If you ask philosophers – those in the English speaking analytic tradition anyway – who is the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, they will most likely name Ludwig Wittgenstein. But the chances are that if you ask them exactly why he was so important, they will be unable to tell you. Moreover, in their own philosophical practice it will be rare, certainly these days, that they mention him or his work. Indeed, they may very fluently introduce positions, against which Wittgenstein launched powerful arguments: the very arguments which, by general agreement, make him such an important philosopher. Contemporary philosophers don’t argue with Wittgenstein. Rather they bypass him. Wittgenstein has a deeply ambivalent status – he has authority, but not influence.
For the more general reader, Wittgenstein’s status in contemporary philosophy will be puzzling. The general view is that Wittgenstein is surely the very model of a great philosopher. The perception is that he is difficult, obscure and intense, severe and mystical, charismatic and strange, driven and tragic, with his charisma and difficulty bound up with his character and his life. Wittgenstein saw philosophy not just as a vocation, but as a way of life he had to lead. This is perhaps why writers and artists have found him an object of fascination and inspiration. He is the subject of novels, poetry, plays, painting, music, sculpture and films. In the arts and the culture generally, Wittgenstein seems to be what a philosopher ought to be.
Born in 1889, Wittgenstein came from an extraordinarily wealthy but tragically dysfunctional Viennese family. He made friends and enemies with equal alacrity. He travelled widely. As well as regular journeys between England and Vienna, he visited and lived for periods in Ireland, Norway, Russia, the US and, in the UK, Cambridge, Manchester, Swansea and Newcastle. At various times, he was an engineer, a sculptor, a photographer, a school teacher, a hospital technician and, of course, a fellow in philosophy at Cambridge. He knew almost every great figure in the intellectual culture of the first half of the twentieth century. He gave away his fortune and, several times, gave up philosophy. He published only one book in his lifetime – the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and claimed that this work solved all the (essential) problems of philosophy. But his later work appears to disown much of it. His reputation is based on the huge collection of manuscripts and notes known as the Nachlass, together with accounts made by others of lectures he gave. Published in various forms, the central work is the posthumous Philosophical Investigations (1953). But later edited collections of remarks such as Zettel, On Certainty and Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics and others are also of enormous importance.
Consisting of seven propositions, all but the last with multiple sub propositions, the Tractatus is austerely beautiful but severe and technically demanding.
One way to approach it is to see the book as the ultimate distillation of a particular historically dominant conception of ourselves: first and foremost, we are conscious thinkers. Only after are we active, embodied, speaking agents. Before we communicate, we must first have something to communicate. We must first be capable of true and false thoughts about the world: to be able to think about things, and combinations of things – what, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein calls “states of affairs”. Some of these states of affairs obtain and some do not. The actual world consists of all the states of affairs – combinations of things – that obtain: the facts. (Hence “The world is the totality of facts, not of things”.) But we can also represent to ourselves what does not obtain – the merely possible – and, as well as thinking what is true, we can think falsely.
We can see Wittgenstein’s question in the Tractatus as: how is this possible? What must be the case if we are able to have such true and false thoughts of the world? What must be the case if the world, is by us, thinkable?
His answer is that the world, language and thought must share a common form of elements and their possible arrangements. Wittgenstein calls this “logical form”. Elements in our representations of the world, true or false, stand in the same relationship to each other as the elements that constitute states of affairs. Reality, language and thought mirror each other. It follows that if we think or say anything meaningful, then what we think or say must be capable of being true or false. For only then will it picture or represent a possible fact. Otherwise what we say or think will be senseless. There must also be a mechanism (which the Tractatus describes) for allowing more complex meaningful thoughts and statements to be generated from more primitive ones.
In articulating his account of how it is that we can think and speak at all, the Tractatus gives expression, sublime and exact but not wholly original, to a conception of ourselves that was arguably already latent in our intellectual culture. A conception of ourselves as representing beings – minds – which can represent the world to ourselves, think and say things that are true or false, and can have reliable means of acquiring truths about the world – which we call science. This picture of the nature of mind, and hence of ourselves, continues to be the default conception in the cognitive sciences. Minds are representational engines.
But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree). But then, according to the Tractatus, in ethical thought, I am not representing how the world is one way rather than another. So strictly speaking, ethical talk will make no sense. Still, according to Wittgenstein, we are ethical beings. The ethical is real. Teaching us how to live in the light of that thought was, Wittgenstein believed, the true aim of the Tractatus.
This general constraint on what can be meaningfully said also applies to what philosophers have wanted to claim over the millennia. For philosophers make claims not about what happens to be true, but what must be. But if the account offered in the Tractatus of how thought is possible is correct, then such claims, not being capable of being false, are strictly meaningless. We might think of it this way: I can use chess notation to describe the actual position on a chess board. But I cannot use chess notation to say how chess notation represents any such chess position. That shows itself in the way the notation works. Of course, I can use English (or any other natural language) to say or teach how the chess notation works. But when we want to explain not chess notation, or any particular natural language but language (and thought) itself, that recourse to another medium is not available. There is only the showing left.
With the relentless honesty that characterized all his thinking, Wittgenstein applies this thought to the Tractatus itself. For the relationship between thought and the world that the Tractatus articulates is not one among all the facts there are. It is a condition of there being any thinkable facts. Philosophy as envisaged by the Tractatus is therefore a futile attempt to say what cannot be meaningfully said but which can only show itself. So, philosophy, insofar as it is possible at all, cannot be a body of doctrines. It must be an activity. It must aim not, like science, at truth and knowledge, but only at clarity and, with the achievement of that clarity, peace. This is why Wittgenstein claims that the propositions of the Tractatus are like rungs on a ladder. We use them to climb up to a position where we can see things as they are, where we can “see the world aright”. But then we throw the ladder away.
