Why is the phrase “Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent” a hint that Ludwig Wittgenstein may have been autistic?Source: Beyond Understanding
2 ANSWERSNo. He was pretty weird, but the idea is one of the tautologies he was so fond of in the period in which he wrote the Tractatus, the book of which that is the final sentence. It's pretty obvious that if you can't speak of something you won't have anything to say about it, and so must be silent. The idea is related to W’s very important distinction between saying and showing. Some thing, he thinks, cannot be said, they must be shown. One sees or gets the point, but it cannot be put into words.
Although there is no reason to believe that W ever had any contact with or knowledge of Zen, the idea of an ineffable realization is core to that religious tradition. I mention this because it's not very plausible that practitioners of Zen, at various points the main religion in China and then Japan, were autistic.
Views · 4 Upvotes · View TimelineThis is pure balderdash. That snippet of an opinion piece misunderstands Wittgenstein, philosophy, and autism in breathtakingly quick succession. I’m sure Andy Martin is a nice enough guy — most people are — but seriously… that was painfully bad journalism.
“Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent” is the conclusion of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; the phrase is meant to imply that people interested in meaningful knowledge should set aside speculative metaphysics in favor of valid and verifiable propositional statements. It has nothing to do with the ability to understand other people’s emotional or social experiences (the hallmark of autism), which are outside the domain of philosophical reasoning that Wittgenstein is discussing.
What Martin is trying to suggest (which has nothing to do particularly with Wittgenstein) is wrapped up in this claim:
Perhaps all philosophers are autistic. Perhaps it is why we end up studying philosophy. A psychologist might say that we take up philosophy precisely because we don't get what other people are saying to us. Like Wittgenstein, we have a habit of hearing and seeing propositions, but feeling that they say nothing. Philosophy would be a tendency to interpret what people say as a puzzle of some kind.
I’ll set aside that this is not at all what a psychologist would say — this is closer to the kind of pop-psychology found in self-help books — because Martin is clearly not a psychologist, and not pretending to be one. However, that royal ‘we’ in the third sentence makes me think that Martin is a philosopher himself, and that is problematic. It may be that he is schooled in the analytic philosophy tradition, which is a bit more mind-numbingly propositional than most, but as a rule (even in that school) philosophers have no trouble understanding what people are saying to us. We are not confused by what people say; we are bemused by why people do not think through what they say.
I mean, I’ll be frank: I frequently find myself having discussions with people where it becomes painfully clear that I understand their philosophical position better than they do. They clearly have an opinion, they clearly want to express it, it’s clearly important to them to be right, and yet I find myself having to argue both sides of the fence: first to show them the philosophical structure of their own beliefs; second to show them how that philosophical structure I just outlined fails to hold together. That’s mostly because I’ve read a lot more philosophy and thought a lot more about philosophy than most people — I have my areas of expertise, just like anyone — but all that means is that the philosophy of the situation poses less of a problem for me (comparatively speaking) than the social dynamics of the situation. This doesn’t mean that I’m autistic. In truth, it means the opposite… I recognize that the social dynamics of this situation are an ego minefield — truly, the only thing more likely to trigger anger and insecurity than correcting someone else’s misconceptions of their own philosophy, is commenting on the shortcomings of their own genitals — and I’m sensitive to the emotional and social ramifications of what I’m doing.
Intellectuals are often oversensitive and scarred, and enough of them have weird emotional defenses and compensations to make it a trope, this is true enough. But that doesn’t add up to Asperger’s, much less autism. This is not a problem of philosophy or philosophers at all, except in the very limited sense that philosophers are trying hard to communicate difficult and abstruse ideas to people who are themselves not in the habit of thinking philosophically. Communication really does require two participants, and when one of those participants is trying to communicate philosophy, it places a decided strain on the other participant, and on the medium of communication itself. Calling a one-eyed man dysfunctional because he has a hard time explaining color to a blind man seems awfully disingenuous.
Sunday, July 16, 2017
Wittgenstein
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment