The Riddle does not exist ” . On proposition 6.5 of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus .

The essay has as its main theme proposition 6.5 of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus and, in particular, its second paragraph " The riddle does not exist". In the first section, the notion of riddle is compared with that of problem, emphasising, among other things, the great relevance that, for Wittgenstein, the distinction between problems of philosophy and problems of natural science has; in the second, an attempt is made to clarify the meaning that Wittgenstein assigns to the word “riddle”: a riddle would be a question “in the void”, without any “direction”, that is, so to speak, a question that does not know what it is asking. This means that, even if it presents itself as a question, the riddle is a non-question. The third section highlights how the denial that there is the riddle is complementary to the denial, so characteristic of the Tractatus , that there are a priori true thoughts or propositions

lies outside space and time" (TLP: 2 6.4312a)? (d) 3 What, if anything, can we learn about this proposition 6.5 from the four direct comments accompanying it (TLP: 6.51, 6.52, 6.53 and 6.54) 4 and from its being one of the main comments on proposition 6? 5 What is a problem? The problems of philosophy and the problems of natural science The term "riddle" immediately recalls another term, the term "problem" (Problem), which, as we can easily verify, occupies an important place in the Tractatus.
Moreover, "problem" is on at least one occasion used by Wittgenstein as a synonym or in the sense of "riddle". It is, in fact, evident that "the problem of life" spoken of in the first paragraph of proposition 6.521, i.e. that problem whose solution "is seen in the vanishing of the problem", is none other than that "riddle of life" evoked in the first paragraph of proposition 6.432: "The solution of the riddle of life in space and time lies outside space and time".
"Problem", in the singular or plural, is, as has just been mentioned, a term that recurs frequently in the Tractatus. We immediately note that, in this regard, Wittgenstein's 2 For the abbreviation used in quotations from the Tractatus, see the final bibliographical note. 3 On point (d) I will limit myself to a few considerations that are certainly not exhaustive. 4 "Scepticism is not irrefutable, but obviously nonsensical, when it tries to raise doubts where no questions can be asked. / For doubt can exist only where a question exists, a question only where an answer exists, and an answer only where something can be said" (TLP: 6.51); "We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched. Of course there are then no questions left, and this itself is the answer" (TLP: 6.52); "The correct method of philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science -i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy -and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
Although it would not be satisfying to the other person -he would not have feeling that we are teaching him philosophy -this method would be the only strictly correct one" (TLP: 6.53); "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them -as steps -to climb up beyond them.
(He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.). / He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright" (TLP: 6.54). It cannot be avoided here to point out how two of the Tractatus most well-known and controversial propositions, propp. 6.53 and 6.54, are part of the comments to proposition 6.5 on the non-existence of the riddle. reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language is misunderstood" (TLP: p. 3) and that, precisely for this reason, they do not belong to that type of problems, the problems of natural science, which testify that our knowledge of the world (or of reality) or of some part or sphere of it is inadequate, partial or even completely absent; that is why, as we shall see, the solution to the problems of philosophy can never depend on a better or more extensive knowledge of the world (of reality); 6 (c) that for these problems he believes he has found, in the Tractatus, "on all essential points, the final solution" (TLP: p. 4), although he declares himself, in the end, convinced that one of the two values of his book consists, precisely, in having shown "how little is achieved [e.g. in the perspective of the man of science or in the eyes of the philosopher who considers philosophy a science] when these problems are solved" (TLP: p. 4).
