Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the only philosopher in history to have produced two great, opposed philosophies, each of which founded a movement. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), a 75-page book of numbered propositions written in the trenches of the First World War, set out the logical structure of language and the world, and drew the boundary of what can be meaningfully said — leaving ethics, aesthetics, God and the meaning of life on the far side, in silence. It inspired the logical positivists of the Vienna Circle (who misunderstood it). Then, after a decade away from philosophy, Wittgenstein demolished his own system. The Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously, 1953) argued that language is not a single logical structure but a motley of “language games” woven into human “forms of life”, that the meaning of a word is its use, and that philosophical problems are confusions produced “when language goes on holiday”. It shaped ordinary language philosophy and much of later analytic thought. Ferocious, ascetic, tormented and charismatic, he is the very image of the philosopher as a man for whom thinking is a matter of life and death.

Life

The Wittgensteins of Vienna

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on 26 April 1889, the youngest of eight children of Karl Wittgenstein, a steel magnate who had built one of the largest fortunes in Europe. The family’s Palais Wittgenstein was a centre of Viennese culture: Brahms, Mahler and the young Pablo Casals played there; Klimt painted Ludwig’s sister Margarete; his brother Paul became a concert pianist who, after losing his right arm in the war, commissioned left-hand concertos from Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten. The family was of Jewish descent but had been baptised; Ludwig was raised Catholic.

The home was also a place of intense pressure. Karl demanded his sons become engineers and businessmen. Three of Ludwig’s four brothers killed themselves — Hans (probably, disappearing in 1902), Rudolf (1904, poisoning himself in a Berlin bar), and Kurt (1918, shooting himself on the Italian front). Ludwig contemplated suicide for much of his life.

He was educated at home until fourteen, then at the Realschule in Linz (1903–06) — where Adolf Hitler, six days his elder, was a pupil at the same time, two years behind. He studied mechanical engineering in Berlin and then at Manchester (1908–11), where he worked on aeronautics and designed a propeller with jet-tipped blades. His interest moved from engineering to mathematics and then to the foundations of mathematics — the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell.

Cambridge and Russell, 1911–1913

In 1911 he visited Frege in Jena, who advised him to study with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. He turned up unannounced in Russell’s rooms in October 1911. Within months Russell thought him “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating”. Russell recalled Wittgenstein pacing his rooms at midnight “like a caged tiger”, announcing that he would kill himself when he left; when Russell asked whether he was thinking about logic or about his sins, Wittgenstein answered, “Both.”

He worked on the foundations of logic, became a member of the Apostles (briefly), and made friends with the economist John Maynard Keynes and the mathematician David Pinsent, his closest friend, to whom the Tractatus would be dedicated. In 1913 his father died, leaving him a great fortune. He withdrew to Skjolden, a remote village in Norway, and built a hut on a fjord to think about logic in solitude.

War and the Tractatus, 1914–1918

When the war broke out, he volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army as a private. He served on a patrol boat on the Vistula, in an artillery workshop, and from 1916 at the front, where he asked for the most dangerous post — the observation post, the target of enemy fire — and was decorated for bravery several times. In a bookshop in Galicia he found Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, which he carried everywhere and read so often that soldiers called him “the man with the Gospels”. His notebooks of the war years alternate logical problems with religious reflections: “To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.”

He finished the Tractatus in summer 1918 on leave at his uncle’s house; in November he was captured by the Italians and spent nine months in a prisoner-of-war camp at Monte Cassino. He sent the manuscript to Russell from the camp. Pinsent had been killed in an air accident in May 1918.

The lost years, 1919–1929

Convinced that the Tractatus had solved the problems of philosophy, he abandoned it. He gave away his fortune to his siblings (refusing anything for himself), trained as a teacher and taught in elementary schools in poor mountain villages in Lower Austria — Trattenbach, Otterthal and others — from 1920 to 1926. He was a demanding and inspiring teacher who compiled a spelling dictionary for children, but was also violent: in 1926 he struck a boy, Josef Haidbauer, who collapsed; there was a hearing, and Wittgenstein resigned. Years later he went back to apologise to the villagers.

The Tractatus was published in 1921 in German and in 1922 in English with Russell’s introduction, which Wittgenstein thought missed the point. He worked as a gardener at a monastery near Vienna, and then for two years designed and supervised the building of a modernist house for his sister Margarete — the austere Haus Wittgenstein, where he was obsessive to the millimetre, famously raising a ceiling three centimetres just as the house was about to be cleaned for occupation.

