Wittgenstein and Darwin 2

The later texts

So, we are in the post-Tractatus era now, leading up to the Investigations period. During this time, he lectured and held discussions with his students, and they were published under the titles Blue and Brown Books in 1967, but they were written in 1933–34, or, rather, were dictated to his students Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose. There is precious little about science in general, let alone Darwin’s theory, in these books, but a couple of passages stand out as possibly important.

Leading to the Investigations

The Blue Book

It seems to us sometimes as though the phenomena of personal experience were in a way phenomena in the upper strata of the atmosphere as opposed to the material phenomena which happen on the ground. There are views according to which these phenomena in the upper strata arise when the material phenomena reach a certain degree of complexity. E.g., that the mental phenomena, sense experience, volition, etc., emerge when a type of animal body of a certain complexity has been evolved. There seems to be some obvious truth in this, for the amoeba certainly doesn't speak or write or discuss, whereas we do. On the other hand the problem here arises which could be expressed by the question: “Is it possible for a machine to think?” (whether the action of this machine can be described and predicted by the laws of physics or, possibly, only by laws of a different kind applying to the behaviour of organisms).¹

Now notice here that, when discussing what we now think of as the problem of qualia (about which I have had a lot to say on this site), he doesn’t dispute that organisms evolved complexity, but he does dispute the mechanical nature of experience.

The Brown Book, and a number of other Nachlass sources such as his conversations with Moore, have nothing to interest us that I can find.

Conversations and remarks

However, we do have a collection of conversations he had with his friend Rush Rhees between 1939 and 1950, one of which deals directly with Darwinian evolution:

21.22 Darwinian evolution²

In 1937, when Wittgenstein quoted “im Anfang war die Tat”³ in speaking of ‘unser Ursache-Wirkung-Spiel’⁴ he wrote as though the only reasonable thing were to regard the simpler and more primitive as the earlier. I think he would have spoken differently ten years later. — I remember certain things he said in conversation about the Darwinian theory of the descent of these forms of organism from earlier forms. I said that although I could not go along with Darwin’s explanation of changes in species through ‘natural selection’, I supposed there was evidence that species were not always the species to be found today, and that various species that once existed are extinct. “On the other hand”, I said, “I don’t see why we need think that the simplest organism, say the amoeba, was earlier than any of the others.”⁵ Wittgenstein agreed emphatically. And he added: “Neither do we need to suppose, as Darwin did, that any big change from one species to another (which superseded it) must have been very gradual.” (A sudden big change need not be harder to imagine than a very gradual one.)

Now Rhees and Wittgenstein are referring to widely held views that are not, really, Darwin’s, as although he did think adaptations evolved by selection, he did not think new species were necessarily entirely due to natural selection.⁶ I suspect that as philosophers they were assuming some generally held views in Cambridge, but a straightforward read of the Origin, let alone the more recent work, would have thrown this into doubt almost immediately, with one caveat I’ll cover when we have seen all the texts.

The Philosophical Investigations

Next we have a passage in the famous Philosophical Investigations, section VII:

"The mind seems able to give a word meaning"—isn't this as if I were to say "The carbon atoms in benzene seem to lie at the corners of a hexagon"? But this is not something that seems to be so; it is a picture.

The evolution of the higher animals and of man, and the awakening of consciousness at a particular level. The picture is something like this: Though the ether is filled with vibrations the world is dark. But one day man opens his seeing eye, and there is light.

What this language primarily describes is a picture. What is to be done with the picture, how it is to be used, is still obscure. Quite clearly, however, it must be explored if we want to understand the sense of what we are saying. But the picture seems to spare us this work: it already points to a particular use. This is how it takes us in. [p184]

Again his focus is on meaning, and if that is what he thought the evolution of consciousness is supposed to be, no wonder he deprecated it as a “picture”. But he doesn’t reject evolution here either. It is a meaning that has a use (presumably in science).

On Certainty

Lastly, in On Certainty, which was his rejection of skepticism about the world, he states [§ 169]

One might think that there were propositions declaring that chemistry is possible. And these would be propositions of a natural science. For what should they be supported by, if not by experience?