What is stated in the Preface could perhaps be clarified by saying that solving the problems of philosophy means or implies that one recognises and accepts that the problems of philosophy are not, strictly speaking, problems, i.e. that, in the proper sense, problems are only and exclusively the problems of natural science, i.e. problems such as those expressed by questions such as "How far is the planet Mercury from the Sun?"; "When was the last ice age?"; "What kind of gas is helium?"; "What is inflation due to?", etc. As these examples suggest, a problem of natural science is one that one can try to solve by making this or that conjecture or hypothesis (cf. TLP: 4.1121) about "how things are in the world" (TLP: 6.44) and ascertaining whether they are, in fact or really, so. After one has solved one of these problems, one would say, one knows more about the world and one can, eventually, use this new knowledge to refine our techniques, to try to satisfy, thanks to them, our various needs, desires, etc. For example, a correct answer to the question "What is the cause of inflation?" can enable us to devise effective economic policies that are useful in counteracting inflation or controlling it or, when appropriate, promoting it. Seeking an answer to the questions of science means, in short, aspiring to a better or more extensive knowledge of the world, whether this is done, let us say, for the sheer sake of knowledge or in view of the practical effects and technical acquisitions that can be obtained from it or for any other reason (personal affirmation, enrichment, etc.).
Of course, it is one thing to be interested in glaciations, quite another to be interested in gases or inflation or the solar system, just as it is yet another thing to be interested, as the science that is psychology is, in the various states or mental processes (human or animal). But there is something that unites all these interests in so many different ways, and that is that what the geologist like the psychologist or the chemist, the astronomer, etc. has to deal with are, precisely, problems. And this means that their eventual resolution depends, as we said, on ascertaining "how things are in the world" (TLP: 6.44). Let us assume that the answer to the question "When did the last ice age occur?" is, as in fact it is, "The last ice age began 110,00 years ago and ended 11,700 years ago". Well, for this proposition one must say what, according to the Tractatus, applies to every proposition, namely that in order to tell whether it "is true or false we must compare it with reality" (TLP: 2.223), it being impossible to tell from the proposition alone "whether it is true or false" (TLP: 2.224). Like any other proposition, "The last ice age began 110,00 years ago and ended 11,700 years ago" cannot be "true a priori" (TLP: 2.225), i.e. before or independently of its comparison with reality.
Of course, the manner or methods of this comparison or contrast may be Note that Wittgenstein's intent when he states that psychology is just one of several natural sciences is not to claim the natural (material or physical) character of its object. It is not to claim, for instance, that the real object of psychology as a science is the brain and not the mind or, still less, the soul. As the third paragraph of proposition 5.641 shows very well, psychology is and remains, according to Wittgenstein, one of the natural sciences, whatever the object assigned to it: "the human being", as non-dualist psychologists may believe, or "the human body", as materialists or behaviourists may think, but also "the human soul", as Cartesian dualists may believe.
Suppose, for example, that the object of psychology is considered to be the human soul, as distinct from the body or, more specifically, the brain. Well, what Wittgenstein wants us to understand is that this does not mean that psychology would cease to be a natural science; like any natural science, it would continue to treat its object as a part of the world (cf. TLP: 5.641c), i.e. as something that, even when it is exactly as it is described, "could be other than it is" (TLP: 5.634c). Even for a possible science of the soul what applies to any other science would apply, namely that none of its propositions would be true a priori.
It should then come as no surprise that, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein would go so far as to consider the problem of "the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death" (TLP: 6.4312a), 7 as a problem of natural Returning, on the basis of the preceding considerations, to the first paragraph of prop. 6.4312, we can begin by noting how evident it is for Wittgenstein that the length of our life has little or, rather, nothing to do with its sense, and thus with the solution of the "riddle" or "problem of life" (TLP: 6.521a). The life of a centenarian has no more or less sense than the life of someone who died long before that venerable age. He who has lived longer has simply lived longer. "Did he die a centenarian," we might also say, is in no way an answer to the questions, "Did he solve the problem of life?" or "Did he find the sense of life?" That he died a centenarian is a fact and, as we have seen and it is What is a riddle? How is a riddle resolved?
As we have seen, a scientific problem is one that requires, in order to be solved, and not by looking in the back cover for an indication of its price. As Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Remarks, "[w]hen I tell someone that tomorrow will be fine weather, he attests to his own understanding, not by seeking now to verify my statement" (Wittgenstein 1980: §27g).
