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c Springer 2005
DANIEL J. DWYER
Philosophy Department, Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH, USA
(e-mail: dwyerd@xavier.edu)
Abstract.
meaningful uses, and this will, as Bouwsma puts it, therapeutically “quicken
our sense of the queer.”20
Wittgenstein thus proposes diagnoses, multiple therapies, and finally a
cure: “The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing
philosophy when I want to. – The one that gives philosophy peace, so that
it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”21
The promise is to be “released” from the problems that “inexorably” keep
reappearing for a certain cast of philosophical reflection.22 But not enough
attention has been paid to the fact that it is a “slow cure” of reason’s ills: “In
philosophy we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural
course and slow cure is all important.”23 If it is neurosis and not complete
delusion that must be cured, then we might speak, as Jonathan Lear does,24
of a therapy that must let the dialectic of surface and depth play itself out
before we can too quickly speak of a complete healing, where our neurotic
“thoughts. . . are at peace.”25 There is a passage in which we can see the
slowness of a cure applied to a curious kind of “dialectic” of itching and
scratching:
But to focus on the slowness of the cure is not merely to draw attention to
the stubbornness of philosophers. The linguistic therapist must be sensitive
to some basis in truth from which the platonic neurosis may spring, for “one
can’t take too much care in treating philosophical mistakes. They contain so
much truth.”27 Wittgenstein practices here a certain reflection on unreflective
philosophical practices, a reflection that points to the ineradicability of appar-
ently compulsory temptations whose cure, no matter how slow, can never be
definitive.
There are good reasons to believe that Wittgenstein does not comprehen-
sively dissolve a kind of philosophical dialectic that both provokes and makes
ultimately unsatisfiable his well-known desire for a “perspicuous represen-
tation” (übersichtliche Darstellung) of linguistic phenomena.28 Wittgenstein
sees a perspicuous representation of the grammar of our language as an ar-
rangement of the reminders of familiar rules, a “complete survey of every-
thing that may produce unclarity.”29 Perspicuity is lacking if we do not have
a “bird’s eye view” or synoptic account of how grammar works, in other
words, if we do not know how to articulate “the way we look at things” and
280 DANIEL J. DWYER
linguistic connections as we would like to.30 The complete clarity which per-
spicuity would give us implies that philosophical problems should completely
disappear.31 As Glock as shown, Wittgenstein borrows the originally scientific
concept of perspicuity from Frege, Hertz, and Boltzmann, but he gives to it
the slightly different sense of being able to “shed light on a diverse multitude
of phenomena without discovering anything new . . . by analyzing what is
already known which clarifies certain links or interconnections between the
phenomena.”32
Although it is true that, for example, psychology and mathematics search for
perspicuity and that platonic philosophers search for an intellectual perspicuity
of a certain kind,33 Wittgenstein clearly distinguishes his goal from both that
of a scientistic reductionism and that of a “sideways-on” transcendent picture
of language use. One of the first uses of the notion is given in the Remarks on
the Foundation of Mathematics, where surveyability (Übersehbarkeit) con-
cerning the validity of a logical proof is shown to exclude all grounds for
doubt.34 But these examples are misleading if one understands by them that
perspicuity needs to be discovered or unearthed by a logical, scientific, or em-
pirical investigation, rather than retrieved or recollected through philosophical
therapy.35 Maintaining that perspicuity is to give the “form of account” we
want to give36 means something above and beyond simply the constant re-
hearsing of imaginary thought experiments and showing the limit of empirical
explanations of meaning. It is closer to a world-view than a scientific theory.37
Perspicuity has apparently only a negative aim: to “remove the influence of
disquieting aspects of grammar to allay philosophical puzzlement.”38 To re-
move disquieting problems is to adopt a kind of quietism that can only be
sustained by perspicuity:
But to allay puzzlement in this way does not mean to get rid of it altogether.
For one reason, there does not seem to be a limited number of ways of getting
confused.40 For another, fascination with philosophical problems is part of
the human condition.41 So perspicuity should at the very least help us see that
“to relieve the mental cramp it is not enough to get rid of it; you must also
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 281
see why you had it”;42 in other words, one needs to understand positively the
kind of attitude that provoked the cramp. Moreover, disclosure of perspicuity
plays the positive role of identifying the “scaffolding of facts” that uphold
our everyday concepts, facts which, if changed, would make our everyday
linguistic practices meaningless.43
One suspects, however, that this desirable goal is not ultimately realizable
because Wittgenstein does not thematize the kind of non-empirical reflection
necessary to disclose a perspicuous representation. The ideal of a compre-
hensive overview implies a kind of reflection that transcends in a way the
language of any particular language game, for it would arguably apply to any
language game whatsoever, including the often cited imaginative examples of
African tribes who ostensibly do not share our form of life, i.e., our form of
“mindedness.”44 To understand mindedness in general seems to be a goal for
which the later Wittgenstein yearned, yet he did not fully appreciate the kind
of transcendental goal implied therein. Furthermore, there is the question of
how we are to understand the whole of the therapeutic techniques themselves,
for this understanding is not the kind of understanding we seek when we dis-
solve our individual mental cramps. To say that perspicuity is simply a matter
of retrieving or reminding does not answer the thrust of the question. For it
is clear that after going through a certain kind of philosophical reflection in
the Investigations, we should be led to adopt a different attitude toward the
futile explanations of meaning, understanding, etc.45 Later in the paper, I will
argue that transcendental dialectic has as one of its “therapeutic” goals the
reflective understanding of the transition between attitudes that continue to
bewitch the intelligence. But Wittgenstein, unlike Kant and Husserl, seems
constrained to articulate such insights because there is no transcendent lan-
guage in which to communicate them – the most we can say is that he shows
them, but cannot articulate them without apparently violating his deflationary
and non-revisionary style of investigation.46
same time attracted to and repelled by the need for a “sideways-on” view of
the world. The final point is the promising suggestion of a way to capture
a kind of transcendental aspect to Wittgenstein’s drawing the line always at
“our form of life.”69 Lear proposes we interpret Wittgenstein’s quietism about
a full articulation of form of life by comparing it to Kant’s transcendental I.
Kant’s assertion of the necessary accompaniment of the “I think” with all our
representations has a Wittgensteinian parallel, namely, that “we are so minded
[in our form of life] must accompany all our representations.”70 Forgetfulness
of our “mindedness” is precisely what is non-empirically disclosed in
just about every imaginative scenario proposed by the later Wittgenstein,
and thus these scenarios must be carried out in a sort of non-empirical
reflection.
conceptual platonism as equal threats to the justified use of reason. For ex-
ample, it may appear that the distinction between Hume and Wittgenstein’s
methods, according to Kant, is the difference between “skepticism” and
“the skeptical method.” The skeptical method is described as “watching or
even occasioning a contest between assertions, not in order to decide it to
the advantage of one party or the other, but to investigate whether the ob-
ject of dispute is not perhaps a mere mirage at which each would snatch
in vain without being able to gain anything even if he met with no resis-
tance” (A 424/B 451). If our conclusion in the previous section is right, we
must show that Wittgenstein’s goal of perspicuity is unattainable until there
is recognition of a non-skeptical, non-empirical insight into the ceaseless nat-
ural temptations into which our understanding falls in its bewitchment by
language.
But what is gained by calling the inherently dialectical tendencies of reason
“natural”? Like Aristotle, Kant distinguishes between natural in the sense of
“that which properly and reasonably ought to happen” and “that which usually
happens” (A 4/B 8). It is this distinction that is key to the unity of this paper,
insofar as a transcendental diagnosis of dialectical tendencies of the mind
must identify both senses of the natural and show in what way transcendental
reflection discloses the slide between normative and descriptive tendencies
of the mind. That there is a convincing explanation of the descriptive use of
natural is the first step in disclosing why the normatively natural change of
attitude is to be adopted.73
For Kant, dialectic is an intrinsic component of reason’s progression toward
self-critique that safeguards against its own natural tendencies to dogmatism
and skepticism. Insofar as the metaphysical tendencies are generated, not by
the world or nature, but within reason, it is within its power to prevent these
inevitable tendencies from reappearing and seeming compulsory again. Rea-
son can render itself “content with its incapacity” to go beyond the boundaries
of possible experience and capable of resisting the ever recurring temptations
to project its subjective conditions of knowledge as objective features of the
world (A 613/B 641). But the calming insight into speculative reason’s own
limits is fragile insofar as this satisfaction seems ever threatened by a return
of the dialectic if critical vigilance is not maintained:
There is a natural and unavoidable dialectic of pure reason, not one in which
a bungler might be entangled through lack of acquaintance, or one that
some sophist has artfully invented in order to confuse rational people, but
one that irremediably (unhintertreiblich) attaches to human reason, so that
even after we have exposed the mirage (Blendwerk) it will not cease to lead
our reason on with false hopes, continually propelling it onto momentary
aberrations that always need to be removed.(A 298/B 354–55)
286 DANIEL J. DWYER
“slips” a phenomenon under the wrong category; in Kant’s general use of the
term, something subjective is mistaken for something objective. As early as
the Inaugural Dissertation, Kant extends the meaning of the term to signify
an error in metaphysics:
Since the tricks of the intellect in decking out sensitive concepts as intel-
lectual marks may be called a fallacy of subreption, . . . the interchange
of the intellectual and the sensitive will be the metaphysical fallacy of
subreption (the fallacy of intellectualizing the phenomena, if a barbarism
be permitted).76
cognitive power(s) from which these concepts are generated. It is also sharply
distinguished from empirical reflection, which is a kind of Humean mental
introspection of the contents of one’s mind.82 For Kant, “reason goes its way
in its empirical use, and a special way in a transcendental use” (A 563/B
591). Logical reflection must be supplemented by transcendental reflection
because we need to see the relation between our representations in general
and their sources in the faculties of our mind. Transcendental reflection is
that through which “I make the comparison of representations in general with
the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distin-
guish whether they are to be compared to one another as belonging to the
pure understanding or to pure intuition” (A 261/B 317; see also A 276–77/B
332–33). What makes transcendental reflection difficult but at the same time
indispensable for uncovering the illusions of the mind is the fact that it re-
quires an “altered way of our way of thinking.”83 Here we encounter again
the shift between the natural (in the sense of descriptive) and natural (in the
sense of normative) attitudes. To disclose the altered way of transcendental
thinking is to “prepare ourselves to find out the subjective conditions under
which we can arrive at concepts . . . [for] all judgements require a reflec-
tion, i.e., a distinction of the cognitive power to which the given concepts
belong” (A 260–61/B 316–17)84 . It is through a sustained transcendental re-
flection that we can ward off platonic tendencies (see A 854/B 882) and
arrive at an a priori insight into the relation between our cognitions and the
faculties responsible for those cognitions that is more than just an expla-
nation of things which, according to Wittgenstein, we “happen to find very
convincing.”
