On Wittgenstein
As many of you are probably aware, I am constantly reading and re-reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations in the way that I imagine a devoutly religious layman constantly reads and re-reads a holy scripture. I do this not out of a sort of personal devotion however, so much from the conviction that he has been very badly understood by almost everyone, which is, I think, a great shame as I believe that he was very much correct about a great many things.
I'll not say I have a perfect understanding of him myself, but I do believe at this point that I have as good an understanding of Uncle Ludwig as anyone who is not a professional philosopher. Further, I think I understand him a good deal better than a good number of Wittgenstein scholars, not the least of which are such luminaries as David Pears, Cora Diamond, Kripkenstein, James Conant, and Richard Rorty.
I also think that much damage has been done to the understanding of Wittgenstein by the exegeses of his apostles Norman Malcom, Peter Winch, Rush Rhees, and Elizabeth Anscombe. All of these people were students of Wittgenstein at a formative period in their careers and Anscombe and Rhees, along with GH von Wright, were appointed by Wittgenstein as his literary executors. Anscombe is the translator with von Wright of the Philosophical Investigations, and also wrote an introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which i think is largely responsible for the persistence of the Fregenstein's monster, created by Russell in his introduction to TLP, into moderm Wittgenstein scholarship. It's worth noting on this point that Wittgenstein himself considered that Gottlob Frege hadn't understood his book at all.
The thing that must be born in mind here is that the work of academic philosophy is not the same thing as philosophy. Academic philosophy rather is that peculiar institution whereby university funds are allocated to thinkers generally not for the quality of their work but for the amount of work they generate for others who disagree with them. Philosophers are trained from an early age well through their graduate study in the fine art of carving out an original position for themselves in the field of discourse on some topic and then attempting in advance to refute any possible exceptions one might take with their views. This is of course very boring reading. Wittgenstein, by contrast, is not respected or even looked at by a great many philosophers. I once took a 400 level theory of knowledge class with the eminent epistemologist Laurence Bonjour, a man possessed of a great deal of intellectual integrity which i greatly respect, who seemed to have read an dismissed Wittgenstein at an early age and who never once appeared to have taken seriously the challenge to epistemology done the way he did it posed by Wittgenstein. Now granted, talking to undergraduate students about the history of this stuff is one thing and the work of a philosopher is another. However, it's striking that a great deal gets said about Wittgenstein in a specialty field called "Wittgenstein" while very little of what Wittgenstein said about the traditional aristotelian categories of philosophy that remain to philosopy, that is: ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, politics, poetics, and epistemology/philosophy of mind/philosophy of psychology. Only in Logic does the thumbprint of Uncle Ludwig seem to remain, in the truth tables of Intro to Symbolic Logic courses and the occasional aside by a well read professor during a discussion of Turing and/or Godel in a more advanced course, and then most likely including him with Russell by mistake, or not taking seriously Wittgenstein's response the to the first incompleteness theorem, which can be roughly translated as "So what?"
but these are secondary concerns. Like the tao te ching, wittgenstein's writings are first and foremost mystical. They are not mystical in the sense that madame blavatsky's writings are mystical, but rather, and I think i'm in agreement with Wittgenstein's best biographer Ray Monk here, in the sense that Wittgenstein believed that first and foremost he had shown in numerous ways that understanding is not limited to that which can be explained in the same language as mathematics and science. Further, he believed that the 20th century exultation of science was a mistake and that it was causing western civilization to lose sight of things that it had previously taken for granted. Specifically, I think Wittgenstein's complaint was about the progression that music was taking post-schoenberg. I think it may have been a psychological and or cultural problem for the son of the wealthiest man in the austrohungarian empire to realize that the popular and folk music of the day was doing just fine and that really it was just the supposed "high culture" of the past that was busy unravelling itself. But in a way, the Wittgensteinian Jeremiad about the mysteries of human understanding being lost under the jackboot of scientific progress has proved to be nothing if not true. We now live in a western culture with no room left in it for art, where we have cordoned off a section of culture formally the domain of art, that is the realm of entertainment, and have lionized it as the final word in such matters. Of course entertainment is important, but it is not the highest value of an art work, and is rather low down on the list both in level of difficulty to achieve and in it's contribution to our understanding of ourselves and of art itself.
