Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

The Incoherence of Wittgenstein's (Weak)
Idealism
Lambert Vincent Stepanich
I
At the heart of Kant's idealism is the idea that the human subject constitutes its own
experience. This of course is his famous reversal: where once it was assumed that our
cognition must conform to its objects we shall now suppose, and with greater success,
that these objects must conform to our cognition (1996, Bxvi). The same direction of
determination is evident in the later Wittgenstein's account of the relation between
human activity and an understanding of the world, and is the reason for ascribing to him
a type of Kantian idealism. "Grammar is not accountable to any reality," Wittgenstein
famously remarks, for the rules of grammar themselves constitute meaning (1974a, §
184). It is the structure of our language, therefore, that "tells what kind of object anything
is" (1958, § 373). When we observe what something is we are merely noting our own
convention (1978, Pt. I, § 73). For this reason Wittgenstein speaks of "Theology as
grammar," and he is careful to add: "The great difficulty here is not to represent the
matter as if there were something one couldn't do. As if there really were an object, from
which I derive its description, but I were unable to shew it to anyone" (1958, § 374).
What underlies this grammar is nothing but the ways in which we use words, the
various "games" we play with language. Human activity therefore grounds meaning, or
the structure of a language, and so also the significance objects have for us (1969, §
204). Yet this activity is itself ungrounded; it is simply there, "like our life"-"[w]hat has to
be accepted, the given" (1969, § 559, and 1958, Pt. II, xi, 226). On account of being
ungrounded, the language-games constituted by our practices are also arbitrary. Our
practices are one way but they might have been another-and so too, therefore, might
have the essence of objects. There are other ways in which we may have divided up
the world (1981, § 331). Here no doubt we find a dissimilarity with Kant's idealism.
The idea that human beings constitute their own experience can be developed in
two ways, however, which parallel Kant's analysis in the Analytic and the Aesthetic and
which we may speak of as "weak idealism" and "strong idealism" respectively. Weak
idealism is the position that what we take objects to be is established by us, and that we
cannot encounter objects but through our interpretations of them. It is idealism as
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