Just the Facts, Ma'am

October 14, 2007 12:31 PM

Wittgenstein filter: Tractatus 6.43 (end) "The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man" What does this mean?

years ago, I thought I understood this. W makes a big deal that (as I understand it) the facts are the same in the two worlds. I concluded from this that even if you picked up the unhappy man and plopped him down in the happy man's world, he would still be unhappy. I still think this is true. But now, I am not even sure I understand what I mean by that.

1) If the facts are really the same in the two worlds, why is one man happy and the other man unhappy? (I can't believe W was thinking in the Norman Vincent Peale way, i.e., a happy man keeps his mind full of happy thoughts while an unhappy man keeps his mind full of unhappy thoughts... or did he mean that?)
2) W seems to believe that his "will" can have no effect on the "facts", as I understand it. How could anyone believe that?

This section of the Tractatus has always been the part that spoke to me the most. I am curious to know what other people make of it. Thanks.

(for those in the know, I think my thoughts on this have been most strongly shaped by Mounce's Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus.)

posted by wittgenstein to religion & philosophy (22 comments total)

Not a philosopher or anything, but that quote sounds a lot like "the glass is half empty/half full" to me. Does it necessarily have to have a deeper meaning?
posted by Leon at 12:36 PM on October 14, 2007

I think that different people have different "hardwirings" that make their experience of the same facts, the same pleasures, and the same pains very different, and these differences sort out how "happy" we are. To use a crude example, would a blind person be as happy as a sighted person in a world where most of the pleasures are visual? Or a numb person in a tactile world? The "facts" of the world are the same, but the experience of those facts varies greatly from person to person.

I also think that most people have a certain "set point" for happiness that can can be decreased much more easily than it can be increased. Most of "becoming happy" is about doing things to remove causes of decreased happiness rather than creating sources of increased happiness.
posted by sherlockt at 12:50 PM on October 14, 2007

2) W seems to believe that his "will" can have no effect on the "facts", as I understand it. How could anyone believe that?

Huh? One's will DOESN'T have any effect on the facts. I can try to will a million dollars to magically appear, but that make it magically appear. But maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

I totally buy the happy man/unhappy man thing. I tend to be pessimistic REGARDLESS of the facts. Yes, if there's a glass that's half full, it will strike me as half empty. I also dwell on things that aren't facts, but are possible outcomes. I dwell on negative possible outcomes. I don't choose to do this. It just happens to me. Maybe there are way I could fix it (therapy, drugs) and I am considering these things. But that doesn't change the fact that I don't choose my unhappiness.

It also doesn't change the fact that someone with a different mindset will have a totally different outlook.

I don't think happiness/unhappiness has anything to do with facts. Facts are neutral. What's a happy fact? "There's food in the refridgerator"? Calling that "happy" is contingent on all kinds of assumptions. Same with "unhappy facts." It's a fact that humans kill each other. Is that bad? Maybe. It depends on your values and outlook -- which are non-facts.

Suppose I take two small children and, every Friday, give each a piece of candy. I also give one of the two kids a small but painful electric shock. That kid will grow up to associate candy with pain. Years later, when they're both adults, they'll have very different moods when walking into a candy store -- yet the "facts" of the store will be the same for both.

That's an extreme, unnatural example, but it plays out in more subtle ways all the time. We interpret facts through a huge number of personal associations and habits. We never encounter facts neutrally. That's one of the reasons it's so important to do double-blind experiments. Even scientists can't face facts neutrally.
posted by grumblebee at 12:54 PM on October 14, 2007

"If the facts are really the same in the two worlds, why is one man happy and the other man unhappy? "

Because "The sense of the world is outside the world". "Will" and "sense" and "happiness" are not things subject to the same rules as the propositional facts of the world. They are, in the view of W in the LTP, like aesthetic judgment, or ethics: things which rational philosophy cannot speak to.
posted by mr_roboto at 1:18 PM on October 14, 2007 [3 favorites has favorites]

I agree with mr_roboto, one cannot look at this statement and make a conclusion without being intimately familiar with W and Vienna Circle philosophy at the time.
posted by geoff. at 1:38 PM on October 14, 2007

If you are happy with a non-specialist response, I presume Wittgenstein's point (no expert on his school) is that one's subjective interpretation of perceived reality is not just different from that of another person, one's construction of that perception will also be different. Two persons whose minds have formed habits that dispose them to particular emotional responses will by and large fit the world as they see it to those frameworks.
Was Wittgenstein familiar with the mind-only schools following Asanga and Vasubandhu?
posted by Abiezer at 1:48 PM on October 14, 2007

This is what scholars think.
posted by limon at 2:06 PM on October 14, 2007

The rest of 6.4.3 (including all the sub-notes) does much to illuminate this passage.

