"Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyword of the imagination"
Wittgenstein (Philosophical Investigations, p.6)
A. Wittgenstein's life and background
I, a mediocre human, would have no audacity to place myself alongside a luminous figure like Wittgenstein, except for the only reason that perhaps like many of his admirers, I find Wittgenstein's life and thoughts utterly fascinating. Like Nietzsche before him, he was a philosopher in whose thoughts I find echoes of my own faint thoughts and longings. They are the only two philosophers I have tried to digest. They have inspired me to study German (on my own) although not with much success. Also, like them in my very biased opinion, I am a functional madman, dangerously perching on the edge of the precipice, and forever contemplating of taking the plunge (Nietzsche: "if you look into the abyss long enough, it will look back at you."). Even the pen name I chose, Wissai, sounds German. It has something to do with Wissen. I love knowledge. I want to know. I want to know just above everything, including myself. Perhaps unlike Wittgenstein, I have no fear of self contradictions. The self-awareness that I am a walking case of self-contradictions has been with me for a long time. My life has been an attempt to override, to integrate the contradictions. Undertaking this project, ostensibly under the guise of note-taking is to sum of the intellectual and emotional (and not so much social) journey I have travelled. It is a confrontation with who I am and what I have been through and done. It is an attempt to achieve self-acceptance and peace. It's my way of saying "Fuck!" at the world and of what most scumbags hold dear and near to their hearts. If I could slap a few faces and kick several butts, I would not write this. I would be busy enjoy my sense of "power". I would be smug with myself. I would have no neuroses.
Please read this piece very slowly, word by word, sentence by sentence and pause frequently before you move on to the next sentence, because that's how reading about philosophy must be done. Philosophy is not for the stupid and the lazy. Philosophy is verbal math and reasoning by means of language and in the case of Wittgenstein-- and Wissai, too, if I may add---mysticism couched in poetic language. Philosophy, properly undertaken and studied, would make a person grow stronger emotionally and intellectually (I am not so sure about socially, though) because it involves higher and personal truths. A person who self declares that he is a philosopher should be viewed as an unusual, uncommon, serious, and maybe dangerous person. We must defer, delay our assessments of him until we have a heart-to-heart conversation with him about his philosophy and the journey he is taking. Any premature yakking about him is a form of mental masturbation.
Unlike Nietzsche who was shy with women and had no success with them, and unlike Wittgenstein who was a closet homosexual, I have been popular with women and I was pursued by gay men in my youth but I spurned all the latter's advances. I was sympathetic to their orientation, but I was not in their league. The following is my second attempt to understand Wittgenstein that I put in writing. It consists of notes copied verbatim (with occasional editorial, personal words of my own) from the books listed at the end of this crazy, meandering, soul-saving piece. Interested readers are encouraged to read the books themselves. The notes are designed to retain what I should get from reading (mainly about) Wittgenstein. The notes are tentative and to be revised and expanded as I get my hand on more books on Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein is considered by his admirers the greatest philosopher in the 20th century. If you go to Wikipedia, you'll find a long list of thinkers and writers affected by him. You'll find a long list of languages, including Vietnamese, in which you can read about him. That testifies a high level of interest a man has aroused. A poll of professional philosophers in 1998 put him fifth in a list of those who made the most important contributions to the subject, after Aristotle, Plato, Kant, and Nietzsche and ahead if Hume and Descartes. (Edmonds p.292)
It is an understatement to say that Wittgenstein's personality was complex. He bewitched people, especially his students who became disciples and aped his attires and mannerisms. British eminent literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, the author of a screenplay and novel about Wittgenstein, wrote, "An arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic."In her book on 20th-century poetic language, Wittgenstein's Ladder, the American critic Marjorie Perloff instances eight novels and plays, twelve books of poetry, and some six performance pieces and experimental artworks that are directly about or influenced by Wittgenstein. (Edmonds, pp 22-23)
He might also be unique among philosophers in having become part of journalists' shorthand, with his name standing in for "charismatic genius." "You don't have to be Wittgenstein to understand..."offers an alternative to "You don't have to be a rocket scientist..."; while "He's no Wittgenstein" puts someone in his intellectual place.
Wittgenstein came from an extraordinary family of high achievers and odd personalities. Three of his older brothers committed suicide. Wittgenstein flirted with the thought of suicide all his life. His friend David Pinsent recorded how Wittgenstein had told him "that all his life there had hardly been a day, in which I he had not at one time or another thought of suicide as a possibility. " (Edmonds p. 196). His choices in life put his physical well-being in high danger. He volunteered for service during the First World War. He lived an austere life as a primary school teacher in rural Austria. He lived in isolation in Norway.
Nietzsche had several penetrating remarks about suicide ("the thought of suicide has helped many pass through difficult nights", "to know why we have to live, we will come up with the how"). I
have thought about suicide as a philosophical and psychological issue all my life (suicide is an attempt to attain peace), but have ruled against it on the principle that it's too drastic, too extreme, too defeatist. I have to live my life as a Sisyphus. Plus, I don't live just for my own little self. I live for others as well. I have responsibilities. Contrary to popular beliefs, your life, as a sentient, conscious, deeply aware human being, is not really your own. Other beings, especially your loved ones, do claim an ownership on your life.
B. Wittgenstein and Russell
Wittgenstein studied philosophy under Russell, but he soon thought he was superior to Russell, and Russell himself admitted that his student was a genius, and soon abandoned serious work in philosophy. When he later tried to pick it up, to his chagrin he found himself out of fashion among the younger generation of British philosophers, among whom Wittgenstein, was now the greatest influence. (Monk, p.278)
When he first met Wittgenstein, Russell realized his new student needed to learn basic logic, so he arraigned for Wittgenstein to be tutored by a leading Cambridge logician, W.E. Johnson, a fellow of King's College. The result was a disaster. Declared Wittgenstein, "I found in the first hour that he had nothing to teach me". Johnson himself ruefully observed, "At our first meeting he was teaching me." (Strathern p.17).
