Baffling philosophy
From Mr Laurence Goldstein
Sir: Edward Smith (Letters, 26 January) cites an amusing but apocryphal attribution to Wittgenstein to the effect that, in the beginning, after God said 'Let there be light', there was still nothing, but you could see it better. There is, however, a real, related Wittgensteinian insight that refutes the 'conventional cosmology' concerning the beginning of the universe, retailed by Michael Smith in a letter in the same issue.
Michael Smith says that 'Until the Big Bang, there was utter void — no matter . indeed . , no time'. Wittgenstein claimed that it is a common mistake to assume that every noun names an object. And, as Kant had previously made clear, the noun 'time' does not stand for any object. We can perfectly sensibly say that a certain object did not exist at some time before a particular time. If you think that time itself is an object. you may therefore be inclined to think it sensible to say that, before the Big Bang, time itself did not exist. But this would be tantamount to saying that at some time before a certain time no time existed. And that, clearly, is a conceptual confusion, an excellent example of the 'bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language' against which, according to Wittgenstein, philosophy battles.
Laurence Goldstein
Department of Philosophy, University of Hong Kona
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