediate level, one sees that this connotes an orderly, hierarchical arrangement of ideas, discrete from one another, but linked with the same precision and objectivity as the relation between the numbers that denote section 5.2 and the subsections 5.21 and 5.22. Assumptions about sequence, about relative levels of generality between sections and subsections, and about their logical interdependence are implicit within this form of organization: represented (shown) but not asserted or defended (said). This apotheosis and purification of the outline form, which most of us are familiar with from early in our schooling, also displays this form itself as a convention of writing, making us aware of the presuppositions about logic that are latent in this convention.

The nonsense of form, of composition, of orderly outlines or rhizomatic bricolage, as with the other sorts of nonsense discussed here, presents the reader/audience/learner with a puzzle to be thought about (we won’t say "solved"), and presents ideas in a manner that cannot be explained or made entirely explicit without destroying the very educational benefit it is meant to have by prescribing a particular way of unraveling the puzzle instead of leaving it up to the reader/audience/learner to work it through. And from this standpoint the greater the number of alternative, equally satisfying ways of working it through, the better.

Now, it would not be reasonable to expect that all pedagogy should be constructed as a pedagogy of nonsense; that would be as self-defeating as would a thoroughgoing pedagogy of sense. But what Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus shows us is that a teaching approach that entirely lacked a pedagogy of nonsense would be seriously incomplete. It would have limits with no way of making students aware of what those limits are. It would remain mired in the domain of facts, without creating an opportunity for students to reflect upon how they came to be facts, or upon those human matters that cannot be discussed as facts. It would neglect those entire areas of learning that cannot be taught explicitly, but which are fundamentally a matter of "getting it," and which can often be described only in terms of "getting it." In this domain, the tools of pedagogy become those that cannot guarantee an outcome: puzzles and paradoxes; aphorisms and aporias; ladders and hyperlinks; metaphors and maps; and, ultimately, even silence. These tools can’t be assessed in narrowly teleological terms; they only create the conditions of a possibility.

REFERENCES

W. W. Bartley, Wittgenstein (Lasalle, IL: Open Court, 1985).

Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973).

Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: Penguin, 1990).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).