Wittgenstein and Russell began discussing mathematical logic, which at the time was so complex that only six people in the world could understand it. Yet within two years, according to Russell, Wittgenstein "knew all I had to teach." More than this, Wittgenstein managed to convince Russell that he would never do any creative philosophy again. Only Wittgenstein could possibly discover the way forward. As Russell wrote in My Philosophical Development, the impact of Wittgenstein came in two waves.
The first wave came in the summer of 1913, when Wittgenstein temporarily destroyed Russell's philosophical self-confidence through his devastating attack on Russell's theory of judgment. The second wave came in 1919, after Russell had to some extent rebuilt his self- confidence, when he read Wittgenstein's TLP and became convinced by it that the view of logic which had most motivated his own work on the philosophy of mathematics was fundamentally wrong. Up until his reading of Wittgenstein's TLP, Russell took a more or less Platonic view of logic, regarding it as the study of objective and eternal truths. After reading Wittgenstein, Russell became convinced that, on the contrary, logic was purely linguistic, so-called "logical truths" being nothing more than tautologies. Russell's great work on the philosophy of mathematics was inspired by the dream of arriving at truths that were demonstrable, incorrigible and known with absolute certainty. Logic, he thought, was such a body of truth, and his ambition of proving that mathematics was but a branch of logic was driven by his desire to show that a substantial body of knowledge, was impervious to skeptical doubt. If logic was not a body of truth, but merely---as Russell put it immediately after his conversion to a Wittgensteinian view---a matter of giving "different way of saying the same thing", then this dream vanished and with it the hope of arriving at any absolutely certain knowledge. Neither logic nor mathematics had the philosophical interest that Russell had attributed to them, and that, fundamentally, was why he abandoned the philosophy of mathematics (Monk pp 6-7).
"(Wittgenstein was) perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating.....His avalanches make mine seem mere snowflakes...."
"His criticism, tho' I don't think he realized at the time, was an even of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy...Wittgenstein persuaded me that what wanted doing in logic was too difficult for me.." (Edmonds, pp 44-45).
But let's backtrack and examine the work on philosophy that Russell did. Until Russell, and from the time of Descartes, the central branch of philosophy had been epistemology---the study of what we can know. Descartes had searched inside him for secure knowledge. His method had been to doubt everything until he reached the bedrock of certainty. When he could not dig further, he coined the phrase "Cogito, ergo sum." The British empiricists Locke, Berkeley, and Hume were among those who followed in this epistemological tradition. But, after Russell, epistemology was replaced by the philosophy of language and the premise that our words are the lenses through which we access our thoughts and the world. We cannot see the world without them.
A great puzzle for philosophers was the relationship between language and the world. How was it that a series of letters, say p-i-p-e when placed in the appropriate order, acquired a meaning? The creed in the early twentieth century---part of the branch of philosophy known as logical atomism---was that all words stand for objects and that is how a word derives its meaning. But what object does a fairy-take creation such as a golden mountain signify? Writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, an Austrian logician, Alexius Meinong, had proposed to this problem. For Meinong, the fact that we can refer to a golden mountain means that there is a way in which a golden mountain is out there logically, though not physically out there. The same is true of ghosts, tooth fairies, the Loch Ness monster,metc... In the world of logic there is a Loch Ness monster. Its existence in the world of logic allows us to deny its existence in the world of reality. This picture of the world conjured up by Meinong seemed to Russelll cluttered and disorderly. To clean this metaphysical mess, Russell came up with Theory of Descriptions.
Russell believed we are confused by our language. We think that descriptions such as "the golden mountain" or the "King of France" behave like names. And so we think these descriptions, just like names, must denote an object in order to have meaning. But they do not function as names. Although the statement "The King of France is bald" seems straightforward enough, it actually masks a complex logical triplet. And its three ingredients are as follows:
1. There is a King of France.
2. There is only one King of France.
3. Whatever is King if France is bald.
Once this logic is exposed, we can see how the statement "the King of France is bald" makes sense but is false because the first premise, that there is (currently speaking) a King of France, is untrue. This deconstruction of the sentence has come to be seen as a paradigm of the analytic methods. And thereafter, when asked what was his most significant contribution to philosophy, Russell would unhesitatingly answered, "The Theory of Descriptions."
C. Importance of Philosophy to Wittgenstein
As Russell observed, Wittgenstein had the pride of Lucifer, but also possessed the spiritual fanaticism of a saint. Wittgenstein once said, "What is good is also divine. Queer as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural". In the Preface to his only published book during his lifetime, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he wrote, "This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it---or similar thoughts."
