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Ludwig Wittgenstein (part One)

A brief introduction to the ideas and personality of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein

Date : 01/06/2022

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Neil

Uploaded by : Neil
Uploaded on : 01/06/2022
Subject : Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Part I

The most perfect example of genius I have ever met said Bertrand Russell, and many since who have known him only through his writings have come to the same conclusion. Austrian born, veteran of the First World War, published only one book in his lifetime yet leaving an ineradicable mark on philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein s personality and his thought are among the most intensely engaging in the Western tradition.

What people don t realize...is he was like an intellectual A-bomb

Born into a wealthy Viennese family just before the turn of the century, Wittgenstein had access to all the privilege and culture of European high society, the parents often playing host to some of the leading-lights of European music and art, such as Johannes Brahms, and Gustavs Mahler, and Klimt. Later in life Ludwig would do all he could to distance himself from the financial privilege he had been born into, signing away all his inheritance to his siblings.

Wittgenstein was first bitten by the philosophical bug when, whilst studying Engineering at Manchester, he was introduced to Bertrand Russell s work The Principles of Mathematics. His interest in the problems Russell discussed soon overshadowed his engineering studies, and in 1911 Wittgenstein sought out Russell and enrolled as his student in Cambridge. This work with Russell was to help Wittgenstein bring forth the only work he published in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (which he completed in part on the front in the First World War, fighting for the Germans).

Thinking that in the Tractatus the problems [of philosophy] have in essentials been finally solved Wittgenstein gave up philosophy to work as a gardener, and then as a school teacher in the mountain Villages of Austria. It wasn t until 1929 that Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge to begin the second phase of his philosophical work, in which he came to see his previous work as seriously flawed. This phase culminated in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, which has gone on, along with the Tractatus, to be one of the most influential works in modern philosophy. Wittgenstein died in April 1951, continuing to write in his philosophical notebooks right up until the end.

Ideas
The First Wittgenstein - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

It is generally accepted that Wittgenstein s work falls into 2 or 3 phases, in which his views are sufficiently distinct that people sometimes refer to the first Wittgenstein , the second Wittgenstein and even the third Wittgenstein . The first phase covers everything up to the writing of the Tractatus Logico-

Philosophicus.

The Tractatus is in large part the fruit of Wittgenstein s work with Russell, and his engaging with another philosopher, Gottlob Frege, whose work on logic was largely ignored during his lifetime, but has been significantly influential since. The questions asked by these two thinkers, had to do largely with language, how it means (that is how sounds and squiggles of ink manage to communicate something), how language relates to thought and to the world. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein sets out to define the nature of the proposition , that is a sentence with meaning like, the cat sat on the mat , john went to the dentist , john went to the dentist, had some tea and thought how lovely the weather was... , that sort of thing. The Tractatus is Wittgenstein s attempt to find the general form of the proposition .

The style of the Tractatus is worth not and requires some explanation. It consists entirely of seven compact sentences, that is propositions. Each proposition is numbered, 1 to 7, and then further divided into explanatory propositions which are numbered also so that 1.1 is a comment on proposition 1, and 1.11 a comment on that. It would be best to see an example, here are the first few lines of the Tractatus:

1 The world is everything that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case

and eventually we move onto proposition 2:
2 What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.

The first experience of the Tractatus is, for most readers, one of bewilderment. However, it doesn t take too much explanation of what Wittgenstein is trying to get at before you can feel more confident in reading him. Remember he is trying to work out how words and sentences manage to make meaning, and how propositions (any meaningful sentences) and the world fit together. In proposition 1 he is telling us how the world is. Wittgenstein is going to give a unique logical picture of the world before he gives us a logical picture of language.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things

The point here is really not as tough as it may appear. Basically we are being told that it is not individual objects that make up the world, it is objects in

relationship to other objects. In the type of philosophy Russell was engaged in, Analytic Philosophy, things were taken apart and scrutinized individually to see what parts made up the whole. We want to see how a camera works, we take it apart, line up all the pieces and see what makes it tick. But the problem with this methods becomes clear when we try to put the thing back together: which bits went together with which?! The relationship between the parts is lost when we analyze, literally take apart a thing. In proposition 1.1 Wittgenstein is stressing that the world is not just a world of objects, but of objects in situ with other objects.

