This is the first instalment of a large study I have undertaken on the Austrian School's notion of "the pure logic of choice" which led to Lionel Robbins's definition of economics as "the science of choice". As we have seen from our studies on Carl Menger and Bohm-Bawerk, the Austrian School defines economic value as "Objective Value" as the resultant of conflicting Subjective Values that are then manifested in market prices. Despite their attempt to reject metaphysics, the central principles of Neoclassical Economics are pure metaphysics - and that is what we are seeking to demonstrate here by drawing the intellectual antecedents of what the Neoclassics believed was a new "positive science".
Cheers to all!
'When I use
a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I
choose it to mean — neither more nor less.'
'The question
is,' said Alice, 'whether you can make words mean so many
different things.'
'The question
is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master — that's all.'
Al hacer el paralelo
lingüístico del punto de partida de Wittgenstein y
de Heidegger acabo de
emplear intencionalmente el término “autoenajenación”.
Con este motivo puede
recordarse una tercera crítica a la
metafísica tradicional, en
boga al presente, que parte asimismo de una
sospecha fundamental: a la
“sospecha de falta de sentido” de Wittgenstein
y a la sospecha del “olvido
del ser” de Heidegger precedió la “sospecha de
ideología” de Karl Marx
dirigida contra la metafísica. Esta consideración
lateral puede servir para
delinear por completo el horizonte históricoespiritual,
dentro del que esferas de
la filosofía contemporánea presentan,
por más heterogéneas y
recíprocamente separadas que parezcan, un
punto de referencia común.
El punto de referencia
común en conexión con nuestro problema es la
puesta en cuestión de la
metafísica occidental como ciencia
teórica.
Así pues, en lo que sigue
yo deseo comparar entre sí a Heidegger y a
Wittgenstein desde el punto
de vista de que a través de ambos, cada uno
de diversa manera, la
metafísica occidental es puesta en cuestión y con
ello es desplazada por
nosotros fácticamente como un fenómeno histórico.
El punto de vista de
nuestra comparación puede determinarse con más
exactitud, si tenemos ante
los ojos la pregunta fundamental de Heidegger
sobre el sentido del ser y
la pregunta fundamental de Wittgenstein sobre
el sentido de proposiciones
filosóficas como maneras de la crítica de
sentido. (K-O Apel, Wittgenstein y
Heidegger, p.4)
The aim of Ernst Mach’s philosophy of
science was to e-liminate philosophy from scientific
inquiry – to push it, and especially meta-physics,
well and truly beyond the realm of
physics, beyond the ken of science. In his own words, philosophy ends where
science begins and it begins where science ends (see Introduction to Knowledge and Error [Erkenntnis und
Irrtum]). Science does not describe a world of “things” – literally, a
“reality” – outside our own perceptions or “sensations” (Empfindungen). Human sensations are what they are: they are and can
never be “erroneous”. What can be erroneous, instead, are the scientific
“hypotheses” that we develop so as to account for our various sensations. When
these hypotheses are changed because of new or different sensations or “evidence”,
it is not that we see “reality” any more “truthfully”; it is rather that we now
assemble and connect our sensations in a manner that is more systematic and
“economical” than before; in a manner that is more “consistent” with our plans
and intentions. The old idea of science as the search for Truth or for a
Reality that lies beyond or behind our sensations is entirely irrelevant. Plato,
Descartes and Kant all assumed that the task of the theoretician was to
penetrate the “nature” of Reality, to arrive at an inconfutable “Truth”. But
this attempt is simply “meta-physical” and therefore impossible, because all we
possess, all that we are aware of and can know are “sensations” - and science
is a way of connecting them through hypotheses that are constantly changing in
correspondence with our needs and activities.
