A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, Consciousness, and Action: Wittgenstein (Investigations into “Metaphysical” Pictures from the Tractatus and other exhibitions)

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Wittgenstein as a young man writing the Tractatus was not well-read in Philosophy. His immediate influences were, of course, Frege, Moore, and Russell against the background of influences from Hertz, Boltzmann, Mauthner, and Schopenhauer. Logic, Language, and Science became the focus of his attention and he was part of a general British reaction to the Absolute idealism of Hegelianism that had previously overturned the Kantian attempt to restore the spirit of hylomorphic theory. The Scientific influence on the early Wittgenstein was probably more significant than the anti-Hegelian reaction. P M S Hacker points out in his work “Insight and Illusion”, (Bristol, Thoemmes Press, 1986) that:

“…….the most significant philosopher-scientists were Hertz and Boltzmann. Hertz’s “The Principles of Mechanics” undertook a philosophical examination of the logical nature of scientific explanation. The point of science, he argued, is the anticipation of nature. Its data are our knowledge of past events, its method is theory-construction, its mode of reasoning is deductive. The possibility of describing reality by an axiomatic mechanics is explained by reference to the nature of symbolisation. We form pictures to ourselves of external objects. These symbolic or pictorial conceptions of ours must satisfy one essential condition: their deductive consequences must match the facts: “the necessary consequents of the images in thought are always the images of the necessary consequences in nature of the things pictured” “(P.2-3)

The above not only inspired Wittgenstein’s Tractatus but also the logical positivist movement which in turn also was influenced by the Tractatus. Both Hertz and Boltzmann argued that there was “conceptual confusion” in science around certain terms which gave rise to nonsensical questions that could be rejected if one refused to engage in “explanations” of a certain kind(Metaphysical explanations). Wittgenstein in his Tractatus claimed no special status for philosophy over science, both were inhabitants of the Republic of ideas, but Philosophy was particularly concerned with language, and tautologies and contradictions which “showed” us the logical structure of the world.

The above reactions were not Kantian but rather the progeny of the early 20th century, a period in which it was becoming obvious that science was an agent sweeping all before its technological wave of change. Mathematics and its relation to logic were in the cultural “air” that Cambridge was breathing after Russell’s Principia Mathematica. Frege, however, was also on Wittgenstein’s mind and was probably more influential than Russell in creating the “agenda” which led from the Tractatus to the later work. Frege was part of the overturning of the view of language Wittgenstein adopted in the Tractatus that claimed that names have a reference but do not have “sense”. Sense, being for Frege, the “way” we language users have of picking out reference via for example definite descriptions(e.g. the morning star is the evening star). Wittgenstein’s early reflections had even in the view of its author, later in his career, failed to acknowledge a distinction between the meaning of, for example, a proper name and its reference or bearer. If names did pick out objects directly then when, in the case of living objects such as Moses, he died, the name would necessarily lose its meaning, which is clearly not the case. Yet for us, the name Moses has meaning because a number of definite descriptions pick out one and the same individual. There are many different ways of using language and picking out one individual in different ways is one of its “uses”. This idea links up with the discussions on seeing an aspect of an ambiguous picture which for the author of the Tractatus was a matter of perceiving two different “facts”. In Jastrow’s duck/rabbit drawing, for example, the Wittgenstein of the Investigations(Wittgenstein’s later work) would claim that we see one and the same figure in two different ways.

Anscombe’s “An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus” distinguishes between the influences of Russell in terms of the presence of “psychological” elements in Russell and the absence of these in the work of Frege:

“Russell, who discusses many of the same questions as Frege, differs from him by introducing the notion of immediate experience, and hence that of private mental contents into his explanations of meaning and his theory of judgment. For Russell is thoroughly imbued with the traditions of British empiricism,”(Anscombe, P.14)

……Which in its turn had been committed to the scientific method since Francis Bacon’s writings. The Tractatus presents us with a “Picture theory of meaning” that no doubt is influenced by both Hertz and Russell. Wittgenstein in the Tractatus claims that the world is the totality of facts and that a proposition is what corresponds to the facts if it is true. Propositions are made up of names that name something and propositions are descriptive of reality. This is reminiscent of Russell’s famous distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. The idea of a proposition obviously was Russellian and Platonic as is evidenced by Wittgenstein’s response to Russell’s question “What are the constituents of thought?” Wittgenstein replied awkwardly :

“I dont know what the constituents of thought are but I know that it must have constituents that correspond to the words of language. Again the kind of relation of the constituents of the thought and the pictured fact is irrelevant. It would be a matter of psychology to find out.”

