wittgenstein’s early theory of the will

8/12/2019 Wittgensteins Early Theory of the Will

1/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE\;\TILL: AN ANALYSIS

JEREMY W LKER

Wittgenstein's ractatus contains a curious and inaccessible theoryof the will. t is presented in no more than about half a dozen re-marks scattered through the latter part of the book. 1) At 5.1362 hewrites: The freedom of the will consists in this, that future actionscannot yet be known. We could know them only if causality were aninn r necessity, like that of logical inference.-The connection be-tween knowledge and what is known is that of logical necessity. 2)Similarly, at 6.373 to 6.375 he writes: The world is independent ofmy will. Even if all that we wish for happened, this would still beonly a favour of fate, so to speak; for there is no logical connectionbetween will and world, which would guarantee it, and the supposedphysical connection is surely not itself something we could will. Justas there is only a logical necessity, there is also only a logical impos-sibility. 3) At 6.423 to 6.43 he writes: The will as the bearer ofthe ethical cannot be spoken of. And the will as phenomenon is ofinterest only to psychology. good or bad willing alters the world,it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts; not that whichcan be expressed through language. Briefly, the world must becomethrough it an altogether different world. t must, so to speak, waxand wane as a whole. The world of the happy man is a different onefrom the world of the unhappy man. 4) Finally, at 5.631 and 5.632he writes: There is no thinking, imaging, subject. f I wrote a bookcalled The world as I found it, I should have to include a reporton my body and say which parts were subordinate to my will andwhich not, etc.; this is a method of isolating the subject, or ratherof showing that in an important sense there is no subject: for it alonecould not be mentioned in that book.-The subject does not belongto the world, but is a limit of the world.

This theory of the will is puzzling for several reasons. First, therehardly seems to be enough in these remarks for a complete theory to


2/27

180 IDEALISTIC STUDIESbe constructed. Nor is the sense of these remarks itself evident; andthere is little else in the Tractatus which could help to make senseof them. Second, what is said is so extremely reductionist as to bescarcely credible. t is implausible that there is no connection at allbetween willing and what subsequently happens, no possibility ofknowing what is going to happen or be done, no subject at all. Thusif we take such views seriously, we are almost driven to suppose thatWittgenstein is talking of something very different from what weordinarily call the will. Third, all these remarks appear to fall underthe anathema of 6.54; they all appear to be nonsensical attempts tosay things that can only be shown. But we should like to know whysuch propositions of philosophical psychology cannot be significant.

There is one further puzzle. vVittgenstein has related the idea ofthe will to the ethical this I take as inseparable from the religious).But the nature of this relation is not further explained in the Trac-tatus. Besides, the ethical views of this book are exceedingly obscurein themselves. And this casts a corresponding darkness on its theoryof the will.These defects are to some extent remedied in the Notebooks thatWittgenstein had previously written. For these contain long sectionsdealing with the concepts of the subject, the will, and ethics. Most ofwhat appears in the Tractatus has been transferred from these sec-tions. A great deal, however, has been omitted. Thus much of thewriting that gives context and hence, presumably, sense to the re-marks in the Tractatus has been omitted. v e must turn to the Note-books then, for light upon these dark places.

This is not to claim that everything in the Notebooks was still inWittgenstein s mind when he came to compile the Tractatus. Muchconflicts sharply, both in doctrine and in methodology, with the laterwork. The Notebooks are, in particular, thoroughly dialectical. Sothey must be used with the greatest care. Perhaps their use shouldpresuppose a general view of the complex relationship between thetwo works; this, however, cannot be explained in the present essay. Ishall say a word about this towards its end.

The primary aim of this essay is to bring together remarks from theotebooks and the Tractatus in such an order as to establish that

Wittgenstein did indeed hold a powerful and general theory of thewill. t is a theory that is compatible with the logical doctrines of theTractatus although it does not follow from these. It is a theory that,


3/27


4/27

182 IDEALISTIC STUDIESI. he Subject and the Will

In the Notebooks entry for 5.8.16, Wittgenstein exclaims, "The I,the I, is the deeply mysterious thing " Clearly the "I," the ego, oc-cupies a special place in relation to the world and the rest of itscontents. But this seems inconsistent with the basic doctrines of theTractatus. Wittgenstein was led by these to the a priori conclusionthat psychology was of no particular interest to the philosopher.Psychology is no more closely related to philosophy than any other

natural science Tractatus, 4.1121). So insofar as discussion of the"I" is psychological discussion, it is irrelevant to philosophy. Wittgenstein naturally fails to say much about the subject in the Tracta-tus. He says rather more in the Notebooks.

hinking subject and willing subject. Wittgenstein's subjectdiffers from most philosphical ideas of the subject in being prima-rilya willing, not a thinking;, entity. He refers at 2.8.16 to "the will-ing subject, and later recurs to this point. "Isn't the thinking vor-stellende) subject in the end mere superstition? (4.8.16). "Thethinking subject is surely mere illusion. But there is a willing sub-ject (5.8.16). In the same entry he writes, I f the will did not exist,neither would there be that centre of the world that we call the egoIch), and which is the bearer of ethics. His earlier reference to thewilling subject was also connected with ethics. Again at 4.11.16 he

claims that "The subject is the willing subject. But here the contextis not directly ethical. He is considering the possibility of the willbeing effective within the world.There is a later entry (19.11.16) in which he expresses doubt aboutthis whole theory. "What kind of ground is there for the assumptionof a willing subject? Is not my world adequate for individualisa-tion? This clearly recalls his attack on the idea that there is a think-ing subject over against the world.

The heart of Wittgenstein's attack on the "thinking subject iscontained in his attack on Russell's theory of judgment. This attackfollows from Wittgenstein's general thesis of extensionalism. For ifthe "I" in first person psychological propositions be construed as akind of name, such propositions can no longer be analyzed s truthfunctions of the propositions they appear to contain. "I think thatp cannot then, for example, be a truth-function of p Again, thiskind of analysis would appear to commit us to construing p also


5/27

WIITGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 183as a kind of name. But this, although central in Frege, is contrary toWittgenstein's Tractatus views. On Wittgenstein's analysis of suchpropositions, they really express the holding of a relation betweentwo facts. t does not matter, for this major point, whether we construe the I as referring to a proposition, or a psychological complex. For Wittgenstein's view is that no complex could possibly bethe subject, in the required philosophical sense. A composite soulwould no longer be a soul Tractatus, 5.5421).

The thesis of extensionalism also, of course, affects psychologicalpropositions about willing, etc. I will that P does not seem to be atruth-function of p. This is no doubt part of Wittgenstein's reasonsfor making the will independent of the world, as I shall describe below.

The subject s limit of the world. This extensionalist consideration shows that there can be no thinking subject. To say thatis to say, there can be no thinking subject in the world. Wittgensteinfirst advances his well-known claim that the subject (whatever exactlyit is is not in the world in the Notebooks at 23.5.15. He there remarks that the subject would be the one thing that could not comeinto the book The world found. (See Tractatus, 5.631). t could notbe part of my experience. Informally, we might say that the I cannot just occur in this book, since it must essentially come into thetitle of the book, where it is used to refer to the book's author. Thisconsideration is analogous to Ryle's argument in The Concept ofMind

Wittgenstein puts what is essentially the same point in the form ofan epigram at 2.8.16: The subject is not part of the world, but apresupposition of its existence. t would be a mistake to think thathe was here arguing from the view that the world is my world to thisdoctrine of the subject. Rather, he first reached this doctrine of thesubject, and thence inferred his peculiar solipsism. Now the notion ofpresupposition must be meant here in a peculiar but strict sense.For Wittgenstein appears to claim both in the Notebooks 4.8.16)and in the Tractatus (5.633) that nothing in the world allows us toinfer that the world is experienced by a subject. There is no objector fact which entails that there is a subject. So presupposition cannot mean any such inferential relation. This does not imply that noform of inference, is allowed, I believe, but only that, whatever it is,it cannot obey the canons of ordinary deductive logic. This leaves


6/27

184 IDEALISTIC STUDIESopen the possibility of a transcendental deduction of the subjectfrom the world.The I is not an object (7.8.16). Wittgenstein adds: I objectivelyconfront stehe gegenuber) every object. But not the I (11.8.16).What confrontation means is unclear. But these words need not betaken as contradicting the view that there is no thinking subject. Forthat view does not make t false to say things like I saw King'sCollege Chapel. t merely imposes certain limitations on the philosophical analysis of such propositions. To say that objectively confront every object is merely to say that everything in the world is apossible object of knowledge or, more generally, experience. And thisreduces to the fundamental Tractatus doctrine that everything in theworld must be constituent of some fact. For the I to be anotherobject would then mean its being the constituent of some fact orfacts. t would be just another possible object of experience. But thenin my experience of it would be over against it, i.e., over againstI And this is senseless.

I say senseless, but many philosophers have seen just here thatpeculiar feature which (they believe) distinguishes the subject fromeverything else, namely, its capacity for self-reflection or selfreference. But this could not be consistent with ':Vittgenstein's sys-tem. For one thing, it supposes that the subject has a certain essentialcomplexity, a point already referred to. Worse, however, is a difficultyconnected with the concept of presupposition. This comes out inWittgenstein's analogy between the relation of subject and world, onthe one hand, and eye and visual field, on the other.

The analogy of the eye and its visual field. This analogy appearsboth in the Tractatus (5.633 to 5.634) and in the otebooks 11.6.16;12.8.16; and 20.10.16). Wittgenstein began by claiming, I know thatthis world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visualfield (11.6.16). Soon he abandoned the view that the eye was part of(in) its visual field. But you do not actually see the eye (4.8.16).Thus: you do not actually experience the subject-your self.

Can we not infer from anything in the visual field that it is seenby (from) an eye? At 20.10.16 Wittgenstein writes: The situation isnot simply that I everywhere notice where I see anything, but thatI also always find myself at a particular point of my visual space, somy visual space has as it were a shape. In spite of this, however, it is,true that I do not see the subject. We might try out the analogy


7/27

WITTGENSTEIK'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 85

here. t is also the situation, we might say, that I always find myselfat a particular place in my world, so that my world has as it were ashape-a logical structure. So one would be supposing that there arelaws of logical perspective obeyed by the contents of the world.

These contents would, then, point in accordance with such laws toa kind of logical center of perception, just as the contents of certain Renaissance paintings point towards an imaginary visualcenter. Then one could infer, in accordance with these laws, theexistence of a center of perception for the world. And this wouldbe the subject.There are, however, many difficulties in making this analogy. Evenif the fact that the visual field has a certain shape allows us to inferthat it is seen, and where from, still it is true that nothing in thevisual field permits this inference. For that the visual field has acertain shape, and that such and such is its shape, is not itself -part of- the visual field. Similarly, even if the fact that my world isarranged in a certain way allows me to infer that it is experiencedfrom a particular point of view, so to speak, still it remains true thatthere is nothing in my world which allows this inference. Again, theanalogy appears to break down when we consider the alleged lawsof logical perspective. For laws of perspective determine how thingslook from different points of view. But we cannot make sense in theTractatus of the idea that things (including facts) might look different from different points of view. Nor, I think, can we readilymake sense of the idea that there could be different points of viewon one and the same world.

Wittgenstein connects the eye-subject analogy with his basic doctrine that none of our experience is also a priori. All that we seecould also be otherwise. All that we can describe at all could be otherwise (See Notebooks 12.8.16; and Tractatus 5.634). f it is quitecontingent how things in the world are, we cannot use a descriptionof the world as the premises from which to deduce the nature of thesubject. For this would make the nature of the subject too quitecontingent. And it is hard to accept that the nature of the subject isso wholly dependent on the contingent state of the world. (There is,however, an important truth in this view, according to Wittgenstein,and I return to it below.)

Wittgenstein probably considered that the impossibility of anything's being both a priori and part of someone's experience was


8/27

186 IDEA1['ISTIC STUDIESconnected with the impossibility of the subject's also being part of itsown experience. For he probably thought that, if there were anypropositions about the subject, they could not be other than a priori.Certainly if the subject is something deduced transcendentally, anytruths about it are highly likely to be a priori.

Whatever exactly transcendental deduction may be, it is fairlyclear in the Kantian tradition that it is always thought of as leadingonly to a priori truths, whether these be synthetic or analytic. So ifthe subject's existence can be deduced only transcendentally fromwhatever facts about the world are relevant as premises, our conclu-sions about it must take the form, So a subject of such and such akind must exist. I believe it is partly for this general reason thatWittgenstein came to believe that the existence of the subject couldnot be asserted significantly.