What this has left me with is an aesthetic position that I don't think Wittgenstein would like, but that i don't think he would consider mistaken either. That is, i find it necessary in the world to create pockets of confusion, of chaos, of immediacy that are never the less entertaining, moving, and in some way communicate the inexpressable without actually expressing them. This is different from the common writing 101 advice to "show not tell" since in the telling one is still expressing something. Often it is something nonsensical, but it is any expression none the less. No, more along the lines of what Wittgenstein meant when he told his publisher that there were two parts to the Tractatus, the first part which included everything he had written, and the second part everything he had not written, and that the second part was by far the more important. More important in that it is this that moves us to understanding, to empathy, to goodness, and to all manner of abstractions which can never be adequately explained by empirical science because empirical science lacks the tools to do so. This is the work the Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the last part of his life trying to describe. He could not simply lay it out as I have done so, because to do so is to proceed into nonsense, or to state something trivial: that we have a hard time defining certain words. Moreover, the failures of Russell and Frege, as well as the insignificance of Godel's work as it appeared to Wittgenstein, had further entrenched him in the position that one could not lay out a doctrine about such matters because all that happens with it is gross misinterpretation and the statement of trivialities there as well. What must be done is to present evidence, to force different ways of seeing language, to train people in the right skills for looking at the world and to recognize patent nonsense when it arises and must be combatted by transformation into plain nonsense. For this task, he employed not argument as so many philosophers and logicians suppose, but art. The Philosophical Investigations then is not a book of philosophy, but a book of poetry, and brilliant poetry at that, which with few allies Wittgenstein attempted to get us to open our eyes and see things as they are, and not as how we talk about them. I think he is successful in that, but there is no way to say for sure. It only works if you read it the right way and with the right mindset, and that is rarely done.
I'll not say I have a perfect understanding of him myself, but I do believe at this point that I have as good an understanding of Uncle Ludwig as anyone who is not a professional philosopher. Further, I think I understand him a good deal better than a good number of Wittgenstein scholars, not the least of which are such luminaries as David Pears, Cora Diamond, Kripkenstein, James Conant, and Richard Rorty.
I also think that much damage has been done to the understanding of Wittgenstein by the exegeses of his apostles Norman Malcom, Peter Winch, Rush Rhees, and Elizabeth Anscombe. All of these people were students of Wittgenstein at a formative period in their careers and Anscombe and Rhees, along with GH von Wright, were appointed by Wittgenstein as his literary executors. Anscombe is the translator with von Wright of the Philosophical Investigations, and also wrote an introduction to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which i think is largely responsible for the persistence of the Fregenstein's monster, created by Russell in his introduction to TLP, into moderm Wittgenstein scholarship. It's worth noting on this point that Wittgenstein himself considered that Gottlob Frege hadn't understood his book at all.
