Passed over in Silence: Deleuze, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and an Ethics of Learning

Abstract

This essay attempts to bring together the philosophies of Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze by developing an ethics of learning that is implicit, and at times explicit, in each of their works. How this comes to be manifest in their works is that for Spinoza, Wittgenstein, and Deleuze, what is most important about this ethics of learning is that it is irreducible to rigid moral laws and to an understanding of reality that is reducible to forms of representational thinking. Most importantly, this essay shows that Spinoza’s understanding of absolutely infinite substance allows Spinoza to develop the ethical project of his Ethics—namely, his ethics of learning—and it is also what helps us to understand what Wittgenstein believed must be passed over in silence. Although the influence of Spinoza on Deleuze is well known, the focus placed here on learning will highlight, and in large part explain, why Spinoza remains a constant thread throughout Deleuze’s work while the importance of other philosophers, such as Nietzsche, slip to the background.

1. Introduction

Of all the secondary literature on the work of Deleuze along with Deleuze’s co-authored works with Guattari, there have been a number of attempts, among both English and French-speaking scholars, to develop the ethical implications of Deleuze’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s thoughts1. In this essay I will build upon this work and argue that there is an implicit ethics at work throughout much of Deleuze’s work, from his early work through to his late work with Guattari, what I will call an ethics of learning. This theme has been touched upon among commentators of Deleuze2. As understood here, ethics will be taken in the classical as a theory of the good life, or an ethics of living that best reflects the reality of our nature. To draw out this ethics of learning, we will read Deleuze’s philosophy, especially as this is found in Difference and Repetition and Logic of Sense, as it relates to two other philosophers—Spinoza and Wittgenstein.

Placing Deleuze’s thought into dialog with Spinoza is a natural move given the influence of Spinoza’s thought on Deleuze and the fact that he wrote two books on Spinoza. There is also a deeper reason. Like Deleuze, much of the exegetical work on Spinoza covers his metaphysics, and when the ethical implications are discussed—namely, the arguments from the latter half of Part 5 of Spinoza’s Ethics, the discussion is largely critical. Some of the reasons for this will be addressed below, but as we will see a Deleuzian reading of Spinoza’s metaphysics will support the arguments made here for an ethics of learning. Bringing Wittgenstein into the mix may seem to be a less natural move, especially given the harsh comments Deleuze makes about Wittgenstein. In his recorded conversation with Claire Parnet, for instance, Deleuze claims that Wittgenstein is “a philosophical catastrophe … They [Wittgensteinians] are assassins of philosophy.3” There are, however, three reasons for bringing Wittgenstein into this discussion. First, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus was influenced by Spinoza, as G.E. Moore has noted, with his title echoing Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Secondly, in a famous letter to Ludwig von Ficker, Wittgenstein claimed that “The book’s [Tractatus’] point … is an ethical one” (cited in [6], p. 251). How the point of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is an ethical one will led to our third reason for bringing Wittgenstein into the arguments of this essay—namely, Deleuze’s acknowledgement in Logic of Sense that “Wittgenstein and his disciples are right to define meaning by means of use. But such use is not defined through a function of representation in relation to the represented … [but rather] use is in the relation between representation and something extra-representative, a nonrepresented and merely expressed entity” ([7], p. 146). This acknowledgment of Wittgenstein’s appeal to a nonrepresented is Deleuze’s sole reference to Wittgenstein in Logic of Sense, and it occurs, significantly for the purposes of the arguments to be made here, in the chapter, “Twentieth Series on the Moral Problem in Stoic Philosophy.” As will be argued below, the nonrepresented that Deleuze sees as integral, even if in passing, to Wittgenstein’s understanding of meaning as use is precisely crucial to understanding both what it is that Wittgenstein claims must be passed over in silence and it will clarify the non-representational ethics of learning that Deleuze draws, or so I will argue, from Spinoza and Wittgenstein (or at least as Deleuze charitably reads the latter in Logic of Sense).

In the first section of this essay, I will begin by setting forth Deleuze’s critique of representational models of thinking as this occurs in the first few pages of Difference and Repetition. In the second section we will unpack some of the reasons for Wittgenstein’s arguments that what cannot be said must be passed over in silence, drawing from Deleuze in order to clarify what precisely is being passed over. In the third section we will further support the Deleuzian reading of Wittgenstein by turning to Spinoza, and specifically to the arguments that lead him to the third kind of knowledge, which I will argue is both a nonrepresentational form of knowledge and is crucial to the ethical project of Spinoza’s Ethics. With this in place, we will return, in the fourth section, to Deleuze, and in particular to the importance of learning as a concept in Deleuze’s oeuvre. This will enable us to sketch the ethics of learning that I argue is implicit to Deleuze’s philosophical project and to his reading of Spinoza. This will also show that although Nietzsche and Spinoza were both key figures in Deleuze’s affirmative philosophical project of the 1960s, Spinoza’s work looms larger as Deleuze, and then Deleuze and Guattari, shift towards an ethics of learning, at which point Spinoza is the primary influence, the “prince of philosophers” as they put it. In the fifth and final section we will return to Wittgenstein and show how his Tractatus is indeed, as Wittgenstein himself claimed, an ethical project and yet a project inextricably tied to learning, and hence to that which must be passed over in silence.

2. Repetition and Generality

In the very first line of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze claims “Repetition is not generality” ([8], p. 1) By repetition, however, Deleuze does not mean the repetition of identical entities or events, what he calls bare repetition, such as with the repetition of tick-tocks on a grandfather clock, but rather “To repeat,” Deleuze argues, “is to behave in a certain manner, but in relation to something unique or singular which has no equal or equivalent” (p. 1). Deleuze offers the examples of Bastille day and Monet’s first water lily painting, arguing that the very first of each of these “repeat(s) an ‘unrepeatable’” such that the first involves “a more profound, internal repetition within the singular” that not only does “not add a second and a third to the first, but carr[ies] the first time to the ‘nth’ power” (p. 1). It is this carrying the first to the “nth” power that compelled Monet to return, in acts of external, empirical repetition, to his garden to paint, and yet each of these paintings never fully repeated the “unrepeatable” singularity that was involved in the creative act of painting. The repetitions we come to identify as repetitions, the 250 lily paintings for instance, are for Deleuze repetitions that echo “a more profound, internal repetition within the singular. This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an ‘unrepeatable’” (p. 1). Rather than see the annual celebrations of Bastille Day as an event that “commemorates or represents the fall of the Bastille,” Deleuze argues that it is “the fall of the Bastille which celebrates and repeats in advance all the [Bastille] Days; or Monet’s first water lily which repeats all the others” (p. 1).

