Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889-1951) Printer Format
Philosopher.
Active 1909-1951 in Austria, England, Britain, Continental Europe
Several of Wittgenstein's siblings committed suicide and he himself often
entertained thoughts of suicide. Despite a frequent need for solitude - as
witnessed by long sojourns in small, remote cottages in Norway and Ireland -
Wittgenstein also formed passionate and fraught friendships with men from
whom he demanded unusual degrees of self-honesty and loyalty. Some of those
friendships were erotically charged, even if, as his biographer Ray Monk
shows, the extent of Wittgenstein's homosexual activities, and of his
consequent tortured remorse, have been exaggerated.
In a remark of 1946, he seems to welcome the atom bomb as offering the
"prospect of the end, the destruction of an evil - our disgusting soapy
water science". These outbursts against moral "gassing" and the hegemony of
science are closely related to each other and to what is perhaps the main
persisting theme in Wittgenstein's philosophy - the conviction that the
"truly important" things, including morality and religion - do not lend
themselves to propositional articulation, whether in the language of the
sciences or any other. In the Tractatus - a lean, haunting work of terse,
numbered assertions - this conviction took the form of insisting that "there
are [...] things that cannot be put into words", that may only be "shown",
not "said": "They are what is mystical". Such remarks may seem remote,
however, from the problem that inspired the work. This was the problem of
the status of the propositions of logic, such as "Either P or not-P". In
Wittgenstein's view, to treat such propositions in the manner of Russell and
Frege, as statements of facts of a special kind, failed to do justice to our
sense that they could not, under any possible circumstances, be false.
Wittgenstein's own solution to the problem flows from an account of language
developed, in large part, precisely in order to address that problem.
Propositions have sense through telling us "This is how things stand" in the
world, and they do this through "picturing" states of affairs - something
they effect in virtue of sharing the structure of the latter and of a
correspondence between the "simple signs" and "simple objects" into which
they and states of affairs are respectively analysable. The propositions of
logic then turn out to be "degenerate" or "limiting cases" of propositions,
for they tell us nothing about how things stand in the world. Rather, they
are complex statements whose component propositions are so combined, by
connectives like "and" and "or", as to guarantee that no states of affairs
count against them. As such they are tautologies that provide no factual
information at all. ("Either it is raining or it is not raining" tells you
nothing about the weather.) They are, in effect, a form of "non-sense", as
are, for rather different reasons, moral, aesthetic and religious remarks as
well. Nevertheless, the things that these remarks, like the statements of
logic, try to assert may be "shown". (For example, as Wittgenstein's
"Lecture on Ethics" of 1929 argues, what ethics vainly tries to state may
yet manifest itself through our lives and experiences.)
Wittgenstein was alert to one implication of his account of language and its
limits: philosophy itself, since it does not report states of affairs, must
itself be a species of "non-sense". A philosophical utterance like "The
world consists of objects" gestures at what is shown by the fact that
propositions have such forms as "a is F", where "a" is the name of an
object. Wittgenstein treats his own philosophical observations as a ladder
which, once climbed, is to be thrown away. This helps to explain his
abandonment of philosophy after completion of the Tractatus. While
philosophy might continue in the form of piecemeal reminders that this or
that proposition goes beyond the realm of sense, or of exposing the logical
structures of problematic statements, its traditional ambition to articulate
large truths about the universe is now seen to have been a deluded one. That
philosophy becomes "non-sense" when it attempts to articulate such
"metaphysical" truths was one of several Tractatus claims that were
followed, though often in a distorted form, by the Logical Positivists of
the Vienna Circle.
Shortly after the return to Cambridge in 1929, the economist Piero Sraffa
made a familiar Italian hand gesture and challenged Wittgenstein to identify
its "logical form". Legend has it that this incident prompted a sea change
in Wittgenstein's philosophical outlook. Whether or not Sraffa's gesture and
challenge were the catalyst, Wittgenstein did entirely repudiate the central
Tractatus contention that meaning belongs to signs only in virtue of their
describing how things stand in the world. From now on, the emphasis is upon
the great variety of uses that words have, the different "forms of life" in
which these uses have their place, and the countless "language games" that
words are employed to conduct. The earlier insistence that all propositions
must have a single essential form is now seen as one symptom among many of a
misconceived "craving for generality". (That a word - including "language"
itself - has meaning should not tempt us to think that there is anything
essentially in common to all the phenomena to which it refers: there may
only be loose "family resemblances" among these phenomena.) When, for
example, one attends, without theoretical preconceptions, to religious
language or to utterances like "I am in pain", it is evident that their use
is not to state how things stand in the world. Rather they are "expressions"
that evoke one's attitude towards the world or serve (like screams and
grimaces) to manifest one's pain.