Mach’s criticism of Newtonian essentialism – of the notions of
absolute Space and Time – does not contest the empirical findings of
Galileo-Newtonian physics, but it does redefine the entire nature and scope of
“science”. This Machian critique of essentialism and of philosophy tout court
is inconceivable, of course, without Schopenhauer’s critique of Kantian
metaphysics, even before one considers Berkeley’s idealism (as does Karl Popper
in Conjectures and Refutations; see
on this our contributions on Schopenhauer). Yet that is precisely why, contrary
to what Mach and the Vienna Circle intended, “the end or com-pletion or
ful-filment of metaphysics”, as diagnosed by Nietzsche, does not entail the beginning of theoretical science but its
real “crisis”. The very inability of philosophy to encompass the world without
reifying it, its inability to ascertain the congruence of “mind” and “thing” is
the reason why science will never be able to be “scientific”. Conversely, Mach’s
attempt to denigrate the ultimate Reality, the ultimate Values, that may lie
beyond science leaves science open to the criticism that it is indeed only a
disguised tool in the hands of the
scientists who pursue it and the business interests that finance its
“research”.
This, then, is the meaning of the Krisis that Husserl denounces in his
seminal essay at the turn of the last century: - a crisis that is not confined
solely, as Apel wrongly suggests above, to Western metaphysics as a theoretical
science, but to all theoretical
science as an enterprise that can capture reality itself from an objective,
“scientific” viewpoint – that is, from a rationally neutral standpoint free
from antagonistic human interests,
free from social conflict.
For this philosophical debility cannot be
interpreted solely from a purely philosophical standpoint, as the failure of
meta-physics. Indeed, as Husserl himself argued in the titles of two of his
last major essays, “the crisis of the European sciences”, including the natural
sciences, is really “the crisis of
European humanity” in the sense that the ideal role of science as the
“neutral” pursuit of Truth par excellence
could no longer be sustained given its growing subordination to the sphere of
capitalist business interests and, thereby, its avulsion from its original
“speculative” goal as theoria. Mach
himself in the Introduction to Irrtum und
Erkenntnis had felt impelled and took pains to distinguish the two roles,
stressing how business aims could not be reconciled with the “nobler” aim of “dispassionate”
scientific research, evincing thus the apprehension that science may not be
epistemologically “scientific” after all. (See also, of course, M. Weber’s
all-important lecture Wissenschaft als
Beruf diagnosing the definitive confluence of science and capitalist
enterprise under the guidance of the State apparatus or bureaucracy.)
Nor does this “crisis” concern merely the
so-called “social” sciences: it concerns all science because the relation of
the apparent “progress” of the natural sciences to human social progress, far
from being “natural”, is entirely dependent on the specific forms of human
social relations. In other words, the crisis is not merely a “social” one but
one that concerns also the very nature and import of “scientific truth”.
What
is obviously also completely forgotten is that natural
science
(like all science generally) is a title for spiritual accomplishments,
namely,
those of the natural scientists working
together; as such they belong, after all, like all
spiritual occur
The
Vienna Lecture / 273
rences,
to the region of what is to be explained by humanistic
disciplines.
Now is it not absurd and circular to want to explain
the
historical event "natural science" in a natural-scientific way,
to
explain it by bringing in natural science and its natural laws,
which,
as spiritual accomplishment, themselves belong to the
problem?
In equal measure, the “suspicion of
ideological intent” moved against metaphysics by Marx is really the suspicion
of the lack of democratic content not just of philosophy but of all theoretical
sciences under the rule of the bourgeoisie, chief among them that “political
economy” that is the object of his “critique”: the “transcendence” of
metaphysics amounts to a hypostatization and a reification of human life and
reality – of “the world” – that prevents the reconciliation of human interests
that only an immanentist view of
human historical reality and therefore of “the world” can allow. Regardless,
Husserl’s own attempts to ground his phenomenology as theoria encompassing the pre-reflexive lifeworld foundered on the
impossibility of separating the lifeworld from theoretical concepts (this is an
expression of Godel’s theorem and of Wittgenstein’s findings in the Tractatus):
While
the theoretically known world may depend on consciousness
for
its "constitution” the life-world seems to provide
the
given materials with which consciousness deals. If it is in
turn
to be dealt with in terms of transcendental constitution, as
Husserl
also insists, then it seems to lose precisely what was
described
as one of its essential features, its pre-givenness. But in
either
case the second difficulty arises, namely, that the attempt
to
describe the life-world, as Husserl admits, is itself a theoretical
activity,
indeed, theöria of the highest order, phenomenology.