Obviously, it can happen that it becomes impossible to establish how many pages the book in question has. For example, it may be that you have never happened to check the number of pages and that the book is stolen before you can do so and that the publishing house that published it has long since destroyed all copies and that no copies of the book exist any more, etc. However, it remains established that "That book has 125 pages" is the true or correct answer if and only if that book has 125 pages and that it is in the book, and not elsewhere, that one must look for the answer. As Wittgenstein writes, " [i]f a question can be framed", then it must also be "possible to answer it" (TLP: 6.5c), even when it is, in fact, i.e. given these or those circumstances, impossible to do so. And this is because understanding a question means knowing where the answer is to be sought. The question "How many pages does the book you are reading have?" can only be answered by looking in the pages of the book and establishing, if it is in fact possible, how many they are. Any other answer would not be an answer. Put somewhat crudely, "The book costs 15 euros" can never be an answer to the question "How many pages does that book have?", although knowing that it costs 15 euros may be more important to me than knowing that it has 125 pages. A few years after the Tractatus, exactly in 1930, Wittgenstein will effectively explain by once again raising the question "What is a question?": What is a question? It is a request to look for something. A question introduces a movement of thought, as it were, at the end of which the answer is to be found. The direction of that movement is determined by the logical place of the answer. If no answer exists, then there is no direction in which you can look for anything; hence there is no movement of thought, and that means that there is no question (Waismann 1979: p. 245).
But there is also something else that must be emphasised here, namely that what applies to every other proposition also applies to "This book has 125 pages": in order to tell whether it "is true or false we must compare it with reality" (TLP: 2.223). Of course, it can certainly happen that the book has exactly the number of pages I claim it has, i.e.
that it has 125 pages. But everything that happens to the book (or of the book) belongs to the world, i.e. to the "sphere of what happens and is the case", i.e. to the sphere of the accidental. Indeed, as Wittgenstein writes, "all that happens and is the case is accidental" (TLP: 6.41b). Certainly, our propositions interrogate reality and force it, when they are really such, 9 to give an answer. As Wittgenstein writes, with what seems almost a reference to the Gospel, "[a] proposition must restrict reality to two alternatives: yes or no" (TLP: 4.023a). What a proposition can never do, however, is to answer "yes or no" instead of reality. It is also in this sense, or especially in this sense, that it is impossible to tell from the proposition alone "whether it is true or false" (TLP: 2.224).
But we will return to this in the last section of this essay.
We finally come to the question of the riddle. What does Wittgenstein mean by "riddle"? The answer is, at least in part, provided to us by the first and third paragraphs of prop. 6.5, which frame, as it were, the second paragraph and its peremptory statement: not know what it is asking; a question, as we might also say, that knows nothing about the answer; a question without "movement" and "direction" (Waismann 1979: p. 245).
But, as we know, such a question, a question that does not move towards the answer, is not a question. In a "verificationist" spirit, he will go so far as to write in the Philosophical Remarks that "[t]he meaning of a question is the method of answering it" (Wittgenstein 1980: §27a), whereas in the Tractatus, in the proposition devoted to scepticism, which, as we know from the decimal numbering, is a comment on our proposition 6.5, we can read, in terms less compromised with verificationism, that a question exists "only where an answer exists" (TLP: 6.51a).
Let us then consider what Wittgenstein writes in the first paragraph of prop. 6.5: "When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words". Here Wittgenstein is referring polemically to all those who think that, just as one can ask what the capital of Norway is, one can also ask, for example, what the sense of life is (cf. 6.521b). For them, there are no limits or constraints or obstacles to the questions we can express or formulate. While it may be more or less difficult to answer, one can always ask. There are, in short, no questions that cannot be "put into words".
So, like the question about the capital of Norway, the question about the meaning of life can also be "put into words", but unlike the former, this second question is one that not only does not yet have an answer, but perhaps never can. Perhaps the answer to the question about the sense of life can never be "put into words". Once again, we have a question without "movement" and "direction" (Waismann 1979: p. 245), thus a non-question.