To put Wittgenstein's arguments in this Kantian context is topresuppose that his philosophy demands a distinction between whatwe may call the phenomenal subject of experience, and that entitywhose existence is an a priori demand of metaphysical thinking.Wittgenstein certainly did not deny the occurrence of such psycho-logical phenomen as thinking, judging, and willing. But as phe-nomena they could be, for him, of concern only to natural science,e.g., empirical psychology. And the role played by such phenomena,and the phenomenal entities we call persons to which such psycho-logical phenomena are ascribed, must be matters of contingent fact.But the metaphysical role of the (metaphysical) subject, and itsessential attributes i f any, cannot be merely contingent.

Wittgenstein thus expresses his denial that the metaphysical sub-ject (see Notebooks, 2.9.16; and Tractatus, 5.641) is part of theworld, together with his claim that t is a presupposition of theworld's existence, in his famous remark that it is the limit of theworld Notebooks, 2.8.16 and 2.9.16; Tractatus, 5.632 and 5.641).This is a doctrine taken directly out of Schopenhauer. Wittgensteinin fact refers to Schopenhauer in the sentence immediately follow-ing his first use of this doctrine. t is, however, extremely obscure.In particular, it is not easy to reconcile with his view that the selfof solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point Tractatus, 5.64). Andit is not clear whether the subject is the only limit of the world, orone among several limits. FOll the limits of language are also, ap-parently, the limits of the world.


9/27

WITTGENSTE IN S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 187Just as my visual field is limited, so my world is limited (see, for

example, Tractatus 4.26 and 5.5561). t is limited by there being alimited totality of objects, and a limited totality of elementary propositions. The limits of language must be the limits of what can besaid significantly. And this is simply the totality of all elementarypropositions, plus all propositions that can be formed from themtruth-functionally. Now the idea that the visual field is limited seemsto have consequences similar to the idea that it is structured, or has ashape. For if the visual field's shape allows us to infer a visual

subject, so equally does its being limited. The particular way inwhich it is limited points just as clearly to the existence of a subjectsituated at some particular place. y analogy, then, one might arguethat the fact that the world is limited, and that it has the particularlimits it does have, points to the existence of a logical subject.The analogy, however, breaks down because we can conceive of thevisual subject's actually being somewhere else, so that the visualfield would have different limits. It is not that we cannot conceive ofthe world having different limits from those it actually has, i.e.,of the totality of elementary propositions differing in some respects.(This would, of course, make the world a different world; but, onemight reply, so is a visual field with different limits a different visualfield too.) t is rather that it is rom the conception of the world ashaving limits that Wittgenstein arrives at his conception of themetaphysical subject, and thus rom the idea that the world mighthave different limits that we might arrive at the idea of the metaphysical subject being differently located in logical space, and notvice versa.

Again, the visual field is limited by things beyond which I cannotsee. But there does not seem to be any possibility analogous to thisfor the world as a whole. The world is limited, in the sense thatthere is a limit to what can be significantly said, or thought. But, inthe case of the visual field, it is limited by objects which couldthemselves be parts of a different visual field. And it is not possiblethat nonsignificant propositions could be significant, although ofcourse sentences which contingently express such pseudo propositionsmight express genuinely significant propositions under a differentsystem of rules.

he metaphysical subject. t is natural at this point to complainthat nothing seems to have been said yet which bears especially on


10/27

188 IDEALISTIC STUDIESthe idea of a subject of exper;ience. This discomfort is increased bythe very reductionist analysis of thought given by Wittgenstein. Hewrites: The thought is the significant sentence Tractatus, 4; thereare alternative translations of this important remark). And thisanalysis underlies what he says about judgment and perception.

It is not, as I said earlier, that he denies the occurrence of thosepsychological phenomena we ordinarily call thinking, judging, andperceiving. The Tractatus arguably even allows a dualistic interpretation of what he does say (and compare his letter to Russell of19.8.19, Notebooks p. 130, paragraph 4). Only the relation betweenthese psychological phenomena and their objects is analyzed as arelation between two kinds of fact. This is simply an application ofthe picture-theory of significance to psychological events and objects.And it tells us nothing at all about the peculiar nature (if any) ofpsychological objects and facts (This would, however, be a questionfor empirical psychology.) o the effect of separating off all questionsabout the nature of psychological phenomena from the purely logicalquestions with which the Tractatus deals is that all questions aboutthe peculiar nature of experience, and of the experiencing subject,are also separated off as irrelevant to logic. vVittgenstein implies,in fact, that all the logician (metaphysician) need know is that theremust exist a subject which is complementary to the world. Hischaracterization is here absolutely minimal and, pro tanto, unhelpful. (He would have said that the kind of help implied in thisremark was an illusion.)

It might be said, all the same, that the Tractatus does not give anabsolutely minimal account of the metaphysical subject. t connectsthis idea with three further ideas.

First is the idea of language. This really replaces the standardCartesian connection of the subject with thinking. (See the Prefaceto the Tractatus, paragraphs 3 and 4.) In the Tractatus at least, theidea that the world has limits is explained via the concept of language. So its concept of the subject is at least the concept of asubject of language} i.e., a user and understander of language. Enpassant) it is just here that I think the critical philosophies of Kant,on the one hand, and Frege and Wittgenstein, on the other, diverge.)

Second is the concept of a fact. t was central to the realism ofMoore and Russell that what is the case is logically independentof any psychological phenomena that happen to be related to what


11/27


12/27

190 IDEALrSTIC STUDIESpresumably underlie the capacities involved in the use and under-standing of language. To say this is perhaps, only to say that noa priori characterization of a language-user can give us empiricalinformation about language-users. Thus, in the end, Wittgenstein'scharacterization of the metaphysical subject is seen to be absolutelyminimal.

The metaphysical subject and the subject of experience. How canthe claim that there is a metaphysical subject be reconciled with thedenial that there is a thinking, imaging, subject ? Surely the subjectthat is the world's limit is so partly in the sense that it is the subjectfor whom this world exists as it does. And this seems inseparablefrom the claim that it is a subject for whom there is experience ofthis world. And how could there be a subject for whom there wasexperience of this world, unless that subject was essentially capableof, say, perception?