The role of philosophy, on the new picture, is no longer that of "vertical"
analysis - of reducing propositions to their "atomic" constituents - but of
"horizontally" relating the use of words to other expressions in the
language and to wider human behaviour so as to obtain a "perspicuous
overview". In performing this role, philosophy serves as therapy, a means of
relieving the "mental cramps" that are due to a failure to appreciate the
workings and normal contexts of language. Traditional philosophical problems
typically arise when philosophers look at language - as Wittgenstein himself
had once done - when it is "on holiday", in abstraction from its functions
"in the stream of life". As Wittgenstein argues in On Certainty, the
sceptic's questions, like "Do I really know that I have two hands?", could
only be asked by someone who ignores the contexts in which real-life worries
about knowledge arise. Traditional philosophical claims, therefore, come off
no better than they did in the Tractatus. This is not because they are
doomed attempts to say what can only be shown, but because the questions
they address are dissolved or deconstructed once the terms in which they are
couched are perspicuously understood. In particular, attempts to say what
the world as a whole must be like for language to be meaningful should be
eschewed - not because that world is "mystical", but because no sense
attaches to establishing a correspondence between language and the world as
wholes. (Not that the idea of the ineffable entirely disappears: rather,
what is ineffable is the implicit and not fully surveyable "background" of
the practices against which our utterances have meaning.) Our world is
inseparable from the world as it is variously spoken of in language games
rooted in forms of human life.
Particular attention is paid in Philosophical Investigations and other later
writings to psychological language. While the specific target is the
venerable idea that words have meaning through standing for "ideas" in the
mind, Wittgenstein is launching, in his remarks on "private language", a
general assault against the Cartesian conception of the mind as an "inner"
realm dualistically set against the "outer" world. There can, Wittgenstein
argues, be no "private" understanding of terms like "pain", resulting from
attaching them to mental states accessible only to oneself. Rather, such
terms owe their meaning to their use in publicly accessible practices, such
as calling for help and expressing sympathy.
These later reflections on meaning, philosophy and mind connect up with
Wittgenstein's continuing cultural pessimism, for the prevailing approaches
to these topics reflect, as he sees it, a demand for theoretical "depth"
that is symptomatic of the hegemony of science. Language gets conceived of
as a calculus only properly understood by the expert who uncovers its
underlying structures; philosophy becomes viewed as an extension of science,
probing the most general truths about reality; while the mind is taken to be
some object - the brain perhaps - whose opaque inner workings are to be
revealed by the cognitive psychologist. This craving for depth and
generality serves to level the world down, to reduce everything to the
underlying structures and constituents that are the concern of the sciences.
This is to douse "the glowing embers of life" with a "cold grey ash". In
truth, when it comes to the "important" things, "nothing is hidden" and what
is required is not depth analysis but a perspicuous overview of our
practices and speech. What such an overview reinforces is a wonder at the
variety to which we should be open, at "something diffused over the whole
range of human life [.] all the ordinary modes of human thought and
activity", as David Pears puts it. "Man has to awaken to wonder, wrote
Wittgenstein, and science - or rather, the hegemony of the scientific image
of the world - is "a way of sending him to sleep again". Possibly
Wittgenstein's deathbed verdict on his own life ("Tell them I've had a
wonderful life") referred, not to its having been a happy one, but to a life
filled with a sense of wonder at things.
David E. Cooper, University of Durham
First published 15 March 2003, last revised 14 April 2003
To cite this article, you may wish to use one of the following formats:
Chicago Style: David E. Cooper, University of Durham, "Wittgenstein, Ludwig"
in The Literary Encyclopedia [online database] Profile first published
15/3/2003 [cited 11 Dec. 2005]; available from World Wide Web @
http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4777
MLA Style: David E. Cooper, University of Durham. "Wittgenstein, Ludwig."
The Literary Encyclopedia. 15 Mar. 2003. The Literary Dictionary Company. 11
December 2005. <http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4777>
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