Wittgenstein: The Philosopher Who Tried to Kill Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote two philosophies.
They are almost exactly opposed to each other.
The first: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). The second: Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously, 1953).
Both are works of genius. Both are, in their different ways, attempts to end philosophy, to show that philosophical problems are not deep mysteries to be solved but confusions to be dissolved.
The first attempt uses logic. The second uses ordinary language.
Both fail, in the sense that philosophy continues. Both succeed, in the sense that they permanently changed what philosophy is allowed to claim.
Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of the twentieth century.
He is also, by most accounts, one of the most difficult human beings who ever lived.
I. The Life
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889.
He was the youngest of eight children of Karl Wittgenstein, one of the wealthiest industrialists in Europe, the Carnegie of Austria.
The Wittgenstein household was a center of Viennese cultural life. Brahms, Mahler, and Clara Schumann performed there.
Three of Ludwig’s brothers committed suicide. Ludwig himself contemplated it throughout his life.
He studied engineering in Berlin and Manchester. He became interested in the foundations of mathematics. He went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell.
Russell, after their first meeting, wrote: “He is perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived: passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”
At Cambridge, Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus during World War I, serving in the Austrian army on the Eastern Front, carrying the manuscript in his rucksack.
He was captured by the Italians. He completed the book as a prisoner of war.
After the war, he gave away his inherited fortune (one of the largest in Europe) and became a village schoolteacher in Austria.
He returned to Cambridge in 1929. He submitted the Tractatus as his PhD thesis.
The examiners were Russell and G.E. Moore, two of the greatest philosophers of the century.
Wittgenstein concluded the viva by clapping them each on the shoulder and saying:
“Don’t worry. I know you’ll never understand it.”
He received the PhD.
He was appointed to a professorship at Cambridge in 1939. He hated academic philosophy. He begged his students not to become philosophers.
He died of prostate cancer in Cambridge in 1951. His last words, to his landlady: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”
II. The Tractatus: The First Philosophy
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is 75 pages long.
It is written in numbered propositions: 7 main propositions, subdivided to arbitrary depth: 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 2, 2.01, …
It begins:
“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.”
And it ends:
“7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Between these two propositions: an attempt to draw the limits of language, thought, and the world, all at once.
The picture theory of meaning:
Wittgenstein’s central claim: language pictures reality.
A proposition is a logical picture of a fact. A picture shares its logical form with what it depicts.
“2.1 We picture facts to ourselves.” “2.12 A picture is a model of reality.” “2.18 What every picture, of whatever form, must have in common with reality in order to be able to depict it at all — rightly or wrongly — is the logical form, that is, the form of reality.”
For a proposition to be meaningful, it must be a picture of a possible fact.
Meaningful propositions: elementary propositions describing atomic facts (this is red, that is to the left of this).
The limits of language:
What can be said clearly: the natural sciences. Facts about the world. Propositions that can be true or false.
What cannot be said: ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, the existence of God, the nature of the self, the logical form itself.
These things cannot be said, but they can be shown.
The logical form of language shows itself in the structure of propositions. Ethics shows itself in how we live. The mystical, that the world exists at all, shows itself but cannot be said.
“6.522 There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical.”
The self-undermining conclusion:
The Tractatus ends with its most famous move:
“6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. He must transcend these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.”
The propositions of the Tractatus are themselves nonsense, they try to say what can only be shown.
The book is a ladder. Once you have climbed it, you must throw it away.
This is either: (a) the most honest philosophical gesture ever made (b) philosophical suicide (c) both
III. What the Tractatus Got Right
The Tractatus had an enormous influence, particularly on the Vienna Circle, the logical positivists: Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, Ayer.
They took from the Tractatus the verification principle: a statement is meaningful only if it is either analytic (true by definition) or empirically verifiable.
Therefore: ethics, theology, metaphysics. All meaningless.
Not false. Meaningless.
