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Wittgenstein and Darwin

Brian Leiter

Philosopher of biology Michael Ruse writes:

I was fascinated to read the stuff on Wittgenstein [via the "Year in Review"] – but what did surprise me was that no one picked up on the evolution question – I think undoubtedly the most important discovery of the past centuries was the realization that we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection

How someone thinks this is not going to have profound philosophical implications – epistemology and ethics – beats me    — what we believe is what works not divinely written on tablets of stone – same for ethics – I feel morally I ought to care for children for those of my would-be ancestors who denied this are only “would be,” whereas those who agreed we have moral obligations to kids do have descendants, namely us

Then I read in the Tractatus that “Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science” (Wittgenstein 1922, 4.1122).  he followed this up some years later by telling his groupies that Darwin’s theory doesn’t have the “required multiplicity” whatever the hell that means.

“I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity. Nowadays some people are fond of saying that at last evolution has produced a species that is able to understand the whole process which gave it birth. … you can’t say [that today].”Rhees, R. (ed.), Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, p. 174, 1981.

As always in these cases there is no evidence of serious study of the scientific literature

I am afraid that at this point, I closed the book on Wittgenstein and have never regretted it – he has led, I think, to some dreadful consequences for philosophy – as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless.

Professor Ruse added in a subsequent message:

It has occurred to me that when Wittgenstein made his comment in the Tractatus, he was still thinking very much in the Continental tradition – so his understanding of evolution would not be very Darwinian – more in the Romantic vision dating back to Schelling – prominent figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, Bergson – so perhaps there is some excuse for wariness

But, by the time he made his later condescending comments, there had been a whole neo-Darwinian revolution – people like R A Fisher putting Darwinism (not just evolution) on a firm theoretical basis, and then people like Theodosius Dobzhansky backing it all up with massive empirical evidence – fruitfly systematic seasonal variations for instance – so, even if we are a bit gentle with the earlier comments – without in any sense allowing that the science was good – the arrogance of the later comments is inexcusable.

Thoughts from readers on Wittgenstein's attitude towards Darwin?

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19 responses to “Wittgenstein and Darwin”

  1. Werthers Original

    "as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless."

    I find this comment to be similarly wrong-headed as Wittgensteins remarks on Darwin. Worthless in what regard? "Continental philosophy" (speaking in broad strokes, as the aforementioned quote does about "Analytic Philosophy") is probably far more "inturned" since the whole discipline is concerned with the exegesis of about two dozen authors since about 150 years. I'd argue the more "technical" papers in analytic philosophy are among the most valuable in the 20th century canon.

    Besides that the quote is pretty much Wittgenstein in a nutshell. He also made some strange remarks in his personal correspondences about logical theorems (especially Goedels incompleteness theorems) which seem very much bewildering considering he was apt in that field. I think this is a case of overconfidently assessing his competence on an issue in an off-hand remark.

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  2. Brian Leiter

    Just one small clarification: I took Professor Ruse's endorsement of Kitcher's remark about analytic philosophy to concern very recent analytic philosophy, not some of the classics of the 20th-century canon.

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  3. wb

    Professor Ruse says Wittgenstein "has led, I think, to some dreadful consequences for philosophy – as people like Kitcher are now pointing out, analytic philosophy has become so technical and inturned it is practically worthless." The Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations are therefore not classics of the 20th-century canon?

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  4. Josh Mozersky

    I think it is interesting to recall that the Tractatus argues that philosophy is concerned with the general form of thought and must remain silent regarding its content. Wittgenstein recognizes that this pushes philosophy toward a dilemma. Either philosophy consists of meaningful propositions, in which case it is contained within its own scope and is subject to the paradoxes of self-reference, or it consists of something non-/pre-meaningful. He opts for the latter horn, insisting that the Tractatus, somehow, shows what philosophy is without expressing what it is, because it cannot express anything. At best, philosophy can pre-meaningfully gesture toward the logical form of meaningful expression and wait for scientific investigation to fill in the blanks; at worst it misleads us into believing we are expressing profound truths about profound issues. Because the logical structure Wittgenstein commits to – elementary name-predicate pairings joined by the 'neither-nor' operator – are not suited to express the normative, he concludes that ethical propositions lack content (he would have to say the same about epistemic justification, understood normatively).

    This renders philosophy some kind of a priori yet contentless pursuit. On *these* terms – which of course may be off base – neither evolution through natural selection nor any other scientific theory is relevant to philosophy. For example, let's agree that our moral sense evolved due to its contribution to the survival of our ancestors' offspring. Might moral propositions nevertheless fail to express anything? This seems compatible with evolution through natural selection, in which case Wittgenstein can accept the theory and still deny its relevance to philosophy, which is nothing beyond gesturing toward logical form. If moral propositions do have content, on the other hand, then the Tractatus insists on parsing such content in logical form, which will ultimately eliminate anything ethical about it, but the important point is that such content cannot have any bearing on our understanding of logical form itself since it is presupposed by any expressible proposition and what cannot be fit into such form is meaningless.

