Ludwig Wittgenstein has been taken as being a solipsist. He’s been taken as not being a solipsist. And he’s been taken as simply hinting at solipsism too. (It’s primarily Wittgenstein’s prose style that’s responsible for the many and various interpretations of his every word.) In any case, Wittgenstein (in proposition 5.63 of the Tractatus) wrote: “I am my world.” Surely you couldn’t find a more solipsistic statement than that…
Interpreting Wittgenstein
One general position on Ludwig Wittgenstein is captured by a note offered by the American philosopher David Keyt about a specific remark from the Austrian philosopher. Keyt wrote:
“The most conservative conclusion that one can draw is that the parenthetical remark is genuinely ambiguous, in which case the proper translation could be settled only by a word from the master himself.”
Earlier in the same note, David Keyt involved himself in some difficult — and boring — mental gymnastics in his attempt to get Wittgenstein right. This involved arguing that both Elizabeth Anscombe and Erik Stenius got Wittgenstein wrong. [See my ‘The Wittgenstein Interpretation Industry’.] Keyt also needed to analyse Wittgenstein’s “original German”, carry out a technical analysis of Wittgenstein’s “objects”, and distinguish idealism from solipsism. All these problems of interpretation are largely caused by Wittgenstein’s gnomic prose.
Yet, in the end, Keyt himself stated that “the proper translation could be settled only by a word from the master himself”.
This isn’t only about a problem with any specific remark, but with much of Wittgenstein’s work. Of course, it can be argued that the remark Keyt referred to is problematic simply because there isn’t enough context to provide a satisfactory or conclusive interpretation of it. So this may not apply to other parts of Wittgenstein’s work… Yet it does apply to much of his work.
What Is Solipsism?
The Finnish philosopher Jaakko Hintikka (writing only 7 years after Wittgenstein’s death in 1951) put it in the following way:
“What is usually taken to be the claim of solipsism is the *impossibility* of getting ‘beyond the boundaries of myself’.”
Not getting beyond the boundary of the self (or subject) doesn’t necessarily mean that there’s nothing beyond it. For example, inside a secure prison, an imprisoned person cannot get beyond it, yet he still knows that there is a beyond. Of course, the comparison isn’t precise because this question can now be asked: What if this person had been in prison his entire life? (As in Plato’s allegory of the cave.) Indeed, even this possibility isn’t strong enough for what solipsists have had in mind.
In Wittgenstein’s case, his solipsism (if it is solipsism) is “not about the empirical subject but the ‘metaphysical’ subject discussed in philosophy”. What is the difference? According to Hintikka again, Wittgenstein is
“interested only in what can be said to be mine *necessarily*; for otherwise he would only be doing empirical psychology”.
This isn’t about particular subjects: it’s about the metaphysical subject. And even though it’s a metaphysical account, it still gives a vital role to language. Indeed, Wittgenstein believed that there is no subject without language.
One other reason why the subject is metaphysical is that, according to Wittgenstein, it’s an “extensionless point”. An extensionless point can hardly be the subject of empirical psychology. That said, the term has been used in psychology. For example, a person’s sense of self has been said to shrink to an “extensionless point” under certain extreme conditions (such as after taking an hallucinogenic drug).
These acknowledgements hardly tell us what an extensionless point is. In mathematics and geometry, of course, such a notion has been well discussed. What about metaphysics and the nature of the subject? How does the-subject-as-extensionless-point connect to a world of extension (i.e., of length, breadth, width and matter)?
Surely, this reality or possibility is even less likely when the subject is seen to be an extensionless point.
All this points to an obvious conclusion, which Wittgenstein himself stated: “The I is not an object.”
Hintikka: Wittgenstein Wasn’t a Solipsist
Wittgenstein has often been deemed to be a mystic of some kind. Yet one way of interpreting his work is to say that he argued that we can never get “beyond” language. Wittgenstein himself wrote:
“What we cannot think, that we cannot think; we cannot even say what we cannot think.”
Of course, this can be taken as stating the view that there actually is something beyond language. Yet, by definition, nothing can be said about it. To spoon-feed:
(1) What can we say about what we cannot think? (If we can’t think it, then we can’t say it.)
(2) What can we say about the possibility that we cannot think?
Having stated these positions (or interpretations), I’m still not sure that understand Wittgenstein here. (The clause “that we cannot think” is especially problematic.)