Is Wittgenstein rejecting chemistry here? If the creationist interpretation were right, then he would be, and physics in several passages. It is a quite ridiculous argument.

Concluding remarks and a caveat

Now in one other passage he (apparently; it’s another Nachlass) says

What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view.⁷

This is very much like Popper’s later claim that evolution is a Metaphysical Research Program (in Objective Knowledge). It is a philosophical point about conceptual schemes. And speaking of conceptual schemes, it is worth introducing the caveat here.

Until around the 1960s, evolution was thought of in a range of ways, including “Lamarckian” inheritance, sudden jumps (saltationism), selection for the benefit of groups, and progressive evolution. All of these were widespread in the 80 years after Darwin’s death, and moreover, they were called “Darwinian evolution” by theologians and scientists who quite clearly were neither Darwinian nor Mendelian geneticists.

It is hardly Wittgenstein’s fault that his education was not more broad in science, although it may have been better for him to avoid making smart remarks about something he was no better than a layman in understanding.

So when Michael Ruse says that he rejected Wittgenstein because of the way he failed to accept evolution,⁸ I think that is precisely the mistake made by Wittgenstein himself. One has to read a bit more contextually.⁹

So I think that there is no “there” there, except in terms of the historical situation. German intellectuals thought Haeckel was a Darwinian. Huxley thought he was. But if there is a contested name in the history of science, it has to be “Darwinian”, that most protean of terms.¹⁰

References

Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Blue and Brown Books, 1964. http://archive.org/details/generallyknownas0000ludw.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Translated by Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford,: Blackwell, 1969.

———. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G. E. M. Anscombe. 3rd ed. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1968.

———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by Charles Kay Ogden. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1922.

———. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Translated by D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness. London; New York: Routledge, 1994.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Rush Rhees, and Gabriel Citron (ed.). “Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Conversations with Rush Rhees (1939–50): From the Notes of Rush Rhees.” Mind 124, no. 493 (January 1, 2015): 1–71. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzu200.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, and Georg Henrik von Wright. Culture and Value. Translated by Peter Winch. [Nachdr.]. Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 2006.

1. Ts-309,78. Page 47 in the English translation.

2. [Original note: 195] Rhees to Peter [Winch] (19 October 1980), Rush Rhees Collection, UNI/SU/PC/1/1/3/1.

3. [Original note: 196] German: ‘In the beginning was the deed’; a quotation from Goethe … {Faust Part One} (6: ‘Faust’s Study (I).

4. [Original note: 197] 197 German: ‘our cause-effect game’.

5. [Original note: 198] 198 See, for example, Darwin 1876, pp. 103–6 (Ch. 4, Sect. ‘On the Degree to Which Organization Tends to Advance’) {This is probably the sixth edition of the Origin, but the pages in the John Murray edition are 97–100].

6. In the sixth edition (p. 421) he writes

But as my conclusions have lately been much misrepresented, and it has been stated that I attribute the modification of species exclusively to natural selection, I may be permitted to remark that in the first edition of this work, and subsequently, I placed in a most conspicuous position—namely, at the close of the Introduction—the following words: "I am convinced that natural selection has been the main but not the exclusive means of modification." This has been of no avail. Great is the power of steady misrepresentation; but the history of science shows that fortunately this power does not long endure.

Darwin was an optimist.

7. Peter Winch’s translation of Culture and Value, page 18. Thanks to Glenn Branch for sending me that page. Trust but verify. One of the obvious problems in at least Anglo-American philosophy of this period is that they do not sight what they cite. I’ve been caught out that way myself a few times.

8. In a message reported by Brian Leiter.

9. Don’t get me wrong. I really like and respect Michael. I think he was just looking for something that wasn’t going to be there in any event. Take Popper’s misunderstanding of evolution, as an example, or Kuhn’s.

10. See Hull, David L. “Darwinism as a Historical Entity.” In The Darwinian Heritage, edited by D. Kohn. Wellington, New Zealand: Nova Pacifica, 1984.