Chapter XI: On Sense and Nonsense
Kazi A. Kadir
When the early Wittgenstein declared that most of what usually went by the name of philosophy was nonsense,
Ramsey reminded him that it was an important nonsense which should be taken seriously.
Wittgenstein then informed us that philosophy was a kind of disease,
a sort of sickness, which needed a therapeutic treatment. We had only to show the senselessness of philosophical thought as if they were a kind of obsessive fear and frustration and the therapeutist could show that they were unreasonable fears.
But why must philosophy be a sort of nonsense or a kind of disease. And if it is such, why has it also to be an ‘important nonsense’? Can ‘nonsense’ be important, and finally what is ‘nonsense’ anyway?
‘Sense’ and ‘nonsense’ are usually regarded as polar concepts. We talk about ‘sense’ in opposition to ‘nonsense’; a reference to one excludes talk about the other. What is nonsense cannot at the same time be sensible; an assertion about the one is taken to be a legitimate rejection of the other. However, talk about the one is not complete without the other since these concepts are, in fact, defined in terms of mutual exclusion; what is one, the other is not. But the burden of definition lies on ‘sense’ rather than on ‘nonsense’; we lay down the structure of sense, and what does not fit in this structure is rejected as nonsense.
When we use the word ‘sense’ in opposition to ‘nonsense’ usually we mean that it is ‘understandable’ and ‘cognitively acceptable’. When we say of a discourse that ‘it makes sense’ or ‘it is sensible’, we need not say also that it is ‘meaningful’.
A sentence or talk may not be meaningless, yet it may be nonsensical. Imagine a case where, after hearing a certain explanation of an event or after being told of a reason for a decision, a person may say, "It was nonsense." I may ask my young nephew not to talk nonsense when he says that he saw fairies in my room last evening or that he was afraid of going to the storeroom because he thought there were ghosts there. Or again, my exclaiming "What nonsense" when someone tells me that the light went out without any reason, etc.
In all such cases when we use the term ‘nonsense’, we mean that what is being said is either not backed up by cogent reasons, there are no reasons, some further reasons are needed, or that some facts are lacking. We have a hazy idea "that if such and such things are also said or done" then this talk would make sense. We always have a criterion in such situations and when all the elements of the talk fulfil that criterion we say, "It makes sense". If that is not possible or is not done, the talk is described as ‘nonsensical’.
To ‘have meaning’ is to fulfil a ‘semantic criterion’; to ‘have sense’ is to fulfil a ‘context criterion’.
To invoke a semantic criterion in order to signify the ‘meaning’ of a talk is to refer to the role or function the elements of that talk are supposed to perform. There can be other semantic criteria too, e.g., of mirroring or referring to images. A semantic criterion holds good in the case of indicatives and utterly fails with regard to imperatives and performatives. There are can-sentences as well as must-sentences but some such as do-sentences come under neither head. It has been the general practice to regard the indicatives as (1) different from the can- and the must-sentences, and (2) as more fundamental in the sense that what has ‘meaning’ must be reducible to the indicative-structure and that what fails any such reduction is nonsensical. Thus, it is believed that the can-
sentences and must-sentences should be assimilated to the indicatives. Accordingly, to say that "I promise to return this book tomorrow" is to say that "I am prepared or set to behave in a particular manner" and the sentence "I promise to return this book tomorrow" is descriptive of this set or preparedness.
But is this reduction or assimilation really correct? "I can walk ten miles a day" is not reducible to "I have just walked ten miles today" which does fulfil the semantic criterion, if I have just walked ten miles that day. But then "I can walk ten miles a day" is not nonsensical.
This ‘either-reducible-or-nonsensical’ principle, though correct, is derived from too restrictive a notion of meaning assimilable to truth. Meaning is confined to what is true or that which may possibly be true. This leads us to the strange conclusion that whatever is false or is liable to be false is nonsensical and meaningless. Unless we are writing a highly personalised dictionary, such a cavalier attitude towards conventional usage can hardly be allowed.
The only way out of this situation is that while still holding the necessity of the reduction of non-indicatives to indicatives, one refer to the ‘odd job’
character of words. Meaning then will not involve ‘truth’ but will refer to a medley of roles and functions. However, what is overlooked here is that to say that someone is engaged in odd jobs does not tell a person what sort of job he is doing. ‘Odd job’ is not another job. To say ‘meaning is not one but many’ is not very illuminating. If such is the case then the very attempt to assimilate the performatives and the imperatives to the indicatives will meet failure.