You can read it online here, although it looks to be the older, less clear translation.

I think this is related to the often-quoted W line: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world."

He's trying to say that although a man's attitude (his will) cannot in itself change the state of affairs of the world, it does indeed change how that man perceives the world. i.e. a happy man sees a loving puppy, an unhappy man sees an enslaved animal.

The attitude of these two men changes how they describe the world. Which, according to W, is their world.
posted by kpmcguire at 2:39 PM on October 14, 2007

Here's my take (it is unclear, by the way, if this question can be answered without figuring out whether "gute oder boese Wollen" refers to normatively or empirically good willing, something I am not at all qualified to answer; the argument for the former is the descent of this section from the discussion of ethics, and for the latter the otherwise unexplainable reference to happiness).

6.2: That this world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of my language are the limits of my world.
6.4: All propositions are of equal value.
6.42: Propositions cannot express anything higher.
The rest of 6.43: If good or bad willing changes the world, it can only change the limits of the world, not the facts; not the things that can be expressed in language.
In brief, the world must thereby become quite another. It must so to speak wax and wane as a whole.

It is clear, given the rest of 6.43, that the phrase to be defined or explained is "the limits of the world", because the structure of the argument is:
1. Good or bad willing changes the world.
2. Good or bad willing does not change the facts (the referents of language).
3. When the world changes, it means only that its limits change.
.: 4. Good or bad willing changes the limits of the world.
5. The world is my world.
.: 6. Good or bad willing changes the limits of my world.
7. My world, when its limits are changed, becomes quite another, waxing and waning as a whole.
8. The world of the happy ones is quite another than that of the unhappy ones.
.: 9. The world of the happy is different because its limits are different.

What does it mean for the limits of the world to be different? Happiness and unhappiness are not higher-order propositions; they are both defined by the structure of limits they put on the world (6.4,6.42). In other words, that someone is unhappy means just that his world has different limits and is thereby a different world.

Well, that begs the question, doesn't it? No. Why? Because Wittgenstein isn't trying to explain happiness or unhappiness; he is trying to explain the influence of interpretation on the facts of the world. The fact that someone's unhappiness is enough to change the limits of the world and make it an entirely different one from that of the happy man is sufficient demonstration.

1) If the facts are really the same in the two worlds, why is one man happy and the other man unhappy? (I can't believe W was thinking in the Norman Vincent Peale way, i.e., a happy man keeps his mind full of happy thoughts while an unhappy man keeps his mind full of unhappy thoughts... or did he mean that?)

You're assuming that the limits set on the world by interpretation are fluid and amenable to change, whereas facts are not. Actually, if we buy into Wittgenstein's theory, they're even less amenable to change. This is because facts have no meaning as noumena, and only acquire meaning when they are interpreted in the context of a "my world" of limits. An unhappy man will never be able, Peale-wise, to change his thinking, because he is dependent on his unhappy interpretation of the world. Whence unhappiness? Wittgenstein doesn't try to answer that question, but the Tractatus does not exclude the possibility that limits evolve out of one another by some dialectical process or other. That's, I think, the most explanation you'll be able to get out of this subsection.

2) W seems to believe that his "will" can have no effect on the "facts", as I understand it. How could anyone believe that?

Facts are noumena. We can't access them, change them, or do anything to them besides, sorta, express them by language. Good or bad will is merely a change in the phenomenal interpretation of the world. This is why "ethics and aesthetics are one." How could anyone not believe that?


Anyway, my interpretation of this question can be summed up with Thesis 7. If Wittgenstein is only speaking about the interpretation of the world, we must be silent about any theory of happiness we think he is advocating.

Sorry this was so damn long and amateurish.
posted by nasreddin at 2:44 PM on October 14, 2007

So yeah, here's another rephrasing of the answer you've already received.

Here, "world" refers to a fact-maker defining the thing it inhabits. When considering the idea of differing opinion, the real-world subject matter becomes irrelevant. Worlds would be inseparable only in the case that the ideas are assessed identically. This isn't impossible...only a rarified situation.

I'd imagine the disparateness of minds frustrated Ludwig. Happy and sad is an easy way to show the distance between facts and the worlds they end up constructing.
posted by Monstrous Moonshine at 3:15 PM on October 14, 2007

I can't answer your question, knowing little about Wittgenstein, but pursuing my intuition about why he might have said that has been extremely interesting, and I'll likely read more about him in consequence. Thank you.

