Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire
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In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.
I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
My advisor at university, a philosophy professor, said the same thing about Wittgenstein. During the initial part of his graduate studies, philosophy left him empty, and depressed. Discovering, and focusing on, Wittgenstein, changed his life.
There is a fantastic book that I recommend along these lines: https://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Story-John-Kaag/d...
It's a bit like "Gödel for transcendentals". But this has been mostly ignored, while the tools used by Wittgenstein have been an inspiration to many.
The relationship between the Russell/Gödel camp and Wittgenstein is complicated - In some ways at odds (as they grew apart Russell thought Wittgenstein was dedicating his life to not thinking) but I think they were concerned with the same questions.
Gödel and Wittgenstein would probably both agree that you can't describe the system from within the system. Gödel was more interested pulling the threads and exploring the edges of that, whereas Wittgenstein took that to mean philosophy (at least as it pertains to living) was a lost cause and distraction from reality. In other words, I feel they were on the same page but had completely different ultimate interests.
And ultimately, the Russell camp won - a modern echo of that is the search for the one equation that will describe all of reality, or at least a belief that even if we never find it there is still one out there. Wittgenstein would probably believe that no man made system could fundamentally describe reality.
It's largely been ignored, yes, because where do you go from there? Someone who believes in Wittgenstein is probably more likely to join the army or become an architect than become a philosopher, which guarantees that it will be ignored. Evolutionarily it's an idea that doesn't fit into the ecosystem.
Mind that I do not mean to suggest any kind of parallelism in a strict sense (hence the emoticon.)
Regarding the lost cause as a distraction, I'm not so sure about that. I guess, Wittgenstein would have insisted on this being about all, which was important to us, but nevertheless being out of reach of any kind of theory in the strict sense.
(And this is, because – according to Wittgenstein – it is essentially outside of any reality, which is accessibly to us. On the other hand, it may have still reality beyond this, "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole." [6.45], "Die Anschauung der Welt sub specie aeterni ist ihre Anschauung als-begrenztes-Ganzes." However, there are no legitimate question that may be actually posed regarding this limited whole, which is reflected just as a feeling from the inside; hence, the proposed riddle – which is really about existence – doesn't exist on any level of disciplined discourse.)
Regarding evolutionary fitness, there may have been a niche: According to the Tractatus, the mystical arises, which might have been further explored by some theory of emergence. But this developed only much later and – as far as I know it — a connection was never made.
Whereas W II does get more specific and deeply explores the real-world implications, partly as a rejection of W I's tendency to speak in abstract, high-level ideas. But W II doesn't dwell on the implications of the inherent fallacy of logic as Godel does, just uses that as a rung in the ladder to somewhere else.
And I didn't take it as you making a direct like to Godel, but it's interesting to think about because they were all part of the same zeitgeist which is still strongly echoing in our culture. They didn't see eye-to-eye in their life despite some common threads, and it got me thinking about WHY that was.
(While some of this may remind of Kant's thing in itself, it is comes from an entirely different direction, namely, a proposed teleology of philosophy, while Kant addresses this from the fundamentals of perception.)
This suggests, as Chalmers has pointed out, that the disagreement is not semantic. It’s rather a substantial philosophical issue. No linguistic analysis will resolve the debate. Science might someday, if the matter can be settled empirically.
In this case it comes to something also very common in philosophy, discussions that can be questioned as “are we discussing terms or philosophy or both at the same time?” and often the case is “both” making it very hard to have a philosophical discussion when opposing sides disagree both on the terminology and the philosophy and don’t separate the two disagreements very well.
How about Epicurus?
I'm not at all in the philosophy realm, so I don't know who is revered or reviled. Maybe he's not noteworthy enough, too idealistic or just plain wrong? Perhaps he's passed over for some other reason.
The few things I've read about his philosophies seem like they're focused on finding basic happiness. Am I just oversimplifying?
Apologies in advance as I haven't read any Wittgenstein myself, but am I wrong in thinking this is what the Philosophical Investigations was about (as opposed to the Tractatus)?
Both had a sort of "end philosophy" ambition, to a degree. The Tractatus, with its ambition to address the ways that language touches the world in a picture theory, was more akin to the idea of "solving" philosophy in a sense. In PI, he makes a change in his view of philosophy towards anthropology and remarks on language that is rooted in behavior and use. PI "ends philosophy" more in the sense of dissolving philosophical issues, by revealing the conceptual underpinnings of a number of philosophical debates as nonsense. Philosophy's job, thus, becomes conceptual clarification.
So to answer your question, yes, though there is some overlap.
Nāgārjuna is one particularly impressive philosopher of the Madhyamaka school, a school which he set the groundwork for in his book Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Madhyamaka means middle way, a kārikā is a work composed of verses that concisely formulate some doctrine). There's a great translation and explanation by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura if anyone is interested.
I think there are a lot of parallels with Wittgenstein's philosophy, and it speaks to Wittgenstein's genius that he was able to conceive of a similar philosophy largely independently.
"2.12: The picture is a model of reality", "3: The logical picture of the facts is the thought.", "4: The thought is the significant proposition.", "4.001: The totality of propositions is the language.", "4.002: Language disguises the thought", "4.003: Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language."