Wittgenstein was appalled by this reading. He said the Vienna Circle had misunderstood him. What he wanted to show was not that ethics was meaningless, but that it was more important than anything that could be put into propositions.
The mystical was not nothing. It was everything that mattered most.
The Vienna Circle heard: ethics is nonsense. Wittgenstein meant: ethics is beyond language, which is the highest possible form of importance.
What it got genuinely right:
The Tractatus made permanent the insight that many philosophical puzzles arise from confusing language with the world, from treating words as if they directly picture facts when they do not.
The question “what is time?”, answered as if there is an entity called Time that philosophy must describe, is already confused.
The grammar of our language generates philosophical puzzles that are not about the world but about how we use words.
This is the lasting contribution.
IV. The Transition
Between the Tractatus and the Investigations: Wittgenstein stopped doing philosophy for ten years.
He built a house for his sister in Vienna, with extreme precision, demanding that the ceiling of one room be raised by 3 centimeters after it was already built, because it was not exactly right.
He returned to Cambridge in 1929.
He heard a lecture by the Italian economist Piero Sraffa, who gestured in the Neapolitan manner of contempt and asked: what is the logical form of that?
Wittgenstein could not answer.
A gesture does not picture a fact. It has no logical form. But it means something.
The picture theory of meaning was wrong.
Language does not primarily picture facts. Language does many things: commanding, questioning, joking, promising, greeting, cursing, praying, none of which are pictures of facts.
The Tractatus had identified one use of language and taken it for all of language.
V. The Investigations: The Second Philosophy
The Philosophical Investigations is nothing like the Tractatus.
No numbered propositions. No systematic structure. A series of remarks, some short, some extended, circling around problems, approaching them from different angles, never quite arriving.
Wittgenstein compared it to an album of sketches.
The style is the philosophy: philosophy cannot be systematized, because philosophical problems are not solved but dissolved, not answered but untangled.
Language games:
The central concept:
“I shall also call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, a ‘language-game’.”
Language is not a single system with a single function. It is a vast collection of practices, language games, each with its own rules, its own standards of correctness, its own point.
The language game of science. The language game of ethics. The language game of mathematics. The language game of religion. The language game of ordinary conversation.
These are not different theories of the same thing. They are different games entirely.
Trying to reduce one to another, reducing ethics to science, mathematics to logic, religion to metaphysics, is a category error: playing one game by the rules of another.
Meaning as use:
“The meaning of a word is its use in the language.”
Not: meaning is a mental image. Not: meaning is the object the word refers to. Not: meaning is a logical form.
Meaning is what you do with a word: how you use it, in what contexts, with what effects.
This seems deflationary, almost trivial. It is radical.
It means: if you want to know what “pain” means, don’t look inward for a mental state. Look at how people use the word “pain”, in what circumstances, what behavior it accompanies, what role it plays in social life.
The meaning is in the practice.
The private language argument:
One of the most important arguments in twentieth century philosophy:
Can there be a language that only one person can understand, a language for purely private mental states?
Wittgenstein’s answer: no.
A language requires rules. Rules require the possibility of following correctly or incorrectly. Correctness requires a check, a standard. A purely private standard cannot function as a standard, because whatever seems right to me is right, and that only means the word ‘right’ has no application here.
Therefore: there is no private language. Mental states are not defined by inner private experience but by their role in public practice.
This argument has enormous consequences:
- For the philosophy of mind (against Cartesian inner theater)
- For epistemology (against foundationalism in private experience)
- For the philosophy of mathematics (against Platonism)
It remains one of the most contested arguments in analytic philosophy.
Family resemblance:
What makes all games games?
There is no single feature common to all games. Chess and ring-around-the-rosie and solitaire and war: what do they share?
Look: board games share some features. Card games share some features. Ball games share some features.
But there is no essential “gameness”, no necessary and sufficient conditions.
Instead: a network of overlapping similarities. Family resemblances.