If you want to know what this intuitive response of mine was, it was that Wittgenstein was drawing on an experience with some form of mental illness, either bipolar disorder or bipolar type schizoaffective disorder. These can profoundly alter perception depending on mood, even causing visual disturbances and hallucinations. I can't prove my speculations, but sufferers from bipolar disorder have claimed him as one of their own. He also had a great deal of sympathy for people like Georg Trakl, a poet who was likely bipolar.

Even if I'm right about Wittgenstein the man, though, it does not mean that he wrote what he did from that point of view.
posted by topynate at 6:26 PM on October 14, 2007

It has been a number of years since I last read the Tractatus! but I cosign nasreddin's reply.

the limits of my language are the limits of my world

In effect.. Can it be that the unhappy man has a more limited language, then? Not in the sense that he uses fewer words. Though, perhaps he does. But he uses them to speak of what is the case in a very different way than the happy man. I am having a hard time saying what I mean, but if you learn a foreign language it can cause you to look at things in a different way. A happy man and unhappy man use the same words but don't speak the same language.
posted by citron at 7:06 PM on October 14, 2007

As to how my "will" can have no effect on the facts: well, if I decide to do something and do it, then this becomes another fact, something external to me. In a sense my will can only change things be becoming factual, becoming part of the factual world. And in this sense my will is also just another fact. If I'm hungry and want to make breakfast, I can also describe this factually and see it factually, hence for me it is also just facts and more facts, nothing of a different substance than the rest.

But I think -- this without having read Tractatus for a long time -- that there is a factual self and a factual will that are simply parts of the word, and there is a self that sits further back, that W talks about like an Archimidean point of awareness, which is outside the world and holds its limits together. And it is of this self that I imagine it's will could not change the facts but only color the entire world. One can have a conflicted relation to the world, or a happy one, affirming and celebrating all that comes, que sera sera; or one could have a pessimistic attitude and see everything as devalued; one could be troubled by one's own mortality and see the world of facts as a precarious and ultimately worthless because one day the whole screen will turn black, or one could be fascinated by its precariousness and treasure it all the more.
posted by creasy boy at 11:22 PM on October 14, 2007

But I think -- this without having read Tractatus for a long time -- that there is a factual self and a factual will that are simply parts of the word, and there is a self that sits further back, that W talks about like an Archimidean point of awareness, which is outside the world and holds its limits together. And it is of this self that I imagine it's will could not change the facts but only color the entire world.

Sartre talks about something like this in Being and Nothingness: the self-reflexive cogito, he calls it.
posted by nasreddin at 7:30 AM on October 15, 2007

As to how my "will" can have no effect on the facts: well, if I decide to do something and do it, then this becomes another fact, something external to me.

That's an extremely complicated, interesting and fraught statement. I think you're implying something like this:

(1) will-to-make-sandwich --> (2) muscles-move --> (3) sandwich-made.

Did (1) cause (3)? You didn't say "cause," you said "had an effect on," which is vague. I'm not sure what it means, so I'm going to stick to "cause." (Which is, alas, maybe the most complicated word in existence.)

Without digging too deep into "cause" (e.g. asking if there even is such a thing as "cause and effect"), can we really say that (1) caused (3) when (2) stands between them? Didn't (2) cause (3)?

Maybe (2) couldn't exist without (1), but even given this, is it fair to say that (1) caused (3)? Hitler couldn't have existed without oxygen, but it seems odd to say that oxygen caused the Holocaust. Or even that Hitler's mother caused it.

I do agree with you that brain states (such as "will") are physical processes. As such, one can make factual statements about them. And they are generally processes that lead to (cause) tangible ends: thoughts lead to other thoughts; impulses lead to muscles moving, etc.

So thoughts DO cause things to happen. But their power is limited. They can only cause things to happen to their "owner" (the person having the thoughts), and even they are further restricted by all sorts of physical laws (I can't will myself to fly). Usually, when people talk about will shaping facts, they're talking about much grander shaping. They're talking about something akin to prayer, magical thinking or "the power of positive thinking."

Another can of worms (and I'm only going to dip my toe in it): Free Will. Will (as an active process) can only change/create facts if it exists. I won't go on, because I don't want to derail, but the worms were eating at this thread before I mentioned the can.