Wittgenstein never says in the Tractatus that the metaphysicalsubject is a subject of experience. He refers several times to ourexperience (see, e.g., 5.552, 5.634, 6.1222, and 6.363). We must hereremember the distinction between the phenomenal self (subject) andthe metaphysical or transcendental ego. My experiences consist ofmy perceptions, etc. But Wittgenstein offers a reductive analysisof such psychological phenomena. The fact that perceive thingsdoes not prove that a metaphysical subject perceives things, sincein the former proposition 1 may well, and indeed must, refer toa phenomenal entity. Experience is in fact a phenomenal concept,and presupposes only a phenomenal subject. Thus Wittgenstein'sdenial of a thinking (etc.) subject amounts to the denial of an experi-encing subject.

So his final account of the relation between the metaphysical subject and the world draws nothing at all from any remarks he maymake about the relation between the phenomenal self and the world.And this is surely what he was after. For if psychology, as a naturalscience, is of no particular interest to philosophy, then a philosophical theory, even one about psychological phenomena, should notinvolve contingent truths of empirical psychology.Wittgenstein's ((transcendental solipsism. Near the end of theNotebooks, at 9.11.16, Wittgenstein seems to clear the way for hisfinal abstraction of the idea oE the metaphysical subject from theidea of (empirical) experience. All experience s world and does


13/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY Of' THE WILL 191not need the subject (my italics). Experience is not, so to speak,something over against the world. Experience too is just a part of theworld, in Wittgenstein's sense of the world.

This implies a denial of subjectivist idealism. But Wittgensteindoes not stop here. For he adds a peculiar form of transcendentalidealism. It is in this way that his solipsism can be interpretedas a form of realism. (We might remember that Kant too claimedto be an empirical realist. ) This is what Wittgenstein indicateswhen he writes, the self of solipsism shrinks to an extensionlesspoint, and there remains the reality coordinated with it Notebooks,2.9.16; and Tractatus, 5.64). An extensionless self is a self withoutempirical content, thus a self which is not itself found among thefacts.

This solipsism is expressed in three passages from the Note-books, each found later in the Tractatus. (1) At Notebooks, 23.5.15Tractatus, 5.62), he writes, The world is my world: this shows

itself in the fact that the limits of language (the language whichalone I understand) signify the limits of my world. (N.B. I agreewith Hintikka's reading of this much disputed passage.) I do notthink we need read this passage as implying the existence of privatelanguages in order to see Wittgenstein's point. For that point,it makes no difference whether my language is private or public.The only important thing about my language is that t is a language,and thus that its limits and the limits of my (the) world are cor-relatives. 'When Wittgenstein says, The world is my world, he istemporarily adopting the genuine solipsist's own inaccurate modeof expression. For the world is certainly not my world, if by meis meant the phenomenal me. And if it means the transcendentalego, then the world is mine only in the sense that to the world theremust, as we know, correspond a transcendental ego. And it is im-possible to identify the transcendental subject with that phenome-non I call myself.

Wittgenstein expresses his solipsism in two other passages ofthe Tractatus (5.621 and 5.63). He writes, The world and life areone. I am my world. (The microcosm). (This is nearly a straightquotation from The World s Will and Idea, Volume 1 SecondBook, Chapter 29, Dover Books Edition, p. 162.) That life is theworld-the world is life is asserted in the Notebooks (11.6.16 and24.7.16). In the latter entry, Wittgenstein continues: Physiological


14/27

192 IDEALISTIC STUDIESlife is of course not 'life'. And neither is psychological life. (Here isa passage which seems to anticipate the central views of Wittgen-stein's later philosophy.) The identification of life with the worldgoes with an identification of death with the end of the world (seeNotebooks, 5.7.16 and 8.7.16; Tractatus, 6.431 and 6.4311). Death isnot an event in one's life. It could be called the limit of one's life.Ordinarily we think of life as having two temporal limits, i.e., birthand death. But Wittgenstein explicitly says Our life is endless injust the same way as our visual field is boundless Tractatus, 6.4311).We might add: in just the same way as the world can be said to lack(empirical) limits.

Wittgenstein claims in the Notebooks (1.8.16 and 2.8.16) that Iam conscious of the uniqueness of my life, and that this conscious-ness is life itself. t would be interesting, and important, to pursuehis treatment of the idea of life further, but since many of theseremarks occur in passages with an ethical sense, it is perhaps betterto postpone this discussion.

I do not want to imply, in all this, that Wittgenstein's solipsismamounts to no more than what has been described. This is how somecommentators, e.g., Hintikka, appear to construe it. f it were so,it would be an almost entirely negative doctrine. Now insofar asWittgenstein is alluding to the Cartesian idea of the subject, hisdoctrine is almost entirely negative. But it has a positive component,and this is his characteristic conception of the subject as a willingentity. I mentioned this right at the beginning of this section of myessay (p. 182 f.). Before discussing it, however, it is essential to saysomething about Wittgenstein's view of the relation(s) betweenthinking and willing.

The relation between thinking and willing. This problem struckWittgenstein while he was compiling the Notebooks. He returns toit again and again. Can there exist a being with will but withoutthought Vorstellung)? Can there exist a being with thought,

but without will? Suchlike problems do not occur in the pages ofthe Tractatus, and their omission does not make its doctrine of thesubject any easier to understand.

In the Notebooks, at 21.7.16, Wittgenstein introduces the ideaof a person who cannot directly exercise his will, but is still in theethical sense the bearer of a wdl. This is the idea of someone whocannot act, i.e., perform bodily movements at will, but can think and


15/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 193want things, and can also communicate his thoughts and desires. (Afigure out of Samuel Beckett, perhaps.) The relation between theideas of willing and wanting will be discussed in the next section.Here there is already a difficulty about the relation between willingand thinking. Wittgenstein senses this. For he goes on to write Ordoes the mistake lie in this, that already wanting (or thinking) isan activity of the will? t looks as if he was prepared to considerthe possibility that thinking falls under the generic concept of will-ing, so that a thinking being would ipso facto be a willing being.(There are again antecedents for such a view in Schopenhauer:Book Four, Chapter 55.)

Later in the same entry Wittgenstein wrote, But is a beingconceivable which could only have presentations vorstellen) (see,for example), but not will at all? In some sense this seems impossible. He does not say why it seems so. But his remark supportsmy view that he found it natural to subsume thinking under willing.When he later asks, Is seeing an activity? Notebooks, 29.7.16),he is probably worrying the same question once more.