It is no exaggeration to compare Wittgenstein wrestling with the problems of logic to Jacob wrestling with his angel. Philosophy became a matter of life and death for him. This thought, this idea, this struggle has resonated deeply with me. Like Wittgenstein, I view anyone who feels it less than this with contempt. Everyone has a philosophy. It is up to the individual to know exactly what it is. To live is to philosophize. Of course, some do that far better than others. Some of us are truer to themselves. They have true pride. They know self-respect is far more important than the superficial, conferred respect based on superficialities. They know they can lie to others (deception) forever because deception is a game and can be fun and is useful for survival, but constantly lying to themselves (self-deception) is not a fun game at all. It is exhausting, hard work and takes heavy toll on their soul, on their ability to look at themselves in the mirror everyday and like what they see there. After all, deep down everybody wants to like himself. Nobody likes to be a rat and a scoundrel, not all his life, not from sunrise to sunset and then from dusk to dawn. To walk tall, not with downcast eyes, and to be comfortable with oneself are essential to mental health and happiness. That's what I think, and I don't give a damn if others disagree with me on this because I know I am right. I have heard whispers of conscience. Certain convictions a man hold are unshakeable because they are born out of living, painful experiences. Ask a man who has gone through the experiences of living through Nazi concentration camps, he would tell you what his views about human nature, about the nature of both the captors and the inmates, are. His views are his convictions and his version of truths. So, I ironically laugh and respect at the same time a person's personal beliefs and convictions, no matter how ludicrous and stupid and extreme they may be (except perhaps his "religious" beliefs because religious beliefs are not born out of life experiences but of hearsay and indoctrination and brainwashing) because I know what that person must have gone through to arrive at those beliefs and convictions. Yes, self-projection is useful sometimes if it comes with empathy and imagination. Before one dies, one must make peace with oneself and knows exactly where he is. In reading about a man's philosophy, one must read word by word because each word is his drop of blood on the printed/virtual page. The page is stained red forever, leaving a permanent record for all to see and determine if the man is speaking from his soul and blood is dripping from his heart or he's just a fraud with words. Wittgenstein is no fraud. If he is, then he has bewitched many smart minds. I don't think I am a fraud either. All my life I have tried not to be one, but whether I have succeeded or not, it's not for me to judge. My words and my actions speak for themselves. But I am willing to wage a large sum of money that many seemingly pious, Bible-spouting, TV evangelicals are frauds and thieves. I also know personally and quite painfully, as a matter of fact, various human animals which are frauds through and through, intellectually, morally and emotionally. Anyway, I am getting off track. It's time to be back to Wittgenstein.
D. The book that shook the intellectual world
It's time to have a look at Tractatus Logicus-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein's most famous book and the only one published in his lifetime.
Wittgenstein opens the book with two striking, haunting remarks. They grabbed the reader's attention:
1. The world is all that is the case.
1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things
He then argues:
1.12 For the totality of facts determines what is the case, and also what is not the case.
1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.
This leads on to:
2. What is the case---a fact---is the existence of states of affairs.
2.01 A state of affairs (a state of things) is a combination of objects (things) .
He then claims:
2.012 in logic nothing is accidental: if a thing can occur in a state of affairs, the possibility of the state of affairs must be written into the thing itself.
Later he states his ethical position:
6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
6.43 If the world or bad exercise of the will does alter the world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not the facts---not what can be expressed by means of language.
He reveals that his attitude is essentially mystical:
6.432 How are things in the world is a matter of indifference to what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the facts.
This leads him to denigrate philosophy:
6.53 The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e., propositions of natural science---i.e., something that has nothing to do with philosophy---and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.
This leads to his final, controversial, famous conclusion:
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence
(Strathern pp 59-62)
At Oxford University during the early 1950's Bryan Magee, a future philosopher and member of Parliament, attended, the Tractatus was held up as the founding constitutional document of logical positivism, but Magee discovered its central thesis was the opposite of logical positivism.
The logical positivists had tended to assimilate all forms of truth-seeking about the world to science. Thus, they judged all truth-seeking activities by the criteria governing those of science, and judged the validity of all utterances by the rules appropriate to scientific utterance. Only what could be verified by observation or experience could be known about the world, and only what we could produce valid grounds for stating could validly or justifiably be said. But everything important could, at least in principle, be said. And what could be said at all could be said clearly. The Tractatus, by direct contrast with nearly all this, maintained that almost everything that is most important cannot be stated at all but only, at the very best, indicated by our use if language. It may possibly be shown, but cannot be said. The Tractatus took a low view of science. All that propositional language is good for is to articulate empirical and analytic truths, that is to say, matters of fact and logic. Outside those spheres it is more likely to mislead than to be useful. Therefore all the issues that matter to us most lie outside its scope. Questions about ethics and morals and values, about the meaning of life, about the nature of the self and of death, and about the existence of the world as a whole (questions that deeply concern Wissai) are questions that that can be settled neither by observation nor by logic, and are therefore such as proportional language cannot handle, with the result that if we insist of trying to deal with them In proportional language we get into a mess. Thus the view of total reality presented by the Tractatus is such that significant discourse in language is possible in two comparatively unimportant areas, but impossible throughout the rest. In accordance with this view, almost the whole of the book is devoted to these two areas---factual discourse and logic---and the main questions to which it addresses itself are what are the nature of such utterance is (i.e., wherein it's meaninglessness consists) and what the limits of its applications are.
It is clear what the misunderstanding of the Tractatus by logical positivists and linguistic philosophers was. The nature of the misunderstanding has been well expressed by Paul Engelmann. "A whole generation of disciples was able to take Wittgenstein as a positivist, because he has something of enormous importance to the positivists: he draws the line between between what we can speak about and what we must be silent about just as they do. The difference is only that they have nothing to be silent. Positivism holds---and that is its essence---that what can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that real matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about" (Magee 111)
What is astounding, in Magee's view, is that Wittgenstein could have been misunderstood on this point after he states his position explicitly in the Tractatus itself. "It is clear that that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental." As for science: "The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena", and: "We feel that when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely in touched." Wittgenstein's attitude towards the ground-level problems that remain permanently untouched by science is at least in part a mystical one, and again he says so: "It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that exists."
Magee thinks the Tractatus is profound but hardly original . In his view, the unspecified presuppositions underlying the book is the philosophy of Schopenhauer. Wittgenstein himself refers to this in the Preface when he write:
"I do not wish to judge how far my efforts coincide with those of other philosophers. Indeed, what I have written here makes no claim to novelty in detail, and the reason why I give no sources is that it is a matter of indifference to me whether the thoughts that I have had been anticipated by someone else."
The full extent of Wittgenstein's intellectual indebtedness to Schopenhauer is laid bare in Magee's The Philosophy of Schopenhauer, which can be summarized as follows.
