Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Most philosophers spend their lives defending one big idea. Ludwig Wittgenstein had two, and the second was a demolition of the first. As a young man he wrote a short, strange, dazzling book, the Tractatus, that he believed had solved the problems of philosophy, definitively, for good; and having solved philosophy, he calmly walked away from it, gave away an immense inherited fortune, and went to teach schoolchildren in remote Austrian villages. Years later he came back, looked again at the masterpiece that had made him famous, and decided its central idea was wrong, profoundly and instructively wrong, and spent the rest of his life patiently taking it apart and building something entirely different in its place. The result is the rarest thing in the history of thought: a single mind that produced two complete philosophical revolutions, the second aimed squarely at the first. But both halves of his work, the early and the late, serve one consistent purpose, and that is what makes him so unusual. Wittgenstein did not, in the end, want to tell you grand truths about reality. He wanted to cure you, of a certain kind of confusion, the deep muddle we fall into, he came to believe, whenever we misunderstand how our own language works. Philosophy, for him, was less a body of doctrine than a kind of therapy, and its problems were less discoveries to be made than knots to be untied.

The edge of the sayable. The early book set out to draw a line around language, and so around thought itself. A meaningful sentence, the young Wittgenstein argued, works by being a kind of picture: it shares the logical structure of the possible fact it represents, the way a model of a traffic accident shares the arrangement of the cars it stands for. This is why language can describe the world at all, and it means that the limits of meaningful language are exactly the limits of the factual world. Whatever can be said at all, he wrote, can be said clearly; everything that can be meaningfully stated is, in principle, a proposition of natural science, a picture of some fact. But then comes the twist that gives the book its strange power. The things we care about most, Wittgenstein insisted, ethics, beauty, the meaning of life, God, the value of the world, are precisely the things that cannot be packed into factual propositions, because they are not facts in the world but something about the world as a whole. They cannot be said. And his conclusion was not the cheerful one a scientist might draw, that these things are therefore nonsense to be discarded; it was almost mystical. The highest things are real, he thought, but they show themselves rather than getting said; they lie in a region language cannot enter, and the honest response to them is not chatter but silence. The book ends with one of the most famous sentences in philosophy: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Look how the word is used. When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy, he came to see that the beautiful theory of his youth rested on a single, seductive mistake: the assumption that language has one essential job, to picture facts, that every word works basically by naming something. Watch how language actually works, the older Wittgenstein urged, and that tidy picture falls apart. Think of everything we do with words: we give orders, crack jokes, make promises, tell stories, thank, curse, pray, greet, count, guess riddles, report a dream. These are not all the same kind of thing in different costumes; they are wildly different activities, each with its own rules, like different games. Wittgenstein called them "language-games," and he pressed the point that there is no single feature all uses of language share, any more than there is one thing all games have in common (chess and ring-around-the-rosy and solitaire and football share no single essential trait, only a web of overlapping family resemblances). And so his new account of meaning was disarmingly simple, and a kind of liberation: the meaning of a word is not some object it secretly stands for, but simply its use, the role it plays in the human activities where it lives. Do not ask what a word really means, in the abstract, Wittgenstein taught; ask how it is actually used, by real people, in the practices of a real form of life. "Don't think," he wrote, in the motto of his whole late method, "but look!"

No private language. One consequence of this new view cuts especially deep, into the place we feel most sure is our own: the inner life. Surely, you might think, whatever is true of public words, the names for my own sensations are mine alone, learned by simply attending to a private feeling and labeling it. Wittgenstein argues, in a famous and dizzying stretch of the Investigations, that this cannot be right, that a wholly private language, one that named purely private sensations and that no one else could in principle understand, is not even possible. The reason is subtle: to mean something by a word, even privately, you must be able to use it rightly or wrongly, and that requires some standard, some check, some difference between really following the rule and only seeming to. But for a purely private sensation-label there is no possible check; whatever seems right to you simply is what seems right, and where one cannot speak of getting it right, one cannot speak of meaning at all. Meaning, even of our most intimate inner states, turns out to depend on public criteria, on shared practices, on the language-games we play with others. It is a startling result, because it overturns a picture as old as Descartes, the picture of the mind as a sealed private theater each of us watches alone. For Wittgenstein there is no such sealed room; even our innermost life is shot through with the shared, public, human world of language, woven into a form of life we belong to before we are anything by ourselves.

The knots in our understanding. Why did all this matter so much to him? Because Wittgenstein came to believe that most of philosophy's grand, ancient problems are not deep truths waiting to be uncovered but confusions, tangles we tie by misusing our own language without noticing. We take a word that works perfectly well in its ordinary home, "time," "mind," "meaning," "free," "I," and we drag it out of the everyday practices where it makes sense, set it spinning in the void, and then stare in bewilderment at the pseudo-problems that result. "What is time?" we ask, forgetting that we knew perfectly well how to use the word until a philosopher asked, and we spin centuries of metaphysics out of a kind of grammatical illusion. Philosophy, Wittgenstein famously said, "is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Its job is not to add to our stock of knowledge, not to build theories or uncover hidden facts, but to untie the knots, to dissolve the confusions, to bring words back from their metaphysical holidays to the everyday work they actually do. He had a vivid image for what good philosophy accomplishes: it is like showing a fly the way out of the fly-bottle, the trapped insect battering at the glass when the opening it came in by is right there. The confusion was never necessary; we walked into it, and we can walk out. It is a humbler and stranger idea of philosophy than the system-builders ever had, and one of the most freeing things anyone has said about thinking itself: that much of our deepest puzzlement is self-inflicted, and curable.

Is the problem even real? The room holds the Tractatus in its old translation, the numbered propositions descending like a logical staircase, and reads the later work from the wider record, since the Investigations remains under copyright; the chat says so. The man behind the books was as singular as the work: heir to one of the great fortunes of Europe, he gave it all away to live in monkish austerity; he served in the trenches, taught village schoolchildren, designed a house down to the door handles, built a hut at the edge of a Norwegian fjord to think in solitude, and struck nearly everyone who met him as the most intense, exacting, and tormented person they had ever known, a man who lived his philosophy as a kind of relentless honesty. His influence then split and ran in every direction. The early Wittgenstein helped launch the logical analysis that shaped a century of analytic philosophy; the later Wittgenstein, with his language-games and forms of life, reoriented the study of mind and meaning and seeded ordinary- language philosophy, and his insight echoes wherever someone notices that a dispute is "just semantics," a quarrel over how words are being used. Even his opening pages reach back into this site: the Investigations begins by quoting Augustine's innocent account of how a child learns language by having objects named, and gently showing how much that natural picture leaves out. But the deepest lesson Wittgenstein leaves is not any single doctrine; it is an attitude, a suspicion turned on our own thinking. When you next find yourself tangled in some impossible-seeming question, he would have you pause, before reaching for a grand theory, and ask whether you have simply been bewitched, whether the problem is real, or whether the words have quietly led you off the path and into the bottle.