Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Lambert Vincent Stepanich
90); and he elsewhere adds, "I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as
in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings" (1980, 7e).
Given this conceptual orientation, moreover, a grammatical investigation, like a
transcendental analysis, is a strictly nonempirical enterprise. But it is not thereby a
priori, or concerned with the conditions of our cognition of objects. Quite the contrary,
as we have already seen, owing to their genesis in our collective activities, activities
which are themselves arbitrary, the rules of a language are local and contingent: other
languages are possible. Conceptual structures are neither a posteriori nor a priori,
therefore; they are simply there, on account of what we do. Yet the defining feature of
transcendental philosophy, as Kant has told us, is its concern with the a priori structure
of objects. Thus despite their affinity as conceptual investigations, grammatical analysis
is not transcendental philosophy-nor, therefore, is Wittgenstein a neo-Kantian idealist.
There are actually two claims being made here that we must treat separately. The
first is that Wittgenstein is not a transcendental philosopher and the second that he is
not a neo-Kantian idealist; the latter, we shall see, does not follow from the former. If we
understand transcendental philosophy as concerned with the a priori structure of
objects, it is clear that Wittgenstein is not a transcendental philosopher. Certainly there
is no reason why we ought not to take transcendental philosophy this way, but it is not
inevitable that we do so. For Kant what is not a posteriori is therefore a priori; thus he
also tells us, "we may call transcendental only the cognition that these presentations are
not at all of empirical origin, and the possibility whereby they can nonetheless refer a
priori to objects of experience" (1996, A56/B81). Wittgenstein has in effect driven a
wedge between the a posteriori and the a priori here, and has further challenged that the
latter category is entirely empty. But it is open to us to continue to think of his
investigation as transcendental, just because it is nonempirical; or we may distinguish
the grammatical from the transcendental, by tying the latter to the quest for the a priori.
Let us suppose that we opt for the second decision and treat a grammatical
investigation as sui generis. Does it follow that Wittgenstein is no Kantian idealist? It
does not, for the simple reason that the idealism of Kant's philosophy is a separate
matter from that of the synthetic a priori. Kant of course runs these notions together
throughout his philosophy, but this is by way of a result and not an initial identification.
Kant's idealism consists in his reversal: supposing objects to conform to our cognition,
we must conclude that the former do not obtain independently of the latter. This is so
whether we construe this relation weakly or strongly, and even if it is to our collective
activity that objects are thought ultimately to conform.
Additionally, Kant introduces this reversal as a hypothesis to explain the possibility
of an a priori cognition of objects, adding that it "already agrees better" with this
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