But
if every theoretical activity presupposes the structures of the
life-world,
this must also be true of phenomenology, which in
this case cannot be without presuppositions. (Ross,
loc.cit., p. xli.)
WITTGENSTEIN
Behind Wittgenstein’s attempt to isolate a
logic that corresponds to an ineluctable reality independent of all metaphysics
lies this strenuous and desperate search for “scientific” neutrality, for objectivity: his ultimate desperate
failure is an admission of the inevitability
of metaphysics, of linguistic ambiguity and partiality, of the ineluctably conventional status of language and
logic – and therefore also of the human antagonism it conveys. Wittgenstein’s
lifelong “logico-philosophical investigations” drown in a sea of mysticism. (Cf.
G. Piana, Interpretazione del Tractatus.)
Equally, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein,
of human existence as contingency and possibility, as mere “freedom toward
death”, - his emphasis on authenticity as a prise
de conscience against the reifications of Technik and of “gossip”- his definition of language as “the house
of Being” – all this mirrors Wittgenstein’s mysticism in the sense that it is
impossible to identify an order of things independently of conflicting human
interests.
Wittgenstein represents the utmost attempt to
give a secure philosophical grounding to the Machian/Austrian Weltanschauung that seeks to relegate
metaphysics to the realm of the unknowable – but an attempt that he records as
a “desperate failure” from the very outset – and the reason for which he
scorned any attempt at affiliation with Rudolf Carnap’s Vienna Circle (see B.
McGuinness, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle). Indeed, Wittgenstein’s logical
investigations into the interface of language and reality only serve to
reaffirm the inevitability of metaphysics and therefore his philosophical investigations (in the
wake of Husserl’s Logical Investigations)
turn into an illustration of the necessity
of his failure – the failure of these investigations is their con-clusion, ful-filment,
their outcome, their suc-cess, their Erfolg (multiple meaning in German of “event”
and “success” or “outcome”).
But Wittgenstein acknowledges this failure only
philosophisch in the sense that he
reaffirms the necessity of the inter-connection of language with the world, the
inevitability of their symbiosis, only from the transcendental viewpoint, not
from an immanent one. His conclusion that language is as dependent on the world
as the world is dependent on language – his dire refusal to fall either into
Platonic rationalism or conventionalism or into Aristotelian realism or
empiricism – still fails to overcome the contemplative
stance of philosophy, its chorismos
or scission of Subject and Object as Gegen-stande,
as the op-posing positions of “mind” and “thing”, of “facts” and “concepts”:
We
have a colour system as we have a number system.
Do the
systems lie in our nature or in the nature of things? How are we to put
it? — Not in the nature of numbers or colours.
Then
is there something arbitrary about this system? Yes and no. It is akin both to
the arbitrary and to the non-arbitrary.
It is
immediately obvious that we aren't willing to acknowledge anything as a colour
intermediate between red and green.
. . .
but has nature nothing to say here? Indeed she has—but she makes herself
audible in a different way.
‘You'll
surely run up against existence and non-existence somewhere!’ But that means
against facts, not concepts.16 (from Pears)
Wittgenstein here neglects the symbiosis of fact and concept in the
immanent development of human perception or intuition (cf. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception). It is in
this regard that the Marxist critique of the bourgeois antinomies on the part
of Gyorgy Lukacs can be inserted in what Apel aptly calls the “self-alienation”
of philosophy from the world in the theories of both Wittgenstein and
Heidegger. By abandoning its enigma,
by reducing itself to a system of identities, by aiming for Truth, all science seeks
to com-plete its object and thereby to abolish itself: this completion (German,
Voll-endung) and therefore
“full-ending” of science has always been the self-alienating goal of Western thought, of metaphysics itself –
its Selbst-aufhebung - in the sense
that Western thought in its philosophical and scientific moments has always
sought to circum-scribe language and human experience by privileging contemplation over praxis, transcendence over immanence, separation (chorismos) over participation (methexis) (Cusanus in Cassirer),
domination and subjugation over discourse and democracy (cf. Colli, Nascita della Filosofia). (This tendency
of Western societies to circumscribe thought and language, to limit them to the
sphere of passivity, inaction and contemplation, is the target of the revival
of the distinction between “constituted power” and “constituent power” by
Hannah Arendt in On Revolution [for a
fuller discussion, v. A. Negri, Insurgencies].)
