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5 The Essence of Ground The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. For the ground keeps on giving us the illusory image of a greater depth, and when we seek to reach this, we keep on finding ourselves on the old level. Our disease is one of wanting to explain. —Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 333 Being is intrinsically groundlike, what gives ground, presences as the ground, has the character of ground. Precisely because it is groundlike, groundgiving, it cannot need a ground. The groundlike is groundless, what grounds, what presences as basis does not need the ground; that is, it is without something to which it could go back as something outside of it, there is no longer any back, no behind itself, but pure presencing itself. —Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, 170–171 As we have seen, Wittgenstein and Heidegger challenge a number of the assumptions and aspirations that have guided philosophy since its inception . One of these, foundationalism, is the attempt to trace all knowledge back to a source or set of claims that, as necessarily true, secure the truth of all that is derived from them. Just as a valid argument produces only true conclusions from true premises, so a properly built system insulates the circulation of truth throughout its entirety. As Descartes argues, if we don’t know that we know what we think we know, then we may not know it after all. The problem, which has been with us nearly as long as philosophy itself, is that a base–superstructure organization requires an ultimate level which itself has no justifying foundation underneath it. Absent the troubled notion of self-justifying beliefs, we have either a bottom level hovering over the abyss or, as they say, it’s turtles all the way down. Wittgenstein and Heidegger accept the first horn of this perennial dilemma. Stopping 174 Chapter 5 at an unjustified level only seems worrisome to a mindset conditioned by foundationalism to expect a transcendent ground which, more than being right, cannot be wrong, an idea which is incompatible with finite creatures like us. Freed from this incoherent demand, we can accept the grounding afforded by human nature and cultural norms as both all that is possible and all that is needed. Once we are weaned off millennia-old cravings for the transcendent, we can learn to live with the human. The Rise and Fall of Wittgenstein’s Foundationalism Wittgenstein’s early work, like most early analytic philosophy, is solidly foundationalist, although he leaves the identity of simple objects—the Tractarian system’s basic elements—undetermined except for the properties needed for language to work. Absolute determinacy of meaning requires language to bottom out in elementary propositions that directly correlate to states-of-affairs, and it is on the foundation of this language– reality isomorphism that the Tractarian edifice is built. Metaphysical atomism determines the nature of any language that could represent it, making logic metaphysically necessary.1 The absence of such a foundation seems to make the whole edifice of knowledge and societal practices sway vertiginously , threatening to collapse into epistemological nihilism with neither right nor wrong.2 Much of traditional philosophy is dedicated to building a bulwark against this possibility, propping up knowledge with all manner of metaphysical flying buttresses. A transcendental inquiry lends its conclusion an appealing finality: as long as the given phenomenon remains in effect, so must its necessary conditions. Just as Kant repeatedly claims that he has captured the mind’s transcendental structure once and for all, so the early Wittgenstein swears that logic is fully settled, reassuring the reader that “there can never be surprises in logic.”3 With all possible propositional permutations anticipated, logic leaves nothing for us to do beyond crafting an apposite sign-language. We have said that some things are arbitrary in the symbols that we use and that some things are not. In logic, it is only the latter that express: but that means that logic is not a field in which we express what we wish with the help of signs, but rather one in which the nature of the absolutely necessary signs speaks for itself. 4 Logic proper deals with the absolutely necessary, where we cannot meddle and nothing is arbitrary. The logician is a metaphysical stenographer, not a novelist. [3.16.76.43...

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