Schopenhauer agreed with Kant in dividing up total reality for purposes of epistemology into such of it as is potentially accessible to us through the apparatus we contingently possess, and the rest. To the rest, by definition, we can never have any direct access. Therefore we can have no direct knowledge of it based on personal experience though we may be able to make indirect inferences about it. Kant and Schopenhauer regarded some of the negative features of the empirical world as among its most important, for instance that the subject for whom the world is object is nowhere to be found in that world; that no foundation for value judgments, whether moral or aesthetic, is to be found in it either; and therefore that those things, if they have any authentic existence at all,must have their foundation outside it, in that part of total reality beyond what is directly knowable by us.
All this was taken over from Schopenhauer by Wittgenstein. But Wittgenstein believed that, for him, the work of Frege enabled him to go a whole layer deeper than Schopenhauer had done in our understanding of the world of experience. The fact that we are able to represent reality to ourselves must mean that there is something in common between reality and our representation of it. Wittgenstein believed this to be their logical structure, manifested correspondingly in reality and in language. Logical possibility sets limits that reality cannot transgress, and in just the same way logical coherence sets limits that meaningful utterance cannot transgress. Not all combinations of fact are possible (for instance something cannot be and not be at the same time) and what mirrors this in language is the fact that not all combinations of words are meaningful. Then again, not everything is possible is the case, and this is mirrored by the fact that not all meaningful utterances are true. These facts yield a threefold classification of empirical propositions, or would-be empirical observations:
(i) statements to which nothing in reality could possibly correspond--- these are meaningless;
(ii) statements to which reality could correspond but happens not to---these are meaningful but untrue;
(iii) statements to which reality corresponds---there's are true.
The picturing relationship that obtains between a meaningful proposition and a practical possibility is the same whether that possibility is actualized or not, but it does not correspond to any truth.It cannot itself be represented. This applies not only representation in words. A painter can paint pictures that correspond to actual scenes, but he cannot paint this picturing relationship. It is something that each of his works exhibits, and exemplifies, but could never itself pictured. Similarly with meaningful empirical propositions: the relationship between them and the possibilities they represent manifests itself in them but cannot be put into words, i.e., cannot be expressed in other propositions. In this latter sense it is inexpressible in spite of the fact that it is displayed. (Magee 114).
Per Magee, this picture theory of meaning, much scoffed at since, but in truth profound, was all that was original in the Tractatus. Everything else in the book came for other sources: most of it from Schopenhauer and Frege, a little from Russell. In almost every speech act there is a representational element: we see, hear, feel, hope, suspect, fear, and so on, that something or other is the case, and so a picture theory of meaning gets us a part of the way. Magee thinks the theory has genuine depth. The book has superbly expressed insights. Its prose is luminous, which has a supercharged intensity approaching that of Nietzsche, capable of smouldering in one's mind for the rest of one's life.
Here was how Edmonds and Eidinow spoke about the intellectual relationship between logical positivism and the Tractatus:
The theory that meaningful statements have either to be analytic (where truth or falsity can be assessed by examining the meaning of the words or symbols employed---"all triangles have three sides") or open to observation became known as "logical positivism," and many took the Tractatus as their Bible. They extracted their principle of verification from the Tractatus, and they have, as had Russell, one of Wittgenstein's core claims: that all mathematical proofs, no matter how elaborate, and all logical inferences---such as, "If it's raining, it's either raining or it's not raining" or "All men are mortal; Schlick is a man; therefore Schlick is mortal"---are merely tautologies. In other words they give us no information about the actual world; they are devoid of substance: they are only about internal relationship of the statements or equations. They cannot tell us about Schlick's mortality or whether to leave the house with an umbrella, or whether Schlick is indeed a man.
The total accuracy of the Vienna Circle where logical positivism was born regarding the interpretation of the Tractatus is another matter. Wittgenstein had divided up propositions into those which can be said and those about which we must remain silent. Scientific propositions fell into the former category, ethical propositions into the latter. Many in the Circle did not understand that the Wittgenstein did not regard the unsayable should be regarded as nonsense, because they are hard-nosed scientists and thus dismissive of metaphysics, moralizing, and spirituality, they initially believed such rejection was also the message of the Tractatus. And here, in the flesh, joined their meeting was this poetry-reciting semi mystic Wittgenstein. As Rudolf Carnap put it:
"His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist, one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or seer...When finally, after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation."
The final breach between the logical positivists and Wittgenstein occurred with the publication of Carnap's masterpiece, Der Logische Aufbau der Welt (The Logical Construction of the World). Wittgenstein accused Carnap of plagiarism---a crime he was always scenting and that he believed was actually compounded in this case by Carnap's acknowledgment in the book of the debt he owed Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein responded, "I don't mind a small boy's stealing my apples, but I do mind his saying that I gave them to him." (Edmonds, pp 158-160).
Russell's introductory essay to the Tractatus is the most useful, so far based on my reading of various books about it, to the laymen, and I am one of them, in understanding the book. Even so, Wittegenstein was not happy with the introduction, thinking it failed to capture wholly the spirit of the book. The publisher refused to publish the book without Russell's introduction because they were convinced that only the introduction from a known and popular author and an authority on philosophy would help sell exceedingly difficult book. The following paragraphs are in Russell's words:
Starting from the principles of Symbolism and the relations which are necessary between words and things in any language, it applies the result of this inquiry to various departments of traditional philosophy, showing in each case how traditional philosophy and traditional solutions arise out of ignorance of the principles of Symbolism and out of misuse of language.
In order to understand the Tractatus, it is important to realize that Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions which have to be fulfills by a logically perfect language. There are various problems as regards language.
First, there is the problem what actually occurs in our minds when we use language with the intention of meaning something by it. This problem belongs to psychology.
Second, there is the problem as to what is the relation subsisting between thoughts, words, or sentences, and that which they refer to mean. This problem belongs to epistemology.
Third, there is the problem of using sentences so as to convey truth rather than falsehood. This problem belongs to the special sciences dealing with the subject matter of the sciences in question.
