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3. The Whole Hurly-Burly of Human Actions
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3 The Whole Hurly-Burly of Human Actions Every significant word or symbol must essentially belong to a “system,” and . . . the meaning of a word is its “place” in a “grammatical system.” —Wittgenstein, Philosophical Occasions, 51 The compound expression “Being-in-the-world” indicates in the very way we have coined it, that it stands for a unitary phenomenon. This primary datum must be seen as a whole. —Heidegger, Being and Time, 78/53 Atomism in some form or other has been the default ontology for most of the history of philosophy: objects are what they are because of their own intrinsic nature, gaining only superficial features from whatever relationships they happen to enter into. This metaphysical structure can then secure semantic determinacy: synching words with referents that retain their nature regardless of circumstances makes words’ meanings independent of their context. They simply mean what they mean regardless of when, where, or by whom they are employed. Chapter 2 showed how the Tractatus bases all language ultimately on the relationship between a name and a simple object which consists of a set of “unalterable” internal properties that subsist “independently of what is the case.”1 This idea is what authorizes the drastic shifts in use that create philosophical confusion , as covered in chapter 1. Similarly, for present-at-hand ontology, “the real entity is what is suited for thus remaining constant,”2 a prejudice that distorts metaphysics and compromises authenticity. Heidegger and later Wittgenstein embrace holism, according to which an object or word derives its nature and meaning from its place within a network, all other members of which likewise draw their sense from their interrelationships. This framework eliminates atomistic determinacy: if an item’s meaning is established by its context, then altering this context 82 Chapter 3 changes its meaning—and the greater the change, the sketchier and thinner becomes the item’s connection with its earlier sense.3 Chapter 1 laid out these thinkers’ conceptions of philosophy as based on a contrast between normal mastery and disengaged confusion. Chapter 2 showed how atomist theories of meaning and being funded the traditional philosophy that both seek to overturn. In this chapter, we will try to recover the holistic and engaged understanding that defines our behavior primarily and for the most part, but which gets covered up by reflection. The Colorful Unraveling of Wittgenstein’s Early Atomism Atomism played an important part in the founding of analytic philosophy. One of the points Russell and Moore emphasized in their rejection of idealism was the doctrine of external relations, that is, the idea that many of an object’s properties and relations are contingent and can change without fundamentally altering the entity so that “an isolated truth may be quite true.”4 In the Tractatus, each state-of-affairs exists in complete isolation of all others; none is affected by the presence or absence of, or changes within, any other state-of-affairs.5 Correlatively, each elementary proposition enjoys a truth value independently of the rest of language.6 While each elementary proposition does presuppose all of logical space, or at least all of its particular region,7 it only decides a hermetically sealed single point therein, which can be filled in or left blank without regard for anything else.8 Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of a measuring stick: the way a picture “reaches right out to” reality is that “only the end-points of the graduating lines actually touch the object that is to be measured.”9 Words and objects make contact vertically, unaffected by the horizontal matters of other words or objects. But this account runs into a problem almost immediately. Although Wittgenstein never specifies the nature of simple objects, colored specks occasionally crop up as a likely candidate.10 Colors, however, are not atomically independent but mutually exclusive; if a point (x, y) is blue, then it cannot simultaneously be red or puce or any other color. This allows us to deduce apparently elementary propositions (“Point (x, y) is not red”) from other elementary propositions (“Point (x, y) is blue”), just the kind of inference that logical atomism forbids.11 Wittgenstein mentions this problem in the Tractatus but appears to solve it to his satisfaction by translating color into the speed of particles: the fact that a particle cannot simultaneously have different speeds accounts for chromatic incompatibility.12 This is hardly helpful, though, since we can now infer that “The light reflected [18.234.202.202] Project MUSE (2024...