Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought 3030775496, 9783030775490

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Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought a l oi si a mose r

Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought “Although the concept of performativity has burgeoned for some time, Aloisia Moser newly applies the performative to the “inside.” Through an innovative reading of Wittgenstein and Kant, Moser sharpens the concept of performativity in such a way that it uncovers the eventfulness in the “act of thinking.” Moser thereby vividly reveals the freedom of thinking by questioning given a priori concepts.” —Sibylle Trawöger, University of Würzburg, Germany and author of Ästhetik des Performativen und Kontemplation “The manuscript presents an exciting and original approach to two historical philosophers of enduring contemporary interest. Moser further demonstrates Kant and Wittgenstein’s ongoing relevance by showing how a neglected point of contact between their respective philosophies may support a novel approach to contemporary issues in the philosophy of mind, language, and action.” —Daniel R. Herbert, University of Sheffield, UK

Aloisia Moser

Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought

Aloisia Moser Department of the History of Philosophy Catholic Private University Linz, Austria

ISBN 978-3-030-77549-0    ISBN 978-3-030-77550-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of my brother Franz

Preface

It is hard to express one’s thought—especially in sensibly perceptive propositions that take written form. My way of doing philosophy has a lot to do with what Wittgenstein elaborates in his thinking: doing philosophy by making true or false propositions inevitably falls short of the problems at hand. One quickly runs up against the limits of language, thought, and the world, especially if one limits oneself to that which can be said. I recognize that what can be shown cannot be said. Many years after I handed in a much earlier draft of this manuscript as my dissertation, I still suffer from not being able to say something about the world by generating propositions that are true or false. What I can do is to show by presenting an album, as Wittgenstein suggests in the Philosophical Investigations, by putting words next to one another. Putting propositions next to one another and putting paragraphs and chapters next to one another is not a way of saying what is true and what is false but of demonstrating a sense within certain constellations. This is why it has been so hard to publish this book. It was written in an architectonic structure aimed at showing the larger picture that I cannot state as facts. I make a comparison of the systems of two thinkers in order to show a family resemblance. Immanuel Kant and Ludwig Wittgenstein, respectively, struggle to make theories about how our experience can be about objects or how our thoughts and propositions can be about things in the world. Each thinker is shown to abandon a metaphysical theory that they initially propose—a theory that suggests an a priori or

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necessary connection between thought or proposition and thing. The work in this book is to elaborate each thinker’s steps and structures and set them up in relation to one another to show a correspondence in how they each ultimately end up making their theories performative. This may not seem to be a very big goal—philosophically speaking—to point out family resemblances, but if we follow the late Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning as use, it is a viable method, and I hope that I have made good use of it in the end. While I have tried to express my thoughts as clearly as I could, I have probably fallen short of my goal. I could not have said things better without writing a wholly new book, which is why this book needs to stand as it is. I hope it will please those of you who have also had similar thoughts when reading the Tractatus and the Critique of Pure Reason, and if it interests some of my readers, I will consider the book a success. Vienna, Austria April 2021

Aloisia Moser

Acknowledgments

Although “performativity” is now a prevalent term and topic of investigation, when I started to work on this book not many were pursuing this concept. The way I came to writing on performativity was through my work on theories of metaphor in my MA thesis while studying in Vienna and Berlin: “Metaphor and Metonymy—Paradigmatic and Syntagmatic Relations as the Movement of Language.” What I called movement of language then is what I call performativity of thought today. We need to make actual moves in order for thought or language to have meaning. During my studies at the New School for Social Research in New York the idea of connecting Kant and Wittgenstein to elaborate this performativity was formulated, and I thank my mentors for the inspiration they provided, especially Agnes Heller, Alice Crary, Dimitri Nikulin, James Dodd, and Jay Bernstein and Richard Bernstein. Friends without whom I would not have made it through the Ph.D. program are Kira Brunner, Katie Terezakis, Edward Butler, and Harvey Cormier. Thanks to all philosopher friends who sat down with me and discussed my ideas, some of which are part of the book Kant, Wittgenstein and the Performativity of Thought, and I owe this to all of you. Special thanks to Paul Livingston, who told me it was a book long before I knew. Parts of Chaps. 6 and 7 on Wittgenstein’s projection and zero method have already been printed in a paper on Hegel and Wittgenstein on method on pp. 283–287. Thanks to Christoph Schirmer and deGruyter for the permissions to reprinting these pages from “Hegel’s Speculative ix

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Method and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method.” In: J. Mácha, A. Berg (Eds.) Wittgenstein and Hegel. Reevaluation of Difference. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 275–290.” Finally, I want to thank my publisher Phil Getz at Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to publish the book as the short monograph that it is. Reviewers suggested making the chapters longer and including discussions of the main themes in Kant and Wittgenstein scholarship. It is my decision and responsibility alone to have opted out of these recommendations. I did not think it would add to the argument of the book. Last but not least I thank Jakub Mácha and Laura Schleussner—Jakub for understanding almost everything I say and write and for helping me with the index of the book. To Laura, wonderful friend, artist, translator, and proof reader who taught me many years ago, when we walked through the streets of postwall Berlin, to see something in the trash-torn ruins of the city, thanks for trying to whip this book into shape. To Brian, Francine, and Alan: there are no words for how grateful I am for our modern version of a nuclear family. I am so glad you are sharing my life and giving it form.

Contents

1 Introduction: Kant’s Acts of the Mind and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method  1 Part 1 Kant and the “I Think” as the Facticity of Thought  15 2 A Connection Between Thought and Thing A Priori 21 3 Judging as Connecting Thought and Thing 39 4 Synthesis and Bringing the Manifold of Intuition into an Image 51 Part II Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory as a Method of Projection  61 5 The Form of the Proposition 63 6 Projection Method 75 7 Logic Degree Zero 89

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Part III Kant’s Schematizing and Wittgenstein’s Picturing or Projecting as Performativity 103 8 Kant, Synthesis, and Schema107 9 Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Use119 10 Performativity and the Act of Thinking135 11 Conclusion147 Index153

About the Author

Aloisia Moser  is an assistant professor at the Catholic Private University in Linz, Austria. She studied philosophy, literature, and linguistics in Vienna and Berlin and earned a PhD from the New School for Social Research in New York. She was a visiting scholar and a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current research project is “On Guessing,” in which she continues to ponder the performativity of thought, stressing the contribution of the sensible.

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Abbreviations

Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 2001. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Meiner. (1st ed. Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich 1790) CPR Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) NB Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1961. Notebooks 1914–1916. Eds. G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Tagebücher 1914–1916 in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. PG Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 2004. Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. A. Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell. In German: 2015. Philosophische Grammatik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1973) PI Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) TLP Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. CJ

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Kant’s Acts of the Mind and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method

The application of logic decides what elementary propositions there are. What belongs to its application, logic cannot anticipate. It is clear that logic must not clash with its application. But logic has to be in contact with its application. Therefore, logic and its application must not overlap. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Why do we need a theory of the act of thinking? There are two major ways of talking about meaning in language and thought. On the one hand, there are scholars who explain meaning by first providing atomic building blocks, which have meanings, and then showing the way these blocks are put together to make larger blocks of meaning. Such theories can be called semantic. On the other hand, there are scholars who focus first on the putting-together and do not accord meaning to the atomic elements. These theories can be called pragmatic. In this book I show that what makes a proposition meaningful are neither the contents of the atomic bits that we put together nor the pragmatics of putting together bits of language or thought. Instead, the fact that we make sentences or speak or think at all is what gives meaning to thought

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_1

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or language.1 Hence, I introduce a performative account of meaning that is pragmatic in a new sense. The following examination of Kant and Wittgenstein will offer an initial idea of how thought or language can be taken to be meaningful in this performative or pragmatic way. I am not claiming that Kant or Wittgenstein conceived their respective theories of the act of thinking as I do; rather, I read both philosophers’ works in such a way as to show that a theory of the act of thinking is nascent in the theories they each present, and these theories of the act of thinking are rooted in a problem each respective thinker encounters. While Kant holds that the understanding produces errors upon attempting to think the thing in itself, Wittgenstein finds that general or logical propositions are nonsensical. I argue that these insights are parallel and consequential: they demonstrate the impossibility of metaphysics; they reveal that things in themselves cannot be known and that atomic bits of meaning cannot be determined. Finally, I show how pragmatics or performativity can be found in both Kant and Wittgenstein. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason a projection of transcendental ideas enables the unity of the understanding, while in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus the projection of the proposition makes possible the comparison of thought or sentence and the world. I do not look at logical theories or philosophical methods as such, but at the application of theories and methods—the acts of thinking them. Both Kant and Wittgenstein write explicitly about acts of thinking. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is largely occupied with what he calls “acts of the mind,” in German Handlungen des Gemüts,2 Gemüt being an old-fashioned 1  It is easy to regard such an account of pragmatic meaning, consisting in that a sentence is spoken or that a thought is thought, in a deflationary sense. But I do not mean to say that it is just the sense of importance that makes a thought meaningful, and that we lack criteria for the intelligibility of thought. What I am to show is that we do not have such criteria after the collapse of semantics and pragmatics. A new understanding of pragmatic theories is needed that also includes a new understanding of what intelligibility could mean once we cannot affix meaning to bits of language or thought in the old way of comparing them with facts. This will become clearer in Chap. 5 in which I offer a new reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as presenting such an account. 2  These acts of the mind or Gemütshandlungen are to draw together what comes in through the senses in the categories. Kant’s description of the conditions of the possibility of experience is a description of the kinds of acts that the mind needs to exert for us to have the experience of a thing (see CPR A105). Unfortunately, this involves “pseudo-acts,” as Wittgenstein would call them similarly to how he calls propositions of logic “pseudo-propositions” (TLP 4.1272), a sort of a priori act of connecting in the mind, which has already taken place before we even have a thought. Only if these exist can we be guaranteed to have

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expression for what we today call the mind. Wittgenstein describes the notion of application and also the projection method as part of the core of his so-­called picture theory in which a fact is applied to, or projected onto, the world to make a comparison. Kant and Wittgenstein, I argue further, both come to realize over time that to think the use of a constructed system entails the use coming to play a role in its own construction. While they describe the elements of the mind and the ways in which the mind acts, they realize that they also needed to take into consideration the experiences and acts of the mind itself as well as what the mind having already experienced and acted means for an ongoing practice.3 What I focus on throughout this book is thinking a system in its application or as applied. How does thought, in the course of thinking, take on authority over what the thought is about? Are the a priori categories of thought merely enacted in the mind? Do we just compare the sentence as fact with the fact in the world? I argue that something more happens in the act of thinking or speaking itself—in its performance, use, or application—and that “something more” is what we call meaning. The first thesis of my book is thus that meaning is performative and pragmatic; it is what happens in the act of thinking or speaking. Wittgenstein’s claim that there is no gap between thought or language and what they are about is, if considered closely, the claim of an idealist monist. Only if we give up the dualism of mind and world do we understand why there would be no gap in the first place. All there is for Wittgenstein is the thinking and speaking that we do about the world; that is the world. We find a similar position in Kant, who thinks that unification in thinking, our Gemütshandlungen or acts of the mind,4 does necessarily give us knowledge of things, since the way things are connected and the way the mind is connected are the same.5 The second thesis of this book is “true” knowledge, that is, for our system of thought to carve nature at its true joints (see Plato 1972, 265e). 3  This will be worked out in Chap. 10. 4  Normal acts of the mind connect representations, but a priori acts of the mind seem to be making the connection to a thing—as I will show in Part I. 5  Compare this to Bernhard Ritter’s book Kant and Post-Tractarian Wittgenstein (Ritter 2020). Ritter argues that “Kant and Wittgenstein invoke elaborated conceptions of ‘philosophical illusion’ in their criticisms of metaphysics” (2020, 53). With this he tries to show that the kind of transcendental idealism Kant espouses is problematic idealism and bears a relationship to Wittgenstein. In contrast, my linking of Wittgenstein and Kant does not draw

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that thinking and speaking are acts which perform the connecting or uniting between thought and thing, a connection that is not really a connection, since, as Wittgenstein says, there is no gap in the first place. Thinking and speaking are thus performative acts that put both thought or language and thing on the map. This performativity will be spelled out in more detail in Part III. In other words, Kant and Wittgenstein each engage in a transcendental project of projecting unity; both are interested in a theory of projection as unification that makes possible the structure of representation as the unity of representation and represented. Kant and Wittgenstein are jointly driven by two fantasies: one, the method of projection establishes unity and, two, a proposition’s determinacy or unity is a structure of proof. I aim to show that Kant and Wittgenstein do not cling to their fantasies over the course of their careers but revert to performative theories in their subsequent work. Let us ponder the problem at hand in a basic thought experiment, posing the question: What enables us to think or speak about anything in the first place? How do we have the capacity to emit sounds in the form of words that are about things? We think thoughts; we can say words that are about things. How did we get there? When we watch a baby babble, we see that the baby uses similar sounds over and over again, sounds that seem to us to be practicing and that mean different things at each repetition. Mjum could be a sound for all things that can be eaten—or for things wanted. Da da da could apply to toys or other things that came to the baby’s attention. A brrr sound may be made after dropping things. There may also be a questioning da da da sound, as if the baby is asking something. Each baby will develop similar but different sounds to do all this and more. One could say that by reiterating sounds, babies perform the connection between the sounds and the things they engage with. One would thereby have to contend that each baby is able to invent its own language. But that is not the case; sooner or later they are trained, or broken into, the language.6 It is usually not at all difficult for the caretaker to from idealism. Although I argue that they both elaborate a position that is idealist, I emphasize that they think we cannot espouse idealism or a metaphysical stance—that it is a fantasy. My position on Wittgenstein is more akin to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s “Wittgenstein: No Linguistic Idealist” in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language (Grève and Mácha, pp. 117–38). 6  “Breaking in” is my translation of Wittgenstein’s use of Abrichten or Abrichtung (PI §5). The standard translation for the corresponding noun Abrichtung as “training” or “drill” is,

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know what a baby means with her sounds. The repertoire of sounds is like a web or net that applies to the things so far available in the baby’s horizon of experience. Over time the horizon of experience grows, as does the web of sounds or phonemes.7 Through exposure to our web of sounds and the way it covers our experience of things, we break children into speaking our language. Children born in any part of the world can be successfully broken into any language. Similarly, semiotics holds that the connection between sign and signified is arbitrary;8 in some sense, anyone could make any sound mean anything. In a very basic sense, however, we all must trust that there is some such connection; otherwise we would not be able to speak to each other or make sense when we think by ourselves.9 What is at stake is the nature of this connection, and I will work to show that the connection is not a priori, a transcendentally logical connection, nor even logical, but performative and pragmatic. My book reinterprets Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as dealing with the union of mind and world.10 Both philosophers, I argue, develop a system of (transcendental) logic, only to question the validity of the system in terms of its application. With Kant, we are holding on to the myth that there is something—such as a law of some sort, a logical a priori connection or the categories—that causes thoughts or bits of language to be about something. Kant’s Transcendental Deduction, in which the a priori categories are described as enabling our in my opinion, not strong enough. The German term Abrichtung is usually used in the context of the military—the training of soldiers—or with wild animals that are trained to obey. I think training or drill does not reflect the intensity of the transformation taking place, from being wild or free to being broken into society, a specific kind of behavior and culture. Giesinger who wrote about the pedagogical meaning of the term also holds that the English translation as “training” is much softer than the German Abrichtung, since it does not recall the breaking in of animals (see Giesinger 2008). 7  Linguists define the phoneme as the smallest contrastive unit in the sound system of a language. In the case of babies, we can see that both sides, the side of the phonemes and the side of what the phonemes are about, constantly evolve and change. Babies are born with the capacity to make the sounds of all languages and only over time do they learn to use some of them and not others, for example, a baby adopted from China will be able to roll the “r,” whereas it cannot distinguish between the sounds of the Chinese language. 8  That the sign is arbitrary was one of Ferdinand de Saussure’s groundbreaking insights. There is no necessary connection or connection of similarity or of causality between the sign and what it stands for (de Saussure and Harris 1998). 9  This is the problem of the private language argument as elaborated by Saul Kripke (1984). 10  In Mind and World (1994), McDowell also makes this point in relation to Kant.

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experience and knowledge to be objective or about something, is thus problematized. Once it is demonstrated that the a priori categories are acts of the mind (Handlungen des Gemüts), it becomes clear that they cannot be rigid and timeless but are altered over time by culture. The solution is thus to read the Transcendental Deduction as pragmatic. The categories are performative in exactly this sense: we arrive at meaning by making the connection between language or thought and the world in the way we do. By this reading, Kant’s categories must be understood as becoming acts of the mind that make possible the connection to things in the first place. Kant knew he could be neither skeptical nor dogmatic about the connection. The critical method clarifies to what extent the connection could be subjective in some sense, and yet remain objective. In providing a theory of the act of thinking through discussing Kant’s projection of unity in the categories in the Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s projection method in the Tractatus, I aim to show that our access to things exists and is warranted—but not beyond thought or language. Any justification of this access cannot be in a proof or a final principle that traditional philosophy would have provided. Part and parcel of my thesis is marking the change from the traditional high hopes of ontology and metaphysics to a critical and modern understanding of exposition and discursivity. The problem of how concepts are connected to the things they are about can be tackled through a discussion of Kant’s critical work, only when we pay attention to his discourse on the form or architectonic of the system itself. Kant’s critical turn, from investigating the object of experience to elaborating the conditions of the possibility of experience (of things), does not stop there but invites us to continue our critical turning, to ask about the conditions of the presentation of the system as well. Kant and Wittgenstein should be understood as two poles of a characteristically modern and critical impetus to address the conditioning of the framework for sense/meaning11 as well as the epistemic possibility of, and the constraints on, presenting that framework. “Modern and critical” mean here that we made a turn to investigating language and thought about things as opposed to the things that they represent (in themselves).12 11  I use sense and meaning synonymously for the purposes of this book, aiming to show that the act of thinking guarantees meaning or for experience to have an object in Kant, and the act of using a proposition (making a projection with it) makes propositions have sense in Wittgenstein. 12  This would of course make Socrates a “modern,” inasmuch as he claims to do just this in his “second sailing” (Benardete 1989). But with Kant, and later Wittgenstein, it is not just

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We need such modern and critical philosophy in both its transcendental and linguistic expressions, but we need especially to gain insight into its application. The theory of the act of thinking will provide an account of how Kant and Wittgenstein’s logical systems need to be applied in order for us to have the experience of things or for propositions to have sense. The theory of the act of thinking spells out how—in the act of thinking and speaking—the connection is made between thought or proposition and what it is about. This becomes clear when one recognizes the marked similarities between Kant’s structure of experience and Wittgenstein’s structure of the proposition. * * * In the following chapters I lay bare what we can call an isomorphic structure: the structure of experience in Kant and the structure of the proposition in Wittgenstein.13 I show that according to Kant and Wittgenstein these structures are respectively conditioned by a form of experience or a form of the proposition, which they respectively think accounts for the alleged connection of mind and world. The form of experience and the form of the proposition are each said to be the possibility of structure.14 Laying bare this structure coincides with the explanation of how form is the possibility of structure. A theory is bound to fail if it tries to prove that its elements are rightfully connected just the way they are, for these elements are not part of the theory’s domain, but are rather the possibility of such a domain, the domain within which the theory proves things to be the case and necessarily so. No system can extend itself beyond this domain. One could say that logic works inasmuch as tautologies illuminate such elements without anyone needing to see anything in them. Language, however, works differently; it shows something in or about the world.

turning the investigation to thought or language about the thing but examining the act of thinking and speaking itself that alone brings forth the thing. 13  The Stanford Encyclopedia holds that Wittgenstein actually considered the logical structure of a picture, both a mental picture and an image described in words, to be isomorphic with the logical structure of the state of affairs it pertains to (see Biletzki and Mater 2001). 14  Friedlander’s reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, which elaborates form as the possibility of structure, develops this point and its implications for a performativity of thought and language (Friedlander 2001, 35 and 165–66). I will discuss Friedlander’s account in Chap. 5.

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Let me provide a picture that exemplifies the problem at hand. The picture depicts the human mind as it engages with the world. We imagine that in order for thoughts to latch onto things, there must be a system of thought that is matched to a system of things. Each part of the system of thought corresponds to an equal or similar part in the system of things. One can imagine one realm standing opposed to the other and lines extending out from one to the other, making all the connections. We define these lines as rules or calculi that describe the connections of the corresponding parts. Let us go inside the picture. One side of the picture of the mind and world connected shows the mind, consisting of thoughts or linguistic items that are connected through internal or logical relations. The other side, the world, consists of things that are connected through external or spatiotemporal relations. How are the two realms themselves connected? What kind of relation relates them? Or, in other words, what does about-­ ness, thought, or language being about things, really amount to? Something is wrong with this picture, though, because something is wrong with any attempt to picture the relation of about-ness. A. B. Dickerson writes that pictures are not merely configurations of ink marks. We need to see something in the picture. Therefore the burden of the explanation lies in justifying our ability to see this or that in the picture, to see what it pictures (Dickerson 2007, 13).15 We may try to make the picture more adequate by taking things instead from one side or the other exclusively. On the one hand, the picture presents something to us: lines and strokes configured in a certain way. On the other hand, we see something in the picture. What makes the picture a picture, the connection between these two things, does not lie in a oneto-­one relation between the picture and the pictured, but in a bigger picture, something like a net. With Wittgenstein, we speak of a shared network of propositions, a network of language that is said to mirror the world. What is still wrong with this picture is that there are two realms and a connection between them. Neither can we account for the connection nor can we account for the shape of the mind or the world system. Therefore, if we do not think of mind and world as two realms, disconnected and needing lines to connect them, we do not have to answer questions as to how the one or the other is constituted and how the two are therefore  This will be discussed in greater detail in Chap. 4.

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connected. However, insofar as these questions can be taken simply as questions about things in the world, they can then be answered. That is, we can think of the mind and the world as one realm. McDowell has treated this in his 1994 book Mind and World (McDowell 1994). Of special interest is his incorporation of Wilfrid Sellars’ work, who thinks about perceptual sensations, which are always already ordered according to certain principles in our minds, and how they correspond to things in the actual making of experience. We are always already connected to the world we live in by way of experiencing it or talking about it, according to Sellars (1992, 54) who is influenced in this respect by Martin Heidegger. The act of thinking or speaking, I aim to elaborate, is related to this work done by Sellars. Our form of experience or language is shaped by our natural history of thinking and speaking. The mind’s ability to judge and therefore to have a world exists in the dynamic activity of categorizing, in time, so that thought is both a kind of process of coming to terms with things and a morphology of its own efforts. Thought has to unfold in time in order to be thought at all. In elaborating a theory of the act of thinking as expressing a connection between mind and world—that is, however, not a relation—one problem that arises is arguing that mind and world are impossible to separate, while contradicting this point by simply laying bare their distinct structures.16 This reintroduces the gap or chasm between mind and world that the investigation tried to avoid in the first place. The difficulty is thinking mind and world as united, while at the same time allowing the unfolding of a structure that first presents them as separate, only to then draw them together into a unity. Contemporary debates are either naturalist,17 privileging the world, or intentionalist, privileging the mind. The claim made is either that everything is nature, whereby nature includes causal features of the brain to which intentionality can be reduced, or that the contents of our mind and the ideal structures they entail are all that exist. But both naturalist and intentionalist accounts fall back on a projection of the primary kind. A naturalist would argue, on the one hand, 16  How do we differentiate between the two, if thought and world are not disconnected in the first place? The solution to this is either a completely idealist position, which makes everything into thought, or alternatively a completely materialist position, as Karen Barad would have it in which matter and what matters are the same or in her words “matter and meaning are not separate elements” (see Barad 2007, 3–38). 17  Most recently we have a number of neo-materialist accounts that perfectly represent the unity from the side of nature, as elaborated in the work of Coole and Frost (2010, 1–43).

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that when we have the experience of something, our perceptual apparatus brings external properties or sensible material from the outside to the inside of our mind by making a copy or representation. The internal relations are therefore merely derived from external ones.18 The intentionalist, on the other hand, would start by positing internal relations between representations of things in our mind—as all that is accessible to us in the first place—and then tell us that those are subsequently projected onto the world. Like the intentionalist, I too argue that the mind projects its internal relations onto the world. However, there is a difference in how I show the “projection” as unfolding. The theory of the act of thinking I develop claims that the structure of our minds and of language is not distinct from the structure of that about which we are thinking or speaking. This structure is one and performed in the projection or in the act. The nature of the (human) mind is to unfold in its activity of judging and categorizing and to create and have a world by that unfolding activity. * * * A roadmap for this book: In Part I, Chap. 2, I investigate Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the categories in the A-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason as the development of a threefold structure of unity or unification that grapples with every one of the problems mentioned above. Kant elaborates an account of the form of experience (of the object), which makes experience possible in a structure that unites intuition and concepts through a rule of projection. Subsequently I give pride of place to two readings of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction that help provide certain elements of my own account of the act of thinking. In Chap. 3 I discuss a line of argument in Béatrice Longuenesse’s Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Longuenesse 1998), which defends the theory that as an act of imagination synthesis is indebted to our capacity to judge. I discuss Kant’s A-Deduction, in which I stress that we are not dealing with an account of identity or self-reference in transcendental apperception. In 18  Here Karen Barad’s account of agential materialism is an interesting exception. She does not think that representation is even the right way of looking at this relation between mind and matter but holds there is an interrelation between subject and object that does not make the one into the agent and the other into the object but does away with the subject-object split (Barad 2007, 132–88).

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Chap. 4, I offer an overview of A. B. Dickerson’s reading of Kant, which boils transcendental apperception down to seeing something in a picture. This is followed by my own reading of “seeing in” as always involving a schema on top of the image, whereby I incorporate the transcendental part of Kant that Dickerson leaves out. Finally, I use the insights of Longuenesse’s and Dickerson’s accounts to go one step further and argue that transcendental apperception in Kant’s system can be read as an account of the referentiality of the sign, in the sense that signs signify right off the bat, so to speak. They can only do so, however, once they are in use or enacted. This is the necessity of the act of thinking that I aim to elaborate. In Part II, Chap. 5, I discuss how the form of the proposition, as laid out in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is threefold and similar to Kant’s structure of experience: the propositional sign together with its symbolizing method is the signified. This projection method also works under the assumption that there is one general form of proposition from which all other propositions can be inferred. I take Eli Friedlander’s claim that in the Tractatus “form is the possibility of the structure” (Friedlander 2001, 166) and push it one step further, showing Wittgenstein’s attempt to give us the general form of the proposition out of which all propositions of language can be produced (TLP 4.5–4.52). There is a rule of projection in Wittgenstein similar to the one in Kant, which entails similar problems in terms of the act of thinking. In Chap. 6, I present Wittgenstein’s threefold account of propositions that have sense, have no sense, or are nonsensical as a function of their use. In Chap. 7, I show that Wittgenstein plays with introducing a zero point of logic, which would be akin to a proposition without application or a transcendental category. To conclude, I foreshadow the solution for a theory of the act of thinking by arguing that the Tractatus gives an early solution to the problem of rule following. In Part III, Chap. 8, I distinguish a theory of the act of thinking by elaborating how I derive it from the discussion of the respective threefold structures in Kant and Wittgenstein. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant challenges his own system with the notion of a “preformation-system of pure reason” as a “middle course” (CPR B167).19 Paul Guyer points to 19  Kant writes: “If someone still wanted to propose a middle way between the only two, already named ways, namely, that the categories were neither self-thought a priori first principles of our cognition nor drawn from experience, but were rather subjective predispositions

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this passage (Guyer 1987, 368–9) and maintains that if we had such a system of preformation, we would not be able to say that nature satisfies the categories. I claim that in order to make sense of how thought can have a bearing on that which it is about, we need to insist that Kant’s system is precisely performative, as opposed to pre-formative. While we cannot find the term performative in Kant, I demonstrate the performativity of reason in Kant’s system through a comparison of the structure of experience to Wittgenstein’s structure of the proposition in Tractatus. A discussion of Longuenesse helps us approach Kant’s work in the Critique of Judgment, and I elaborate how the concept of reflective judgment there, especially aesthetic judgment, warrants a performative reading of Kant. In Chap. 9, I revisit the Rule Following Considerations of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, which leads to the claim that it is never the rule alone that warrants its application, but rather being part of a form of life that makes us know how to go on doing the same thing. Finally, Chap. 10 on performativity presents the conclusion that there is no gap between thought or language, and what they are about, the connection being made in use, and on each occasion through performativity. I discuss the notion of performativity of language, from its inception to the manner in which I employ it as performativity of thought in making the fundamental argument of this book.

References Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Benardete, Seth. 1989. Socrates’ Second Sailing: On Plato’s Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Biletzki, Anat, and Anat Mater. 2001. Wittgenstein. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Accessed February 22, 2021. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ wittgenstein/. Coole, Diana H., and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

for thinking, implanted in us along with our existence by our author in such a way that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along which experience runs (a kind of preformation system of pure reason)” (CPR B 167).

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de Saussure, Ferdinand, and Roy Harris. 1998. Course in General Linguistics. Reprint edition. LaSalle, Ill: Open Court. In French 1st  ed. 1995. Cours de linguistique generale. Payot, coll. “Grande Bibliotheque Payot”. Dickerson, A.B. 2007. Kant on Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedlander, Eli. 2001. Signs of Sense: Reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Giesinger, Johannes. 2008. Abrichten und Erziehen. Zur pädagogischen Bedeutung der Spätphilosophie Ludwig Wittgensteins. Pädagogische Rundschau 62: 285–289. Grève, Sebastian Sunday, and Jakub Mácha, eds. 2016. Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 2001. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Meiner. (1st ed. Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich 1790) (Abbreviated as CJ) ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Kripke, Saul A. 1984. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. 2016. Wittgenstein: No Linguistic Idealist. In Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. Sebastian Sunday Grève and Jakub Mácha, 117–138. Palgrave Macmillan. Plato, 1972. Plato: Phaedrus. Edited by Reginald Hackforth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ritter, Bernhard. 2020. Kant and Post-Tractarian Wittgenstein. Palgrave Macmillan. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1992. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (abbreviated as PI) ———. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

PART 1

Kant and the “I Think” as the Facticity of Thought

In the first part of this book, I discuss Kant’s philosophy, especially the transcendental apperception of the Critique of Pure Reason, in order to lay the groundwork for a theory of the act of thinking that is performative and pragmatic. My aim is to pursue a new way of understanding the unity of the understanding in transcendental apperception as a uniting activity that is performative. To do so I first present Kant’s account of thinking, which consists of a range of acts of the mind that are brought about through different faculties and powers, but are also acts of the projection of transcendental ideas. Unity or uniting, according to Kant, makes possible the thought connection between the acts of the mind and things that these acts are about. However, it is always about possible experiences of objects, and never about real objects or things in themselves. I argue that this connection is not an a priori or logical connection, but a performative and pragmatic one. In the following paragraphs I give an outline of a step-by-step exegesis of how Kant conceives the connecting of thought or mind and world in transcendental apperception. I pay special attention to what kind of acts of the mind are at work. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant determines the a priori categories of our mind to be the conditions of possibility for the experience of things. He argues that we can be sure that our experience is the experience of objects, only because objects conform to these a priori categories of our mind. Let me begin with a detailed outline of how Kant thinks we undergo

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experience, or how we (re-)cognize what comes in through the senses as being the same as the categories we have in the mind a priori. Our mind receives objects through intuition in the form of sense perceptions. However, our sensations are not completely undetermined— they are not mere noises—but are already shaped by what Kant calls the forms of intuition. In the Transcendental Aesthetics Kant argues that we perceive all objects through the forms of intuitions that are time and space, which he also calls a priori intuitions. This is the first activity of the mind that Kant describes. He calls it the first faculty of the mind, sensibility or receptivity,1 with the a priori intuitions time and space. There is a second activity or faculty of the mind that does not receive objects but orders or categorizes them.2 Kant calls this faculty the understanding or spontaneity, and it orders the sense perceptions that were first received through the intuitions of space and time. Spontaneity has its own ordering devices—the categories, which also are a priori. It is the connection of the two activities or faculties of receptivity and spontaneity a priori that ensures that we have objects of experience and not just empty experiences. I will flesh out this connection as a uniting activity. It is not enough to have a priori intuitions and a priori concepts; we also need the act of uniting them, which is the activity of judging. We have to think of experience as a threefold structure that resembles an equation or is an act of equating or judging. Things are on the one hand received through the a priori intuitions of time and space and on the other hand ordered by the a priori categories. The full act of experience according to Kant is then a judgment of the following kind: what is taken in by the senses and what is ordered by the categories is united or judged to be the same. My point about performativity or pragmatics is that this equation or judgment has to be actually made in order for experience to have 1  See Kant (CPR B33): “The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility.” The German original reads: “Die Fähigkeit (Rezeptivität), Vorstellungen durch die Art, wie wir von Gegenständen affiziert werden, zu bekommen, heißt Sinnlichkeit.” 2  At the beginning of “The Transcendental Doctrine of Elements Second Part,” “The Transcendental Logic,” in the Introduction “The Idea of a Transcendental Logic” Kant writes: “Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources of the mind. The first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions), the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts); through the former an object is given to us; through the latter it is thought in relation to that representation (as a mere determination of the mind).” (CPR A50/B74)

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an object or content according to Kant. This is the meaning of “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (CPR B132) as we will see later on. My main contribution to reading Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is, however, to point out that the discussion of the a priori forms or categories of the mind is generally a discussion about static logic and order, not about the ordering activity or the acts of thinking. What is new about my reading of Kant is its focus, not on the logical ordering devices that the categories are or where they come from, but on the act of judging. I am interested in underlining that the a priori forms of intuition, time and space, on the receiving side, and the a priori categories, on the ordering side, are the same, their formal dimension only coming about in the making of a judgment. Kant gives an account of this activity of judging the a priori intuitions and the a priori categories only in transcendental logic, since general logic only deals with a form independently of an object. This is why I focus on the transcendental apperception, in which Kant discusses three syntheses that are the making of that judgment. In the following three chapters I will give a close reading of both general logic and transcendental logic to show why the connection remains empty in general logic and becomes a necessary connection in transcendental logic. * * * Chapter 2: “A Connection Between Thought and Thing a priori” looks at the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction to provide us with the link between thought and what thought is about. I stay close to the text to elaborate the connection in an equation of the threefold syntheses Kant describes. The equation set up by Kant—that the synthesis of apprehension and the synthesis of reproduction are judged as the same in the synthesis of apperception—works only because there is also transcendental apperception, which brings with it another three syntheses that are repeated on the transcendental level and assure the connection a priori. I show that the distinction between general and transcendental logic made by Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason forces us to reexamine the way experience is connected to what it is about. I argue—in a rereading of Kant’s account of transcendental apperception—that the connection between experience and what experience is about is dependent on a performativity of reason or the very act of thinking or making the connection in a judgment. It is not an a priori connection, but a performative one. I

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argue that apperception is performativity. My focus is on the term Vorstellung—re-presentation—which I translate literally as putting-before-­ the-mind, since it helps us understand how the power of imagination— Vorstellungskraft—is already active the moment we have an experience. We put something in front of our mind in a form that fits with the categories under which it will be subsumed. But what is at stake is the act of doing so. In Chap. 3: “Judging as Connecting Thought and Thing” I discuss the second set of syntheses again and focus on how Kant presents transcendental apperception in the B-edition by characterizing it as a connecting of the thought and thing through the mind’s capacity to judge. The key to the account of performativity of thought or language that I elaborate in this chapter is seeing it as an act of experiencing something as something. I set up the following equation: what is taken in by the senses is equal to what the mind puts in front of itself, as given in the transcendental deduction. I show that the equation of the three syntheses, which is without sense in general logic, becomes meaningful through the relation to intuition, when it is looked at from the viewpoint of transcendental logic. The difference is made by what I call the latent performativity of the mind, which is evident in Kant’s account of spontaneity in the transcendental logic. My account of performativity draws from Beatrice Longuenesse’s reading in Kant and the Capacity to Judge, in which she argues that the table of categories and the table of the logical forms of judgment are parallel in Kant’s system, because the reflections that men have made on the operations of their mind has led to forms of mental activity in the form of universal rules of discursive thought. (Cf. 1998, 5). In Longuenesse’s interpretation, the categories are conditions of the possibility of cognition. They are therefore able to provide the needed connection between thought and world, a connection crystallized in judging and judgmental forms. While Longuenesse provides proof that we use the categories legitimately when we experience something as something, I put my emphasis on the act of experiencing something as something, which is what enables us to have experience of a thing. A.  B. Dickerson’s representationalist reading of Kant in Kant, Representation and Objectivity distinguishes between the representation and what we see in the representation as the object of experience, and thereby gives us another reading that makes the experience of the thing dependent on the uniting activity of the thinker. Together with Dickerson I support my reading of Kant by considering an interpretation that does

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not make a great deal out of the distinction between general and transcendental logic. This is why Chap. 4: “Synthesis and Bringing the Manifold of Intuition into an Image” gives an outline of Dickerson’s representationalist reading. It also shows that it cannot solve the problem presented in Kant: how can we critique our thought practices, if we cannot assume a standpoint outside of our thinking? I argue that Dickerson’s reading falls short precisely because it is unable to pick up the performative aspect of the theory presented by Kant, and that Kant does not give a representationalist reading but a performative one. Though Dickerson offers an insightful reflection on the connection between experience and thing experienced, he does not deal with transcendental apperception and transcendental logic directly. While Dickerson is right in emphasizing that seeing something in a representation is an important aspect of Kant’s theory, he remains within the image or picture as rule, and he does not go on to discuss what it is that Kant calls a transcendental schema. The schema is more than just seeing an image in something; it is a method of projecting something that performs the connection. I will say more about the schema in Chap. 8: “Kant, Synthesis, and Schema.”

