Frege ridiculed the formalist conception of mathematics by saying that the formalists confused the unimportant thing, the sign, with the important, the meaning…Without a sense, or without the thought, a proposition would become an utterly dead and trivial thing….And the conclusion which one draws from this is that what must be added to the dead signs in order to make a live proposition is something immaterial, with properties different from all mere signs.
But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say that it was its use.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, p. 4
I have rewritten this post several times. Philosophers tend to make me do that. They don’t necessarily communicate in such a way as to be understood. But anyhow, I’m convinced there’s something interesting, and probably important, here. I just don’t know that I can put my finger on it precisely as of yet.
I have written about meaning and application on the blog several times. For example, I did a three part series on the subject last Fall (HERE, HERE, and HERE). Why do I care? I care because I realize that we cannot claim to truly understand Scripture unless we are actually experiencing and living out its teachings. I discuss that in the other posts, so I won’t retread it here.
The life of the sign (call it meaning), Wittgenstein says, is the use of the sign (call it application). That is, if we are not correctly using the sign, applying the sign, then the sign is empty, meaningless, and, really, lifeless. This goes for a sentence on a page. The words I am writing have no power in them unless they are put to some sort of use. The same goes for all sentences written by all writers. They are dead letters: empty pixels. Without a spiritual meaning (I don’t know what else you could call it) behind the letters, words, sentences, etc. they are of no use. If you do not make use of your reading, then you either reject it or do not understand it. In the latter case, it is dead to you, or you are dead to it, depending on how one looks at such things.
Now you might apply this concept to a number of things. Say, for instance, the sacraments (confusing the sign and the thing signified, or failing to experience and live out the internal meaning), or the actual reading of Scripture (failing to make application, or use, of its teachings in your own soul). In general, this is a failure to draw out the immaterial from the material; or an inability to distinguish the difference. When you miss one, you miss both; when you confuse them, well, you are confused. You cannot separate them, but at the same time you must not confuse or conflate them.
Confused?
You’ve chosen an excellent excerpt. It is an essential idea of his and resurfaces a great deal in his philosophy of mathematics, comments on religious belief, the mind/body dichotomy, etc.. Gilbert Ryle’s (shamefully derivative) Concept of Mind draws a great deal from this idea. The ‘ghost in the machine’, the misconception that there is a ghostly, immaterial, essence behind the words, inside the brain, etc..
You don’t sound confused as you write; where do you feel your confusion lies?
I’m actually encouraged that you think I’m expressing my thoughts clearly. It’s not really that I’m confused; it’s just one of those things where I don’t know how to communicate the sense I have of what Wittgenstein was saying. If you could make sense of what I was saying, then I’m happy.