Aloisia Moser

Against the widely held but contradictory ideas that (a) there is no method in Wittgenstein and that (b) the picture theory is at the heart of the Tractatus, I argue that the center of the Tractatus is Wittgenstein’s projection method, a method which shows us how propositions can have sense when they are used or, to put it another way are projected onto reality. I argue that we do not find in the Tractatus a static picture theory, as the common reading of the Tractatus has us believe, but a projection method. Although Wittgenstein presents an additional zero-method, a state of the projection method that would be transcendental, he rejects this as a limiting case. I make a connection to the later Wittgenstein and his theory of meaning based on the use of language. By means of a perspicuous representation, I compare Wittgenstein’s method to Hegel’s the speculative method as Hegel develops it in the Science of Logic.While Hegel’s method is transcendental, Wittgenstein’s is not.

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In diesem Beitrag diskutiere ich Kants Einheit des Selbstbewusstseins und die Möglichkeit von Erfahrung und Erkenntnis. Ich argumentiere, dass Kants Konzeption der transzendentalen Apperzeption als ein performativer Denkakt betrachtet werden kann, der notwendig ist, um Erfahrung von Dingen zu haben und Wissen zu erlangen. Ich betone, dass Kants Philosophie nicht statisch ist, dass die Kategorien des Denkens nicht starr und zeitlos, sondern performativ sind. Ich behaupte, dass die Performativität des Denkens auf allen Ebenen zu finden ist, angefangen bei den Akten des Geistes bis hin zur transzendentalen Deduktion der Begriffe und der Verbindung von Anschauung und Begriff im Schematismus. Dabei vergleiche ich die Idee der Performativität bei Kant mit anderen Philosophen wie Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ich diskutiere auch den Ansatz von Thomas Khurana, der den doppelten Gebrauch der Vernunft in Bezug auf das Selbstbewusstsein untersucht. Dabei gelingt es ihm zu zeigen, dass die Einheit des „Ich denke“ der synthetischen Tätigkeit des Verstandes nicht vorausgeht, sondern sich aus ihr – performativ – ergibt.

The projection method has a privative case, which Wittgenstein calls the zero method. Mathematical and logical propositions are tautologies; they do not project a possible situation, since all situations are possible in them. The projection method works in the following manner: the propositional form projects a possible situation onto reality in order to make a comparison and establish whether a proposition is true or false. This is why some propositions are nonsensical: they are propositions that come up empty in the projection of a possible situation. In a literary interlude, I compare what I call Wittgenstein’s Logic Degree Zero with Roland Barthes’ discussion of Writing Degree Zero, in which he describes a zero point of style that makes style possible in the first place.

This chapter explains unity as the result of synthesis, while stressing that it is a uniting activity. The chapter outlines Béatrice Longuenesse’s reading of Kant’s account of transcendental unity as produced through synthesis speciosa, a unity performed in thinking but preceding the unity of the a priori categories that are applied in thought. Longuenesse’s Kant and the Capacity to Judge focuses on the B-edition of the Transcendental Deduction to show that the capacity to judge is an activity of synthesis that is twofold: intellectual and figurative/synthesis speciosa. While intellectual synthesis is the application of the categories to the manifold of intuitions, figurative synthesis is the capacity to generate the pure intuitions of space and time as an effect of the understanding on sensibility. Longuenesse argues that the impact that we make on the operations of our minds in thinking is reflected in the logical forms of judgment.

In this chapter, I give an overview over the appearance of performativity on the philosophical scene. I also discuss various proponents of progenitor theories. These include Ferdinand de Saussure and his distinction between langue and parole; Noam Chomsky and his differentiation between competence and performance; and Wilhelm Humboldt and his distinction between form and use of language. Then I present John Austin and his detection of performative utterances. I also present Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas who continue the work of Austin on locution and illocution and finally Judith Butler’s and Jacques Derrida’s insistence on the role of perlocutionary effects. In the second section of the chapter, I distinguish my own account of performativity from these others by showing the semantic connection cannot be pre-assumed, for example, is not there beforehand, and that it has pragmatic effects; I demonstrate that the object of thought or language is itself only created in the moment of performance.

In this chapter, I draw the connection between the discussions of schematism in the Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of Judgment in which Kant discusses the power of judgment as reflective judgment. In distinction to determinate judgment, reflective judgment gives an idea to itself in an act of reflection, not determination. The reflection entails subsuming the intuitions not under a determinate judgment but under the mind itself as judging.In the second section of the chapter I turn to the Rule Following Considerations of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. I make the point that projection is needed for propositions to have sense, or in the vocabulary of Wittgenstein’s later writings: “Meaning is use.” Wittgenstein claims that following a rule is a custom, not an interpretation. We grasp a rule in use, by obeying it or going against it.

This chapter introduces the world of the Tractatus as one in which a general propositional form is able to project the world. I show that the propositions of the Tractatus are set up like mathematical equations: what is on the left side equals what is on the right side. The sub-propositions serve to elucidate the right side of the equation in a new equation. The chapter describes two perspectives on the proposition in the Tractatus. The first perspective views the proposition as a variable of a general form that represents a fact. The second perspective considers the proposition to be an elucidation. However, in order for the proposition to be a fact, it must be projected onto the world. Philosophical or mathematical propositions are tautologies; they are true or false without needing to be projected.

In the introduction to the book, I lay out its aims, which is to show how thought or language has meaning through a performative act of speaking or thinking. I state that, in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we find such performativity in the projection of transcendental ideas. This enables the unity of the understanding, while in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus performativity is evident in the projection of the proposition that makes possible the picturing and comparing of thought and world.The notion of meaning as performative is elaborated through readings of Kant in Chaps. 2, 3, and 4 and readings of Wittgenstein in Chaps. 5, 6, and 7. Chapter 8 returns to Kant’s Schematism; Chap. 9 is dedicated to Kant’s Critique of Judgment and Wittgenstein’s account of rule following. Finally, Chap. 10 provides a “historical” overview of the account of performativity.

In this chapter, I present a reading of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction that lays the groundwork for a discussion of Wittgenstein and the problem of the unity of the proposition. A. B. Dickerson’s Kant on Representation and Objectivity parallels the deduction as a problem of making intelligible the unity of complex representations with the problem of the unity of the proposition. For Dickerson representation is an act of synthesis, which presents to us determinations of the mind constituted in the representational medium. In short, it makes us see something in that representational medium. Dickerson is interested in the kind of image-making that takes place in the metaphysical deduction, of which he gives an excellent interpretation with the example of seeing a smiley face in a line drawing. Dickerson sees that apperception is both receptive and spontaneous and that in representation the subject must perform synthesis, but he avoids a discussion of the transcendental level, that is, schematism.

In this chapter, I return to Kant’s schematism and discuss two recent readings that are productive for my take on performativity. The first stems from Sibylle Krämer’s Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis (2016), in which Krämer examines Kant’s writings on schematism, while taking a special look at the notion of figurality. Krämer is keen on describing that intuitions and concepts are dissimilar, and the schema is required to make them similar. The transcendental schema or schematization, Krämer underlines, is a method or act. It is not an image but figurality, and in Kant it is temporal figurality, which acts as a hinge providing homogeneity between concepts and intuitions and thereby making intuitions into something that the categories can latch onto. The second reading of the schematism I discuss is outlined in Maja Soboleva’s Das Denken des Denkens (2016). Soboleva’s reading is monist and realist, claiming that the understanding does not judge in its primary activity but “shows” in its ability to make rules; it mimics an object for the human understanding. Intuition is crucial for thinking, since we are presented with a system of images, a sphere of semantically undetermined objects that we then judge in a concept.

In this chapter, I present a reading of the propositions of the Tractatus, which is not a picture theory but what I call a “projection method,” in reference to Wittgenstein’s proposition 3.11. The way in which we get propositions that are true or false in the Tractatus is by projecting the sensibly perceptible propositions onto the world. But, according to Wittgenstein, in order for us to be able to do this, something in the proposition must be identical with the reality that it is projected onto. This “something” warrants that the nature of the proposition and the nature of all facts are connected, and Wittgenstein calls it logical form or the general propositional form. This general form of the proposition cannot be expressed as a fact but is shown in the way the propositions stand in relation to one another.

In this chapter, I show how the necessary link between thought and what it is about is made in the A-edition of the Transcendental Deduction of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. I make a distinction between the synthesis of judgment made in general logic and in transcendental logic, and I argue that the transcendental apperception does not give us an a priori connection, in the sense of self-reflexivity, but a performative one, in the sense of a thought being thought. The concept of Vorstellung is elaborated as an act of the mind in which the manifold of intuition is re-presented before our mind. However, prior to this judgment in a concept that which comes in through the senses needs a transcendental judgment allowing the manifold of sense perception to share something with the concept.

This book explores the idea that there is a certain performativity of thought connecting Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. On this view, we make judgments and use propositions because we presuppose that our thinking is about something, and that our propositions have sense. Kant’s requirement of an a priori connection between intuitions and concepts is akin to Wittgenstein’s idea of the general propositional form as sharing a form with the world. Aloisia Moser argues that Kant speaks about acts of the mind, not about static categories. Furthermore, she elucidates the Tractatus’ logical form as a projection method that turns into a so-called ‘zero method’, whereby propositions are merely the scaffolding of the world. In so doing, Moser connects Kantian reflective judgment to Wittgensteinian rule-following. She thereby presents an account of performativity centering neither on theories nor methods, but on the application enacting them in the first place.

In this paper I discuss two recent readings of Kant’s schematism that are productive for my take on performativity. The first stems from Sibylle Krämer’s Figuration, Anschauung, Erkenntnis from 2016, in which Krämer examines Kant’s writings on schematism, while taking a special look at the notion of figurality. Krämer is keen on describing that intuitions and concepts are dissimilar, and the schema is required to make them similar. The transcendental schema or schematization, Krämer underlines, is a method or act. It is not an image but figurality, and in Kant it is temporal figurality, which acts as a hinge providing homogeneity between concepts and intuitions and thereby making intuitions into something that the categories can latch onto. The second reading of the schematism I discuss is outlined in Maja Soboleva’s Das Denken des Denkens from 2016. Soboleva’s reading is monist and realist, claiming that the understanding does not judge in its primary activity but “shows” in its ability to make rules; it mimics an object for the human understanding. Intuition is crucial for thinking, since we are presented with a system of images, a sphere of semantically undetermined objects that we then judge in a concept. Finally, I conclude with my own reading of Kant’s schematism in outlining two kinds of imagination – one that imagines (Einbildungskraft) the connection in the intelligible realm and the other that emagines (Ausbildungskraft) the connection in the sensible realm. This is how in experience we take in with the senses and subsume under the concepts after concepts have been ordered or prefigured through this double schematization, which effects that intuitions and concepts are the same.