Like the features of a family: this one has the nose, that one the chin, another the eyes, no single feature in all of them, but a web of resemblances.
This destroys essentialism: the view that every concept has a set of necessary and sufficient conditions.
Most concepts (game, art, language, knowledge) have family resemblance structure. Philosophers who search for essential definitions are searching for something that does not exist.
VI. Philosophy as Therapy
The deepest claim of the Investigations:
Philosophical problems are not deep truths awaiting discovery. They are confusions, diseases of language, awaiting dissolution.
“Philosophy simply puts everything before us and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us.”
“The philosopher treats a question like an illness.”
When a philosopher asks: “What is time? What is knowledge? What is consciousness?”
They are not discovering facts about the world. They are being misled by the grammar of their language, by the fact that “time,” “knowledge,” “consciousness” are nouns, which suggests they are things, which suggests they can be defined, which suggests philosophy must find the definitions.
But language does not work this way.
The task of philosophy: to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use, to show that the puzzling question dissolves once we look carefully at how the relevant words actually work.
“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about.’”
Philosophy is navigation, not discovery. Finding your way around the language you already know, but have become confused by.
VII. The Rule-Following Paradox
One of the most disturbing arguments in twentieth century philosophy:
What determines that I am following a rule correctly?
I have been adding numbers. Every time I’ve added before, I’ve obtained what seems like the correct sum.
But: consider the rule “plus” that I seem to be following. Is the rule I’m following actually “plus”, or is it “quus”:
\(a \text{ quus } b = a + b \text{ for } a, b < 57\) \(a \text{ quus } b = 5 \text{ otherwise}\)
For all the cases I’ve encountered (all less than 57), “plus” and “quus” give the same answer.
What makes it the case that I mean “plus” not “quus”?
Not my past behavior, consistent with either. Not my mental states, I have no memory of stipulating “plus.” Not the rule itself, any rule can be interpreted to be consistent with any behavior.
“This was our 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.”
The paradox seems to show: there is no fact of the matter about what rule I mean.
The solution (Kripkenstein):
Saul Kripke’s influential interpretation: there is no fact about meaning, but there is a communal practice.
We count someone as following a rule when they agree with the rest of us, when their responses fit the community’s expectations.
Meaning is not private fact. It is communal norm.
Wittgenstein’s own “solution”: the paradox itself shows that rule-following cannot be grounded in interpretation, in a further rule for applying the rule.
Rules are followed in practice. The practice is the foundation. There is no deeper foundation.
“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.’”
VIII. Wittgenstein and Science
Wittgenstein was not anti-science. He was anti-scientism: the view that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge, that all questions are scientific questions.
“Even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all.”
Science describes how the world is. It does not address how to live. It does not address what matters. It does not address the meaning of existence.
Not because these questions have no answers, but because they are not questions of the same kind.
The confusion of scientific questions with questions of value, meaning, ethics: this is the deepest philosophical confusion.
The Tractatus said: these things cannot be said. The Investigations says: they belong to different language games.
Both versions agree: science does not exhaust what can be meaningfully said. The philosopher who thinks otherwise has confused the rules of one game for the rules of all games.
IX. What Wittgenstein Leaves Us
Wittgenstein changed philosophy permanently.
He ended the quest for foundations:
After Wittgenstein, the search for the ultimate foundation of knowledge, of language, of mathematics, the search for bedrock, is recognized as chasing a phantom.
There is no deeper ground. There is only practice, use, the form of life.
He ended the picture theory of language:
After Wittgenstein, the naive view that words picture facts, that language is primarily descriptive, is not available.
Language is action. Meaning is use. Understanding is practical capacity.
He democratized the ordinary:
The Investigations treats ordinary language not as a deficient form of ideal logical language but as fully adequate for all human purposes.
Ordinary language is not confused. Philosophers who try to replace it with logic are confused.
The ordinary is the ground. The technical is built on it.