There is clearly some tension here because this suggests that epistemological investigation would reveal what the objects are that we are “acquainted with”, and therefore what the constituent elements of thought are. But this is a puzzling remark because we are nowhere provided with an explicit theory of knowledge in the work, notwithstanding the following proposition:

“Psychology is no nearer related to philosophy than is any other natural science. The theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology”(4.112)

In the Tractatus we find the claim that Language disguises thought which suggests perhaps that only logic can “clarify” language but Frege in his letter to Husserl claimed:

“It cannot be the task of logic to investigate language and determine what is contained in a linguistic expression. Someone who wants to learn logic from language is like an adult who wants to learn how to think from a child. When men created language, they were at a stage of childish pictorial thinking. Languages are not made to match logic’s ruler.”

Wittgenstein subsequently abandoned the picture theory of meaning and the epistemological and solipsistic foundation he supposed supported it. In his later work, he further cut his ties to both Russell (and to some extent) Frege by exploring the natural implications of the words he used in the Tractatus, using the argument:

“All the propositions of everyday life, just as they stand are in perfect logical order”(TLP 5.5563)

The deep “gulf” that this trinity of “Analytic” Philosophers(Russel, Frege, and the early Wittgenstein) supposed existed between thought and language was denied categorically in the “Philosophical Investigations”. We are instead provided with a descriptive phenomenological approach that examined how language was used in different language-games. Pictures are abandoned for the data of language-use and here we are witnessing a Copernican “turn” to being able to talk about the way in which “norms” and language are related to “norms of representation” or “rules”: these being the principles we use to guide our understanding of the meaning of meaning. Logic, as Wittgenstein was to claim, is not discarded in this kind of a priori investigation. The principles of non-contradiction and sufficient reason still apply, as does all of modal logic which Anscombe claimed(P.81) was denied a role in the Tractatus by the claim that the only function of a proposition was a truth function. Logical possibility could not be pictured on the picture theory of meaning we find in the Tracatatus. Here Wittgenstein invoked the mysterious notion of propositions showing something that cannot be asserted. Commentators are divided on the issue of the importance ´of the last proposition of the Tractatus which claims that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence. The theory presented leaves us in the position that the only meaningful propositions are those of natural science and this was in accordance with the cultural winds that were sweeping over the waste-land left in Europe after the first world war. We should also remember that the thoughts of the Tractatus were being shaped sometimes to the sound of canons in the trenches. The following is Wittgenstein’s response to Russells “interpretation” of the Tractatus (claiming that it made an important contribution to logic):

“Now I am afraid you have not really got hold of my main contention…..The main point is the theory of what can be said in propositions–i.e. by language–(and which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be said in propositions, but only shown which, I believe is the cardinal problem of philosophy.”(Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore edited by Von Wright, G., H.,(Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press,1974, P.71))

Many Psychological judgments would then appear to fall into the category of what “cannot be said” and this coincides with a thought recorded in Wittgenstein’s wartime Note Books: “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious”(P.80). Aesthetic, ethical, and paradoxically for the times, religious judgments also fell into this category of the proposition. Political judgments were not even mentioned.

The metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s earlier work was a realist metaphysics that fixated upon St Augustine’s view of language. In St Augustine’s theory, the “atoms” are names that name the “atoms” of reality, namely objects. Every genuine name has a meaning that is the object for which it stands. We learn these names via the process of ostensive definition: a process whereby our linguistic elders and betters point to objects. Whether the connection is via the epistemological idea of “acquaintance” is left suspended like a question mark hanging in the air. Given the claim that propositions are logical pictures, this might seem to suggest that we are “logically acquainted” with the basic elements of language. It is not clear that either the concept of a “logical “picture ” or “logical acquaintance” have any clear meaning. Anscombe suggests(P.162) that propositions can be known by acquaintance to be true.

