The Middle Wittgenstein: From Object to Phenomenon — Time, Memory, and the Limits of Language

The early Wittgenstein held that the world is divided into a space of actuality and a space of possibility, both of which take as their starting point of construction and terminus of analysis the indivisible “object.” The meaning of language consists precisely in its capacity to picture and describe the possibility of the actual world.

Yet whether we consider the actual world or logical space, both are ultimately the creations of logical inference — metaphysical constructions that are formal and a priori. Within this structure of the world, the so-called “perceiving subject” is a mere figurehead: whatever “facts,” indeed whatever “world,” is experienced by such a subject is nothing other than the realized possibility — the actual subsisting — of what already lies in logical space. The direct experience of the perceiving subject is unimportant; it need not be taken into account.

The Collapse of Simplicity: For the Perceiving Subject, Objects Do Not Exist

The middle Wittgenstein, however, overthrew his own earlier, crystal-palace-like edifice of the world. The collapse of the building begins with the recognition that, for the perceiving subject, the object simply does not exist. The absolute simple in logical space (i.e., the object) is not necessarily simple for the perceiving subject. “Can one say that a smaller patch is simpler than a larger one?” A larger patch may be a composite of a smaller patch and another part — but why should one not equally represent the smaller patch as the difference between the larger patch and that ring? Plainly, the smaller patch is not “naturally” simpler than the larger; what counts as simple depends on how one interprets one’s own “sensations.” The thought of “dividing infinitely until one reaches the absolutely simple” is itself a misapplication of language: there is no such thing as an absolute simple, standing absolutely independent of others.

The collapse of simplicity also brings down another requirement: the mutual independence of atomic states of affairs. The early Wittgenstein required that “from the existence of one atomic state of affairs one cannot infer the non-existence of another” — this is the precondition for the system of truth-functions. But once the “object” is no longer absolutely simple, the states of affairs constructed from objects are no longer mutually independent. Wittgenstein was therefore compelled to abandon his earlier metaphysical dogma about objects, along with the requirement of mutual independence among atomic states of affairs, and to turn toward a structure built upon sense-data: the structure of direct experience, or of phenomena.

Perceptual Space and Hypothetical Space: The First System and the Second System

Wittgenstein calls the world of direct experience (or the world of sense-data) the primary world / first system, and the everyday world the physical world / second system. For ease of distinction, I prefer to describe the two as the perceptual space (the perceived world) and the hypothetical space (the physical world) — here “perception” is not limited to sensory perception, but covers every direct experience or phenomenon, including “inner” phenomena such as memory-images. The perceptual space is what one truly experiences directly; the hypothetical space is the perceiving subject’s working-up of sense-data. The former alone is real; the latter is a logical construction out of the former, a hypothetical existence.

What is directly experienced or perceived is the phenomenon; the phenomenon is real, and as such already certifies the meaning of propositions, so that the meaning of language is established. The problem is that only propositions about phenomena are the only real ones — the only ones that the perceiving subject truly knows — while propositions about physical objects are merely hypothetical. One qualification is in order: such “hypothesis” is not dispensable. To describe phenomena with the aid of the hypothesis of a world of physical bodies is absolutely necessary, because, in comparison with an “unfathomably complex phenomenological description,” it is simple (for the perceiving subject there is no simple thing — every phenomenon leads into infinite detail). In other words, the second system, as a tool of simplification, is unavoidable; its “misuse” lies not in its existence as such, but in the supposition that through it one has stated the essence of the world. When language speaks, it is interpreting sense-data; that is, language itself is a hypothesis constructed by perception (the so-called “picture”) — and this is the “misuse” of language. The essence of the world precisely cannot be said; language exists only within the hypothetical space, as a purely logical fabrication.

Yet those who dwell in the “everyday world” are so accustomed to the everyday world and the language used in it that they forget that their direct experience is the only real thing. Language is applied indiscriminately to both the perceptual world and the physical world. Wittgenstein unambiguously opposes the conflation of the two and draws a strict boundary for language: language exists only in the second system; the first system is prior to language. Wittgenstein uses the word “time” to elucidate this point.

Time: Physical Time and the Time of the Phenomenon

We perceive direct experience or phenomena as being in constant flux, while physical processes are relatively stable; for Wittgenstein, this is the result of a misuse of “time.” In physical time, time is divided into “past → present → future” so as to represent “the possibility of change.” But the perceptual world does not lie within such a time. To put it plainly: the time one directly experiences and the time we ordinarily speak of are two different things. In the perceptual world, the only thing we can truly and directly experience is the present — yet this present is not the “present” in the sense of physical time (for the latter presupposes a contrast with past and future); it is rather a “quasi-present,” the time in the phenomenon (perhaps the word “presencing” gives a flavor of it).

Within the time of the phenomenon, the present experience or phenomenon is the only real thing; the phenomenon at this moment is nothing but a cross-section of motion, fixed in this moment, and this moment is eternity. But the moment one utters the word “fix,” the metaphor is already smuggling something in: any account that imagines a “phenomenon” as something that can be taken out, displayed, or looked back upon, is already invoking the grammar of the second system. Wittgenstein himself warns: “We have used a simile, and now the simile tyrannizes over us.” The most rigorous formulation, then, might be this: the phenomenon contains time but is not in time; its form is time, but it has no position within time. The phrase is awkward, but its very awkwardness is a kind of self-protection — it refuses to be translated into any “pictorial” formulation, because once translated into a picture, the first system has been quietly stuffed back into the second.

What, then, is the “time” of direct experience? Wittgenstein holds that “the first system is ordered according to time” — but he immediately adds: “this temporal order looks completely different from the temporal order of the second system.” In other words, the first system is not orderless chaos; it has a certain before-and-after, but this before-and-after cannot be identified with the positional relations on the axis of “past—present—future.” To put it plainly: direct experience does indeed have the structure of “this is after that,” but this “after” is neither the “after” of the clock nor the “after” of historical narrative — it is the form of direct experience itself, nothing more, and cannot be further analyzed into anything else.

Memory: The Construction-Material of Physical Time

Language is a construction out of sense-data; what, then, is the construction-material of physical time? One might try to refute our usual conviction that physical time is real by saying: “I remember the past… (the image was like that), now… (the image is like this).” — does this not show that physical time is real? — On the contrary, it shows a misuse of “memory.” In the context of this utterance, we are treating memory as “a preserved image of past events,” and thereby we set it alongside “the image of the present event” for comparison. But how do we know that the image we read off from memory truly comes from the past, and not from the present (or even from the future)?

In the primary world, then, memory is not any kind of image at all; it does not fade; it is merely one of the sense-data present here and now. In the first system, memory is part of the sense-data of the present (in the first system, time is the arrangement and combination of experiences / phenomena; memory is some experiential cross-section that, in its “presencing,” becomes the feeling of déjà-vu that I directly experience). In the second system (i.e., everyday language), memory is bound to past images, and seems to serve to faithfully reflect those past images.

The materials of my “present” experience together with memory (Wittgenstein: “the present materials and the present memory-images”) are themselves the source of physical time. Plainly: the time of the second system, ordered as “past—present—future,” is constructed out of the present materials of the first system.