further questions about the reality of any substance we specify. Thales said, “All things
are water,” but what about the reality of the water?
Reality, it seems, is what all real things have: they all have “being.” In this way, the verb
“to be” is reified into a realm in which all real things inhere. But to speak of “Being
being,” is as senseless as to speak of “Running running.” Walt Disney can show us the
Eiffel Tower running, but not even he could show us “Running running” or “Being
being” (Sprague 1962).
Because of these logical confusions, many philosophers in the wider Anglo-American
analytic tradition have concluded, perhaps under Frege's influence, that it is incoherent to
say that “what is” is. The preoccupation of continental philosophers with the notion of
“being” is often dismissed as an instance of the reification of the verb “to be” (Williams
1997). Premature though that dismissal certainly is, the problem of talking of “being as
such” that begins with the Presocratics runs through the history of philosophy. Can
Plato's Forms be said to exist? Can this be said of Locke's substratum? Can Hegel's
Absolute Spirit be said to exist? Can Heidegger's “Being” be said to be?
How does the notion of “being as such” become connected with Wittgenstein's thought
and lead to a caricature of it? It is easy to miss if we simply concentrate on certain aspects
of Wittgenstein's analogy between language and games, those that stress the various
forms language takes. Of course, a great deal of confusion is caused by confusing the
grammars of these forms, for example, the grammar of physical object language with the
grammar of “God.” This was an aspect of philosophy emphasized in Oxford linguistic
philosophy. To remain here, however, would be to miss the deepest aspect of
Wittgenstein's thought, which has to do, not with confusions between different forms of
language, but
end p.454
with confusions about language itself. These confusions cannot be treated in the same
way. We bring out the confusion between different forms of language by giving
perspicuous representations of the different grammars. But confusions about language as
such, those that lead to postulating a metaphysical realm, cannot be treated in the same
way, for how could one give a perspicuous representation of the whole language? That
means nothing.
How do confusions about language lead to the claim that, according to Wittgenstein, the
only reality we have contact with is the reality of language, not contact with reality as
such? Let us consider a simple case of a disagreement over whether a tablecloth is red in
the absence of the tablecloth. The two persons who disagree agree, of course, about the
meaning of “red”; they agree in their reaction to colors.^10 But this does not mean that
when I say “The tablecloth is red” I am saying anything about language, about the
meaning of “red.” I am saying something about the color of the tablecloth. What is more,
if I am standing in front of the tablecloth, that is something I may be certain of. I do not
say, in those circumstances, as the other epistemologies argued I ought to say, that the
tablecloth is probably red, that I believe that the tablecloth is red, that it is suggested to
me that the tablecloth is red, or that I interpret that the color of the tablecloth is red. When
I say that the tablecloth is red, I am referring to what Reformed epistemologists call a
sober truth about the world, the fact of the matter. How, then, can it be said that the