2010 – 2011, nummer 1 - Thauma

Heideggers Welt-analyse / Auke Briek Het beslissende boek
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
Göran Sundholm
van de hamer zijn. Het probleem met
deze substantivering is echter, dat de
bruikbaarheid van de hamer afhankelijk is
van de gebruikscontext. Wanneer we een
huis bouwen, dan is een hamer inderdaad
om spijkers in twee stukken hout te slaan.
Wanneer we een houten tafel demonteren
om het afval gemakkelijker te verwerken,
dan blijkt de betekenis van die
hamer in deze gebruikscontext
omgedraaid te zijn. In dat
laatste geval is de hamer
namelijk om spijkers
uit twee stukken
hout te trekken. Dit
eenvoudige voorbeeld
laat zien dat de
bruikbaarheid van een
gebruiksvoorwerp niet
iets van dit voorwerp
zelf is, maar van de
context waarin het
gebruikt wordt. Het laat
zien dat de wijze waarop de
hamer aanwezig is (de zijnswijze
van de hamer) niet begrepen kan worden
in termen van substantie en accident. 9
In plaats daarvan is de hamer aanwezig
vanuit de gebruikscontext en bepalend
voor deze context is het geheel van
gebruiksmogelijkheden dat zich daarin
ontvouwt. Heideggers analyse van de
zijnswijze van gebruiksvoorwerpen in
termen van betekenisgehelen blijkt dus lang
zo gek nog niet.
Das Dasein
ist seine
Erschlossenheit
noten:
1 M. Heidegger (1993), Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag,
Tübingen, p. 1, 5.
2 ibid., p. 107.
3 A. Verbrugge (2001), De verwaarlozing van het zijnde:
een ethologisch kritiek van Heideggers Sein und Zeit, SUN,
Nijmegen, p. 29, 33-37.
4 M. Heidegger, op.cit., p. 53.
5 ibid., p. 62.
6 ibid., p. 133.
7 ibid., p. 69.
8 ibid., p. 83-87.
9 H. Dreyfus (1991), Being-in-the-world: a
commentary on Heidegger’s Being and time,
MIT press, New Baskerville, p.
The teacher’s strike in Sweden, in the
spring of 1971 - a true paradise for an
academically inclined youngling. Six weeks
of unadulterated freedom to read what one
wanted, without straightjackets imposed
either by the teachers or the examination
schedules at the Gymnasium Beta, where I
was then a pupil. The public library in my
home city of Linköping was exceptionally
good. It was one of four “Diocesan and
Provincial” Libraries in Sweden. While
not academic university libraries, these
libraries still had scholarly and
scientific pretensions, and, as
we shall see, not without some
justification.
On a memorable day in March,
as was my wont, I spent long
hours in the library, reading
whatever took my fancy; on a return
trolley there was a row of books, bound
in identical green, supposedly greaserepellent
bindings, with titles in gold on the
spines. I wished to pick up a volume – Rolig
Astronomi (“Astronomy made fun”, on
how to build one’s own reflection telescope)
– when my hand shot miss and instead I
picked up the book next to it, which proved
to be the Swedish translation by Anders
Wedberg of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. I had
had no previous exposure to philosophy,
which was taught only in the final year
of the Gymnasium. Nevertheless, its first
strange sentence appealed to me: “Världen
är allt som är fallet”. I borrowed the book,
and the rest is history.
Apart from this Swedish translation,
the library also possessed the Pears-
McGuinness parallel German-English
edition from 1971, as well as commentaries
in English by Erik Stenius and David
Favrholdt. There were also books by
Wittgenstein’s successor in Cambridge,
the Finnish-Swedish philosopher Georg-
Henrik von Wright, on Logical Empiricism
and on Logic, Philosophy, and Language,
that were written in a remarkably elegant
Swedish. (The prose of the Swedish
speaking minority in Finland is often of an
outstanding quality.) I quickly worked my
way through these works and moved on to
logic. Regarding this subject I discovered
that both Quine’s Methods of Logic and
Mathematical Logic were to be found in
the collection. Also Elliot Mendelson’s
more advanced Introduction to
Mathematical Logic could be found
on the shelves for mathematics.
When I left the gymnasium in 1972,
in order to study Mathematics and
Theoretical Philosophy at Lund, I
had mastered these books and several
others that I had bought; e.g. Tarski’s
Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics,
and Carnap’s Logical Syntax of Language.
Clearly I had found my proper field of study.
Since then I have reread the Tractatus at
least once a year, and I have often taught it.
It remains the finest exposition of realism
in logic, a realism, however, that I do not
share. But, as Wittgenstein observed,
apropos of Frege’s habit of attacking
idealism where it was at its weakest, it is
much better to attack it where it is at its
strongest. In general, one’s own philosophy
will only benefit from choosing worthy
opponents. Thus, perhaps paradoxically,
the arch-realists Bolzano, Frege, and the
Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, are prime
sources of inspiration, to which I return
again and again, in order to feed my antirealism.
And thus, still after forty years, the
Tractatus remains my decisive book.