Wittgenstein

1889-1951

1. A bewildered student

When John King went to Cambridge to study philosophy, he fell under the spell of Ludwig Wittgenstein. King, by his own admission, was not the kind of student to go on to a career as a philosophy don. Nevertheless, he said that he learned three things from Wittgenstein.

• That the kind of questions he was asking can’t be answered by philosophy.

• That there was much to appreciate in the symbolism of Christianity.

• That a sense of the ethical and mystical are things of which, as Wittgenstein famously said, we must not speak.

It’s a strange collection of things to have learned from the person who is widely viewed as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century.

2. Unanswerable questions

King, like many students who get interested in philosophy, wondered what it meant to live a good life.

That’s the kind of question that can’t be answered — in a way you’d expect — by philosophy, Wittgenstein said. 

If we investigate what people mean when they speak of “good,” we find that language has limits. When we use the word “good,” we generally use it to refer to something — let’s say a chair. A good chair is stable and comfortable. “Good” meets a set of standards that all who sit down can appreciate. But those standards refer to something. They are related — or relative — to something specific.

The standards change if the reference changes. If we are talking about a watchdog, instead a chair, we’ll have different standards for “good.”

“Good” has relative sense. A problem arises when we take a word that has relative sense and try to use it in an absolute sense. There is no “good” that covers everything we talk about.

The same problem occurs if you investigate ethics as a matter of what is “right.” If you start in Texas, the “right” road is one thing if you want to go to New York and another if you want to go to California. The notion of a “right” road that is above all those particular details, that somehow covers all the contingencies in an absolute sense, is a chimera. The “right” that covers all cases is nonsense.

In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein drew a boundary marking the limits of language. He tried to show what could be said and what couldn’t. The famous last words of the Tractactus are: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

3. Limits of language

It’s a commonplace that Wittgenstein alone among the world’s great philosophers put forth two influential philosophies, one of which he repudiated. That view is based on two books: the Tractatus, which he wrote as a young man, and Philosophical Investigations, which was published after his death.

A more productive way of looking at his work is to view it as he did. It was a single enterprise, one long investigation into the limits of language.

We think — at least when we are thinking rationally — in language. We reason in language — that is we form and give reasons in language.

We tend, when we think of ethics, aesthetics and religion, to run into the limits of language.

We want to find an ethical principal that is good universally. We want to find an aesthetic principle that distinguishes good art from the bad, not just in one case, but in all. In doing so, we run into the limits of language.

“This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless,” Wittgenstein said.

4. Things beyond science

When we attempt to assign values to things, we can’t organize those observations into a science. We can talk of the “good” chair or the “right” road, but we can’t organize our observations into a science of goodness or a science of rightness.

We can have an argument over which is the “right” road only if we agree on our aim — that our goal is to get to New York and not California.

We can argue about how best to get there: traffic, repair work and whether the pleasure of the scenic drive outweighs the utility of the freeway. But we can’t argue about the “right” road if one of us is thinking about going to New York and the other is thinking about California.

We can argue about things in cases where the values are reducible to facts. If we are in a hurry, the facts about traffic and road construction carry weight. But if we don’t have an agreed destination in mind, we don’t have a common set of facts to argue about. We don’t have a basis for rational discussion.

My asserting a greater value for one road carries no more weight than your asserting a greater value for another. The fact that I prefer coffee while you prefer tea resolves nothing.

5. What’s scientific, what’s important 

If we return to John King, Wittgenstein’s student, we can see why he concluded that philosophy could not answer the questions he was most interested in. If aesthetics, ethics and religion are largely beyond the boundaries of language — that is, if we can’t talk of them in a scientific way — we are limited in what we can say about some of the most interesting features of human life.

And so it might seem surprising that King says he came away with a greater appreciation for the symbolism of Christianity after spending time with Wittgenstein, who was not a believer. And it might seem a paradox that King says he came away with a deeper sense of the ethical and mystical.

But an understanding of the limits of the language can yield two vastly different approaches to philosophy.

One holds that any subject that cannot be treated as a science is nonsense. That’s still the largely unspoken view of most scientists today. It’s a view that holds that the arts, ethics, religion and similar subjects, if they are not banned from the university, should at least be avoided by serious people who do not have time to waste.