The question this leaves us with, and a question that Deleuze will take up over the course of Difference and Repetition, and arguably over the course of all his works, is to account for the relationship between the external repetitions and behaviors—Monet’s 250 lily paintings—and the “internal repetition within the singular” that has, Deleuze argues, made these external repetitions possible. We can begin to clarify the nature of this relationship for Deleuze if we turn to the discussion of sense in The Logic of Sense, especially the fifth chapter where he introduces what he calls the “paradox of regress, or of indefinite proliferation” ([7], p. 28). The paradox of regress, and I will say more on the relation between the two in a moment, gets generated straightforwardly enough. If I were to ask a server in a restaurant for a beer, I would assume they have clearly understood what I said if they return a few minutes later with a beer. In fact, for Deleuze when we “designate something, [we] always presuppose that the sense is understood, that it is already there” (p. 28). We would not even begin to speak without presupposing that the sense of what we say is there to be understood. If the server returns a few minutes later with a whiskey, however, I will no doubt be confused, for my presupposition that the sense of what I said was understood will prove unfounded, and consequently I will likely ask the server if they understood what I meant, referring explicitly now, through another utterance, to the sense of my previous utterance. Deleuze’s point is that what enables me to do this, to refer to the sense of what we say, is the paradoxical fact that meaningful utterances of ordinary conversations do not state their meanings, or as Deleuze puts it, “I never state the sense of what I am saying” (p. 28). It is this paradoxical fact that generates the regress for, as Deleuze claims, “I can always take the sense of what I say as the object of another proposition whose sense, in turn, I cannot state” (p. 28), a proposition that likewise has a sense that can become the object of yet another proposition whose sense I cannot state, and so on ad infinitum.

We could turn at this point to discuss many of the factors involved in successfully communicating the sense of what one says, the linguistic, socio-cultural, and political factors that are inseparable from the sense of what I say. Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari, will do just this, and on numerous occasions. The focus of the current essay, however, will be on the immanent nature of sense itself, on its dual, paradoxical tendency to be both differentiating and dedifferentiating. For instance, sense can be further and further differentiated as it opens the regress of forever referring to the sense of what was said, and at the same time this differentiating tendency is made possible precisely because sense is not to be identified with what is said, with any of the differentiated utterances, propositions, and representations that express this sense. Inseparable from what is said, therefore, and from our efforts to further differentiate the sense of what is said, is the tendency of sense to undermine these efforts through its dedifferentiating tendency. Important implications follow from this dual tendency of sense, its de/differentiating nature, and they run throughout Deleuze’s work. First and foremost, the de/differentiating nature of sense will provide Deleuze with a means to critique representational modes thinking, which is a critique that is arguably the primary driver of the arguments in Difference and Repetition. If representational thinking entails re-presenting a determinate content by means of various signs and other forms of expression, then the paradox of sense highlights the fact, for Deleuze, that there is something significant that eludes representation, eludes being expressed, and yet it is precisely this fact that makes it possible for one to refer to the sense of another expression, and the sense of that expression, and so on. The infinite nature of this regress will loom large as we bring in the metaphysical implications of Spinoza’s philosophy for Deleuze’s project. Before turning to that, however, let us first turn to Wittgenstein, for he too encountered the limits of representation and with this the question of distinguishing between what can be represented and stated clearly and what eludes representation and must be passed over in silence.

3. Passed over in Silence

Early in his Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein encounters the problem that would bedevil his efforts to write the Investigations, and a problem that would eventually lead him to conclude that he had failed to write a good book. The problem, as Wittgenstein saw it, was to take all the various remarks and paragraphs he had written on various subjects—“the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things” ([9], p. vii)—and then bring them together such that they “proceed from one subject to another in a natural order and without breaks” (p. vii). Try as he might, Wittgenstein was unsuccessful in his efforts to bring his many paragraphs and thoughts into a coherent whole, and he recognized along the way that the “best that I [Wittgenstein] could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination.—And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation” (p. vii). More to the point, and as he no doubt knew, the reason his investigations were unable to be shoehorned into a continuous, natural order was not because Wittgenstein jumped from topic to topic, as he acknowledges he does, but rather it is the nature of philosophical investigation itself that foreclosed his efforts, even when this involved investigating a single topic.

We do not have to wait long to see the difficulties Wittgenstein encountered in his efforts “to produce a good book” (p. viii), even while addressing a single topic. As Wittgenstein opens the Investigations, he turns first to language and begins with Augustine’s explanation of how we learn a language. For Augustine, what learning the meaning of a word entails is associating someone’s bodily action with their intention to refer to and name some object, whether these bodily actions be, as Augustine puts it, “the sound they uttered…bodily movements…the expression of the face, the play of the eyes,” ([9], §1; p. 2) among many other possibilities. After hearing the words “repeatedly used in their proper places in various sentences,” the result, Augustine claims, is that we come to learn “what objects they [the words and bodily actions] signified” (§1; p. 2). In elaborating upon Augustine, Wittgenstein offers the example of a shopkeeper being given a slip of paper marked “five red apples.” The shopkeeper takes the slip and opens the drawer with the matching word “apples” on it, and then he finds the color that matches the word “red” on a corresponding color chart. Wittgenstein assumes the shopkeeper knows the cardinal numbers by heart and is able, as a result, to get the requested “five red apples”. Even this simplest of explanations, however, is inadequate. Questions remain. How, for instance, and as Wittgenstein himself puts it, “does he [the shopkeeper] know where and how he is to look up the word ‘red’ and what he is to do with the word ‘five’?” (§1; p. 3). Wittgenstein provides us with no answers here, and he simply leaves us with the claim that the shopkeeper “acts as I have described,” adding that “Explanations come to an end somewhere” (§1; p. 3). This is simply what the shopkeeper does. We will return to this point below.

Wittgenstein’s claim that “Explanations come to an end somewhere” (§1; p. 3) is related, as we will see, to his difficulties in laying his thoughts out in a “natural order and without breaks.” In his remarks on Augustine, for instance, Wittgenstein quickly discovered that connecting a physical occurrence—a spoken word, written text, expressions of the face, etc.—to a “meaning” is not as straightforward as it may seem. In setting forth the possible rules whereby a physical manifestation (i.e., sign) leads one to identify and pick out the appropriate object (e.g., the five red apples, or the signified), it became clear that this process presupposed other rule-following actions, such as knowing what to do with the number “5” or how to look up the word “red”. At some point, Wittgenstein concludes, we simply need to accept that there are certain ways things are done, certain “forms of life” and “language games” as he will put it, and these are primitive and in no need of an explanation.

As surprising as it may seem, Spinoza can help us to clarify Wittgenstein’s claim that explanations come to an end. This is surprising precisely because Spinoza is often seen as upholding the view that everything is intelligible, or that everything, in principle, can be explained4. Despite this reading of Spinoza, which we will return to later, there are two reasons for bringing Spinoza into the discussion. First, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was given the title it has, and at G.E. Moore’s suggestion, in homage to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. This was more than a casual allusion to Spinoza, however, for in the preface to his Tractatus Wittgenstein famously claimed that “The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence” ([12], p. 3). This can be comfortably read as being in line with the fairly common view of Spinoza as a rationalist for whom everything can be explained. There remains, however, the question about what, if anything, “we must pass over in silence.” It is this last question, I argue, that Spinoza provides an answer for, and which in turn clarifies Wittgenstein’s troubles, which is the second reason for bringing Spinoza into the mix.

With respect to the rationalist reading of Spinoza, Ursula Renz, in her book The Explainability of Experience, states one version of this reading as follows: “the central programmatic conviction that motivates the work [of this book] as a whole…can be expressed as follows: subjective experience is explainable…” ([9], p. 1); or even more strongly, Michael Della Rocca claims that “For Spinoza, no why-question is off limits, each why-question—in principle—admits of a satisfactory answer” ([10], p. 1). Despite this quite glaring difference regarding the limits, or not, of providing explanations, Spinoza would nonetheless agree with Wittgenstein’s claim that we cannot explain what one does in their physical, observable behavior—the shopkeeper looking up the color “red” on a chart for instance—in terms of a non-physical, mental phenomenon. This follows for Spinoza from his claim, in the Ethics, that “E1P5: In nature there cannot be two or more substances of the same nature or attribute.5” Since an attribute is defined by Spinoza as being “what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence,” (E1D4), with substance being understood to be “what is in itself and is conceived through itself, i.e., that whose concept does not require the concept of another thing, from which it must be formed” (E1D3), then either two substances will have the same attribute, and hence be the same substance, or they will be conceived differently by way of different attributes, and therefore not be substances “of the same nature or attribute.” Consequently, if the actions of the shopkeeper in his shop are, to use Spinoza’s terminology, modifications of the attribute of extension, then they cannot be explained by way of a mental phenomenon, or a modification of the attribute of thought. Spinoza would thus reject, as with Wittgenstein, the use of mental phenomena to explain one’s actions. The other more important point of convergence between Spinoza and Wittgenstein is, I will argue, that Spinoza ultimately relies upon an explanation that is neither distinct nor determinate; rather, the final explanation he calls upon is not what can be said clearly—it is precisely what Wittgenstein claims we must “pass over in silence.”

4. Spinoza

By calling upon a reason that, in the end, cannot be said clearly, Spinoza’s arguments will provide another way of setting forth Deleuze’s own critique of representational modes of thinking. To begin to show how Spinoza’s arguments move in this direction, we can begin by picking up where we left off in the previous section, with how Spinoza understands the relationship between one’s thoughts and their body, between a mode of Thought and a mode of Extension as Spinoza puts it. Spinoza’s initial claim, at E2P11, is simple enough: “The first thing that constitutes the actual being of a human Mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists,” which then gets stated more precisely two propositions later: “E2P13: The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body, or a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else.” Not only does Spinoza appear to claim that there is a connection between a certain mode of Extension, one’s Body, and the idea that constitutes the human Mind which takes this Body for its object, but at this point Spinoza is also relying upon an explanation based on determinate modes rather than on anything that we must “pass over in silence.” As we will see, however, things are more complicated than this.

To see that this is the case, let us take up two points. First, we need to elaborate upon what Spinoza means by a “singular thing that actually exists.” In E2P9, Spinoza connects the “idea of a singular thing” to an infinite regress: “The idea of a singular thing which actually exists has God for a cause not insofar as he is infinite, but insofar as he is considered to be affected by another idea of a singular thing which actually exists; and of this [idea] God is also the cause insofar as he is affected by another third, and so on, to infinity.” Singular things, therefore, presuppose an infinite series of other singular things. On this point, Spinoza appears to echo Descartes’ claim from the Fourth Meditation that when we “inquire as to whether the works of God are perfect, we ought to look at the whole universe, not just at one created thing on its own” ([13], p. 39). This also seems to be just what Spinoza himself argues for at E2P8 when he claims that “The ideas of singular things, or of modes, that do not exist must be comprehended in God’s infinite idea in the same way as the formal essences of the singular things, or modes, are contained in God’s attributes.” Without delving into the rather involved debates regarding the status of non-existent modes, over which there is much controversy, for the purposes here—what is key is that non-existent modes or singular things are contained, albeit virtually, in God’s infinite idea, presumably meaning the infinite idea that contains the infinity of relations between singular things. This reading is supported by the Scholium to E2P8, where Spinoza offers the example of a circle in which “there are contained infinitely many rectangles that are equal to one another,” but he adds that “none of them can be said to exist except insofar as the circle exists…” In other words, even if only two rectangles actually exist in the circle as a result of two lines drawn in the circle, the circle nonetheless contains the ideas of infinitely many other rectangles. What God’s infinite idea provides, therefore, is a totality within which any singular thing that comes to be known, including our bodies, is already comprehended, and hence it is in principle capable of being explained. This supports the view of Ursula Renz and Michael Della Rocca who, as we have seen, claim that Spinoza accepts the rationalist principle that all can be explained.