The thing that must be born in mind here is that the work of academic philosophy is not the same thing as philosophy. Academic philosophy rather is that peculiar institution whereby university funds are allocated to thinkers generally not for the quality of their work but for the amount of work they generate for others who disagree with them. Philosophers are trained from an early age well through their graduate study in the fine art of carving out an original position for themselves in the field of discourse on some topic and then attempting in advance to refute any possible exceptions one might take with their views. This is of course very boring reading. Wittgenstein, by contrast, is not respected or even looked at by a great many philosophers. I once took a 400 level theory of knowledge class with the eminent epistemologist Laurence Bonjour, a man possessed of a great deal of intellectual integrity which i greatly respect, who seemed to have read an dismissed Wittgenstein at an early age and who never once appeared to have taken seriously the challenge to epistemology done the way he did it posed by Wittgenstein. Now granted, talking to undergraduate students about the history of this stuff is one thing and the work of a philosopher is another. However, it's striking that a great deal gets said about Wittgenstein in a specialty field called "Wittgenstein" while very little of what Wittgenstein said about the traditional aristotelian categories of philosophy that remain to philosopy, that is: ethics, metaphysics, philosophy of science, politics, poetics, and epistemology/philosophy of mind/philosophy of psychology. Only in Logic does the thumbprint of Uncle Ludwig seem to remain, in the truth tables of Intro to Symbolic Logic courses and the occasional aside by a well read professor during a discussion of Turing and/or Godel in a more advanced course, and then most likely including him with Russell by mistake, or not taking seriously Wittgenstein's response the to the first incompleteness theorem, which can be roughly translated as "So what?"
but these are secondary concerns. Like the tao te ching, wittgenstein's writings are first and foremost mystical. They are not mystical in the sense that madame blavatsky's writings are mystical, but rather, and I think i'm in agreement with Wittgenstein's best biographer Ray Monk here, in the sense that Wittgenstein believed that first and foremost he had shown in numerous ways that understanding is not limited to that which can be explained in the same language as mathematics and science. Further, he believed that the 20th century exultation of science was a mistake and that it was causing western civilization to lose sight of things that it had previously taken for granted. Specifically, I think Wittgenstein's complaint was about the progression that music was taking post-schoenberg. I think it may have been a psychological and or cultural problem for the son of the wealthiest man in the austrohungarian empire to realize that the popular and folk music of the day was doing just fine and that really it was just the supposed "high culture" of the past that was busy unravelling itself. But in a way, the Wittgensteinian Jeremiad about the mysteries of human understanding being lost under the jackboot of scientific progress has proved to be nothing if not true. We now live in a western culture with no room left in it for art, where we have cordoned off a section of culture formally the domain of art, that is the realm of entertainment, and have lionized it as the final word in such matters. Of course entertainment is important, but it is not the highest value of an art work, and is rather low down on the list both in level of difficulty to achieve and in it's contribution to our understanding of ourselves and of art itself.
What this has left me with is an aesthetic position that I don't think Wittgenstein would like, but that i don't think he would consider mistaken either. That is, i find it necessary in the world to create pockets of confusion, of chaos, of immediacy that are never the less entertaining, moving, and in some way communicate the inexpressable without actually expressing them. This is different from the common writing 101 advice to "show not tell" since in the telling one is still expressing something. Often it is something nonsensical, but it is any expression none the less. No, more along the lines of what Wittgenstein meant when he told his publisher that there were two parts to the Tractatus, the first part which included everything he had written, and the second part everything he had not written, and that the second part was by far the more important. More important in that it is this that moves us to understanding, to empathy, to goodness, and to all manner of abstractions which can never be adequately explained by empirical science because empirical science lacks the tools to do so. This is the work the Ludwig Wittgenstein spent the last part of his life trying to describe. He could not simply lay it out as I have done so, because to do so is to proceed into nonsense, or to state something trivial: that we have a hard time defining certain words. Moreover, the failures of Russell and Frege, as well as the insignificance of Godel's work as it appeared to Wittgenstein, had further entrenched him in the position that one could not lay out a doctrine about such matters because all that happens with it is gross misinterpretation and the statement of trivialities there as well. What must be done is to present evidence, to force different ways of seeing language, to train people in the right skills for looking at the world and to recognize patent nonsense when it arises and must be combatted by transformation into plain nonsense. For this task, he employed not argument as so many philosophers and logicians suppose, but art. The Philosophical Investigations then is not a book of philosophy, but a book of poetry, and brilliant poetry at that, which with few allies Wittgenstein attempted to get us to open our eyes and see things as they are, and not as how we talk about them. I think he is successful in that, but there is no way to say for sure. It only works if you read it the right way and with the right mindset, and that is rarely done.