Objects, on this account, do not exist separately but only as constituents of states of affairs. There are “elementary” states of affairs that exist independently of other elementary states of affairs. Thought also has constituents that mirror the “form” of what it is “about”. Wittgenstein in his later work admitted to assuming a metaphysics of the “mental acts and processes” and a metaphysics of a “solipsistic linguistic soul” in his earlier reflections. Elementary states of affairs, whatever else they were must be “facts” but a number of difficulties convinced the later Wittgenstein that facts must be in a certain sense “holistic” entities that are not capable of resolution into simpler elements. Wittgenstein realised that there was confusion in his earlier theory between a complex such as a broom which is composed of parts(the stick and the brush) and facts. The fact that the book was on the table is not composed of the book, the table and the relation of “being -on”, (or the sense-data associated with these “elements”). It was also realised that it did not make sense to speak of propositions as describing facts as if these facts were occupants of the spatiotemporal world standing in splendid isolation waiting to be described. The isomorphism of language and reality was not placed in question in the Tractatus. The later work expressed this “confusion” in the following terms:

“Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language”(Zettel, §55)

This together with the realisation that describing or reporting was just one language game amongst many others, produced a major shift in theorising that returned Wittgenstein to the fold of the kind of Philosophical Psychology we can find in Kant and Aristotle. Wittgenstein in his later work examined the mode of thought of expectation and pointed out that the connection between what we expect and the event that fulfils it, is logical or “Internal” or “grammatical”. The relation is both logical and linguistic. Language, of course, has meaning but the meaning is given not by something “in reality” but rather by an “explanation of meaning”. Even if it is the case that I might point to an apple as an “explanation” of the meaning of apple, Wittgenstein argues, this apple is “linguistic” in the sense of being a “sample” of language. This is also true for what makes a belief true or a desire satisfied. Here, in the case of belief and desire, we see a remarkable shift away from mental or psychological states to attitudes and their telos. The “elements” of the explanation will be the expression of the propositional attitude in question and the description of its truth or satisfaction. This means that believing, thinking. wishing and wanting are not psychic states of a solipsistic linguistic (psychological)soul that injects meaning into things. Instead, It is language and its grammar that constructs the mind or the soul. This latter move, of course, is revolutionary and reminds us of the Aristotelian definition of a person as a “rational animal capable of discourse“. This “reversal” might also have more complex origins. Apparently Wittgenstein, while pondering the problems with his Tractatus attended a lecture by Brouwer(the founder of mathematical intuitionism), which inspired him. Brouwer’s views on Mathematics were not the likely source of inspiration but rather as Hacker suggests in his work “Insight and Illusion” P.124, that it was Brouwer’s focus on the primacy of the will which may have evoked thoughts of Schopenhauer’s work “The World as Will and Representation”. For Wittgenstein, at this point in his thinking, calculation with numbers is not done psychologically with the help of intuition, but instead, it is the activity or Action of calculation that creates or gives rise to the intuitions. The sequence of numbers is stipulated as a norm of action and has no relation to reason or evidence. This focus on a norm of action is the beginning of the process of understanding of mathematics, and there is nothing “psychological” about it as would have been the case if we were dealing with the Tractarian soul injecting meaning or intuition or understanding into reality. Understanding is an Aristotelian power in Wittgenstein’s later position, a power to use the stipulated norms of the rules of language games. Understanding is also manifested in action, in using the language and as is the case with all forms of action it is behaviour for which there are reasons and justifications. These justifications will at some point refer not only to the individual person behind the action but also to the cultural context of the action, ie, we need to grasp these practices and justifications sub specie humanitatis. The aim of Philosophy remains clarification, but now this activity is crucially related to the understanding of the grammar of our language. This grammar is not in the normal case “surveyable” and it is the task of Philosophy to attempt to construct some kind of map of the grammatical terrain of our language. Similarly, it was claimed that Philosophical problems are caused by philosophers not understanding the grammar of the language they use. Here both the Socratic method of attempting to help his interlocutors “recollect” what they must know and the psychoanalytic method of helping a patient “become conscious” of the causes of their maladies, are applications of the later Wittgensteinian “method”. Dispelling illusion is an important part of this new method and this extended over the whole sphere of knowledge from scientists wanting to claim that “brains can understand” to mathematicians claiming that “numbers are understood intuitively” to psychologists postulating “hypothetical mechanisms of mind” “causing” various psychological phenomena. This latter misconstrual of an ability as a mental state is of course not innocent, it is probably in its turn a result of the scientific method demanding that “events” be isolated and causal relations between them found.

The interesting fact to note here is that Wittgenstein himself believed that his thoughts in the “Philosophical Investigations” would not fit into the mainstream philosophy of the century. He was wrong. The work became famous and the fascinating task for the Historian of Philosophy is to ask why this was the case. We have already pointed out the resemblance of the new approach to the Philosophy of Aristotle and his hylomorphic theory and we have also pointed out earlier the resemblance of Kant’s theory to hylomorphic theory. P M S Hacker says the following in his work “Insight and Illusion”:

“Like Kant, Wittgenstein saw the illusions of metaphysics as the product of a deep-rooted need to thrust against the limits of language….again analogously to Kant, Wittgenstein drew attention to what can be thought of as a regulative principle of science, if not as an engrained feature of the understanding, namely to search always for the prior condition of every conditioning element we discover in our explanations of phenomena. But this principle distorts our judgment in Philosophy.”(P.174)

Hacker wrongly attributed a realist version of the synthetic a priori judgment to Kant that was not consistent with Kant’s transcendental Philosophy. Synthetic a priori judgments for Kant belong to the understanding which is both the faculty of concepts or rules but it is also the concern of both general and special logic which he takes pains to distinguish by relating to the “rules” of thought:

“Logic, again, can be treated in a twofold manner, either as the logic of the general or as the logic of the special employment of the understanding. The former contains the absolutely necessary rules of thought without which there can be no employment whatsoever of the understanding. It, therefore, treats of understanding without any regard to difference in the objects to which the understanding may be directed. The logic of the special employment of the understanding contains the rules of correct thinking as regards a certain kind of object. The former may be called the logic of elements, the latter the organon of this or that science. The latter is commonly taught in the schools as a propaedeutic to the sciences, though, according to the actual procedure of human reason, it is what is obtained last of all, when the particular science under question has been already brought to such completion that it requires only a few finishing touches to correct and perfect it.”(Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason trans, Kemp Smith, N., London, Macmillan, 1963, B 76)

The special use of the understanding will include synthetic a priori judgments and these as described in the remarks about logic above are consistent with Wittgensteinian grammatical judgments, although it also has to be admitted that Kant did not detect the role of the medium of language either in our Philosophical confusions or in the formation of synthetic a priori judgments. In the context of this discussion It should not escape our attention that in considering the Aristotelian hylomorphic theory of change, the motion of a meteor across the night sky obeys very different laws to the person purposefully throwing a rock as high as he can into the air. The laws of gravitation and the principles governing the intended movement, beliefs, and desires of the agent are very different and given that we as agents are capable of discourse it is conceivable that the agent expresses in a proposition what he going to do before he does it. The resultant propositional attitude will contain both an expression and a description that are according to both Aristotle, Kant, and the later Wittgenstein “logically” tied together. We can not at the moment find this kind of reasoning about attitudes in Psychology textbooks but according to Wittgenstein, this is because of the conceptual confusions that are rampant in a subject blinded by the science that is best used for the object of the meteor flying across the sky rather than the agent acting to launch the object into the air. Philosophers, however, are not blameless in this matter. Wittgenstein in his early work, for example, did leave all the logical positivists with the impression that the only meaningful statements were those of natural science, those relating to the sciences we use in describing and explaining physical phenomena and change.

William James the Pragmatist and Bertrand Russell, however, were formative factors in Wittgenstein’s later remarks in the field of Philosophical Psychology because they, like the Logical Positivists were intent on denying the role of transcendental Philosophy and Metaphysics in the sciences of man. We know for example that Wittgenstein read and criticised Russell’s work “The Analysis of Mind”. Criticism which Russell largely ignored because he viewed all Wittgenstein’s later Philosophy with suspicion. Russell agrees that “the behaviour of living bodies in the present state of our knowledge is distinct from physics”(Analysis of Mind, London, Allan and Unwin, 1921, P37) and he chastises the Freudian account of unconscious desire for not telling us what an unconscious desire is. He also says that Freudians:

“have thus invested their doctrine with an air of mystery and mythology which forms a large part of its popular attractiveness.”(P.37)