Fourth, there is the question: what relation must one fact (such as a sentence he) have to another in order to be capable of being a symbol for that other? This is a logical question, and is the one with which Wittgenstein is concerned. He is concerned with the conditions for accurate Symbolism, i.e., for Symbolism in which a sentence "means" something quite definite. In practice, language is more or less vague, so that what we assert is never quite precise. Thus, logic has two problems to deal with in regard to Symbolism:
(1) the conditions for sense rather than nonsense in combinations of symbols;
(2) the conditions for uniqueness of meaning or reference in symbols or combinations of symbols.
Wittgenstein is concerned with the conditions for a logically perfect language which has rules of syntax which prevent nonsense, and which has single symbols which always have a definite and unique meaning.
The essential business of language is to assert or deny facts. Given the syntax of a language, the meaning of a sentence is determinate as soon as the meaning of the component words is known. In order that a certain sentence should assert a certain fact there must be something in common between the structure of the sentence and the structure of the fact. This is perhaps the most fundamental thesis of Wittgenstein's theory. That which has to be in common between the sentence and the fact cannot, so Wittgenstein asserts, be itself in turn said in language. It can, in his phraseology, only be shown, not said, for whatever we may say will still need to have the same structure.
Wittgenstein begin his theory of Symbolism with the statement (2.1) : "We make to ourselves pictures of facts." A picture, he says, is a model of the reality, and to the objectes in the reality correspond the elements of the picture: the picture itself is a fact. The fact that things have a certain relation to each other is represented by the fact in the picture its elements have a certain relation to each other.
Wittgenstein maintains that everything properly philosophical belongs to what can only be shown, to what can only be shown, to what is in common between a fact and its logical picture. Its result from this view that nothing correct can be said in philosophy. Every philosophical proposition is bad grammar.
The word "philosophy" must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
Another instance of Wittgenstein's fundamental thesis: it is impossible to say anything about the whole as a whole, and that whatever can be said has to be about bounded portions of the world. We could only say about the world as a while if we could get outside the world, if, that is to say, it ceased to be for us the whole world. Our world may be bounded for some superior being who can survey it from above, but for us, however finite it may be, it cannot have a boundary, since it has nothing outside it. Wittgenstein uses, as an analogy, the field of vision. Our field of vision does not, for us, have a visual boundary, just because there is nothing outside it, and in like manner our logical world has no logical boundary because our logic knows of nothing outside it. These considerations lead him to a somewhat discussion of Solipsism:
Logic, he says, fills the world. The boundaries of the world are also its boundaries. In logic, therefore,we cannot say, there is this and this in the world, but not that, for to say so would apparently presuppose that we exclude certain possibilities, and this cannot be the case, since it would require that logic should go beyond the boundaries of the world as if it could contemplate these boundaries from the other side also. What we cannot think we cannot think, therefore we also cannot say whatwe cannot think.
Before we leave Tractatus and move to his second book, it's useful to sum up Tratatus as follows:
Just as in the Tractatus the pictorial relationship between language and the world could not itself be pictured, so to try to mark the boundary between sense and nonsense was to trespass over this very same boundary. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent."
E.The second book where the author took new course
It was therefore, most significantly, that this picture theory of meaning was repudiated by Wittgenstein himself in his next book, Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in1953. In the new work, the metaphor of a pictured was replaced by that of a fool: the meaning of a word was seen as consisting in what one could do with it, and was therefore the sum total of its possible uses.
-There was no longer any talk of an independent world of fact to which language could, or might fail to, correspond.
-The uses of language were rooted in diverse human purposes,and therefore grew ultimately out of differing forms of life. Each of the ways in which humans used language could be understood only from within such a context, and had a logic of its own which was perhaps appropriate only to it.
-Philosophical problems were conceptual problems or muddles that arose when we used a word, or a form of words, inappropriately, that is to say, in a context other than the one or ones in which it made proper sense. The way to dissolve philosophical problems was to work patiently to work patiently to untangle the conceptual knots thus created.
Philosophical Investigations introduced several terms and ideas to the common currency of philosophy and then of a number of other disciplines:
-Form of life.
-Family resemblance, as applied to the different meanings of a word. When we say of several members of a family that they have a family resemblance we do not usually mean (we can, but we do not usually) that there is a single facial characteristic that they all have in common, but rather that it is as if they had drawn varying combinations of features from a common pool. Likewise, per Wittgenstein, there is not (usually) one single feature that is common to all the legitimate uses of a word, but rather a family resemblance among its uses. The reason why this is so important is that human beings have had a strong tendency to believe, perhaps because they have a psychological need to, that meanings are fixed, and that there is one thing for which the same word always stands if it is properly used. For example, Socrates went around asking questions like What is courage? What is virtue? What is beauty?, and there can be no doubt that he believed there were actual entities represented by these words---not material objects, of course, but nevertheless entities that had a genuine existence: what one might call real essences. Some belief of this sort has been deeply entrenched in many human minds down the ages, and this is what Wittgenstein attacks.
-Another argument Wittgenstein put into circulation was to the effect that there can be no such thing as a private language. Before him two theories of meaning had been widely held---one that the meaning of a word is set by what designates, the other that it is set by the intention of the person using the word---and Wittgenstein is equally determined to abolish both.
* Words have meaning only in so far as there are criteria governing their use, and for such criteria to be criteria they need to be inter-subjective, that is to say they must have a social and therefore public dimension. No matter how "inner" and "private" an experience may be to which linguistic expression, the fact remains that the language we use to describe it existed before we came on the scene, and it was from other people that we learned both the words and how to use them. So even when I tell you my dream my use of language is a rule-governed social activity, and if it were not you would not be able to understand what I was saying.