I would argue, however, that this is only part of the story, the story where what can be said can be said clearly, where there is, in principle, a determinate explanation for each and every thing, albeit an explanation that presupposes an infinite series. To recall our earlier point regarding Deleuze’s understanding of the de/differentiating nature of sense, this part of the story captures the differentiating nature of sense, the infinite series of forever expressing sense of another expression. The other part of the story, the dedifferentiating tendency, is that which we must pass over in silence, and that, I will claim, is precisely how Spinoza understands God as absolutely infinite substance. It is indeed tempting to infer from Spinoza’s example of the infinite rectangles within the circle, coupled to his earlier proposition—“E1P15: Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God”—that God is understood by Spinoza to be the determinate totality that contains everything that is, including our determinate bodies and minds. If we were to accept this reading, it is rather straightforward to interpret Spinoza’s next proposition—namely, “E1P16: From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e., everything which can fall under an infinite intellect.)”—as one where Spinoza is implicitly calling upon the necessity of natural laws to explain the relationship between “the divine nature” and the “infinitely many things in infinitely many modes” that follow from these natural laws. This is precisely how Curley reads Spinoza, and he claims in his influential book on Spinoza that “my emphasis on explanation in terms of natural law is fundamentally rightheaded” ([14], p. 155). Spinoza, I argue, resists this interpretation, however, for it only tells part of the story, the part where what can be said can be said clearly and it is precisely his concept of absolutely infinite substance that provides the other half of the story, and an alternative understanding of what it means for determinate things such as our minds to follow from “the necessity of the divine nature.”

The key move here is Spinoza’s concept of God as absolutely infinite, which he defines early in his Ethics, at E1D6: “By God I understand a being absolutely infinite, i.e., a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes, of which each one expresses an eternal and infinite essence.” In the explanation to this definition, Spinoza contrasts the absolutely infinite with something that “is only infinite in its own kind” (E1Def6Exp). To be infinite in its own kind entails, for Spinoza, the reality of something this infinite kind is not, another kind. This is why Spinoza adds that “if something is only infinite in its own kind, we can deny infinite attributes of it,” for if there are only a finite number of attributes, as some have argued6, then there is a limit to God, or God is a substance limited to only a finite number of attributes, and thus there is a limit beyond which God is not. Spinoza reiterates this point in a number of places, but most famously in a letter to Jarig Jelles (Letter 50). In this letter Spinoza rejects the view that sees God as a unique, determinate being7. In part this is because to count something as one or unique, or even as a plurality of individuals that are one or unique, we need to conceive of that which is counted relative to something else. For example, a person with a penny and a dollar bill in their hand will not, to adopt Spinoza’s own example, “think of the number two unless he can call the penny and the dollar by one and the same name,” such as “piece of money” ([20], p. 406). To be two of something, or even one of something, this something needs to be a genus or category, such as “piece of money,” or simply “thing” or, thinking of Kant, “object in general,” so that one can count the objects that are given as being given in a particular, determinate, and countable way8. For Spinoza, however, since “the existence of God is his essence, and we can’t form a universal idea concerning his essence, it’s certain that someone who calls God one or unique does not have a true idea of God, or is speaking improperly about him” (ibid.). There is no conception of the essence of God independent of God’s existence that would enable us to think and determinately count God. Since “the existence of God is his essence,” as Spinoza stresses, God is not to be thought of as determinate at all, for as Spinoza famously puts it later in this same letter, in reference to “matter as a whole,” he argues that matter “considered without limitation, can have no shape, and that shape pertains only to finite and determinate bodies…Therefore, because the shape is nothing but determination, and a determination is a negation, as they say, it [shape] can’t be anything but a negation” (ibid.). Since God is an absolutely infinite being, and hence a being without limitations, God is not to be understood as a determinate, unique being. When Spinoza does refer to God as unique, such as at E1P14c, it is to reiterate the absolutely infinite nature of God: “God is unique, i.e., (by E1D6), that in Nature there is only one substance, and that it is absolutely infinite.” To follow from “the necessity of the divine nature,” therefore, will for Spinoza involve more than simply following in an infinitely determinate and determinable causal series that is in accordance with a determinate law of nature9.

Let us return to Spinoza’s claim, at E2P11, that what “constitutes the actual being of a human Mind is nothing but the idea of a singular thing which actually exists.” We can now see that there is indeed the infinite series of determinate relations between singular things, including the body, which is “the object of the idea constituting a human mind” (E2P13), but this series itself, even if it is comprehended by way of a determinate totality, follows from the absolutely infinite, and hence indeterminate nature of God. We can now begin to clarify Spinoza’s move at E2P12, where he argues that, “E2P12: Whatever happens in the object of the idea constituting the human Mind must be perceived by the human Mind, or there will necessarily be an idea of that thing in the Mind; i.e., if the object of the idea constituting a human Mind is a body, nothing can happen in that body which is not perceived by the Mind.” The point here, for Spinoza, is not that we perceive everything that goes on in our body. If so, we would be the first to detect our own cancer, kidney stones, etc. Rather, and in line with the readings of Spinoza by Renz, Della Rocca, and others, Spinoza is arguing that we can use the ideas crafted and grasped by the human mind to make sense of and explain what is going on in our bodies. But what about our minds themselves, and the ideas our mind uses to explain and make sense of the world as well as our mind and its many other ideas? It is here where the nature of God as absolutely infinite substance becomes key.

To clarify this point, let us return to E2P13, and to Spinoza’s claim that “The object of the idea constituting the human Mind is the Body, or a certain mode of Extension which actually exists, and nothing else.” The important qualifier in this proposition is the final three words, “and nothing else [et nihil aliud].” In the demonstration to this proposition, Spinoza justifies this qualifier by assuming, first, that if the object of the idea constituting the mind were another body, then this body “would not be in God (by EP9c) insofar as he constituted our Mind, but insofar as he constituted the mind of another thing…[and thus] the ideas of the affections of the Body would not be in our Mind…” If there is no object or singular thing, there is no idea, and if this object or singular thing is not our Body, then whatever Mind takes it for its object would not be our Mind. If the object is not the object that constitutes the human mind, then the object the idea is an idea of would also not have ideas of the affections of this body, but since we do have these affections, as Spinoza claims in E2A4—“We feel that a certain body is affected in many ways”—it is thus, to repeat, our body, not another’s, that is the object of the idea that constitutes our mind. The role the qualifier “and nothing else” plays, therefore, is to rule out other objects besides the body constituting the mind, for if there were such objects then there would be affects and hence ideas of these other bodies, which Spinoza denies, stating the point explicitly a few propositions later: “E2P19: The human Mind does not know the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through ideas of affections by which the Body is affected.”