But does the dialectical conflict end once its primordial subreptive and
dialectical tendencies are disclosed? Kant seems to be open to several in-
terpretations here, and his thought does not seem to escape a fundamental
ambiguity: “Kant wants to hold both that the erroneous metaphysical conclu-
sions are somehow inescapable and that it is possible to avoid succumbing
to the ‘actual errors’ that are involved in accepting such conclusions.”85 On
the one hand, he claims that transcendental illusion “does not cease even
though it is uncovered “and its nullity is clearly seen into by transcendental
criticism” (A 297/B 353, emphasis added). The subjective investigation of
itself reveals that reason is its own source of unavoidable illusion and thus
constitutes a house divided against itself.86 Even the wisest of philosophers
“may guard himself from error, but he can never be wholly rid of the illusion,
which ceaselessly teases and mocks him” (A 339/B 397). Kant even speaks
of a transcendental ground which is the basis of false inferences and “has its
ground in the nature of human reason, and will bring with it an unavoidable,
although not insoluble, illusion” (A 341/B 399).
290 DANIEL J. DWYER
Transcendental Illusion (Schein) . . . does not cease even after it has been
detected and its invalidity clearly revealed by transcendental ciriticism. . . .
This is an illusion (Illusion) which can no more be prevented than we can
prevent the sea from appearing higher at the horizon than at the shore; . . .
or to cite a better example, than the astronomer can prevent the moon from
appearing larger at its rising, although he is not deceived (betrogen) by this
illusion. (A 297/B 354).
On the other hand, he argues that if we can keep the merely regulative use
of reason “in view and beyond doubt, the conflict of reason with itself will
also be entirely at an end” (A 516/B 544). In the preface to the first edition
of the Critique, an optimistic Kant declares “I flatter myself that in following
[this path] I have succeeded in removing all those errors that have so far put
reason into dissension with itself. . .. After discovering the point where reason
has misunderstood itself, I have resolved them to reason’s full satisfaction” (A
xii). “In this business I have made comprehensiveness my chief aim in view,
and I make bold to say that there cannot be a single metaphysical problem
that has not been solved here” (A xiii)87 .
It seems that the problem is the following: If the mind naturally makes
illicit ontological claims that transcend the legitimate use of cognitive judg-
ment, it will remain in dialectical conflict with itself, insofar as internally
generated antinomies are sustained by such a conflict.88 But reason is fated
by its “fallen” nature always to go beyond the limits of sensibility, “naturally”
avoiding transcendental reflection (A 564/B 592), and this insofar as a kind
of metaphysically erotic drive is constitutive of it.89 The critical philosopher,
moreover, realizes that the ideas of reason cannot be rejected out of hand and
dispensed with as mere projections of reason’s unrequited love. Reason can
achieve insight, not into the beings projected by its ideas, but rather into what
it lacks, namely, a comprehensive perspicuity of the ground of the empirical
world. It comes to feel its need for systematic completeness of experience
through what its drive for knowledge leaves unexplained.90 Critique requires,
then, transcendental reflection to maintain an eternal vigilance to safeguard
reason’s vocation to know itself, both in its a priori insight into the conditions
of possibility of thought and, by an altered way of thinking, its “seeing into”
the nullity of its own illusions.91 Transcendental reflection shows, finally, that
Wittgenstein lacks an articulation of why his desire for perspicuity cannot
be satisfied, for perspicuity transcendentally considered would imply non-
empirical insight not only into our mindedness in our form of life, but the
conditions of possibility of any mindedness whatsoever. Even if Wittgenstein
insists that this insight cannot be said but can be shown, we need a fuller ac-
count of the “altered way of thinking” and transcendentally changed attitude
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 291
Both Kant and Husserl can be said to lay claim to an “inevitability thesis”:
There is something natural and inevitable to the way in which reason or con-
sciousness gets the world wrong in thought, precisely by getting itself wrong
as the condition of possibility of knowledge.92 Whereas Kant and Wittgenstein
were combating a naı̈ve realism about objects in their concern to critique a
broadly conceived platonistic metaphysics, Husserl discloses a naı̈ve realism
about the nature of subjectivity in his concern to critique both metaphysics
and empiricism. Kant’s diagnosis of the mixing or blending (Vermengung) of
certain wandering and shifting faculties finds its phenomenological counter-
part in the critique of the blending of two existential standpoints or attitudes
(Einstellungen) one can take toward reason’s own capacities and its own
boundaries.93 To put it in Kant’s terms, what is necessary is the distinction of
reason’s empirical and transcendental uses and the disclosure of the “altered
way of thinking” that distinguishes empirical introspection from transcenden-
tal reflection. For Kant, the aim of the transcendental dialectic can seem to
be primarily negative, namely, to show that the hyperphysical employment of
concepts does not constitute knowledge or experience strictly speaking, even
though transcendental hypotheses must be adopted in order to make sense
of what does constitute knowledge in its systematic form (A 63–64/B 88).