CHAPTER 2

A Connection Between Thought and Thing A Priori

And without that sort of unity, which has its rule a priori, and which subjects the appearances to itself, thoroughgoing and universal, hence necessary unity of consciousness would not be encountered in the manifold perceptions. But these would then belong to no experience, and would consequently be without an object, and would be nothing but a blind play of representations, i.e., less than a dream. —Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason1

In this chapter I discuss the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction and show how the necessary link between thought and what it is about is made. I examine in detail how Kant shows that on the level of general logic this connection cannot be assured, since general logic is about logical forms apart from their content, but that we need the transcendental level for the connection to be made in judgment. I end the chapter with an interpretation of Kant’s account of transcendental apperception to show the connection to be performative rather than a priori. I argue that apperception is performativity.

1  See Kant (CPR A 112). The full quote is about the category of cause, which serves as a unity synthesizing one appearance with the other. But Kant’s point here early in the Critique of Pure Reason is that unity has a transcendental basis and that without appearances being united in a concept we could not have objects.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_2

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I begin my discussion of Kant with an emphasis on the different notions Kant uses to set up the connection, most importantly the notion of unity. According to Kant, we draw the manifold of sense perceptions that we receive in intuition together into a unity (the category). This makes it possible for us to have an experience of an object. To make it easier for the reader and make sure we are on the same page, I will first give a recap of the first sections of the Critique of Pure Reason. What Kant investigates is the way we have an experience of objects. He starts the book with what he calls the Transcendental Aesthetics. In it he explains how we first must have objects given to us in order for us to have experience of them. “We are affected2 by objects” (CPR A19/B33)—which Kant calls sensibility; our general capacity to acquire presentations he calls receptivity. Transcendental aesthetics deals with the principles of a priori sensibility. The system is sophisticated and complicated, but once one gets the basic distinctions, it becomes clear that throughout the Critique of Pure Reason Kant repeatedly makes the point about human reasoning being limited; he does this by using different vocabulary or by inserting it at different points within the architecture of his theory, as it were. Kant’s emphasis is clear in his title: Critique of Pure Reason. Let me start with drawing up the distinctions, again pretty much as Kant does. He sets out to demonstrate how experience can be had by the likes of us: human beings who take in their impressions through the senses, and who have a mind that works on what comes in through the senses once it is put in front of the mind. He also describes in what cases we cannot have an experience. There is one expression in Kant that I find mistranslated. It is the concept of Vorstellung. I am trying to revive it quite literally as the mechanistic “doing” that it conveys by translating it more technically in some passages as “before-putting,” Vorstellung as in putting 2  Only in the twentieth century has philosophy made what we call an emotional or affective turn in which we look at this part of Kant in terms of sensibility, the fact that we are affected by objects. There are several strains in contemporary philosophy that start with this notion. Most recently there is a new notion of “affordance”—which stresses the agential side of that which encounters the mind, thereby making matter into something more active than previously conceptualized. Various approaches to this concept of agency include those of MarieLouise Angerer (2007) on “affect,” James J.  Gibson (2014) on “affordance” and Bruno Latour (2005) on actor-network-theories. The concept of agency also marks the fruitful beginning of what we call artistic research today—a research that is not driven by the conceptuality of our mind but by the kind of knowledge that we can get through the senses, as described by Dieter Mersch in Epistemologies of Aesthetics (2015) and Anke Haarmann’s Artistic Research (2019).

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something before the mind.3 Kant chooses this term, because there is a step between the having-of-sense-impressions and the processing of them, which is to put them in front of our mind. Using this vocabulary, one can see how the sense impressions go from being mere intuitions to being perceptions—by being put in front of the mind, by virtue of having been registered/processed in a certain way. And this is what transcendental aesthetics is about. It is about “in a certain way” that there are forms in which our senses allow sense impression to be taken in or sensed. These forms Kant calls the forms of intuition. More importantly, however, he insists that all of our Vorstellungen—our “before-puttings”—are always already in time and space, which are our a priori forms of intuition. We could say that through the intuitions space and time our sense impressions are presented in front of our mind and by virtue of that they are represented.4 What presentation and representation as translations both lack is the connection of Vorstellung to the term Vorstellungskraft—the power of before-­ putting—because once we put something before ourselves in the mind, we imagine that thing, which is the connection to the power of imagination. The latter will become so important in the course of transcendental logic that we cannot afford to miss this connection. Kant divides up experience into different faculties, which he painstakingly analyzes, and within those faculties he sets up categories and principles. It takes the whole thought, in the real sense of the whole act of thinking, for a thought to be true, to be about something, to have content, and so on. However, in analyzing how we have an experience of things, it becomes clear to Kant that we kid ourselves into thinking an experience of things is possible in instances when we really cannot have an experience. This is the point of the Transcendental Dialectic, which comes after the Transcendental Analytic and in which Kant shows what ensues when the human mind cognizes a thing a priori. We simply cannot do that. Confusing about the beginning of the Critique of Pure Reason is the way Kant introduces us to two faculties of the mind: sensibility, or as Kant also calls it receptivity, which is our ability to take in sense impressions and understanding or spontaneity, which is our ability to subsume these sense 3  Dickerson also uses the same wording: “Kant’s German term for ‘representation’ captures this sense nicely, for a Vorstellung is literally a before-putting” (2004, 15). 4  Guyer and Wood (1999), whose translation I mainly use, translate Vorstellungen as “representations,” which is better than “presentations,” but still not as evocative as the act of “putting before.”

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impressions under a concept. Kant makes it very clear that both have to work together for us to have the experience of an object. But when we look closely at the acts of the mind described—Kant calls them Handlungen des Gemüts—we realize that there is a third power of the mind, or faculty, that gets thrown in at some point and that really seems to do all the heavy pulling. What I mean here is the power of imagination (Vorstellungskraft) already mentioned above. It makes sense that Kant does not single it out as a particular faculty of the mind because it is more or less built into the working together of the other two faculties; it is a go-between, so to speak. Especially in the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction we can see beautifully how this “third” aspect relates to the others, and why Vorstellungskraft is always already the act of combining the two or the act of judging them to be the same. * * * We start with transcendental aesthetics as the science of all principles of a priori sensibility and with transcendental logic as the science of principles of pure thinking. What Kant is going for with both is the question about the conditions of the possibility of experience of things. Because we present or “put before” ourselves objects as outside of us in space through the outer senses, and because we “put before” ourselves by means of inner sense the mind itself, space and time are our a priori intuitions. Importantly, Kant says clearly that our intuition is nothing but the presentation, the “before-putting” of appearance, of that which appears to the senses.5 The distinction between what is intellectual and what is sensible has in the past been seen as a logical distinction. Kant claims that the distinction is transcendental. What is the difference? In general logic we determine laws of thought apart from the object of thinking. Kant is convinced that we cannot reach synthetic judgments beyond objects of the senses, so we need a logic at least for objects of possible experience. This is why a distinction is made between general and transcendental logic right at the outset of Kant’s Transcendental Logic.

5  Kant refers back to Leibniz and Wolff, who considered the distinction as a logical one (Cf. CPR B61). Pluhar points this out in his translation of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1996).

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Our cognition arises from two fundamental sources in the mind, the first of which is the reception of representations (the receptivity of impressions); the second the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations (spontaneity of concepts); through the former an object is given to us, through the latter it is thought in relation to representation (as a mere determination of the mind). Intuition and concepts therefore constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cognition. (CPR A50/B74)

Made clear in this passage is that in receptivity the object is given, in spontaneity it is enabled to be thought in relation to the given representation. The distinction between empirical and pure intuitions and concepts is a differentiation between intuitions or concepts that contain sensation and those that do not. We have already gotten to know the pure intuitions of the transcendental aesthetics in which space and time are mere forms of intuition with no sensible content. Thought similarly has pure concepts that contain only the form of the thought of an object, but not the object. The understanding thus can produce presentations—put things before the mind—without them coming from the senses. This is what Kant calls spontaneity. An important point at this juncture is that since our intuition can only be sensible, understanding can only think the object of sensible intuition: “Without sensibility no object would be given to us, and without understanding none would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CPR A51/B75). Kant’s next step is to insist that we need their union in order for cognition to arise. He claims there are two points of view for logic: understanding’s general use and its special use. Its general use gives us the absolutely necessary rules of thought for the use of understanding without regard to the difference of objects. This is also called the “canon.” Kant calls the special use the “organon,” meaning that it is about thinking a certain kind of object correctly. This latter is akin to the application of logic, and Kant says we come at this last, even though it is often a propaedeutic, a preface to science. In some sense we must know the objects of a science well to know how to apply general rules to them. What are the respective purposes of general logic for and applied logic for? Pure general logic abstracts from all empirical conditions and deals with nothing but a priori principles. It is the canon of understanding and of reason but only in regard to what is formal. Kant gives it two rules: it

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abstracts from all content of the cognition of understanding and from the difference among the objects of that cognition and deals with the mere form of thought. It also has no empirical principles, borrowing nothing from psychology. Applied general logic concerns the rules of the understanding as used under the subjective empirical conditions taught us by psychology. But applied logic is neither a canon nor an organon. Pure logic deals with the forms of understanding irrespective of the origin of that form. But what does general logic do? It analyzes and breaks down the formal parts of the understanding and reason into their elements.6 However, something that Kant himself understands is that the mere agreement of a form of cognition with logical laws cannot establish that the cognition is objectively true. The canon cannot be used like an organon. This is what happens in the dialectic. General logic is used as a supposed organon and it becomes a logic of illusion. This does not broaden and expand one’s knowledge. It is idle chatter, as there is no content. This is why a distinction is drawn between Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Dialectic. The Transcendental Logic is about how cognitions are applied or possible a priori. Here, to get ahead of myself somewhat, it is interesting to note that in so many ways Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is about the application of logic and thus about the same problem of transcendental illusion as Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Logic is empty, since it is devoid of objects it could be about. If we look at the use of a priori logical categories, as Kant says, transcendental analytic “is misused if one lets it count as an organon of a general and unrestricted use” (CPR A63/ B88). Kant insists that the hyperphysical use of understanding and reason must be critiqued. Only through this can we uncover the deceptive illusion. Let us now have a look at the understanding in the “Transcendental Analytic.” Kant gives us its elements in a table. What is important—and offers another link to Wittgenstein—is Kant saying that we need “an idea of the whole of the a priori cognition of the understanding” (CPR A64/ B89). Kant conceives this as coherence—or as a “connection in a system” (CPR A65/B89). There is a unity that is self-subsistent, sufficient unto itself, and impermeable to augmentation or extrinsic additions. * * * 6  We get principles governing all logical judging—another useful point here is Kant’s insistence that Beurteilung and Urteil are one and the same, so no difference is made between determinative and reflective judgment, which Pluhar points out (Kant 1996 A60/B84, fn69).

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This unity is the starting point for my considerations. It is the system’s unity and completeness that warrants the correctness of the components of cognitions. Kant’s “Transcendental Analytic” is divided into a book of concepts and a book of principles. Let us consider why. Kant says we need to dissect the power of understanding itself, not just analyze its concepts. The concepts alone can be explored in relation to their possibility a priori, as located in the understanding as their birthplace, and can be examined in accordance with their pure use. At stake here is tracking the pure concepts back to their first seeds in human understanding, where they lie prepared until an experience arises in which they are developed. What about the analytic of principles? When Kant starts Book II of the “Transcendental Analytic,” he tells us that general logic coincides with the divisions of the higher cognitive power, which at this point are three: understanding, power of judgment, and reason. General logic dissects the acts of reason into their moments, writes Kant. In contrast, transcendental logic is limited to a definite content, the pure a priori cognitions alone. And the transcendental use of reason is therefore never objectively valid at all; it is a logic of illusion, a transcendental dialectic. But that does not mean we cannot have a canon of objectively valid and true use in transcendental logic because the power of judgment and understanding can have objectively valid true use. Reason cannot, however, because it attempts to establish a priori something about objects and expands cognition beyond the bounds of possible experience. This is why Kant says the “Analytic of Principles” is a canon solely for the power of judgment and teaches it how to apply the concepts of the understanding to appearances. When Kant begins the analytic of the transcendental power of judgment as such, what is interesting is that again he distinguishes between general logic, which has no prescriptions whatsoever for the power of judgment since it abstracts from all content of cognition. That means that if he spells out analytically the mere form of cognition found in concepts, judgments, and inferences, he would have to bring about these formal rules for any use of the understanding. He is confronted with an infinite regress because to subsume under this rule would require another rule. But from what could this rule be derived? He would again need the power

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of judgment to be able to give that rule.7 Kant tells us the power of judgment is a talent, a feature of “mother wit” (CPR A133/B172). There is also the passage about examples being “leading-strings of the power of judgment, which he who lacks the natural talent for judgment can never do without” (CPR A134/B174). General logic can give any prescriptions to the power of judgment because it is the task of transcendental logic to correct and secure it in the use of pure understanding by means of determinate rules. What is the peculiarity of transcendental philosophy? Kant says, “Besides indicating the rule (or, rather, the universal condition for rules) that is given in the pure concept of understanding, it can simultaneously indicate a priori the case to which the rules are to be applied to” (CPR A135/B175). He continues, “Rather it must at the same time offer a general but sufficient characterization of the conditions under which objects in harmony with those concepts can be given” (CPR A136/B175). The chapter called “The Schematism of the Pure Understanding” tells us under which condition alone the pure concepts of understanding can be used: the sensible condition. It also explains the principles of pure understanding as synthetic judgments that emanate a priori from pure concepts of understanding that lie a priori at the basis of all other cognitions. Back to the “Analytic of Concepts”: transcendental philosophy must locate its concepts according to a principle. Concepts, says Kant, rest on functions, while intuitions rest on our being affected. What does Kant mean here by function? “By a function, however, I understand the unity of the action of ordering different representations under a common one” (CPR A68/B93). This is so very interesting! The function is judgment by means of concepts in the use of the understanding. This makes sense: we never directly judge something, but only its representation, which is put before the mind. Here we see for the first time why Guyer’s translation goes with “representation” not “presentation” (as Pluhar’s translation does), which is better, since it is not the object itself that is in front of our mind; we deal with its “before-putting,” its Vorstellung, hence its representation. When we judge an object, we cognize it not directly but indirectly—we put in front of our mind not the thing, but its Vorstellung or representation. What Kant does here is interesting; he explains how the understanding has different logical functions in judgments and how it abstracts from the entire content of a judgment. Here we also get the 7

 See Chap. 9.

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different syllogisms in the table of judgments. But the Vorstellungen—re-­ presentations—“before-puttings” need to be provided from somewhere else; then they are transformed as presentations into concepts. In the transcendental logic the manifold of a priori sensibility is the material for the pure concepts of the understanding. Kant shows that in order to make the manifold, the “before-putting,” into a cognition it “must first be gone through, taken up, and combined in a certain manner. This act I call synthesis” (CPR A77/B103). Synthesis is what gathers elements for cognition and unites them to form content. Already here Kant says synthesis “is the mere effect of the imagination, of a blind though indispensable function of the soul, without which we would have no cognition at all” (CPR A78, B103). However, it is exactly the function of the understanding to bring this synthesis to concepts. One could say that an act of cognition only becomes cognition through this function of synthesis. So analytically speaking, synthesis brings various re-­ presentations or “before-puttings” under a concept in general logic. Synthetically speaking, synthesis brings the pure synthesis of presentations to concepts in transcendental logic. Unity is now at once uniting activity and result. Moreover, the Critique of Pure Reason is at once a presentation of the way we draw perceptions into unities and a critique thereof. Kant claims that whatever appears to us through our senses is subjected to an a priori unity (the category); this a priori unity is at the same time a transcendental unity of consciousness that makes it possible for us to perceive the manifold as an object and as part of our experience in the first place. In this sense, Kant can say that without such unity we could have neither experience nor dream (see CPR A112). In the following it is my goal to make these connections clearer. To do so we have to go through Kant’s text several times and look at the three steps from different angles. Unity (the category) is an a priori connection between experience and thing experienced. As I explained above, Kant presents a model of the mind in which experience and knowledge spring from two basic sources: receptivity, through which we receive sensations, and spontaneity, which enables us to receive objects through them. Objects are given to us through receptivity and are thought, so as to become objects per se, through spontaneity. In this spontaneity they are drawn into unities. While receptivity is externally determined, spontaneity is free from external determination and thus opposed to but also related to receptivity.

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Let us have a look at this relation. Kant calls spontaneity the “theoretical aspect of freedom” and makes it “a close analogue of its practical aspect of autonomy.”8 In what sense is spontaneity free, what does it mean that drawing together into a unity is free? Kant says spontaneity combines two properties of freedom: it is free from external determination and it is also free to self-legislate. Free from external determination is “the faculty for bringing forth representations itself” (CPR A51/B75), in the sense that spontaneity’s function is to synthesize the manifold given by sensibility in the production of experience. Though it receives sensation from outside, its contribution to the representation as such is irreducible. The second, related property of spontaneity’s freedom is that of giving itself its laws or rules of synthesis. In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant discusses this: “But suppose there subsequently turned up—not in experience but in certain (not merely logical rules but) laws holding firm a priori and concerning our existence—the occasion for presupposing ourselves to be legislative fully a priori in regard to our own existence, and as self-determining in this existence” (CPR B430). Consequently, Kant can claim that “this would disclose a spontaneity through which our actuality is determinable without the need of conditions of empirical intuition” (ibid.). Kant describes spontaneity in the A-edition as the “ground of a threefold synthesis” (CPR A97), while in the B-edition he calls it “productive imagination” (CPR B152). In the following we shall see how these two definitions are played out in the A- and B-editions respectively. In Kant’s theory, unity—or that which draws together the parts of the representation into a unity—has to be understood as a compound of both sides: of that which is given (receptivity) as well as of the mind uniting that which is given (spontaneity). The importance of spontaneity can be seen when considering one of the hallmarks of Kant’s project, the Copernican Turn. In the Critic of Pure Reason Kant inverts what we hitherto held to be the natural order, namely that sense perceptions are given in a certain order and that the mind or our thoughts would conform to (the order of) those sensations perceived. The Copernican Turn is a reversal of that expectation. Kant saw that he could not secure knowledge, if he assumed that thought conformed to things in the world. He turned the equation around and held that things should conform to the form of experience in our minds.

8

 See the entry “Spontaneity” in Howard Caygill’s Kant Dictionary (1995, 374–6).

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Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object, and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori. (CPR B XVII)

The form of experience consists of a connection between a priori intuitions and a priori concepts, as we have seen above. With respect to the a priori intuitions, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant first presents the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” which isolates time and space as the pure forms of intuition from all possible matter of intuition: The capacity (receptivity) to acquire representations through the way in which we are affected by objects is called sensibility. Objects are therefore given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone affords us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from it arise concepts. But all thought, whether straightaway (directe) or through a detour (indirecte), must ultimately be related to intuitions, thus, in our case, to sensibility, since there is no other way in which objects can be given to us. (CPR A19/B33)

Kant holds that human beings cannot receive objects in any other way than through sensibility. Sensation is “the effect of an object on the capacity for representation, insofar as we are affected by it” (CPR A20/B34). The representations we receive through sensibility are called intuitions. Through sensation an intuition is posited in relation to the object. However, Kant isolates the aspect of intuition, insofar as it is distinct from its determination, and calls it the appearance. Even appearances already have form and matter: the matter is given a posteriori and corresponds to sensation, while the form is given a priori. This a priori form of the manifold of appearance is that “which allows the manifold of appearance to be intuited as ordered in certain relations” (ibid.). The relations in which all appearances are first ordered are time and space. Our cognition, as Kant says, arises from “two fundamental sources in the mind”; one being the “reception of representations” just discussed,

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while “the second” is “the faculty for cognizing an object by means of these representations” (CPR A50/B74). The “Transcendental Aesthetic” deals with sensation, while the “Transcendental Analytic of the Understanding” is its equivalent in terms of isolating everything that is not the pure form of understanding. Both intuitions and concepts have to interact in order for us to have cognition or knowledge, or, famously: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind” (CPR A51/B75). Since “the understanding is not capable of intuiting anything, and the senses are not capable of thinking anything” (ibid.), we have to deal with two sciences: aesthetics and logic. Regarding the aspect of thought which has its origin solely in the understanding, Kant argues, in accordance with this interdependence of concepts and intuitions, that to elaborate the pure principles a priori of the understanding is only possible by means of an idea of the totality of the a priori knowledge yielded by the understanding; such an idea can furnish an exact classification of the concepts which compose that totality, exhibiting their interconnection in a system. Pure understanding distinguishes itself not merely from all that is empirical but also from all sensibility. It is a unity that is self-subsistent, self-sufficient, and not to be increased by any additions from without (Cf. CPR A64–65/B89–90). Kant discusses this unity in the “Analytic of Concepts,” in particular in “The Clue to the Discovery of All Concepts of the Pure Understanding.” For now, it is enough to state that Kant insists that the concepts “spring pure and unmixed from the understanding, as absolute unity, and must therefore be connected among themselves in accordance with a concept or idea” (CPR A67/B92). Because the understanding is the non-sensible faculty of knowledge, its concepts do not rest on affections, but on functions. “By a function, however, I understand the unity of the action of ordering different representations under a common one” (CPR A68/B93). * * * Here is a curious and important point in Kant’s theory. If concepts rest on functions, and if functions are unities that result from uniting representations in one common representation, then concepts themselves result from acts of synthesis. Concepts are therefore never related to objects immediately, but always to some other representation of objects. Hence, “concepts, however, as predicates of possible judgments, are related to some representation of a still undetermined object” (CPR A69/B94).

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Kant thinks we can discover the functions of the understanding by giving an exhaustive statement of the functions of unity in judgments. Accordingly, he brings all judgments under four headers, each of which contains three moments, and thereby presents the table of categories. Transcendental logic has only a priori sensibility lying in front of it as material for the concepts of pure understanding. These are time and space, as elaborated above, which contain the manifold of pure a priori intuition. In order for this manifold to be known, a “taking up and connecting” has to happen spontaneously. The concepts of our mind spontaneously enact the syntheses. By synthesis in the most general sense, however, I understand the action of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition. Such a synthesis is pure, if the manifold is given not empirically but a priori (as is that in space and time). Prior to all analysis of our representations these must first be given, and no concepts can arise analytically as far as the content is concerned. The synthesis of a manifold, however, (whether it be given empirically or a priori) first brings forth a cognition […]. Yet the synthesis alone is that which properly collects the elements for cognitions and unifies them into a certain content. (CPR A77-8/B103)

What we take in with our senses as manifold appears to us ordered in a certain manner (in space and time). The understanding reproduces this given manifold as representations in front of our mind, representations originating in the spontaneity of our concepts. Finally, the represented sense perceptions and the (re)produced representation are recognized as the same in a concept. This is however not the whole account and would remain pre-critical. What lies behind that process is what Kant set up in “The Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” which he formulates in the following way: The first thing that must be given to us a priori for the cognition of all objects is the manifold of pure intuition; the synthesis of this manifold by means of the imagination is the second thing, but it still does not yield cognition. The concepts that give this pure synthesis unity, and that consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity, are the third thing necessary for cognition of an object that comes before us, and they depend on the understanding. (CPR A78–9/B104)

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If unity is the form of experience that provides conditions a priori for the possibility of experience, then concepts that express this formal and objective condition of experience in a general and sufficient way (see CPR A96) are called pure concepts of the understanding. Kant defines cognition as the whole of compared and connected representations. In the “Transcendental Deduction” he claims that spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis, which has to occur in all forms of cognition: “apprehension of the representations, as modification of the mind in intuition; reproduction of them in imagination; and of their recognition in the concept” (CPR A97). We saw above in our definition of spontaneity that reason produces “laws which are not merely logical rules, but which holding a priori also determine our existence—ground for regarding ourselves as legislating completely a priori” (CPR B430). * * * So far, we have discussed Kant’s account of the form of experience as the connection of a priori intuitions and a priori concepts without mention of transcendental synthesis. The threefold synthesis has a second part to it, which Kant discusses in the “Transcendental Logic,” in which he demonstrates “how to bring to concepts not the representations but the pure synthesis of representations” (CPR A78/B104). This is of utmost interest for the a priori form of experience. We enter the most important part of Kant’s account for our purpose: Kant repeats that we first need a manifold of pure intuition and then the synthesis of this manifold. But, he says, this does not yet yield knowledge. There is a third requisite: “the concepts that give this pure synthesis unity, and that consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity” (CPR A79/B105). And here we encounter the well-known quote: The same function that gives unity to the different representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition, which, expressed generally, is called the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, therefore, and indeed by means of the very same actions through which it brings the logical form of a judgment into concepts by means of the analytical unity, also brings a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general […]. (CPR A97/B104–5)

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The mind’s spontaneity is the ground of a threefold synthesis. Whenever we have experience, the thing which was apprehended and put in front of our mind is judged in a concept. However, this judgment is supplemented by transcendental apperception, which is nothing more than the insight that the judgment in a concept is carried out according to the mind’s productive spontaneity. This means that the mind’s operation is self-reflexive, or as I call it performative. Fascinating about Kant’s theory of experience is his description of the form of experience as a way to redescribe the absolute connection between world and mind. He does so by presenting the form of experience as an equation: what a priori intuition takes in = what a priori concepts order. He cannot give the ground for this equation on the level of general logic but does so on the transcendental level. Unity in the intuition, or “the synthesis of various representations in an intuition,” is the same as the unity of the logical forms of judgment. And this is why the threefold synthesis into which the categories are analyzed is an equation: that which is apprehended is judged to be the same as that which is put in front of the mind. But the bigger picture here is that experience is one, or a unity, and that the equation elaborated as the three syntheses takes place also on a transcendental level. We may have a manifold of sense perceptions, but we have one experience only, in which all perceptions are represented in a law-like connection. There is only one experience, in which all perceptions are represented as in thoroughgoing and lawlike connection, just as there is only one space and time, in which all forms of appearance and all relation of being or non-being take place. If one speaks of different experiences, there are only so many perceptions insofar as they belong to one and the same universal experience. (CPR A110)

What would be the object of such general experience? Kant calls it an object that “must be thought of only as something in general = X” (CPR A104). However, this object X corresponds not just to one experience but also to the manifold of representations—although this manifold must be different from the manifold of representations that is in front of our mind. First, we have a manifold of sense perceptions that is apprehended and thereby put in front of the mind and represented as unified. This unity can only come about because we have one experience, which contains all the

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sense perceptions, and which orders them according to the a priori concepts of the understanding. Thus, on one side of the equation, we have the apprehended manifold of sense perception, which is first given by our sensibility in time and space, and then, on the other, the representation of that manifold as reproduced by the imagination, which adds unity or the concepts of the understanding. Both apprehension and reproduction already include the use of a priori principles: time and space in apprehension and the categories in the reproduction and association. Now a third synthesis called apperception must also take place in order for us to have experience of a thing. It is not enough to add up intuitions as apprehended and associated in the order of concepts. This third synthesis takes place through recognition, through making a judgment in an actual experience, in which the apprehended manifold of sense perceptions is also represented in front of the mind. If this equation seems quite meaningless, then this is only because we view it from the standpoint of general logic. All it does is underline the presupposition that world and mind are already connected. Apperception, or performativity—since I argue apperception is basically performativity—as a source of the new and changeable, has to be made compatible with an account of this unity of experience. We will understand this equation better once we consider the point of view of transcendental logic. Whenever Kant invokes the transcendental object or X, he readily admits that we find ourselves a bit in the dark. Of what do our experiences consist, if their objects are made possible by a rule of the understanding that corresponds not to real objects but to an ominous transcendental object that can only be thought, but not experienced? What kind of connection does Kant present between a priori category and transcendental object? Is this not an external standpoint? In experience, we have a manifold of sense perceptions to which we apply the a priori concepts of our understanding. However, we are unable to know what corresponds to them. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism holds that we cannot know the things in themselves to which the a priori categories correspond, but we can think them. Thinking them means to have a necessary connection of perceptions that results from the application of the categories, albeit things in themselves can never be perceived. The Critique of Pure Reason accounts for the necessary connection of perceptions through the form of experience, the relation between the a priori intuitions, time and space, and the a priori concepts or categories. Let us

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dwell on the form of experience and investigate how it performs the task of making the necessary connection between perceptions that leads to the relation to the transcendental object. Once an object affects the mind through a sensation, a representation is made. However, before objects are representations in the sense of being put before the mind—before-­ putting—they are undefined objects of empirical intuition in their manifold and are called appearances. We never encounter the matter of appearance other than in its a priori form, in space and time. A priori concepts, on the other hand, even though they do not relate to things per se but to the transcendental object, assure that our experiences have content. I call this form of experience Kant’s performative act of thinking, since Kant claims that it is that which makes it possible for a thought to be about something or have an object or content at all, despite it being thought apart from any content or object. When we have experience, we judge and thus apply the a priori rules or categories to an object. The general structure of logic is not about an object, but it nevertheless connects to an object as its general form, which is the form of experience, and in that sense performs the possibility for us to have an experience of an object. Kant claims that in every experience there are three syntheses that take place in the operation of the mind, positing that what the senses take in and what the mind represents is judged as the same: a unity. Thus, we can look at the mind’s spontaneity as an act of unification: what we take in through apprehension (1) and what we put in front of the mind as reproduction (2) are judged to be the same in recognition (3). Therefore, Kant writes in the A-Deduction (CPR A105): “Hence we say that we cognize the object if we have effected synthetic unity in the manifold of intuition.” Transcendental apperception makes this structure of syntheses possible in the first place. Here we glimpse the answer to our original problem for the first time. We do not have to introduce an a priori connection, for it is the fact that we make the judgment—its performativity—that guarantees the connection. In this chapter I have shown that performativity is basically apperception. The next chapter pursues this performativity of transcendental synthesis further.

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References Angerer, Marie-Luise. 2007. Vom Begehren nach dem Affekt. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes. Caygill, Howard. 1995. A Kant Dictionary. Malden, MA: Basil Blackwell Publishers. Dickerson, A.B. 2004. Kant Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gibson, James J. 2014. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Classic edition. New York and London: Routledge. Haarmann, Anke. 2019. Artistic Research: Eine epistemologische Ästhetik. Bielefeld: Transcript. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by W.  S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. ———. 1999. (ed. by A.W. Wood and P. Guyer) Critque of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Latour, Bruno. 2005. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-­ Theory. Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies. Oxford  and New  York: Oxford University Press. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Mersch, Dieter. 2015. Epistemologies of Aesthetics. Translated by Laura Radosh. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes. In German: 2015. Epistemologien des Ästhetischen. Zürich and Berlin: Diaphanes.

