“People Say: Here is the World”: Wittgenstein and Husserl on the Status of Reality

Abstract

The article treats two interpretations of the statement “here is the world”: in a conversation between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Friedrich Waissmann on the ethics of Moritz Schlick (1930) and in Edmund Husserl's working manuscript “The traditional idea of the being-in-itself and the essential relativity of the being of the world and of all mundane beings” (1932). For Husserl, it is a matter of unfolding the tacitly implied premise of the “natural attitude” of consciousness — the so-called “general thesis”. This allows him to thematise, with regard to the existence of the world: the way of stating the fact of existence, its intersubjective and temporal aspects, the idea of the being-in-itself as an independent substratum, the accompanying horizon of implications, the “obvious” character of this existence. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, endeavours to clarify what is implied in the everyday use of this expression. In this way, a number of paradoxes are revealed concerning the tense interaction between: the good and facts; values and their description (more broadly: ethics and theory); religion and meaningful speech; the actual existence of the world and the ethical. The interpretation of the positions of the two philosophers reveals that they have fundamentally different understandings of inverted commas when writing down the expression “here is the world”: in one case they are direct speech inverted commas and inverted commas indicating the meaning of the expression, and in the other case they are inverted commas of the title of the rubric and inverted commas of the figurative sense, denoting (and provoking) transition into the register of the phenomena. Taking this into account, we can, while reading the expression “here is the world”, make a “change of aspect”, shift from one philosophical coordinate system to another and back again.