But we have also emphasized both reason’s positive insight into its own di-
alectical nature as the necessary step to its long-deferred self-knowledge and
Kant’s confidence that reason’s lust for knowledge can be satisfied within cer-
tain bounds. In the Prolegomena, the transcendental viewpoint yields insight
into the boundary of pure experience, and the reference to what transcends
experience:
The early Husserl critiques the different varieties of this primordial episte-
mological unclarity as psychologism, anthropologism, and biologism. What
he discloses is the “extraordinarily strong inclination” in modern philosophy
and psychology to mis-take the totality of consciousness for either some-
thing it is not or something it is only in part. Husserl’s critique of naturalistic
psychology and empiricist philosophy of mind emphasizes a kind of illicit –
indeed a kind of reverse – subreption of reason in which the transcendental
capacities of consciousness are confused with the natural, causal properties
of transcendent objects:
as absolutely complete so that reason can take a rest (A 689/B 717). Just as
Wittgenstein’s imaginary interlocutors express the kinds of platonistic and
skeptical views to which they are tempted quite spontaneously in a kind of
context-free dialogue, so too Husserl’s sense of the “naturalness” with which
we at first study our minds and its achievements has more to it than merely
the fact that our historical era is unduly impressed by the ever increasing suc-
cess of empirical science. In sum, naturalism, insofar as it presupposes that
empirical answers suffice to answer transcendental questions about the condi-
tions of possibility of knowledge, provides a seemingly compulsory starting
and endpoint of thought to which our minds are always tempted to return.
Naturalism is thus the original sin of epistemology, insofar as transcendental
questions admit only of transcendental answers, “i.e. answers . . . without the
least empirical admixture” (A 640/B 668).110 For Kant, a full exploration of
the cosmological ideas should deter us from naturalism, which “asserts nature
to be sufficient for itself,” because we will be led to see “the obvious insuf-
ficiency of all possible cognition of nature to satisfy reason in its legitimate
enquiry.”111 For Kant, the concepts of the understanding are not derived from
natural experience in Humean fashion precisely because our natural experi-
ence is derived from them.112 So too, for Husserl, consciousness must not be
seen as just another part of the world like any other, because it is precisely the
reason why there is a world there for us in the first place.113
The very strength of the natural inclination to metabasis concerning con-
sciousness motivates the recourse to the phenomenological reduction or the
putting out of play of our belief in the transcendent aspects of the natural
world in which we unreflectively live. First we problematize and withhold
our assent from straightforward object-directed beliefs stemming from what
Husserl innocently calls the natural attitude (in the descriptive sense of natu-
ral). The attitude is natural insofar as it is the point of view from which we are
at first directed toward transcendent objects in the world in a way that is obliv-
ious to the ways in which these objects are given to and for consciousness. It
encapsulates how we normally accept the world as it presents itself to us,114
and this normality does not manifest countersense, which arises only when
one tries to explain away or reduce everything to the natural attitude.115 The
natural attitude is characterized by a mental directedness towards the pregiven
world “within a universal unthematic horizon” where notions of pregivenness
and horizonality do not yet have any sense.116 We are unreflectively aware of
the transcendence of the objects in the world without a having a correlative
understanding of the immanent ways in which the sense of transcendence in
general is grounded and synthesized in consciousness itself. The natural atti-
tude needs to be put out of play because it is saturated with naı̈ve, pre-critical
tendencies to believe that there are indeed objects of perception, memory,
296 DANIEL J. DWYER
Even those who have gotten clear on the problem find it very difficult to
hang onto this clarity and, in subsequent thought, easily slip back into the
temptations of the natural modes of thinking and judging as well as those
false and misleading formulations of the problem which grow on their
basis.122
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 297
5. Conclusion
Wittgenstein, Kant, and Husserl all uncover reason’s natural and inevitable
temptations to think and make claims in unjustifiable ways. The revelations of
these temptations disclose them to be operative dialectically in tandem with
opposed views of apparently equal and opposite force. The ultimate antidote
to the ceaseless play of natural misunderstandings, to reason’s natural wander-
ings, shiftings, and vacillations (A 615/B 643) may seem to be the dissolution
of reason’s natural neuroses and to provide it the “peace” or the “calm insight”
(A 797/B 825; A 615/B 643) it yearns for. But I have argued that philosophy
must not simply learn to know when to stop: it must first thematize its own
non-empirical ability to work through the dialectical temptations in order to
achieve a reflective overview of reason’s tendencies. It is only by transcenden-
tal reflection on the conditions of possibility of knowledge that one can achieve
Wittgenstein’s goal of complete surveyability or perspicuity of “our minded-
ness” in a form of life.130 Kant and Husserl in equally Socratic fashion show
that dialectic is not to be avoided at all costs; “reason very much needs such a
conflict” (A 747/B 775). Recourse to transcendental reflection is motivated by
the awareness of the inevitable frustration of all empirical or naturalistic claims
to yield a comprehensive overview of philosophical problems. It is also mo-
tivated by the understanding that the problem of reason in its naturally fallen
state is that it tends to overstate or understate its own cognitive competence.