Husserl
follows Plato and Aristotle in attributing the
origin
of philosophy to Thaumazein simple wonder at things being
the
way they are. But while such wonder constitutes at most a recurring,
fleeting
pause in the natural course of life, the theoretical
attitude
reverses the priorities: the concern with "the way things
are"
which was intrusive and nonessential to natural life becomes
the
primary concern, while the non-theoretical life, which still
remains,
is subordinated to the theoretical life. "In other words,"
Husserl
says, "man becomes a non-participating spectator, surveyor
of
the world; he becomes a philosopher" (Appendix I, p.
285, below).
Yet
contained in this description of the emergence of the
theoretical
attitude, and developed at length in the Crisis, is a
theory
of its dependence upon the naive attitude that precedes it.
The
naive, pre-theoretical life is engaged in the world, the milieu
and
horizon of its activity. The world with which the philosopher,
the
scientist, attempts to deal is this very world-horizon in
which
the naive life runs its course. This is the life-world, which
is
always "already there," "pre-given," when theory begins its
work.
But the world's very pre-givenness, the structure through
which
it envelops conscious life and provides the ground (Boden)
on
which it moves, is always presupposed by any theoretical
activity.
The
pre-theoretical attitude of naive world-life, and the lifeworld
which
is its horizon, are thus found to be prior to all
theory, and not merely in the historical sense. (D.
Carr, Intro. to E. Husserl, Krisis,
p. xl.)
In keeping with Mach’s empirio-criticism, the
very first proposition of the Tractatus,
that the world is all that either is or is not the case, already “banishes” the
world itself from the compass of philosophical analysis intended as
meta-physics – because the world is not a proposition and it is not a “case” (Fall), a mere “possibility”. By
circumscribing the task of philosophy to that of identifying what may and what may not be the case, Wittgenstein already relinquishes the aim of
philosophy, indeed of language tout court,
to describe the world as a totality encompassing its individual “cases”: “the
world is the reach of my language”.
Nella
metafora dello spazio logico si annuncia gia’ nelle prime frasi del Tractatus
il tema della connessione tra logica e mondo. La logica non tratta del mondo, di cio’ che in esso accade, ma di
cio’ che puo’ accadere. I suoi “fatti” sono tutte le possibilita’. Percio’
possiamo dire che la forma logica e’ la forma della realta’; oppure che la logica e’ logica del
mondo (Piana p.47)
The “logic” of the Tractatus is purely formal in that it applies to “objects” that
cannot be further described on the purely “logical” assumption that for every
describable fact there must be an object that can no longer be described as a
fact. But this is a purely formal assumption that does not correspond to
reality because language can never be logical except to the extent that it is
governed by logical rules – and in turn logical rules can never be proved
ab-solutely, that is, independently of linguistic senses or meanings that are
il-logical. Language, like the lifeworld,
encompasses logic but it is not itself logical. Similarly, the world
encompasses language but is not itself linguistic.
