Reading Group: Williams on Wittgenstein

I'm going to be very brief today for the reason that my grip on some of the central aspects of this paper is pretty slender. As is familiar, Williams thinks that there is a view implicit in the later Wittgenstein that might be called 'first-person plural transcendental idealism'. All rests on his view that the later Wittgenstein accepts something along the lines of "the limits of our language mean the limits of our world" (p.150).

I want to focus in on two remarks that Williams makes that are, as I understand it, intended to give flesh to this first-person plural transcendental idealism. They are:

"what the world is for us is shown by the fact that we can make sense of some things and not others: or rather - to lose the last remnants of an empirical and third-personal view - in the fact that some things and not others make sense." (p.152)

"our language, in this sense in which its being as it is has no empirical explanation, shows us everything as it appears to our interests, our concerns, our activities, though in the only sense in which we could meaningfully say that they determined everything, that statement would be false. The fact that in this way everything can be expressed only via human interests and concerns, things which are expressions of mind, and which themselves cannot ultimately be explained in any further terms: that provides grounds, I suggest, for calling such a view a kind of idealism." (p.151)

The relevant "we" here is not an empirical group of people located within the world, but a plural version the metaphysical self of the Tractatus. This is what is supposed to legitimate the move in the first quote that would otherwise appear to express an unfounded optimism, or arrogance. The thought is perhaps expressed by saying that "we" refers to all possible subjects. One problem with this might be that we (some empirical group) cannot be said to have privileged access to what "we" can make sense of. But I won't say anything about that.

My query is why we should think of the first quote as expressing a form of idealism. It concerns, after all, what the world is for us. But shouldn't idealism tell us something about what the world is. I realise that this is overly blunt. But the point is that there is a way of reading the first quote such that it is very far from idealistic.

The second quote, I presume, is supposed to provide something of an answer to this query. It seems reasonable to suppose that Williams' use of "human" in this passage is a slip suggesting, as it does, some empirical group. But, in so far as I think I understand the claim, it once more seems to me to be susceptible to non-idealist readings. For the claims concerns "everything as it appears" and the way "everything can be expressed". But this doesn't strike me as being a claim about what is in any obvious way. Or, at least, I need to be shown why we should understand even this second passage amounts to something which should be regarded as treating the world (phenomenal, noumenal, empirical, transcendental, in-itself, whatever...) rather than our expression of it, or its appearance, as in some sense mind-dependent.

These remarks are, no doubt, naive. As I said, I felt that much of the subtlety of this paper was passing me by. But nobody said life was a bed of roses. J