    So the question, according to the Tractatus version of Wittgenstein, is whether evolution by natural selection has any implications for the form of logic. Many naturalists say yes. Wittgenstein says no. Maybe this ultimately leads, as Kitcher argues, to an insular dead-end of pointless, formal work. That is certainly possible. Then again, the Tractatus does insist that philosophy has no content, so this might amount to its vindication.

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  5. Gary Kemp

    The TLP-remark is hard to argue with; no scientific hypothesis is relevant to logic, and logic (in LW's sense) exhausts philosophy, according to the TLP. The later remark is obscure and open to interpretation (for people who know the context better than I do). But LW's general attitude remained the same: Knowledge consists of natural science and logic, nothing more. So criticism of Darwin is just from the peanut gallery, not from the pov of philosophy, by LW's lights.

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  6. Kimbda

    "How someone thinks this is not going to have profound philosophical implications – epistemology and ethics – beats me — what we believe is what works not divinely written on tablets of stone – same for ethics – I feel morally I ought to care for children for those of my would-be ancestors who denied this are only “would be,” whereas those who agreed we have moral obligations to kids do have descendants, namely us"

    Can someone translate this into English? I try not to be stickler about grammar and punctuation but there's a point at which it's so bad that it becomes unreadable.

    Reply
  7. Grad Student

    I'm not a Wittgenstein expert by any means, but I do know a lot about evolution. Wittgenstein remarks strike me as amateurish, not unlike some comments he made about mathematics. It's not a rare event to see philosophers simply not understanding evolution.

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  8. Mohan Matthen

    I take it that Wittgenstein must have interpreted adaptation in perfectionist terms and reasoned that if there can only be a few kinds of perfection at best, there wouldn't be enough "multiplicity" to account for the variety of species. To continue with this speculative train of thought, maybe he thought that speciation is just a continuation of natural selection. Perhaps he didn't think of each species as occupying an adaptive equilibrium; he could have thought of cockroaches evolving toward humanity. All very speculative, as I said, but the remark about multiplicity does suggest this line of thought.

    Such a "perfectionist" way of thinking about evolution is completely misaligned with Darwin's thinking about "the origin of species." But perhaps one wouldn't learn this by chatting with philosophers at the Moral Sciences Club. Especially not during the nineteen thirties.

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  9. Mohan Matthen

    @Kimbda, #6. I will assume that you really didn't follow the thought. So here's a "translation into English."

    Some think we should take care of our children because that's what God commands. Darwin suggests that we have a propensity (and perhaps also a desire) to take care of our children because in earlier generations, those who didn't care for their children had fewer descendants. This a profoundly different explanation than the one about God's command.

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  10. Thomas Osborne

    "what did surprise me was that no one picked up on the evolution question – I think undoubtedly the most important discovery of the past centuries was the realization that we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection"

    Mindboggling. I remember Hilary Putnam saying that evolution now (in the 90s) has nothing important to contribute to philosophy. I disagreed (silently), but am not sure that this view impairs his greatness.

    What does it mean to be "the most important discovery of the past centuries"? Is there one most important discovery? if there is one, does Wittgenstein's importance depend on his engagement with it?

    If there is one most important discovery, is the discovery that "we are not the end-product of a Good God on a creative spree but of a slow process of evolution fueled by the meaningless process of natural selection."

    Just as a first reaction, I would need to know whether the amazing discovery includes the realization that

    1) evolution is natural selection
    2) evolution is a slow process
    3) evolution is slow in the sense that it is incompatible with a creative spree
    4) before evolution was discovered, people believed in a fast creative spree that would be proven wrong with the discovery that there was a slow process as described by natural selection
    5) evolution is a meaningless process
    6) before evolution was discovered, people believed in a creative spree that was meaningful in the way that evolution makes impossible

    I don't know what Wittgenstein would make of the quote.

    Reply
  11. Mohan Matthen

    @Thomas Osborne, #10.

    The "amazing discovery" (and I put that in scare quotes in order to avoid debating the factive) is that there is evolution is a chance-driven natural process. It is meaningless in the sense that its end-product cannot be normatively predicted: it isn't always what was antecedently "better" or "more desirable," and even when it is, this isn't why it came about. This contradicts most creationist theories, whether they posit a fast process or not.

    I don't believe that (1) Darwin was committed to evolution being (identical with) natural selection. He did (2) assert a gradualist viewpoint, but most evolutionists today believe that sometimes it is fast and at other times slow. (Extinction is (part of) evolution, and it's fast.) (3) Whether slow or fast, it is incompatible with creation inasmuch as the latter is mind-driven (and in that sense, meaningful). (4–6) Before and after Darwinian evolution was discovered, there were some who believed in creation, fast or slow.

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  12. Tom Hurka

    Re part of the OP and Mohan's translation of it: explaining why we believe that we ought to care for our children and explaining why we ought to care for them (if in fact we ought to) are very different things. Only the second of them is ethics. I thought the idea that evolutionary theory has direct implications for ethics was refuted ages ago by T.H. Huxley.