CHAPTER 3

Judging as Connecting Thought and Thing

When we try to explain unity as integral to Kant’s understanding of the operation of the mind and attempt to account for its genesis, all we can rely on is form: the form of experience as the combination of the form of intuition and the form of concepts. What lies at the core of my theory of the act of thinking is the following: similarly to how a representation, Vorstellung in German, is the result of the process of representing or putting (something) in front of the mind, unity is the result of the process of uniting (something) in a judgment. Unity is thus formed or—as I will elaborate—performed in judgment. How is unity introduced in the Critique of Pure Reason? The German term for unity, Einheit, means literally oneness, but can be translated in various ways, that is, as unit or entity, item or object.1 It is useful for us to consider its different meanings because Kant employs unity in many different ways throughout the text. We have already discussed the most overt relevance of the term in Chap. 1. However, Kant uses the term ubiquitously in the Critique of Pure Reason, and for our purposes it is important to distinguish between the uses of unity: to differentiate between an original, transcendental unity and a derived, empirical unity. Kant writes: The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise from the combination; rather, by being added to the representation of the manifold, it first 1

 I think it is interesting that the German term Einheit is also used for a unit.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_3

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makes the concept of combination possible. This unity, which precedes all concept of combination a priori, is not the former category of unity (§ 10); for all categories are grounded on logical functions in judgments, but in these combinations, thus the unity of given concepts, is already thought. The categories therefore already presuppose combination. We must therefore seek this unity (as qualitative, § 12) someplace higher, namely in that which itself contains the ground of the unity of different concepts in judgments, and hence of the possibility of the understanding, even in its logical use. (CPR B131)

On the one hand, unity according to Kant can thus be the result of a combination of things (e.g., when we add apples to apples we get a pile of apples, which is a new unity). On the other hand, there is a higher kind of unity that makes combination possible in the first place. This higher unity, Kant claims, pertains to the concepts of our understanding as the original-­ synthetic unity of apperception. He also calls it the “I think” that “must be able to accompany all my representations” (CPR B132). This “I think” as the unity of apperception has often been equated with the unity of consciousness and self-consciousness. In the following I argue, with the help of Catherine Longuenesse’s reading of Kant’s account of transcendental unity as produced through synthesis speciosa, as a unity brought about or (per)formed in thinking or thought, even though it precedes the unity of the a priori categories that are applied in thought.2 In Kant and the Capacity to Judge Longuenesse argues that the unity of intuition is the “effect of the understanding on sensibility” (1998, 225) and that pure intuition and formal intuition are therefore one and the same intuition, which is produced by synthesis speciosa, a special kind of synthesis by the imagination. In that sense Longuenesse can claim that the B-Deduction is a “reexamination of the manner in which things are given to us” (Ibid.). She thus elaborates to what extent we can understand the activity of our mind as having an effect on our sensibility. Longuenesse holds that:

2  I do not have the space or time to give an in-depth explanation of Longuenesse’s full account of the relation between forms of intuitions, the capacity to judge, and forms of concepts. However, the presentation that follows will suffice for my purpose, which is to offer a unique account of the act of thinking and explain how experience or thought is connected to that which it is about.

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Part of the minimal equipment that a human being, capable of discursive thought, has at his disposal, is the capacity to generate the “pure” intuitions of space and time as that in which empirical objects are instances of concepts. […] This is how the synthesis speciosa can be said to be an “effect of the understanding on sensibility,” prior to any concept, although by it all conceptual representation of empirical objects is made possible. (1998, 224)

Longuenesse’s take on the capacity to judge comprises the ability of the understanding to judge. Judging is an activity of synthesis that is twofold. On the one hand, synthesis is intellectual; this is the application of the categories to the manifold of intuitions. On the other hand, synthesis is figurative, or as Longuenesse calls it synthesis speciosa, as Kant had called it in the dissertation he wrote before the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter synthesis is our capacity to generate the pure intuitions of space and time and thus the sensibility that we need in order to then apply our concepts. This “effect of the understanding on sensibility” (CPR B152) makes possible the connection of thought to thing, since our mind first produces the unity, the manner in which things are given, so that it can subsequently apply its categories in the judgment. In this sense the manner in which sense perceptions are given (ordered by synthesis speciosa or represented) and the manner in which the understanding orders them in front of the mind in reproduction (through synthesis intellectualis) are the same. I will elaborate this in a moment. We saw above that in the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction that transcendental apperception comes in only at the end. It is my aim in this chapter to keep the interpretation of transcendental apperception as self-consciousness or as transcendental consciousness at bay, and instead to present a reading that explains transcendental apperception in a different way, by focusing on the concept of unity without yet discussing it as the transcendental unity of self-consciousness.3 For this purpose I reproduce Kant’s attempt, in the A-Deduction, to show how in experience we work our way to unity from the bottom up.4 Starting at Critique of Pure Reason A120 Kant unfolds the following structure: in our experience of things, what is given to us first through sensibility are not things, but rather the appearances of things. According to Kant, appearances are undefined 3  I think one of the crucial problems of the Transcendental Deduction in the B-edition is the way in which transcendental apperception is equated with self-consciousness. As I said above, I think of the subject as an effect of the structure, not as standing above it. 4  Longuenesse points this out in (1998, 36).

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objects of empirical intuition (e.g., see CPR B34). Intuition, Anschauung in German or literally “that which we look at,” relates to the object without mediation. However, when we put appearances in front of our mind— in the sense of “before-putting,” the more literal translation of Vorstellung that I introduced in the last chapter—they cease to be just intuitions but become representations, something mediated, or conceptual. The object in an appearance is already a representation, something put before the mind, and it cannot simultaneously be an appearance that relates immediately to the object. Appearances already contain the necessary relation to the understanding through the categories, precisely because they are also Vorstellungen, re-presentations. Appearances are, on the one hand, matter; sensations connect immediately to the object or “that which we look at.” On the other hand, they are form; they are connected to the concepts of the understanding through mediation in representation, by “being put before the mind.” Appearances, as intuitions in space and time, have to be represented through the same synthesis through which time and space as such are determined. The connection, Kant says in the A-Deduction, comes about through the faculty of imagination,5 which achieves synthesis of, or unifies, the manifold. The act by which imagination connects perceptions is called apprehension. Furthermore, after the apprehension of impressions, imagination brings the manifold of intuition into an image (CPR A120). Kant makes clear that apprehension alone would not bring forth a connection of impressions into an image, unless there was a subjective ground (CPR A121)—a perception that made it possible for the mind to go from one to the other, to communicate to the next perception and thus to represent whole rows of perceptions. This is why in addition to apprehension Kant introduces the second part of the structure: reproduction or 5  One could say “at least in the A-edition,” because Kant seems to attribute synthesis to the understanding in the B-Edition. There is controversy about what it means that the B-edition equates imagination with understanding. At least this is Martin Heidegger’s reason to prefer the A-edition to the B-edition, arguing that Kant reinterprets transcendental imagination in favor of the understanding in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (see Heidegger 1997). Kant erased the two main passages in the A-edition in which he made imagination the third faculty next to sensibility and understanding. One of those passages was just quoted above, while the second passage is in the Transcendental Deduction. In the B-edition of the Transcendental Deduction the understanding alone takes on the role of the origin of the syntheses, while in the A-edition all synthesis springs from imagination, independently of sensibility and understanding.

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association. The apprehended perceptions need to be reproduced in order for the mind to go from one perception to the next. However, even through reproduction the connection between perceptions is not yet made in a determined way. Kant writes that we therefore need a rule for the reproduction, according to which one representation connects to this rather than to another representation. Therefore, in addition to the apprehension, reproduction, and association of representations, we need a determining rule. This rule is what Kant calls unity, in German Einheit. Now we are a bit closer to the solution of our puzzle in terms of how the categories of the mind can determine our experience of things. The judgment that what we take in by our senses is the same as that which we reproduce in front of the mind means that the judgment that holds the two parts of experience together designates those parts themselves as a unity. In the following I strive to lay out this equation as making possible the “higher” unity, which arises, as I argue, from the fact that a judgment is made. The categories, however, are as yet only parts of this higher unity; they are unities or rules that pull together the manifold through synthesis. Without unity, it would be sheer coincidence that appearances ever coincided in cognition.6 Kant calls this rule or unity figurative synthesis or transcendental apperception. This is why in the B-Deduction Kant writes that “combination is the ‘representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold’” (CPR B 130–1). As I pointed out above, apprehending, reproducing, and associating perceptions on the subjective ground of unity is not enough to guarantee experience, since in addition to the unity of apprehension and association and apperception we need an objective ground for unity: “for only because I ascribe all perceptions to one consciousness (of original apperception) can I say of all perceptions that I am conscious of them” (CPR A122). Sensibility and understanding are thus not only working together in experience, but they are connected necessarily via the transcendental function of imagination or original unity. Real experience consists of apprehension, association (reproduction), and finally recognition of appearances in apperception. It contains concepts, which make possible the formal unity of experience and with it all the objective validity—truth—of empirical cognition. 6  Maja Soboleva suggests just that in her reading of the role of intuition in thinking. She thinks that we can “coincidentally” apply the categories of the understanding to both intuitions and to judgments. I look at this reading in detail in Chap. 8 (see Soboleva 2016, 87–111).

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“These grounds of the recognition of the manifold, so far as they concern merely the form of an experience in general, are now those categories” (CPR A125). The formal unity of the synthesis of imagination—and through it all empirical use of it: recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension down to the appearances—is grounded in the categories. Thus, for Kant we have a threefold structure that shows us how to combine the elements of experience into unity when we make judgments. And there is a threefold structure in the transcendental apperception, which stems from unity and needs to be already in place.7 My aim here is to bring light to these two different threefold structures by pointing to the distinction between general and transcendental logic. For general logic, the equation works, and we can have a metaphysical theory of experience that says the following: the received sense perceptions ordered by time and space are apprehended by the imagination through a synthesis. Then they are reproduced and associated, which means ordered and subsumed under a concept by the understanding. Finally, they are judged to be the same, since the concept had before been drawn into a unity by the same synthesis in which the intuitions were united. From the standpoint of general logic, we thus have the experience of any general object. However, in addition to this, Kant argues we need transcendental logic and the transcendental synthesis or synthesis speciosa to make this equation possible in the first place. My performativity reading achieves the following here: Kant’s theory of experience is based on the form of experience, which is the combination of a priori intuitions and a priori concepts. In the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Logic Kant describes how a priori intuitions and a priori concepts are deduced. A priori intuitions are won by eliminating everything from sensibility that is a posteriori. The manifold of sensations taken in by the senses is thus stripped bare of a posteriori content. All that is left to an intuition without this a posteriori relation to the object is its appearance. However, the appearance itself has form and content; the form of the appearance is the form of intuition, which is the manner in which the appearance is given, that is, in time and space. In contrast, the content of the appearance has to be guaranteed by the categories. A priori concepts are deduced in a similarly complicated way. What is left of the understanding once it is completely stripped of anything a posteriori is 7  Mitch Davis’ dissertation also develops two arguments for unity, one from and one to unity (Davis 2004).

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again a manner of ordering or the categories. But let us pause for a moment and revert with Longuenesse to the earlier discussion about “the Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” At this juncture it is helpful to take a look at Longuenesse’s take on Kant’s transcendental apperception, since I think she gives the crucial explanation of how the categories are generated in transcendental synthesis. This may sound contradictory, since the categories are supposed to be a priori. However, since experience needs to be had in order for transcendental synthesis to happen, Longuenesse can help us understand that the categories need to be performed, that is, brought into being by having an experience or making a judgment in the first place. Longuenesse elaborates Kant’s attempt to prove the validity of the categories in the B-edition and shows that it is possible to ascertain a genesis of the categories. Nevertheless, this is odd, since Kant holds that the categories cannot be gained from experience, as they are the condition for the possibility of experience. According to Longuenesse, however, the B-edition offers a clue, in which Kant focuses on human beings’ capacity to judge as what enables first the transcendental unity or synthesis that leads to the a priori forms of intuitions, and second the fact that this unity allows the a priori categories to do their subsuming and connecting work. Longuenesse therefore presents the A-Deduction as a via negativa to something the B-Deduction is able to master: a reading that legitimizes the categories of the understanding. This means that the table of categories and the table of the logical forms of judgment are parallel in Kant’s system because Kant believes that “logical form” refers to the universal rules of discursive thought. Here “he understands logic in much the same way as the Port-Royal logicians did, as ‘the reflection that men have made on the […] operations of their mind’” (Longuenesse 1998, 5). But Longuenesse is not talking about the categories per se. It is the reinterpretation of the Transcendental Aesthetic that is most interesting for our purposes. Longuenesse insists that the forms of intuitions are not yet determined by the forms of the understanding but are pure intuition. Even though they lend themselves to being judged under the categories in reproductive synthesis, they are first and foremost an expression of the ability to judge that renders them forms of intuitions. This is what makes it feasible to see the categories, the conditions of the possibility of cognition, as making the connection between the forms of intuition and forms of concepts in a judgment—as the new kind of performative connection. Longuenesse’s reading of Kant is valuable insofar as she points out with

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great gusto and eloquence the importance of understanding Kant’s theory as being about mental activities, which are crystallized in judging and judgmental forms. Furthermore, Longuenesse’s distinction between reproductive and figurative synthesis and imagination is of particular importance. We will discuss this further in Chap. 10. Here I argue that instead of understanding Longuenesse’s work as a proof for the legitimacy of the categories in the Transcendental Deduction, we should understand the ability to judge as something that at the same time “performs” the form of intuition, making it able to conform to the forms of judgments—the categories—once a judgment is made. I put emphasis on the fact that only through the performance of the judgment the connection between the experience and thing experienced itself is made. Let us examine Longuenesse’s contribution to a proper reading of the Transcendental Deduction. A proper reading entails the insight that Kant’s notion of logical form is not that of modern logic, but “refers to something different, namely the universal rules of discursive thought” (1998, 5). This means that reflected in the logical forms of judgment is the impact people have made on the operations of their minds. The logical forms of judgment are forms of mental activities that are necessary for the representation of objects (ibid.). Longuenesse argues that the syntheses of the A-edition are not faculties carrying out three different syntheses, but instead are representations “in which there is an act of synthesis.” This act of synthesis of apprehension takes place “in” intuition, as a singular and immediate representation; it takes place similarly “in” reproduction. Finally, the concept “in which” there is synthesis of recognition is not a faculty, but it is a universal or reflected representation (Longuenesse 1998, 35). It is the empirical genesis of representations, from sensible impressions to their representations in imagination to the concepts that we get here. These acts of combination then contribute to the cognition of a phenomenon, an object, which differs from the appearance, German Erscheinung, only insofar as they all belong to the same act of synthesis. The form of this act, Longuenesse says, is determined a priori by the nature of our mind—the a priori categories. The act in which these three syntheses are created is the act of synthesis, which Kant attributes to transcendental imagination. Longuenesse draws a parallel between the table of categories and the table of logical forms of judgments, claiming that any experience of objects presupposes the use of the categories, which do not result from experience

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but are the very condition of experience. Thus, according to her thesis the Transcendental Deduction demonstrates the role of the pure concepts of the understanding. The system of principles can only be understood if it is related to the role which Kant assigns to the logical forms of judgments and the manner in which he establishes the table of categories according to the guiding thread of logical forms. The logical form refers to “universal rules of discursive thought” (Longuenesse 1998, 5), which are the reflection made by people on the operation of their minds. In short logical forms are forms of mental activity created over time through the repeated performance of the act of thinking. Mental activities are read as discursive syntheses or combinations of sensible perceptions in concepts through judgments. Longuenesse makes a psychological or mentalist argument, although Kant’s procedure here is not introspective. She claims that the architectonic function of the logical forms of judgments is to represent acts of the understanding. The ability to judge, in German Vermögen zu urteilen, is a possibility or tendency to act that is proper to a substance—a conatus.8 A conatus according to Longuenesse is the tendency or effort to actualize itself, to become a force or a Kraft,9 once determined by external conditions. For Longuenesse actualization lies in the capacity to judge, or Urteilskraft in German. The mind is not a substance, but a capacity for discursive thought. In the actualization of this capacity for discursive thought, in the Urteilskraft, the mind is brought into relation with sensory perception. An aspect of Longuenesse’s perspective worth stressing is that the actualization of our capacity to judge can be described as that which makes the connection between thought and what the thought is about. Kant’s justification of the table of logical forms is the fact that he adopted it from “the logicians” in conformity to the Aristotelian heritage. Kant speaks of logical functions rather than forms. Longuenesse underlines (1998, 3n2) Kant’s assertion that “by function I mean the unity of an act of arranging various presentations under one common representation” (CPR A68/B93). Longuenesse adds that she thinks that we should 8  The term conatus was already used in antiquity. The Greek term was hormê, which was often translated as “impetus.” Spinoza employs the term, describing it as the drive toward self-preservation, from which the affects are derived: “Each thing, as far as it lies in itself, strives to persevere in its being” (Spinoza 1994, Ethics, part 3, prop. 6). 9  Relevant here is the work of Christoph Menke, who distinguishes between Vermögen and Kraft. He argues they are different forms of power, and that aesthetic anthropology attempts to offer a basis of difference between the two (Menke 2017).

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understand “unity of the act” as the way in which the act is structured. The act she describes is the act of making a judgment; acts or logical functions are forms of judgment. Longuenesse further argues that the parallel between the table of categories and the table of the logical forms of judgment is by no means an accident of Kant’s system. Kant holds that experience of an object presupposes the use of the categories. The categories do not arise from experience but are the conditions of experience. In the Transcendental Deduction Kant demonstrates the role of the concepts of the pure understanding. We can only understand the system of principles, if we connect it with the role that Kant accords to the logical forms of judging and how the table of categories is ordered according to “the Clue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding” which we get in A70/B95. Longuenesse argues that the forms of judgment are mental activities in the sense that discursive syntheses or combinations just are concepts in judgments. Thereby she underlines that Kant’s process is not introspective. According to Longuenesse the ability to judge is therefore the possibility or tendency to act. With Spinoza she calls this the conatus, or the tendency or effort to actualize oneself. Once ability becomes actualized and thereby becomes a force, it is determined no longer by inner but by outer conditions. What Longuenesse shows in her outstanding reading of Kant is that which is presupposed in the activity of the transcendental synthesis of the imagination. She argues that the A-edition is a via negativa, which fails to show how the human empirical-psychological genesis of our perceptions and the combination thereof gives us good access to our ability to subsume singular intuitions under general concepts. Only a close reading of the B-edition offers a way of understanding how Kant’s form of experience can come about through the connections of a priori concepts and a priori intuitions, in the sense that sensibility and understanding have to work together for us to have experience. Longuenesse is able to elucidate both how the categories of the mind can be a priori, because they are our forms of judgments, and how our capacity to judge, which is structured by the categories of the mind, makes possible the unity of the a priori forms of intuitions. Both of these moments are necessary for us to have the experience of a thing. This brings a number of things together: our capacity to judge, as the conatus of a substance that is our mind, first and foremost in the transcendental apperception, that performs or brings about the unity that is a higher or transcendental unity, expressed in the forms of intuition. This

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transcendental act gives us sense perceptions ordered according to those forms of intuitions, which then can be judged to be the same as the concepts of the understanding or the categories of the mind, which made experience of objects possible in the first place. As Longuenesse writes: Everything, as it were, remains to be done. But part of the minimal equipment that a human being, capable of discursive thought, has at his disposal, is the capacity to generate the “pure” intuitions of space and time as that in which empirical objects are instances of concepts. […] This is how the synthesis speciosa can be said to be an “effect of the understanding on sensibility,” prior to any concept, although by it all conceptual representation of empirical objects is made possible. (Longuenesse 1998, 224)

In this chapter I have argued that Longuenesse’s reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction is guided by her interpretation of the capacity to judge as the underlying enabler of the unity of intuitions as well as the unity of concepts. For my own purposes, this is helpful in setting up a framework in which we need a judgment to be performed in order to have an experience of a thing.

References Davis, Mitch. 2004. Mental Unity in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. New School University: Dissertation. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans. Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. In German: 1st ed. 1929 Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik. Bonn: Verlag von Friedrich Cohen. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Menke, Christoph. 2017. Kraft: ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Soboleva, Maja E., ed. 2016. Das Denken des Denkens: ein philosophischer Überblick. Edition Moderne Postmoderne. Bielefeld: Transcript. Spinoza, Benedictus de. 1994. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Ed. and Trans. E. M. Curley. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In Latin: 1677. Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrate.

CHAPTER 4

Synthesis and Bringing the Manifold of Intuition into an Image

I have so far argued that Kant’s account of the form of experience in the Critique of Pure Reason needs to be understood as the working together of receptivity and spontaneity, in the sense of being the result of a uniting act performed by the mind. The mind itself is characterized by its capacity to judge. In the following I want to say more about the specific connection between a priori concepts and a priori intuitions that results from such performance. I do so by turning to another reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction that shows it to be less an affirmation of the unity of consciousness or self-consciousness and more an analysis of cognition that outlines how a necessary connection can arise between thought and that which it is about. In his book Kant on Representation and Objectivity (2004) A. B. Dickerson examines in what way we can understand the deduction as a “problem of making intelligible the unity possessed by complex representations—a problem that is the representationalist parallel of the semantic problem of the unity of the proposition,” as the author summarizes on the dust jacket to the publication. As I describe in Chap. 2, unity is the result of a uniting activity in the same way in which a representation, German Vorstellung, is the result of the process of representing. Dickerson starts his book with a chapter on representation, reading Kant as a representationalist, albeit as one for whom representations are Vorstellungen, not Repräsentationen, another German term for representations. Dickerson tries to underline the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_4

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difference between representations and Vorstellungen by translating Vorstellung as before-putting. We put things before the mind, and this is the only way in which the mind has access to things—in the act of the before-putting. Vorstellung is thus both an act and the result of an act at the same time.1 The way we make the connection between representations and that which they are about is by synthesis, which he understands to be an act that determines and modifies the mind. Dickerson’s reading aims to give “an account of awareness independent of reality that is consistent with the claim that the only immediate objects of our awareness are the mind’s internal representations” (Dickerson 2004, 13). Now Dickerson thinks that representation works in the following way: it is an “act of synthesis in the sense that the ‘determinations’ or ‘modification’ of the mind constitute the representational medium, which must not be assimilated with the object represented in that medium” (ibid.). In this way, Dickerson avoids a reduction of representation to nonrepresentational states. He compares the work of synthesis to the way we see things in pictures. Dickerson chooses the simple example of the smiley face (2004, 14),2 which is not only a configuration of lines and dots but

1  Dickerson shows Kant to be a representationalist, but also how he differs from both the position of the indirect realist and the idealist. An indirect realist, someone like Descartes or Locke thinks that representing objects involves both an act of awareness of an idea (or representation, impression, etc.) and an inference to the external cause of that idea. This means the ideas or representations stand for external things, and it is an actual perception of ideas that causes us to be influenced by the external things. This is what makes it indirect, or mediated by ideas. The idealist, for example, Berkeley, thinks representing objects works through an act of awareness of an idea and the constructive acts through which the idea is linked with other ideas. Here the ideas do not stand for something beyond themselves. The ideas of the external world are identified with or constructed out of ideas (see Dickerson 2004, 10–11). He does this to mark two different readings of Kant. He thinks Paul Guyer reads Kant as an indirect realist in Kant and the Claims to Knowledge (1987), while Jonathan Bennett reads him as an idealist in Kant’s Analytic (1966). Dickerson thinks that both readings do not do justice to Kant, since “Kant explicitly denies that we infer our knowledge of external object from knowledge of our own inner states (ideas or representations), and thus explicitly denies that he is committed to indirect realism” (Dickerson 2004, 12). Kant, like Berkeley, also denies being an empirical idealist. 2  With Dickerson we take the first step toward Wittgenstein in bringing together the unity of thought and the unity of proposition. Dickerson connects the projection method of the Tractatus 3.11 with the synthesis of the mind “to apply a method (or rule) of projection is for it to grasp a representation as representing (to think the sense), which in turn is for the mind to cognize something in its mental modifications” (2004, 52).

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also a smiling face.3 There is no way for us to claim that the smiley face is an object above and beyond a configuration of lines. The smiling face is in the picture in the same way in which the objects of our representations are in our minds. Dickerson calls the smiley face the intentional object of the picture. His account can therefore be called one of representational intentionality.4 The beauty of Dickerson’s account lies in the simplicity of his example. He encourages us to think about a smiley face and to consider it first simply as lines drawn on paper and then as the smiley face that we recognize in these lines. The content of our perception is the same each time: the lines drawn on paper. But in the case of the smiley face, we interpret the lines as a smiling face; we draw them together into a unity. Dickerson’s account is focused on this key aspect. Through synthesis we see the smiley face in the lines. Dickerson also puts to work the distinction between metaphysical and transcendental synthesis. However, while I underline the differences between Kant’s A- and B-Deduction, Dickerson focuses, as Longuenesse does, on the B-edition. While I make a distinction between image and schema, Dickerson only deals with image-making and metaphysical synthesis. I insist—as does Longuenesse—that we need to look at transcendental synthesis as an important aspect of Kant’s work, and that we also must examine the way in which transcendental synthesis results in transcendental unity, thus allowing us to account for schema as opposed to a picture or images. First, I will detail Dickerson’s excellent interpretation of the metaphysical deduction, which gives us an interesting account of how we have an experience or an object of representation by seeing things in the medium of representation. Later in the book, in Chap. 8, I will provide an account of the difference between image and schema and its connection to synthesis. With Dickerson I want to introduce a new term that I have so far mostly withheld from my conceptual repertoire: the concept of intentionality. In my reading of Kant and Wittgenstein the concept of intentionality ultimately takes on new meaning. The before-putting—Dickerson’s smart 3  I use “smiley face” to signify the lined drawing and “smiling face” to talk about what it conveys. 4  Dickerson makes an interesting observation here. He claims that we can say that the face is smiling. However, we cannot say that the “configuration of the lines and dots is not smiling—for that is nonsensical” (2004, 14).

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translation of the German term Vorstellung—is, as he argues, not “dead” (see Dickerson 2004, 16). There is an intentionality of sensation5 that Dickerson underlines and that equals a synthesis of combination as an imaginative act. Therefore, Dickerson shifts the question of the Transcendental Deduction from how the categories are justified to the question of how representations can be representations of something beyond the medium of representation. The main agenda of Dickerson’s book is to explain synthesis as “seeing in,” and he does a good job of arguing for his reading. He characterizes the Critique of Pure Reason as a book about the human mind in general, which must be considered from a first-­ person perspective and then he presents Kant’s famous claim that in cognition receptivity and spontaneity have to work together in a way that fits his account. The analysis that follows rests on the difficulty arising from the fact that while receptivity is our passive medium of representation, spontaneity is the active work of our imagination or the power of image-making (a closer translation of Kant’s German Einbildungskraft). How can we make the grasping of a unified complex through the power of image-­ making compatible with objectivity, which is guaranteed by receptivity? Dickerson’s Kantian answer is that the act of grasping the unified complex is governed by a priori rules derived from the essential structure of the act of judging, which are the categories. In this, he approximates Longuenesse’s reading. Transcendental apperception is thereby closely connected with the intentionality of perception and thought. There is an important distinction made by Dickerson that I would like to employ. He argues that one should not assimilate the notion of apperception to “modern notions of ‘self-awareness,’ ‘self-consciousness,’ ‘self-­ knowledge,’ or ‘self-reference.’ Rather, apperception is the reflexive act whereby the mind grasps its own representations as representing, and is thus an essential part of all thought and cognition” (Dickerson 2004, 81). Apperception is not the “apprehension of a mental state as one’s own.”6 5  Dickerson uses the term “intentionality of sensation” (2004, 16n18), which he borrows from Gertrude E. M. Anscombe (2002). 6  Dickerson quotes Derk Pereboom (1995) to show that Kant distinguishes “sharply between apperception and (ordinary) self-awareness or self-knowledge” (Dickerson 2004, 86). With this statement Dickerson is countering what he considers to be Pereboom’s understanding of apperception. Generally Pereboom construes Kant’s theory of mental representations as a theory of intentionality. He thinks Kant holds “what we are immediately aware of in typical intentional relations are the contents of intuitions, some of which are real or, we might say, exist, and others of which are not real, or do not exist” (Pereboom 1988, 325).

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Dickerson elaborates that apperception does not “refer to the capacity to think about or cognize one’s own mental states; it is instead a technical term in Kant’s representationalist epistemology referring to the reflexive grasp of one’s own internal states as presenting something” (Dickerson 2004, 97). Dickerson wants to get away from a reading of the internal states as my own, but instead reads them as being representations. It is in that sense that “Kant’s notion of apperception is thus the representationalist equivalent of the semantic notion of understanding a sign. The ‘signs’ in this case are the subject’s internal states.” This is how Dickerson can claim that Kant’s “‘original-synthetic unity of apperception’ concerns the representationalist equivalent of the semantic problem of what it is to understand a complex unified sign—the problem of ‘the unity of the proposition’ or the ‘unity of judgment’” (Dickerson 2004, 97). This connection between the problem of the unity of judgment and the unity of the proposition made by Dickerson is valuable, since it helps me make the connection, important in this book, between Kant’s structure of experience and Wittgenstein’s account of the structure of the proposition in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. What is at stake with apperception and its original-synthetic unity? Why does it matter whether we understand it as self-consciousness or as reflecting something in one’s own consciousness? * * * Dickerson claims that the “nature of apperception” is such that it is both receptive and spontaneous (see Dickerson 2004, 108). The understanding plays an active role: “apperception is spontaneous—the spontaneous application of a rule of projection in virtue of which the subject cognizes appearances in the modifications of its sensibility” (2004, 109). Working from Dickerson’s insights, we can read the threefold synthesis in yet another way, which helps accomplish our goal of explaining the connection between thought or language and things in the first place. The threefold synthesis is a dynamic relation that as it were produces the object in In the discussion of §§16–20 of the B-edition Pereboom focuses on self-understanding and writes that “apperception, first of all is the apprehension of a mental state as one’s own. […] my apperception has necessary unity because all of my representations, my ‘empirical consciousness’ must be grounded ‘in pure apperception, that is, in the thoroughgoing identity of the self in all possible representations’ (CPR B 131–2)” (Pereboom 1995, 8).

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the very act of thinking. However, this object is never arbitrary because of Kant’s understanding of unity as the result of transcendental apperception. In each thought, a judgment is made that is, in essence, an equation: what we take in and what we represent in front of our mind are the same. To take in something we rely on our a priori intuitions in time and space, and to judge we rely on our a priori concepts. Dickerson’s reading helps us to move away from a notion of “self-­ consciousness” as the “I think” that is mysteriously added to any process of experience. We can see apperception as an act on the metaphysical level of seeing-in, which is cognizing appearances in the modification of sensibility and on the transcendental level of a seeing-in, not through cognizing in a concept but through seeing-in the schema to bring intuitions to a concept, as I will elaborate in Chap. 8. While Dickerson picks up on the similarity between Kant and Wittgenstein’s accounts of a method of rule or projection, he does not engage the performative nature of synthesis on either the transcendental or the metaphysical level, as I elaborated in the preceding two chapters in relation to Kant, and which I will develop as the theory of the act of thinking in Chap. 10.7 For Dickerson, there is one synthesis or structure: apprehension, association and reproduction, and recognition in a concept. In the latter, the rule—as the a priori concept—is buried. Dickerson’s discussion of the Transcendental Deduction is informative, since he does not treat it as proof but as an explanation of how we grasp a complex representation. We do so in “a holistic, rather than an atomistic way,” Dickerson claims (2004, 122). He goes on to say that “for Kant the capacity to apperceive the ‘manifold in an intuition’ as a unified whole must be recognized as irreducible—that is, as not explicable in terms of the capacity to be aware of the content of individual component representations” (ibid., 123). When it comes to the unity of consciousness, Dickerson rephrases Kant’s famous “the I think must be able to accompany all my representations” (CPR B132) as an account of how we think the object of our representations, in other words an account of the intentionality of perception and thought. The unity of apperception is thus neither in the thought of a representation nor in the making of a first-person propositional 7  We need more than just the projection in the metaphysical deduction as image-making. We also require the transcendental deduction’s purposive structure that projects an object “as if.”