What these arguments presuppose is the determinate identity of the body. In fact, following E2P13, Spinoza offers a lengthy tangent, which is often called the physical digression, where he sets forth the general conditions for the individuation of bodies. In particular, Spinoza argues that “E2L1: Bodies are distinguished from one another by reason of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance,” which leads to the later claim that if there are a number of bodies, with their varying amounts of motion and rest, that “communicate their motions to each other in a certain fixed manner, we shall say that those bodies are united with one another and that they all together compose one body or Individual…” What is key in this move is that while Spinoza clearly sets out the conditions of individuation for a body, and hence for the object the idea of which constitutes the human mind, Spinoza is also clear that this only explains bodies by virtue “of motion and rest, speed and slowness, and not by reason of substance [emphasis mine].” In addition to the nature of bodies that exist as a consequence of their determinate relations to an infinite series of other singular things [from E2P9 and as discussed above], there is [from E1P15] the existence of bodies, including my determinate body, in the nature of God as divine substance, as absolutely infinite being. Understood in this way, the body the idea of which constitutes the human mind is both a determinate, singular thing in relation to an infinite series of other singular things, but it also presupposes the absolutely infinite and indeterminate nature of substance. The nature of our bodies, therefore, consists of a dual tendency. On the one hand, there is the determinate nature and tendency of our bodies, the tendency to persevere in the “certain fixed manner” that makes us the determinate individuals we are, and there is the tendency toward the absolutely infinite and indeterminate, a tendency we already are moreover since our bodies, as something that exists, must be, as with everything else, in God for, to repeat, “E1P15: Whatever is, is in God, and nothing can be or be conceived without God.”

After Spinoza’s physical digression, which occurs between E2P13 and E2P14, and after having set forth the general conditions for the individuation of bodies, a key question emerges regarding the nature of absolutely infinite substance. In particular, if an Individual is taken to be a certain fixed ratio of motion and rest that holds among all the bodies that constitute the individual, and if this is what determines the formal essence of this individual, then the question one might ask is how my body, following E1P15, is in God as absolutely infinite substance? How is a body, a body that is actively in relation to other determinate individuals as part of its ongoing effort to persevere in its own being, its own fixed ratio of motion rest (what Spinoza calls conatus), related, if at all, to God as absolutely infinite substance, and the God Spinoza claims we can know with the third kind of knowledge? Such a knowledge of God, it would seem, given the absolutely infinite nature of God, would not be a determinate knowledge, a knowledge of a determinate object, even if it is an infinite object. Other than a mystical intuition into the nature of God, which some have claimed is how Spinoza should be read, what type of knowledge could this be, and how does this knowledge relate to our determinate bodies?

These questions, among many others, have been the focus of much of the secondary literature on Spinoza. Spinoza was likely aware of the questions his physical digression leaves us with, and he prepares the groundwork for addressing them in the propositions that immediately follow it. In E2P14, for instance, Spinoza follows the last of his six postulates, which reads, “The human Body can move and dispose external bodies in a great many ways,” with E2P14: “The human Mind is capable of perceiving a great many things, and is the more capable, the more its body can be disposed in a great many ways.” On the one hand, this proposition supports the reading of Spinoza discussed earlier whereby our body, as a singular thing, is to be understood within a totality that is God and the infinite singular things that are possible within this totality. The more we can do with our bodies, therefore, the more we come to approximate this totality, and hence the closer we come to being like God. Spinoza, in fact, will make just this point late in the fifth part of the Ethics: “E5P39: He who has a Body capable of a great many things has a Mind whose greatest part is eternal.” But this reading, as I have been arguing, only tells part of the story, for it does not address the implications of an absolutely infinite substance that is not to be confused with anything determinate, including a determinate totality of infinitely many singular things.

Spinoza prepares the way for this other part of the story with the next few propositions, and in E2P15 he draws upon his famous parallelism proposition—namely, “E2P7: The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things”—to bring the implications of his physical digression to bear on the nature of the mind. Having shown that an Individual is nothing less than a fixed ratio of motion and rest that is maintained among all the bodies that constitute our individual body, it follows for Spinoza that “E2P15: The idea that constitutes the formal being [esse] of the human Mind is not simple, but composed of a great many ideas.” Since the body is not a simple, determinate object, but a systemic relation of bodies in a certain, fixed ratio, the idea of this object is not simple either, and hence the idea of the body that constitutes the Mind is not simple. Moreover, as the mind itself comes to be understood in relation to a systematic relation of bodies, we come again to the question of individuation, though this time with respect to determining which bodies are or are not included within the fixed ratio that constitutes the Individual that is our body? As Spinoza makes clear, in E2P16, our body entails its own individual nature and it involves the nature of other bodies, bodies that are not my own. As Spinoza puts it, “E2P16: The idea of any mode in which the human Body is affected by external bodies must involve the nature of the human Body and at the same time the nature of the external body.” If we are indeed affected by external bodies, however, as Spinoza assumes, then the question remains as to determining whether the external body is as it appears, or whether it even exists at all. Spinoza acknowledges this point at E2P17, where he admits that “If the human Body is affected with a mode that involves the nature of an external body, the human Mind will regard the same external body as actually existing, or as present to it, until the Body is affected by an affect that excludes the existence or presence of that body.” According to Spinoza, therefore, our default setting is to assume that the affects we receive as being from an external body are indeed from an external body, or at least from something that is not our own body. Our body, however, is for Spinoza our only access to external objects10, and since “the Mind does not know itself except insofar as it perceives ideas of the affections of the body” (E2P29c), and further because our body is complex and related to objects that may or may not exist, and due to the nature of our own experience and the random, “fortuitous encounter with things” (E2P29s) that goes with it, the result for Spinoza is that we are left with “a mutilated and confused knowledge” (E2P29c).

