The picture theory
A proposition is a logical picture of a fact, sharing its logical form. Logical form itself cannot be said, only shown.
The Twentieth Century to Today · 1889 – 1951
Ludwig Wittgenstein
维特根斯坦 · Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein
He changed philosophy twice: the Tractatus says language pictures the world and whereof one cannot speak one must be silent; the Investigations say meaning is use and philosophy is therapy for the diseases language causes.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Source: Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 7
Wittgenstein was the youngest child of one of Vienna's richest families; his father was a steel magnate, Brahms and Mahler were guests, his brother Paul a one-armed pianist, three other brothers suicides. He attended school in Linz, studied engineering in Berlin, researched aero-engines in Manchester, read Russell and Frege through an interest in the foundations of mathematics, and in 1911 sought out Russell in Cambridge, who soon judged him a genius. In 1913 he spent a year alone on a Norwegian fjord thinking about logic.
When war came he volunteered, asked to be sent to the front, wrote notes under fire, and was captured in Italy in 1918, finishing the Tractatus in a prison camp. The book of some seventy numbered pages says that the world is the totality of facts, that propositions are logical pictures of facts, that the propositions of logic are tautologies, and that philosophy, ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life lie outside the world and so cannot be said: 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent'. Believing philosophy's problems finally solved, he gave his entire inheritance to his siblings and spent six years as a village schoolteacher in the Austrian mountains.
He then worked as a monastery gardener and designed a severely minimal house for his sister, and in 1929 returned to Cambridge; Keynes wrote, 'God has arrived'. He took his doctorate on the Tractatus, examined by Russell and Moore, clapping them on the shoulder: 'don't worry, I know you'll never understand it'. For twenty years he lectured without notes, thinking painfully in front of students, whose notes became the Blue and Brown Books. He succeeded Moore as professor in 1939, worked as a hospital porter during the war, and resigned in 1947.
The Philosophical Investigations, published after his death, repudiate the Tractatus almost point by point: language is not a picture but countless 'language-games', the meaning of a word is its use in the game, and games are rooted in 'forms of life'; there can be no private language; following a rule is a practice; philosophical problems arise 'when language goes on holiday', when one use is mistaken for another, and philosophy's task is 'to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle'. He died of prostate cancer; his last words were 'tell them I've had a wonderful life'.
Key Ideas
The sayable and the unsayable
The propositions of natural science are all that can be said. Ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life lie outside the world; they are the mystical, about which one must be silent.
Meaning is use
Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use. Words are like tools in a toolbox, with different functions and no common essence, only 'family resemblance'.
Language-games and forms of life
Speaking is an activity embedded in human practice. To understand a sentence, look at the form of life in which it is used.
The private language argument
A language only its speaker could understand, referring to private sensations, is impossible, since there would be no criterion of correct use. Meaning is public.
Philosophy as therapy
Philosophical problems are not to be solved but dissolved; they come from misunderstanding the logic of language. Philosophy leaves everything as it is.
Influenced by
- Gottlob Frege
He said Frege's work was what he most admired; in 1911 he went to Jena to see him, and Frege sent him to Russell. The Tractatus' context principle and anti-psychologism come straight from Frege.
- Bertrand Russell
Russell was his teacher and within a year his pupil, saying 'the next big step in philosophy will be taken by him'. The atomist frame of the Tractatus was hammered out in argument with Russell.
- Arthur Schopenhauer
He read Schopenhauer as a boy, and the closing passages of the Tractatus on will, ethics and the mystical speak with Schopenhauer's accent.
- Søren Kierkegaard
- Augustine of Hippo
The Investigations open by quoting the Confessions on learning to speak, taking it as the archetype of the picture that meaning is naming, and criticising it.
- G. E. Moore
- William James
Influenced
- Bertrand Russell
His student, later his critic. He wrote the introduction to the Tractatus; Wittgenstein said he had not understood a word.
- Rudolf Carnap
The Vienna Circle read the Tractatus sentence by sentence; from it he took that logical truths are tautologies and metaphysics is meaningless, though the two men's meetings were strained.
- Donald Davidson
- G. E. M. Anscombe
His student, literary executor and translator of the Philosophical Investigations; Wittgenstein said she was the one woman student he did not find tiresome, and she applied his method to action, intention and ethics.
- Thomas Kuhn
The word 'paradigm' and the use of 'family resemblance' come from Wittgenstein: scientists work not by explicit rules but by shared exemplars.
- Jean-François Lyotard
The central tool of The Postmodern Condition and The Differend is the language-game: no metalanguage can adjudicate all games, and between heterogeneous discourses there are disputes that cannot be settled.
- Hilary Putnam
- Alasdair MacIntyre
- Jürgen Habermas
- Richard Rorty
- Thomas Nagel
- Saul Kripke
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language read out of the Investigations a sceptical paradox: no fact determines that by 'plus' I meant plus rather than 'quus'. He said this was 'Kripkenstein', not Wittgenstein.