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attribution or judgment like “I think p,” but first and foremost in a judgment about what the perception or thought is about: its content. Dickerson’s main point is that the act of unification is at the core of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I agree with this reading, although it should be added that it is the performance of the transcendental apperception that creates the unity of the a priori concepts. Unity can only be brought about in the manifold by the thinking subject. Every structure of unity without a judging subject would have to be relegated to a being whose experience was different from ours, who did not possess intuition or understanding. Human beings create this unity in judgment. Here we get an example how a nonhuman being, for example, a god, would have an experience: “Now the intuitive intellect does not need a synthesis precisely because it is not receptive, and is thus never given a manifold by an independent reality. Therefore, its cognition is not the grasp or understanding of the data that are presented to it, but rather the pure expression of an intention” (2004, 165). I bring in this quote, because it foreshadows a kind of a priori intentionality that we can also see in the Tractatus, namely the idea that there could be a connection between thought and thing without an act of thinking being performed. My reading of Kant and Wittgenstein aims to dismantle such a transcendental a priori reading. I argue that what takes place is a performative act. This act by itself brings about thought and content of thought or propositions in speaking or thinking. God, according to Dickerson, could express pure intentions without the work of going through and uniting the data through which he would otherwise need to present such an intention. Dickerson describes Kant’s account of our cognition as synthesizing into unity the data that are represented in us and as seeing something in a picture. God’s intuitive intellect would be more like the drawing of a picture (see ibid.). This could be compared with the a priori synthesis of apperception: “On my reading of the B-Deduction, however, the transcendental unity of apperception (i.e., the unified grasp of the manifold in an intuition) just is the cognition of an object, and therefore Kant commits no fallacy in identifying the two” (2004, 169). I strongly agree with Dickerson’s reading, although it does not do full justice to the performative aspect of the human mind. It is not just God that is able to draw a picture, while humans only see the picture in the lines. As Kant points out in the Critique of Pure Reason, we also need to perform the drawing of a line or a triangle to think it (CPR B156). I will

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elaborate this further in the next chapter and in Chap. 8. However, before moving forward, I would like to sum up Dickerson’s argument and give his account the name “representational intentionality.” What Dickerson calls Kant’s master argument is the following: the premise is that the empirical consciousness accompanying different representations is by itself dispersed and bears no relation to the identity of the subject. Its conclusion is that a relation to the identity of the subject does not come about by my accompanying each representation with consciousness, but by “my adding one representation to the other and being conscious of their synthesis” (CPR B133). The nature of apperception is thus not simply reading off the data. That would be simply making obscure representations clear. The understanding would then only boil down to analyzing or organizing or making distinct what is confused in those representations. Dickerson claims that Kant’s two-faculty model of cognition sees apperception as spontaneous: its function is not to “make the representations of the object distinct, but rather to make the representation of an object possible at all” (CPR A199/B244). Therefore, we do not add consciousness to each representation, but by adding one representation to another, we are conscious of their synthesis (CPR B133). I agree with Dickerson that this reading of Kant’s argument results in a question of the “nature of representation” (2004, 116) through thought and language. Dickerson writes that “the signs in themselves do not determine their own application” (ibid., 127). Therefore, intuitions as unsynthesized do not represent objects but are blind (ibid., 128). However, as synthesized they are representations of objects. Dickerson adds: “It is not to claim that there is first an unsynthesized ‘proto-intuition,’ which then undergoes a certain temporal process and becomes a fully-fledged intuition” (ibid., 129). For Dickerson representation itself is what is at stake in synthesis. When he writes “Apperception is thus the act whereby my internal states come to function as representations for me—as it were, as my point of view on the world” (ibid., 95) it should be clear to us that apperception then is a reflexive act or an act of self-awareness, but not about the cognizing self or its internal states. It is an act in which we “grasp a representation as presenting something to us” (ibid.). In this sense Kant’s notion of apperception becomes the “equivalent of the act of understanding a sign” (ibid., 36). At one point Dickerson comes even close to a performative reading, when he holds that the unification of representation or apperception cannot just be passive but must be spontaneous and active: the mind’s active

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application of a rule of projection. Dickerson writes, “for this unity to be possible, the subject must perform a synthesis” (2004, 106, my emphasis). It is exactly this “performance,” or I would say performativity, that is crucial to my reading but this eludes Dickerson in terms of a far-reaching understanding of its consequences. * * * In Chap. 5, I have endeavored to give a reading of Kant that presents his form of experience in a new way, namely as a dynamic categorization. It is less a form of experience than it is experience performed. The connection of the object of experience and the experience itself are each time performed and by that they make the connection first and foremost possible. For Kant, there is no gap between thought and what the thought is about. Receptivity and spontaneity work together in the sense that they are necessarily connected, since the connection is an ever-new expression of the relation between world and mind. In my reading, the distinction between general and transcendental logic contains a performativity of reason, which lies dormant in Kant’s system. I argue that we can escape the problem of identity, self-­ consciousness, and reflexivity of the B-edition in a way very similar to Dickerson’s: it is not the subject’s self-reflexivity that is the problem for Kant, but thought’s self-reflexivity or referentiality once it is in use. This self-reflexivity brings about the connection to the thing—not in the sense of transcendental realism, which posits a thing in itself, but in the sense of Kant’s transcendental idealism interpreted as performativity of thought. In the next chapter, I take a closer look at Dickerson’s idea that the unity of thought in Kant can be aligned with the unity of the proposition in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Wittgenstein’s account of the unity of the proposition, as well as his theory of sense, no sense, and nonsense parallel the discussion of Kant’s a priori unity of the categories and his theory of transcendental illusion. In the same way in which Kant’s theory of the understanding produces errors when it tries to think things in and of themselves, Wittgenstein presents propositions that are nonsensical but purely logical. Yet once something is projected in the proposition—once it is in use—it becomes meaningful, and on the transcendental level a projection of transcendental ideas makes possible the unity of the understanding.

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References Anscombe, G.E.M. 2002. The Intentionality of Sensation: A Grammatical Feature. In Vision and Mind, ed. Robert Alva Nöe and Evan Thompson, 55–75. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Bennett, Jonathan. 1966. Kant’s Analytic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dickerson, A.B. 2004. Kant on Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Pereboom, Derk. 1988. Kant on Intentionality. Synthese 77: 321–352. ———. 1995. Self-Understanding in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction. Synthese 103: 1–42. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

PART II

Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory as a Method of Projection

In Part II of this book, I discuss how the form of the proposition, as laid out in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, is similar to Kant’s threefold structure of experience. While Kant describes a judgment that determines what comes in through the senses to be the same as the concept, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus the propositional sign together with its symbolizing method is the signified. While Kant operates with the notion that the form of the a priori intuition and the form of the a priori concept on the transcendental level coincide, in the Tractatus the projection method operates under the assumption that there is one general form of proposition from which all other propositions can be inferred, due to the logical form that is shared with that which the proposition is about. In Chap. 5 I introduce the world of the Tractatus as one in which, out of a general propositional form, all the propositions can be projected onto the world which shares a form with it. I show that the propositions of the Tractatus are set up like mathematical equations: what is on the left side equals what is on the right side. The sub-propositions serve to elucidate the right side of the equation in a new equation. The chapter describes two perspectives on the proposition in the Tractatus. The first perspective views the proposition as a variable of a general form that represents a fact. The second perspective considers the proposition to be an elucidation. However, in order for the proposition to be a fact, it must be projected onto the world. Philosophical or mathematical propositions, however, are tautologies; they are true or false without needing to be projected onto the world.

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In Chap. 6, I present Wittgenstein’s threefold account of propositions that have sense, have no sense or are nonsensical as a function of their use. This is similar to how in Kant the a priori unity of the categories has to do with the projection of ideas and that the wrong projection leads to the theory of transcendental illusion. In the same way in which Kant’s theory of the understanding produces errors when it tries to think things in and of themselves, Wittgenstein presents propositions that are nonsensical but purely logical. Only once something is projected in the proposition—once it is in use—does it become meaningful, and on the transcendental level only a projection of transcendental ideas makes possible the unity of the understanding. Therefore, in Chap. 6 I elaborate what a successful projection looks like and what constitutes the privative model, a proposition in which nothing is projected. We keep in mind that the threefold structure of the proposition in the Tractatus is compared to the threefold synthesis in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction where what is apprehended and represented is then recognized to be the same in a concept. In Chap. 7 I show the privative case of the projection, the case when nothing is projected. My aim in this chapter is to show that Wittgenstein plays with introducing a zero point of logic, which would be akin to a proposition without application or a transcendental category. I elaborate this in a kind of “thought experiment” to develop what Wittgenstein calls the zero method. The projection method is a relation that manifests itself only in use. In other words, we need to use the sensibly perceptible propositional sign in order for something to be thought or pictured in it. One could thus say that the connection is actually made through the projection. As a result, this renders those propositions problematic in which no projection is made, e.g., logical and mathematical propositions. In a literary interlude, I compare what I call Wittgenstein’s Logic Degree Zero with Roland Barthes’ discussion of Writing Degree Zero, in which he describes a zero point of style that makes style possible in the first place. But both in Wittgenstein and Kant, propositions need to be used and a judgment must be made, so that what comes in though the senses and what is put in front of the mind can be judged to be the same. The notion that only the act of thinking or speaking brings about the connection to what is thought or said is one of the main theses of this book.

CHAPTER 5

The Form of the Proposition

The general form of proposition is the essence of proposition. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein claims that he wishes to draw a “limit to thinking,” a claim, which he immediately qualifies: “not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts” (TLP 22) “This limit”—so much is clear for Wittgenstein—“can only be drawn in language” (ibid.). In the same breath, he apologizes for not having lived up to the possible, in terms of how well he succeeded in expressing his thoughts. This is the first value he ascribes to his book: to have expressed his thoughts as well as he could. When it comes to “the truth of the thoughts communicated,” he insists they are “unassailable and definitive” (ibid.), and that therefore he has finally solved all philosophical problems. In the end Wittgenstein concedes that the Tractatus can merely show how solving these problems has done little, which is the second value he attributes to his booklet. What are the thoughts expressed in the Tractatus, and what do we make of Wittgenstein’s peculiar emphasis on expressing them successfully and his conviction “how little has been done when these problems have

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been solved” (ibid.)?1 If we go by the main seven propositions presented (TLP 1–7), we get a sort of inventory: . The world is everything that is the case.2 1 2. What is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of affairs*.3 3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.4 4. The thought is the significant proposition.5 5. Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)6 6. The general form of truth-function is [p̄, ξ ̄, N(ξ ̄)]. This is the general form of proposition.7 7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.8  Wittgenstein speaks of expression but this also extends to representation. Maybe it is one of the most important lessons to be learned from the Tractatus. The moment we express something, we represent it. There is no such thing as immediacy in expression; it is always already mediated. When we look at the relation between an expression or a representation and what is expressed or represented, we realize that there is no formula or rule for connecting the two because they are not disconnected in the first place. 2  I am generally using the Ogden translation published in 1995 (the first English translation and originally published in 1922), but for some passages I prefer alternatives from the Pears and McGuinness translation, which I mark as * and quote in the footnotes to each proposition. For proposition 1 the German reads: “Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” Pears and McGuiness translate this as “The world is all that is the case.” See the List of Abbreviations for the full bibliographic information on the Pears and McGuinness translation of the Tractatus. 3  In German proposition 2 reads: “Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.” The Pears and McGuinness translation says: “What is the case—a fact—is the existence of states of affairs.” It renders Sachverhalt as a “state of affairs,” which I think is better than how Ogden translates it as “atomic fact,” because the latter has led to an atomistic reading of the Tractatus. I will say more about Sachverhalt when I come to the difference between Sachverhalt and Sachlage. 4  In German proposition 3 reads: “Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.” Pears and McGuinness translate this as “A logical picture of facts is a thought.” 5  Pears and McGuinness translate proposition 4 as “A thought is a proposition with a sense.” In German it reads: “Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.” 6  Proposition 5 in Pears and McGuinness reads: “A proposition is a truth-function of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.)” The original German reads: “Der Satz ist die Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze. (Der Elementarsatz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion seiner selbst.)” 7  In Pears and McGuinness proposition 6 reads: “The general form of a truth-function is ¯ [p , ¯ ξ , N(ξ¯)]. This is the general form of a proposition.” In German: “Die allgemeine Form ¯, ¯ der Wahrheitsfunktion ist: [p ξ , N(ξ¯)]. Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes.” 8  Pears and McGuinness for proposition 7: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” In German: “Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.” 1

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Wittgenstein’s absolute form of presentation is interesting, to say the least. He sets up seven propositions,9 by which he attempts to define the world. And he does so by breaking down the world into distinct parts. Wittgenstein states: the world is everything that is the case; and what is the case, the states of affairs that exist, are facts; and finally we picture facts logically in thought. However, all the propositions of the Tractatus are ultimately discarded as nonsensical. In order to understand this, we need to follow Wittgenstein’s perspectives on the proposition. On the one hand, he is concerned with the propositional form that itself entails the possibility of all different sentence structures. Wittgenstein calls every part of a proposition that characterizes its sense an “expression” or “symbol”; the proposition itself is also an expression or symbol: 3.311 An expression presupposes the forms of all propositions in which it can occur. It is the common characteristic mark of a class of propositions. 3.312 It is therefore represented by the general form of the propositions which it characterizes. And in this form the expression is constant and everything else is variable.

There is also another perspective in which Wittgenstein thinks of the proposition. He claims that propositions are elucidations of one another: “A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of ‘philosophical propositions,’ but to make propositions clear” (TLP 4.112). Philosophy should make clear and sharply delimit the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred. Another indication as to how Wittgenstein understands the propositions of the Tractatus as elucidations can be found in the first footnote of the text, right after the first proposition. Wittgenstein writes:

9  Some commentators have claimed that he models the propositions on the biblical story of the seven days of the creation of  the world. This interpretation is espoused by Eli Friedlander (2001, 15).

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The decimal figures as numbers of the separate propositions indicate the logical importance of the propositions, the emphasis laid upon them in my exposition. The propositions n.1, n.2, n.3, etc. are comments on proposition No. n; the propositions n.m1, n.m2, etc., are comments on the proposition No. n.m; and so on. (TLP n1)

Propositions 1 to 7 cited above hold the text’s main logical weight. They are like mathematical equations; subject-predicate compositions state that what is on the left side (the subject) is equivalent to what is on the right side (whatever is predicated). The next subordinate proposition elucidates the right side with a new subject-predicate form that makes a new equation. Wittgenstein writes in the Tractatus that mathematical equations, or proofs, function by demonstrating that what is on one side equals what is on the other. However, the equality is concealed by the form of the equation: 6.23 If two expressions are connected by the sign of equality, this means that they can be substituted for one another. But whether this is the case must show itself in the two expressions themselves. It characterizes the logical form of two expressions, that they can be substituted for one another.

What happens over the course of the text is that these two different perspectives on propositions—as variables of a general form and as elucidations—become intertwined. With one kind of proposition, we talk about the (general) form of the proposition itself. With the other, we aim to talk about that which the proposition is about. It turns out that we cannot keep the two perspectives apart in any proper way, since propositions always show in their form what they are about, even though it may sometimes be hidden. In order to get closer to the intertwining of these two perspectives on the proposition, I want to consider the difference between equations proper—mathematical propositions—and philosophical propositions as equations. What I will show in my reading is that Wittgenstein holds that philosophical propositions like mathematical propositions are tautologies and always true. Propositions have sense when they project something. Mathematical propositions never project anything. In a mathematical equation both sides are merely expressed in language. Therefore, what is on the left side and what is on the right side are said to be the same, and

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mathematical propositions do not need a third component that connects the proposition with what it is about. Propositions in general, including philosophical propositions, however, seem to need such a third component. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein names this third element the picture-­ making or projection method. He holds that it is the sensible proposition together with its projection onto reality that makes the proposition have sense—and therefore makes it actually true or false. If nothing is projected, then the proposition does not have sense. Logical propositions are therefore tautologies and always true like mathematical propositions. However, because of that they have no sense, as nothing is projected in them. Wittgenstein postulates that only in use, only in the projection onto reality, does a proposition have sense. 6.121 The propositions of logic demonstrate the logical properties of propositions, by combining them into propositions which say nothing. This method could be called a zero-method. In a logical proposition propositions are brought into equilibrium with one another, and the state of equilibrium then shows how these propositions must be logically constructed. (My emphasis)

Now we run into the problem that the main propositions, and actually all propositions of the Tractatus, are equations of the kind illustrated above, and by this virtue are tautologies. According to what I have just outlined above, proposition 1 is the equation of the world to everything that is the case. Proposition 2 elucidates what is on the right side of proposition 1: that what is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of affairs. Proposition 3 elucidates the right side again, the fact, by equating the logical picture of facts with thought. Proposition 4 equates the right side of 3, thought, with the proposition that has sense. Proposition 5 elucidates the proposition having sense as a truth-function of elementary propositions and adds that an elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself. Proposition 6 finally elucidates the right side of proposition 5, the general form of truth-function as [p̄, ξ ̄, N(ξ ̄)], which is the general form of the proposition. Wittgenstein’s proposition 7 concludes: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” This I read as Wittgenstein’s conviction that the general form of the proposition cannot again be elucidated, which is why one could stop here, claiming this shows that Wittgenstein’s attempt fails; that he is unable to give us the general form of the proposition; and

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that he is unable to say of what this form consists, the form connecting the proposition to what it is about. I think, however, it is important to stress that the Tractatus is in fact an attempt to provide this general form. Here lies the similarity to Kant’s system and his attempt to prove the a priori categories of the mind. Wittgenstein discards the propositions of the Tractatus as nonsensical in the end and suggests we throw away the ladder we climbed up upon (think of the ladder as the opposite of the descending elucidations in the numbering system). But this only applies when we are trying to come up with the general form of the proposition as that which links any thought or expression to that which it is about. This would be akin to an a priori connection between thought or language and world. Once we give up the need to understand this connection as a sort of intentionality a priori, the whole of the Tractatus becomes a network of propositions elucidating each other in the form of left-side, right-side equations. As Wittgenstein argues in his later work, the connection arises in the application or use of language. This will be elaborated in Chap. 10 “Performativity and the Act of Thinking.” In the following I engage in an analysis of how Wittgenstein wanted the sub-propositions of the Tractatus to work allowing each proposition to further elucidate the former proposition, all the way down to the elementary proposition or general form of the proposition. I quote the propositions with their sub- and sub-sub-proposition to show their logical equality: 1 The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things. 1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts. 1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. 1.13 The facts in logical space are the world. 1.2 The world divides into facts. 1.21 Any one can either be the case or not be the case and everything else remains the same. 2 What is the case—the fact—is the existence of states of affairs*.10 10  As already pointed out I find Ogden’s translation of Sachverhalt as “atomic fact” misleading, which is why I am using the Pears and McGuiness translation as “state of affairs” instead throughout the text. This is the only deviation from the Ogden translation and will be marked with * throughout the book.

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2.01 A state of affairs* is a combination of objects (entities, things). 2.02 The object is simple. 2.03 In a state of affairs* objects hang one in another like the links of a chain. 2.04 The totality of existent states of affairs* is the world. 2.05 The totality of existent states of affairs* also determines which states of affairs* do not exist. 2.06 The existence and non-existence of states of affairs* is the reality. (The existence of states of affairs* we also call a positive fact, their non-­ existence a negative fact.)

Proposition 1.1, the sub-proposition to proposition 1 “The world is everything that is the case” defines “everything that is the case” as “a totality of facts, not of things.” The next sub-proposition 1.11 elucidates “the totality of facts” in the same manner: “the world is determined by the facts and by these being all the facts.” The point of 1.11 is to elucidate what is meant by the totality of facts, namely that only if all the facts are given can the world be determined and thus be everything that is the case. Sub-proposition 1.12 is placed on the same logical level and further elucidates “the totality of facts.” We thereby learn that the facts are not just what is, but also what is not. Finally, 1.13 elucidates that what is the case and what is not the case are “the facts in logical space” and these “are the world,” which brings us back to where we started: on the left side of the equation of 1 and 1.1, “the world.” Accordingly, proposition 1.2 “The world divides11 into facts” should read as an elucidation of proposition 1 “The world is everything that is the case” but in connection to proposition 1.1 “The world is the totality of facts not of things.” Propositions 1.1 and 1.2 are placed on the same level, although they differently express what they are about. Proposition 1.1 states that the world is the totality of facts, not of things, and proposition 1.2 states that the world divides into facts. Finally proposition 2 is on the same level as 1 “The world is everything that is the case.” We can, however, see how the elucidations in the sub-propositions have prepared us for 11  Ogden translates this as “divides into facts.” Wittgenstein, however, writes in German: “Die Welt zerfällt in Tatsachen.” Zerfällt contains a form of the word Fall (in English “case”), which he used earlier when elucidating the world to be “alles was der Fall ist” (“everything that is the case”). This may be a slightly poetic or Heideggerian reading of Wittgenstein, but it offers a graphic understanding: the world thus divides and falls apart into facts, in German was der Fall ist.

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the new proposition: “What is the case—the fact—[as elaborated in the elucidations above] is the existence of states of affairs*.” The subsequent elucidations are of the expressions on the right side of the equation, which in the case of propositions 1 and 2 is the existence of states of affairs. Wittgenstein does not elucidate the existence of the states of affairs, the next proposition is 2.01 and he elucidates directly states of affairs, 2.01: “A state of affairs* is a combination of objects (entities, things).” Proposition 2.011 continues to elucidate the right side: objects in combination are said to be essential to a thing to be part of a state of affairs*. The reason for leaving out a discussion of existence and introducing “0” into the numbers of sub-propositions will be discussed further down. I listed the zero propositions here to show how the elucidating works as rungs of the ladder going downward, but that some rungs are left out as they concern things that would be hard to elucidate. Moving ahead to 2.02 “The object is simple” we can see it is on the same logical level as 2.01 “A state of affairs* is a combination of objects (entities, things).” Proposition 2.03 says: “In the state of affairs* objects hang one in another like the members of a chain.” Proposition 2.04 elucidates the world being the entirety of all existent states of affairs* to be the world. Proposition 2.05 goes on to say the entirety of all existent states of affairs* determines which states of affairs do not exist. Proposition 2.06 states that the existence or non-existence of states of affairs is reality. We find the greatest jump from proposition 2.061 “The total reality is the world” to proposition 2.1 “We make to ourselves pictures of facts.” In proposition 2 “What is the case—the fact—is the existence of states of affairs*” existence could not be elucidated properly in terms of the right side of the equation. Wittgenstein’s solution to this problem is to say that while states of affairs either exist or do not exist, we can only determine the fact—what is the case—through the making of pictures, that is through the projection method, the way we make pictures of facts as I will discuss below. We know neither what is the case nor what is not the case. We cannot know about the existence of facts—existence being a category that cannot be elucidated since it is a priori, at least in Kant’s system—if we do not have a way to access the facts. We can only access the facts through making pictures. There is no direct access to existence. This, I argue, is the key move of the Tractatus in proposition 2.1: 2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts.

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2.11 The picture presents the facts in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs*. 2.12 The picture is a model of reality. 2.13 To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture. 2.131 The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects. 2.14 The picture consists in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way. 2.141 The picture is a fact. 2.15 That the elements of the picture are combined with one another in a definite way, represents that the things are so combined with one another. 2.151 The form of representation is the possibility that the things are combined with one another as are the elements in the picture. 2.16 In order to be a picture a fact must have something in common with what it pictures. 2.161 In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all. 2.17 What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—rightly or falsely—is its form of representation. 2.171 The picture can represent any reality whose form it has. The spatial picture everything spatial, the coloured everything coloured, etc. 2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation: it shows it forth. 2.173 The picture represents its object from without (its standpoint is its form of representation), therefore the picture represents its object rightly or falsely. 2.174 But the picture cannot place itself outside of its form of representation. 2.18 What every picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality, in order to represent it at all—rightly or falsely—is the logical form, that is, the form of reality. 2.181 If the form of representation is the logical form, then the picture is called a logical picture. 2.182 Every picture is also a logical picture. (On the other hand, for example, not every picture is spatial.) 2.19 The logical picture can depict the world. 2.2 The picture has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures. 3 The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

As I mentioned above, there is no proposition 2.0 even though there is a proposition 2.01, since it would have to elucidate what the existence of

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state of affairs is. Wittgenstein could simply have gone on with 2.1, but he went on with 2.01 and marked an absence, a zero.12 Existence can only be represented or pictured by the proposition, as Wittgenstein elucidates in 2.11, using the German vorstellen (“present” or literally “to put in front of us”) in a way similar to Kant’s notion of before-putting that I repeatedly stressed in previous chapters. Proposition 2 goes on to elucidate how we make pictures of facts. “The picture presents the facts in logical space, the existence and non-existence of states of affairs.” In 2.12 this presentation of facts in logical space is said to be a model of reality. “The picture is a model of reality,” and 2.13 elucidates the model that “To the objects correspond in the picture the elements of the picture.”13 In 2.14 the elucidation of the picture comes out as the model of reality in which the elements of the picture correspond to the objects in the picture as consisting “in the fact that its elements are combined with one another in a definite way.”14 Finally in 2.15 “That the elements of the picture are combined with one another in a definite way, represents that the things are so combined with one another” shows the structure of representation and the possibility of it being so structured as the form of representation, which we can see in 2.16: “In the picture and the pictured there must be something identical in order that the one can be a picture of the other at all,” and in 2.17, “What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—rightly or falsely—is its form of representation.” In these sub-propositions about making a picture of facts we get that picture and pictured must share a logical form or a form of presentation. Proposition 2.2, “The picture has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures,” leads up to proposition 3, “The logical picture of the facts is the thought.” This occupies the same logical level as 2: “We make to ourselves pictures of facts.” The picture that we make of a fact—and pictures are always logical pictures as Wittgenstein states in 2.182 “Every picture is also a logical picture”—is the thought. So far, our involvement with the method of the Tractatus has led us to the problem of representation or making pictures, and the question of 12  Or as I will call it later, a zero-proposition. Some might offer the simple explanation that, well, in math 2.0 = 2, so nothing is missing. But I argue that a gap is inherent to Wittgenstein’s logical framework. The 0 may seem to be negligible, but in fact it gives a foundation to a reading that reveals the metaphysical strand in the Tractatus. 13  Proposition 2.131 goes even further: “The elements of the picture stand, in the picture, for the objects.” They represent the object. 14  See also TLP 2.141: The picture is a fact.

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what the picture and the depicted must have in common to warrant the fact that the representation can be made. This parallels Kant’s problem of receptivity and spontaneity working together in experience. The task of this chapter is to elucidate Wittgenstein’s discussion of the unity of the proposition, or its essence of form. With proposition 2.1 “We make to ourselves pictures of facts” and then 3.1 “In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses,” it becomes clear that only through language can we get to the world that is everything that is the case. The Tractatus does not stop there in attempting to delimit the way propositions are essentially about the world. Wittgenstein’s project is to elucidate all the parts of propositions down to the most elementary proposition and to determine its innermost form by which it is connected to the reality to which it pertains. In this sense, I argue, the Tractatus is a treatise that poses the questions: In what way can the proposition be about the world? How do we succeed in making pictures of reality? And how do we represent the world through sensibly perceptive propositions that express our thoughts of things? We compare thought and world by projecting thought onto the world. Wittgenstein investigates the structure of thought expressed in the proposition to see how both connect to the world. Wittgenstein never claims that thought and world are distinct, or that we could know the world as such or its existence or reality. Instead, he claims that we only know it through the mirror or network of language that is thrown or projected onto it. One thing we do learn about the world is which kind of net we can use to capture it. 6.342 […] The possibility of describing a picture like the one mentioned above with a net of a given form tells us nothing about the picture. (For that is true of all such pictures.) But what does characterize the picture is that it can be described completely by a particular net with a particular size of mesh.*15

15  Here I quote the Pears and McGuinness translation of proposition 6.342 because it renders the meaning of the German much better by staying closer to the text, while the Ogden translation is more general and sacrifices the essential image of the net. Compare here the German translation: “Dass sich ein Bild, wie das vorhin erwähnte, durch ein Netz von gegebener Form beschreiben lässt, sagt über das Bild nichts aus. (Denn dies gilt für jedes Bild dieser Art.) Das aber charakterisiert das Bild, dass es sich durch ein bestimmtes Netz von bestimmter Feinheit vollständig beschreiben lässt.”

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Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is a step-by-step investigation into the form of that net and he tries to boil it down to the smallest possible connection node: the general form of the proposition, which is the logical form, or the projection method, or the internal relation between the proposition and that which it is about. Internal relations are essential both in the Tractatus and in the Philosophical Investigations. They are different in essence, however, in the latter work—as we will see when we elaborate the theory of the act of thinking in Chap. 10.16 What both accounts share is the aspect of use. Unless there is the activity of projecting the proposition onto the world that results in it being true or false, there is no sense. Use already plays a major role in the Tractatus. Thought has an object only when the proposition is projected onto reality as a model of it, in that sense a picture of it is made. Later, in the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein argues that meaning simply is use, but there is a connection to what he described in the Tractatus as propositions only having meaning when they are actually projected onto the world. In the next chapter I present in detail how Wittgenstein already thinks the aspect of use or the projection in the Tractatus.

References Barthes, Roland. 1977. Writing Degree Zero. Reissue edition, with a preface by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang. 1st ed. 1953. Friedlander, Eli. 2001. Signs of Sense. Boston: Harvard University Press. Mácha, Jakub. 2015. Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations: Tracing All the Connections. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

 Cf. Jakub Mácha Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations (2015).

16

CHAPTER 6

Projection Method

At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In Kant, we found that sensibility and understanding are the two interacting faculties of the mind necessary for us to have the experience of something;1 now we turn to examining Wittgenstein’s means of determining how our propositions are about something. One of my interpretatory goals is to compare the structure of experience in Kant and the form of the proposition as the possibility of its structure in Wittgenstein. Both consist of an equation of two elements by uniting them in a threefold structure. While in Kant we have the a priori intuitions and a priori 1  This connection between A priori categories (understanding) and A priori forms of intuition is a synthesis worked by the capacity to judge, which is as Longuenesse described it part of the nature of our mind as the reflection we have made on it through judging. See Chap. 3 and the discussion of Longuenesse’s Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Longuenesse 1998).

Part of this chapter on Wittgenstein's projection method has already been printed on pp. 283-287. In “Hegel’s Speculative Method and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method.” In: J. Mácha, A. Berg (eds.) Wittgenstein and Hegel. Reevaluation of Difference. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 275–290. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_6

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concepts that are united in judgment, in Wittgenstein there is the sensible form of the proposition and the form of the proposition as its unity or essence that needs to be projected onto reality, as elaborated in Chap. 5. Wittgenstein understands this unity or essence of the proposition as the nature of the depicting form, or as the nature of the form of the proposition. If we read these threefold structures as parallel then Wittgenstein’s philosophy can be viewed as a continuation of Kant’s Copernican Turn, insofar as Wittgenstein provides the understanding that our language is not what conforms to the things in the world, but it is rather the objects in the world that conform to the nature or essence of the propositions. Wittgenstein is on to something very particular when he observes in 6.371 that we mistakenly conceive the laws of nature as actually explaining natural phenomena. What then are the laws of nature according to the Tractatus? To better comprehend Wittgenstein’s understanding, let us consider the following: 2.0123 If I know an object, then I also know all the possibilities of occurrence in states of affairs*. (Every such possibility must lie in the nature of the object.) A new possibility cannot subsequently be found.

Wittgenstein talks about the nature of the object, which, in part, consists of the possible occurrences in states of affairs, as outlined at the beginning of the Tractatus.2 However, one thing that Wittgenstein never succeeds in elucidating is the nature of the object as the smallest constituent of elementary propositions. All we have access to are representations, as we see in 2.1 “we make to ourselves pictures of facts.” Since according to 1.1 “the world is the totality of facts” our pictures need to have something in common with what they are pictures of, otherwise what we represent to ourselves would not be part and parcel of the totality of the world. What the Tractatus talks about in terms of nature is the nature of the truth relation: “What the picture must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it after its manner—rightly or falsely—is its form of representation” (TLP 2.17). The form of a picture could be 2  Wittgenstein claims that to be a constituent of a possible state of affairs is written into things as their nature: “It is essential to a thing that it can be a constituent part of a state of affairs*” (TLP 2.011). This is followed by “In logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs* the possibility of that state of affairs* must already be prejudged in the thing” (TLP 2.012).

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described as how the picture must agree with reality in order to be capable of portraying it at all. In 2.18 Wittgenstein writes that it is logical form that the picture has to have in common with reality. The first thing that the theory of logical portrayal by means of language provides is a piece of information about the nature of the truth relation: The theory of logical portrayal by means of language says—quite generally: In order for it to be possible that a proposition should be true or false— agree with reality or not—for this to be possible something in the proposition must be identical with reality. (NB 20.10.14)

The truth relation Wittgenstein invokes here is the relation of the proposition to reality. Thoughts as logical pictures of facts must be rendered in a proposition, so that we can take them in by the senses. This is what Wittgenstein says in proposition 3.1: “In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.” Could not nature itself or the world or things be perceived by the senses? Wittgenstein claims that what we can perceive is the way things stand3 in relation to one another, and we can only perceive this once we have a thought that we can express in a proposition: 3.11 We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs.4 The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.

We can infer from this that laws of nature are not about natural phenomena, but about the nature of the proposition, which Wittgenstein understands to be the essential relation of picturing thoughts that are about facts. This again expresses the way things stand—in a truth relation. Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks: My whole task consists in explaining the nature of the proposition. 3  This awkward formulation is the literal translation of the German term Sachverhalt. The way things stand in relation to one another. 4  Irritatingly, Ogden really uses “state of affairs” here not for Sachverhalt, but for the German term Sachlage. Pears and McGuiness translate Sachlage as “situation.” I prefer the translation of Sachverhalt as “state of affairs.” It literally means the way things stand in relation to one another, which is why I sometimes use this expression in the text. Sachlage would literally be the way things could be laid out—as in a possible situation.

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That is to say, in giving the nature of all facts, whose picture the proposition is. In giving the nature of all being. (And here Being does not mean existing—in that case it would be nonsensical.) (NB 22.1.15)5

Wittgenstein is keen on describing the relation between the nature of the proposition and that which it is about as one; the nature of the proposition could thus provide the nature of all facts. But the point here is that Wittgenstein posits a necessary relation between the sensible perceptible propositional sign and that which it is about—and sets out to elucidate this relation. He is convinced that because of this necessary relation, he is able to get at both the nature of the object and the nature of the proposition: 5.47 It is clear that everything which can be said beforehand about the form of all propositions at all can be said on one occasion. For all logical operations are already contained in the elementary proposition. For “fa” says the same as “(∃ x) . fx . x = a.” Where there is composition, there is argument and function, and where these are, all logical constants already are. One could say: the one logical constant is that which all propositions, according to their nature, have in common with one another. That however is the general form of proposition. The general form of the proposition is the essence of proposition.

The general propositional form is what all propositions have in common with one another: that they are composite and that they contain all logical operations. But this itself is not something that can be claimed, but rather something we can only see in the propositions as they stand in relation to one another: 6.36 If there were a law of causality, it might run: “There are natural laws.” But that can clearly not be said: it shows itself.

5  Speaking about both existence and reality results in nonsensical propositions as we will see in Chap. 8. We cannot make sense talking about reality or existence, but our propositions show the existence and reality of things through the way things stand in relation to one another.

