Richard McDonough

No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking; so that it would be impossible to read off thought processes from brain processes. I mean this: if I talk or write, there is, I assume, a system of impulses going out from my brain and correlated with my spoken or written thoughts. But why should the system continue further in the direction of the center? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos? The case would be like the following—certain kinds of plants multiply by seed, so that a seed always produces a plant of the same kind as that from which it was produced—but nothing in the seed corresponds to the plant which..

There has been considerable disagreement about the relationship between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and his Philosophical Investigations with some scholars arguing that there is considerable continuity between them and some arguing that they are completely opposed. The paper argues that this breadth of disagreement is not surprising because the relation between TLP and PI is analogous with that described in Hegel’s dialectical model of philosophical truth in the Phenomenology of Spirit. One might say that TLP is “refuted” by PI but there is also a sense in which PI is “the truth” of TLP. TLP and PI are both essential stages in “the progressive unfolding of truth” bound together like the successive stages in a single living organism where the view of the former is both “annulled” and “preserved at a higher level” in the view of the latter. The paper thereby helps to facilitate Rorty’s attempt to usher “analytical philosophy” from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage.

Many influential philosophers have argued that in pgh. 608 of Zettel (hereafter Z608) Wittgenstein appears to say that language and thought might emerge out of physical chaos at the neural “centre”. By contrast, the present paper argues that these scholars are, in a fashion that would be readily understandable by Thomas Kuhn, assuming the very Anglo-American paradigm that Wittgenstein is actually critiquing in Z608 when they interpret his remarks. In opposition to this, the paper argues that Wittgenstein’s notion of emergence, chaos and the center in Z608 (and elsewhere in his works) is better understood in terms of the universal cross-cultural archetypes, emphasized by Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade of emergence, chaos and the center found in numerous religious and cosmological traditions around the world. The paper also points out that Wittgenstein also uses many other cross-cultural symbols also emphasized by Jung and Eliade, including the Shadow (which, in Jung, represents the opposite of the ego), the Trickster (or Devil), the mandala, the labyrinth, the microcosm, the crystal, the abyss, darkness, circular movement and creation (genesis), in order to illustrate his view. Perhaps the most fascinating of these concerns the archetypal cosmological symbolism in Wittgenstein’s self-reported but largely ignored“ alchemical” dream, including the Indian mandala symbolism in that dream. The paper concludes that Wittgenstein that is not restricted by Anglo-American “analytical” philosophy or the associated “scientistic” paradigms but is informed by a way of looking at things implicit in a fundamental archetypal symbolism found in very different cosmologies, religion and cultures all around the globe

Most scholars understand para. 608 of Zettel to suggest that language and thought might arise from chaos at the neural centre. However, this contradicts Wittgenstein’s signature view that the philosopher must not advance theories. The paper proposes an alternative model of Z608 based on the Austrian Gestalt-movement that influenced Wittgenstein. Z608 does not suggest that language and thought might arise from chaos in the brain but that they may arise in a different non-causal sense from the “chaos” of activities in forms of human life on analogy with the way a Gestalt-image “arises” from a “chaos” of perceptions. The concepts of chaos and the centre in Z608 are not neurophysiological concepts but refer to aspects of forms of human life. The Gestalt-interpretation also clarifies why Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is quite different from “ordinary language philosophy.” Finally, the Gestalt-interpretation clarifies why Wittgenstein is not, as is often believed, making an attack on legitimate empirical psychological investigations.