Only by striving to know what is untenable, even though somehow natural, in
reason’s own inclinations can Kant and Husserl show the way to a consistent
adoption of a transcendentally “altered way of thinking” or “changed atti-
tude,” that will not only hold the dialectic of reason in check put also yield the
non-empirical insight necessary to reveal the perspicuity Wittgenstein denied
himself. Transcendental epistemology reveals such a goal of perspicuity
to be, contrary to Wittgenstein’s therapeutic intentions, yet another way in
which reason’s natural instinct for systematic completeness discloses itself
as both inevitable and not fully dissolvable by recourse to merely empirical
investigations.131
Acknowledgements
Notes
1. Many of the representative proponents of this view are the contributors in The New
Wittgenstein, ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read (NY: Routledge, 2000). Crary’s intro-
duction (1–18) shows what is common to the method employed by these contribu-
tors, namely, explaining linguistic therapy as a diagnosis and cure of conceptual pla-
tonism about meaning and the world, both in the late and the early Wittgenstein. An
excellent reading of this sort is James Conant, “A Prolegomenon to the Reading of
Later Wittgenstein,” in The Legacy of Wittgenstein: Pragmatism or Deconstruction,
ed. Ludwig Nagel and Chantal Mouffe (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2001), 93–
130.
2. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932–35, ed. Alice Ambrose (Totowa, NJ: Rowman
and Littlefield, 1979), 98–99 and 108.
3. Philosophical Investigations (henceforth PI), rev. trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, third ed.
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), §593; cf. Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G.H. von
Wright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 44.
4. Blue and Brown Books, second ed. (NY: Harper and Row, 1960), 59.
5. Philosophical Grammar, ed. Rush Rhees, trans. Anthony Kenny (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1974), 130.
6. PI §115.
7. PI §110.
8. PI §§ 89 and 127.
9. PI §133.
10. PI §428. See also Philosophical Grammar, 462: “Human beings are entangled – all
unknowing – in the net of language.” One wonders whether a merely therapeutic view
of language games could yield the knowledge of the existence, not of the world as such,
but of an all-encompassing linguistic net.
11. PI §158.
12. Blue and Brown Books, 27.
13. Ibid., 5.
14. Ibid., 70.
15. Culture and Value, 15.
16. PI §§100, 109, 110, 132 and On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright,
trans. Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (NY: Harper and Row, 1969), §§31 and 435.
17. PI §89, emphasis added.
18. PI §38.
19. Zettel, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), §452; see also Philosophical Occa-
sions 1912–1951, ed. James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993),
183.
20. O.K. Bouwsma, “The Blue Book,” in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and His Philosophy,
ed. K.T. Fann (NY: Dell, 1967), 158ff.
21. PI §133. Compare Philosophical Occasions, 195.
22. Zettel, §299.
23. Ibid., §382.
24. Jonathan Lear, “The Disappearing We,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, sup-
plementary volume 58 (1984): 240–241. Interestingly, Wittgenstein compares logical
analysis to psychoanalysis in the section “Philosophy” from the “Big Typescript.”
300 DANIEL J. DWYER
25. Culture and Value, 43. That talk of a seemingly compulsory philosophical “delusion”
seems to end after a certain stage in Wittgenstein’s thinking makes Lear’s “neurosis”
interpretation more convincing.
26. Ibid., 86–87.
27. Zettel, §460.
28. PI §122.
29. P.M.S. Hacker, Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996), 108. See also Hacker and G.P. Baker, Wittgenstein: Understanding
and Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 531–545 for an analysis of
the continuity and discontinuity of the Tractatus view of “a correct logical view” in the
Tractatus (4.1213) and the later notion of Übersichtlichkeit.
30. See Philosophical Occasions, 133, 175, and 177. “Bird’s-eye view” is the perhaps not-so-
infelicitous translation of Übersichtlichkeit in Philosophical Remarks, ed. Rush Rhees,
trans. Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) in the sense that
it captures a kind of non-empirical reflection on the limits of empirical explanations.
31. PI §133.
32. Hans-Johann Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 278–289.
For an even more detailed account of what perspicuity entails, see James Conant, “A
Prolegomenon to the Reading of Later Wittgenstein,” 127. It is interesting to note a
certain similarity between the ideal of perspicuity and the debunked notion of “the a
priori order of the world,” which is an order that “must run through all experience.” (PI
§97).
33. Zettel, §464.
34. Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, ed. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M.
Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1967), 83–84.
35. I am indebted to Andrew Peach on this point.
36. PI §§122 and 158.
37. See PI §122: “The concept of a perspicuous representation is of fundamental significance
for us. It earmarks for us the form of account (Darstellungsform) we give, the way we
look at things. (Is this a Weltanschauung?).”
38. Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, 281.
39. Friedrich Waismann, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, ed. Brian McGuinness,
trans. Joachim Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979), 183.
40. PI §133.
41. “Big Typescript,” 422–424, as cited in Glock, A Wittgenstein Dictionary, 282.
42. Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge, 1932–35, 90, emphasis added. On the liberating
effect of relieving a mental cramp, see Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 43.
43. Zettel §350. See also PI II, xii, 195.
44. Lear describes this as the goal of capturing what constitutes our “mindedness” or our
agreement in judgments within our form of life. See Lear, “The Disappearing We,” and PI
§§241–242. He goes so far as to compare Kant’s assertion of the necessary accompaniment
of the “I think” with all our representations with a Wittgensteinian parallel, namely, the
“we are so minded must accompany all our representations.” (229)
45. See Lear, “Transcendental Anthropology,” in Subject, Thought, and Context, ed. Philip
Pettit and John McDowell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), 282.