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Any attempt to “say” the things that show themselves must, first and foremost, result in senseless and nonsensical propositions, which Wittgenstein finds the Tractatus guilty of producing. Wittgenstein’s aim is to make us aware of this confusion, even as he tries to alert us to the fact that nothing is really wrong with our idea of there being laws of nature. However, these laws simply cannot be formulated or put in a proposition. The quote from the beginning of the chapter about the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena continues like this: 6.372 So people stop short at natural laws as something unassailable, as did the ancients at God and Fate. And they are both right and wrong. But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.

What is at stake is the source of laws of nature, which the ancients saw as originating in God or Fate. But nothing is explained through that and as we know especially from the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein thinks that explanations come to an end. Here Wittgenstein says that it is a misunderstanding that laws of nature are explanations of natural phenomena. There is no metaphysical necessity. Kremer writes about this passage that laws of nature “are a way of organizing our description of the facts that we have observed in reality.”6 Earlier in the Tractatus Wittgenstein had expounded his view that some things cannot be said. 4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly. 4.12 Propositions can represent the whole reality, but they cannot represent what they must have in common with reality in order to be able to represent it—the logical form. To be able to represent the logical form, we should have to be able to put ourselves with the propositions outside logic, that is outside the world.

Here we clearly see the kind of problem that Wittgenstein is struggling with throughout the Tractatus, and this passage also reveals his relation to 6  Michael Kremer also thinks the passage points to the fact that we may be able to capture facts with a particular mesh. But logic is groundless; we cannot provide justifications for it (see Kremer 2013, 483).

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Kant. We cannot formulate propositions that represent the logical form connecting proposition and reality. Reality cannot be represented; the representation itself is the connection, but that cannot be “said.” If one tried to represent reality, one would produce nonsensical propositions, or one would step outside the world of phenomena into the world of noumena, as Kant does. Both logical and mathematical propositions are problematic, as they are borderline phenomena. They are representations, but they do not extend to reality; they merely identify two different things and claim that they are the same, which makes them tautological. However, since such propositions are about themselves, they make the point that the proposition itself says that this and this is the same. They do not project themselves onto reality. Wittgenstein writes in the Notebooks: “The question of the nature of identity cannot be answered until the nature of tautologies is explained. But that question is the fundamental question of all logic” (NB 15.12.13). This recalls Kant’s distinction between general and transcendental logic. In general logic, where there is no object, no projection is made. * * * I will elaborate in the following what a successful projection looks like and what constitutes the privative model, a proposition in which nothing is projected. We keep in mind that the threefold structure of the proposition in the Tractatus is compared to the threefold synthesis in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction where what is apprehended and represented is then recognized to be the same in a concept. In the Tractatus 3.12 we see: 3.12 The sign through which we express the thought I call the propositional sign. And the proposition is the propositional sign in its projective relation to the world.

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is not a treatise that is skeptical about the world. In proposition 2.1 Wittgenstein claims that we access the world through picturing facts to ourselves. Subsequently Wittgenstein elaborates what he calls the “method of projection” for picturing the world successfully. What is at stake in our making pictures of facts is the representation of “sense,” as Wittgenstein states in 2.221: “What the picture represents is its sense.”

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The first time Wittgenstein mentions sense in the Tractatus is in proposition 2.0211, in the context of the world and its substance. Here Wittgenstein mysteriously claims that “if the world had no substance, then whether a proposition had sense would depend on whether another proposition was true.” The primary concern here is not what Wittgenstein means by “substance,” but instead the question as to how the sense of a proposition can be had without knowing whether it is true or false. According to 2.221, what one represents by the picture is its sense. Truth-­ conditions factor in only by way of comparing the picture I made, the sense, with reality, as described in 2.222: “In the agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality, its [the picture’s] truth or falsity consists.” Therefore, it is the making of a comparison between the sensibly perceptible sign and its projection onto reality how I determine whether a proposition is true or false. But sense already seems to be represented by the picture alone. Let us look at the projection method in detail. Wittgenstein sets this up as an equation. First, he claims that the proposition or the propositional sign is a logical picture of a thought. Then, he states that the propositional sign together with the method of symbolizing (what it images) is identical with what is signified, that is, the sense (see TLP 3.11). The equation is always that the sign together with the symbolizing method is equal to that which is signified and only in the next step do we ask whether that sense is true or false. Wittgenstein makes it clear that no a priori true picture or proposition can exist, since truth lies in the comparison of the sense, that which the picture pictures, with reality. The point is only that the logical part of what is signified should be completely determined just by the logical part of the sign and the method of symbolizing: sign and method of symbolizing together must be logically identical with what is signified. The sense of the proposition is what it images. (NB 26.10.14)

A little side remark about Wittgenstein and a priori truth may help here. He establishes that thoughts are logical pictures of facts. Thoughts that are a priori true must allow us to recognize them as being true without a comparison with reality. But to see the truth of the proposition we still need to be able to look at the thought it expresses, and that is only possible if it is perceptible by the senses. Thus, Wittgenstein says, it must be expressed in a proposition, and therefore we cannot have a priori truth:

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3.11 We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible situation*. The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.

In order to get the sense of the proposition, we need to project it as a possible situation in a perceptible sign. The picture or the propositional sign is a projection of a possible situation, or the possibility that things stand in relation to another in a certain way. Whether or not things stand in that way is another question. What is crucial in order for a picture or propositional sign to have sense is that the picture projects the possibility that things stand laid out in a certain way. The projection is part and parcel of the proposition with sense. The proposition does not yet have sense, only the potential to express it. Wittgenstein makes an important distinction between this perspective, in which a proposition does not have sense, and a second perspective, in which the proposition or the picture, as propositional or pictorial sign, is a fact that can express sense. My aim is to liken this distinction in Wittgenstein to Kant’s distinction between general and transcendental logic.7 The connection between the thought or picture and that which it thinks or pictures must be made in language, through the projection or symbolization method in the same way in which the connection between what comes in through the senses and the categories of the mind is made in a judgment. Wittgenstein insists that language is always necessary to express relations; Kant says that we need intuition and concepts to have experience of objects. But what’s more, we need to use language in order to project any possible situation, in the same way in which we need to make or perform the judgment in order to have experience of the object.

7  These two perspectives that I describe here and that are united in the projection method could be compared to the three perspectives that Eli Friedlander discusses in Signs of Sense. Listing three perspectives, Friedlander does not engage a performative or dynamic dimension, while I show how two perspectives are said to be the same (in a third). In Friedlander we find “perspectives of facts, of objects, and of the world” (Friedlander 2001, 161). Friedlander connects the perspective of facts with an elaboration of logical inferential relations and with the notion of structure and of making sense. “The perspective of objects gives us a grasp of the notion of realized form, or of real possibilities” (ibid., 162). Friedlander calls the perspective of objects the recognition of meaning and significance in language and the notion of showing. The third perspective is opened by “world.” This perspective is explained through an elaboration of the concept of limits and the drive to nonsense. For Friedlander, this perspective is what makes us want to throw away the ladder (ibid.).

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Only by this means can we think the sense of propositions as seen in proposition 3.11. Wittgenstein’s distinction between propositional sign and proposition is crucial. The first perspective is that of the propositional sign in its projective relation as elaborated above. This already gives us the possibility of sense. The projection belongs to the proposition as its possibility. But there is a second perspective of the proposition as a fact. The propositional sign needs to be in use, or, as Wittgenstein calls it, needs to be thought, in order for it to be a thought8 at all. The conditions of the representability of the object are thus in the projection, and not in the object. But the proposition is used for being projected onto the object. Again, Wittgenstein is here fully in line with Kant’s Copernican turn. Proposition 6.233 readily removes any doubt about that: “To the question whether we need intuition for the solution of mathematical problems it must be answered that language itself here supplies the necessary intuition.” Wittgenstein asks whether mathematical problems need intuition, German Anschauung, in order to be solved. Mathematical propositions are logical. In a mathematical proposition two expressions are equated and the equation marks the standpoint from which one looks at the expressions of both sides, which is the standpoint of them being the same.9 The mathematical problem, therefore, always looks at what is on the left side and tries to take the standpoint that it is the same as what is on the right side. This standpoint is expressed in language. From here we can start to see the problem with logical and mathematical propositions and how they have no sense. * * * In the previous paragraphs, I turned our attention to Wittgenstein establishing the sense of the proposition as being independent from whether it is true or false. The sense is what the proposition represents, and the proposition represents its sense by way of the propositional sign being able to project its sense onto reality. According to the second perspective elaborated above, the picture does not just represent a fact. It also is a fact, and as such it is true or false. This fact itself is a logical proposition. However logical propositions as such do not have sense, since nothing is projected in them. 8 9

 Cf. TLP 3.5. The applied, the thought, the propositional sign is the thought.  Cf. TLP 6.2322.

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We have read proposition 3.11 more than once and I am now trying to give an example for it. The proposition “The glass of water stands on the table” is on the one hand the sensible perceptible sign (written or spoken) that includes the possibility of a sense—for the glass of water to stand on the table. But the propositional sign is also a fact that is pictured in it: that the glass of water stands on the table. In 3.11 Wittgenstein says that “we use the sensibly perceptible sign … of the proposition as a projection of the possible situation.” And then adds: “The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.” As soon as we picture the glass of water as standing on the table we have the possible sense of the proposition, but whether the glass stands on the table is true or false can only be determined once we use the proposition and say “the glass is on the table” and compare the proposition with reality, which is the fact that a glass of water stands on the table that has to obtain. Wittgenstein holds we need to use the proposition but there is already another kind of application or use in the method of producing the sensible perceptible proposition that also factors in. The problem with logical propositions or pseudo-propositions, in German Scheinsätze,10 is that they are always true but have no sense. They are senseless, in German sinnlos, since they do not project anything. The projection or symbolizing method turns out to be a zero method. Wittgenstein’s elucidation of what happens in logical propositions is just a special case of the projection method, one in which nothing gets projected. In 6.121 Wittgenstein defines the zero method in the following way: The propositions of logic demonstrate the logical properties of propositions, by combining them into propositions which say nothing. This method could be called a zero method. In a logical proposition propositions are brought into equilibrium with one another, and the state of equilibrium then shows how these propositions must be logically constructed.

Again, the form of logical propositions is the tautology, while the form of mathematical propositions is the equation; logical propositions are tautological in that they say nothing more than what is on the left is equal to what is on the right side. Propositions, however, as we established above, 10  Scheinsatz means literally a proposition that only appears to be a proposition (that appears to project something onto reality and thus has sense).

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can be looked at from yet another perspective. They are not just propositional signs that signify a thought, but they are facts themselves. “The fact that propositions of logic are tautologies shows the formal—logical properties of language, of the world” writes Wittgenstein in 6.12. This can be read in parallel with Kant’s setting up the a priori form of experience, which plays a similar role in making sure our experiences are about something: In order that propositions connected together in a definite way may give a tautology they must have definite properties of structure. That they give a tautology when so connected shows therefore that they possess these properties of structure. (TLP 6.12)

What Wittgenstein states in 6.12 is that logical propositions have no sense but are tautologies. This presupposes that some part of the logical proposition has sense, and this part is their connection with the world. 4.003 Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so, it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems. 5.5303 Roughly speaking: to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing.

If in the Tractatus propositions are taken as equations or tautologies, they are without sense; they do not project reality. However, that does not mean that they are nonsensical, or that they are not true or false. The sense that the propositions picture only arises subsequently, when the propositions are compared with reality. The problem with these propositions only becomes virulent, if they are compared with reality while not projecting possible states of affairs. When the propositions try to merely say something about the very form that they picture, then they are logical propositions without sense. Since Wittgenstein’s aim is to elaborate a general form of the proposition, his propositions are thus propositions of this kind.

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I emphasize this formal trait of the propositions of the Tractatus, since the form of the proposition is our clue to understanding why Wittgenstein dismisses the propositions of the Tractatus as nonsensical. It is not their outer form that Wittgenstein finds lacking. The problem is that they are used to say something about their own form is the problem. Above I have shown that according to the Tractatus we can make pictures only in language: the propositional sign projects the proposition onto a reality, by which it is thought. The clue to understanding why the propositions of the Tractatus are to be dismissed as nonsensical is recognizing that they are not used to make pictures nor are they projected onto reality—thus nothing can be thought in them. “Man,” Wittgenstein says, “possesses the capacity of constructing languages, in which every sense can be expressed, without having an idea how and what each word means” (TLP 4.002). The form of language does not reveal the form of thought, since its purpose is different from showing the form of thought, he continues. All that is wrong, Wittgenstein claims in the foreword, is our understanding of the logic of our language. Whatever we can say at all, we can say clearly, but about which we cannot speak, we must remain silent, recommends Wittgenstein at the conclusion of the Tractatus. He thus makes good on what he lays out in the preface, in which he describes wishing to draw a limit to the expression of thought: “It will therefore only be in language that the limit can be drawn, and what lies on the other side of the limit, will simply be nonsense.” That the limits are drawn in language does not, however, mean that we can speak what is unspeakable. I have only started to elaborate the way the two perspectives—the proposition as sensible perceptible and the proposition as fact drawn together in the projection method—make that our propositions have sense or are true or false. To elaborate this further, I will continue with a little thought experiment in Chap. 7, in which I examine more closely the condition for these two perspectives and prepare my account of the performativity of language.

References Friedlander, Eli. 2001. Signs of Sense. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kremer, Michael. 2013. The Whole Meaning of a Book of Nonsense. In The Oxford Handbook of the History of Analytic Philosophy, ed. Michael Beaney, 451–487. Oxford University Press.

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Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (Abbreviated as PI) ———. 1961. Notebooks 1914–1916. Eds. G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Tagebücher 1914–1916 in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Abbreviated as NB) ———. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

CHAPTER 7

Logic Degree Zero

The gramophone record, the musical thought, the score, the waves of sound, all stand to one another in that pictorial internal relation, which holds between language and the world. To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths, their two horses and their lilies in the story. They are all in a certain sense one.) —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

In order to further examine Wittgenstein’s two perspectives of language I will conduct a “thought experiment” in order to develop what Wittgenstein calls the zero method. The projection method is a relation that manifests itself only in action, which, in respect to later Wittgenstein, we could call a hinge1 between the sensibly perceptible propositional sign and that 1  I use the term “hinge” in the way Danièle Moyal-Sharrock elaborates it in Understanding Wittgenstein’s “On Certainty” as something that is necessarily true or indubitable. Internal relations as Jakub Mácha discusses them are hinges in the same sense. Moyal-Sharrock writes that we accept hinges because “logically we cannot do otherwise” (Moyal-Sharrock 2004,

Part of this chapter has already been printed on pp. 283–287 in “Hegel’s Speculative Method and Wittgenstein’s Projection Method.” In: J. Mácha, A. Berg (Eds.) Wittgenstein and Hegel. Reevaluation of Difference. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 275–290. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_7

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which is thought or pictured in it. I aim to show that the connection is actually made through the projection. This renders some propositions problematic, namely those in which no projection is made. This is similar to how in Kant a judgment must be made, so that what comes in through the senses and what is put in front of the mind is the same. The notion that the act of thinking or speaking only brings about the connection to what is thought or said is one of the main theses of this book. However, both in Kant and Wittgenstein there seems to be—on an a priori or transcendental level—another projection that needs to be made, which enables the second one, as it were. In Kant this is transcendental apperception, the schema that unifies a priori intuition with a priori concept, which makes possible that we subsume intuitions under concepts in an act of experience. By my understanding of Kant, this transcendental apperception need not be read as a priori or as self-reflexivity or self-­ consciousness, but more as an enactment or as the performativity of that a thought is thought. Similarly, I aim to show that a similar a priori or transcendental level can be made out in Wittgenstein called the nature of the proposition or internal relations or the projection method. This prior or a priori or transcendental connective hinge, I argue, needs to be reinterpreted as performative—as that a thought is thought or that propositions are said. The two perspectives on the proposition—projection method and zero method—that I elaborate in Wittgenstein mirror the account of general and transcendental logic in Kant and I argue that both are about how thought or experience can be connected to that which it is about. This chapter is a bit tricky because in it I aim to make the same point coming from different directions. I hope that the resemblances in my presentations will help draw my thinking together to succeed in making my point. First, I explicate in what sense Wittgenstein’s propositions have sense, no sense, or are nonsensical. Second, I think our understanding of the zero method in Wittgenstein can be elucidated by looking at another 76). She compares this to “the hinges on which a door can turn” (ibid., 78). The reason why I point to the notion of hinges as Moyal-Sharrock elaborates them is because she calls them “enacted,” she argues that “hinges can manifest themselves only in action” (ibid., 97). This enactive—or as I call it performative—feature is important to my interpretation as well. “The world exists” is considered a deep kind of hinge for Moyal-Sharrock (ibid., 151). Finally, I think that Moyal-Sharrock’s notion of the “doppelgänger,” her account of nonsense, and the way in which Wittgenstein is called a pragmatist are all a good fit with my interpretation. With Moyal-Sharrock one could say I am reading the first Wittgenstein as a third Wittgenstein.

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philosopher of the twentieth century writing about the poetic use of language and coming up with a similar stance: the zero degree of writing. I hope that by drawing these readings together my goal of showing how Wittgenstein’s form of the proposition is structurally similar to Kant’s form of experience can be brought about. The propositions of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus show how we make pictures of facts as models of reality. The picture theory2 is best superseded by a discussion of the projection method. However, the propositions dismantle themselves in the end; they are revealed as answers given for which no questions can be asked. Specifically, one cannot inquire about the underlying structure connecting language and world without presupposing that the world exists and that language and world exist in a state of connectedness. To give an account of this connectedness is to presuppose that the world is outside, and that language or thought is inside, with a kind of a priori intentionality functioning as a golden bridge over the chasm. This is not, however, the picture that the Tractatus provides, although Wittgenstein never questions the relation between thought and world. Instead, he introduces a very special form of connection that is something akin to a hinge—what we could call an account of an a priori intentionality. He secures the relation of the propositional sign to that which is expressed in the proposition by introducing a third constituent, which is the projection of reality. Over the course of the text, he uses many different names for this connective third component: “internal relation,” “formal concept,” “method of symbolizing,” or “projection method.” Given this diverse terminology, it is not surprising that the Tractatus has been read in a number of ways. My interpretation of the Tractatus has specifically focused on the elaboration of the two perspectives of the proposition that are connected through this third that I have started to elaborate as the projection method. Whether it is referred to as internal relation, projection method, zero method, or formal concept or symbolization method, we need to understand in what way it is a performative connecting.

2  One main interpretative strand of this book is that there is not a picture theory in the Tractatus but a picturing theory, which I elaborate as the projection method. The pictures of states of affairs that we make to ourselves are not static pictures, since the connection between picture and pictured only comes about in the picturing.

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Wittgenstein develops a method called the projection method in which he distinguishes between propositions with sense, logical propositions without sense, and finally zero-propositions, which are nonsensical. For propositions with sense, the picture (or later the propositional sign as logical picture) consists of the perceptible sign and that which is signified by it. Wittgenstein claims that the relation between the two—the internal relation—is its symbolizing or projection method or formal concept. He seems to say that the signifier together with the signifying method equals the signified. This equation is practical and has to be applied in the sense that only when we use a proposition as being about something—when we actually project it onto the world—does it have its intentional or representational content as sense. With the help of Jakub Mácha’s book Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations we can expound the different formulations in Wittgenstein for this connective third component: “internal relation,” “formal concept,” “method of symbolizing,” or “projection method.” Mácha explains the difference between an external and internal relationship in the following way: “A relation is internal if it is unthinkable that its terms should not possess it, and it is external otherwise” (Mácha 2015, IX). Mácha continues to explain that internal relations are hard to express in language and are easier shown or elucidated. What does it mean that the internal relations cannot be expressed in propositions? Mácha says they can only be exhibited in tautologies. A state of affairs can be pictured means it is thinkable. Mácha underlines that Wittgenstein’s work is about the possibility or the conditions of the possibility to think. If the question is why we express internal relations at all even though they cannot be said but only elucidated, Mácha insists that far from being nonsensical the internal relations express current or proposed logical or grammatical rules. Why are internal relations or logical propositions said to not represent anything? In what sense are propositions without sense, since nothing is projected or thought in them. In order to understand this better we need to look at the privative model of the projection method which Wittgenstein calls the zero method. The connecting element or hinge is called the picture-making or projection method. Wittgenstein had elaborated that the sensible proposition together with its projection onto reality is what makes the proposition have sense. However, if nothing is projected, then the proposition does not have sense. We see this case in 6.121.

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6.121 The propositions of logic demonstrate the logical properties of propositions, by combining them into propositions which say nothing. This method could be called a zero-method. In a logical proposition propositions are brought into equilibrium with one another, and the state of equilibrium then shows how these propositions must be logically constructed. (My emphasis)

This is what I would like to call “logic degree zero” in Wittgenstein. We saw the way Wittgenstein defined the projection method: 3.11 We use the sensibly perceptible sign (sound or written sign, etc.) of the proposition as a projection of the possible situation.*3 The method of projection is the thinking of the sense of the proposition.

In logical propositions there is no thinking of the sense of the proposition because there is no projection of a possible situation. Proposition 4.461 strings together a couple of observations about tautologies and contradictions that explain why logical propositions as tautologies have no sense. 4.461 The Proposition shows what it says, the tautology and the contradiction that they say nothing. […] Tautology and contradiction are without sense […] 4.4611 Tautology and contradiction are however, not nonsensical: they are part of the symbolism in the same way in which “0” is part of the symbolism of Arithmetic. 4.462 Tautology and contradiction are not pictures of reality. They present no possible situation*. For the one allows every possible situation*, the other none.

From these quotes we can see the system of logic entails its own zero point that is a part of the symbolism but still zero. Tautologies—when it comes to having sense—allow every possible situation and in that sense they do not have sense. But having no sense and being nonsensical is not 3  Ogden translates this as “possible situation” although the German is “Sachlage” not “Sachverhalt.” Here again, I prefer the Pears and McGuinness translation.

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the same.4 I will say more about propositions with sense, no sense, and nonsensical propositions, but at this point I would like to insert a short literary interlude: * * * Let us have a look at the problem from a different angle, through some reflections about the concept of “Writing Degree Zero” described by Roland Barthes in his first book (Barthes 1977). A parallel can be drawn between the idea of a zero degree of language and what I call Wittgenstein’s “logic degree zero.” As I just elaborated tautologies represent the zero point of a symbolism, since every part of the symbolism symbolizes, and so the tautology has no distinct value in the symbol-system, it has no sense. Barthes presents a zero degree of that which he calls writing or the style of the author. Barthes is interested in the literary tendencies of symbolism, surrealism, and avant-garde and experimental literature as opposed to traditional realistic forms. First, his view of modern poetry must be understood against the backdrop of Sartre’s position, which he laid out in his famous essay “What Is Literature” from 1947. Sartre holds that prose literature differs from other arts because of language, because of the way words signify or convey meaning. That fact of signification makes the purpose of literature communicative, and the writer thereby has the obligation to take a position. In short, according to Sartre a writer cannot be neutral, and literature is necessarily engaged (Sartre 1988, 4). In contrast, Roland Barthes’ chapter on poetic writing in Writing Degree Zero takes a completely different standpoint. According to Barthes words do not signify or convey specific meanings, but contain endless possibilities of meaning instead:

4  Cora Diamond was the first to point out that the notion of nonsense plays a central role in the Tractatus in terms of the book’s method. While other interpreters have held that this was a feature of the later writings of Wittgenstein, Diamond and later James Conant have pointed out its significance for the Tractatus. See Crary (2007, 6). Crary calls this basic reading the “Diamond-Conant reading.” Diamond and Conant introduce the austere view of nonsense, which holds that the propositions of the Tractatus dubbed nonsensical “are not logically distinct from gibberish and that we should give up the idea that they are trying to say anything” (ibid.). There are only psychological distinctions—made according to the way they make us think we understand them—among nonsensical sentences.

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Thus under each Word in modern poetry there lies a sort of existential geology, in which is gathered the total content of the Name, instead of a chosen content as in classical prose and poetry. The Word is no longer guided in advance by the general intention of a socialized discourse. […] The word, here, is encyclopedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state, which is possible only in the dictionary or in poetry—places where the noun can live without its article—and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications. The word here has a generic form; it is a category. Each poetic word is thus an unexpected object, a Pandora’s box from which fly out all the potentialities of language. (Barthes 1977:48, my emphasis)

In addition to the distinction between language and style, Barthes speaks of écriture, which has been translated as writing. “Writing,” Barthes explains is “an ambiguous reality,” (Barthes 1977 Preface, xx) because “it unquestionably arises from a confrontation of the writer with the society of his time” (Barthes 1977, 16). It also refers the writer back to the sources, that is, to the instruments of creation. This source and instrument of creation would be a stage in which there is Writing Degree Zero. In her preface to the English translation, which was first published in 1968 (15 years after the French original!) Susan Sontag points out that whereas Sartre had actually already discussed neutral, colorless writing, it “enters Barthes’ argument only briefly: in the introduction” and at the end; for Barthes it is “one solution to the disintegration of literary language” (Barthes 1977 Preface, xxi). She argues further that the concept of Writing Degree Zero is really only a boundary concept, adding that the notion of Writing Degree Zero has played little or no role in subsequent philosophical and literary discourse. Barthes does write that “the multiplication of modes of writing” (Barthes 1977, 84) is an inevitable development. One could therefore conclude that Sontag is right, that there is no such thing as Writing Degree Zero, or it is merely a boundary concept. This take is also validated by Maurice Blanchot, who sees literature as verging “on becoming a total experience,” which cannot be held in check by any strategy of writing, Writing Degree Zero included (Barthes 1977 Preface, xxi). Sontag concludes that Writing Degree Zero must be seen as the neutral position between Sartre, who demands ethical communication, and Blanchot, who seeks abolition of literature.

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This reminds me of how Barthes defines the term Writing Degree Zero as “between two terms of a polar opposition,” where he sees “the existence of a third term, called a neutral term or zero element: thus between the subjunctive and the imperative moods, the indicative is according to them an amodal form” (Barthes 1977, 76). Barthes may indeed have thought of Writing Degree Zero as something akin to the indicative mode. However, when he gives the example of journalist writing, which is writing without style, he admits that it is often the case that journalists develop their own style. I argue that there is another dimension of what Barthes wants the concept or boundary concept of Writing Degree Zero to do, a dimension which Sontag’s exegesis does not elaborate. For this purpose, let us examine Barthes’ description of “neutral” writing: If the writing is really neutral, and if language, instead of being a cumbersome and recalcitrant act, reaches the state of a pure equation, which is no more tangible than an algebra when it confronts the innermost part of man, then Literature is vanquished, the problematic of mankind is uncovered and presented without elaboration, the writer becomes irretrievably honest. (Barthes 1977, 78)

Neutral writing, according to this passage, rediscovers the intentionality of language as pure equation. Writing Degree Zero is then not merely a neutral position between two extremes: it becomes a condition for modes of writing. Although Barthes considers Writing Degree Zero a utopian state of language—since he is convinced that modes of literature are inexorable—he still does not consider it to be a neutral form of writing poised between the ethics of engaged literature and the multiplicity of modes that threaten to abolish literature altogether. Barthes saw every mode of writing as saddled with a double structure. This is the same as that of a revolutionary situation: “the impetus of a break and the impetus of a coming to power” (Barthes 1977, 87). Exactly through this dual structure, the different modes of writing and the proliferation of those modes bring a new literature into being: Feeling permanently guilty of its own solitude, it is none the less an imagination eagerly desiring a felicity of words, it hastens towards a dreamed-of language whose freshness, by a kind of ideal anticipation, might portray the perfection of some new Adamic world where language would no longer be alienated. (Barthes 1977, 88)

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At the heart of every mode of writing Barthes describes is a struggle to attain a language that could anticipate an Adamic world. Language would no longer be alienated in that world of immaculate intentionality. Word and thing would be one. Barthes considers modern poetry as tangent upon this Adamic word/world and thereby as exposing or elucidating the condition for the meaning of language. Barthes describes such language as distilled to a “zero degree”: The word, here, is encyclopedic, it contains simultaneously all the acceptations from which a relational discourse might have required it to choose. It therefore achieves a state that is possible only in the dictionary or in poetry— places where the noun can live without its article—and is reduced to a sort of zero degree, pregnant with all past and future specifications. (Barthes 1977, 48, my emphasis)

The words of poetry have thus neither representational nor intentional content, because, in a sense, they are what they are about. It does therefore not matter who uses them to mean what or what they represent on their own. That a literary thinker would make this a central part of his theory of literature makes more sense. Before the backdrop of such a word or language that is what it is about, we can better understand how Wittgenstein thinks that language means “off its own bat” and how word and world are connected. * * * This literary interlude interrupted my discussion of propositions with sense, without sense, and nonsensical propositions. But let us turn to the latter: What then is nonsense? Under which conditions of a privative connection between word and world are nonsensical propositions produced? Let me go back to something that puzzled me in Wittgenstein’s system of decimal numbers. He left some gaps in his sequencing, on the first glance for no apparent reason. Is his counting arbitrary? Did he wish to add some more thought to certain propositions later on and marked those places with a 0? Or, maybe he left them out on purpose. For example, why did Wittgenstein continue with proposition 2.01 immediately after 2 and leave out 2.0. Subordinate decimal numbers usually elucidate the prior decimal number. What could or would a proposition 2.01 elucidate?

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I have already proposed in Chap. 5 that the 0 propositions are not just placeholders but stand in for something that in a way cannot be said with sense but shows in the way the propositions are put together. If I treat the Tractatus-propositions as tautologies or mathematical equations in which the left side equals the right side, proposition 2 means: “What is the case, the fact, is the existence of states of affairs*.” Proposition 2.01 below it says: “A state of affairs is a combination of objects (entities, things).” Proposition 2.01 elucidates what is on the right side of the equation of proposition 2: the existence of states of affairs. But 2.01 says nothing about the existence of states of affairs; it only elucidates states of affairs and leaves out existence. It follows that proposition 2.0, if it were there, would probably have something to say about this existence, the fact of there being (in German das Bestehen) states of affairs. This, as we have seen above, is not something we can express by a proposition. But it shows the way in which the propositions are related to one another. The logical or pictorial form is what the thought shares with reality but that cannot be said. Some people hold it can also not be shown. It is nonsense or austere nonsense—as the reading of the New Wittgenstein put it5—or zero: the proposition does not even show up or has disappeared. When we look more closely at proposition 2.1, the lacking proposition before it becomes evident. Proposition 2.1 says: “We make to ourselves pictures of facts.” The existence of the states of affairs,* as we learned in the first part, can only come about using the sensibly perceptible sign of the proposition as a projection of the possible state of affairs (Cf. TLP 3.11). Let us look at another instance of a zero-proposition, this time on a different logical or subordinate level. Proposition 2.2 reads: “The picture has the logical form of representation in common with what it pictures.” Reading this proposition as an equation results in the picture and that which it pictures are the same, by way of the logical form of picturing. Wittgenstein does not, however, continue on to 2.21 at this point and elucidate the logical form of this picturing, but instead he moves ahead to 2.201: “The picture depicts reality by representing a possibility of the 5  I have already explained “austere nonsense” or the “austere reading” on page 66 fn. 75. But also see Crary and Read (2000). I think that my discussion of Wittgenstein’s projection method and zero method offers a solution to the different notions of nonsense described here. See also Medina (2003), Read and Deans (2003), Sullivan (2003), Vilhauer (2003), Reck (2002), Sullivan (2002), Gunnarsson (2001), Kremer (2001), Witherspoon (2000), McGinn (1999), Reid (1998), and Diamond (1981).

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existence and nonexistence of states of affairs.*”6 He forgoes talking about reality, and there is no proposition 2.20, of which 2.201 would serve as an elucidation. Instead, Wittgenstein talks about the picturing activity. In 2.21, the next proposition, Wittgenstein says: “The picture agrees with reality or not; it is right or wrong, true or false.” Proposition 2.22 continues with the same theme. It talks about how a picture pictures what it pictures through the form of picturing, independent of it being true or false. Proposition 2.221 is an elucidation of this, holding that independent of it being true or false what the picture pictures or represents is its own sense. Finally, proposition 2.222 reads: “In the agreement or disagreement of its sense with reality, its truth or falsity consists.” It is not hard to see that this proposition represents Wittgenstein’s linguistic version of Kant’s Copernican Turn here. Proposition 2.223 says that we have to compare the picture with reality in order to know whether it is true or false. By now we know that the picture pictures something, and that something is its sense. The sense is what the picture represents through the form of picturing; it projects reality through this form; it pictures a possibility of existence or non-existence of matters of fact. More “zero” propositions can be found branching off proposition 3: “The logical picture of the facts is the thought.” The numbering then jumps to 3.001: “‘A state of affairs* is thinkable’ means: we can imagine it.” Proposition 3.01 then says: “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world.” There are no propositions 3.0 and 3.00. We can infer a pattern from the two former occasions for zero-­ propositions, which are on the same logical levels. According to this pattern, 3.0 would say something about existence, 3.00 about existence and reality. Testing our potential pattern, we see that proposition 3 says: “The logical picture of the facts is the thought,” that is, in this thought what is presupposed is the existence of the state of affairs. Then follows: “‘A state of affairs is thinkable’:—means: we can imagine it” (3.001). The next propositions read: 3.01 “The totality of true thoughts is a picture of the world,” or, in other words, the entirety of true thought equals a picture of the world. Again, reality is not said, which can be seen even more so in 3.02, which is “The thought contains the possibility of the state of affairs which it thinks. What is thinkable is also possible.” Finally proposition 6  The 0 in the numbering would indicate that a proposition is missing. However, I call it a zero-proposition, because its meaning cannot be expressed by saying, but is performed or shown, as Wittgenstein calls it.