E
come nel razionalismo il richiamo all’evidenza era niente altro che la
posizione dell’istanza di una sfera di verita’ fondate in se stesse, cosi’
anche qui’ [con Wittgenstein] arriviamo a concludere che “la logica deve
bastare a se stessa” [5.473]. Ma in questo contesto l’idea dell’autonomia della
logica non e’ altro che l’idea dell’autosufficienza [della logica], della conclusione e perfezione dek suo linguaggio (Piana, 83)
Wittgenstein proves that, just like metaphysics,
the aim of logic is to ful-fill, to com-plete, to per-fect, and therefore to
abolish itself. The Tractatus still
held out the promise of an internally-coherent “language” with demonstrable
truth value referring to sense data that could clarify thought processes prone
to philosophical delusions – on the ground that reality cannot be
contradictory, but language can be. But logic is the rigorous,
non-contradictory form of language. And language can never define the world
because its definitions are indefinite – they always engender fresh definitions
(cf. Godel’s Theorem) - and because the world is not Being but rather being-as-becoming, physis (cf. Heidegger’s fundamental essay on physis in Holzwege). This is the enigma of theoria – one that can be solved only by
human resolve, only through praxis.
Language can only be logical by being
“internally” coherent, on its own terms
(Godel), only by axiomatic definitions that cannot be proved “externally”; it
can describe the world only by inscribing it, by de-limiting it through
tautologies and their obverse, contradictions, set as its outer limits. A
tautology is the outer limit of logic – the point at which, according to the
principle of non-contradiction, logic has exhausted its possibilities and
language has become circuitous or meaningless. The principle of non-contradiction is founded on the conventional
application of tautologies to propositions. Logic can only certify the
internal consistency of the use of symbols within “closed” or circuitous language-games: it can tell us whether a
game is being played according to its
internal “rules”. But logic, and therefore language, can never assure us of the
intrinsic reality of the objects (intended in Wittgenstein’s
sense of the word) to which language-games apply. This Wittgensteinian
discovery – which, as we showed in the Nietzschebuch,
belongs to Nietzsche - applies to all language-games, including theoretical
science.
All language must then become a
language-game that can never encompass the world and yet is indissolubly bound
to the world when it exits its own logical content. Only by abandoning logic
can language hope to act upon the
world. Logic is a negative tool that can tell us what is impossible, what is
contradictory, but can never capture the possible entirely - because to do so
its language, its signs, would need to be identical with their content – be factual in the sense of objective – and in that case this identity of object and predicate would
annihilate itself as tautology.
(On conventionality and Poincare’,
‘S&H’, p66, see Cacciari, p72.)
Tragic were therefore both Wittgenstein’s
stance and the attempts by the WKreis to give the lifeworld a “logical”
foundation together with mathematics. W knew this and advised his readers to
read the Preface and the Conclusion. But the PI relinquish even this goal. The turnaround in the PI represent a further concession of
defeat in that they now confine the entire task of philosophy to the formal
exercise of describing “language games” without even the hope of internal
truth-hood coherence – the real reference of words to objects or perceptions -
that the Tractatus had held out.
The inexorable instrumentality of the
formal logico-mathematical “rules” ensures that the “theory” (which is the mere
“id-entity” of the relations between “entities” that make up the rules) has a
functionality that confuses “inexorability” with “predictability” and therefore
makes those rules effective. But not true, because “truth” would require the
ab-solute identity of the “rules”, of the language-game, with reality, the
ab-solute congruence of thought and thing, mentis
et rei – which is impossible, because no “rule” can be ab-solute, that is a legibus
solutus - independent of other rules or of the matters over which it rules.
(This is a version of Russell’s Paradox: logic depends on the rule or principle of non-contradiction;
if this rule is independent of all other rules, if it is ab-solute, then it is
not a rule because by definition a “rule” is dependent on the matters over which
it rules; and if it is dependent on the matters over which it rules, then it
cannot be an ab-solute rule. Thus, even the rule of non-contradiction is
relative to the particular set of logical rules or matters to which it applies.
Put differently, non-contradiction relies on difference, on the possibility of
non-identity or non-tautology:
La
proposizione negante deve avere qualcosa in comune con la proposizione negata,
eppure non deve avere nulla in comune (Piana, p.
42.)
Yet difference
can be tested only by reference to identity,
which is a paradox because identity is mere tautology that can tell us nothing
about the identical entities – which means that identity [like mathematical
equations] can tell us nothing about difference.)