Things get worse. As we come to have the ideas we have as we encounter the things of the world, we acquire associations between our ideas of things. In anticipation of arguments Hume will make famous, Spinoza recognizes that “E2P18: If the human Body has once been affected by two or more bodies at the same time, then when the Mind subsequently imagines one of them, it will immediately recollect the others also.” Coupled to this association of ideas is the emotional association that comes with them as well, which Spinoza will develop in the Third Part of the Ethics. If my first encounter with a person or thing was unpleasant—the person was particularly rude, let us say, or the food I ate caused food poisoning—then future encounters with the person or food, or even with things associated with them, may in turn bring an emotional coloring to the experience that affects how we interpret and understand what is going on. There is no refuge in our singular, individual body that is distinct from, and sheltered from the storm of fortuitous encounters with things and the emotional associations these bring, for as Spinoza argues, at E2P19, “The human Mind does not know the human Body itself, nor does it know that it exists, except through the affections by which the Body is affected.” Since these affections are subject to our “fortuitous encounters with things,” and to the emotional associations that come with these encounters, the result for Spinoza, it seems fair to say, is that our knowledge of the object that is the object of the idea that constitutes our mind is in the end a “mutilated and confused knowledge.”

Spinoza does offer some potential correctives to this poor state of affairs, noting (as we saw above in E2P17) that we are inclined to accept the existence of an external body as the cause of an affection of our body until “the Body is affected by an affection that excludes the existence or presence of that body.” Donald Davidson, whose Spinozist leanings have been noted but not given the emphasis they probably deserve, will echo Spinoza in the closing lines to his last book, Truth and Predication. In the context of discussing how we come to learn the relationship between a predicate and that which is being predicated, Davidson argues that the assumption should be that we take the subject of predication to be of something that exists, and take it to be truly predicated as well, or at least until it comes to be corrected. As Davidson puts it, “the learner must assume in the case of ostension that what is held to be true is true until enough of the relations among sentences are in place to treat some ostensions as false” ([21], p. 163). Regardless of whether or not Davidson is correctly aligned with Spinoza on this point, if he is it is the Spinoza that understands God as the determinate totality that includes all the relations that will, once revealed, establish the truth of what is the case while excluding, in the process, what is not the case. This is the reading of Spinoza wherein it is assumed that what can be said can in the end be said clearly. The other part of the story, the part that Wittgenstein claims “we must pass over in silence,” enters the scene at E2P20.

Despite the situation we appear to find ourselves in, where we are largely condemned to having only a “mutilated and confused” knowledge of things as a consequence of having our knowledge filtered through the affections of our body, Spinoza is in the end optimistic about the possibility of acquiring a true, adequate knowledge of things. We can see this shift at E2P20: “There is also in God an idea, or knowledge, of the human Mind, which follows in God in the same way and is related to God in the same way as the idea, or knowledge, of the human Body.” In the Demonstration to this proposition, Spinoza references the corollary to E2P11 to show that there is in God an idea of all affections, and hence of the human Mind that consists of the ideas of these affections. As we discussed E2P11, we saw how this led to the reading of Spinoza as an advocate for a determinate totality of relations. The corollary to E2P11 further supported this reading, for here Spinoza adds that “the human Mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God.” Spinoza then goes on to add that insofar as the human mind is a part of the infinite intellect of God, it is the human mind that in part explains the nature of God. Stated differently, as we explain the determinate nature of our affections and their relations to other affections and to other things, we come to explain more of the determinate relations that are part of God’s infinite intellect. As Spinoza will put it later, “…our Mind, insofar as it perceives things truly, is part of the infinite intellect of God” (E2P11c). That is, we overcome the mutilated, confused nature of knowledge as we place the affections we know only with respect to our body and place them in relation to ideas only. This point is clearly stated by Spinoza at E3P5: “an affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it,” and “a clear and distinct idea of the affect itself,” Spinoza adds, “will only be distinguished by reason from the affect itself, insofar as it is only related to the Mind” (E5P3Dem). In other words, as our affects come to be rationally reconstructed within a holistic web of determinate relations, we come both to form clear and distinct ideas of our affects and we come to know more of the nature of God, or at least God insofar as this is the infinite intellect of God.

It is this last point that is key, for the infinite intellect is only part of the story. This is the story where what can be said can be said clearly, the story that is stressed by Renz, Della Rocca, and others. As Spinoza makes clear, however, God’s infinite intellect, including my mind insofar as it “is part of the infinite intellect of God,” falls on the side of Natura naturata rather than Natura naturans. As Spinoza defines the distinction, at E1P29S,…by Natura naturans we must understand what is in itself and is conceived through itself, or such attributes of substance as express an eternal and infinite essence, i.e., God, insofar as he is considered as a free cause. By Natura naturata I understand whatever follows from the necessity of God’s nature, i.e., all the modes of God’s attributes insofar as they are considered as things which are in God.

A couple of propositions later, Spinoza places intellect, both finite and infinite, on the side of Natura naturata: “E1P31: The actual intellect, whether finite or infinite, like will, desire, love, etc., must be referred to Natura naturata, not to Natura naturans.” Natura naturans, I argue, needs to be understood as absolutely infinite substance, as substance without limit, negation, and hence without determination. This absolutely infinite substance, or God, is nothing less than the power of God or substance. As Spinoza states this point, “E1P34: God’s power is his essence itself.” Moreover, the absolutely infinite nature of this power is not something that resides in a distinct realm separate from the determinate, from Natura naturata. To the contrary, Natura naturans is always already expressed within the determinate, or “whatever exists,” Spinoza argues, “expresses in a certain and determinate way the power of God” (E1P36dem). As Spinoza states this in letter 12, Natura naturata is what can be accounted for in terms of duration, in terms of a measurable, quantifiable time, whereas Natura naturans is to be understood in terms of “Eternity, i.e., the infinite enjoyment of existing” ([22], p. 202). This infinite enjoyment of existing, however, is inseparable from the things that follow from the nature of God. One can only separate the two in analysis whereas each and every determinate thing reflects both its determinate nature, its place in the infinite intellect of God (that is, Natura naturata), and it expresses the infinite enjoyment of existing in a certain and determinate way, or God as absolutely infinite substance (that is, Natura naturans). All things, therefore, have a dual aspect, a tendency toward the determinate, and the determinate web of relations we seek to understand and explain through reason, and the tendency to the absolutely infinite, to that which cannot be reduced to anything determinate.