Meanwhile, in Vienna, the philosophers of the Vienna Circle — Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, Friedrich Waismann — were reading the Tractatus line by line as the bible of logical positivism. Wittgenstein met some of them, sometimes turning his back and reading Rabindranath Tagore’s poetry to them.

Return to Cambridge, 1929–1947

In 1929 he returned to Cambridge — “Well, God has arrived,” Keynes wrote to his wife. “I met him on the 5.15 train.” He submitted the Tractatus as his PhD thesis; at the viva, examined by Russell and G. E. Moore, he clapped them on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.” Moore’s report reportedly said: “It is my personal opinion that Mr Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy.”

He became a fellow of Trinity College and began to dismantle his early work. Criticism from the economist Piero Sraffa was decisive: Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of contempt (brushing his chin with his fingertips) and asked, “What is the logical form of that?”

He lectured without notes, thinking aloud in front of small groups of devoted students, in his spartan rooms furnished with deck chairs, agonised silences broken by “I’m a fool!” Students dictated The Blue Book and The Brown Book (1933–35). Many imitated his gestures and wondered whether to abandon philosophy for manual work, as he urged. In 1935 he visited the Soviet Union, hoping to work as a labourer; he was offered university posts instead and declined. He succeeded Moore as professor of philosophy in 1939 and became a British citizen.

During the Second World War he worked as a porter at Guy’s Hospital in London and in a medical research laboratory in Newcastle. After the war he quarrelled with Karl Popper at the Moral Sciences Club (“Wittgenstein’s poker”, 1946), resigned his chair in 1947, and lived in Ireland — in a cottage in Galway and a hotel in Dublin — then in America with his student Norman Malcolm.

Diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1949, he spent his last months in the house of his doctor, Edward Bevan, in Cambridge, working until two days before his death, on the notes later published as On Certainty. He died on 29 April 1951, a few days after his 62nd birthday. His last words, to Mrs Bevan: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Form

The Tractatus consists of seven main propositions, numbered 1 to 7, with comments numbered decimally (2.1, 2.11, 2.12…) to show their logical weight. It is 75 pages long. Its preface states:

The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.

The world and facts

1 The world is all that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

The world consists of facts — combinations of objects — not of things. The simplest facts are atomic facts (states of affairs), configurations of simple objects. The objects form the unchangeable “substance” of the world; their possible combinations give the world its logical form.

The picture theory of meaning

2.1 We picture facts to ourselves.

A proposition is a picture of reality. Wittgenstein reportedly got the idea from a newspaper report of a Paris court case in which a road accident was reconstructed with toy cars and dolls. A picture represents a possible state of affairs because its elements correspond to objects and their arrangement corresponds to the arrangement of the objects — they share a logical form. A proposition is true if the state of affairs it depicts obtains, false otherwise. Complex propositions are truth-functions of elementary ones; Wittgenstein invented the truth tables now taught in every logic course.

Saying and showing

A proposition can depict reality, but it cannot depict the logical form it shares with reality: logical form shows itself. “What can be shown, cannot be said.” The propositions of logic are tautologies, saying nothing about the world.

Ethics, the mystical and the ladder

The Tractatus’s last pages turn to what lies beyond the limit:

6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is… in it no value exists.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists.

6.52 We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.

6.521 The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem.

The subject is not in the world but “a limit of the world”, as the eye is not in its visual field. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (5.6).

And then, the strangest conclusion in philosophy: the Tractatus’s own propositions are nonsense, since they try to say what can only be shown.

6.54 My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)

7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen.)

He wrote to the publisher Ludwig von Ficker that the book had two parts: the one written, and the one he had not written — “and it is precisely this second part that is the important one”. The Vienna Circle thought the book banished metaphysics and ethics as nonsense; Wittgenstein meant that what matters most lies beyond words.

The Philosophical Investigations

Against Augustine’s picture

The Investigations, composed between 1936 and 1949 and published two years after his death, consists of 693 numbered remarks. It opens with a quotation from Augustine of Hippo‘s Confessions describing how the child learns language by elders naming objects and pointing. In this picture, Wittgenstein says, “the individual words in language name objects”, and every word has a meaning correlated with it. This picture — which was also the Tractatus’s — is too narrow.

The builders

He imagines a primitive language: a builder A calls out “block!”, “pillar!”, “slab!”, “beam!”, and assistant B brings the stone. This is a complete language. Its words are not names but tools in an activity.

Meaning as use

43 For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word “meaning” it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.

Words are like the tools in a toolbox — hammer, pliers, saw, glue, nails — with very different functions; or like the handles in a locomotive cab, which look alike but do different jobs.