The problem he had with Tractatus was the absurdity of trying logically construct an argument against logic - Tractatus was strongly influenced by Russell. But he wasn't trying to define a universal logic system like Russell or poking at the limits of one like Godel. He makes that clear at the end:
"6.54: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.", "7: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
The difference between "early Wittgenstein" and "late Wittgenstein" is mostly (though not entirely) about form, he's just much clearer about and does deeper dives into his ideas in Philosophical Investigations and other later writing. He started hating the whole idea of writing a "general, abstract form", but doesn't shift the fundamental thrust of his worldview.
Of course, the Tractatus is pretty dense and there's a lot of disagreement about interpretation, this is just my opinion on it. It's a really wonderful book if you spend time with it, the structure is very fascinating, it feels like a puzzle. I assume anyone on HN trends nerdy, and though it might be more difficult that Investigations, I think Tractatus appeals more to my nerdy side.
It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.
It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.
Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...
Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends.
I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.
"On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?".
But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning.
Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work.
As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications.
Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).
Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?
There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).
There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.
Did you acquire this conviction through thoughts arisen by Wittgenstein’s words?
That's not what I meant though. I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing. We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself. We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real". Not all words or sentences point to anything, or anything meaningful. And the trap we sometimes fall into (as philosophers especially?) is assuming that they always mean something.
Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it. The mistake is reversing that, by thinking that by creating new words or combinations of words, we can bring something into existence.
It links nicely with the positivists' ideas about meaningful/non meaningful statements as well - which I believe were inspired by Wittgenstein.
We think intuitively that because we constructed this sentence with words, that it must have meaning, and must have an answer - as you say, it is flipping the causal relationship between starting with a sign and using language versus starting with language and trying to find a sign. This question is ultimately the latter.
Would my opinion be that you are wrong, it would not imply that:
- I'm right about you being wrong;
- my own view is right and spread it would be an act of correction.
> I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing.
Nothingness doesn't point at anything real by definition.
> We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself.
Nor the sign with an interpretation act stimulated by some sign.
> We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real".
Words don't exist outside some interpretation process, by the way.
>Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it.
That's a bit trickier. Because before someone use a word to refer to something, this word didn't exist. Naming things is a performative action. Through words, not only can you gain new knowledge that you can challenge through non-verbal actions, but they change the reality itself as it introduces new relationships in the world that where not present before there were used as a reference tool.
This argument was initially somewhat ignored until revived by the great Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I take this to be one of the great epistemological problems, joining the ranks of similar challenges like Descartes' demon. Like Descartes, Wittgenstein offered a solution, albeit a much less religious one than Descartes.
I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.
There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:
- Language is a form of behavior.
- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.
- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.
- Understanding is akin to an ability.
- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.
- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.
One of the most influential books in the last century together with Tractatus.
https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/43904/_HANDOUTS/...
The so-called "late" period his scope was no more bounded than the early Wittgenstein, but he changed his method of analysis from strict conceptual analysis to something more conversational. His study of language is not really interesting for what it contributed to philosophy of language, but because of the implications to the methods of philosophy itself.
Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.
Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.
Does anyone who has read it have any insight as to what it was about it that was so captivating to Wittgenstein?
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring
Wittgenstein was not a Catholic because he had no faith, but he was respecful of Catholicism, had many Catholic friends, and asked for a priest to be present as he died. There's no evidence he formally converted.
Edit: This one went over my head.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/06/ludwig-wittgenst...
There's this weird assumption in popular culture that somehow the moment near death contains more truth than other moments, as if right before passing we have some "ah!" moment. But the opposite seems far more reasonable: as we get closer to death our reasonings will become increasingly distorted.
For example, a common narrative is "on their death bed they had wished they had focused less on career and more on family." Of course that's what you'd think on your death bed! You're likely scared, feeling alone and wish there was someone with you. You also don't have to worry about rent, gaining the respect of your peers, what you're going to do with your free time, retirement etc.
The idea that the moment of death brings some sort of grand understanding only makes sense if you presuppose there is some grand sense behind it all. Otherwise it's just the final moment of a long process of physical, emotional and mental decline.
Your analysis begs the question. It assumes the secular worldview, but that's precisely what a deathbed conversion repudiates. To a Catholic, deathbed conversions matter a great deal because Catholics don't conceptualize death (or life) in the same way as a secular person.
As such the statement "Surprisingly" make no sense, since this information is not "surprising" to anyone, even if it were true (which is it very likely not).
If you're not, then think of it like an actuary: at every moment in your life, you have to live with the sum of your past and future choices, adjusted as need be. At the last moment, you have no more uncertain future choices, so it's clear what the optimal path was, so naturally you have regret.
* No instance for (Ord Philosopher) arising from a use of `<'If you meant "is derived from", that wasn't clear. It wouldn't have been flamebaity if you'd explained what you meant! In that case, though, you should have added something about why you think the lineage derives that way.
(Side remark, not moderation-related: Wittgenstein read Schopenhauer as a young man but later rejected him as not a great thinker, so there's a certain burden of proof if you want to draw that line.)