Who the hell is Ludwig Wittgenstein?: and what are his theories all about?

By Howard Peacock

Regarded as the most important philosopher since Kant, Wittgenstein set out to solve all the major problems of philosophy, stating that these arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language. Tracing his life and influences, Who the Hell is Ludwig Wittgenstein? gets to grips with who this brilliant man was and what his philosophy i

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bowden & Brazil Ltd
• Release date: Sep 30, 2021
• ISBN: 9781915177155

Book preview

Introduction

What is philosophy for ? In popular imagination, it is associated with finding answers to the great mysteries of human existence – in Douglas Adams’ immortal phrase, the solution to ‘the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything’ (Adams, 1979). Professional philosophers are sometimes only slightly less grandiose: philosophy, they might say, is in the business of describing the fundamental nature of the world – ‘limning the true and ultimate structure of reality’ (Quine, 1960), or understanding ‘how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’ (Sellars, 1962). Less ambitious thinkers might see their task as explaining the nature of thought, or of language; or more humbly still, as simply ‘conceptual analysis’, shedding light on concepts we take for granted the rest of the time. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is famous not only for the scope of his ambition – at one point he believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy – but also for his influence on the development of the subject (as we’ll see, he played a foundational role in many of the 20th century’s most significant philosophical movements). Wittgenstein is also notorious for his ambivalence about the subject itself, more likely to see philosophical thinking as a trap from which we must be freed, rather than a discipline to be promoted. The task of philosophy, he said, is ‘to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle’ ( PI I.309), and the real discovery would be the one that enables us to stop doing philosophy when we want to ( PI I.133). If you want to understand what has been going on in philosophy during the last hundred years, you need to know about Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein seems a more alien and challenging philosopher on first encounter than perhaps he should. First, there’s the name (you should pronounce it as he would have done, with an initial ‘v’ for the written ‘w’, and the stress on the first syllable). Then, there’s the semi-mythical status surrounding his exploits: writing the outline of his first book in the trenches of the Russian Front in World War I; then abandoning philosophy to retrain as a primary school teacher, believing that there were no further philosophical problems to solve; returning to Cambridge in 1929 with a reputation already so formidable that the economist J.M. Keynes (1883–1946) wrote to a friend, ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train’; becoming so threatening when debating the existence of moral principles with the philosopher Karl Popper (1902–94) that the latter offered ‘not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers’ as an example of an obviously true moral imperative. He had a profound sensitivity to high art, and especially music, but was indifferent to physical comfort, living (it seems) mainly on a diet of milk and vegetables. On the other hand, his favourite relaxation after teaching was visits to the cinema, where – so it is said – he displayed a particular fondness for spaghetti Westerns of the most undemanding kind.

The sheer force of Wittgenstein’s personality shines through in every contemporary account: he is described as dominating every philosophical discussion he participated in, impatient of anyone who attempted to defend positions contrary to his own. In teaching he would alternate between animated exposition, walking around the room and making frequent use of a chalkboard for illustration, and slumping in a chair clutching his head, exclaiming ‘I’m a fool’, or ‘I’m a terrible teacher’. His teaching was irregular in other ways too. There was little pre-conceived plan, apart from his habit of arriving an hour or so early for the session to think through what he wanted to talk about that day, and no attempt to relate his lecturing to the university examination syllabus, with the effect that other philosophy dons tended to believe that he actually reduced students’ ability to pass their exams.

Wittgenstein’s obvious charisma and personal magnetism tended to attract disciples, and he took few steps to discourage this: attendance at his discussion sessions was by prior arrangement only, and reserved for those who committed to regular participation. His followers tended to assimilate his mannerisms: the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001), his pupil and later his translator and literary executor, could be perceived as affecting just a hint of an Austrian accent in debate. There is also a much-repeated story about Wittgenstein’s visit to see his former pupil, Norman Malcolm, lecture in the USA: after meeting Wittgenstein without realizing who he was, a student is supposed to have asked, ‘who’s the old guy who keeps imitating Professor Malcolm?’

Although constantly working to refine and organize his thoughts, Wittgenstein published nothing whatsoever during the second half of his career. During his life, his fame was due to one book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Chapter 3), typed-up lecture notes prepared and circulated informally by students, and word-of-mouth discussion of his views. Most of the books now available under his name are compilations from typescripts and manuscripts he left unpublished at death – some clearly intended to be read in the format he had left them, others little more than edited versions of day-to-day notebooks. Wittgenstein’s collected papers (the so-called Nachlass) can now be accessed in searchable form online, a resource unavailable to biographers even a few decades ago. However, this makes the challenge of understanding his views harder still, and many scholars have made it their life’s work to catalogue and systematize this vast, sprawling archive.

The combination of personal magnetism and textual complexity makes Wittgenstein a controversial figure in the history of philosophy. Fêted by many as the 20th century’s greatest philosopher, he was regarded by some contemporaries and subsequent interpreters as a fraud, who used deliberately obscure and impenetrable language to build an undeserved reputation for profundity. Particularly striking recent criticism comes from Crispin Sartwell (b. 1958), who accuses Wittgenstein of disabling the entire discipline of English-language philosophy for decades with a needlessly destructive approach to its subject-matter (Sartwell, 2019).

For other readers, Wittgenstein, though a thinker of genius, has no specifically philosophical contribution to make: he is a visionary and a mystic, someone whose main teaching is to learn to live with the limits of what can be said in language, to recognize the nonsense we produce when we attempt to transcend those limits, and (like a zen monk of fable) to engage with the mysteries of reality in an accepting silence. He has been particularly influential in that regard in the philosophy of religion: here, in its least subtle form, a reading might co-opt his remarks to the attempt to place religious practices outside the scope of rational criticism; religion makes sense within a ‘form of life’ which the atheist is in no position to challenge, and debate about religion for that reason is said to be impossible.

However, another, more conventional assessment is possible: although Wittgenstein was arguably not the best at explaining his own reasoning, it is possible to reconstruct coherent lines of thought, and persuasive philosophical arguments, within his text. Tangled and obscure as it is, Wittgenstein’s work displays a consistent originality which has been a fertile ground for the development of radical new ideas in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). The business of this book, then, is not only to explain who (the hell) Wittgenstein was, and how he got to be that way; it is also to provide a sense of why he is important to philosophy, by exploring three key ideas: the account of how language and thought represent the world in his ‘picture theory of meaning’ (Chapter 3); the claim that talk about private, inner sensations is impossible, associated with his ‘private language argument’ (Chapter 4); and the response to philosophical scepticism contained within his account of ‘hinge propositions’ (Chapter