N ow if the concept of thinking falls under the generic conceptof willing, it will be impossible-logically impossible-that a beingshould be able to think (whatever this comes to) but not to will.Not being able to will may mean one of two things. 1) t may

mean possessing a will but not being able to exercise it. (2) Or itmay mean not possessing a will at all. This distinction shows that itmight be possible that there should exist a being which could think,but not exercise its will, even if it were impossible that there shouldexist a being which could think, but did not possess a will. Wittgenstein speaks in the otebooks of the life of knowledge (13.8.16).He seems to mean a life based on renunciation of the will, or renunciation of one's desires. Now someone who has, in this sense, re-nounced his will must still be capable of thought and be thinking:the life of knowledge. What he renounces, therefore, cannot be allwill, in the sense in which this general term includes thinking.

He renounces that part of his will which is expressed in his havingdesires and trying to satisfy them.The correlative problem is discussed in the otebooks entry at4.11.16. Here Wittgenstein writes: The will seems always to haveto relate to an idea Vorstellung). We cannot, e.g., imagine that wehave carried out an act of will without having detected that we have


16/27

194 IDEALISTIC STUDIEScarried it out. Otherwise there might arise such a question aswhether it had yet been completely carried out. He continues:I t is so to speak, clear that we need a foothold for the will in

the world. Further on he considers the possibility that it is throughcertain feelings that we detect when an act of will is occurring, i.e.,that we detect when we are acting. Then there is a curious passagewhich reads: I f the will has to have an object in the world, theobject can be the intended action itself. And the will must have anobject. Otherwise we should have no foothold, and could not knowwhat we willed. And could not will different things.I f the will had no foothold in the world, we could not know thatour willing had been fulfilled, or not. For the will to have its fulfillment n the world is simply for it to have its object in the world.And it must have its fulfillment in the world, if we are to be able tojudge whether it has been fulfilled or not. Otherwise it would notbe a f ct that it had been fulfilled or unfulfilled. And Wittgensteinclearly thinks that it must be a matter of fact whether any particular act of will is fulfilled or unfulfilled. I t will also, of course,follow that it is a matter of fact whether it has been completelyfulfilled or not; there is no third possibility.

Wittgenstein goes further than this, however. He implies that ifI can will, I must be able to know whether my will is fulfilled ornor. He also implies that i f I can will, I must be able to knowwhat I will. Now if I know what I will, it follows that I am at leastable to know whether what I have willed has come to pass or not.The latter view thus entails the former. So if the former were false,the latter would necessarily also be false. Then, if it were impossiblefor me to know whether my will had been fulfilled or not, it wouldfollow that it was also impossible for me to know what I willed. Ithink it is in this way that Wittgenstein argues: i f the will had nofoothold in the world, we could not know what we willed.

In all of this, it is clearly implied that, in the ordinary sense, wenormally do know what we will. The supposition that we may notreally know what we will is not taken seriously.

Now I shall argue in the second section of my essay that we haveto distinguish several senses of '''will'' in Wittgenstein's early writings.The sense of will which we have just been discussing is a sense inwhich we can say, So-and-so willed th t P i.e , that it should come tobe the case that p And this is obviously pretty closely related to the


17/27

WITIGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 195idea of wanting that p. What Wittgenstein will have argued, giventhe possibility of a distinction of senses of will , is merely thatthis kind of willing necessarily implies thinking. From this it doesnot follow that all kinds of willing necessarily imply thinking.Again, as I argued above, it may still be true that a being couldthink but not will in the narrow sense, without its being true thata being could think but not will in toto. (Willing in the narrowsense we might call propositional willing. )

II The Will and the WorldThe independence of the world from the will. When we speak ofthe possibility of being able to exercise our wills, or to carry out ouracts of will, we seem to imply that in some manner the world can,so to speak, be bent to conform to our wills. We can make it bethe case that such and such; at any rate, this is always an openpossibility. But Wittgenstein denies this. And his denial is explicit,and strongly founded in some of his logical doctrines. This denialdearly raises a problem of possible logical inconsistency. Can wereconcile the view that the will (in the narrow propositional sense)has a foothold in the world, i.e., can be fulfilled or unfulfilled in theworld, with the doctrine that the world is logically independent ofthe will? Perhaps this is unnecessary. For there is nothing apparentlyleft in the Tractatus or the Notebooks view that the will, in somesense, has a foothold in the world. Wittgenstein seems to havesimply given up the latter view s incompatible with his chief logicaldoctrines.

The idea that the world is independent of the will came to himquite early (see Notebooks 5.7.16.). In the previous entry he hadalready written: I cannot bend the happenings of the world to mywill, but am completely powerless (11.6.16). To have power wouldmean that the world was not logically independent of my will,since it would mean that I could influence what happened. Wittgen-stein claims, however, that we can have a certain kind of power,namely by renouncing any influence on happenings (11.6.16).That is, by coming to realize that one in fact has no possible influ-ence on what happens, coming to assent to this (necessary) state ofaffairs, and abandoning the vain attempt to influence the courseof the world. (N otice already hints of a Stoic ethics peeping throughvVittgenstein's words.)


18/27

196 IDEALISTIC STUDIESThe world is logically independent of the will. For it is a fact

of logic that wanting stands in no logical connection with its fulfillment Notebooks) 29.7.16; my italics). (This is not absolutelyconclusive, since it is not absolutely clear that the will can beidentified with the psychological phenomenon of wanting.) Althoughthe sense of willing that p presupposes that P has sense, stillthe truth-value of any proposition of the form So-and-so wills thatp is logically independent of the truth-value of p.

N ow in the world everything is logically speaking, on a level.This includes my own body, and in particular those parts of itwhich we ordinarily consider as subordinate to my will, e.g., mylimbs. That some parts of the world are subordinate to my willin the ordinary sense is stated even in the Tractatus (5.63); this isa matter of fact. t is however, puzzling in the face of the doctrinethat there is nothing whatever that I can influence. For what thenwould be the sense of the common-sense idea that we can distinguishbetween parts of the world subordinate to my will, e.g., my limbs,and parts not subordinate? 'That could be the sense of subordinate ? n the long Notebooks entry for 4.11.16, Wittgenstein writes,For it appears through consideration of willing as if one part of the

world were closer to me than another (which would be intolerable).f this were the case, the will would clearly no longer stand as theworld's limit, i.e., its correlative.