Wittgenstein took the approach that language sets limits on what can be said about the most important subjects in human life. Those limits do not diminish the importance of those topics.

6. What can be said, what can be shown

King, for all his self-professed limitations as a student of philosophy, got Wittgenstein’s point. King did not pursue a career in teaching philosophy. He went on to live a life that made sense to him.

Those kinds of personal, individual decisions were vital to Wittgenstein. It would be hard to imagine a teacher who took more interest in the kinds of lives his students lived or had stronger views about the kinds of interests they pursued.

That passion for finding a good route in life might seem paradoxical to someone who held that a science of ethics was impossible. But Wittgenstein held that while some things can’t be said, they can be shown. While some things can’t be explained, they can be exemplified.

Consider two examples.

First, while Wittgenstein showed why a science of aesthetics is impossible, the arts were vital to him. Wittgenstein grew up in a musical family. His brother Paul was a concert pianist. Wittgenstein himself knew music. He sometimes whistled the soloist’s part of a concerto while a friend played the symphony’s part on a piano. Wittgenstein lived his life in a way that showed music was important to him.

Second, while Wittgenstein was not religious, he said it was impossible for him not to take a religious approach to life. He talked about religion, and particularly Christianity, with students such as John King and Maurice O’Connor Drury. 

Drury at one time was preparing for ordination into the Anglican Church but eventually decided to become a physician, later specializing in psychiatry. Wittgenstein, in his conversations, emphasized that religion is not something you talk about it. Religion, to be religion, makes a life different in some way. If you are religious, it’s obvious. There is no need for an explanation.

The teaching about music and religion also applies to ethics: While facts can be argued, values must be incorporated, embodied, lived.

7. What about his values?

The way Wittgenstein lived was his “statement” about ethics. His life was a way of showing something that cannot be said. Here are some of the characteristics of that life.

• Wittgenstein wanted to change himself. He was constantly seeking to become a “decent” man. It was an attitude in contrast to Epictetus’s pursuit of contentment, of self-acceptance. Epictetus’s prayer was that he might want to be “that which I am.” Wittgenstein was utterly dissatisfied with himself, was constantly seeking change. Relatively late in life, he considered giving up his position as a professor of philosophy to train as a doctor.

• One of his first instincts at self-improvement was renunciation. It’s the impulse that drove the old church fathers to the desert, fleeing the temptations of the city. Wittgenstein fled distractions, rather than temptations. He came from an enormously wealthy family. He gave away his wealth, mostly to his siblings. He avoided marriage and most other social ties. He pursued simple occupations. At various points, he was a soldier, a gardener at a monastery, an elementary school teacher and a hospital porter. His living arrangements were Spartan. His furniture consisted of a folding table and deck chairs. His clothing was simple, clean and unvarying, much like a uniform. Wittgenstein lived in such a way as to achieve goals that weren’t related to earning a livelihood.

• By eliminating distractions, he focused on philosophy, something he thought he had a talent for. His biographers agree that he took enormous pains to find out where his talents lay and then to make the most of them. It seems to me that it’s more helpful to talk of interests, rather than talents. Wittgenstein finally found a passionate, lifelong interest: philosophy. It was the single-minded pursuit of that interest — his focus — that people described as genius. Wittgenstein, in pursuing his education, followed his interests relentlessly. He started studying physics and drifted to aeronautical engineering, then an emerging field. The task of describing precisely, that is mathematically, the shape of an airplane propeller interested him in the foundations of mathematics. It was the pursuit of that interest that drove him to study logic and philosophy. The pursuit of the questions that interested him was the characteristic trait. Wittgenstein pursued his own interests. He had no us for questions that other people thought should interest him. After he retired, he once mused that a one-time professor of philosophy had never read a word of Hume or Aristotle.

• Wittgenstein valued conversation. He wanted to have serious discussions about topics that interested him. You could say that his life was rich, not in money, but in conversation.

8. What a person should be

Conversations are clues to the kind of life a person leads. They reflect the thoughts a person actually thinks, rather than the lofty thoughts a person would like to think.