* By extending the wider implication of this fact Wittgenstein compared the use of language in some detail with another ruled-governed social activity, namely games. He coined the unfortunate term "language game" not because he thought we were playing with words but because, just as the moves and terms and meanings in any game derive their significance from the rules governing the game, which are interpersonal, so the meanings of words derive their significance from the particular language game in which they are used---philosophical, scientific, artistic, conversations, or whatever it may be. For example, what counts as "evidence" has a different logic and structure in a court of law from what it has in a physics lab, and is different for the historical researcher. To the historian hearsay count so as evidence; in fact it is very often the only evidence that he has, whereas for the judge it is admissible as evidence, while for the physicist it does not even arise. Because of this, if we find ourselves in a middle about what does and does not constitute evidence, it may be because we have tried to apply the concept in one set of circumstances in a way that is only appropriate only to another. Because of the family-resemblance character of meaning, this kind of mistake is easy to make, and Wittgenstein believes that it explains why philosophical puzzlements arise.
So, Wittgenstein produced two different and incompatible philosophies in the course of his life, each of which influenced a whole generation. For several years after the publication of Philosophical Investigations, the general view in the English-speaking world was that both were philosophies of genius. As time passed and the later philosophy came more and more to be seen was a product of genius but the earlier one was not. There are some, however, of whom Russell was a conspicuous one, who took the opposite view. And then, there had been some, such as Karl Popper--and others, such as Anthony Quinton, came to the opinion after a period of years---who took the view that neither of the philosophies was really of lasting significance. (Magee 117-118).
Magee shares Russell's sentiment about the works, with some qualifications. He does not judge the later philosophy to be empty and worthless as Russell did. He thinks Philosophical Investigations contains some thought-provoking ideas and suggestions., but they have to be taken up for what they are worth more or less in isolation, since the context in which they are embedded constitutes a radically mistaken view of the role of language in human life and thought. Magee further thinks that in the translation from the early philosophy to the later the most valuable things of all have been lost:
-The direct acknowledgment of a world of non-linguistic reality;
-The perception that there is something mystical about the very existence of such a world;
-The realization that any significance life has is transcendental, as must be also all values, morals, and the import of art;
-And that is for that reason inherently impossible to give a satisfactory account in language of these things, the very things that are of greatest significance to us.
Magee thinks all the above insights majestically seized and expressed in the Tractatus. After that, Wittgenstein seems to have lost his sense of the authenticity of both sides of reality---the world of fact and the domain of the transcendental---and come adrift in a Sargasso Sea of free-floating language. His only frame of reference now is a means of communication treated almost as if it were everything there is, without any of the things it communicates about or between. He has become like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle and unable to find its way out. (Magee p. 118).
F. Impact of Wittgenstein
Magee thinks since the later philosophy of Wittgenstein not only is not about philosophical problems in any traditional sense but denies their authentic existence, it is capable of appealing to people who do not have philosophical problems. This explains two things about it that might otherwise be difficult to account for simultaneously: its great appeal to academic philosophers and its attractions for people outside philosophy. In this sense it is like those forms of music that appeal only to the unmusical, whether inside or outside the music profession.
Despite his protests to the contrary, Wittgenstein was curiously in accord with the spirit of his age. During his time human values were largely determined by those who had no use for philosophy---the populists and demagogues who shaped the public ethos of the 20th century.
Strathern thinks as a consequence of Wittgenstein's philosophy, the questions once asked by philosophy have now passed into the realms of poetry. And the way poetry is going (and painting for that matter, and arts in general where incomprehension substitutes for identification), it looks like they won't be asked much longer to be here either. We, most of us anyway, have learned to do without God, and it looks like we will learn to do without philosophy. It will now join the ranks of subjects which are completed and thus have become spurious, such as alchemy and astrology. (Strathern p.58)
According to Edmonds and Eidenow, Wittgenstein's intellectual legacy is as ambiguous as so much of his writing. Its substance is as elusive as the meaning of his philosophical pronouncements. His harshest critics say that his impact has been like his analysis of philosophy itself: it has left everything as it was. He blew through the world of philosophy like a hurricane, but in his wake there has been a settling back down. He was an inspiration for the Vienna Circle and for logicadll posittivism,but logical positivism has been discredited (with Popper's help). He was an important influence on the Oxford language philosophers, but their approach has gone out of fashion. A line can be traced between Wittgenstein and the postmodernists---but he would be appalled to be held responsible for them.
Some Wittgernsteinian ideas have become givens. Truth tables have become an indispensable tool of formal logic. The tautological nature of logic and mathematics is broadly acknowledged. "Meaning is use" has proved an enduring slogan: words have the meaning we assign to them. Lamguage---like all rule-governed activity---is grounded in our practices, our habits, our way of life. But the majority of philosophers remain unconvinced that, in releasing us from the delusion that language mirrors the world, Wittgenstein has extricated us from all our problems. It is still unclear that all our philosophical problems arise solely from our use of language. Professional philosophers online to grapple with such issues as the mysteries of consciousness and the relationship between the mind and the body. They don't believe such problems can be solved by linguistic analysis. However, of the great figures in twentieth-century philosophy, only a very few have given their names to those who follow their path. Popper and Wittgenstein are two.
My view on Wittgenstein is in no way in the same league as the above philosophers and professors of of philosophy. It will, be surely be subject to change as I research and read on him further. So far, my impression of the man and his philosophy is as follows:
We can look at the a man's life and his background as a window into his soul and his philosophy. Certainly, Wittgenstein was a very strange, intense, self-conflicting, and gifted man.
-Extremely wealthy, but he gave away all his inheritance money and earned his money by the sweat of his labor.
-He tacked all his projects with intensity, ranging from voluntarily to be in the Austrian Army during the First World War to doing philosophy to being school teacher to being monastery's gardener to constructing an austere, exact house for his sister.
-His notebooks recorded his sufferings and his copious references to a God, despite having renounced a belief in God's existence during his high school days. He wanted to be buried as a Catholic, despite being an atheist.
