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From 1929 until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein worked out a new way of doing philosophy that has no precedent in the history of the subject. It is a way of approaching philosophy that tries to remain faithful to the insight he had in the Tractatus that philosophy cannot be a science, or anything like a science. It is not a body of doctrine but an activity, the activity of clearing up the confusions caused by the bewitchments cast by language. This conception of the subject is, in my opinion, Wittgenstein’s most radical and most important contribution to philosophy.
but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.
‘because they alone give the book lucidity and clarity and it would be an incomprehensible jumble without them’.
We are to think of the world, not as made up of ‘things’ but as made up of facts.
The crucial difference is that things are simple, but a fact is articulate, in the sense that an articulated lorry is articulate, i.e., it has parts.
These parts are what Wittgenstein calls objects, but we can know nothing about objects except insof...
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Of course, if, as Wittgenstein insisted to Russell, nothing can be said about the world as a whole, it follows that each of the seven propositions with which the Tractatus opens is an attempt to say something that cannot be said and is therefore meaningless.
This much is explicitly acknowledged by Wittgenstein and is common ground among his interpreters.
4.11. The totality of true propositions is the whole of natural science (or the whole corpus of the natural sciences). 4.111 Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word ‘philosophy’ must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.) 4.112. Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.
4.1122. Darwin’s theory has no more to do with philosophy than any other hypothesis in natural science. 4.113. Philosophy sets limits to the much disputed sphere of natural science. (TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS, 1921) The task of philosophy, as Wittgenstein sees it, is to reveal the true nature of the logic of our language, and thereby to ‘solve’ the philosophical problems that arise when that logic is misunderstood.
philosophy is an activity, not a doctrine.
THE NEW PHILOSOPHY: GIVING UP THE CRYSTALLINE PURITY OF LOGIC 107. The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (For the crystalline purity of logic was, of course, not a result of investigation: it was a requirement.) The conflict becomes intolerable;
The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, 1953)
Since then, many of the manuscripts and typescripts that constitute Wittgenstein’s Nachlass have been published as ‘works’ by Wittgenstein – Philosophical Remarks, Philosophical Grammar, The Blue and Brown Books, Remarks on the Philosophy of Mathematics, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, On Certainty, On Colour, etc. Though all of these contain important philosophical writings, it should be borne in mind that none of them, not even Philosophical Investigations, can be regarded as a book by Wittgenstein.
Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: ‘What is the logical form of that?’
Gone is the icy rigour of numbered propositions that give the appearance of wanting to belong to a mathematical demonstration, and in its place is a more colloquial style, full of inventive similes and metaphors.
now the emphasis is not on showing the reader things that cannot be said, but on getting the reader to see things afresh.
Wittgenstein’s notion of an Übersicht and of what it could achieve was heavily influenced by the work of one of his literary heroes, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who, in addition to the poetry and fiction that established him as one of the greatest ever German writers, wrote a number of works outlining his notion of a morphological study of nature, which he considered to be a rival to the mathematical methods
‘What I give,’ Wittgenstein once said in a lecture, ‘is the morphology of the use of an expression.’ Elsewhere, he wrote: ‘Our thought here marches with certain views of Goethe’s which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants … We are collating one form of language with its environment, or transforming it in imagination so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being.’
In 1938, he told his students: ‘I am in a sense making propaganda for one style of thinking as opposed to another.
Don’t do what? The answer seems to be: don’t worship science.
This alone I would call misleading … I might say the title The Mysterious Universe includes a kind of idol worship, the idol being Science and the Scientist.’
‘People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them,’ he once wrote in a notebook, ‘poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – that does not occur to them.’
Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages.
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. (The Blue Book, pp.17–8.)
the ‘language game’. There are many prevalent misconceptions of this notion, the most widespread of which is to take it to be a theoretical notion, a key component of a general theory of language.
When, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to analyse ‘the general form of the proposition’, he had fallen victim to the ‘tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term’, thinking that there must be a single form that was common to all propositions.
In most cases, Wittgenstein does not offer an argument, but rather a kind of therapy. In his conversations and lectures, Wittgenstein drew attention to the analogy between his philosophical method and Freud’s psychological methods, even to the extent of describing himself as a ‘disciple of Freud’.
Freud had not given us a set of scientific explanations for, e.g., dreams and neuroses. His achievement was much greater than that, for what Freud had given us, according to Wittgenstein, was a new mythology,
‘a picture held us captive’. His task is to free us from that picture. Because the picture that held us captive and that gave rise to the philosophical problem is assumed in everything we say, it cannot usually be dislodged by argument. It is, as it were, too deep for that. What is required to free us from the picture that holds us captive is an enriched imagination, and this cannot be given to us through argument, it must be acquired through, as it were, therapy.
Here the term ‘language game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.
The American philosopher, Saul Kripke, regards the section 243–315, not as the Private Language Argument itself, but as an elaboration of it. The argument itself, Kripke thinks, is contained in paragraph 202: ‘And hence also ‘obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’: otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.’ What is appealing about this paragraph, not only to Kripke but to many other philosophers as well, is that it is, at least, identifiable as an
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Together, they would seem to show that what Russell purports to be merely ‘intolerably prolix’ and ‘very inconvenient’ is, in fact, incoherent. There can be no such thing as the private language imagined by Russell, because the only criteria for the correct or incorrect uses of the words of this language would be private criteria.
To say this is to forget the ‘triviality’ of which Wittgenstein reminds us: ‘If we are using the word “to know” as it is normally used (and how else are we to use it?) then other people very often know when I am in pain.’
We have only rejected the grammar which tries to force itself on us here. The paradox disappears only if we make a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts
The mistake Wittgenstein himself made in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the mistake Augustine made in Confessions is the mistake we all make when we want to counter behaviourism with some suggestion of the sort that thoughts, desires, etc. are not nothing. No, they are not nothing, and they are not identical with behaviour either. But neither are they things, and the only reason we want them to be things is that we are committed to a faulty view of language,
A culture is like a big organization which assigns each of its members a place where he can work in the spirit of the whole; and it is perfectly fair for his power to be measured by the contribution he succeeds in making to the whole enterprise. In an age without culture on the other hand forces become and the power of an individual man is used up in overcoming opposing forces and frictional resistances; it does not show in the distance he travels but perhaps only in the heat he generates in overcoming friction.
I have no sympathy for the current of European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. It is all one to me whether or not the typical western scientist understands or appreciates my work, since he will not in any case understand the spirit in which I write. Our civilization is characterized by the word ‘progress’. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features. Typically it constructs.
I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings. So, I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists and my way of thinking is different from theirs. (EARLY DRAFT OF THE FOREWORD TO PHILOSOPHICAL REMARKS 1930)
‘well-meaning commentators’ who ‘make it appear that his writings were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against’.
‘People nowadays,’ Wittgenstein writes in Culture and Value, ‘think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them – that does not occur to them’.