5. An Ethics of Learning

We can return to Deleuze at this point, for his own project provides a window whereby we can understand how things follow from the nature of God as absolutely infinite substance without this “following” being thought of as following in accordance with determinate laws of nature. For Deleuze such laws are abstractions and rules that do nothing to explain how it is that things actually follow from the nature of these rules; to the contrary, for Deleuze a key part of his philosophical project is to understand the processes that explain the emergence of the determinate rules themselves. Deleuze is quite forthright on this point: “Abstractions,” he argues, “explain nothing, they themselves have to be explained: there are no such things as universals, there’s nothing transcendent…there are only processes, sometimes unifying, subjectifying, rationalizing, but just processes all the same” ([23], p. 145). It is in Difference and Repetition, and in his discussions of learning in particular, where Deleuze most clearly explains how abstractions and rules come to be. One place where Deleuze does so is by way of the example of a “well-known test in psychology [that] involves a monkey who is supposed to find food in boxes of one particular colour amidst others of various colours…” ([8], p. 164). As we might imagine, a hungry monkey may fortuitously encounter food under a box and then begin to search for food under the remaining boxes, regardless of their color. At some point, however, and as Deleuze continues, “there comes a paradoxical period during which the number of ‘errors’ diminishes even though the monkey does not yet possess the ‘knowledge’ or ‘truth’ of a solution in each case…” (ibid.). Deleuze will refer to this “paradoxical period” as the “objecticity [objecticité] of a problem (Idea),” whereby the elements that constitute the problem are drawn together—for instance, the boxes, their varied colors, food, hunger, etc.—in a way that allows for the solution to appear, a solution that then enables the monkey to “know” that the food is under boxes of “one particular colour.” This process of encountering a problem (Idea) is precisely how Deleuze understands learning: “Learning is the appropriate name for the subjective acts carried out when one is confronted with the objecticity of a problem (Idea), whereas knowledge designates only the generality of concepts or the calm possession of a rule enabling solutions” (ibid.). Moreover, the determinate solutions that result from the process of learning do not exhaust the nature of a problem, a nature that is infinite and indeterminate. When a child learns to tie their shoes, to take a simple example, they confront the problem of arranging and tying the laces of their shoes such that, among other things, (1) the laces remain tied together and do not unravel, (2) the shoes are tightened and do not fall off, and (3) the laces can be easily untied. As anyone who has watched several children who have recently learned to tie their shoes will know, there are multiple solutions to this problem, or the solution a particular child comes to does not exhaust the problem. It is this process of learning that Deleuze claims accounts for the abstractions and rules we come to follow and employ when we possess “knowledge.”

It is at this point where we can begin to see the overlap between Wittgenstein and Deleuze, and from there the important influence of Spinoza, who was in many ways the teacher of both Wittgenstein and Deleuze. Picking up from our earlier discussion of Deleuze’s claim that “repetition is not generality,” and his related claim that an internal repetition of the singular is not to be confused with external repetitions, we can see that it is the latter, external repetitions that can be represented by moral and natural laws. Deleuze is quite forthright on this point, arguing that “If repetition is possible, it is as much opposed to moral law as it is to natural law.” If there is an ethics for Deleuze, therefore, it will not be an ethics that takes the form of a moral law, an ethics lays out the moral rules and laws that we are to follow. To the contrary, the ethics Deleuze will implicitly call upon throughout Difference and Repetition and more explicitly in What is Philosophy?, is an ethics of learning, a charitable questioning that finds within the given the possibilities for transformation and an enhancement of connections and relations. In Difference and Repetition as well, Deleuze will encourage a living and thinking that embraces the problematic, that affirmatively encounters the “objecticity of a problem”—that is, a life of learning. One of the ways this is stated in Difference and Repetition is that we ought to engage in what he calls “the art of multiplicities: the art of grasping the Ideas and the problems they incarnate in things, and of grasping things as incarnations, as cases of solution for the problems of Ideas” ([8], p. 182). Although this ethics has been stated in a sentence, for Deleuze the metaphysics that underlies it eludes the categorial, representational modes of thinking that had typically been the philosophical approach to clarifying and arguing for a position. In a word, an ethics of learning passes over, in silence, the dictums and mandates that come with an ethics that grounds itself in the determinate nature of moral and natural law.

To bring Spinoza into the conversation at this point, and to align his project in important ways with both those of Wittgenstein and Deleuze, we can pick up on our earlier discussions of Spinoza and turn now to highlighting what Spinoza might mean by the intellectual love of God grounded in the nature of God as the “infinite enjoyment of existing,” as Spinoza puts it, and how we are to distinguish this intellectual love of God—third kind of knowledge—from the knowledge and understanding that is based in explanations that draw from laws of nature. We can begin to do this by turning to Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza’s understanding of non-existent modes. Spinoza offers the following explanation of what he means by non-existent modes: “The ideas of singular things, or of modes, that do not exist must be comprehended in God’s infinite idea in the same way as the formal essences of the singular things, or modes, are contained in God’s attributes” (E2P28). If God, as absolutely infinite substance, is a substance without limitation, as we have seen earlier, then this substance should be fully actualized, there should be no possibilities that God has not realized for this would appear to be a limitation on the nature of God. If there is something that God has not yet actualized, then there is something that delimits the actualized from the non-actualized nature of God. The mistake in this view, according to Deleuze on his reading of Spinoza, is to prioritize the numerically distinct and extensive over the intrinsic and intensive nature of God. Stated differently, the mistake is to think one can understand the essence and nature of a singular thing by listing off its determinate properties, the existent properties one may think individuates the singular thing as being the thing that it is. Alternatively, Deleuze suggests we consider that “a mode’s essence exists, is real and actual, even if the mode whose essence it is does not actually exist,” to which he adds that a mode’s essence “is not a logical possibility, nor a mathematical structure, nor a metaphysical entity, but a physical reality, a res physica” ([24], p. 192). A mode’s essence “can only be assimilated to the possible,” to imaginative, mathematical structures, laws of nature, etc., if, Deleuze adds, “we consider them abstractly, that is, divorce them from the cause that makes them real or existing things” (ibid. 194, emphasis mine). And this “cause that makes them real or existing things,” finally, is precisely God as absolutely infinite, intensive, immanent process, as Natura Naturans. Stated in the terms Deleuze uses in Difference and Repetition, the cause that makes determinate modes real is God as problematic substance, by which a problem for Deleuze is precisely the condition that makes possible the actualization of determinate solutions while it at the same time is not to be confused with the solutions it makes possible, nor do the solutions exhaust the nature of the problem. The implications for Spinoza are significant, for when Spinoza says, at E1P16 that “From the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes,” we can see now that on Deleuze’s reading as well this does not entail following from the determinate laws and rules of nature, but rather from the intensive “internal repetition within the singular,” the paradoxical repetition of “an ‘unrepeatable’” ([8], p. 1). The nature of rules and laws themselves are made possible by this internal repetition, or on the Deleuzian reading of Spinoza offered here, by the nature of God as problematic substance. While the determinate rules and laws of nature do indeed assist the imagination in its attempts to make sense of our world and our place in it, and they can, ideally, be stated clearly, they are not to be confused with the nature of God as absolutely infinite substance and the infinite enjoyment of existing. As for the nature of the solutions made possible by God as problematic substance, they are not transcendent realities but rather tendencies of immanent processes themselves, tendencies that are never fully realized as determinate nature, nor are they completely dedifferentiated in a chaos of indetermination. Solutions, in other words, are inseparable from sense and thus involve both a differentiating tendency toward determinate solutions and a dedifferentiating tendency toward an indeterminate problem that undermines and transforms these solutions. This is precisely the indeterminate, immanent condition Deleuze reads into Spinoza, and this is the metaphysics that supports not only Deleuze’s ethics of learning but also the metaphysics of Spinoza’s Ethics, and the metaphysics that supports his ethics.