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  13. Michael Ruse

    Huxley was refuting Herbert Spencer's vision of evolution and its implications for ethics — Darwin had a completely different take on ethics and even gave a proto-version of the debunking argument — at the risk of seeming just to promote my own writings, in the intro to my recent WHY WE HATE: UNDERSTANDING THE ROOTS OF HUMAN CONFLICT (OUP) I give a detailed exposition of Darwin's thinking — the key work is Darwin's DESCENT OF MAN (1871)
    Huxley may have been Darwin's "bulldog," but he rarely got anything of Darwin's right — starting with his review of the ORIGIN on Boxing Day 1859

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  14. Thomas

    The TLP remark is – as Gary Kemp already pointed out above – much less about Darwin than about the TLP conception of philosophy. And on that conception, it is simply true that Darwin’s theory of evolution is no more relevant to philosophy than any other scientific hypothesis. On that conception – whatever we might think of it – Darwin’s otherwise ground-breaking discovery is simply no more important to philosophy than, say, Newton’s hypothesis that white sunlight is a mixture of the all colours on the visible spectrum; Maxwell’s theory of thermodynamics or even Schaumann’s early (but ultimately correct) hypotheses about the exact underlying cause of syphilis.
    Also note that the TLP remark is emphatically not a remark about the truth or falsity of Darwin’s theory (just read it! Or even better: take just two minutes to read the few remarks surrounding the quoted passage from TLP §4.122).

    If anything, it seems to me that Professor Ruse’s comments on Wittgenstein have the stench of “amateurism” and “inexcusable” “arrogance” (to use the exact same terms here directed against Wittgenstein).

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  15. Mohan Matthen

    In response to Tom Hurka, comment 12: I agree that having a natural disposition to care for one's children does not directly imply that one ought to do so. But this does not mean that explaining the natural disposition (or showing that it is natural) has, in Wittgenstein's words, "no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science." It seems plausible that Darwin's theory can tell us something about human nature, and philosophers have always thought that propositions about human nature are relevant to ethics and political philosophy.

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  16. Mohan Matthen

    Responding to Thomas, comment 14: There are two comments by Wittgenstein under discussion. Gary Kemp and you adequately explain the Tractatus remark, though I think one can legitimately complain that it is unduly restrictive to identify philosophy with logic. The other remark, taken from Rush Rhees's recollections is: "“I have always thought that Darwin was wrong: his theory doesn’t account for all this variety of species. It hasn’t the necessary multiplicity." I think it's perfectly reasonable to characterize this as amateurish. (I offered my take on this remark in comment 8 above.)

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  17. Thomas Presskorn-Thygesen

    @Mohan Matten. Yes, the second remark has indeed sometimes been taken to mean something along the lines of what you indicate in #8. Yet to me, it’s a sign of, let’s say, “Wittgenstein Amateurism” to assign much interpretative weight to the second remark. Interpretative caution is instead needed and perhaps there is even a need to establish some basic facts about the second remark, which you seem to misattribute to Rush Rhees and which Prof. Ruse slightly mischaracterizes.

    So let’s just establish the basic facts about the context of Wittgenstein’s supposed “required multiplicity”-remark: It is not from Wittgenstein’s published writings, not from his unpublished writings, not from his note books, not from his lecture notes, not from the lecture notes of his students, etc. It’s context is not even that of any type of scholarly discussion. It is from someone else’s – M.O.C. Drury (not Rhees!) – recollection of what Wittgenstein might have said in an casual conversation, namely when Drury and Wittgenstein took a walk in the Zoological Gardens in Dublin in 1949. Conclusion: It is a quite well known remark, perhaps even an infamous remark, but it carries little to no serious interpretative weight.

    The remark simply seems unfit for making inferences about Wittgenstein’s philosophy or even his views on biology (spoiler: he didn’t have any particular views on biology; his limited interest in the natural sciences was within physics, engineering and aeronautics).

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  18. Mohan Matthen

    @Thomas Presskorn-Thygesen: That's fair. The most we can conclude about Wittgenstein is that he hadn't ventured very deeply into Darwin's theory or the New Synthesis (though much of the latter was taking place within a hundred metres of where he lived and taught). I take your point that one can't use the remark as an interpretive fulcrum. (And I didn't–I have tried to steer clear of any but exegetical comments on this thread.) But I wonder whether you'd agree that there are a lot of people who make casually uninformed remarks about Darwin. People who wouldn't be so casual when talking about the Big Bang, for example. Or even about Godel's incompleteness theorems.

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  19. Allen Hazen

    Witters wasn't the only important philosopher to have expressed (in reported conversation) scepticism about the "naturalist" orthodoxy. Gödel, in conversation with (I think) Hao Wang, said he thought physicalism about the human mind would be refuted scientifically: that the human brain would be shown not to be complex enough to support human thought. Most contemporary philosophers seem to assume he was wrong about this, but it doesn't seem confused about the relevant theories in the way thinking a roughly Darwinian theory can't explain the existence of as many species as there are in the current biota. (But then, I would put more credence into a report by Wang about Gödel's thought than I would in a report by Rhees of a report by Drury of Wittgenstein's!)

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