What Wittgenstein seems to be suggesting is that it is precisely these questions that philosophy has always considered the most precious profound (cf. TLP: .003c), precisely because they are the hardest and most difficult. Harder and more difficult than the hardest and most difficult questions of science. Unlike those of science, in fact, the questions of philosophy are riddle. It is certainly no coincidence that many philosophers seem to have thought that the task of philosophy was not so much to unravel these riddles as to preserve and pass them on. How many times have we not heard it repeated that in philosophy, unlike in science, it is the questions, and not the answers, that count? years later in the first lines of the Blue Book, regarding questions of the form "What is...?", for example questions such as "What is lenght?", "What is meaning?" or "What is the number one?". These questions, he says, "produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)" (Wittgenstein 1975: p. 1).
The preceding remarks can serve as a background to prop. 6.52, one of the most quoted in the Tractatus, which constitutes the second comment to prop. 6.5. Here Wittgenstein refers to a feeling that, by using the pronoun "we", he wishes to share with the reader he evokes at the beginning of the Preface. 12 "We feel -we read, in fact, in the first of the two statements that form it -that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched" (TLP: 6.52).
We might immediately note that here the adjective "scientific" is redundant. As we know, there are no questions that are not scientific. A question, if it is such, is a scientific question; which does not mean that it belongs to this or that science (physics, biology, etc.), but that it, like its possible answer, belongs to "what can be said" (TLP: 6.53); to what can be "put into words" (TLP: 6.5a). The same clarification applies to the identification found in the prop. 6.53 between "what can be said"' and "propositions of natural science" (TLP: 6.53). According to Wittgenstein, what he elsewhere calls "the propositions of our everyday language" and of which he states that they are, "just as they stand, [...] in perfect logical order" (TLP: 5.5563a) are, like the propositions of physics, biology, etc., "propositions of natural science" (TLP: 6.53).
But perhaps it is not accidental that prop. 6.52 speaks of "scientific questions".
Wittgenstein is probably referring here to that "modern conception of the world" (TLP: 6.371) or to that "modern system" (TLP: 6.372b) which is characterised by the conviction that, with its research, discoveries and inventions, science can provide, if not now, at least in the future, an answer to "the problems of life" (TLP: 6.52). For the modern conception of the world, in short, it is only science that can solve "the problems 12 "Perhaps this book will only be understood by someone who has already had the thoughts that are expressed in it -or at least similar thoughts. -So it is not a textbook. -Its purpose would be achieved if it gave pleasure to one person who read and understood it' (TLP: p. 3). Proposition 6.5 (with its comments) is one of the places in the Tractatus that confirm its author's idea that "[i]t is not a textbook". gown of the scientist. But neither is he suggesting to us some flight into the irrational.
In fact, what, in perfect harmony with prop. 6.52, Wittgenstein is telling us is that "to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science" (TLP: 6.53) is the most correct way, indeed the only correct way, for philosophers 16 to give an answer to the problems of life. 17 Wittgenstein's idea is, to put it a little too directly, that one can do science without being subject to "the modern conception of the world", which "tries to make it look as if [by science] everything were explained" (TLP: 6.372).

Neither riddle nor a priori truth
As we have seen in the previous sections, a riddle would be a question "in the void" (Wittgenstein 1980 Here Wittgenstein observes, that a thought "correct a priori" would be "a thought whose possibility ensured its truth" (TLP: 3.04). This would mean that its truth would be "recognisable from the thought itself (without anything to compare it with.)" (TLP: 3.05). If we recall what we said about the riddle, we might then conclude that an a priori truth is, as we said, the exact opposite of the riddle: a question that, as it were, contains within itself the truth of its answer. Asking and answering would be the same and identical thing; one and the same movement. Well, if against the riddle the Tractatus asserts that " [i]f a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it" (TLP: 6.5c), against rationalism he argues that the truth of the answer is never contained in the question. The question is directed towards the answer, but it is not the answer.