He showed the limits of philosophy itself:
Perhaps Wittgenstein’s deepest contribution: the insistence that philosophy has limits, that it cannot stand outside language and judge it, cannot stand outside the form of life and evaluate it, cannot provide foundations that are not themselves in need of foundation.
Philosophy can clarify. It cannot ground.
This is either liberating or terrifying, depending on what you were hoping philosophy could do.
X. The Man and His Silence
Wittgenstein was not a comfortable person.
He demanded absolute honesty, from himself, from his students, from his friends.
He would stop in the middle of a lecture and stand in silence for minutes, wrestling with a thought.
He once said to Norman Malcolm: “What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, and it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”
Philosophy as a way of life, not as an academic specialty.
He lived this. He gave away his fortune. He became a schoolteacher, a gardener, a hospital orderly. He begged his students not to become professional philosophers, to do something real instead.
He thought most of what passed for philosophy was vanity and confusion. He thought most of what passed for depth was self-indulgence.
He was often wrong about this, often dismissive of genuine work, but the demand was real:
mean what you say or be silent.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
He lived by this.
Most of what matters most (love, beauty, the fact that anything exists at all, the ethical life, what makes a life worth living) cannot be put into propositions.
It shows itself. In how we live. In what we do. In the quality of our attention.
The silence at the end of the Tractatus is not defeat. It is reverence.
I Do Not Want to Be Silent
There are philosophers you settle with, and philosophers you argue with all your life. Wittgenstein is the second kind for me.
Three things draw me in.
The first: he is the most effective antidote I know for pseudo-intellectual posturing. His philosophy keeps asking the question I want to shout in every graduate seminar: drop the big empty words. What are you actually saying? I cannot stand inflated language, and Wittgenstein takes a hammer to it on principle.
The second: he is not a showy philosopher. He is a knife. The sentences are short, cold, sometimes cruel. I have always preferred intelligence that is ambitious without shouting, the kind that makes its point and steps back. The Tractatus is seven propositions and the rest is silence; the Investigations is sketches refusing to become a system. I find that severity beautiful.
The third: he moves freely between mathematics, logic, language, world, meaning. I do not see those as separate domains. Physics, quantum mechanics, semantics, consciousness, they are the same problem from different angles. Wittgenstein understood this in a way most philosophers, and most physicists, do not.
Three things make me resist him.
He can feel too sterile. My favorite thinkers carry literature in them: tragedy, the body, aesthetics, melancholy, human warmth. Wittgenstein sometimes reads like a man made of stone. Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life, he said at the end. Beautiful last words. But did he live one? My mind is sharp, I hope, but it is not cold. Things mix in me: my grandmother, travel, the body, desire, physics, philosophy. I want a thinker who has lived as well as thought.
He refuses to give a system. He opens doors and then closes them; he says we must stop here. I am someone who wants the big picture even when the picture is hard. His refusal to commit to a structure can feel, in my worst moods, like principled evasion. I keep wanting to ask: yes, but now what do we do?
And then the line itself: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. It moves me and it irritates me in the same breath. I am exactly the person who tries to speak about what cannot be spoken: time, death, meaning, God, quantum mechanics, consciousness, love, desire, intellectual vanity. I do not want to be silent. I want to push at the limit with a beautiful sentence and see what gives way.
So I keep him close, and I keep him at arm’s length. He sharpens me. And he keeps making me want to ask: yes, but where is the human?
Further reading:
Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), trans. Ogden & Ramsey, or Pears & McGuinness. Read both translations; they differ significantly.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), trans. Anscombe, Hacker & Schulte. The Hacker & Schulte translation (2009) is definitive.
Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990). The best philosophical biography ever written.
Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982). The most influential interpretation; contested.
Hacker, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (1990). The detailed commentary; four volumes.
Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (1959). Still the best guide to the Tractatus.
McGinn, Wittgenstein and the Philosophical Investigations (1997). Accessible and accurate.
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