At 11.6.16 vVittgenstein says, my will penetrates [durchdringt-perhaps permeates is better] the world. He adds, The world isgiven to me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there (7.7.16). Notice the reemphasis of the idea that the will is so to speak, completely beyondthis world of facts-its limit. Second, notice the implicit emphasison the prior givenness of this world. The world is not something thatwe can bring into being in any way. Given these familiar claims,what can we make of the idea that the will in some way penetratesor permeates the world? For if it does this, is this not to say thatin some way the will gets into the world? And how could the willbe in the world without being operative in the world? These puzzleslead directly to vVittgenstein's discussions of the relation of the willto the body, and to bodily action.

he will and the body. The concepts of the will and the bodyare related to each other in the concept of action. vVittgenstein's


19/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 197difficulties about this relation reflect a difficulty in his idea of action.vVhen he says that it looks as if part of the world, i.e., my body orparts of it, were closer to my will than the rest of the world, heimmediately adds, But of course it is undeniable that in a popularsense I do certain things and do not do others (Notebooks, 4.11.16).I shall say more specifically about action below.

There are two important passages in the Notebooks in which theideas of will, body, and action are related to each other. At 20.10.16vVittgenstein writes, At any rate I can imagine carrying out theact of will for raising my arm, but that my arm does not moveLet us go further and suppose that even the sinew did not move, andso on. We should then arrive at the position that the act of will doesnot relate to a body at all, and so that in the ordinary sense o theword there is no such thing s the act o will (my italics). Presumably it is part of the ordinary sense of act of will that performance of an act of will necessarily involves something happeningin the world, e.g., in my body. Wittgenstein is then supposing thatwe might come to conceive of a kind of act of will taking placealthough nothing happened in the world. Indeed, his argumentseems to be that this possibility is contrary to first sight, alreadyimplicit in the ordinary use of the phrase act of will.

At 21.7.16 he writes, Let us imagine a man who could use noneof his limbs and hence could, in the ordinary sense, not exercisehis will. He then supposes that this man could, as it were, exercisehis will indirectly, by communicating it to someone else. t is clearthat he thinks all of this is a possibility. Let us distinguish the kindof willing, here imagined as the ethical will, from its ordinarysense as the body-moving will. Wittgenstein's considerations will,then, have shown that a man may possess the ethical will withoutpossessing the body-moving will. Ethical willing does not necessarily involve the capacity for bodily action.

The concept of a body-moving will, as introduced here, is theconcept of a will which is essentially embodied in some action.Now Wittgenstein seems to distinguish between action and speechin the second passage quoted above. t is not clear why, and it makeshis argument unnecessarily weak. Even speech involves bodily movements, and thus the distinction between ethical willing and bodymoving willing is not yet clear. Of course the ethical will, unlike thebody-moving will, is not immediately embodied in that action at


20/27

198 IDEALrSTIC STUDIESwhich it aims: it is embodied only indirectly, via its being communicated to someone else who is presumably to carry it out. Stillit shares with the body-moving will, according to Wittgenstein'sown description, the important feature of being effective possiblyeffective-in the world. And Wittgenstein could, I think, havestrengthened his position if he had postulated a completely ineffec-tive will. This is not inconceivable. We have only to extend his ownexample by imagining someone who has lost all power of movementincluding the power of speech, so that it is quite impossible for himto communicate his will to anyone else by any means whatever. Wecan still perfectly well credit such a person with desires and an ethicalattitude, in the ordinary sense.

In fact this extremely inefft Ctive will seems to be a demand ofWittgenstein's own theory that the world and the will are logicallyindependent. For a body-moving will must be connected essentiallywith some (human) body. This would not be possible if the generaltheory were true. Indeed it seems to follow from the general theorythat there can be no such thing as an act of will in the ordinarysense. To say this is to say that there can be no actions, in theordinary sense of the word. ,\Ve can of course identify among theworld's happenings a class of events involving movements of (human)bodies. But this does not identify a class of events differing incategory from events not involving movements of human bodies.Psychophysical parallelism. In the long Notebooks entry at 1510.16, Wittgenstein considers yet another way in which the conceptsof will and body might be related. This passage seems to introducea concept of will which is distinct from, and wider than, eitherconcept so far discussed. For ,\Vittgenstein here appears to identifywill with Geist, i.e., spirit, or character. As I can infer my spirit(character, will) from my physiognomy, so I can infer the spirit(will) of each thing from its physiognomy. (N.B. He is going to reject the inference-view contained in this conception.)

This passage is difficult to interpret, since Wittgenstein does notcome down quite decisively on either side. He does reject the ideathat spirit and body are related merely empirically, i.e., causally,for there is no causal nexus, as he repeated later in the Tractatusin a quite general context. (See 5.136.) A natural philosopher'salternative is the view that the relation is in some sense internal.So an angry face would, on this view, be angry in itself, as he says,


21/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 199and not just through its empirical connection with feelings of anger.I f the relation were internal, we could of course then genuinelyinfer the nature of the spirit from the nature of the body, i.e.,its physiognomy. (See Tractatus, 5.131 to 5.133 for the generalunderpinnings of this claim.) When Wittgenstein speaks, in thispassage, of the psychophysical conception, he appears to meansomething like this aprioristic theory.

In his considerations he now proceeds to broaden the parallelismhe has introduced. He writes, Now is it true (following the psychophysical conception) that my character is expressed only in the buildof y body or brain and not equally in the build of the whole of therest of the world? This contains a salient point. This parallelism,then, really exists between my spirit, i.e. spirit, and the world. Thisconclusion is probably behind his identification of the worldand life.

Interestingly, it is in the context of this argument about psychophysical parallelism that Wittgenstein first writes down the thoughtthat turns up in the Tractatus (5.64) as the claim that solipsism,strictly thought through, coincides with realism. In the otebookshis expression is somewhat different. This is the way that I havetravelled: Idealism divides men from the world as unique, solipsismdivides me out as solitary, and at last I see that I too belong withthe rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over,and on the other as unique the world. So idealism strictly thoughtthrough leads to realism.