The record of his conversations shows Wittgenstein was interested in the very topics that present such difficulties with language. Questions about art, ethics and religion were important to him.

While there cannot be a science of aesthetics, ethics or religion, we do see patterns, and Wittgenstein talked about them.

A system of absolute rules about what’s good for human beings doesn’t exist — and can’t possibly exist. But that does not preclude one from finding patterns in an individual’s life that suggest what would be good for that person. It’s possible to talk about what would make a good individual person — a good Ludwig Wittgenstein, let’s say — just as a we can talk what it would take to make a good individual chair.

Wittgenstein had strong views about his friends. He was apt to think that he knew exactly what each should do. His advice was confident and forceful — and is apt to strike today’s reader as overly so — intrusive, arrogant and paternalistic, rather than caring. He was far from silent about what, in individual cases, might count as good behavior.

He also talked about patterns in art, especially music. He saw patterns in every aspect of music, in a composer’s tendencies or in a performer’s techniques.

“Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent” did not ban talk of values. It banned talk of absolute values. It banned talk of a science of values. It limited talk about values to areas where the conversations could be productive.

9. How he wrote

One of the obvious things — and thus one of the overlooked things — about Wittgenstein was that he was a writer. His philosophical estate, or Nachlass, is something like 20,000 pages. Writing was at the center of his life.

Writing is a species of thinking. People are apt to discuss Wittgenstein’s thinking while paying less attention to his writing.

The characteristic feature of his writing is that it almost always is in the form of remarks — short paragraphs, sometimes only a sentence long, about a single aspect of a topic. (As Wittgenstein pointed out, exceptions are telling when it comes to rules, and his “Lecture on Ethics” is an exception to the rule that he wrote remarks, rather than arguments or essays.)

Wittgenstein arranged the remarks to give an overall impression of the topic.

The remarks are often numbered. The remarks of the Tractatus are not only numbered, but organized into a decimal system that indicates how one remark relates to the others. In this system, 1.1 and 1.2 amplify remark 1, while 1.11 amplifies remark 1.1. The system shows the care with which Wittgenstein arranged the individual remarks within a larger structure.

The remarks came to him, as thoughts do. Before World War I, he left Cambridge to work on the book that became the Tractatus at small house on a fjord in Norway. He thought he needed isolation to write. With the outbreak of war, he returned home and joined the Austrian army. He discovered he could write wherever he was, whenever he had time to think. He carried a pocket notebook and recorded and reworked his thoughts at the front. After the surrender, he finished the book in a prisoner of war camp in Italy.

Throughout his life, he expressed frustration when his thinking was sluggish and surprised when, in unlikely circumstances, he would find himself able to work. When he was dying of prostate cancer, he was delighted to find, after a dry spell, that the “curtain had gone up,” allowing him to write again.

He was preparing Philosophical Investigations for publication when he died.

The enormous collection of remarks — his zettel or notes — was left in the hands of several of his students and friends. His literary executors mined books from the enormous collection. In the collection of remarks published as On Certainty, the remarks show the problems we encounter with words such as “know” and “believe” and “being certain.” Another such book, published as Zettel, has some interesting remarks about what we mean by “intention.”

In Culture and Value, G.H. von Wright collected remarks on art, ethics and culture. It was Wittgenstein’s version of table talk — Wittgenstein talking to himself.

For a certain kind of student, Wittgenstein can be a revelation. But the student looking for quick, simple answers, Wittgenstein can be exasperating. Wittgenstein often said that many writers point out the similarities between things, suggesting a simpler pattern. He said his role was to point out the differences, and to suggest that the subject is more complicated than originally thought.

10. Was he important?

Is it possible to sum up Wittgenstein, to place him in the context of the great philosophers? Was Wittgenstein the greatest philosopher since Socrates? Or, was he a remarkable personality whose efforts amounted to little?

One answer is that kind of assessment isn’t possible. Or, more precisely, there can be no science to such assertions. Claims about philosophical greatness are much like a sports fan’s insistence that the home team is the best. 

What we can say is that to a certain kind of student Wittgenstein can be a revelation.