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3.05 is a really interesting example, because “Only if we could know a priori that a thought is true if its truth was to be recognized from the thought itself (without an object of comparison).” Finally, with proposition 3.1 we leave the 0 and 00 propositions. Wittgenstein says: “In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.” We have arrived at language. The degree zero of logic described in this chapter is a crutch on which it is helpful to rely, as Wittgenstein gives importance to the form of the propositions of the Tractatus and to its decimal system. This is what I attempt to elaborate through the distinction between propositions with sense, in which a projection takes place, and propositions without sense, which go empty because nothing is projected in them, and finally zero-­ propositions, or nonsensical ones, which cannot be expressed in a proposition. Wittgenstein tries to articulate a general form of the proposition in the Tractatus, but he realizes that whatever proposition he makes about the form of the proposition and how it relates to that which it is about is a logical proposition and therefore without sense. In other words, to say what he wanted to say would make the logical propositions nonsensical. The way language and mind are connected—Wittgenstein uses the Kantian term verknüpft—is dependent on the use of language. The connection is made in language, not by propositions that make that point, but through propositions relating to one another in a certain way. Finally, the elaboration of the missing, nonsensical zero-propositions helps elucidate why nonsensical propositions do not say anything; they are not there. Nonsensical propositions in the Tractatus do not hint at something that can only be shown. But there is another role that this zero degree of logic plays in the way we make propositions with sense. The degree zero of logic, in its impossibility, makes possible logic as such, just as the projection of transcendental ideas makes possible the unity of the understanding necessary for us to have experience of things. In this chapter I have elaborated how Wittgenstein’s form of the proposition is similar to Kant’s form of experience, since it comprises a threefold structure that needs to be performed in the use of language or thought. It turns out that in both cases the form of experience, or the form of the proposition is the possibility of structure, but only once we actually think or once we use language.

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References Barthes, Roland. 1977. Writing Degree Zero. Reissue edition, with a preface by Susan Sontag. New York: Hill and Wang. 1st ed. 1953. Conant, James. 2000. Elucidation and Nonsense in Frege and Early Wittgenstein. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and James Read, 174–217. London; New York: Routledge. Crary, Alice, eds. 2007. Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crary, Alice. 2016. Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Diamond, Cora. 1981. What Nonsense Might Be. Philosophy 56: 5–22. Gunnarsson, Logi, and Philosophy Documentation Center. 2001. Climbing Up the Ladder: Nonsense and Textual Strategy in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Journal of Philosophical Research 26: 229–286. Kremer, Michael. 2001. The Purpose of Tractarian Nonsense. Nous 35: 39–73. Mácha, Jakub. 2015. Wittgenstein on Internal and External Relations: Tracing All the Connections. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. McGinn, Marie. 1999. Between Metaphysics and Nonsense: Elucidation in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. The Philosophical Quarterly 49: 491–513. Medina, José. 2003. Wittgenstein and Nonsense: Psychologism, Kantianism, and the Habitus. International Journal of Philosophical Studies 11: 293–318. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. 2004. Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Read, Rupert, and Rob Deans. 2003. “Nothing is Shown”: A ‘Resolute’ Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and Vilhauer. Philosophical Investigations 26: 239–268. Reck, Erich H., ed. 2002. From Frege to Wittgenstein: Perspectives on Early Analytic Philosophy. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Reid, Lynette. 1998. Wittgenstein’s Ladder: The “Tractatus” and Nonsense. Philosophical Investigations 21: 97–151. Sartre, Jean-Paul. 1988. “What is Literature?” and other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sullivan, Peter. 2002. On Trying to be Resolute: A Response to Kremer on the Tractatus. European Journal of Philosophy 10 (1): 43–78. ———.  2003. Ineffability and Nonsense. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 77: 195–223. Vilhauer, Ben. 2003. On a Tension in Diamond’s Account of Tractarian Nonsense. Philosophical Investigations 26: 230–238. Witherspoon, Edward. 2000. Conceptions of Nonsense in Carnap and Wittgenstein. In The New Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert J.  Read, 315–349. London; New York: Routledge.

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Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

PART III

Kant’s Schematizing and Wittgenstein’s Picturing or Projecting as Performativity

What is spoken can only be explained in language, and so in this sense language itself cannot be explained. Language must speak for itself. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar

Part I and Part II were dedicated to the unity of experience and of thought and the unity of the proposition in Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s writings. In my elaborations in these chapters I have emphasized that both thinkers are only able to render a proper account of the form of thought or the form of the proposition by taking into consideration the use of thought and language. Now, in Part III I turn to a discussion of the performativity of thought and language. This following examination of the theory of the act of thinking shows that even if the intentional relation of the thinker or speaker to the object is given, this does not exhaust how thought or language connects to that which it is about. In other words, intentionality cannot be considered as the connector of what was hitherto disconnected, nor can intentionality be understood as the connecting, by means of an intentional act, of either thought or language with that which it is about. I underline that this connection—which really is not a connection at all— requires a performative act. My conception of performativity pays special attention to the fact that: “the proposition represents the situation—as it were off its own bat” (NB 5. 11. 1914),1 but it does so in the act of 1  The German for “off its own bat” is auf eigene Faust. Importantly, it is not the meaning of the words that make the connection here, but the constellation. I elaborate this in a chap-

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thinking or speaking. There is no a priori account of intentionality as Kant and Wittgenstein seem to elaborate, nor is there any naturalized account of intentionality, as one finds in J. McDowell’s Mind and World.2 My investigation of Kant’s theory of the form of experience in Chap. 2 focused on putting aside interpretations of transcendental apperception—the famous “The I think must be able to accompany all my representations (CPR B131)—as self-consciousness or self-reflexivity. Instead, I developed the “I think” in relation to the fact that a representation is made, an account that brings Kant’s thought in line with the idea of a proposition representing “off its own bat.” In Chap. 5 Wittgenstein’s account of the unity of the proposition as the form of the proposition that is the possibility of its structure was developed, preparing us for my account of the performativity of language and thought. I show that it is only insofar as the proposition is used—when the form has made possible or enacted the structure that is the connection to the thing—that it has sense. Part III is structured in the following way: In Chap. 8 I explore a number of ideas relevant to the notion of performativity by looking at Kant’s schema both on the general and transcendental level. I begin by outlining Sibylle Krämer’s reading of Kant, which stresses intuition for orientation in thought. Krämer shows that it is a movement of figuration—especially in schematism—that makes new cognition possible. Schematism is described as the mental operation of the power of imagination. It is how concepts are applied to objects of ter on Wittgenstein and “Zerzeigung—What knowledge do constellations yield?” in my next book On Guessing. 2  Cf. Moser (2008): In this paper, which discusses the work of J. McDowell, I show that there are a number of interpretations which argue that intentionality is a relation between physical items, or at least that it can be reduced to this relation by showing to what extent the relationship of the mind to a mental object is just a higher order version of this physical kind of intentionality. The difference is simply one of degree (158–159). McDowell introduces a new way of talking about the human mind as part of nature in his account of “second nature” in Mind and World (McDowell 1994). Second Nature is an offshoot of Kant’s theory of experience in the sense that McDowell takes serious that we need sensibility and intellect to have experience. But he argues that our intellect is also nature. In this sense he naturalizes intentionality. In his reading he develops a naturalized account of intentionality, which—similar to a priori intentionality—is an expression of mind and world as not being disconnected in the first place. Now my reading is different in that the accounts of both a priori and naturalized intentionality are static. My account is performative, showing that only the act of thinking or speaking connects thought or language and thing even if one could say that there is actually no gap in the first place.

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experience. The schema functions as a link, as a third component that forms a similar connection to both the category and the appearance. But the schema, as elaborated in the following, is always inherently the act of schematization. Krämer elaborates a reading of schema or schematization as a third component that unites concept and intuition, not as a third element imposed on them, but as an act that arises simultaneously from the side of the subject as well as the object. In the second part of Chap. 8 I take a look at Maja Soboleva’s work on thought, as a means of shedding more light on the nature of this connection, which is neither a priori nor naturalized. Soboleva shows that Kant can be read as a realist monist, if one sufficiently recognizes the role of intuition in thought. Intuition must be considered as relevant on the perception “side.” The crux of the matter in Kant is the simultaneity of the object which is cognized and the process of cognition in which that object is first constituted as an object of cognition. Surprising in Soboleva’s reading is how in this primary activity the understanding does not yet judge but only “shows” as the ability to make rules. Both these readings lay the groundwork for my reading of the “I think” in Kant as performativity. In Part III of the book I am leading up to the chapter on performativity. One could say I perform in the book what performativity does: through writing the book I am making the connection and bringing about performativity. So I hope that finally in Chap. 9 I can fully do justice to the self-creative aspect of performativity, which brings about thought and language simultaneously connected to that which it is about, discussing Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Finally, in Chap. 10 I provide an overview of a number of theories of performativity comparing and contrasting these accounts to the one I develop in order to give shape and outline to my account of performativity of imagining, schematizing, and projecting that I develop from my readings of Kant and Wittgenstein.

References McDowell, J. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Moser, Aloisia. 2008. “Naturally Intentional.” In Philosophy of Language, Proceedings of the XXII World Congress of Philosophy 39. Seoul, Korea. 157–165.

CHAPTER 8

Kant, Synthesis, and Schema

In the book Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis (2016) Sibylle Krämer outlines how Kant uses intuition for orientation in thought. Krämer posits that Kant needed something extra to explain synthetic judgments a priori, which serve to create new cognition or knowledge without drawing from experience. She thinks that in order to give an account of experience Kant needed to add a movement of figuration. Figuration can be defined preliminarily as a way of seeing things. In the following I will show how Krämer arrives at a figural movement in Kant, which is especially important in schematism; she sees it as the third or middle component between concept and intuition in the form of a figural synthesis—a framework that is similar to Longuenesse’s understanding of synthesis speciosa and follows my discussion of Dickerson’s reading of “seeing something in a picture” in Chap. 4. For Kant schematism is a mental operation of the power of imagination—“mentale Operation der Einbildungskraft” (Krämer, p. 248). Kant does not consider schematism to be about visible images, which are only the product of schematism. He explains schemata as the a priori conditions of possibility for having the experience of epistemic pictures; schemata are not pictures or images unto themselves. Krämer underlines that the schema is conditioned by time, not space. The question follows: if schemata are determinations of time and thus temporal pictures, how do we think them? What are schemata and schematizations? What is their epistemic value and how do they fulfill their epistemic roles? Asking these © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_8

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questions, Krämer starts an examination by underscoring how Kant radically distinguishes between concepts and intuitions as two different sources of cognition or knowledge. Space and time are part of intuition, which results in, for example, math being part of the side of sensibility and not of intelligibility or understanding. Although both sensibility and understanding have to work together for us to have experience, Krämer focuses on the former. In the Critique of Pure Reason the chapter on schematism is preceded by the Transcendental Deduction of the concepts, which shows that the concepts can be applied to objects of experience (CPR B116–69). Schematism shows us how the concepts are to be applied. Below I will show how this works through an outline of Krämer’s reading. Krämer elaborates that Kant gives three kinds of concepts that objects can fall under: (1) empirical objects, such as dogs and plates; (2) mathematical objects like triangles and circles and a third kind of concept (3) categories like quantity or causality or relation, which we cannot perceive and therefore find in intuition. In the latter, concept and intuition are completely dissimilar, which is why we need the schema to make them similar. But in order to have a schema, concept and intuition already need to have something in common. The schemata are third components, which, on the one hand, bear some similarity to the category, and, on the other, to the appearance. They are a “mediating representation” which needs to be “intellectual” on the one hand and “sensible” on the other (cf. Krämer 2016, 250, my translation). “Such a representation is the transcendental schema,” writes Kant (CPA B177/A 138). In order to better understand in what way we can understand the schema as partly intellectual and partly sensible, it is helpful to look at the four different aspects of the schema as elaborated by Krämer. Going forward, I would like to stress that the schema is simultaneously always also the method of schematization. * * * Krämer shows us four different aspects of the schema(tization) found in Kant (Krämer 2016, 253f). First, she describes it is as a method of imagination; it is how the imagination affords its concept a picture. The domain of the schema is in the imagination. (This is similar to my discussion of Dickerson in Chap. 4 and his account of imagination as “seeing in.”) Imagination works where there is no object and perception cannot

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happen. Imagination has qualities similar to perception, which enable it to deliver a perception-like image. “The schema is not an image” (Krämer 2016, 254) insists Krämer, underscoring that this is essential for understanding what schematization is. Second, schematism is a general method, a synthesis, that is, a figural synthesis to be exact. Through a synthetic act the productive power of spontaneity brings connection to the manifold of intuition. This connection is understood as figure, as order, as structure.1 It is the categories that draw the manifold of intuition into unities in what Kant calls intellectual synthesis. But since the categories lack an intuitive component, this needs to be completed by a “figural synthesis” that is rooted in imagination.2 Figurality in the transcendental sense is something that Dickerson does not address, and it is this figurality that is brought about in schematism. On the transcendental level, figurality is the connection that is brought to the manifold through intuition. For Krämer it is the task of schematization to bring about this kind of synthesis, which is figural. The question then arises: how is figural synthesis connected to the rule-like character of general concepts? Krämer explains this by playing through the three kinds of concepts that objects can fall under. One of these is the empirical concept. The concept of a dog, for example, is a rule according to which my imagination can generally build the Gestalt of a four-legged animal, without being limited to any particular Gestalt that experience or even a possible picture would provide. If the concept of dog consists in being four-legged and having fur, it is not said how long the legs are or which color the fur. Dogs we experience can only be examples for the empirical concept of dog. “To have the schema of the empirical concept means to be capable of the epistemic act of identifying individual things as examples for a concept” (Krämer 2016, 255, my translation). The same applies with a priori mathematical concepts. Kant’s example is the triangle, for which a picture would not be adequate, because the generality of the concept cannot be reached. It is only a recipe (Vorschrift) for construction. Krämer shows that the figural synthesis by which we bring about the form of the triangle in the intuition a priori is the same as the synthesis with which we discover 1  I roughly translated what Krämer writes: “Mit ihr [der Schematisierung] wird es möglich, ‘Verbindung’ in das Mannigfaltige der Anschauung hineinzubringen (CPR B162), Verbindung, begriffen als Figur, ist Anordnung, ist Struktur” (Krämer 2016, 254). 2  The original reads: “Doch da den Kategorien jegliche anschauliche Komponente fehlt, muss diese intellektuelle Synthesis durch eine in der Einbildungskraft verwurzelte ‘figürliche Synthesis’ (CPR B151f) komplettiert werden” (Krämer 2016, 254).

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triangularity in real existing objects. Both syntheses have the same form. And finally, the last type of concept that Kant describes to warrant applicability to experiences is the category of the pure concepts of the understanding, which “can never be found in any intuition” (CRP B176/ A137). These pure concepts are quantity, quality, relation, and modality, which form the structure for everything that can be experienced as given. This is the red thread running through Krämer’s reading of the schematism; she shows how pure concepts can be applied to appearances as such. With the examples that Krämer gives, we will see that the the principle for the schematization of all concepts, the “Gestalt” given, is a temporal figurality. This means that schemata are determinations of time a priori according to rules that “concern the time-series, the content of time, the order of time, and finally the sum total of time in regard to all possible objects” (CPR B184-5/A145). Krämer spells out the example of quantity. The pure schema for quantity or magnitude, as a concept for the understanding, is number. For example, if we try to represent the number 3 through different symbolizations, for example, through dots “…” or though “III” or through a dash “- - -” or, as Kant also describes, with our fingers, and so on, then none of these constellations for the number 3 is the schema, since the schema relates only to the rule of how to bring about the symbolizations. What counts is the operation that is made in which homogenous unities are put after one another in the succession of time. In the heart of quantity lies “the successive addition of one (homogeneous) unit to another” (CPR B182/A142). The addition is an act which is executed in the form of a successive operation. Third, Krämer asks whether the schemata are then nothing but determinations of time. She goes on to discuss Eva Schaper’s interpretation of temporality outlined in the article Kant’s Schematism Reconsidered (Schaper 1964). Schaper thinks that via schemata human beings discover their own nature and the nature of that in which we are—the world, since we are, as Heidegger phrases it, “being-in-the-world” (see Schaper 1964, 281). Krämer’s reading of Schaper shows that Schaper does not treat the schematism as “merely” underlining a constructivism. The schematism shows that there is something in the world itself, which allows it to be suited to the form of our experience.3 Krämer continues to show that 3  The last sentence is a rough translation of the following quote from Krämer: “Doch Eva Schaper will zeigen, dass der Schematismus bei Kant mehr ist als ‘nur’ die Bestärkung eines ihm so häufig zugeschriebenen Konstruktivismus. Der Schematismus führe vielmehr vor Augen, dass es etwas in der Welt selber gebe, was diese an die Form unserer Erfahrung angepasst sein lässt” (Krämer 2016, 260).

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Schaper wants “to bring about” and “to discover” to be a close fit, and schematism shows the family resemblance between what is subjective and what is objective (see Krämer, 260). Krämer sees the temporal order as building the “hinge”4 for Kant. We will see this in more detail in the next part and Soboleva’s reading of Kant. Finally, the fourth definition of schematism is “a hidden art in the depth of the human soul” (CPR A141/B180), which indicates that schematization is not a conscious activity. Nature is part of schematism, but it is unclear how. Krämer holds that it is “vor-begrifflich” (2016, 266)—pre-­conceptual and unconscious—and repeats one of Schaper’s fundamental ideas, that the forming intellectual acts on the part of the subject only lead to the experience of objects, because that which is given to the senses is constituted in a certain way. The question is thus not what the subject must do in order to cognize the appearances of the world but how the experiences must be constituted in order for cognition of them to be possible (ibid.). The question as to how objects can be subsumed under concepts is necessarily linked with the nature of schematism as a hidden art. Something must be found that makes the object and the concept homogeneous. This third is then introduced as a third on top of concept and intuition, but which still unites the properties of both (CPR B177/A138). Schematism is thus a third component, the giving of structure; this is not merely reduced to an act on the part of the subject (Krämer 2016, 265). Ultimately what this offers us is an underlining of the nonintentional. Krämer argues further that as subjects we do not stand opposite nature, but we discover that we are of the same kind (“vom selben Holz geschnitzt,” ibid., 66). The manifold of the world of senses is not just simply structured by the subject; it already has structure, and that is why we can cognize nature. This is what differentiates nature from fictions, phantasies, and illusions. At this juncture it becomes clear that schematization is not a kind of a priori intentionality, but instead it turns out to have an unconscious, passive aspect. This is not merely a naturalized kind of intentionality, as I will show in the following section of this chapter through a look at the work of Maja Soboleva, who underlines the importance of intuitions in a realist reading of Kant. * * * 4  Krämer uses the German term Scharnier, which is best translated as “hinge,” to stand for the schematism as the temporality ensuring the categories can be applied to phenomena, which can make a connection between intuition and concept. This can be brought in connection with Moyal-Sharrock’s (cf. 2004) interpretation of hinge concepts or propositions.

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Next, I introduce Soboleva’s interpretation of the role of schematism in Kant’s theory of thinking that she develops in an article in the publication Das Denken des Denkens (The Thinking of Thinking), which she edited in 2016.5 “Braucht man Anschauung um zu denken” is the title of the article, which in English reads: “Do we need Intuition for Thinking?” Soboleva answers this question in the affirmative, offering an insightful take on how Kant builds the architecture of our thinking activity. Soboleva develops Kant’s conditions of possibility of experience and shows how they are coequal with the possibilities of the experience of the object of thinking, thus providing both a monist and realist theory. Soboleva’s starting point is the fact that there is a difference between experience and the judgment of experience. She contests that intuition is already conceptual and provides us with a notion of intuition that is rooted in perception and not yet in judgment. In order to do so she stresses the notion of experience and shows that the two parts to experience are developed in the transcendental aesthetics and the transcendental analytic respectively. In both, Kant investigates the specific a priori forms of human sensibility and of human understanding and he writes that “the a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience” (CPR A 111). Soboleva points out that the paradox of Kant’s account here is that we get at the same time the object that we are to cognize and the process of cognition in which this object is even constituted as an object of cognition (Soboleva 2016, 89). In earlier chapters I have called this a performative account of thinking because it brings about the object of thought in the course of thinking. This is how we get the difference between appearances and things in themselves in Kant, which according to Soboleva has led to different readings of Kant.6 Soboleva’s theory is ultimately a monist theory, which aligns with theories asserting that appearances and things in themselves do not form two different worlds but two different aspects of one world. However, I want to show to what extent Soboleva’s theory is actually a realistic one, as she claims. 5  The article (Soboleva 2016, 87–111) develops in great detail Kant’s theory of experience, paying special attention to the act of drawing into a unity. In the citations of this article all English translations are my own. 6  Soboleva distinguishes between two kinds of interpretations: Zwei-Welten (two-worlds) and Zwei-Aspekte (two-aspects) interpretations. Naming Guyer (1987) as exemplary of the former and Prauss (1974) of the latter, she sees herself as aligned with the two-aspects faction (Soboleva 2016, 89).

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How does Soboleva justify her realistic approach to Kant’s transcendentalism? Kant thought he proved the objective reality of the outer word as given by the special character of human cognitive experience (Soboleva 2016, 90). This realism is founded on what Krämer elaborates as the fit between the forms of intuitions and the forms of concepts, which constitutes the transcendental schema of time. Soboleva shows that our experience is not just imagination—which would make it idealist—but that the outer sense and the inner sense are connected. She specifically refers to the B-introduction of the Critique of Pure Reason: This consciousness of my existence in time is thus bound up identically with the consciousness of a relation to something outside me, and so it is experience and not fiction, sense and not imagination, that inseparably joins the outer with my inner sense; for outer sense is already in itself a relation of intuition to something actual outside me; and its reality, as distinct from imagination, rests only on the fact that it is inseparably bound up with inner experience itself, as the conditions of its possibility, which happens here. (CPR B XL)

According to this passage the certainty of the subject of itself runs parallel to the subject’s certainty of the outer world: I know of myself, and am sure I exist. The reality of the outer world is sensibly immediate in the same way. Outer affections are always connected to inner affections. We are rooted in the world, says Soboleva, thanks to the essential, immanent coordination of inner and outer sense, of consciousness and self-­ consciousness (Soboleva 2016, 90). Since the reality of the outer world cannot be proven in the way that we are able to discursively or conceptually prove things, it is possible to refute material idealism. Kant says: “the reality of the outer sense with that of the inner belongs to the possibility of experience” (CPR B XLI). Soboleva considers human beings and the world as falling under the same Kantian ontological category, that of reality. Soboleva thinks that a core concern and contribution of Kant is his understanding of the structure of consciousness as enabling both cognitions of the world and that of the human self. Soboleva takes a close look at Kant’s problematic notions of “the thing in itself” and “appearance” from which she facilitates a realist and monist reading of Kant’s transcendental theory of cognition. She subsequently shows by reconstructing the transcendental structure of cognition that it is a necessary and general structure a priori that makes experience

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possible. Experience is composed of “a) objects are given in intuition; b) the categorization of intuitions in productive imagination on the basis of the schematism of time in relation to the unity of the consciousness of the subject” (Soboleva 2016, 92). Soboleva spends quite some time with the notion of something as “given” and how our sensibility is affected by this. Ultimately, she reads the given as a transcendental affect; a subject does not initiate perceptions but is affected. This understanding bears similarity with Krämer’s reading of Schaper. However, “sensibility once affected by the object affects the concept of the object and the understanding affects the inner sense” (ibid., 95). Affect is important for experience. It is the relation between inner sense and the transcendental unity for apperception. It is the relation between the “I” that simultaneously intuits itself and thinks itself: “Sensibility that is affected by the object affects the concept of the object and the understanding affects the inner sense, that is, the intuitions of the ‘I’ itself in its synthesizing activity” (see Soboleva, ibid.). This is how each intuition is taken up into the unity of the whole of representations of the logical “I” as its representation, which ensures this intuition a position as a part of reality. Cognition now is a unitary system of experience that is holistically united. World and “I” are constituted through the forms of sensibility, both as appearances (Soboleva 2016, 96). What is the given? Is it “raw sensory data,” as Henry Allison thinks (2006, 120), or individual sensations in the form of sensory data? Kant says it is a manifold. The understanding only thinks in connection to the representation (Vorstellung). Experience is about the constitution of reality as a connected whole. To have intuitions then means having an object of appearance as contained in a moment (Augenblick), writes Soboleva, and having that represented. Another important point for Soboleva is that transcendental cognition does not subsume different representations under a concept but brings the pure synthesis of representations to a concept (gathers them in a concept). This is how we attain the unity of experience. In distinction to Krämer, Soboleva does not think that intuitions are proto-concepts (Vor-Begriffe); instead, she underlines that if we dissolve intuitions into conceptual activity, then we lose the model of two different sources of cognition: intuition and concepts.7 In literature on Kant a 7  Soboleva distinguishes between the nonconceptualists, like Henry Allison and Robert Hanna, and their opponents, namely Wilfrid Sellars and J. McDowell, Christian H. Wenyel, Hannah Ginsborg, and others (2016, 97n11).

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distinction is generally made between the layer model and the two-step model, she says. The former says you can have one without the other, whereas the latter describes logical consciousness as built upon sensible consciousness. The categories are here the original and primitive concepts of the pure understanding that relate to thinking and to sensibility. Soboleva argues for putting the notion of “coincidence” at the foundation of Kant’s interpretation of the transcendental theory of experience. “Coincidentally” we can apply the categories of the understanding to both intuitions and judgments. For Soboleva, the central argument takes up the idea of a universal applicability of the categories of the understanding to intuitions as well as judgments—and this is underscored by Kant: “The same function which gives unity to different representation in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of different representations in an intuition” (CPR A79/B104–5). The categories are thus “the primitive ur-concepts of the pure understanding” (CPR A81/B107). They relate to thinking and to sensibility in the same primordial way (Soboleva 2016, 99). This means that Soboleva’s understanding of how the understanding “transforms” intuition into an object approximates A.  B. Dickerson’s “seeing something in a picture” as discussed in Chap. 4. Her take is that intuition is not yet an object, since “the object is only ‘something in relation to it being a possible cognition’” (Soboleva 2016, 99). Intuition becomes the object or the representation of the object by being subsumed under the transcendental unity of the understanding. Designating the categorized intuition as conceptual simply means that it is used as a representation of the object. This is Soboleva’s most important point: “the object gets its primary determination not in relation to other objects, not thanks to discursive judging, but in relation to the transcendental unity of the consciousness of the subject alone, that is in a topological way” (ibid.). By topological she means that the concept is not a general representation, but a singular one, is mere identity. Which is why intuition is determined through concepts but not by being ordered in a genus-species relation, or through being subsumed under a linguistic concept. Instead, its conceptuality consists in it mimicking (I take the liberty of translating darstellen in this old Platonic way) an object for the human understanding. Intuition as categorized is not the formula “S is p,” but the formula “S is S.” We do not subsume under a concept but bring to a concept (auf einen Begriff bringen, gather in a concept).

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Kant’s argument, Soboleva continues, is that the understanding does not yet judge in its primary activity; it “shows” as the ability to make rules. It makes possible the formation (Bildung) of experience thanks to the unification of individual intuitions into a unitary system of representations (ibid., 100). Experience for Kant is nothing but the result of the synthetic judgments a priori, “which creates what we call today a natural image of reality” (ibid., 101). The categorical synthesis of intuition may be categorized and objectified, but it is still an intuition. When we look at experience from the transcendental philosophical point of view, it is a unity of objective representations and not of propositional judgments of experience: The word “picture” used by Kant is not just a metaphor, because if one interprets experience as a system of statements and not a system of pictures, then one does not understand his idea that our cognition must be aligned with the objects given in experience. (Soboleva 2016, 101)

Soboleva underlines that Kant uses the term Bild for “picture” (or “image”) because it is not a system of propositions but a system of images. Experience has to be oriented toward the objects given in experience. Experience is thus not what we say or think, but that about which we speak and think. Experience as the product of synthesis a priori builds a sphere of semantically undetermined but necessary objects, which will only get their qualitative characteristics thanks to the judgments of thinking. This sphere is an area of determined-undetermined objects, of not-knowing, that humans try to cognize. (ibid., 101).8

Understanding has a dual function: in relation to sensibility it is the capacity to come up with rules for intuitions while in relation to thinking it is the capacity to judge as we saw in detail in Chap. 3 and the discussion of Longuenesse’s position. The question remains: how exactly do the categories relate to the world? The understanding is not free, but it is “restricted” (restringiert) according to Kant (CPR A 146/B186). “The concept must contain that which is represented in the object that is to be subsumed under it, for that is just what is meant by the expression ‘an object is contained under a concept’” (CPR A 137/B176). There must be homogeneity of intuitions 8  The German reads: “Die Erfahrung als Produkt der Synthesis a priori bildet die Sphäre der semantisch noch unbestimmten, aber notwendigen Objekte, die ihre qualitativen Charakteristika erst dank dem urteilenden Denken erhalten. Sie ist ein Bereich der bestimmtunbestimmten Gegenstände, des Nicht-Wissens, die der Mensch zu erkennen sich bemüht.”

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and concepts. In order to arrive at this point, we need a common constituent that can mediate between the categories and intuitions. As Soboleva writes: “This schema is given or specified (better even simulated or mimicked) to the understanding from the side of intuition” (2016, 102).9 We have already outlined in detail how this plays out by looking at Krämer’s reading. Now we have reached the most complicated part of the schematism of time. The transcendental schemata show how things appear in time, and these rules give the instructions for the categorizing performances of the understanding (see Soboleva 2016, 102). This ability (Vermögen) of the schemata to mediate between sensibility and understanding is what Kant calls the transcendental imagination. But it is an operation unfolding before discourse or discursivity. Experience as the product of the cognition a priori is one of images and not of language or concepts within the frame of the transcendental theory of cognition. It is not verbal (Soboleva 2016, 103). There is an immanent correspondence between sensibility and understanding through imagination in relation to the unity of apperception. Soboleva ends her exegesis of Kant with the statement that the processes of givenness, of the categorization of intuition in relation to the transcendental unity of apperception, and finally of the application of the resulting concepts of objects in judgment are only structurally distinct in theory, but belong together in reality. They are the conditions of possibility of the specific human cognition. Soboleva sums up her reading as follows: Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception cannot be read as “that p” or “I think that p” but as “I think that I think that p” (Ich denke, dass ich denke, dass p). The self-reflexive structure of the transcendental unity of apperception is thus explicit. Soboleva’s interpretation is simple: the condition of the possibility of objectifying thinking is the unity of self-consciousness, since the structure of selfreflexivity contains in itself the structure of objectivation. What this means is that the world is not opposed to us as something situative and associative but is related to us as something connected and as a whole. Soboleva reads the “I think” as the act of transcendental apperception, as the connection of intuition through understanding in one experience. The “I think” is syntax and not thought. Soboleva concludes that Kant’s cognition is thus embodied cognition, since human cognition is dependent on sensibility, understanding, and imagination, that is, on the cognition of the cognizer. * * * 9  In this context I point to a theory of the act of thinking that starts with Freud’s notion of the unconscious act and investigates from the act of thinking to action. This acting is deliberate but also compelled by the body and put in relation to poetic mimesis (see Pechriggl 2018).

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In this chapter I have shown how schema is already schematization and how the cognizing and cognized object hang together. It is now time to look at a notion of performativity of thought that can be found in Kant and Wittgenstein, which I will do in Chap. 9.

References Allison, Henry. 2006. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. In A Companion to Kant, ed. Graham Bird, 111–124. Dickerson, A.B. 2004. Kant on Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Krämer, Sybille. 2016. Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 2176. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Moyal-Sharrock, Danièle. 2004. Understanding Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Pechriggl, Alice. 2018. Agieren und Handeln. Studien zu einer philosophisch-­ psychoanalytischen Handlungstheorie. Berlin: Transcript. Prauss, Gerold. 1974. Kant Und Das Problem Der Dinge an Sich. Bonn: Bouvier. Schaper, E. 1964. Kant’s Schematism Reconsidered. The Review of Metaphysics 18 (2): 267–292. Soboleva, M. E., ed. 2016. Das Denken des Denkens: ein philosophischer Überblick. Edition Moderne Postmoderne. Bielefeld: Transcript. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (Abbreviated as PI) ———. 1961. Notebooks 1914–1916. Eds. G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Tagebücher 1914–1916 in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. (Abbreviated as NB) ———. 2004. Philosophical Grammar. Ed. R. Rhees. Trans. A. Kenny. Oxford: Blackwell. In German: 2015. Philosophische Grammatik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1973) (Abbreviated as PG)

CHAPTER 9

Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Use

Kant’s system, with its critical method, tries to show that in order for our experiences to be about something, we need the activity of uniting intuitions under a concept. After the readings of Longuenesse, Dickerson, Krämer, and Soboleva we can see that the uniting of sense perceptions under a concept is something that we do—not necessarily but more coincidentally or performatively. As we unite we project the unity and in a way also bring it about. The uniting activity, or synthesis, is a representation in the sense of a projection. Conversely, systematic unity (as mere idea) is only a projected unity, which one must regard not as given in itself, but only as a problem; this unity, however, helps to find a principle for the manifold and particular uses of the understanding, thereby guiding it even in those cases that are not given and making it coherently connected. (CPR A647/B675, my emphasis)

Unless the projection or representation is made, there is neither a system of thought nor an object of thought. Therefore, there is no account of an idea or a concept unless someone actually reasons or understands. This is what I call the performativity of reason. My focus on the difference between general and transcendental logic in Chap. 2 and again in Chap. 8 gives us a better understanding of synthesis and schema in both. In this chapter, I explore in detail the self-creative aspect of performativity, which makes thought and language born of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_9

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themselves, in a discussion of Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. There are different takes on synthesis and schema throughout the work of Kant. Here, I would like to present some distinctions that will be helpful for an overarching understanding of Kant’s project in relation to performativity with a specific look at aspects of the Critique of Judgment. Synthesis is the act of drawing together into unities, while the schema is the method or rule according to which the synthesis draws together the manifold of intuition. From the investigation of Longuenesse’s reading of Kant in Chap. 3, it is clear that there are two forms of synthesis or uniting activity in Kant’s account: intellectual and figurative synthesis. While intellectual synthesis orders the manifold of sense perceptions into a unity in order for us to bring them under a judgment (determinative judgment), figurative synthesis brings the material of intuition into the right synthetic form (reflective judgment). Kant’s distinction between empirical synthesis and transcendental synthesis starts with a general account of synthesis as the act of running through, taking up and connecting the manifold in pure a priori intuition, in order to attain knowledge (CPR B102). It is the act that combines different representations with each other and gathers their manifold in a unity. “Imagination is the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition” (CPR B151). Transcendental logic therefore explains how we bring the pure synthesis of representations to a concept. Required in order for this to occur are (1) a priori intuition; (2) synthesis through imagination; and (3) unity in the concepts (CPR B104). As mentioned above, the schema is the method or rule according to which the manifold is drawn together in synthesis. There are empirical and transcendental schemata. The empirical schema is a technical unity through empirical purposes—that is, when it springs from an idea it grounds architectonic unity, as we see in Kant’s system itself. Therefore, a schema is always: [a] third thing, which must stand in homogeneity with both the category on the one hand and the appearance on the other, and makes possible the application of the former to the latter. This mediating representation must be pure (without anything empirical), and yet intellectual on the one hand and sensible on the other. (CPR B177)

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The schema is in itself always only a product of imagination, but since the synthesis of the latter has as its aim no individual intuition, but rather only the unity in the determining of sensibility, the schema is to be distinguished from an image. (CPR B179)

Furthermore, schematic thinking is akin to the representation of a method: the schema is a way of representing an image according to a concept, and not the image itself. A schema finally, most prominently, has been determined as the “representation of a general procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image” (CPR B179–80). The transcendental schema, in contrast, is something that cannot be brought into an image at all. It is merely the act of pure synthesis according to a rule of unity—according to concepts as such—which is expressed by each category. The schema, as a transcendental product of imagination, concerns the determination of inner sense as such. Schemata of pure concepts of the understanding are the true and only conditions affording a relation to objects and thus meaning. In the end, the categories are of no other use than a possible empirical one, in which “they merely serve to subject appearances to general rules of synthesis” and by that to “make them fit for a thoroughgoing connection in experience” (CPR B185). Kant employs the logic of the schema several times in the Dialectic, as schema or as “analogue of such a schema” (CPR A665/B693). Later he claims that the ideas of reason “should not be assumed in themselves, but their reality should hold only as that of a schema of the regulative principle for the systematic unity of all cognitions of nature” (CPR A674/B702). Kant ultimately concedes that schematism is a “hidden art in the depth of the human soul, whose true operations we can divine from nature and lay unveiled before your eyes only with difficulties” (CPR B180–81). But this gives rise to the question: what is so artful and hidden about schematism? If spontaneity of our mind is the reason why we can have experience of things the schematism shows us that the part of receptivity plays a crucial role too. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant presents a slightly different picture, which I will articulate in brief in relation to the idea of performativity. While the Critique of Pure Reason focuses on spontaneity and the act of judging in which we project a schema, the Critique of Judgment brings into focus that this schema is purposive or an “as-if” structure.