46. See Lear’s “Leaving the World Alone,” Journal of Philosophy 79 (1982): 383. Straw-
son shows what perspicuity looks like without falling into the traps of Wittgenstein’s
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 301
interlocutors. His descriptive (as opposed to revisionary, or, as Wittgenstein would put
it, explanatory) metaphysics is “content to describe the actual structure of our thought”;
Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1963), xiii.
Lear’s notion of an account of our mindedness is echoed in the following line: Descriptive
metaphysics describes “some general and structural features of the conceptual scheme in
terms of which we think about particular things.” (2) It is no coincidence that Strawson
carries out the project in a Kantian spirit (xiii, 53).
47. PI §97.
48. PI §192.
49. Philosophical Occasions, 187.
50. Culture and Value, 15. See also Zettel §260.
51. Lear, “Transcendental Anthropology,” 288 and John McDowell’s Mind and World
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 35.
52. Mind and World, 11. Finkelstein defines a platonist about meaning as “someone who, in
an effort to explain how mere noises and marks can have semantic significance, is driven
to posit self-standing sources of significance – items which stand to the significance of our
dead marks and noises as the sun stands to the light of the moon.” See his “Wittgenstein
on Rules and Platonism,” in The New Wittgenstein, 53–54. Crispin Wright puts it in the
following way: “Platonism is, precisely, the view that the correctness of a rule-informed
judgment is a matter quite independent of any opinion of ours, whether the states of affairs
which confer correctness are thought of as man-made – constituted by over-and-done-
with episodes of explanation and linguistic behaviour – or truly platonic and constituted
in heaven.” “Wittgenstein’s rule-following Considerations and the Central Project of
Theoretical Linguistics,” in Reflections on Chomsky, ed. A. George (Oxford: Blackwell,
1989), 257.
53. On rules as rails, see Zettel §375, Philosophical Occasions, 429, McDowell’s Mind and
World, 92n., and David Pears, The False Prison: A Study in the Development of Wittgen-
stein’s Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 10. McDowell claims
the platonist chafes and recoils from the vertigo of not having such rails in his “Non-
cognitivism and Rule-following,” in The New Wittgenstein, 43: “The idea that consider-
ation of the relation of thought and reality requires the notion of an external standpoint
is characteristic of a philosophical realism. . .. This realism chafes at the fallibility and
inconclusiveness of all our ways of finding out how things are, and purports to confer a
sense on ‘But is it really so?’ in which the question does not call for a maximally careful
assessment by our lights, but is asked from a perspective transcending the limitations of
our cognitive powers.” (46)
54. “We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others,
to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will
take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules),
just as nothing insures that we will make, understand, the same projections. . .. Human
speech and activity, sanity and community, rest upon nothing more, but nothing less,
than this. It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (because it is)
terrifying.” Stanly Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (NY: Scribner’s, 1969), 52.
55. On dialectic, see Alice Crary’s Introduction in The New Wittgenstein, 7–9, and Finkelstein,
“Wittgenstein on Rules and Platonism.”
56. Mind and World, 19, 77, 91, and 110. “Rampant platonism” is opposed to his innocent
form of naturalized platonism, which is based on the recognition that we need to allow for
the satisfaction of our desire for clarity about meaning that is not wholly subjective (91).
302 DANIEL J. DWYER
Given our argument above that Wittgenstein strives in a similar way to satisfy our desire
for perspicuity, it is no surprise, then, that McDowell conceives of the naturalized platonist
as simply concerned with Wittgensteinian “reminders” (PI §127).
57. Mind and World, 176–77.
58. On the importance of hinge propositions, see John Cook, “The Metaphysics of
Wittgenstein’s On Certainty,” Philosophical Investigations 8 (1985): 81–119 and his
Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
59. Mind and World, 159. McDowell even admits that “the idea of a transcendental consti-
tution of consciousness sounds harder to rehabilitate, but perhaps even that would not be
impossible.” (155n.)
60. Ibid., 177.
61. See his “Having the World in View: Sellars, Kant, and Intentionality,” in Journal of
Philosophy 95 (1998): 431–491 and “Experiencing the World” in Reason and Nature,
ed. Marcus Willaschek (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2000), 3–18.
62. P.M.S. Hacker is perhaps the most insistent commentator on the fullness and complete-
ness of therapeutic cure and the resulting satisfaction of our reflective desires; see his
Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy, 107–117.
63. PI §255.
64. “If the formation of concepts can be explained by facts of nature, should we not be
interested, not in grammar, but rather in that in nature which is the basis of grammar?
– Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general
facts of nature. . .. If anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones,
and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then
let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used
to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible.”
(PI, 195) Also relevant here are Strawson’s Kantian-inspired descriptive metaphysics and
the notion of scaffolding of facts at Zettel §350.
65. Lear, “Transcendental Anthropology,” 277.
66. Ibid., 273 and 280.
67. Kenneth Westphal, “Epistemic Reflection and Cognitive Reference in Kant’s Transcen-
dental Response to Scepticism,” Kant-Studien 94 (2003): 151. Recall the Tractatus,
5.5563: “All propositions of our colloquial language are actually, just as they are, logically
completely in order.” Were this not so, then language could not be capable of representing
reality at all.
68. Philosophical Grammar, 190.
69. PI §§241–242.
70. Lear, “The Disappearing We,” 229.
71. Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), A 271/B 327. All parenthetical references in the text
will be to this translation and the page numbers will refer to the Akademie edition.