So we have a picture of the world as made up of atom like objects, but objects in relation to each other, objects that cannot be imagined without the possibility of their relating to other objects.

2.1 We make to ourselves pictures of facts

At 2.1 we come to where the world as just described fits together with the language we use: language pictures the world. This idea (called the Picture Theory in the literature) can best be explained by telling what gave Wittgenstein the thought. Apparently, while on the front, Wittgenstein had read an article about a law court in Paris where a car accident had been reconstructed using model cars and people. In this reconstructive method Wittgenstein saw our whole mode of representing through language. His notebook entry of 29th September 1914, he tells us what he understood from this article:

In the proposition a world is as it were put together experimentally. (my emphasis)

Our words, that is our names for objects, are arranged just like the model cars and people in the law court, in order to make a picture of a situation. In essence we make a little world with language.

An example will help. I arrive at my girlfriends and might text her saying, I m outside the house . According to Wittgenstein what is going on here is that I have taken some names, I m and house , and arranged them in a relation to each other in order to make a picture for her. The picture says I m stands in a certain relation to house , in this case the relation of being outside. My girlfriend can look at this picture and understand where I say I am - I have succeeded in creating meaning.

Now whether or not that picture is true is a different question. If the objects in the world do not stand in the same relation as my picture shows they do, I have said something false, my proposition is false. I may send my girlfriend a linguistic picture of myself outside her house, but that does not make it so.

(Now before we move on I just want to introduce you to formal logic. All this is is where we use a kind of algebra on language, and represent words and their

connections symbolically. Wittgenstein puts the kind of relation in our I m outside the house example into formal logic like this: aRb. Pretty simple, right? Expanded out it just means an object (a), stands in a certain relation (R), to another object (b). It can get somewhat complicated but that is the basic idea of formal logic. It ll come in handy later.)

3. The logical picture of the facts is the thought.

So a proposition is simply a model we make to show how things stand in the world - that is the relation between the world and language. We now move on to the relationship between language and thought. For Wittgenstein, thought in its technical sense is always sentential, that is we only think in language. Now that s not to say that we don t have random images floating through our minds, or that we don t have pictures in our heads or experience inner sensations all it means is that Wittgenstein is here defining what is properly classed as a thought, as opposed to inner experience in general.

The thought itself is a picture, a logical picture. By logical picture we mean simply a picture that defines the relationship between objects, just like a spoken or written proposition. The only difference is that the thought is unspoken or unwritten. Wittgenstein says:

3.1 In the proposition the thought is expressed perceptibly through the senses.

This is how the thought relates to language - language, spoken and written, is the perceptible expression of the thought, that is the unexpressed logical picture.

4.1212. What can be shown cannot be said.

This then is the basic picture of how, for the early Wittgenstein, language, thought and reality fit together. But here we must throw a spanner in the works. Wittgenstein opens up a new category of expression which threatens to bring down the whole edifice he has built up thus far. As well as language being able to say things by picturing, it can also show things forth, and what can be communicated in one mode cannot be communicated in the other, and visa-versa. This will bear repeating, it is important.

There are things like car crashes, the arrangements of objects in a room, the state of the weather and so on, that can be communicated by saying, we can make sentences about them. But Wittgenstein is saying in 4.1212 that there is also a class of things that are ineffable, that is you can t say them - but you can show them. What things fall into this category? Logic is one of them, as are aesthetics (statements about beauty), ethics, and theology. But lets take logic first of all. By logic we mean hear how language makes meaning, that thing in language and in the world that makes it possible to mean things when we speak. Now logic, as understood thus, cannot be spoken because it would

require us to say using propositions how language says things. Ok, but then it would be incumbent upon us to show how the sentences we used to explain meaning-making make meaning we would (and forgive the way of expressing it) have to be able to picture how the picture pictures. Wittgenstein puts it like this:

2.22 The picture represents what it represents...through its form of representation. (italics mine)

2.172 The picture, however, cannot represent its form of representation it shows it forth.

And form of representation is another way of talking about logic, the means by which language means. And this cannot be described in words, it simply shows itself every time we use a sentence to picture the world.