Russell complains about the unconscious being a kind of underground prisoner living in a dungeon and claims:

“I do not believe the truth is quite so picturesque as this. I believe an “unconscious” desire is merely a causal law of our behaviour, namely, that we remain restlessly active until a certain state of affairs is realised when we achieve temporary equilibrium. If we know beforehand what this state of affairs is, our desire is conscious: if not unconscious. The unconscious desire is not something actually existing, but merely a tendency to certain behaviour: it has exactly the same status as a force in dynamics.”(P 38)

There are a number of points that need to be made about the above quote. Firstly the “picture” of the unconscious Russell refers to does not correspond with the highly technical account that Freud presented us with. For Freud becoming conscious and the unconscious are vicissitudes of instinct which in turn has the complex structure of having a biological origin, various aims, and variable objects. The unconscious is not in Freud’s mature work a phenomenon, something to be described, but rather an agency or a system with its form of thinking(Primary process thinking) that obeys two different kinds of principle, the energy regulation principle and the pleasure-pain principle. The first principle is indeed a biological principle that regulates a living system of the human body and Russell’s talk of homeostasis is appropriate in such a context but the energy regulation principle is subordinate to the pleasure-pain principle (which also regulates the activities of the body) and the kinds of expression related to this principle. The descriptions of the states of affairs to be brought about by this principle are very different to purely biological dynamical “forces”. Each principle has its aim and its field of objects and each is also a different vicissitude of instinct. Secondly, we know that Wittgenstein disagreed with the account of desire that Russell gives which basically construes desire as a disagreeable “sensation” or “stimulus” that provokes a behavioural response: a response that has the “aim” of removing the sensation or stimulus. The problem with this account is it’s atomising of elements of the whole desire that is expressed and satisfied into a stimulus and a response(a cause and a logically independent effect). Now, in the case of my desiring food and your response of punching me in the stomach, this may be an action that takes my conscious desire for food away and leaves me conscious of the pain from the punch. When relief from the pain occurs and I am no longer conscious of being hungry, on Russell’s account, I must have desired the punch in the stomach. Such is the logical consequence of dividing our desiring activity into atomic elements that no longer have any relation to the whole activity. A lesson we ought to have learned from Aristotle.

Much of what Wittgenstein claimed in the name of the rules of language games could well be claimed by Kant in the name of the concepts and judgments of the understanding in his Philosophy of Mind. Just as the rules relating to concepts are antecedent to the truth of the various categories of judgment for Kant, so for Wittgenstein grammar also preceded the activity of determining the truth or falsehood of a proposition. For all that, grammatical rules determine what makes sense, not what is true, but facts remain important, as do the laws of logic. Our concept of weight or our use of the word “weight” presupposes facts relating to gravitational fields and stable solid objects. These gravitational fields and properties of objects are constant over time and provide the setting for our judgments. We learn about such things in school as Kant pointed out above. Human powers such as desire and understanding also obey principles and possess properties that are constant over time. For Wittgenstein and for Kant, essences are conceptual, but they are also creations of our biological and psychological constitution, a constitution that is embedded in a civilisation with present expectations and past traditions.

Bertrand Russell’s “Analysis of Mind” spurred Wittgenstein to elaborate upon a number of specific issues in the arena of Philosophical Psychology: issues that were being treated by Russell’s account causally, and required a mind and language independent reality to be separated. Insofar as Aesthetics and ethics are also related to Philosophical Psychology, Transcendental Philosophy, and Metaphysics, this separation created considerable problems for the areas of Philosophy that Wittgenstein in his earlier work challenged us to remain “silent” about. There is a famous “incident” in which in an ethical discussion with Popper, Wittgenstein picked up a poker to “show” Popper the importance of ethics. This incident demonstrated for many the abyss that existed between the Philosophy of Wittgenstein and the more “fashionable” theories of the logical positivists which embraced the “falsificationism “of Popper.