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* * * So far we have discussed judgment as determinate, as subsuming the manifold of intuitions under a concept in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant employs a purposive structure of thought in the Critique of Judgment to illustrate our projection of organization onto empirical nature. We do not determine nature, but we view nature as if it was organized by a purpose. I aim to show a close relationship between reason in Critique of Pure Reason and reason in the Critique of Judgment by pointing out the similarity in terms of the projection. In the Critique of Pure Reason judgments are determinate judgments. In the Critique of Judgment the account of reflective judgment, for example, in the judgment of beauty, is completely free. There is free play in judging something for which there is no concept. Think of the example of the beautiful, judging something to be beautiful is an activity that appeals to all of our cognitive capacities. In the preface to Critique of Judgment Kant writes that the power of judgment (Urteilskraft) is akin to common sense (gesunder Verstand) because it does not deal with a priori principles of the understanding but concerns the application of the understanding. In that sense, the power of judgment has to provide a concept, through which “no thing” is cognized and which only serves as a rule unto itself. This cannot be an objective rule that serves to adjust the judgment, since the power of judgment would then need another power of judgment, in order to distinguish whether this or that is a case of the rule or not. This illustrates the problem of all rule following that is such a concern to Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations: one rule always requires yet another rule that would explain how to follow that rule. In the Critique of Judgment Kant elaborates aesthetic judgments in a way that they do not follow a predetermined rule, but are made as-if, taking into consideration what everyone would find beautiful: So judgment itself must provide a concept, a concept through which we do not actually cognize anything but which only serves as a rule for the power of judgment itself—but not as an objective rule, to which it could adapt its judgment, since then we would need another power of judgment in order to decide whether or not the judgment is a case of that rule. (CJ 169, Preface)

How can we understand this power of judgment as being able to avoid the circle of needing yet another power of judgment to determine whether the rule we give ourselves as guidance has been successful? In the

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introduction to the Critique of Judgment Kant says that the power of judgment is the third thing, the Mittelglied or connection, between the understanding and reason. He also considers this the ability to think the particular as contained under the general (CJ, Preface 179). Whenever we have a general rule or principle or law, we use the power of judgment to subsume the particular under that general rule. This is the determining power of judgment. However, when the particular is given, and we are supposed to find the general rule it falls under, then the power of judgment is not determining but merely reflective. In the following Kant is looking for a principle that allows reflective judgment to make its judgment, a principle that cannot be borrowed from experience, a principle that judgment can give to itself as a law. Here is where we need to pay attention to the purposive structure that Kant underlines. The solution Kant gives to the fact that there is no determining concept in reflective judgment is this: when judgment finds a particular, it treats that which is not determined and needs to be brought to a unity as if an understanding had given it to us in order to make possible a system of experience according to particular laws of nature. This idea that reflective judgment thereby makes up or “gives to itself” only serves the act of reflection, not determination. The idea or understanding is only supposed, and not really given. The idea or law is only given to itself and not to nature, even though it is given to itself as if it were given to nature. Returning briefly to my discussion of the transcendental deduction of the a priori categories in Chap. 2, I pointed out that experience is constituted by a projection of a representation. In the Critique of Pure Reason this projection is made according to the categories. In the Critique of Judgment, in which Kant addresses the experience of a thing, which is particular and for which we do not yet possess a general (concept), the subsuming judgment comes up with its own principle in accordance with which the judgment is made, as if it were a general judgment. What happens is that the given representation is compared not with the representation as ordered in front of the mind by the a priori category (a general concept), but with the whole capacity of representation (Vermögen der Vorstellungen), which is the capacity to judge. The mind becomes aware of this in the feeling of its condition. What comes next is difficult to comprehend but very helpful for our understanding of what is different with reflective judgment. What Kant describes in the case of aesthetic judgments is an interesting situation: he claims that the powers of cognition through which a

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representation is first made are in free play. A representation through which an object is given needs imagination to put together the manifold in the intuition and understanding in order to unify the representations in the unity of a concept. With aesthetic judgments, there is no determining concept with a special rule of cognition. The capacities of cognition are in free play. This condition, however, must be able to be communicated generally and cannot be anything but the condition of the mind in free play: The subjective condition of all judgments is the faculty for judging itself, or the power of judgment. […] since the freedom of the imagination consists precisely in the fact that it schematizes without a concept, the judgment of taste must rest on a mere sensation of the reciprocally animating imagination in its freedom and the understanding with its lawfulness, thus on a feeling that allows the object to be judged in accordance with the purposiveness of the representation (by means of which an object is given) for the promotion of the faculty of cognition in its free play; and taste, as a subjective power of judgment, contains a principle of subsumption, not of intuitions under concepts, but of the faculty of intuitions or presentations (i.e. the imagination) under the faculty of concepts (i.e. the understanding); insofar as the former in its freedom is in harmony with the latter in its lawfulness. (CJ §35)

* * * Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment is at first glance a further development of synthesis and schema in which Kant claims that we have determinative and reflective judgments. There are readings1 that claim that Kant’s account of reflective judgment does not just supplement determinative judgment but gives us a new perspective on both. If we go back to the notion of experience as determinative judgment in Critique of Pure Reason, then it follows: receptivity and spontaneity work together for us to have experience of things. We take in, through receptivity, a manifold of sense perceptions that comes ordered through the forms of intuition. We put that in front of our mind and order it 1  A thorough account of what is added with the reflective faculty of judgment in the Critique of Judgment is Angelica Nuzzo’s 2013 article “Reflective Judgment, Determinate Judgment and the Problem of Particularity” (Nuzzo 2013). A variety of takes on reflective judgment can be found in Kukla (2006).

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according to the a priori concepts of our mind. We make the judgment under the category, which establishes that the judgment we took in and the judgment we put in front of our mind are the same. As elaborated in Chap. 3, Longuenesse’s introduction of the figurative synthesis highlights an interesting point: what we take in by the senses is, in the final order, judged through our capacity to judge, which is nothing but the form of the mind or understanding. A priori concepts of the mind start to look more like schemata—and following Longuenesse’s reading and a performative reading of Kant’s account in the Critique of Judgment brings us full circle. Namely, Kant claims that it is the mind itself that judges according to its own rules of beauty, which are nevertheless communally valid. This, as elaborated below, goes hand in hand with Wittgenstein’s account of following rules in the Philosophical Investigations. * * * As described above, Kant’s theory of reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment provides yet another module for the theory of the act of thinking as performativity. This essentially means a shift away from determinative judgment, in which the a priori concepts of the mind make sure that our experience is experience of something, toward reflective judgment, in which there is no a priori principle guiding the judgment. The structure of reflective judgment, as developed through the Critique of Judgment’s aesthetic judgments, makes this connection dynamic, as the mind is formed by way of schemata that are rules. At this juncture I turn to a reading of the “rule following” sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. This serves the purpose of showing how these sections parallel the discussion of the projection method in the Tractatus, which, as I argued in Chap. 4, foreshadows Wittgenstein’s famous slogan “meaning is use.” Now I would like to take up this argument once again and examine it more closely. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein does not ask the question “How is language possible?” but a question akin to “What are the conditions of the possibility of language?”—in the spirit of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. In the following I discuss Wittgenstein’s “Rule Following Considerations”2 in the Philosophical Investigations and frame them as a response both to the 2  The paragraphs §147–202 in the Philosophical Investigations are often referred to as the “Rule Following Considerations,” even though one can show that the theme runs through

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problem of the connection of the proposition and what it is about in the Tractatus and the relation of thought to its object in the transcendental philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment, as discussed in the first section of this chapter. “Meaning is use” is going to be Wittgenstein’s answer to the question as to what connects the form of language to what language is about. Let us see how we get to “meaning is use.” In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein comes up with various possible options for the question of meaning, which range from mental items such as pictures to a method of projection, that is, a formula or rule to bridge the gap between thought or proposition and thing. He ultimately rejects all of those options. I argue that Wittgenstein’s discussion in Philosophical Investigations and the answer he comes up with there should be regarded as a final answer, which he lets stand. In the same vein, the elaboration of an account of act of thinking intends to show that there is no gap between language and world, and that they are connected in use. The main steps taken so far have been to outline in what way we understand the unity of mind or language and world through Kant’s form of experience (Chap. 3), and Wittgenstein’s form of the proposition (Chap. 4). Furthermore, I have elaborated in what sense I think this connection is made in the performance of thought or language in Chap. 5. Form, as the possibility of structure, must be enacted. This is why Wittgenstein’s Tractatus has a projection method at its core. The crucial idea here is: unless something is actively projected onto the world, the propositional sign does not have a signified or meaning. One could say the structure that the form makes possible is not laid out. Similarly, in Kant’s system we have a transcendental apparatus that does not yield any experience, unless the senses take in the world and the understanding makes a judgment. Kant makes it clear in the Transcendental Dialectic that if we do take the a priori concepts for real objects outside of their empirical applications, we run into transcendental illusions. What is crucial for both Kant and Wittgenstein is the actual application in a judgment or what I call the performativity of thought and language. Kant may speak of a priori concepts of the mind, but unless we make actual judgments, there is no experience of objects. Kant never claims that there is a priori experience accessible to us. All we have are a priori forms of experience, which make possible the structure of experience, without other paragraphs before and after. For literature on rule following, see Miller and Wright (2002).

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which there could be no object of experience. Even if Kant held that experience was one and encompassed all different perceptions, we still would have to actually perceive. This is similar to Wittgenstein’s assertion that the elementary proposition—the general form of the proposition—contains in it all possible propositions. However, without actual application in judgment—without the use of the proposition—there is no sense. * * * Let me now turn to the Philosophical Investigations and introduce a distinction that Wittgenstein makes, and that I call the distinction between language idling—the logical propositions we elaborated earlier, or the nonsensical propositions in Wittgenstein’s terms—and language in use, an underlying distinction of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Furthermore, although there is generally considered to be an opposition between the logic of the early writings and the grammar of the works from the 1930s on, and although Wittgenstein is claimed to focus on the issue of use only in the later works in terms of his concern with grammar, I claim that the shift from language idling to language in use is not only prominent in the Philosophical Investigations but also evident in the Tractatus, as I articulated in Chap. 4. I take Wittgenstein’s account of rule following in the Philosophical Investigations as the continuation of Wittgenstein’s attempt to render the performativity of language constitutive of meaning. I can best elaborate this by first considering the perspectives of Saul Kripke, as well as G. P. Baker and P. M. S. Hacker, on the Rule Following Considerations; these readings unfold on an empirical level of investigation and do not do justice to Wittgenstein’s writing. My reading presents a distinction between static logic in the early work and dynamic grammar in the Philosophical Investigations, thereby allowing us to gain a better understanding of the performativity of thought and language articulated in the previous chapters. At the same time, I stress the difference between language idling and language in use, in order to emphasize the point I made about the propositions of the Tractatus in Chap. 5. I will start with an introduction to the problem of rule following. Then I present Kripke’s reading, which goes wrong, because it opens up a gap between rule and application. The subsequent presentation of Baker and Hacker’s criticism of Kripke focuses on their explanation as to why there is no gap in the first place: rule and application according to Baker

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and Hacker are internally related. However, I argue that this internal relation is not understood in the right manner. The problem of rule following can be illustrated with the following example: I buy a sandwich wrapped in paper, which bears an imprint on the paper warning: “Paper is not edible.” At first it seems odd and senseless to have such a warning on a piece of paper that is clearly not edible. But since there are sandwiches—wraps—that come wrapped in what looks very much like paper and are edible, the warning does make sense after all.3 Anyway, on the first reading the warning is puzzling, and one is not sure how to understand it. It is too obvious that one would not eat a sandwich with its paper on to think about there being another message behind it. One can try to come up with various interpretations in order to make sense of the words. But what does not come naturally when one is interpreting is—simply do not eat the paper. In Philosophical Investigations 199 Wittgenstein writes: —To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions)

The same holds for signposts or warnings. In order to understand a warning and act accordingly, it is crucial to be immersed in a community that has a certain practice or life associated with the warning. Understanding or not understanding the warning does not entail making the right interpretation but abiding by the interpretation, custom, or use of the community that issued the warning in the first place. In this sense, to understand a warning, or again to obey a rule, is not an interpretation but an actual use made in an actual case. This is what Wittgenstein says in PI 201: […] what this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases.

The Rule Following Considerations have been read in this way for almost five decades. Crary and Read’s analysis in the New Wittgenstein (2000) stresses that there is no gap between rules and interpretations in 3  In addition, the culture of lawsuits in the United States makes it imperative to have such warnings on sandwich paper, in order to prevent being sued by people who mistake wrappings for sandwiches.

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the first place. In their book they show again and again why it is necessary to abandon the view that there is a paradox in rule following. Let us now see how we got to this paradox in the first place by discussing Kripke’s interpretation. Kripke elaborates the following paradox in his groundbreaking contribution to the problem of rule following in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. He makes us think of a simple example of addition: 68 + 57. Since we know the rules of addition, the result is determined for indefinitely many cases: 68 + 57 = 125. But Kripke invents a skeptic who challenges our answer and claims the right answer to 68 + 57 to be 5. He doubts our grasp of the rule, wants us to prove that we have followed one rule and not another. He claims to have followed the rule of “quaddition” rather than the rule of addition; the difference being that in “quaddition” from the number 68 on the result is always 5 (Kripke 1984, 8ff). Now suppose I encounter a bizarre sceptic. This sceptic questions my certainty about my answer, in what I just called the ‘metalinguistic’ sense. Perhaps, he suggests, as I used the term ‘plus’ in the past, the answer I intended for ‘68 + 57’ should have been ‘5’! Of course the sceptic’s suggestion is obviously insane. My initial response to such a suggestion might be that the challenger should go back to school and learn to add. Let the challenger, however, continue. After all, he says, if I am now so confident that, as I used the symbol ‘+’, my intention was that ‘68 + 57’ should turn out to denote 125, this cannot be because I explicitly gave myself instructions that 125 is the result of performing the addition in this particular instance. (Kripke 1984, 8)

The example developed by Kripke is made more dramatic in the following: That rule could just as well have been the rule for quaddition (the quus function) as for addition. The idea that in fact quaddition is what I meant, that in a sudden frenzy I have changed my previous usage, dramatizes the problem.

In contrast to this Wittgenstein states: This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. (PI 201)

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Kripke’s paradox gains traction, when we realize that we are in fact incapable of stating any fact of whatever kind as a proof that we really did follow the rule of addition and not the rule of “quaddition.” This means that whatever we do can on some interpretation be brought in accord with the rule. One thing Kripke fails to acknowledge is “Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning” (PI 198). Wittgenstein holds that to make interpretations of rules is not to follow rules: “Hence there is an inclination to say: every action according to the rule is an interpretation. But we ought to restrict the term ‘interpretation’ to the substitution of one expression of the rule to another” (PI 201). To think that the relation between rules and the grasping, understanding, or application of rules needs to be secured by the right interpretation of that relation is mere inclination according to the Wittgensteinian interlocutor. There is no gap between the rule and its application in the first place. But then again, we are convinced that we did follow the rule of addition and not the other. Similarly, Kripke falls for Wittgenstein’s vexed interlocutor who exclaims his confusion about the fact that he is convinced that the rule comes with the instruction for how it is to be interpreted: “‘But I don’t mean that what I do now (in grasping a sense) determines the future use causally and as a matter of experience, but that in a queer way, the use itself is in some sense present’” (PI 195). This again points to the paradox, that there is something—a rule, the meaning of the word and its use present in it—that intimates how to go on. Wittgenstein’s response to this vexed interlocutor is expressed by another interlocutor who immediately answers: “—But of course it is, ‘in some sense’! Really the only thing wrong with what you say is the expression ‘in a queer way.’ The rest is all right; and the sentence only seems queer when one imagines a different language-game for it from the one in which we actually use it” (PI 195). There is nothing odd or paradoxical about our life with rules or concepts. If we find it strange that the “use is somehow present,” that only means we just have not properly understood the use of the word. Rule and application are not divided by a gap that must be interpreted but are joined by the use of the word. The slogan “meaning is use” can only be understood from the standpoint: rule and application are internally related. This internal relation is not to be mixed up with an internal relation between different thoughts or different propositions. What is meant here is the intentional relation that holds between thought or language and that which it is about. As argued in all previous chapters, the key is an

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intentionality that is performed, for example, in Chap. 5, where the propositional sign and its projection method (the rule) are that which is signified and are internally related. However, Baker and Hacker give us a substantially different reading of internal relations. Two years after Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Baker and Hacker published Skepticism, Rules and Language (Baker and Hacker 1984) an approach to the problem of rule following that takes a definite stance against Kripke’s skeptical paradox. Their claim is that “the absurd paradox that rules cannot guide one shows [is] that how one understands a rule need not be an interpretation, but is manifest in acting, in what we call ‘following the rule’” (Baker and Hacker 1984, 13–14). Grasping the rule means applying it, grasping the meaning means using the word. Baker and Hacker criticize Kripke’s rule-skeptical misapprehension of internal relations and claim that rule-skepticism ignores or distorts these relations: “The rule skeptic comes into conflict with a conceptual truth expressing an internal relation between rules and their applications” (ibid., 101). Baker and Hacker use the term internal relation interchangeably with the term logical or grammatical relation. In the Tractatus 4.123 Wittgenstein had held that internal relations are such that it is inconceivable that entities should not stand in this relation, thus they are necessarily true or tautological. Later on, he adds that nothing external could mediate between them. Baker and Hacker’s example for an internal relation is the relation between desire and its fulfillment. There is no third component— such as the feeling of satisfaction—allowed to enter into the relation. It is, as they claim, “a truth of grammar” or a “necessary truth” that, for example, the fulfillment of the desire to drink a pint of beer is to drink a pint of beer: “It can be read off the expression of the desire” (Baker and Hacker 1984, 108). Desire and fulfillment make contact, so to speak, in language. The internal relation is exhibited in grammar. Rule and application are internally related in the same way in Philosophical Investigations. An interpretation, as a mediation, would occupy the same function as the feeling of satisfaction—and drop out. In contrast, I argue that the example of rule and application is more complex. There is no direct contact in language to match the example of drinking beer as desire and fulfillment. Baker and Hacker claim that the internal relations “make contact in the practice of using language, of explaining and justifying its use. […] To understand the rule is to know what counts, in this technique, as doing the same” (Baker and Hacker 1984,

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115). To understand the rule is therefore to know how to proceed in applying it. In this sense, the explanation of the meaning of a word is a rule or standard for its correct use. The uses of a word are viewed as the applications of these rules or instances of following it. There is a problem with this reading, and it is akin to the account Baker and Hacker give of rules of syntax in the Tractatus. They claim that “Wittgenstein’s ‘rules of grammar’ serve only to distinguish sense from nonsense. Unlike the depth rules of logical syntax, they do not reflect ineffable metaphysical truths” (Baker and Hacker 1985, 40). This quote is interesting if we go back to my parallel accounts of Kant and Wittgenstein in Chaps. 2 and 3. Baker and Hacker distinguish between two completely different stances. Their reading implies that the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus held that there are internal relations between rules and their applications because of there being harmony between language and the world. Only late Wittgenstein realized that there are only grammatical conventions, and there is no pre-established metaphysical harmony. By my reading, the rules of logical syntax and the rules of grammar are similarly structured. They are both exhibited when we use language. What is exhibited when we use language is not an ineffable metaphysical truth about harmony but the connection of language to what it is about as rules of logical syntax in early Wittgenstein and the rules of grammar later on. Internal relations as they appear in the Tractatus, and as they pave the way from language idling to language in use in the Philosophical Investigations, can therefore be understood as intentional relations of a special performative kind. In the Tractatus they are the relations between propositions and their constituents and are usually tautologies because they are always true. Therefore, the proposition “Paper is not edible” is nonsensical—like all the propositions of the Tractatus according to Wittgenstein (6.54). But that does not mean that “Paper is not edible” is always nonsensical. When the proposition is actually used, as in the example of the sandwich wrapped in paper that holds the inscription “paper is not edible”, it makes sense.

References Baker, Gordon P., and P.M.S.  Hacker. 1984. Scepticism, Rules and Language. Oxford and New York: B. Blackwell. ———. 1985. An Analytic Commentary on the Philosophical Investigation, Volume 2. In Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Crary, Alice, and Rupert J.  Read, eds. 2000. The New Wittgenstein. London, New York: Routledge.

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Dickerson, A.B. 2004. Kant Representation and Objectivity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 2001. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Meiner. (1st ed. Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich 1790) (Abbreviated as CJ) ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Krämer, Sybille. 2016. Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis: Grundlinien einer Diagrammatologie. Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft 2176. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Kripke, Saul A. 1984. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition. Revised edition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kukla, Rebecca, ed. 2006. Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Miller, Alexander, and Crispin Wright, eds. 2002. Rule-Following and Meaning. Chesham: Acumen. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2013. Reflective Judgment, Determinate Judgment and the Problem of Particularity. Washington University Jurisprudence Review 6 (1): 6–25. Soboleva, Maja E., ed. 2016. Das Denken des Denkens: ein philosophischer Überblick. Edition Moderne Postmoderne. Bielefeld: Transcript. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (Abbreviated as PI) ———. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

CHAPTER 10

Performativity and the Act of Thinking

The concept of performativity took center stage in twentieth-century linguistic philosophy. First, I would like to give a short introduction to the way in which twentieth-century accounts of performativity have appeared on the philosophical scene. This is followed by an explanation in what sense my account of performativity of thought and language—the theory of the act of thinking I aim to develop—sets itself apart from such approaches. My exegesis of Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s work in Parts I and II can be seen as both a prelude to such theories of performativity and a way of moving beyond them. My reading of Kant and Wittgenstein enables a reading of performativity that is significantly different from the strand of performativity theories that I outline below. While a look at previous readings elucidates a number of progenitor theories, my emphasis on the importance of use—implicit in the Critique of Pure Reason and explicit in my reading of the Tractatus—leads to a different account of performativity altogether. The approach I have developed does not attempt to formulate a solution to the supposed problem of a gap existing between thought and language and its use, but rather it changes the question altogether by offering a new perspective on experience. Whenever we allow a distinction to be made between the form of language and the use of language, we run into the problem that we do not know what comes first, the use of language or language itself. However, this problem disappears entirely in the account of performativity that I © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. Moser, Kant, Wittgenstein, and the Performativity of Thought, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-77550-6_10

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elaborate, which ultimately presents itself as a solution to an utterly different kind of problem. Performativity must be understood as a “connection” that gives constant birth to itself and to what it is about. I aim to show that thought or language is not a substance or an object that is activated each time we think or speak nor is it a predetermined form that is repeated as is or performed as the same. The difficulty with the account of performativity that I develop is that it has to theoretically capture how the object of thought or language is itself only created in the performance. This is akin to writing a theory that only works in practice. The problematic situation at hand is this: On the one hand thought or language only happens in use, when we think or speak. On the other hand, language is there already at our disposal, and when we speak, we just repeat the form of language. Ferdinand de Saussure (Ferdinand de Saussure and Roy Harris 1998) in the Course in General Linguistics has expressed this problem under the aegis of making a distinction between langue and parole.1 The distinction between language (langue) and the activity of speaking (parole) expresses the fact that speaking is an activity of the individual, while language is the social manifestation of speech. Finally, language is a system of signs that evolves from the activity of speech. Wilhelm Humboldt formulated this problem in the early nineteenth century in a treatise about Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development2; he distinguished between the form of language and its use (von Humboldt 1972) in a way that similarly foreshadows the problem, for which my account of performativity provides a solution. Humboldt gives more weight to the speech act and less to the structure of language. For Humboldt language in its true being is something that is always fleeting. It is not an ergon, but an energeia. Therefore, its definition can only be genetic. He holds that language happens in the act of speaking and states that speech in itself is only the external form that the inner essence of humanity assumes. De Saussure, in contrast, is convinced that speaking is actualized in language. Both accounts point to a general problem: we want to understand language from its active use; however, we also want to 1  The distinction here is between langue as a system, langage as the spoken language, and finally parole as the “acts of speaking” or the use of language (de Saussure and Harris 1998, 15–17). 2  This is the title of the introduction (my translation) to his work Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts originally published in 1836.

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allow its use to stem from a form or schema of language that precedes the use. If we continue to follow the development of the concept of performativity, we need to introduce the distinction between constative and performative utterances, as John Austin introduced it in How to Do Things with Words (Austin 1962). To utter a sentence, according to Austin, means on the one hand to make a constative utterance: “To ‘describe’ some state of affairs, or to ‘state some fact,’ which it must do either truly or falsely” (Austin 1962, 1). There also is another distinct class of utterances: performative utterances, which cannot be assessed through being judged true or false. Austin holds that they are best assessed as being happy when they perform the kind of conventional effect that is to be expected when a speaker utters such a statement in the right circumstances, or as being unhappy, when this is not the case. Austin’s prominent example is that of saying “I do” when getting married. If one is not in front of a priest or judge, the “I do” will not be a happy one and the person who utters it will not be married as an effect. However, Austin’s tidy classification becomes more complicated when there turns out to be different ways in which performative utterances can be unhappy. On the one hand they can misfire, as in the example described above, when the priest or judge is not a priest or judge. But, on the other hand, they can be abused—when I say, “I do,” and I do not actually mean it (Austin 1962, 5). The problem with this last example is that by any convention I will still be married. The problem Austin sees is that my utterance “I do” fails to do justice to the fact that I do not want to marry this person, even though I do get married. What Austin realizes from this is that what is true for performative utterances may also be true for constative utterances: they may misfire or be abused, for example, I can abuse a constative utterance in the following way: I talk to someone at a cocktail party and I refer to a person standing on the other side of the room as “that person drinking champagne.” I do this even though I happen to know the person on the other side of the room never drinks alcohol and has sparkling water in their glass. I make a constative utterance that is false, but I still get away with it. Austin realizes, through his investigation of how performative statements work, that constative statements run into

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the same kinds of problems and require consideration of how they are used on particular occasions as well.3 My reading of Austin here is restricted to the interesting question of what happens with unintended consequences or, as Austin calls them, perlocutionary effects. For Austin, illocution had been the main form of utterance, a kind of norm of language in its basic rules. Locution, illocution, and perlocution are distinguished from each other in the following way: Locutions are statements or questions; illocutions are the intentions behind the locutions; and perlocutions are the effects that are produced on the listener. Therefore, illocutions say what they do and do what they say and thereby perform acts, in saying something, while perlocutions are merely the effects being brought about by saying something. Perlocutions are however not just deviations from the standard of illocution in that the effects on the listener can be different from the intention of the speaker. What became problematic in Austin’s account and has been pointed out by many readers of Austin in the last decades is that there are no illocutionary acts without perlocutionary effects.4 Therefore, the distinction between acts that were intended and acts that come about without being intended becomes problematic. The discussion of misfires and abuses cited earlier connects to the problem of the effects of language, both intended and unintended. I take up Austin’s perlocutionary effects and use them in a new way for my own purposes: I claim that whenever an utterance is made, it is the perlocutionary effects that are crucial to making thought and language be about what they are about. It is not simply the intentionality of the speaker or thinker that makes the connection. As we saw, the distinction between the intended and unintended has to be put into question altogether. When we look at unintended consequences, we are not looking at them with the question in mind whether they are a good thing or a bad thing, as the terms happy, unhappy, misfire, and abuse may indicate. What I am 3  Crary offers an in-depth discussion of Austin’s argument (Crary 2007, 49–95). Crary’s interpretative strategy with Austin’s distinction between constative and performative utterances is remarkable in that she claims that unbeknownst to himself Austin does away with an account of literal sentence meaning as we know it. She subsequently uses the augmented literal sentence meaning won through Austin’s account to supplement her moral theory that claims morality goes beyond just moral judgments. All our utterances include sensitivities that are pertinent to what we call morality, not just utterances that are about moral things. 4  “And certainly in stating we are or may be performing perlocutionary acts of all kinds” (Austin, 138).

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arguing here is that in the use of language there is always an element that cannot be captured by the structure of language or by our intentions. “That the utterance is made” adds something to the utterance and its content. And this facticity of “that the utterance is made” is now what makes a clear-cut distinction between the intended and not intended impossible. It will not come as a surprise that this facticity has been discussed widely and intensively under the notion of the event in the literature of twentieth-century philosophy.5 In addition to the linguistic act or the act of thinking such-and-such, there is the fact that the act is made—its performance—as an event. What comes into view now is a novel way to look at the question of intentionality. Over the course of the chapters of this book, I have laid the groundwork to develop a theory of the act of thinking. By now it should be clear that we get to such a theory once we take into account the performativity of thought and language and introduce a completely new way of conceiving intentionality. It posits itself as the connection to what it is about, without taking refuge in the old concept of intentionality that consisted of a truth relation between the form of thought or language and its intentional content. Classical theories of performativity like Austin’s and Searle’s, and also those of Apel and Habermas,6 still determine performativity in terms of intentional acts by speakers accompanied by normative circumstances. For them, it is the person who acts by thinking or speaking–the sovereign subject, as it were–that makes the connection. While Habermas explicates the structure of performative utterances by describing them solely on the basis of illocutionary acts, the explication is successful in that it uses performative verbs. The illocutions could be described as self-expository in the sense of “I do what I say and I say what I do.” The doing can be described through verbs that express my action. The performative verb explains the mode, and thus a foundational problem of philosophical theories of meaning seems to be solved, namely the problem of force as opposed to meaning. But only the forces are what give sense to the sentences. If the mode can be clarified by adding the right performative verb in the illocutionary act, then that problem seems to be solved. Right here is the difference that makes all the difference in the Searle-Derrida debate (cf. Derrida 1988). While for Searle language is a mode that can be 5 6

 Cf. especially the work of Jacques Derrida (1982).  See Searle (1983), Apel and Vandevelde (1998), and Habermas and Lawrence (2004).

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reconstructed performatively through verbs that can be bound back to the acting speaker, Derrida thinks language is a texture or a symbolic order that is principally detached from the speaker or hearer.7 Habermas takes Searle’s theory of speech acts and reformulates it; the performative part through which social connection is constituted is defined in the pragmatic mode of what is said as well as the propositional part in which there is reference to something in the world is defined as the one that provides content. In that sense the performance of language is constitutive of semantics of language. What is at stake is how the performative status of utterances—their referring to the utterances—can be explicated.8 Illocution is thus self-fulfilling; Habermas calls this self-reflexivity. But the structure of self-reflexivity must be made precise in the difference between “saying” and “showing” in that illocutions say what they do, or at least what they say exemplifies in acting itself. There is an immediate connection of the performative structure of language and this mode of identity in the self-exposition. This is the normative fundament of Habermas’ theory of communicative action, and one should therefore call it illocutive rationality rather than communicative rationality. But perlocution is part of communication and so is the utterance as a means to something else, that is, nonverbal actions. In a way, the perlocutionary act is parasitic; it rides on the back of the illocution. This makes perlocution far more productive, especially in connection in terms of the difference 7  Dieter Mersch points this out in an early text originally titled “Überlegungen zur Performativität der Sprache” as an unpublished manuscript and later published as Performativität und Ereignis. Überlegungen zur Revision des Performanz-Konzeptes der Sprache (2004). On p.  23  in a footnote Mersch criticizes the performative-propositional double structure of speech. He states: the simple circumstance that the explication of the mode through performative verbs and the explication of an utterance “p” through “I” plus performative verb plus the same “p” brings distills all of Habermas’ validity claims and the whole of the theory of communicative action. Habermas thinks that objectivity, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity are already in place when I say to you thus that “p” because it is always already connected as the “I,” the “you,” and the “p.” Mersch points out that nobody ever says: “I thereby state that I love you” but only “I love you.” The performative verb “to state” demands the transition from the utterance to its complete performative-propositional double structure. But this transition cannot be made from the outside because a sentence does not give away whether it is a statement or the beginning of some sort of ritual, for example. This is Derrida’s take: even the grammatical form does not guarantee that an utterance can act as a question or as a warning, neither its intonation, nor the gestures accompanying it, nor the bodily presence of the speaker. For Habermas and others, however, they always refer back to the speaker as the subject of the speech act. 8  Cf. the preface of Habermas (2007).

