Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1889–1951)

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WITTGENSTEIN, LUDWIG (1889–1951)

Philosopher.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential European philosophers of the twentieth century. Born in Vienna into a family of enormous wealth and culture, Wittgenstein received his early education at home. He trained as an engineer at the renowned Technische Hochschule at Charlottenburg, Berlin, and then did work in aeronautics at the University of Manchester, where he patented a propeller design in 1911. His scientific interests became increasingly foundational, taking him from engineering to mathematics and finally, to logic.

In 1911 Wittgenstein began attending lectures on logic and philosophy by Bertrand Russell at Trinity College, Cambridge. He was concerned with the problem of how language could be about the world and was also interested in the nature of logic. After studying with Russell for less than two years, Wittgenstein set off on his own, living in Norway for a year and then joining the Austro-Hungarian Army at the start of World War I. He continued his philosophical work, even at the front lines, and completed what was to be called the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by the end of the war.

Published in a German periodical in 1921 and then printed with an English translation in book form in 1922, the Tractatus is a numbered series of often oracular assertions and is not easily understandable.

The book presents a "picture theory" to explain how indicative sentences are about the world. Sentences are like abstract pictures: a sentence, when fully analyzed, must be structurally similar to what it is about, when that too has been fully analyzed. In both cases, the analysis leads to basic units, or atoms—simple names in the sentence that refer to simple objects in the world. This mimicked Russell's "logical atomism," save for the fact that Wittgenstein took no position on what the simple objects might be. As a result, interpreters have made various conjectures, positing that these atoms are anything from sense data to space-time points; but Wittgenstein seemed to want his theory to be ambiguous on this point. Furthermore, the way descriptive language functioned was "shown" by its use and could not itself be "said" or described. Trying to say what can only be shown results in nonsense.

Originally this distinction between showing and saying was limited to certain aspects of language and logic, but the war had a profound spiritual effect on Wittgenstein, and some of these spiritual lessons found their way into the distinction as well. Wittgenstein judged that religion, ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life were realms that could only be shown and could not be said or expressed in language. Finally, he thought that philosophy could not properly be expressed in words, thus leaving interpreters to wonder about the status of the Tractatus itself, which ends with the infamous: "7. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

After the war, Wittgenstein renounced his share of a large inheritance from his father. With the completion of his book, he withdrew from philosophical pursuits to teach elementary schoolin rural Austria. But the Tractatus became a seminal text in the discussions of the Vienna Circle, a group of scientifically minded philosophers that included Moritz Schlick and Rudolf Carnap. In their attempts to put philosophy on a solid foundation and to limit discourse to the realm of the meaningful, they thought they had found an advocate in Wittgenstein. Yet Wittgenstein was at odds with them, in that he highly valued the very realms of ethics, religion, and art that they labeled as nonsense. Despite this significant difference, Wittgenstein's book had a great influence on philosophy by putting the logical analysis of language at its center.

Discussions with the Vienna Circle eventually led Wittgenstein to realize he had more to say about philosophical issues. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge to rethink the Tractatus. At first the changes were minor, but they became increasingly radical. His new thoughts about philosophical matters were never published by him, but by the time of his death he had left some twenty thousand pages of notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts formulating his ideas. Among these was a mostly finished typescript, which was posthumously published in 1953 under the title Philosophical Investigations. This book is also a numbered series of paragraphs and is more revealing than the Tractatus, but hardly any easier to understand. Other records of Wittgenstein's later thoughts have been published steadily since then.

Two important things remained constant in Wittgenstein's thinking from his early to his later work—the centrality of language to philosophical issues and the idea that philosophy is fundamentally different from science. Philosophy is a method to help us avoid confusions of thought and not a set of theories or doctrines.

Wittgenstein came to see that his early view of language had been overly narrow, focusing only on descriptive uses of language. He came to emphasize the diverse uses of language and resisted the temptation to oversimplify phenomena and ignore their contexts for the sake of fitting them into a theory. He no longer saw language as having an essence but saw a multiplicity of "language games" that bore various "family resemblances" to one another. For example, the words "ham sandwich" could be part of a language game in which we describe the contents of our lunch box, but they could as well be part of a language game in which we order lunch at a restaurant. In the latter case we are not describing or picturing anything, but requesting it.

This attention to the concrete instances of phenomena, and the move away from abstract theorizing about phenomena, earned Wittgenstein Russell's criticism that he had grown tired of serious thinking. But this new attention to the concrete spawned a new method of philosophy, sometimes called "ordinary language" philosophy. Thus, Wittgenstein forged two different approaches to philosophy, both of which have been significant in the twentieth century.

See alsoRussell, Bertrand.