T:
By logos I mean our immanent ability to make sense of our existence and the world around us.
There are various ways in which we can make sense of our existence and the world around us.
Science cannot help us understand our existence: why are we here, why is there a world at all, what is consciousness and so on.
We may create various stories as to why we are here or why there is a world at all, but they are only stories. When we accept a story we fool ourselves if we think we have gained understanding. The question of consciousness, is, I think, a different kind of question, one that may yield to scientific inquiry; but, of course, this may depend on what one thinks consciousness is, whether it requires an organism that is sufficiently developed to be conscious or if consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. And this in turn has bearing on the question of the subject.
I mean something that gives us transparency of our existence so that we end up seeing that our being in the world does not need an explanation any more. Reality is causa sui.
One might think an explanation is no longer needed because we now have that explanation (
causa sui) or because such questions are about something that stands outside the logical nexus of explanation. Is
causa sui an explanation or is just a way of saying that things are as they are without anything above or beyond, without anything transcendent being the cause?
But it is absurd to think of a world with its logic without an 'I'.
It is self-contradictory. To think requires a thinker. There is, however, no logical contradiction in a world without an ‘I’, no logical necessity that there be an ‘I’.
And how can there be logic without the subject?
The subject is only needed to provide a picture, that is, to represent the logical relations that exist between facts. Those relations are not the result of the subject who represents them in language.
The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world.
The metaphysical subject is an abstraction. A way of describing the relationship between me and the world. It is like the analogy of the eye. The eye that sees is not the eye that can be seen. It is the difference between seeing and what is seen.
Wittgenstein:
The I in solipsism shrinks to an extensionless point and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it.
What is at issue here is that the I and world form a coordinate reality.
Wittgenstein:
The I occurs in philosophy through the fact that the “world is my world”.
In solipsism “strictly carried out” the ‘I’ recedes and what remains is my world. In the Investigations he says:
Only of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (281).
To what extent this is a departure from the Tractatus must be viewed in light of the changes in his understanding of language, privacy, and intersubjectivity. In any case, I do not see what he says as support for your claim that the subject manifests itself in the individual subject.
I think the word 'I' denotes two things: an individual, empirical subject and the transcendental subject that only happens to be this empirical subject.
I agree that the metaphysical or transcendental subject is not an individual, but not with the distinction between the empirical subject and the transcendental subject. There is no empirical subject. Fooloso4 and Tamminen are not empirical subjects, although we can be empirical objects.
The subject is transcendental in the Kantian sense, that is, part of the condition that makes possible my world.
Wittgenstein says:
Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.
It is through the actions of my will my world comes to be as it is for me. The ‘I’ does not make empiricism possible, logic does. Logic is the structure that underlie both what exists in the world and empiricism.
T:
I interpret W. so that the world is there with its logic and always with an 'I' whose world it is. So it is independent of some particular empirical subject but depends on subjectivity because the world is always my world, whoever that 'I' happens to be. The being of the world, the being of logic and the being of the metaphysical subject are equiprimordial.
That the world is always my world is true only for subjects and only with regard to the meaning of the world. Wittgenstein does not posit hypothetical subjects for whom the world would still be their world even if there were no humans or human like creatures. He does not rule out a lifeless world without subjects as illogical, only it is not what is the case.
The facts in logical space are the world (T 1.13)
The metaphysical ‘I’ is not a fact and is not in logical space. The metaphysical 'I' is in ethical space.
What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)
The totality of existent atomic facts is the world.(2.04)
The existence and non-existence of atomic facts is the reality. (2.06)
The total reality is the world (2.063)
T:
A universe without subjects who bring meaning to it would be something that is impossible to think about without contradicting oneself.
A world without subjects is meaningless but not contradictory. The contradiction lies only in the fact that it is impossible to think without a subject that thinks. There is nothing logically impossible about a meaningless world. We cannot posit a world without subjects because we are subjects. We have no evidence or reason to conclude, however, that because we are subjects that the metaphysical 'I' is primordial. Subjectivity may be the exception, an anomaly, or something that occurs in some places but not others.
Its impossibility can be proved with reductio ad absurdum.
Please demonstrate.