Assuming that there's a material world (another can of worms!), we can't experience it directly -- only through our senses. So while you and I sense the same world, we each build our own mental model of it. Your model is filtered through your personality, limitations and prejudices. Which are different from my personality, limitations and prejudices. So it makes perfect sense for "my world" to be different from "your world" (but not completely different). In a mental sense, we're living in parallel universes.
posted by grumblebee at 8:06 AM on October 15, 2007

Yeah, that's what W seems to think, that we're living in parallel universes, but this is complicated by the fact that he thinks any statements of this sort are complete nonsense. Because you can only sensibly talk about facts in the world and not about your relation to the world, i.e. its coloring by happiness or sadness, 'your' world and 'my' world, etc. It's a self-destructing book ultimately, that's the really weird part about it that no-one really knows what to do with. At the end he pulls the rug out from everything and says you can't be saying all the things he's been saying.

What you're saying about the will's inability to cause things in the world seems approximately right to me...if a brain state causes a muscle movement that causes something else, then the fact that I can describe it this way shows that there's an 'I' that sits even further back than all this and can describe it as a set of external facts. And the question is what this 'I', the furthest removed 'I', can actually do. This is different from a psychological 'I' as in: the person named Karsten who likes steak and eggs. The concrete psychological 'I' can get up to all kinds of stuff, which I can describe as a set of facts, and this 'I' that describes it as facts and sees it as facts is further removed and cannot do very much except just seeing, conceiving. By definition. If it were to do anything in the world then it would be the more concrete psychological I and not the I that is like the Archimedean point of awareness. He has a drawing, too, of an eye in its field of vision, and he says something like: the eye is not in its field of vision, it cannot see itself. And this is how he sees a certain kind of philosophical 'I': we can only conceive it as being outside of the world. This leads to solipsism, too, for him -- for the early W.
posted by creasy boy at 9:26 AM on October 15, 2007

wittgenstein the MeFite: who is "Mounce" and is his book any good? I'm gonna be taking up the Tractatus again at some point in the next year.
posted by creasy boy at 9:32 AM on October 15, 2007

there's an 'I' that sits even further back than all this and can describe it as a set of external facts. And the question is what this 'I'...?

Well, there seems to be some brain process that models a world. It can also model intelligent agents moving about in that world. It can say, "Oh, Fred just picked up a glass of water. That must be because he's thirsty." Which means that this process can also model minds.

Surely this process models the body that houses it. It can sense that body -- just as it can sense trees, other people, etc. (If I look down, I can see my body. I can't see my head, but I can infer its existence, just as I can infer a bird that I can't see, via its tweeting.) So it makes sense that this process would also model "its" body as having a mind, and that it would make predictions about that mind.

I don't see anything really strange about us have a world modeler. Presumably, most other animals have one, too, though probably simplified compared to ours. Such a modeler would give the user huge survival benefits.

And surely it's "programmed" to consider similarities: item X looks and acts just like item Y. I concluded that item Y is a lion, so therefor item X must be a lion. That combined with a theory of mind would lead our modelers to conclude that the bodies that contain them are people with minds. Which is exactly what we DO conclude about ourselves.
posted by grumblebee at 10:21 AM on October 15, 2007

Creasy Boy -- I think Mounce's (just type "mounce tractatus" into Amazon.com and it's the first result; I am not linking because the site address is so looooong) book (first published many years ago) is the best introduction to the Tractatus. It is very comprehensible even to someone who knows very little about formal logic. I dis-recommend Anscombe's introduction to the Tractatus; it is hard to read and confusing though the last chapter has some interesting gems in it.

Thanks for all of the replies. You have given me much food for thought, which is really why I asked the question in the first place. I think it would be appropriate to not mark any of these answers as the best.
posted by wittgenstein at 3:08 PM on October 15, 2007

wittgenstein, I'm really curious about something you wrote in your original post:

W seems to believe that his "will" can have no effect on the "facts", as I understand it. How could anyone believe that?

I promise not you nitpick or poke fun or force you into defending some view, but I'd love to hear a little more about your views. What confuses me is "how could anyone believe that?" because I SO believe it. How could anyone not believe it?
posted by grumblebee at 4:58 PM on October 15, 2007

Um ... in thinking about it, I guess it makes more sense than I thought.

I guess I was thinking along the lines of "willing something" being the first step to actually DOING something. and surely W didn't think that actions have no effect on the facts of the world.

But clearly the willing does not change the facts (I don't believe in paranormal phenomena).

So, my "How could anyone believe that?" now seems really overstated.

Thanks again to everyone who took the time to respond.
posted by wittgenstein at 11:45 AM on October 16, 2007

Thanks for clarifying, w!
posted by grumblebee at 12:06 PM on October 16, 2007