It is hardly surprising therefore that what was perceived to be a move on the part of Wittgenstein from the natural sciences(early work) toward the social sciences(later work) was regarded as a puzzling move for many analytical philosophers who felt that the “conventions” that governed society had nothing to do with the necessities associated with logical truths. The reasons for this shift are probably manifold but primary among them must be his changing view of the nature of language. Wittgenstein no longer believed that language had the “logical” structure he had earlier attributed to it: a structure of representation whose primary task was the formulation of scientific theories. Something equivalent to a dawning upon him of the Aristotelian pluralistic vision of the many meanings of being produced a seismic shift in his thinking which he now expressed by saying “I will show you differences”. The pragmatism of James’s writings may have contributed to this shift in regarding language as embedded in forms of life that were largely, practically oriented. James defined the largely theoretical notion of “intelligence” in practical terms, i.e. as the human power or capacity to select the “means” to achieve ends. We also know that Wittgenstein read Freud carefully and must have become aware that Freud’s “Reality Principle” was a principle of practical reasoning that carried the weight of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy behind it. For Freud, language was the medium or the tool of his therapy and given Wittgenstein’s negative view of the Scientifically inclined Philosophy of his time, he began to see language for what it was, a medium of communication of everything from screams of terror to synthetic a priori or grammatical judgments.

For Elisabeth Anscombe it was clear that the practical reasoning of Aristotle was in need of support from Philosophical Psychology(Intention, Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1972, P77-78) if the reasoning was to be ethical, i.e. not concerned with the choice of means to ends but rather with the justification of ends themselves. This terminus of practical reasoning was defined by Aristotle in terms of self-sufficiency (lacking nothing and therefore not requiring anything else). Such an end state is of course only achieved by living a virtuous life after one has acquired the habits of the virtues. Understanding for Wittgenstein is also achieved by training. When we, therefore, ask why something ethical is done and the answer is given “Because it was my duty”, the words are not a result of introspecting or inner observation that obtains access to the medium of the mind or a region of the mind. The words are not the description of anything inner but are rather an explanation or justification entailing a challenge to my questioner to “understand” my action from the point of view of someone who has self sufficiently chosen to do what they thought they ought to do for the reasons that they thought they ought to do it. The question “Why?” that was asked above is not asking for a Humean causal explanation but rather a more formal justification. A mentally insufficient schizophrenic, in the midst of a schizophrenic attack who always felt that his actions happened to him, would of course not be able to understand the freedom involved in the ethical action. This is the reason why we and the law do not hold him responsible for his actions even if he kills someone. It is not that some inner thought is lacking but rather that the power of understanding and judgment is inoperative. Restraining him until the fit passes and talking to him when he regains his composure is about the only thing we can do in such circumstances, hoping this capacity for discourse will help to generate an understanding for “what happened to him” when he failed to take his medicine. His reason for what happened can only be causal, e.g, “because I did not take my medicine”. This is an answer to the question of why, which demands an explanation but this is not the same kind of question, as asking the above “why?” which assumes rational agency and not just a capacity for discourse restricted to describing what has happened to one. The interesting question to ask here is whether there is any form of agency presence when a patient is experiencing a full-blown schizophrenic fit in which, to use O Shaughnessy’s example, the patient believes they are a divinity addressing angels about the state of the world when he is actually talking to some cows in a field. Here we have to assume that his language is also “automatic” flowing “through” him, otherwise, he would still be a human being “capable of discourse”. He cannot possibly “mean” what he says. Would he later remember what he has said? Now whilst one can agree with most of what Wittgenstein said when he remonstrates against the “hypothetical mechanisms of the mind” there is a sense explored by O Shaughnessy in his work (Consciousness and the World, P 155) that we are nevertheless dealing with an interior dimension of consciousness. A Consciousness that precedes and enables the perceptual and cognitive responses. The way in which consciousness is involved in voluntary action is characterised by Wittgenstein in terms of the absence of surprise. The power of observation is a power of discovery, a power that is to some extent surprised by what it discovers. It does not “know” what it will discover in the way that, when I am reaching for a fruit in a bowl, I know what it is I am reaching for. I know both what it is I am doing, (reaching for fruit) and why (because I am hungry). Resolving or dissolving this unity into the “atoms of stimulus and response” is, of course, the program of behaviourism which has oscillated between denying the existence of consciousness to claiming its irrelevance in the process of describing and explaining action. Now if someone is demonstrating clearly that they are in a bad mood all day and an observer then says: “I noticed that he was out of humour.”, can this be only about the behaviour I have observed? Or is it also about him and his mood? Wittgenstein has the following to say:

“Is this a report about his behaviour or his state of mind? (“The sky looks threatening”: is this about the present or the future?) Both: not side by side, however but about the one via the other.”(Philosophical Investigations trans G E M Anscombe, Oxford, Blackwell, 1972)

Wittgenstein is merely making what he would call grammatical statements about mood terms here and it is not clear that there is any Aristotelian animus behind his comments but let us analyse this from the pint of view of hylomorphic theory. We are not here in the region of the being of substances and their properties but rather in the categorical territory of what Aristotle called “Having”(has a negative state of mind), “Acting”(behaving inconsistently and irritably) and “Being Affected”(being unaware of why his behavior is inconsistent, inconsiderate etc). Furthermore we are dealing with an “agent” who is an enduring subject over the different kinds of change we may be witnessing and perhaps several principles that will be revealed in the different kinds of explanations( aitiai, “causes”) which we appeal to in answer to the different kinds of “Why?” questions we can encounter in this realm of discourse. These principles will gives us the “substance”, the “What it is” that is being discussed here. Human beings as agents can be affected and possess states of mind which cause them to behave irrationally (in accordance with the pleasure-pain principle and energy regulation principle). The “judgment” “…he was out of humour” using the word “out” is also suggestive of the reality principle(Aristotle’s practical rationality) which indicates that humans ought not to behave inconsistently and inconsiderately).

Wittgenstein has clearly moved away from the world view of the Tractatus in which his opening remarks were : The world is all that is the case. The world is a totality of facts. Facts are now not language independent and Philosophical investigation has become a matter of attempting to provide piecemeal a perspicuous representation of the world which requires no powers of discovery but only powers of recollection(cf Socrates). Facts will be related to the natural history of man(his forms of life embedded in traditional practices and language use) which Wittgenstein claimed (in his “Foundations of Mathematics”(trans Anscombe (Oxford, Blackwell, 1967, p43e)) have always been “before our eyes” . There is no abandonment of logic in these “Investigations”:

133. The propositions of logic are “laws of thought”, “because they bring out the essence of human thinking”–to put it more correctly: because they bring out or shew, the essence, the technique, of thinking. They shew what thinking is and also shew kinds of thinking.”(Foundations P41e)

Wittgenstein believes these laws are demonstrable in everyday experience:

What corresponds to our laws of logic are very general facts of daily experience. They are the ones that make it possible for us to keep on demonstrating those laws in a very simple way(with ink on paper for example). They are to be compared with the facts that make measurement with a yardstick easy and useful. This suggests the use of precisely these laws of inference, and now it is we that are inexorable in applying these laws.” (Foundations P36e)

The above was by way of comment on the inexorability of the laws of logic and the laws of nature. Here we are at the level of complex practices and forms of life which sustain our language and complex activities such as mathematics. We agree in our judgments about the facts and this is not an empirical agreement but a “grammatical” or “logical” agreement, internal to our discourse about these matters. This is connected to our agreement in “forms of life”.This agreement is not a perceptual matter of “recognition” (perceptual recollection)but rather involves acts of understanding and reason that give rise to acts of judgment(cognitive recollection). The key “normative” commitment of the later work of Wittgenstein is of course connected to the idea of following a rule but these rules appear to be of very different kinds, e.g. grammatical rules, mathematical rules, rules of games. Whatever the type of rule, however, it is clear that they are related “logically” to the activities they regulate, whether that activity is, what can be said, what can be done in the name of calculation, or how one plays a game. Rules are not a family resemblance concept, they are rather a logical condition of our practices. Playing games and doing mathematics are not as important as keeping one’s promises or doing one’s duty in relation to one’s countrymen by fighting in a war but Wittgenstein did not register this difference in “logic”: the difference namely between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives that we can find in the Philosophy of Kant. This may be why we can only find an album of sketches (in his later work) of some of the territory of the philosophical landscape and not a world picture of the kind we can find in Aristotle or Kant. What we do find, however in “regions” of this album of sketches is reflection that is reminiscent of that we find in Aristotle and Kant and this fact sufficed for many philosophers of this “terrible 20th century”(Arendt) to return to our Aristotelian and Kantian roots. This is especially true of the region of Philosophising we call Philosophical Psychology.