The argument that led Wittgenstein to solipsism appears to beas follows. I f we raise the question of ascribing a spirit (character,will) to beings other than ourselves, a familiar answer is that weare justified in doing this in virtue of a certain analogy. I f I wereto look like the snake and to do what i t does then I should be suchand-such Notebooks, 15.10.16). Wittgenstein seems to construethis argument as part of the general theory of psychophysical parallelism. But he now raises an objection. But the question ariseswhether even here my body is not on the same level with that of thewasp and of the snake and surely it s so), so that I have neitherinferred from that of the wasp to mine nor from mine to that of thewasp (my italics).

So i f inference comes in here at all, it is no more inference fromthe relation between my body and my spirit to the relation between


22/27

2 IDEALISTIC STUDIESyour body and your spirit than it is the other way round. So atleast Wittgenstein rejects the familiar form of solipsism that ispresupposed by an attempt to use the argument from analogy. Hewas, like the genuine solipsist, still inclined to say that there couldbe only one spirit. Only it will now have to be a will that is common to the whole world Notebooks) 17.10.16). We can still in asense identify this will with my will: but the sense of this identification is obviously quite different from ordinary solipsism. As myidea is the world, in the same way my will is the world-will (ibid.).Some at least of this doctrine is still implicitly present in theTractatus. For in that work we still find that my will is the world'slimit; that is to say, that it is the world's will, as we might call it.

Wittgenstein does not make it clear how this third concept ofwill is distinguished from, or related to, the two other concepts ofwill-the concepts of the body-moving will (the will embodied inaction) and the ethical will (ineffective and world-independent wishing). I am inclined to think it relates more closely to the latter.For if we take it that when Wittgenstein speaks of the world of thehappy man as being a happy world he is tacitly doing ethics, itfollows that we shall be doing something very close to ethics if weparaphrase that remark by saying that the character of the happyman is mirrored in his world, his life.

ction and the will. I want here to return to the difficult topicof action. I t is here that vVittgenstein seems to have experiencedsome of his greatest difficulties. Let us begin, once again, from theidea that the will has to have some foothold in the world. Inthe Notebooks) at 4.11.16, vVittgenstein writes, I f the will has tohave an object in the world, the object can be the intended actionitself. And the will does have to have an object. For I cannot willwithout willing that p i.e., that something determinate shouldcome to be the case.

The claim that the will has to have an object in the world isambiguous. I t might be understood as the claim that the will musthave some potential object in the world, as, say, fear and hope musthave potential objects. I t might also be understood as the claim thatthe will must have an actual object in the world. There are, perhaps,some grounds for this strong interpretation for vVittgenstein. Forseveral times he makes it plain that he does not consider the actof will as something independent of and prior to the willed action.


23/27

WITTGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 2 1

This is clear: it is impossible to will without already performingthe act of the will. The act of the will is not the cause of the actionbut the action itself. One cannot will without acting Notebooks)4.11.16). He adds later, Wishing is not acting. But willing isacting The fact that I will an action consists in my performingthe action, not in my doing something else which causes the action.He adds, The wish precedes the event, the will accompanies it.

Wittgenstein thus seems to identify the act of will with thewilled action. This partly explains his view that the act of willis compelled to accompany the willed action. The relation be-tween the act of will and the willed action is some kind of internalrelation.

f the act of will is identified with the willed action, then it comesto appear as if it were identical with what is its own object. Thisis peculiar, since it implies that in this case we cannot make theusual distinction between mental act and object that we can,for example, in respect of fear or hope, or wishing.

In the Notebooks at 8.7.16, Wittgenstein wrote, What my willis, I do not yet know. t is fairly natural to begin by trying toidentify the will with wanting or wishing. t seems to have been theabsence of an internal connection between wanting and its fulfill-ment that first led Wittgenstein to claim that the world and the willmust be independent. At 21.7.l6 he appears to identify the conceptI have called the ethical will with wanting; at any rate, wantingis an essential constituent of such a will. At 29.7.16, too, he seemsto move from the question whether it is possible not to will atall directly to the concept of not wanting anything.

Even if something like that identification were accepted, it wouldnot follow that we must abandon the identification of the act ofwill with the willed action. For it is possible to claim that wantingis one of the activities of the will. Wittgenstein does make just thissuggestion at one point Notebooks) 21.7.16). This move would,however, force a dissociation of the concepts of action and bodilymovement. For clearly wanting is not itself an activity in the senseof itself involving bodily movements.On the other hand, Wittgenstein has two ways of contrasting thewill and wanting. At 4.11.16 he writes, The wish precedes theevent, the will accompanies it. This does not perhaps imply thatwishing cannot ever accompany the event, only that willing can


24/27

202 IDEALISTIC STUDIESnever precede the willed action. Again, that the act of will ac-companies the willed action is not a merely contingent matter offact. On the other hand, even if a desired action be accompanied bythe corresponding wish, this can never be more than a contingentmatter of fact.

One possible conclusion may be as follows. f wanting is to beidentified with a kind of willing, it must be identified with theethical will, rather than the body-moving will. For wanting can

obviously be quite ineffective. Again, it is obviously possible thatthere are conceptual relations between wanting and that broaderidea of the will which Wittgenstein identifies with character, spirit.This is surely, however, one of those points at which Wittgensteingot out of his Notebooks difficulties by simply abandoning a certainpart of their views. Nothing is heard in the Tractatus of the dialectics of the Notebooks with a few faint exceptions. I shall suggestbelow, moreover, a radical interpretation of Wittgenstein's viewson the will which will allow us to make sense of nearly everythingthat appears even in the Notebooks and that fits the Tractatus too.At this point we need note only the apparently insoluble confusionsgenerated by the supposition that Wittgenstein has a unitary conceptof the will.

he freedom of the will. t is natural to follow a discussion ofaction by a discussion of the classical idea of the will as free.Wittgenstein, however, says very little about this. The freedomof the will consists in this, that: future actions cannot be known yet.We could know them only if causality were an inner necessity, likethat of logical inference. (See Tractatus 5.1362, and Notebooks27.4.15.) This is a minimal characterization of the freedom of thewill. For the impossibility of knowing what actions are going to beperformed is just part of the general impossibility of knowing whatevents are going to occur. t is clearly claimed in the Tractatus(6.3631 to 6.36311) that we have no grounds for believing that thesimplest eventuality will in fact be realized. We do not knowthat the sun will rise tomorrow. This claim is founded, first, onWittgenstein's total rejection of the idea of induction as a kindof logical inference. Induction occurs, but does not involve employment of a special class of laws of logic; it can thus be justified onlyin a psychological sense. This attack goes with his attack on theLeibnizian notion of causality (see Tractatus 6.36 to 6.361, 6.32 to


25/27

WIITGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 2 3

6.34, and 5.136). He seems to have thought this notion animistic,since he remarks that belief in a causal nexus is superstition. TheHumean claim is founded, second, on Wittgenstein's general doctrine of the logical independence of any two distinct events Trac-tatus, 5.135).

