METAPHYSICS Bad and Good Metaphysics The Tractatus is one of the most metaphysical works ever written: its likeness to Spinoza’s Ethics is no coincidence Yet it was taken as a bible by one of the most anti-metaphysical groups of philosophers, the Vienna Circle The logical positivists seized on the idea that necessary truths were necessary only because they were tautologies: this enabled them, they believed, to reconcile the necessity of mathematics with a thoroughgoing empiricism They then employed the verification principle as a weapon that enabled them to dismiss all metaphysical statements as meaningless Wittgenstein, throughout his life, shared the positivists’ view that the removal, the dissolution, of metaphysics was one of the tasks of the philosopher He described the task of the philosopher as ‘bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ He condemned the metaphysics that was a search for the hidden essence of language or of the world Yet he was himself a metaphysician in his own right—and not just at the time of the Tractatus, whose propositions he condemned as nonsensical, but throughout his later philosophy He recognized that there could be a legitimate attempt to understand essences, in which he was himself engaged In our investigations, he said, ‘we try to understand the essence of language, its function and construction’ What was wrong, on his view, was to consider the essence not as something that lies open to view and must merely be given a perspicuous description, but as something interior and hidden: a kind of metaphysical ectoplasm or hardware that explains the functioning of mind and language There were in particular three kinds of metaphysics against which Wittgenstein set his face: spiritualistic metaphysics, scientistic metaphysics, and foundationalist metaphysics When we consider human thought, the metaphysical impulse may lead us to postulate spiritual substances, or spiritual processes We are misled by grammar When grammar makes us expect a physical substance, but there is not one, we invent a metaphysical substance; where it makes us expect an empirical process, but we cannot find one, we postulate an incorporeal process This is the origin of Cartesian dualism; the Cartesian mind is a metaphysical substance and its operation upon the body is a metaphysical process Cartesianism is metaphysical in the sense of isolating statements about mental life from any possibility of conclusive verification or falsification in the public world 187