Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

The Incoherence of Wittgenstein's (Weak) Idealism
possibility than the precritical assumption (1996, Bxvi). Yet though it explains the
possibility of the synthetic a priori, the idealist inversion in no way requires this latter
notion. If one saw fit to adopt the former, or some version of it, while eschewing the a
priori, one could. It is just this configuration that we find in the latter Wittgenstein, which
is why he is to be classed as a type of Kantian idealist.
III
The idea that human beings constitute their experience, in whatever form it is found, is
not without its difficulties however. As regards Wittgenstein's articulation of this idealism,
a problem arises when we further inquire into the nature of the relation between our
practices and the essences of objects they are held to originate. The best way to
approach this problem is through the notion of an internal relation.
As Wittgenstein rightly points out, an internal relation is a relation between terms that
cannot be otherwise (see Lee 1980, 9 and 57). "This shade of blue and that one stand,
eo ipso, in the internal relation of lighter to darker," he tells us in the Tractatus: "It is
unthinkable that these two objects should not stand in this relation" (1974b, 4.123). This
is so, as Hans-Johann Glock observes, because the "relation is constitutive of the relata"
(1996, 162).
"What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions," Wittgenstein further
remarks, "is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurlyburly
of human actions, the background against which we see any action" (1981, § 567).
And though a hurly-burly, these actions form a system, a structure-so too therefore do
the concepts constituted by them (see 1981, § 568, and 1969, §§ 102, 141, and 410).
Thus Wittgenstein refers to the whole of both concepts, or language, and the actions into
which they are woven as a "language-game" (1958, § 7). But these language-games or
grammatical structures, let us remember, express the essence objects have for us;
accordingly, these essences also stand in structural relations to each other. A structural
relation is an internal relation, however (1974b, 4.122), so what one entity is is logically
related to what other entities are: "I set the brake up by connecting up rod and lever,"
Wittgenstein's interlocutor informs, to which the former replies, "Yes, given the whole of
the rest of the mechanism. Only in conjunction with that is it a brake-lever, and
separated from its support it is not even a lever; it may be anything, or nothing" (1958,
§ 6).
Not only do these logical relations obtain between objects and between practices,
they also obtain between objects and practices. The brake-lever, qua brake-lever, is not
only structurally related to the rest of the mechanism of which it is a part, it is also
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