Socrates talked about his single-minded pursuit of philosophy as heeding the god’s voice and following the guidance of one’s daemon. Wittgenstein followed the questions that interested him with the same single-minded devotion but without the pious language.

We can fairly say many things about Wittgenstein, including that he showed what was fundamentally wrong with Plato’s Theory of Forms, an idea that influenced Western thought. The Theory of Forms is one answer to basic questions: How do we make sense of the world around us? How do we recognize similarities and differences?

Plato’s answer was that the countless individual cases get their meaning from a transcendental ideal. We can speak meaningfully of a good chair because, in some way, the ideal Chair exists and because the ideal Good exists. In Plato’s view, the absolute Good must exist or we wouldn’t be able to talk about “good” at all.

Many people — beginning with Plato’s student Aristotle — have objected to the theory. But the idea has been enormously influential. It shaped the Western church and its idea of an eternal, perfect life. It shaped the prevailing ideas of law and justice. If it’s possible to identify the single most influential idea that shaped Western civilization, Plato’s Theory of Forms is it.

Aristotle and many after him objected to the theory, but Wittgenstein showed clearly why the theory doesn’t work and why it can’t possibly work. He also showed what a better approach might look like.

That, we can fairly say.

11. Did he live a good life?

When Wittgenstein was dying, he said, “Tell them I’ve lived a wonderful life.”

Norman Malcolm, his great biographer, was troubled by those words, which seemed to him ironic in light of a life that seemed to be driven, even tormented — a life not marked by contentment.

Was that deathbed statement ironic?

One answer to the Malcolm’s question is so obvious it has been overlooked. Wittgenstein’s way of life was showing, by example, what can’t be said. That a life devoted to pursuing one’s own interests, one’s own most burning questions, is a good life.

In giving up his wealth, in constantly trying to change himself for the better, in trying in refusing to teach philosophical systems he didn’t believe in, he gave an example of what one kind of good life might look like.

We are free to disagree and to imagine a better life for ourselves. But we’ll have to try to live that life, rather than just imagine it and talk about it.

The search for contentment is almost a human obsession. But Wittgenstein looked at a contented life with something akin to horror. He looked on contentment as a kind of assent to himself as he was — and to the world as it is. He was content with neither. He tried to change himself, the part of the world he could change.

Making that attempt, staying on that quest, is one view of what a good life might look like.

12. Bibliography

Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, Oxford University Press, 1977. This book, which runs about 80 pages, is in my mind, is one of the great books of the world. It catches the personality of a complicated, difficult man. If I were just starting out with an interest in Wittgenstein, I would read this book first, even before getting to the philosopher’s work.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, New York: Barnes & Noble, 2003.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, N.D.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, “Lecture on Ethics.” The lecture, written in 1929, has been published in several places. Several versions and scholarly commentary are in Lecture on Ethics, edited by Edoardo Zamuner, Emelinda Valentina and D.K. Levy, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1972. I ran across this book in college. It’s where I began.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981. The name of the book seems unfortunate to me, since almost all Wittgenstein’s writing was in the form of zettel. But it’s a good example of some of the interesting remarks mined from the Nachlass.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, The University of Chicago Press, 1984. This collection of remarks has many wonders for people interested in culture and arts. When musicians talk about a musical “expression,” they don’t just mean that you should play louder. What do they mean, Wittgenstein wondered. Is musical expression comparable to a facial expression? 

Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, Penguin Books, 1991. This is the definitive biography.

Ray Monk, How to Read Wittgenstein, London: Granta Books, 2005. I include this book as an example of several short treatments of Wittgenstein. Other philosophers who’ve published similar books include A.C. Grayling, A.J. Ayer and David Pears. Monk’s full-length biography is unlikely to the surpassed. But all these books left me feeling that something was not quite right — and that feeling was the nagging Muse behind this essay.

Rush Rhees (ed.), Reflections on Wittgenstein, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. This remarkable book includes short recollections by people who knew Wittgenstein. John King, the student quoted in this essay, can be found here. Dr. M. O’C. Drury wrote two pieces on his teacher during his lifetime. Though he seemed to have been satisfied with neither, they are more illuminating than just about anything that has been published in academic circles.