If we move on to Hintikka’s position again.
Hintikka captured what he took to be the prime mistake of other interpreters of Wittgenstein (echoing David Keyt earlier) by stating the following:
“How little Wittgenstein’s identification of one’s self with the logical limits of one’s language (which are nothing but the limitations of language in general) has to do with solipsism.”
This raises the question as to how traditional accounts of solipsism differed from Wittgenstein’s own position. One obvious point is that Wittgenstein’s position stressed the importance of language. Moreover, it stressed the logical limits of language (i.e., as such limits apply to the subject).
In any case, Hintikka was unhappy with the view that Wittgenstein was a solipsist. Indeed, he argued that
“5.62 was the only passage of the Tractatus which could have forced one to conclude that Wittgenstein held something like solipsism in the usual sense of the word”.
He continued:
“This is the basis of Wittgenstein’s ‘solipsism’. Having identified the metaphysical subject with the totality of one’s language and the limits of language with the limits of the world, he could say that the limits of the (metaphysical) subject are the limits of the world.”
Here it isn’t being argued that there’s only one subject. It isn’t even being argued that there’s only one subject — according to each subject. Instead, in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, the subject is identified “with the totality of one’s language”. (This has a very post-structuralist and postmodern ring to it in that the subject is identified with — rather than created by — the language the subject uses.)
From that identification, it’s an easy step to also arguing that the limits of language are “the limits of the world”. Perhaps, more correctly, it should be said that the limits of the subject’s language are the limits of the subject’s world.
So this isn’t really about the world: it’s about the subject’s world…
What is beyond the subject’s world?
After all, no subject can transcend his/her language, and therefore his/her world. This effectively means that this position really is about the limits of the world.
Hintikka himself certainly accepted this much of Wittgenstein’s position:
“The only boundaries I cannot possibly transcend are those of my language. Whatever we think can be expressed in language; there is no way of getting ‘beyond’ language.”
Wittgenstein often talked about “boundaries” in different respects. In this precise respect, language constrains and limits what we can think because we cannot think beyond language. Indeed, thought and language are (almost?) fused together in Wittgenstein’s scheme. (This had a profound effect on analytic philosophy. It’s a position that can be dated back to Gottlob Frege [see here].)
Finally, there may be something we can experience or feel beyond language, but that “can only be shown, not said”.
… But Wittgenstein Was a Solipsist!
Wittgenstein did state an extreme — or perhaps simply pure — solipsism in the following passage:
“[T]he limits of my world and of the world are one and the same; therefore the world is my world.”
This is surely an explicit statement of solipsism in that Wittgenstein claimed that there’s nothing else but his world. In other words, there’s nothing beyond the limits of my world.
Now we can move from the words “my world” to Wittgenstein’s “I am my world. (The microcosm.)”. Is there a difference between the world is my world and I am my world? Yes, the first locution is about possession, whereas the second states an identity.
Wittgenstein became more psychological when — in his Notebooks (1914–1916) — he said:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world!”
That statement verges on some kind of egotistic solipsism in the sense that solipsism needn’t always be egotistic.
In the passage above, Wittgenstein dismissed history because history wasn’t (literally) him. Yet it can also be interpreted as meaning that history can only be interpreted through the individual subject (in this case, Wittgenstein). Indeed, that’s even the case if the subject reads other subjects’ interpretations of history. In this case, the subject simply interprets the historical interpretations of other subjects.
Thus, there’s no history that’s independent of the subject. So, to paraphrase, the following can now be stated: My interpretation and knowledge of history is the first and only history.
Wittgenstein went on to say something very similar about what we see. In the Blue Book, Wittgenstein wrote: “Only what I see (or: see now) is really seen.”
Conclusion
The Israeli philosopher Eddy Zemach clarified what he took to be Wittgenstein’s solipsism by saying that “the I as a metaphysical subject is the entire world”. Thus, there’s nothing more real to the “thinking subject” than the thinking subject. The subject is more real than the world because the world only exists because the subject experiences it as being real. The reality of the world, then, is dependent on the reality of the subject.
Unlike traditional solipsists, Wittgenstein himself added the original idea that the logical limits of the subject’s language are also the logical limits of the world. Thus, from all of Wittgenstein’s Tractarian positions, it’s easy to conclude that the world has no reality without the subject.
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