72. “A wholly natural antithetic . . . into which reason falls of itself and even unavoidably;
and thus it guards reason against the slumber of an imagined conviction, such as a merely
one-sided illusion produces, but at the same time leads reason into the temptation either
to surrender itself to a skeptical hopelessness or else to assume an attitude of dogmatic
stubbornness. . .. Either alternative is the death of a healthy philosophy, though the form
might also be called the euthanasia of pure reason.” (A 407/ B 434) The dialectical role of
Hume, the “naturalist of pure reason,” is to play “the taskmaster of the dogmatic sophist
for a healthy critique of the understanding and of reason itself.” (A 855/B 883).
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 303
73. Good examples of Kant’s use of the descriptive sense of natural are to be found in the
following preliminary passages of the Critique: “Human reason . . . inexorably pushes
on, driven by its own need to such questions that cannot be answered by any experiential
use of reason.” (B 21) “How is metaphysics as a natural predisposition possible? i.e., how
do the questions that pure reason raises, and which it is driven by its own need to answer
as well as it can, arise from the nature of universal human reason?” (B 22) “[Critique
deals] merely with itself, with problems that spring entirely from its own womb, and that
are not set before it by the nature of things that are distinct from it but through its own
nature.” (B 23)
74. See also Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, second edition, trans. James W.
Ellington (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2001), Ak 328.
75. A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge, second rev. edition by P.H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 167–168.
76. Inaugural Dissertation, in Kant’s Latin Writings, trans. Lewis White Beck (New York:
Peter Lang, 1992), 148–49.
77. Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 215, Ak. V:
342.
78. Béatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. Charles T. Wolfe
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 7–8.
79. See Michelle Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 91: “Kant’s point seems to be that because of the failure to
recognize the kind-distinction between sensible and intellectual distinctions, the tran-
scendental use of the understanding inadvertently (and perhaps unavoidably) falls victim
to applying sensible (spatiotemporal) predicates as if they were universal conditions of
objects in general. This account of the transcendental employment of concepts is thus
the critical analogue to the theory of subreption in the Dissertation.”
80. See Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, ch. 4, Karl Ameriks, “The Critique
of Metaphysics: Kant and Traditional Ontology”, in The Cambridge Companion to Kant,
ed. Paul Guyer, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 249–279, and Susan
Nieman, The Unity of Reason (NY Oxford University Press, 1992).
81. “In all judgments illusion rests on the confusion of the subjective and the objective,
especially in the case of the principles of reason, where subjective grounds can also be
[mistaken for] objective grounds”; Reflexion 5058, cited in Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of
Transcendental Illusion, 278.
82. Westphal, “Epistemic Reflection and Cognitive Reference,” 141.
83. “The attempt to think [objects as they are thought merely through reason] will provide a
splendid touchstone of what we assume as the altered way of our way of thinking, namely
that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.” (B
xviii). On transcendental reflection, see also A xvi–xvii, A 51/B 75–76, A 261/B 317,
and A 260/B 316.
84. The secondary literature on transcendental reflection is rather sparse. See Longuenesse,
Kant’s Capacity to Judge, 113 and 126–127 and Westphal’s “Epistemic Reflection and
Cognitive Reference,” 138 and 141.
85. “Either, it would seem, the metaphysical conclusions are ‘inevitable,’ in which case the
accompanying errors are unavoidable, or it is possible to correct, or avoid altogether, such
errors”; Grier, Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion, 5. Grier works out a helpful
distinction between the illusions that give rise to the fallacies of the Transcendental Di-
alectic and the actual fallacies themselves, and takes the former to be unavoidable and the
304 DANIEL J. DWYER
latter to be avoidable (9–10). She argues furthermore that one must take seriously Kant’s
claim that illusion is necessary in a way that both leads us to metaphysical wandering
and in some way makes knowledge possible (5).
86. Prolegomena, Ak 329, 339.
87. Kant’s boldness on this count does not end in the prefaces. On the last page of the Critique
he claims that his goal before the end of the 18th century is “to bring human reason to
full satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its lust for
knowledge.” (A 855/B 883)
88. On the juridical metaphor that governs this idea of conflicting parties within reason itself,
see Dieter Henrich, “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background
of the First Critique,” in Kant’s Transcendental Deductions, ed. Eckart Förster (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1989), 38–39, and Ian Proops, “Kant’s Legal Metaphor and
the Nature of a Deduction,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 209–229.
89. On the metaphysical eros of Kantian reason, see Richard Velkley, Freedom and the End
of Reason (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1989).
90. “What Does it Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?”, in Religion within the Boundaries of
Mere Reason, ed. and trans. Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press, 1998), Ak 140n.
91. Prolegomena, Ak 328.
92. Kant even claims that dialectical inferences in the paralogisms have a “transcendental
ground in the nature of human reason [that will] bring with it an unavoidable, although
not insoluble, illusion.” (A 341/B 399)
93. It should be noted that sensibility, understanding, and reason are not understood by the
pre-transcendental Husserl as separate human faculties but rather as different aspects of
the subject’s constitutive achievement of knowledge. For Husserl, reason is not a faculty
above and beyond understanding and sensibility but rather a title for the rational way in
which understanding arises out of sensibility in a way that is normally – and normatively –
continuous. The genesis of rational activity arises in such a way as to preserve the proto-
rational structures of sensibility but in a higher form, that of conceptually articulated
experience. See Prolegomena to Pure Logic, in Logical Investigations, ed. Dermot Moran,
trans. John Findlay (NY: Routledge), vol. 1, 216–217.