We must then treat sentences like "I can walk ten miles a day", "I hope you get good marks in the finals" independently of sentences like "Ishurdi is between Dacca and Rajshahi", etc. All this amounts to treating ‘sense’ independently of ‘meaning’, and having a criterion for sense different from the criterion of meaningfulness. The sense-criterion, as I have said earlier, will be called the context-criterion.
However, one may object that if ‘sense’ is contextual, so is meaning. The semantic criterion is fulfilled in a context. The meaning of ‘knowing’, it may be said, is contextual to human capacities and dispositions. If both ‘meaning’ and ‘sense’ are contextual, what reason can there be to distinguish one from the other? I hope this can be explained with help from an artist’s vocabulary. Let us take the example of colour. Colour is one form of radiant energy.
One colour is distinguished from the other because of a difference in wavelengths. The colour red will have a wavelength different, say, from that of yellow. However, there are different kinds of reds. When red is placed along with light brown, it undergoes a very decisive change. It loses its luminosity. If placed against a white background, red attains a kind of brightness which it did not have when it was placed beside brown. It is called ‘red’ in both the situations or contexts, yet it ‘looks’ different. A colour’s vibratic-criterion is analogous to a word’s ‘semantic-criterion’,
while its ‘context-criterion’ is not very different from the principle according to which because of different colour contexts, a colour may undergo a series of gradual chromatic changes. Similarly a word may undergo such context variations and have different senses without losing its meaning. The principle of the chromatic changes because of the presence of different colours is a clue to the different senses of words. Words acquire different senses because of the human contexts in which they are employed. The sentence "shut the door" addressed to a son by a father and then again by the son to his father ‘means’ the same but ‘sounds different’; the words are the same but they have a different ‘ring’. Words ‘sound different’, acquire ‘different senses’ and give different ‘rings’ because we have gone beyond the notion of function (semantic criterion) to the concept of human ends and purposes. Function is a purely instrumental concept where we deal with tools and appliances; apart from one’s own self, others are taken merely as replaceable and manipulable entities. But to invoke the context-criterion, to talk about the sense of a word, is to refer to persons rather than to things, and to open the vista of human relations, hopes and aspirations.
In talking about ‘nonsense’ we should keep these facts in view. Ordinarily, what does not fulfil a criterion is regarded as nonsense and in most cases, such a situation is thought to be final. Nonsense cannot be more or less nonsense. Apart from Ramsey’s one brief remark, perhaps unintentional, philosophers believe that there are neither grades nor types of nonsense. What is nonsense is nonsense and that is the end of the matter. For them, I believe, nonsense is essentially incorrigible.
It appears, however, there is already a reason, at least at the common sense level, to grade ‘nonsense’. We hear remarks such as; "I tell you, it is complete nonsense." Or, "Yes, it is nonsense, all right." There are attempts at categorising ‘nonsense’. The categorising, again, is contextual. Remember sentences like: "It is nonsense if you take that position, but look at it from this angle." One can rightly conclude, perhaps, that ‘nonsense’ can be treated both vertically and horizontally; there can be grades as well as kinds of nonsense. However, I would not go so far as to say that every nonsense can be considered in both these ways. Not every nonsense can be graded. There are types of nonsense which shade into other types; some are hard to classify.
The concept of type is used to refer to a range of application of a predicate. It two predicates or sets of predicates have similar application (or range of application), they are said to fall under the same type. This is true of ‘kind’ as well; to say that two are of the ‘same kind’ is to say that a certain set of predicates is applicable to both. In cases where two sets of predicates are neither reducible to, nor replaceable by the other, they are said to refer to different types. There are type words, and there are question types as well. Questions can be of different types if they are satisfied by different sorts of answers. The question, "When did it happen?" is not satisfied by the answer, "It is red, or it is bigger than that," etc. When I speak of different types of nonsense, I have such satisfiability criteria in view. There are always almost unmentioned distinctions between our various references to ‘nonsense’. These distinctions need spelling out.
Consider the case of a doctor who diagnoses a certain disease and another doctor commenting: ‘nonsense’. What is implied here is that the first doctor has not taken all the facts into consideration and that if he had he would have given a different diagnosis. In ordinary language we will say that the diagnosis was ‘wrong’; philosophically, the statement about the patient’s sickness was ‘false’. Similarly, when I tell my nephew that it was nonsense to talk about ghosts in the store room, in philosophical jargon I implied that it was false that there was a ghost in the room. Nonsense in such situations means ‘false’. There is also a reference to the ‘fitness of things’ in our talk about ‘sense’ and ‘nonsense’.
If we take the case of a person naming a ship and a ‘low type’ wrecking the ship, were someone to say that the intruder named the ship, we would angrily ask him not to talk nonsense. This may be called ‘non-formal’ type of nonsense to distinguish it from the ‘formal’ where ‘reasons’ are sought and not ‘facts’. In such cases, conceptual schemes are isolated, logical distinctions are overlooked, and unwarranted ‘reduction’ of the types is attempted.
I will now take the concept of grading in nonsense, but start from the other end. We have said that ‘sense’ is a context-criterion word. Criteria are fulfilled. We achieve success by different methods and through various ways. Sometimes these ways are approved; at other times they are disapproved, even if we have succeeded in fulfilling the criterion. Sense, then is a ‘success word’. It is used in contexts where we successfully fulfil a norm or a criterion.
Success, however, is not a fixed concept. We are rather liberal in talking about ‘success’. In cases where someone fails to come up to the full norm, and does not meet with full success, we do not mind saying, and sometimes quite approvingly, that "he almost did it", "he almost beat it".
After a track event, we hear someone talk of "almost winning the race". While marking the examination scripts we have a ‘rough norm’ rather than a rigid, logically tight standard. This ‘rough norm’ goes fairly well with the mundane affairs and even with scientific assessments as well. ‘Attainable certainty’ is an expression one often hears in functional physics. In field studies standards of research are loosely set and ‘attainable accuracy of results’ is enough to guarantee the success of an expedition. In such cases ‘success’ does not mean proving a theorem in classical geometry and initialling it Q. E. D. Not all successes are mathematical.
What we have said about ‘success’ holds equally well in the case of ‘sense’ as a success word. Literature does not lack examples of expressions like: He was fairly successful in making sense of his theme, i.e., he was surprisingly able to work out all the implications and consequences of the subject discussed. After a classroom session, a tutor may confide to his colleagues about a student’s paper that as it stands it can be judged approvingly, however ‘partial’ the ‘success’ that the student may have achieved.
Now we grade partial success by marks, but unfortunately we do not have cataloguing names for ‘partial success’ or ‘partial achievements’. A similar difficulty is encountered in cataloguing grades of success. However, we do sometimes refer to a talk being ‘weak’ or ‘weighty’, ‘sound’ or ‘unsound’; we hear of a ‘plain talk’, ‘just a talk’. ‘Unsound’, ‘weak’, ‘plain talk’, ‘just a talk’ are pretty often regarded as descriptive of a discourse being short of a desired status. These words refer to certain characteristics over and above the ‘meaningfulness’ of a discourse. Of course, they cannot be taken as forming a hierarchy of grades. Here we find the same difficulty as we do in a less advanced language which has names for distinct hues but no names for colour-saturation. It is similar with ‘sense’. At one end of the scale we have ‘sense’, at the other we have ‘nonsense’. As far as the intermediate grades are concerned, i.e., above nonsense, below sense, our language is blind as regards grades.
No doubt we do mention ‘sense-grades’ since we talk about ‘making complete sense’, not ‘frightfully nonsensical’, etc., but there are no descriptive names for them. There are, however, languages which do have such descriptive names for various grades of sense/ nonsense.
The question about a kind of ‘nonsense’ being important or not, can be answered with reference to its possible social and conceptual relevance. There are ‘grand failures’ and ‘miserable successes’. There are also ‘important mistakes’ which, though they do not solve an immediate problem, serve as pointers to other issues. When Ryle
tells us that Hegel does not deserve study even as an error, we have a case of an error being unimportant.
But for Popper, Hegel is important as an error. It is the same with nonsense. The history of philosophy offers a variety of important and unimportant ‘errors’ and ‘nonsense’.
The classical example of philosophical nonsense for Wittgenstein, I believe, will be Platonic thinking. Plato tried to put meaning in an apparently meaningless world, order in a disorderly situation, reason in absurdity. The result is philosophical anomaly and bewilderment. Plato devised a style of philosophical writing which for him did justice to the issues which pertained to life and were thus dramatic. They could not be dealt with in a neat, dry textbook fashion. The ‘drama of life’ has to be dramatically, conversationally, presented. The dialogues move, twist and turn. The conversation starts, breaks; there is a deviation of theme; again, the thread of the conversation is picked up and a chain formed.
However, one may ask: why is the thread picked up and a chain formed? If life is a drama, why can it not have an unpredicted end? Why does every fact or event have to point to the impending end? It appears as if Plato after all is writing textbooks in a rather untextbooklike fashion. The threading through separate entities which do not stand for such a treatment, for Wittgenstein, leads to the genesis of philosophical absurdity, i.e., to reading a system where there is none.
One will hold that philosophy has, through the ages, been an attempt to reconcile the ‘irrationality’ of the earthly existence with the idea of system and order.
This is the absurd discrepancy between what is the case and what ought to be the case. But a person cannot, or should not say, what ought to be the case because he does not know his way about it.
A philosopher is like Kafka’s surveyor who had a work to do but does not know how to go about it. There is persistence of effort, but no method.
However, there is more to Plato’s hopeless swing between order and disorder, namely, his equally incurable oscillation between hope and despair which becomes so manifest in his tragic account of knowledge. The most eager, skyward flight of the soul to attain Episteme
turns into the tragic realisation by the freed prisoners of the cave that truth and beauty are too painful to behold.
Some lucky people may dare and succeed, for the rest, all knowledge is nostalgia. We are nostalgic when we fail to relive our past. Our being becomes alienated and we crave or unity and completeness, but are prevented by our present. Meno’s question about goodness remains unanswered. The knowledge one acquires by looking into the past, as shown by Socrates, is not knowledge of the highest, but of the mathematical
-- one step down from the highest.
It is then no knowledge.
This epistemic pessimism pervades Platonic writings and the Socratic searching. Socrates asks questions, but gives no answer, and those supplied by others are wrong since the logic of the questions does not correspond to that of the answers. There is an essential discrepancy between the two logics. If one is the logic of Episteme, the other is the logic of the Doxa: Answers are sought for the contingent, but they are sought in the necessary.
The category confusion which we found in Platonic writings had its counterpart in Baconian conclusions. Bacon succeeded no doubt in giving a non-Platonic start to his system but finally succumbed to, what I would like to call, category-equivalence nonsense. There were some Platonic elements too in Bacon’s thinking. He intended to provide a new ‘instrument’ of knowledge with which its possessor could do many things. It supplied him with power. The source of this power was nature. A person only had to purify himself from irrational prejudices, commonplace notions and sentimentality to have the right to possess that power -- knowledge.
For Bacon, then, knowledge had some special status, which a person acquired the way he could earn title to a piece of land. In the latter you presented the relevant documents, in the former you showed your credentials.
Knowledge did not imply frustrations, which was obvious from the role Bacon gave to knowledge. If knowledge was power, an instrument which gave you mastery over the affairs of the world, the value of such an instrument lay in its uncanniness, efficacy and infallibility. Knowledge could not go wrong. This was almost definitory with Bacon. He believed, one thinks, that it was stretching the meaning of knowledge to cover cases where you expected but found your hopes frustrated and broken, ‘Anticipating nature’ was a case of ignorance and not of knowledge. A person was not supposed to make conjectures, frame hypotheses, manipulate data, verify or falsify hypotheses. Nature is an open book; you only had to look at it with unprejudiced eyes and behold its majesty. The gods of classical antiquity were now replaced by the goddess Nature.
This is what I meant by the category-equivalence nonsense.
For Plato knowledge either was hidden in your past or had a transcendent source for Bacon as for Plato, knowledge was the court of last resort. If knowledge was power, it should also have authority, without which all power is impotent. Nature gave Bacon that authority and this is precisely what one would like to object to.
What strikes us here is the fact that while Bacon strove to give an account of human knowledge, the account itself became so inhuman. He relied on ‘senses’ and yet ascribed ‘non-sensory’, logical and necessary qualities to them. He strove to deal with the actual, in opposition to the ideal; and yet made it an unattainable ideal. The mistake was to see the contingent as the necessary. What were separate and distinct categories were seen as equivalent.
Hegel went further than Bacon and tried to argue the necessity of the contingent. Hegel started by making a distinction between Necessary and Contingent, the all-embracing and the merely individual, and viewed the contingent as a mode or determination of the necessary. The principle of dichotomy holds good in the whole of Hegelian thought: the distinction between Reason and Understanding, between the Ideal and the Actual, between the Particular and the Universal. These distinctions are put under the fundamental division between the Necessary and the Contingent; in each case the particular, actual or individual was shown to ‘swing over’ to its opposite and exhibit its particularity and contingency as its necessary mode of existence. All existence is fatal existence. Hegel’s logic showed this fatality or essentiality of the non-essential. Hegel not only assigned this logic to physical nature, but applied it to social and psychological phenomena. For Hegel, it was not enough to talk about the case but also ‘why this and not otherwise’; it was not sufficient to say that if promises are made ‘they ought to be kept’, but why there must be promises at all.
I take this to be a legacy of Platonism. In Plato the particular ‘shared’ its existence in the Ideal. It ‘participated’ in the Universal the way members of the family do in the affairs of the family. But one is a member of the family because one is fated to be so.
This Platonic echo with Hegelian ‘resonance’
found its full expression in Wittgenstein. The early Wittgenstein was also concerned, like others, with ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. If there was no order, we must invent one. But Wittgenstein afterwards confessed that all this was nonsense. I would certainly like to say something about the background of this confession and then end with the observation that the sort of nonsense Wittgenstein found in his earlier writings plagued his later writings too.
The ‘method’ which the early Wittgenstein wanted to impose upon the world and which he was ‘forced’
to abandon was the traditional logico-mathematical one. Wittgenstein had found that this method relied on consistency and adherence to the non-contradiction principle, which principle had to be followed. Whether it had to be faithfully followed was the problem for the post-Tractatus Wittgenstein. It was an either-consistency-or-contradiction dilemma. The later Wittgenstein chose contradiction, and from formal deduction ‘swung over’ to Hegelian dynamism.
He asked: "Does it make our language less unable if... a proposition yields its contradiction and vice-versa?"
This ‘superstitious fear’ of ‘contradiction’
is to be replaced by the Hegelian boldness that contradiction is the soul of the real. "If there is a contradiction here, well, there is a contradition here." "Does it do any harm here?"
The difficulty with contradictions is that they are not helpful for predictions and generalisations.
But the craving for generality and consistency
overlooks the role of language in life; they give rise to ‘philosophical puzzles’ and ‘bewilderment’ and thus must be cured. As with illnesses and their treatment,
we have to look for the source
of philosophical illness -- the philosophers’ puzzlement.
This is looking for the cause, rather than seeking reasons. In fact philosophical convictions are not unlike the groundless conviction (Unbeqrundeten Uber-zeugung) of a person who, while taking a walk in the environs of a city, may believe that the city lies on his right rather than on the left.
As the person has no reason for such a belief, we have to explain it psychoanalytically and determine its causes.
The source of philosophical bewilderment is ascribing a permanent role to odd-job
words: we make unreasoned, groundless decisions with regard to the use of words.
If earlier Wittgenstein was involved in nonsense, that is, in the absurdity of reducing the empirically contingent to the mathematically necessary, later he swung over to ultra-contingency and irrationalism. If no contradiction reigns in the Tractatus, contradiction rules afterwards. This world, however, is populated mainly with ‘things’ rather than with persons. There are chess pieces; machines breaking down; streets, suburbs and cities; maps and their countries.
Words too are things; they are tools and appliances which have functions and uses.
I have a feeling that with all his fight against the craving for generality and system, Wittgenstein is aiming at a sort of ‘monism of things’ at the expense of persons. If language is a form of life,
he has made this form rather rigid and arbitrary. Fundamentally, Wittgenstein’s explanations are thing-bound,
rather than person-oriented: his talks of persons is in terms of things.
Though Wittgenstein’s purpose is to break false analogies between different expressions, he creates fascinating but false analogies between men and machines, behaviour and function. If for Wittgenstein all pre-Tractatus philosophy was nonsense in the way that pre-Kantian philosophy was less than real philosophy for Hegel, then post-Tractatus philosophy is no less a nonsense in a definitely non-Tractatus sense. But it is important in so far as it points to a possible avoidance of such one-sided reductions.
We can still achieve sense in our talk and actions, provided we first come out of this nonsense in which thusfar we have been living.
Notes
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Author: Naeem Ahmad