-He had a dominating, intense, personality. He had a nasty habit of interfering drastically in the lives of those around him. He brownbeat his friend Skinner I to abandoning a brilliant academic careers and becoming a factory hand. Someone who sought his advice about becoming a surgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps was told he should volunteer for the front as a private. While at Cambridge, Wittgenstein also spent considerable effort trying to convince the leading literary critic F.R. Leavis that he was not suited to the study of English Literature and should give it up. This came from the man who admitted that he didn't understand Shakespearee. (Strathern p. 70)
-He was gay at an age being gay was not cool.
-He was convinced of his superiority and greatness and was accorded much academic respect.
-Yet he was humble and self-effacing. During World War II, he worked as porter at the hospital and didn't tell anybody of his exalted status as a world-renowned philosopher.
My understanding of his philosophy so far has depended on the analyses of other scholars. What attracts me to his philosophy is the mysticism and boldness of it, as well as a search for Reality of a man who lost faith in the existence of God but recorded his thoughts in his Notebooks as if he never did lose the faith. I further think Wittgenstein was a deeply disturbed and unhappy and suicidal man, albeit very gifted. His philosophy was his way of working out of the thought why he didn't go ahead and killed himself as the three brothers of his did. His sisters did worry about him. Certainly, his philosophy and the way he expressed it was strange and unusual, like the man himself. Who else but him proclaimed that he had found the end of philosophy? His views are mystical. He tried to find Reality and the World, but then he wrote two books in such a way that it was almost impossible to understand his views. I think Wittgenstein was a mystic. A mystic is a deeply religious man, though not necessarily affiliated with a known, established religion, who has difficulties communicating what he knows in a language non-mystics can understand. Mystics speak in pronouncements and private truths which they think of universal applications. I am no mystic nor a professional philosopher. I am just a mediocre man struggling to find meaning of my existence. Reading (about) Wittgenstein helped me in that struggle. I am slowly slouching towards what I live for (self-actualization, certainly not cheap power as some scumbags I know personally are hungering after). Though Wittgenstein was unhappy, he made a name for himself. The intellectual world knows about him. His thinking made an impact. People write books and articles about him and study him in college. He has exerted influence on philosophers and artists (Edmonds p. 209).
I think some of his detractors are jealous of him. While Karl Popper was famous, Magee was a nobody in the intellectual world and is known only as popularizer of philosophy for the masses and unlikely to even gain a footnote in the history of intellectual thought, I have a feeling that Wittgenstein earned a permanent place in the pantheon of true philosophers. His views might be viewed eventually as nonsense or irrelevant, but at least his views are causing a stir for almost 80 years. Because of him, thinkers are forced to come to terms with what they traditionally were led to believe what philosophy was. Wittgenstein's thinking is dangerous because it is revolutionary. It upsets the status quo in the world of philosophy. We must come to terms with his views, either embracing them or rejecting them, before we can move on with our intellectual life. After running into him, we cannot just ignore the man. We must take him into account. As noted on the jacket of Rorky's book:
"Philosophy is a dangerous profession, risking censorship, prison, even death. And no wonder: philosophers have questioned traditional pieties and threatened the established political order. Some claimed to know what was thought unknowable; others doubted what was believed to be certain. Some attacked religion in the name of science; others attacked science in the name of mystical poetry; some served tyrants; others were radical revolutionaries."
So, in the twilight of my life, I am slowly recognizing that all human beings hold fast to a certain self-conception as an anchor to go through life, a certain pride, a certain peace, even if that self-conception is based on a delusion---and for many, it is a big and helpless delusion. I will never forget a wise Hindu man told me when I was traveling in India that, "Mr. Wissai, all humans---I am not sure about other sentient beings because I don't know how they think. I only know how and what I think, and by extension and extrapolation, what and how other humans think. Don't be an absolutist. We all practice self-projection, but the wise and more understanding among us do so with more sensitivity, more empathy, with constant revisions based on updated info gleaned from the words and actions of others----find a reason to live for. I suggest you do likewise. Even a man universally condemned vile and vicious as Hitler thought of himself as a good and caring man, doing all what he could for Germany. We all practice self-deception without being aware of that. Yes, based on our long talks of the past three days, and they were some of the most scintillating talks I had, I know you are very diligent of not doing so, but you are still human. The secret of happiness is to be lax on others and be critical on yourself. You laughed at people living lives of animals having no or incapable of higher aspirations and values, but that's okay. We are all constricted by our circumstances and our limitations. Do you know what makes a beggar happy? Just to have enough money to buy him some food for the day or maybe some leftover for the following day. Yes, he follows the biological imperative to live. We must respect him for that. We must respect his sanity, his strength, his refusal to give in to the temptation of giving up and killing himself. A beggar's life may not mean much to you, but it means a lot to the beggar. In the final analysis, life is life, no life is better than another's. You laugh at certain women who live like barnyard animals, having sex and having children and being very proud that while having accomplished nothing worthy to write home about. But those women have lived the kind of life you described and held in contempt because that was all they could do. Their lives were governed by the limitations of their abilities. You should not ask them to do more than they could do. It does not matter they have delusions and fantasies about their self-worth. I repeat, we humans have all those so we could carry our heads high. Yes, we are not honest with ourselves, but please, remember we are like that because we want to live. Too much self-honesty tends to lead to despair and suicide. Don't be annoyed if they turn the table around and ask you what you have done with your life. Stupid folks ask stupid questions. That's why they are stupid in the first place and too stupid to admit and accept their stupidity. It was your mistake to associate yourself with them in the first place. If you sleep with dogs, you will get fleas. Have a higher standard. So, you go ahead and feel good about yourself for being a philosopher on top of being a poet and a writer of occasional exquisite, transcendental, lyrical prose. Yes, go ahead and fancy that you are dangerous, in your contempt of others who cannot remotely think as critically, to argue as cogently, and to write as beautifully, both creatively and critically, as you do. We all have our private contempts. Yours is just too public. It's not pretty and it's not cool. I wish you peace and I wish you strength in the rest of your journey. Namaste."
It dawned on me as I read about Wittgenstein's life and his interactions with people, whatever I have, he had it more and I much greater depth, therein lies the explanation why I am attracted to the man and his views. The only exception was that although he liked literature (especially understated spirituality and crystalline purity of Tagore's poetry, Edmond, p. 155; he regularly read Sterne, Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky; he was familiar with Kierkegaard and Cardinal Newman, St. Augustine, Molière, Eliot, and Rilke, Edmonds p. 197), he didn't produce any single literary works (no fiction, no poems). But, maybe his works are not only philosophical, but also literary since they were couched in literary, mystical language which is having much appeal to novelists and artists. Reading Wittgenstein is having a slow but profound effect on me. I want to be less frivolous and more serious in whatever undertaking I take. I want also to live a life with more authenticity. Nonetheless, there are some areas I am convinced that I am on firmer ground than he was: I am saner, I am not wishy washy about God, I do respect social rules and conventions up to a point, and I am not into Messiah complex---I don't look for disciples as Wittgenstein did (Edmonds p. 16, p. 189). He was violent, aggressive and instilled fear in people, in friends and foes alike (Edmonds pp 200-204). He was not in the world of polite conversation and social chitchat. Clarity of meaning was all, and he went straight for it---no matter what. When his Russian teacher, Fania Pascal, confessed to a blunder she had made, Wittgenstein weighted it up and replied simply, "Yes, you lacked sagacity." (Ed
Wittgenstein was different, all right. He was a genius. I am also different. Many people have told me that they have not met anybody quite like me. Yes, I am different but I am not a genius, not like Wittgenstein. I don't have a striking, original thought or framework of thinking to share with the world. My interests are scattered and far-ranging, maybe more than those of Wittgenstein's. I have diluted myself, but that's okay. I know my place in this world. I am proud of who I am. I am ethically better and more intellectually honest than most, far more sensitive than a majority of monkeys and chimps who have human appearance, and I have creativity with words. I can write with impact and originality of expressions. I am no fraud. Wittgenstein was accused by many of his detractors as frauds, maybe out of jealousy or failure of understanding. Peter Gray-Lucas, a talented linguist, fluent in German, played his part in WWII at the top secret decoding center at Bletchley Park, where so much of the Nazis' fighting strategy was undone, here said something about Wittgenstein.
"(He was) a charlatan....He missed his vocation: he should have been a stand-up comedian. In his funny Austrian accent he could do all sorts of mimicry of accents, styles of talking...I remember one evening he got up from his chair, talking in this funny voice, and said something like, "What do we say if I walk through this wall?" And I remember realizing that my knuckles were going white gripping my chair. And I really thought he was going through the wall and that the roof was going to fall in. That must have been part of his spell: that he could conjure up almost anything." (Edmonds, p. 24)
Several stupid women have accused me of being a fraud, after being dumped by me because I found them---belatedly, of course---cheap, selfish, vicious, and boring. They could not take rejections. But what do they know? They are just unaccomplished, untalented little peons, short in stature and abilities, but big in fantasies of themselves so they can live for another day. They have not accomplished a single damn thing comparable to what I have done. They have not read a serious book from cover to cover. They cannot write a poem, a short story, or an essay. In fact, they cannot write a paragraph without making at least five errors either in spelling or grammar or both. They cannot express themselves coherently. All they could do was to have sex and then got pregnant and had babies, just like a little sow in the pigsty or a wandering, roaming mongrel bitch on the streets does. And yet they stupidly fancied they were my equal. They wanted me to give them proofs and evidence that I was superior to them! One of them gave me a long list of reasons as to why she thought I was a nobody. I rolled on the floor laughing. Here was a woman who had a lousy scholastic record, was rejected by men and close relations and society at large, and lived in isolation, and yet entertained delusions about herself. Nobody knows about her. She has made no name for herself, no splash, because she could not do it. She is an absolute nobody. And now she goes around thinking I am a nobody like her. Stupid people, as my Hindu friend in India whom I met during my visit there told me, do stupid things and I should laugh at them and at their stupidities, instead of getting mad at them. "Why should you get annoyed at skunks for exuding foul odor when their sense of being, their self-conception, is threatened? Just stay away from skunks. Don't associate yourself with skunks. Stay away from them."
But let's us hear from Wittgenstein himself on what it means being a philosopher. To me, there are echoes of Nietzsche and there are awareness of pushing the limits, and maybe going beyond, of reason and sanity, expressed in the aphoristic manner like that of Nietzsche. What we take as truths, after spending our lifetime reflecting on them, we don't bother to supply with long supporting arguments. We express them in pithy, concise, oracular, muscular statements. Like-minded kinsmen would understand us right away when we pronounce them. Others would not understand or agree with us anyway even if we write long books to explain what we mean. Truth is like Poetry. You must be ready for it and have a capacity for it.
-When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
-A philosopher is a man who has to cure many intellectual diseases in himself before he can arrive at the notions of common sense.
-Working in philosophy---like work in architecture in many aspects---is really more a working on oneself. On one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.)
(Rorty p.422)
References
Edmonds, David & Edinow, John, Wittgenstein's Poker, New York, HarperCollins, 2001
Kenny, Anthony, The Wittgenstein's Reader, Oxford, Blackwell, 1994
Magee, Bryan, Confessions of a Philosopher, New York, Random House, 1997
Monk, Ray, Bertrand Russell, The Ghost of Madness , New York, The Free Press, 2000
Rorty, Amélie, The Many Faces of Philosophy, Oxford, 2003
Strathern, Paul, Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes, Chicago, Ivan R. Dee, 1996
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatatus Logico-Philosophicus, New York, Dover, 1999
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