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between meaning and action. I can say that I love you, but I can performatively practice a form of violence by doing that.9 We are confronted with communicative paradoxa here, and they can be examined, if we identify the difference between a propositional utterance and a performative “showing.” Bateson, for example, speaks of “double-binds,” especially in the analysis of schizophrenia, and insists that these are part of the genuine possibilities of communicative action (Bateson 2000). It is the self-explication versus the exemplification of something else in the perlocution that we need to look at. That which is shown in acting can strike back to what is said. The double bind is this: what the action shows is in opposition to what the utterance says. Here we see that the propositional content and the performative explication are not to be brought into unison. Karl-Otto Apel wants to justify a kind of transcendental philosophy that can provide an answer for the question about the conditions of the possibility and validity of conventions (Apel and Vandevelde 1998), so that we can have a sort of Letztbegründung, a final justification of theoretical and practical philosophy as well as science. Apel’s final justification is dependent on the idea that illocutionary acts explicate themselves performatively. One could say that they “testify to themselves as actions” in the sense that to promise something implies the action of promising. You can see here why Apel’s principle of avoidance of the performative self-­ contradiction as the basis of his argument of final justification cannot work and must be seen as an empty postulate. It seems to be the case that this is part of the genuine possibilities of linguistic communication and not something that needs to be avoided. Let us go back to the example of saying “I do” in a situation where there is a priest, a groom, witnesses, and a whole wedding party. If the bride says: “I do” and is not sure she really wants to get married, the utterance brings about her being married nonetheless. For Austin and Habermas this is a misuse of a conventional situation, since their main focus is how the intention of the speaker connects in the circumstances. My theory of the act of thinking does not encounter the problem at hand. The bride says: “I do” and thus “that the ‘I do’ is uttered” is what makes her married to the groom. This, however, does not mean she did not have doubts or maybe did not want to marry him. She may not have wanted to get married altogether, but she got herself married by uttering the right words in the right situation. 9

 This is also Judith Butler’s argumentation and point in Excitable Speech (1997).

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This is why performative theories that rely on the intentionality of the old kind are bound to fall back onto the problem of a distinction between rules and the application of rules. When is the bride really married? When all the right words have been spoken in the right way? Similar to Chomsky’s distinction between competence and performance—wherein Chomsky defines competence as the ability to generate an infinite number of structures from a finite apparatus of rules or “the speaker’s/hearer’s knowledge of his language” (Chomsky 2015, 2), while he defines performance as the actual use of language in concrete situations or the putting into actual use of the system of rules that has been mastered. These theories repeat the problem of rule and application on the pragmatic level.10 This brings us straight back to the problem we encountered at the start with Humboldt and de Saussure: how we can speak about something that must be presupposed in the act of speaking? And this reminds us of Kant’s problem: how can we have experience of objects, when the form of experience must be presupposed in the experience? What we can say is that in our case the bride has gotten married all right, nevertheless she is married in her very own way, not really having wanted to get married altogether, but having said “I do” anyway. We don’t need to be surprised by how many different ways people can be married. What we need to avoid is the splitting up of performativity itself into rule and act or use, so that the act follows the rule one to one. Whenever we speak about rules of thought and language, we have to speak about thought or language itself. The problem above only occurs if we look at thinking or speaking acts only in terms of exact copies of the rules to their applications, in which the intentions of the speaker would be the criterion as to whether the rule was applied rightly or wrongly. Even a description of the wedding situation in terms of pragmatic rules and a competence to follow those rules ultimately repeats the split between rule and act on the pragmatic level.11 My account of the theory of the act of thinking avoids 10  I think that Habermas, similarly to Chomsky, introduced the performative-propositional double structure of speech and wanted to capture the difference between act and reference. In each act of speech there is a duality of propositional content and performative part. The former relates to the world; the latter constitutes sociality in that we attest for what we say in a performative way. This is Habermas’ pragmatic turn, and he thus reinterprets illocutionary force. It is no longer an irrational component, but it is the Geltungsanspruch, the validity claim, that the speaker has when she utters a performative sentence (Habermas 2007). 11  For the longest time, we decided to only look at the illocutionary side without seeing that all along we ran the risk of the unwanted effects systematically taking over. At least this

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this separation, showing that the performativity (of thought or language) brings about that which it is about in the act. That which the thought and language is about becomes, by the same token, less an indifferent instance of a more general rule. I want to end my interlude about the history of the concept of performativity12 with a remark about where I insert my own account of performativity. My reading of Kant and Wittgenstein from the previous chapters serves to detect in two philosophers’ logical systems the aspect of use and the work done by it. My account of the theory of the act of thinking is different because it solves the essential dilemma in the structure of performativity. The problem is to understand a thought or speech act as, on the one hand, a repetition of a rule or given form, and, on the other hand, as a singularity or event. In this sense, I am aiming at an account of the connection between our thought and speech acts and what they are or bring about, which is a performative kind of intentionality. The activity of connecting is made not by a correspondence of truth values but exactly by the way we perform thought and speech—be it truthfully and to the letter or as a misfire or abuse and so on. This is why in Chap. 2 I have pointed out that Kant grapples with a theory that makes a priori concepts the connection between thought and things, and I underlined that the form of experience looks more like an activity of connecting that is not backed up by a priori forms, but rather by the way the mind is minded. In Chap. 3 I elaborated how Wittgenstein tried to substitute the account of a logical picture in the form of language for something that is similar to Kant’s account of the a priori categories, a general form of the proposition that is “the way the mind is” in terms of language. A proposition about something is always already its own way of picturing itself, its logical form, without being able to explicate such form. is how Judith Butler understands the problem of performativity in her account in Excitable Speech (1997). Butler points out that the form-content identification that happens with the illocutionary speech act is such that we cannot get rid of perlocutionary effects. The presence of the act in the illocution is nothing but prejudice. If something is said “p” it always already needs to be said “I say that p.” Postmodern theories of performativity have therefore taken on the problem of the facticity of thought and language. I point here to Lyotard’s solution in reading Kant (cf. Lyotard 1988). 12  For a more complete overview see Kertscher and Mersch (2003), Fischer-Lichte (2004), Holz and Spiegl (2016), and (Trawöger 2019). Trawöger elaborates the concept of performativity in aesthetics as well as in theology in the sense of contemplation.

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Someone speaks, but she does not say “how” she speaks. The “how” cannot be explicated by her. The way in which the proposition speaks is not a mode of speech itself: it happens performatively. * * * In this chapter, I have been discussing how we can gain a specific understanding of the role of use as the performativity of thought and language. Now I want to follow through and state my account of the theory of the act of thinking in full. What has become clear by now is that such a theory of the act of thinking interprets how language and thought can be about things in a completely new way. If we have so far understood it as intentionality—either as the intention of the speaker or thinker or as the content of our thoughts or language, in the sense of that which we intended to think or say—we now see that the account I present here has no use for either of these. It is as if the intention as well as the intentional content has dropped out. What is left is the structure of experience or of language in the event or the performance of thought or language that presents what it is about off its own bat. I came to this account by way of a discussion of Kant through the lens of Dickerson in Chap. 3 and with Longuenesse in Chap. 4 and through discussing reflective judgment in the Critique of Judgment. This account underlines the importance of our capacity to judge as such, which is brought into play in each active judgment, and which holds up as a standard of “how our mind is minded” when we make judgments of particulars that we cannot generally subsume under an a priori. The other route by which I came to the account of the act of thinking is through Wittgenstein’s account of rule following in the Philosophical Investigations, which does not present a model of a right interpretation of the rule that would warrant our going on. Instead, in going on to do the same thing we perform the rule each time and we do so by acting in accordance to customs, or what Wittgenstein calls our forms of life.13 My account of the act of thinking can now be presented in two different variant forms. First, we can say that the intentional shows itself in the execution, which means, performatively. The intentional is then never 13  “‘So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?’—It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.” […] “What has to be accepted, the given, is—so one could say—forms of life” (PI 226).

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antecedent but comes after the fact. “It can therefore only be ‘performed’ through ever-new propositions: ‘This is what I meant, not this ….’ The intentional can then not be reconstructed, but must be put off, displaced or translated at all times.”14 In this sense, the intentional must be seen as a function or as an effect of the performative. Then again, we can think of intentionality as something that must perform itself through itself, in its own proper and singular performance, through which it is first and foremost realized. In order to say what I mean, I need to perform an act; however, it is the act only that will bring about the meaning (in the sense of the result and the activity of meaning). The moment I want to say what I mean again, I am already involved in a different performative act, which always already modifies or dislocates the realization of my intention. Here the second account merges with the first one.

References Apel, Karl-Otto, and Pol Vandevelde. 1998. Towards a Transformation of Philosophy. In Marquette Studies in Philosophy, vol. 20. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press. Austin, J.L.  1962. How to Do Things with Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard University in 1955. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bateson, Gregory. 2000. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge. Chomsky, Noam. 2015. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. 50th Anniversary ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Crary, Alice, eds. 2007. Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Representation and Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Margins of Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1988. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2004. Ästhetik des Performativen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, Jürgen, and Frederick Lawrence. 2004. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Habermas, Jürgen. 2007. Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Vol. 1 of The Theory of Communicative Action. Trans. Thomas MacCarthy. Boston: Beacon. 14  This reading is of Jacques Derrida, who always plays with this dislocation or supplementation in his writing (Derrida 1982, 1988).

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Holz, Birgit Georgia, and Andreas Spiegl. 2016. Making the Non-Visible Visible: The Latency of the Performative. In Oberflächentiefe =: Surface Depth, ed. Hans-Jürgen Hauptmann, 182–188. Wien: Verlag für Moderne Kunst. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1972. Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development. Trans. George C.  Buck and Frithjof A.  Raven. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 2001. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Ed. Heiner F. Klemme. Hamburg: Meiner. (1st ed. Berlin und Libau: Lagarde und Friedrich 1790) (Abbreviated as CJ) ———. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Kertscher, Jens, and Dieter Mersch. 2003. Performativität und Praxis. München: Verlag Wilhelm Fink. Longuenesse, Béatrice. 1998. Kant and the Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. Charles T. Wolfe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. In French: 1993. Kant et le pouvoir de juger. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1988. The Differend: Phrases in Dispute. Theory and History of Literature 46. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Mersch, Dieter. 2004. Performativität und Ereignis. Überlegungen zur Revision des Performanz-Konzeptes der Sprache. In Rhetorik: Figuration und Performanz, Germanistische Symposien-Berichtsbände 25, ed. Jürgen Fohrmann, 502–535. Stuttgart: Metzler. de Saussure, Ferdinand, and Roy Harris. 1998. Course in General Linguistics. Reprint ed. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Searle, John R. 1983. Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trawöger, Sibylle. 2019. Ästhetik des Performativen und Kontemplation: zur Relevanz eines kulturwissenschaftlichen Konzepts für die Systematische Theologie. Paderborn: Schöningh. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (Abbreviated as PI) ———. 1999. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. C.K. Ogden. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Alternate translation: 2002. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Trans. D.F. Pears and B. McGuinness. London: Routledge and Kegan. (1st ed. Trans. C.K. Ogden and F. Ramsey. Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner & Co. 1922) In German: 1995. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus in Werkausgabe Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995. (Abbreviated as TLP)

CHAPTER 11

Conclusion

It was my intention at first to bring all this together in a book whose form I pictured differently at different times. But the essential thing was that the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations

In this book I put emphasis not as much on logical theories or philosophical methods as on the application of such theories and methods. My claim is: in the same way in which Kant’s theory of the understanding produces errors upon thinking things in themselves, we encounter in Wittgenstein general or logical propositions that are nonsensical. While in Kant’s theory a projection of transcendental ideas makes possible the unity of the understanding, for Wittgenstein, once something is projected in the proposition—once the proposition is in use—it becomes meaningful. I have elaborated that something happens in the act of thinking or speaking itself—in its performance—that is, the creation of the connection to the thing. Intentionality thus has to be understood as an activity that performs the connection between thought and language and that which it is about whenever we think or speak. Intentionality is, however, not performed according to fixed rules that are applied or a logical system that is enacted. Instead, in the performance itself thought or language and thing are in

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connection. Intentionality is the performance of thought or language and thing. In my discussion of Kant’s cooperation of receptivity and spontaneity I have shown that the activity of uniting at work in both intellectual and figurative synthesis first draws together the received sense perceptions into the right unity and then orders those sense perceptions thus put in front of the mind into a unity, which in turn makes it possible for us to judge that the former is the same as the latter. This ordering and uniting activity is the performative work, as it were, carried out in intentionality. Even though Kant invokes categories of the mind that are a priori, they have been generated in the same process of synthesis. The thinking activity itself has made a reflection on our mental capacities for unification. Wittgenstein utilizes a projection method in order to elaborate the form of the proposition as a threefold structure in which the sensible sign is projected so that it is about something or a signified. However, similar to the Critique of Pure Reason, in the case of a logical system such a projection is empty. We need to actually speak in order for something to be projected in the proposition. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein has given up on the rendering of rules as rigid structures that predetermine how speaking is going to be carried out in every instance. He sets up an interpretation of how we follow rules performatively. While Kant grapples with how a priori concepts make the connection between thought and thing, I read Kant in the sense that he presents the form of experience as an activity of connecting, which is not backed up by an a priori form but by the way the mind is minded, or the way the mind was formed through human beings having used it. Wittgenstein, too, according to my reading, does not give an account of a logical picture but of the way the mind is minded in terms of the form of language or what he later calls form of life. Therefore, we can approach the problem of how our thoughts or language can be about something by focusing on what happens when we actually think and speak. The performativity of thought and language enables us to have a rich understanding of our life with things and people in the world. Other readers of Kant have questioned whether the cooperation of receptivity and spontaneity through the categories as the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience is enough to ground experience. On the one hand, Susan Neiman has argued that more is required to make thought be about things (Neiman 1997). She claims that it is the

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regulative ideas of reason that we need on top of the categories. On the other hand, McDowell represents a kind of Hegelianized Kantianism. In his analysis, he looks at the same problem from the other side, which is to see logic as an abstraction from experience (McDowell 1994). Logic then becomes akin to the inferences that take place in thought or language. I situate myself between those accounts, which both naturalize intentionality, by emphasizing that in a theory of the act of thinking no gap between thought or language and that which it is about can exist in the first place. I am neither on the side of the thing or world or nature nor on the side of the thought or language. I look at thinking and speaking as performative acts, which unite by the act of bringing about. In this sense, I could have ignored intentionality altogether in this book and simply addressed performativity. However, it is also my aim to reinterpret intentionality in such a way that it can be understood performatively. Relying on Kant and Wittgenstein’s idea that there needs to be projection, my account follows a certain path of development, which cannot circumvent intentionality.1 This trajectory of my account of the act of thinking leads to the understanding that the unity we produce in the synthesis is nothing else but nature. Let me explain this. At some point, I was tempted to call my thesis Natural Intentionality, since what we learn is that the way we reflect on our mental capacities ends up being the nature of our minds. And now that mind and world are not disconnected and need not be united by our experience—in the sense of an intentional attempt of the kind that is supported by logical rules—we can see that we not only perform the relation to that which we experience but actually perform nature itself.2

1  There is another strand of philosophy coming from Wittgenstein called enactivism that is making a similar performative point about how the mental act becomes contentful. “Enactivist philosophers understand cognitive processes as sensorimotor interactions enacting mental content” (Facchin 2021, 1). Their claim is that the agent establishes a meaningful perspective through the sensomotorical interaction. This is how we find out what should be loved, feared, avoided, or sought (cf. Varela et al. 2000; Thompson 2010). In comparison to that radical enactivists like Daniel Hutto and Myin (Hutto and Myin 2017) argue that most cognition does not involve content. They think cognition is twofold: basic forms that involve no content and non-basic forms that revolve around the manipulation of linguistic and public symbols. Sensory images “inform anticipatory behavior and [to] guide or at least adjust, any intelligent engagements” (Hutto and Myin 2017, 196). 2  It would take a wholly new book to reinterpret naturalism in this way and fully elucidate an account of “performative naturalism.” The way we actually think and speak about things,

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It is noteworthy that Wittgenstein thinks that there is natural order to his thoughts in the Philosophical Investigations, as we see in the aphorism above, which is taken from the preface. There are also other passages of the preface, in which he talks about the “natural inclination” of his thoughts and says, furthermore, this was “connected with the very nature of the investigation.” But there is yet another way in which nature plays a role in the Philosophical Investigations, and that is through the kind of thoughts Wittgenstein puts forth about language and the way we learn it and use signs to communicate. He starts by giving us a picture of how language and language learning works that he does not support. Here we encounter “nature” in the form of body movements as natural language: Their intention was shewn by their bodily movements, as it were the natural language of all peoples: the expression of the face, the play of the eyes, the movement of other parts of the body, and the tone of voice which expresses our state of mind in seeking, having, rejecting, or avoiding something. (PI 1)

Augustine says there is a natural language, which is the expression of the body, which similarly expresses our state of mind. Wittgenstein does not subscribe to this theory but suggests that we are broken into language by imitating our teachers’ and society’s expressions. Upon closer examination, one recognizes that Wittgenstein did learn something from bodily movements and gestures. In order to understand that language is not a collection of rules that can be merely repeated each time for it to mean this or that, we can compare linguistic performance with gesture. Language represents “off its own bat,” that is, on its own accord. This is similar to how each person embodies a gesture in a different way. There are no two people who smile the same smile or point the same way, even though there is a general meaning of smiling and pointing. What kind of take on thought and language are we finally left with? We perform the connection between thought and language and world each time we use them; the object of thought or language is created in the performance, which we both are and carry out. Only in this sense is there togetherness of mind and world. That sense can neither be expressed in

the performativity of thought and language, opens up a brand new understanding of what naturalism means.

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the image of the rider riding the horse nor the horse riding the rider; there is now no difference between the two.3

References Benjamin, Walter. 1986. Illuminations. Edited by Hannah Ahrend and Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Crary, Alice, eds. 2007. Wittgenstein and the Moral Life: Essays in Honor of Cora Diamond. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Facchin, Marco. 2021. Is Radically Enactive Imagination Really Contentless? Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, January. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s11097-­020-­09721-­y Hutto, Daniel D., and Erik Myin. 2017. Evolving Enactivism: Basic Minds Meet Content. Boston: The MIT Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In German: 1998. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Ed. Jens Timmermann. Hamburg: Meiner. (A = 1st ed. [1781], B = 2nd ed. [1787]) (Abbreviated as CPR) Neiman, Susan. 1997. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. New  York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Evan. 2010. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 2000. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, 1st ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1958. Philosophical Investigations. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, R. Rhees, and G. H. von Wright. Trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. In German: 1995. Philosophische Untersuchungen in Werkausgabe. Vol. 1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. (1st ed. 1953) (Abbreviated as PI)

3

 Walter Benjamin expresses this image at the end of his essay “Franz Kafka” (1986).

Index1

A Act of thinking, Gemütshandlung, 1–3, 2n2, 6, 6n11, 7, 7n12, 9–11, 15, 17, 23, 37, 39, 40n2, 47, 56, 57, 62, 68, 74, 90, 103, 104, 104n2, 117n9, 125, 126, 135–145, 147, 149 Apel, Karl-Otto, 139, 141 Appearance, Erscheinung, 24, 27, 31, 35, 37, 41–44, 46, 55, 56, 105, 108, 110–114, 120, 121 Apperception, see Transcendental apperception Apprehension, 17, 34, 36, 37, 42–44, 46, 54, 55n6, 56 Architectonics, vii, 6, 47, 120 Association, 36, 43, 44, 56 Atomic fact, see State of affairs, Tatsache Augustine, 150 Austin, John, 137–139, 138n3, 141

B Babble, 4 Baker, Gordon, 127, 131, 132 Barthes, Roland, 62, 94–97 Bateson, Gregory, 141 Blanchot, Maurice, 95 C Canon, 25–27 Category, 2n2, 3, 5, 6, 10–12, 11n19, 15–18, 22, 23, 26, 29, 33, 35–37, 40–49, 43n6, 54, 59, 62, 68, 70, 75n1, 82, 95, 105, 108–110, 111n4, 113, 115–117, 120, 121, 123, 125, 143, 148, 149 Chess, 128 Chomsky, Noam, 142, 142n10 Conatus, 47, 47n8, 48

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Concept, Begriff formal, 91, 92 pure, 25, 27–29, 34, 47, 110, 121 Consciousness, Bewusstein original, 43 transcendental, 29, 41, 115 Copernican Turn, 30, 76, 83, 99 Critique of Judgment, 12, 105, 120–126, 124n1, 144 Critique of Pure Reason A-edition, 10, 42n5 B-edition, 30, 42n5 D de Saussure, Ferdinand, 5n8, 136, 136n1, 142 Deduction, see Transcendental deduction Derrida, Jacques, 139, 140, 140n7, 145n14 Desire and fulfillment, 131 Dickerson, A. B., 8, 11, 18, 19, 23n3, 51–59, 52n1, 52n2, 53n4, 54n5, 54n6, 107–109, 115, 119, 144 Dualism, 3 E Elucidation, 61, 65, 66, 68–70, 72, 84, 99 Enactivism, 149n1 Equation, mathematical, 61, 66, 98 Exemplification, 141 Explication, 139, 140n7, 141 F Fact, vii, 1, 2n1, 3, 22n2, 37, 43, 45–47, 54, 61, 64, 64n3, 64n4, 65, 67–73, 68n10, 69n11,

72n12, 76–86, 79n6, 82n7, 91, 94, 98, 99, 103, 104, 112, 113, 123, 124, 129, 130, 136, 137, 139, 145 Figural synthesis, 107, 109 Figurative synthesis, 43, 46, 120, 125, 148 Force, Kraft, 17, 47, 47n9, 48, 139, 142n10 Form depicting, 76 of judgment, 18, 35, 45–48 logical, 18, 21, 34, 35, 45–48, 61, 66, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 98, 143 of representation, 71, 72, 76, 98 Free play, 122, 124 Friedlander, Eli, 7n14, 11, 65n9, 82n7 Fulfillment, see Desire and fulfillment Function logical, 28, 40, 47, 48 truth (see Truth-function) G Gestalt, 109, 110 Gesture, 140n7, 150 God, 57, 79 Grammar, 127, 131, 132 On Guessing, 104n1 Guyer, Paul, 11, 12, 23n4, 28, 52n1, 112n6 H Habermas, Jürgen, 139–141, 140n7, 142n10 Hacker, Peter, 127, 128, 131, 132 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 42n5, 110 Humboldt, Wilhelm, 136, 142

 INDEX 

I Idea, transcendental, 2, 15, 59, 62, 100, 147 Idealism, 3–4n5, 113 Illocution, 138–140, 143n11 Image, see Picture Imagination, 10, 18, 23, 24, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 40, 42–44, 42n5, 46, 48, 54, 96, 104, 107–109, 113, 114, 117, 118, 120, 121, 124 Intentionalist, 9–10 Intentionality, 9, 53, 54, 54n5, 54n6, 56–58, 68, 91, 96, 97, 103, 104, 104n2, 111, 131, 138, 139, 142–145, 147–149 representational, 53, 58 Intentional object, 53 Interlocutor, 130 Intuition, 10, 16–18, 22–25, 28, 30–37, 40–42, 40n2, 43n6, 44–46, 48, 49, 51–59, 61, 75, 75n1, 82, 83, 90, 104, 105, 107–122, 111n4, 124 form of, 39, 44, 46 Isomorphic, 7, 7n13 J Judgment aesthetic, 12, 122–125 of beauty, 122, 125 determinative, 26n6, 120, 124, 125 reflective, 12, 26n6, 120, 122–125, 124n1, 144 Judgment, faculty of, 124, 124n1 K Krämer, Sibylle, 104, 105, 107–111, 109n1, 110n3, 111n4, 113, 114, 117, 119 Kripke, Saul, 5n9, 127, 129–131

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L Language, vii, 1–12, 2n1, 5n7, 5n9, 7n12, 7n14, 18, 55, 58, 63, 66, 68, 73, 76, 77, 82, 82n7, 83, 85, 86, 89, 91, 92, 94–97, 100, 103–105, 104n2, 117, 119, 125–127, 130–132, 135–140, 136n1, 142–144, 143n11, 144n13, 147–150, 150n2 Langue and parole, 136 Lawfulness, 124 Laws of nature, 76, 77, 79, 123 Learning, 150 Limit, vii, 63, 82n7, 86 Locution, 138 Logic applied, application of, 5, 11, 25, 26, 62 general, 17–19, 21, 24–29, 35, 36, 44, 80 of illusion, 26, 27 (see also Transcendental dialectics) Port-Royal, 45 pure, 26 transcendental, 5, 17–19, 23, 24, 27–29, 33, 34, 36, 44, 59, 80, 82, 90, 119, 120 Logical space, 69, 71, 72 Longuenesse, Beatrice, 10–12, 18, 40, 40n2, 41, 41n4, 45–49, 53, 54, 75n1, 107, 116, 119, 120, 125, 144 M Mácha, Jakub, 4n5, 89n1, 92 Manifold, 22, 29–31, 33–37, 39, 41–44, 51–59, 109, 111, 114, 119, 120, 122, 124 McDowell, John, 5, 5n10, 7–9, 104, 104n2, 114n7, 149 Meaning is use, 125, 126, 130

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INDEX

Mental activity, 18, 46–48 Metaphor, 116 Metaphysics, 2, 3n5, 6, 113 Method of projection, see Rule, of projection Mind and World, see McDowell, John Mirror, 8, 73, 90 Model, 29, 58, 62, 65n9, 71, 72, 74, 80, 91, 92, 114, 115, 144 Monist, 3, 105, 112, 113 N Natural history, 9 Naturalism, 149n2, 150n2 Neiman, Susan, 148 Nonsense, 59, 82n7, 85, 86, 90n1, 94n4, 97, 98, 98n5, 132 Notebooks, 77, 80 Noumenon, 80 O Ontology, see Metaphysics Operation logical, 78 mental, 104, 107 Organon, 25, 26 P Paradox, 112, 129–131, 141 skeptical, 131 Perception, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, 33, 35–37, 41–44, 47–49, 52n1, 53, 54, 56, 57, 105, 108, 109, 112, 114, 119, 120, 124, 127, 148 Performativity, 2, 4, 7n14, 12, 16–18, 21, 36, 37, 44, 59, 68, 86, 90, 103–105, 118–121, 125–127, 135–145, 148, 149, 150n2 Perlocutionary effect, 138, 143n11

Phenomenon, 46 natural, 76, 77, 79 Philosophical Investigations, vii, 12, 74, 79, 105, 120, 122, 125–128, 125n2, 131, 132, 144, 148, 150 Picture epistemic, 107 logical, 64, 64n4, 67, 71, 72, 77, 81, 92, 99, 143, 148 Plato, 3n2 Pluhar, Werner S., 24n5, 26n6, 28 Poetry, 94, 95, 97 A posteriori, 31, 44 Power of judgment, see Judgment Pragmatics, 1–3, 2n1, 5, 6, 15, 16, 140, 142, 142n10 Presentation, see Representation A priori, vii, 2n2, 3, 3n4, 5, 6, 11n19, 15–17, 21–37, 40, 44–46, 48, 51, 54, 56, 57, 59, 61, 62, 68, 70, 75, 75n1, 81, 85, 90, 91, 100, 104, 104n2, 105, 107, 109–113, 116, 117, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 143, 144, 148 Projection method, 1–12, 52n2, 61, 62, 67, 70, 74–86, 89–93, 91n2, 98n5, 125, 126, 131, 148 Proof, mathematical, 66 Proposition, Satz elementary, 64, 64n6, 67, 68, 73, 76, 78, 127 essence of, 73, 76, 78 general form of, 11, 61, 64–68, 64n7, 74, 78, 85, 100, 127, 143 logical nonsensical, 2, 11, 59, 62, 65, 68, 78n5, 79, 80, 85, 86, 90, 92, 94, 94n4, 97, 100, 127, 147 pseudo, 2n2 senseless, 79, 84, 85

 INDEX 

as variable (see Variable, propositional) zero, 11, 62, 72, 72n12, 84, 90, 92, 98–100, 99n6 Psychology, 26 transcendental, 48 Purpose, pursposiveness, 6n11, 25, 34, 39, 40n2, 41, 45, 49, 86, 94, 96, 97, 120, 122, 124, 125, 138 R Reality, 52, 57, 67, 69–74, 76, 77, 78n5, 79–81, 83–86, 84n10, 91–93, 98, 99, 113, 114, 116, 117, 121 Receptivity, 16, 16n2, 22, 23, 25, 29–31, 51, 54, 59, 73, 121, 124, 148 Recognition, 34, 36, 37, 43, 44, 46, 56, 82n7 Relation external, 8 grammatical, 131 intentional, 54n6, 103, 130, 132 internal, 8, 10, 74, 89n1, 90–92, 128, 130–132 logical, 8 of picturing, 77 Representation, 3n4, 4, 6, 10, 10n18, 16n2, 17–19, 22–25, 23n3, 23n4, 28–37, 39–43, 40n2, 46, 47, 49, 51–56, 52n1, 52n2, 54–55n6, 58, 64n1, 65, 71–73, 76, 80, 90, 98, 104, 108, 114–116, 119–121, 123, 124, 127 Rule logical, 30, 34, 149 of projection, 10, 11, 52n2, 55, 59 Rule following, 11, 122, 125, 127–129, 131, 144

157

S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 94, 95 Schaper, Eva, 110, 111, 114 Schema/schematism/schematization, 11, 19, 28, 53, 56, 90, 104, 105, 107–121, 124, 137 Searle, John, 139, 140 Self-consciousness, 40, 41, 41n3, 51, 54–56, 59, 90, 104, 113, 117 Self-reference, 10, 54 Self-reflexivity, 59, 90, 104, 117, 140 Sellars, John, 9 Semantics, 1, 2n1, 51, 55, 140 Semiotics, 5 Sense inner, 24, 113, 114, 121 outer, 24, 113 Sensibility, 16, 22–25, 22n2, 29–33, 36, 40, 41, 42n5, 43, 44, 48, 49, 55, 56, 75, 104n2, 108, 112, 114–118, 121 Showing, vii, 1, 11, 82n7, 86, 91, 104n2, 125, 140, 141, 143 Sign pictorial, 82 propositional, 11, 61, 62, 78, 80–86, 83n8, 89, 91, 92, 126, 131 Soboleva, Maja, 43n6, 105, 111–119, 112n5, 112n6, 114n7 Sontag, Susan, 95, 96 Space and time, 16, 17, 23–25, 31, 33, 35–37, 41, 42, 44, 49, 56, 108 Spontaneity, 16, 16n2, 18, 23, 25, 29, 30, 33–35, 37, 51, 54, 59, 73, 109, 121, 124, 148 State of affairs, 7n13, 64n3, 68n10, 69, 70, 72, 76n2, 77, 77n4, 92, 98, 99, 137 Tatsache, 64n3, 68n10 Substance, 47, 48, 81, 136

158 

INDEX

Surrealism, 94 Symbol, 65, 129, 149n1 Symbolism, 93, 94 Symbolizing, method of, 11, 61, 81, 84, 91, 92 Syntax, 118, 132 Synthesis of apperception, 17, 57 metaphysical, 53 of recognition, 46 Synthesis intellectualis, 41 Synthesis speciosa, 40, 41, 44, 49, 107 T Tautology, 7, 61, 66, 67, 80, 84, 85, 92–94, 98, 132 Thing in itself/things in themselves, 2, 15, 36, 59, 112, 113, 147 I think, 5n6, 15–19, 39n1, 40, 41n3, 45, 56, 57, 64n3, 68, 90, 90n1, 98n5, 104, 105, 117, 118, 126, 142n10 See also Transcendental apperception Time and space, see Space and time Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 55, 63 Transcendental Aesthetics, 16, 22–25, 31, 32, 44, 45, 112 Transcendental Analytic, 23, 26, 27, 32, 112 Transcendental apperception, 10, 11, 15, 17–19, 21, 35–37, 40, 41, 41n3, 43–45, 48, 54–58, 54–55n6, 90, 104, 114, 117 Transcendental Deduction, 5, 6, 10, 17, 18, 21, 24, 34, 41, 41n3, 42n5, 46–49, 51, 53, 54, 56, 56n7, 62, 80, 108, 123

Transcendental dialectic, 23, 26, 27, 126 Transcendental idealism, 3n5, 36, 59 Transcendental imagination, 42n5, 46, 117 Transcendental object =X, 36 Transcendental unity, 29, 39–41, 45, 48, 53, 57, 114, 115, 117 Translation, 4–5n6, 23, 23n4, 24n5, 28, 42, 54, 64n2, 64n3, 68n10, 73n15, 77n3, 77n4, 93n3, 95, 108, 109, 110n3, 112n5, 136n2 Truth-function, 64, 64n6, 64n7, 67 U Understanding, faculty of, 16, 42n5 Utterance, 137–141, 138n3, 140n7 V Variable, propositional, 61, 66 W World, vii, 2, 3, 5–10, 18, 30, 35, 36, 52n1, 58, 59, 61, 64, 65, 65n9, 67–71, 69n11, 73, 74, 76, 77, 79–81, 82n7, 85, 90n1, 91, 92, 96, 97, 99, 104n2, 110–114, 116, 117, 126, 132, 140, 142n10, 148–150 Z Zero-method, 62, 67, 84, 89–93, 98n5