Language games and forms of life

Wittgenstein calls the whole of language and the activities into which it is woven a language game. There are countless kinds: giving and obeying orders, describing, reporting, speculating, making up a story, acting in a play, singing catches, guessing riddles, making a joke, asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” Language is embedded in shared human practices — a form of life (Lebensform).

Family resemblance

What do all games have in common? Board games, card games, ball games, Olympic games — “Don’t think, but look!” There is no single common feature, only “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing”, which he calls family resemblances (Familienähnlichkeiten), as the members of a family share build, features, eye colour, gait and temperament in various combinations. Many concepts — “language”, “number”, “art” — work like this. This was a direct attack on the Socratic demand for definitions (see Socrates).

Rule-following

How do we know how to continue a series — “+2” — beyond 1000? A pupil writes 1000, 1004, 1008… and insists he is going on “in the same way”. Any rule can be interpreted to fit any action. The paradox: “no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule”. Wittgenstein’s answer is that following a rule is not interpreting but a practice: “When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly.” “If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: ‘This is simply what I do.’” Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) made this the most debated topic in his work.

The private language argument

Could there be a language whose words refer to what only the speaker can know — their immediate private sensations? Wittgenstein imagines someone keeping a diary, writing “S” whenever a certain sensation occurs. But there is no criterion of correctness: “whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’.” Hence a private language is impossible; our words for sensations get their meaning from public expressions of pain, embedded in shared practices. The argument undermines the Cartesian picture of the mind as an inner theatre known only to its owner (see René Descartes).

The beetle in the box: suppose everyone has a box containing something they call a “beetle”, but no one can look into anyone else’s box. The thing in the box “drops out of consideration as irrelevant” to the meaning of the word.

Philosophy as therapy

109 Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

309 What is your aim in philosophy? — To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday” — when words are taken out of the language games in which they work. The philosopher’s task is not to discover new truths but to assemble reminders, to give a perspicuous representation (übersichtliche Darstellung) of our use of words, so the problems disappear. “Philosophy leaves everything as it is.”

Seeing-as

The second part of the Investigations discusses aspect-seeing: the duck-rabbit drawing, which can be seen as either. Seeing an aspect “dawn” is neither simply seeing nor interpreting.

On Certainty and the later notes

In his last eighteen months, provoked by G. E. Moore’s “proof” of the external world (“here is one hand”), Wittgenstein wrote the notes published as On Certainty (1969). Certain propositions — “I have two hands”, “the earth has existed for many years” — are not known on the basis of evidence; they are hinges on which our doubts and inquiries turn. “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” See Knowledge.

Other posthumous works include Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, Zettel, Remarks on Colour, and Culture and Value, a collection of reflections on music, religion, architecture and Jewishness.

Religion and ethics

Wittgenstein said he was not a religious man but could not help seeing every problem from a religious point of view. In the Lecture on Ethics (1929) he described the experience of “wondering at the existence of the world” and of “feeling absolutely safe”, and said any attempt to put such experiences into words runs against the walls of our cage — “perfectly, absolutely hopeless”. He admired Søren Kierkegaard, Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and in his later remarks treated religious belief as a form of life rather than a hypothesis: belief in the Last Judgment is not like a scientific prediction.

Influence

• Logical positivism: the Vienna Circle took the Tractatus as founding text — the verification principle owes something to it.
• Ordinary language philosophy: Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, and the Oxford school.
• Philosophy of mind: the private language argument, behaviourism (though Wittgenstein denied being a behaviourist).
• Social sciences: Peter Winch’s The Idea of a Social Science (1958).
• Philosophy of mathematics: rule-following, conventionalism.
• Religion: “Wittgensteinian fideism” (D. Z. Phillips).
• Art and literature: Thomas Bernhard’s novels, Derek Jarman’s film (1993), Bruce Duffy’s novel The World As I Found It.

Critics

• Russell came to regard the later Wittgenstein as having given up serious thinking.
• Popper held that there are genuine philosophical problems, not puzzles.
• Ernest Gellner, Words and Things (1959): ordinary language philosophy is conservative and trivial.
• Quietism: critics argue that “philosophy leaves everything as it is” cannot be the last word.

Key terms

Picture theory

Propositions represent facts by sharing their logical form.

Saying / showing

What can be stated versus what can only be shown.

The ladder

The Tractatus's own propositions — to be climbed and thrown away.

Language game

Language together with the activities into which it is woven.

Form of life

The shared practices in which language is embedded.

Using Wittgenstein in conversation

• On definitions: “Don’t think, but look!” — family resemblance.
• On meaning: the meaning of a word is its use.
• On confusion: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.”
• On the ineffable: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”