The reason that things ethical, aesthetic and theological cannot technically be put into propositions, but only shown forth , is because there is nothing in the world that we could arrange into a picture of them. They have to do with value, and value cannot be seen in the simple arrangement of objects. Language can only picture the way things stand in the world, it cannot picture what value they have or don t have. It can only say that a thing is or is not, e.g. there is a man outside sleeping in a card-board box you cannot make a picture of whether or not it should be so.

Throwing away the ladder

So we come to the most hotly debated and enigmatic propositions in the Tractatus, 6.54. It says:

My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless [another translation is nonsense ], when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)

He must surmount these propositions then he sees the world rightly.

One might rightly feel a sense of anti-climax on being told, after toiling through his propositions (and possibly even this account of them), that all that has gone before is nonsense. But all is not lost. As I have said the meaning of proposition 6.54 is much debated but there are two readings I will briefly explain. The first, called the Therapeutic reading, drawing on Wittgenstein later work sees this as proof that Wittgenstein was just doing a kind of philosophical therapy on us (hence Therapeutic). Wittgenstein was insistent that philosophers are prone to make certain mistakes, like that it is possible to make and prove philosophical theories. The Therapeutic school says that 6.54 is telling us that the Tractatus is an exercise in speaking philosophical nonsense. We are then supposed to see ourselves in this nonsense saying these are the kind of things I say when I

do philosophy . And so we become aware that just as the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsense, so are our attempts, indeed any attempts to do philosophy.

Needless to say not everybody agrees with this reading. Other readings leave us with something more than therapeutic revelations. The Ineffablist reading sees Wittgenstein admitting himself to be on the horns of a paradox. As we have seen Wittgenstein says some things cannot be said, only shown. It turns out that everything Wittgenstein has been trying to describe must, on his own account, be unsayable (that is ineffable). The way a picture represents what it does, its form of representation , cannot be represented by propositions, and yet say how language manages to mean things is precisely what the Tractatus purports to do. In other words Wittgenstein has tried to say that which can only be shown. Therefore he recognizes that all that has gone before is technically nonsense, without a sayable sense. So we must so to speak throw away the ladder that is Wittgenstein s propositions before we can see the truth about how thought, language and reality go together.

Roundup

Wittgenstein is not an easy philosopher. In fact he is very hard (I remember likening my first encounter with Wittgenstein to landing at Normandy ). But despite that, or maybe because of that, he stands for me at the head rather than the tail of philosophy. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus had fulfilled Russell s prophecy that Wittgenstein would make the next big step in philosophy . And yet, as we shall see, there was more to come...

Further Reading

The two major english editions of the Tractatus are those by C.K. Ogden (Routledge Keegan Paul Ltd. 1922) and by D. F. Pears B. F. McGuinness (Routledge Keegan Paul Ltd. 1961). The Ogden translation was overseen by Wittgenstein himself who offered critical changes to the text. This fact and the clarity of the translation lead me to to prefer it. However, Pears and Morgan s is a very popular and excellent work also.

There are many short guides to Wittgenstein s work which usually follow the classification into early and late work. Some excellent examples are:

- David Pears, Wittgenstein, Fontana, 1971 (one of the translators of the Pears/McGuinness Tractatus).
- A. C. Grayling, Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press, 1988.
- Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, Granta, 2005. The best and most

accessible introduction to Wittgenstein s thought in my opinion.
- Avrum Stroll, Wittgenstein, Oneworld Publications, 2002 (notable for the threefold division he makes in Wittgenstein s development, including a section

on the Third Wittgenstein ).

Again, guides to the Tractatus itself abound, but a very impressive and clear account is given in:

- H. O. Mounce, Wittgenstein s Tractatus: An Introduction, Basil Blackwell Publisher, 1981.

Also very good, written by one of Wittgenstein s students and literary executors, but for my money somewhat more challenging is:

- G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein s Tractatus, Harper Row, 1965.

(These guides are essential for understanding Wittgenstein, but of course there is no substitute for wrestling with the man himself.)

For my money the best biography of Wittgenstein which also gives an account of his thought is:

- Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Vintage, 1991.

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