These grounds for Wittgenstein's view that the will is freemake it clear that this is a minimal view. For the will is not givenany kind of distinctive characterization.

To say that freedom of the will amounts to the unpredictability(i.e., logical unpredictability) of future actions is to say, conversely,that (logical) predictability of future actions would amount to thewill's being unfree. Such arguments have been found in the history of philosophy. However the idea of future actions as logicallypredictable can be given no sense whatever in the Tractatus system:it is the denial of a proposition that is itself a necessary truth andthus a tautology. So the unfreedom of the will, in this system, issomething inconceivable, self-contradictory. That the will is free isnow seen to be, in the Tractatus a tautology. Hence it gives us noinformation about the nature of the will.

Similarly, the idea of freedom does not seem to be given anycontent. f the impossibility of predicting future actions is just partof the impossibility of predicting the future, we have not yet beengiven any particular role for the idea of action (see above).

The absence of any distinctive characterization of the will, and itsfreedom, is a partial consequence of the view that the world islogically independent of the will. t is a partial consequence of theTractatus claim that the will is quite ineffective in the world. Indeed,it looks as if claiming total ineffectiveness for the will amounts toclaiming freedom of the will. For to claim that the will had a certaineffectiveness in the world would be to claim that the future couldin certain respects be predicted. And this would be claiming thatthe will is not wholly free.

In ordinary thought, perhaps, we connect those ideas that Wittgenstein disconnects and contraposes, i.e., the ideas that the will is freeand that it is partially effective. We ordinarily think that the will'sfreedom is shown in the predictability of future actions. Thesecommon sense views do, as I showed, crop up in the Notebooks inthe discussions of action and the will. Thus the Tractatus doctrineof the freedom of the will involves a wholesale rejection of every-


26/27

204 IDEALISTIC STUDIESthing in the Notebooks whose gist is that the will is in any wayeffective within the world. This must include the idea of the bodymoving will, the idea of the will as embodied in action. The Trac-tatus does, however, seem to allow room still for those other notionsof the will I introduced earlier, i.e., the notions of the purelyethical will and of the will character or Geist.

The transcendence of the will. The radical view of Wittgenstein1 wish to propose is that in the Tractatus we must distinguish between a phenomenal will and a transcendental will. This distinctionis in fact made in 6.423, w h ~ r Wittgenstein says, I t is impossibleto speak about the will insofar as it is the subject of ethical attributes.And the will s phenomenon interests only psychology (my italics).About ethics 1 shall not speak, although I believe it can be shownthat Wittgenstein's doctrine of the will is intimately bound up withhis ethical theories.

By the will as phenomenon, i.e the phenomenal will, Wittgenstein can mean only those phenomena, facts, which we are ordinarilyreferring to in speaking of the will or willing. This will, then,stands for the empirical facts of wanting, wishing, and hoping, ofvoluntary and deliberate action, and of happiness and unhappiness,and so forth. (For the latter, see Notebooks 30.7.16: happiness toocan be regarded as noumenon for the objective mark of the happylife can be only a metaphyical, a transcendental mark.) Thesephenomena are the subject-matter of empirical psychology, not ofphilosophy or logic. On the other hand, if we try to identify whatthe correlative will as noumenon (noumenal will) might be, interms of the set of definitions discussed above, both (i) will as Geistand (ii) the idea of the ineffective will, i.e., the ethical will seem tofit Wittgenstein's requirements.

The noumenal, transcendental, will is Wittgenstein's subject -the willing subject.

This transcendental will will not, like the phenomenal will, bepart of the world. It will not be in the world, an object or fact. (Ispeak loosely here.) I t will in fact be the world's limit.

The sense in which the transcendental willing subject is free andindependent of the world is explained by the arguments alreadygiven. Now it was seen there that these arguments end by giving onlya minimal, and hence unsatisfactory, account of the will. But wecan now see that this dissatisfaction was misplaced. For of the


27/27

WITIGENSTEIN'S EARLY THEORY OF THE WILL 2 5phenomenal subject, and will, there is no doubt much to say. Thepsychological characterization of the phenomena of willing is proba-bly extensive. But all of this is a matter of concern only to empiricalpsychology. But of the transcendental will, of course, nothing canbe said; and even those few things that apparently can be said, e.g.,that such a will exists, that it complements the world, etc., are notin the end really significant. So the very demand for any nonminimaldescription of the transcendental will is a mistake, resting on failureto see that Wittgenstein distinguishes the noumenal from the phenomenal. (It is, in the end, a mistake even to desire and attemptreference to the transcendental will, as it is a mistake to attemptreference to the transcendental subject.)

onclusionAlthough the argument of this essay is self-contained, it fails to sayeverything that is to be said concerning Wittgenstein's early theoriesof the will. For I have not discussed his ideas about the relationbetween the concepts of the will and the ethical, the latter under-stood as including the ideas of the meaning of life, happiness, value,duty, and God. It is obvious, however, that such a discussion wouldhave to be at least as complicated and lengthy as the analysis contained in my essay up to this point. For a further justification ofthis omission, I point with some hesitancy towards a distinction ofmethods or subjects. Let me say that what I have been doing in thisessay is sketching the epistemological aspects of Wittgenstein's earlythinking about the will. That his thinking has other aspects, including the ethical (in a very broad sense), is not denied. But I havelimited myself to a study of the former. I have tried, partly byargument and partly by plausible interpretation, to show that wecan make philosophical sense out of the puzzling remarks on the willin Wittgenstein's early writings. I have argued that we may ascribeto him a powerful and general theory of the will. And I havetried to show that this theory is one of the family of theories wemay call neo-Kantian. McGill University

wittgenstein’s early theory of the will

Documents