94. Prolegomena, Ak 361–362. From a phenomenological point of view, the awareness of
the boundary of consciousness is evidence for the givenness – within consciousness it-
self – of that boundary, understood as the givenness of the intentional reference to that
which transcends the field of consciousness. Idea, 35. Indeed the phenomenon qua phe-
nomenon has the intrinsic quality of a relating-itself-to-something-transcendent. So a
kind of erotic directedness to the world as the horizon of all objectivity is characteristic
of all kinds of intentionality, not just the intentions of the absolute ideals of Kantian
reason. What is disclosed in the phenomenological attitude is the very meaning of tran-
scendence as given within the realm of the immanence of pure consciousness. Any other
notion of the meaning of transcendence, as if it were conceivable entirely apart from
the conscious intending of natural, objective, extramental reality, runs into the problem
of the metabasis – which then occasions the dialectic of naturalism, and ultimately the
dialectic of realism and idealism. For the latter are theories which share the assump-
tion that immanence is something internal to the mind and transcendence is something
external to the mind. Husserl gets beyond this inside-outside dichotomy by uncovering
from within the different ways in which the internal and the external are given to the
subject.
THE DIALECTICAL TEMPTATIONS OF REASON 305
95. Einleitung in die Logik und Erkenntnistheorie, Husserliana XXIV, ed. Ullrich Melle
(Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1984), 197, hereafter Einleitung.
96. Velkley, Freedom and the End of Reason, 15.
97. Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Prussian Akademie (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1902), Ak
18, R4936.
98. In this regard Heidegger’s anecdote is revealing: “Göttingen 1913: For a whole semester
Husserl’s students argued about how a mailbox looks. Using this kind of treatment,
one then moves on to talk about religious experiences as well. If that is philosophy,
then I, too, am all for dialectic”; Ontology, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1999), 86. Also telling is Husserl’s all too brief and superficial
discussion of “romantic” Hegelianism as generating both the naturalism and historicism
of the nineteenth century; see “Philosophy as a Rigorous Science,” in Phenomenology
and the Crisis of Philosophy, trans. Quentin Lauer (NY: Harper, 1965), 76–77.
99. See Dilthey’s “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie,” in
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 5 (Stuttgart: B.G. Teubner, 1964), 156 and 159.
100. Logical Investigations, vol. 1, 55. The spirit of the methodological point here is captured
nicely by Aristotle: “It belongs to an educated person to seek such certitude as the nature
of that thing allows.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b24)
101. The Idea of Phenomenology, trans. Lee Hardy (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999), 62, hereafter
Idea.
102. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 79.
103. Ibid., 107
104. “What is taken for granted in natural thinking is the possibility of cognition. Constantly
busy producing results, advancing from discovery to discovery in newer and newer
branches of science, natural thinking finds no occasion to raise the question of the
possibility of cognition as such. . .. Cognition is a fact in nature. It is the experience of
a cognizing organic being. It is a psychological fact”; Idea, 15.
105. Idea, 63.
106. Phenomenology and the Crisis of Philosophy, 109.
107. Ibid., 120.
108. On the “species relativism” of psychologism, see Prolegomena to Pure Logic, section
36, in Logical Investigations, vol. I.
109. “If we combine with this the extraordinarily strong tendency to judge in a transcendent
sense whenever a transcendently directed act of thought occurs and a judgment is to be
based upon such an act, thus falling into a metabasis eis allo genos, then we can give
a sufficient and complete deduction of the following epistemological principle: in every
epistemological investigation, into whatever type of knowledge, the epistemological
reduction must be performed, that is, all transcendence that comes into play here must
be excluded, must be supplied with the index of indifference, of epistemological nullity,
with an index that says: the existence of all transcendent entities, whether I believe in
them or not, does not concern me here; this is not the place to pass judgment on the
issue, to do so is entirely beside the point”; Idea, 30.
110. Husserl dramatizes what is at stake in missing the genuine sense of epistemology
by using religious imagery of the temptation and subsequent fall of modern reason:
“The specifically epistemological sin, the sin against the holy spirit of philosophy,
and unfortunately also the original sin, in which the human being who has awoken
from the condition of epistemological innocence necessarily falls, is the confusion of
consciousness and soul, of epistemology and psychology”; Einleitung, 176.
306 DANIEL J. DWYER
129. Iso Kern argues that the main difference between the reduction as presented in the
1907 Idea of Phenomenology and the reduction as presented in the 1920s is that only
in the latter is there “a self-reflection (Besinnung) on the possibility and essence of this
operation.” Thus, the possibility and indeed the necessity of a phenomenology of the
phenomenological reduction arises only later for Husserl; see his Husserl und Kant:
Untersuchung über Husserls Verhältnis zu Kant und zum Neukantianismus (The Hague:
Nijhoff, 1964), 93. See also the recently published Zur phänomenologischen Reduktion:
Texte aus dem Nachlass, Husserliana XXXIV, ed. Sebastian Luft (Dordrecht: Kluwer,
2002), especially Part One.
130. Wittgenstein says in the Preface to the PI that the investigations contained therein are
only an album and that, “after several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together
into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed.” (ix)
131. An earlier draft of this paper was presented at Xavier University in spring 2004 and the
Husserl Circle in June 2004.