Durante
le lezioni tenute a Cambridge negli anni 1930-33, Wittgenstein riprende questo
tema con una sorta di reductio ad absurdum della stessa nozione di regola
deduttiva.
Vi
sia una regola r in base alla quale posso concludere p da q. Potremmo dire che
p deriva da q e da r. Vi sara’ allora bisogno di una nuova regola che
giustifichi questa inferenza. Sic ad infinitum (p.88. Piana’s attempt to
explain away W’s reduction of deducibility is thoroughly unconvincing – because
it is specious to distinguish between the “rule” r that makes a proposition
deducible from another, and the “proposition” that it entails for the simple
fact that the rule and its implied proposition are not logically
distinguishable. If indeed a proposition has the logical “force” of
deducibility, then it is equally a “rule”. And it is clear that all “rules”
must be able to be “read” or interpreted, however “intuitively”, as
propositions – because there can be no distinction between logic and its
translation into language [ although, as we have said, language is broader than
logic]. Cf. Piana’s discussion of W’s meanings for “intuitive” from p.79.)
Se vi e’ una
regola che consente di concludere p da q, allora p deve essere gia’ una consequenza di q. In nessun
modo una regola inferenziale puo’ giustificare dall’esterno il sussistere di un rapport di consequenza logica tra
proposizioni. Percio’ la regola – e qui l’argomento erroneo di Wittgenstein
mostra il suo rovescio – non puo’ essere intesa come come una nuova premessa
che va ad aggiungersi alle premesse di una deduzione. Non vi e’ una
molteplicazione infinita delle regole ma, al contrario, vi potrebbe essere una loro totale eliminazione (p.90)
But, if Piana were right, then one could
argue, as he does, that there is a total elimination of rules of deducibility!
How, then, would we be able to determine that p is deducible from q?
Deducibility is not a fact: it is an argument, it is a proposition that tells
us about the necessity of the deduction. Even assuming that the rule of
deducibility is a command (Do this!) and not a proposition, it is still true
that a command is a proposition of the type “All propositions of the type q
necessarily must result in p”. Indeed, all tautologies contain such a “command”
which is really a “de-finition”. Deductions or inferences or tautologies do not
follow “intuitively” – this is the point! There is no intuitus originarius (pace
Leibniz and Kant) behind tautological deductions: they are just “rules of the
game”, axioms and definitions set up conventionally
before they are applied to propositions. (This realization or objection was
behind Heidegger’s critique of Kant’s notion of “imagination” and “intuition”
in “Kant’s Metaphysik”.)
If the correspondence of proposition and
reality were “unregulated”, then no “deduction” would be possible because there
could be no awareness of a tautological state: quite simply, the tautology
would not, could not, ec-sist. This, if nothing else, is the basis of Kant’s
distinction between synthetic and analytic a
priori! But Kant could not see just this point: that the “synthesis” is
purely tautological, just as the analysis – because of the “rule”!!! Even a
phrase such as “the bald man is bald” requires a rule of deducibility because
there is nothing in “the bald man” that requires this phrase to be
tautological, unless we state that “the bald man” on either side of “is” are
one and the same “object”! If all “rules” could be abolished, then there could
never be a tautology or a contradiction (which relies on tautologies – because
nothing is contradictory unless it is defined by a rule as the direct opposite
of a tautology) in the first place! Otherwise, if deductions were “possible”
without “rules” of deducibility, then deductions would be a matter of merely
empirical intuition, indeed of an intuitus
originarius! But what makes tautologies and deductions empirically possible
– what makes them “effectual” – is precisely the conventional “rule” of
deducibility. Here the materiality of
logico-mathematics comes prepotently to the fore!
Therefore, neither mathematics nor logic
and least of all scientific “laws” based on equations can reconcile human
interests – because their validity
and value only become apparent at the
precise point where logico-mathematics and science abolish themselves, at the
point where their conventionality, their arbitrariness becomes evident – at the
point of tautology. A logical tautology is more than “nothing” when it implies
a practical difference between the entities whose id-entity it wishes to fix
“logically”!