6. Wittgenstein’s Ethical Project

We can now return to the difficulties Wittgenstein had in his effort to put his written thoughts into a “natural order and without breaks” ([25], p. vii), and we can use the metaphysics of Spinoza and Deleuze that has been sketched here to understand these difficulties. Stated simply, the difficulty expresses the nature of the encounter with the dual tendencies of human reality (or reality simpliciter) as problem. In the effort to describe the language-games that account for what we do when we ask questions, give commands, tell a story, multiply numbers, etc., we bring to bear the Natura naturata tendency whereby the determinate is in relation to other determinate things, and these too are in relation to other determinate things, and so on ad infinitum. Although these relations may remain impossible for us to completely understand, they may serve as a regulative ideal, to borrow a phrase from Kant, that guides our enquiries, and at the very least it does not in principle hinder our efforts to establish a natural order between phenomena, and an order without breaks no less. To the contrary, the Natura naturata tendency provides the sense that whatever we do in our lives can ultimately be explained, can be put in a natural order and hence that everything, in the end, is intelligible, a point that has been stressed, as we have seen, by Renz, Della Rocca, and others. On the other hand, the Natura naturans tendency eludes anything determinate and is only properly understood as an absolute that cannot be limited in any way and is thus without relations to something other that could provide an explanation or justification for why it is the way it is rather than otherwise. The Natura naturans tendency undermines relations and our efforts to explain one thing in terms of another, or to provide a natural order that connects one thing with another without breaks. As these dual tendencies come to be expressed in and as the reality we encounter, the reality where our ethics of learning and philosophical investigations plays out, the effort to provide a natural order to the relations we attempt to describe and explain comes to involve an incommensurability that cannot be explained in terms of the determinate relations at hand. This incommensurability often provokes an alternative effort to determine the relations at play in another effort to explain what is going on, an effort that is in turn incommensurable to the previous effort. This effort presupposes its own incommensurability that provokes yet other efforts to determine what is going on, and so on. As Wittgenstein’s investigations proceeded, he did make headway in his efforts to understand “the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things” ([25], p. vii), but the relations between these various topics became incommensurable with each other and prevented Wittgenstein from setting it all forth in “a natural order and without breaks.”

7. Conclusions: Troubled Reason

Bringing this essay to a close, we can now see that the difficulty with Wittgenstein’s thought process was not with his inadequacies but with the difficulties of reasoning itself, with what we might call troubled reason. Despite his claim that “what can be said at all can be said clearly,” and despite the fact that his Tractatus is widely thought to be an example of saying things clearly, the reality is that most people did not understand what Wittgenstein was saying. Gottlob Frege, for example, confessed to finding himself “tangled in doubt as to what it is you [Wittgenstein] want to say and [I] can make no headway with it” (cited in [26], p. 152); and Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, and Frank Ramsey each in turn acknowledged the difficulties they had in understanding the text, or even if they understood it at all. Wittgenstein himself recognized he was likely to be misunderstood, and not by virtue of being unclear; rather, it is by virtue of being understood that he comes to be misunderstood. As Wittgenstein puts it, in ending the Tractatus, his “propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical” ([12], 6.54; p. 74). Wittgenstein then offers the analogy of the ladder one can discard once one has climbed up it, with the propositions taken to be the ladder. With the arguments put forth in this essay we can offer a friendly addendum to this reading of the analogy. On the one hand, we can see the propositions of the Tractatus, along with the propositions of Spinoza’s Ethics and the arguments in Deleuze, as the determinate steps of a ladder, the steps necessary for acquiring understanding (Wittgenstein), blessedness (Spinoza), and the art of multiplicities (Deleuze). Understood in this way, these steps are distinct from the end they enable us to achieve, and hence Wittgenstein’s claim that we can “throw away the ladder after [we have] climbed up it.” On the other hand, and this is the other part of the story that has been stressed throughout this essay, there is the absolutely infinite nature of substance for Spinoza, the internal repetition for Deleuze, that is not to be confused with anything determinate and yet is inseparable from the determinate. For Wittgenstein this is the nonsense that is inseparable from understanding, the troubled reason inseparable from clear, logical reasoning. It was therefore in the nature of Wittgenstein’s investigations themselves that his attempts to place his thoughts in a natural order and without break came to ruin, for the nature of reasoning is itself troubled, or involves a problematic Idea that undermines attempts to set things in a determinate order. This is not a sign of failure, however, for thought itself finds its true purpose, its ethics we could say, in learning, when confronted with the nature of a problem, a problem thought cannot understand.