All that remains is the sheer
“functionality-instrumentality” of symbolic frameworks that can only be “games”
with inexorable rules (Foundations, 118). The ‘de-finition’ of a
“language-game” can achieve only “internally logical” (self-referential,
circuitous) consistency by the postulation of “arbitrary” premises or axioms
that exclude/abolish any “scientific or logical” validity. Indeed, Cacciari
reminds us, Wittgenstein objected (against Russell) to the very idea of a
“single” language game, one with “meta-linguistic”
or “essential” rules. Just as the “rules” of a language-game” subject its
‘universe’ and domain to an inexorable logic or “destiny” (recall Nietzsche’s
and Heidegger’s ‘Schicksal’), so are they ‘destined’ to “scientific failure”.
Just like sovereignty (Schmitt) and freedom
(Hobbes, Schopenhauer) and existence (Hegel, Heidegger) for the negatives Denken. Legality and
legitimacy cannot co-exist in the same entity: a sovereign reigns but does not rule.
To rule, a sovereign must receive its authority from a pre-existing rule, but
then the sovereign would be subject to that rule, which removes the auctoritas of the sovereign. That is
why, for Schmitt, “sovereign is he who
decides on the exception [to the rule]”. Nevertheless, the authority of the
sovereign relies on the acceptance of rules on the part of subjects, including
acceptance of any “exception” imposed by the sovereign. But the sovereign’s
ability to impose both the rules and the exception does not and cannot arise
from the rules themselves – because otherwise the sovereign could not impose
the exception to the rules. But if this authority is “extra-legal”, if it is
beyond the law, then it is illegal and illegitimate, or it can be “legal and
legitimate” only if the law prescribes who
is to decide but not what is decided, what
is “law”. Hence, legality and legitimacy
cannot co-exist (cf. Schmitt’s homonymous work).
As Carl Schmitt acutely perceived, it is
always “the outer boundary” of a science that reveals its real content – its
“effectuality”, its political force. Like sovereignty for Schmitt, it is the
exception to the law that defines the ruler; like the Hobbesian social
contract, it is the alienation of freedom that preserves its possibility: by
limiting the Ego, the State preserves but can never reconcile all individual
egoisms (Schopenhauer). It is the destructive tautology – the logical identity
that destroys the content of entities by erasing their difference - that shows
the outer limit of language. Only beyond tautology can language begin to describe
the world; but beyond tautology logic and language have no rational validity or
consistency: they have only a political sense.
Una
tautologia non e’ una proposizione vera
per ogni cosa, essa non dice qualcosa che vale per tutte le cose. Essa non
dice, in generale, nulla (Piana, 81-2, also pp.84-5 and p.88)
To reprise and correct Humpty Dumpty, then,
it is not “the master” who can fix the meaning of words (the rules) through his
power; instead, it is the power of
the master that determines what meaning words (rules) must acquire (including
the exception) if he is to remain master! The master cannot make words mean
what he chooses; rather, it is what makes him master that gives a particular meaning
to words: words reflect the power of the master, they are not the master’s
arbitrary imposition or expression; they are the expression of the “game” that
empowers the master. Hence, the master must play by the rules of the
language-game that reflects his real power if he is to retain that power.
Cio’ che
un segno puo’ esprimere e’, fino a un certo punto, deciso dal segno stesso: e’
impossibile prescrivere ad un segno “che cosa gli sia lecito esprimere” (Piana,
p.54)
Ad
esso e’ lecito esprimere cio’ che gli e’ possibile esprimere” (what it can[!]
express)
The language-game is a strait-jacket that
reproduces and seeks to perpetuate the power of the master; it is not an
arbitrary invention by the master. Max Weber’s notion of “responsibility” [Ver-antwortung or “answerability” or
“accountability”] takes heed of this necessary constraint on “power” – that it
cannot be “arbitrary” because, as Hannah Arendt points out in On Violence, arbitrary power lacks
authority or legitimacy, which is why its exercise is prone to violence. This
is the political significance of Wittgenstein’s insistence that logic and
language are not entirely “conventional”.