In the years that followed – which have been examined and documented in immense detail by scholars – Wittgenstein came to abandon and replace much of this conception of language and thought while maintaining a great deal of its spirit. Perhaps it was because Wittgenstein had been able to give such complete expression to the earlier conception that only he was able to see, so deeply and so clearly, where it came from, how it failed, what should be kept and what replaced.
This new conception of ourselves – of language and of mind – is articulated in his masterpiece, widely regarded as one of the two or three greatest works of philosophy in the Western Tradition, the Philosophical Investigations.
The work consists of 693 numbered remarks of varying length (with a second part whose exact relationship to the main body is a matter of scholarly controversy). In contrast to the Tractatus, the Philosophical Investigations, can, indeed must, be read first hand. It contains almost nothing that might be called technical and mentions only a very few other philosophers by name. But as Wittgenstein wrote: “It will be easy to read what I will write. What will be hard to understand is the point of what I say”.
In this work, Wittgenstein thinks and writes with ruthless intellectual honesty. He pulls at every thread in his thought. To read it is to have the palpable sense of a thinker in the act of philosophical inquiry. And yet, at the same time, we cannot as readers be merely the passive audience for this drama. To read the Investigations as it should be read is to participate in a shared, essentially democratic endeavour in which we must find our own place among the myriad voices that enter, have their say, and exit, call out from off stage, return again in different garb with new parts. We are invited and must accept to be one of these players. We have to try to read it as honestly as it was written.
As we struggle to follow the twisting lines of thought – the apparently abrupt changes of topic, the multiple voices and changes in key and colour, we also have to try to pause and answer the hundreds of questions it asks. In fact, as someone once counted, there are 784 questions asked in the Investigations. Of those only 110 are answered. And of those answers, seventy are meant to be wrong. And more often than not, we find that the answer we want to give to a question – that, if we pause for a moment, comes naturally to us, is then anticipated and forms the subject of a next or near passage or remark.
Sometimes he more or less straightforwardly asks a question, makes an observation and answers it:
Is what we call “obeying a rule” something that it would be possible for only one man to do, and to do only once in his life? – This is of course a note on the grammar of the expression “to obey a rule”.
It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule. It is not possible that there should have been only one occasion on which a report was made, an order given or understood; and so on. – To obey a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions).
Sometimes, he directly engages with the reader in order to end or start a new track of his investigations:
Make the following experiment: say “It’s cold here” and mean “It’s warm here”. Can you do it? – And what are you doing as you do it? And is there only one way of doing it?
Elsewhere, anticipating our own first response, he offers further questions as misleading answers to the original question, and then offers his own, sometimes sharp, put down:
What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?
Is it that my education has led me to it by drawing my attention to feelings in myself, and now I transfer the idea to objects outside myself? That I recognize that there is something there (in me) which I can call “pain” without getting into conflict with the way other people use this word? – I do not transfer my idea to stones, plants, etc.
Couldn’t I imagine having frightful pains and turning to stone while they lasted? Well, how do I know, if I shut my eyes, whether I have not turned into a stone? And if that has happened, in what sense will the stone have the pains? In what sense will they be ascribable to the stone? And why need the pain have a bearer at all here?!
And can one say of the stone that it has a soul and that is what has the pain? What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone?
Only of what behaves like a human being can one say that it has pains.
There are many other uses of questions in the Investigations (indeed, Wittgenstein once considered writing a work that consisted entirely of questions). Responding to them, as we read, makes the experience of reading Wittgenstein peculiarly intimate, and also, as very many have found, including Daniel Dennett, “liberating and exhilarating”. But having gone through this process it is then very difficult to stand back and say, “Well, then what we learned was such and such. I can use that idea here in relation to this current debate or issue”. In this respect, reading Wittgenstein is very like engaging with works of art: it is a process deeply resistant to paraphrase. You have to experience it for yourself. And it not just what but how you think that will change.
The Philosophical Investigations discusses the nature of language and mind, and the confusions about both to which Wittgenstein thought we and our culture are inevitably prone. He seeks to explore the conception of ourselves he had so completely articulated in the Tractatus: that we are fundamentally thinking, knowing, representing beings. And to expose this conception as a deeply engrained set of mutually reinforcing illusions and confusions, mistakes and myths. He attempts this not or not mostly by what philosophy traditionally regards as argument. For a picture is not the kind of thing against which one can argue. Rather his aim is to break the grip of the pictures of mind and meaning that “hold us captive”. Thought experiments, reminders of perfectly ordinary facts of life or ways of speaking, striking juxtapositions, elaborate lists of examples and a host of disputing voices are all brought into play. All the time, he is criss-crossing the same landscape in different directions, offering sketches, partial and incomplete, of what he finds and trying to map how apparently distinct positions on the nature of mind and of language are connected together. Just as in the Tractatus, in the Philosophical Investigations, the task of philosophy is not to advance claims or theories, but to be a never-ending activity of seeking clarity about the ways that we think. One difference from the earlier work is that the Philosophical Investigations gives us not a single ladder to climb. Instead it shows us the paths up a series of hills and promontories, from which we may gain different overviews of the landscape and, with luck, see the light gradually dawn.
A guiding theme is Wittgenstein’s attempt to wean us from the conception of intrinsically representational, intrinsically meaningful, psychological states or processes and their non-psychological analogue in the form of meaning rules.
Central to this conception are two pictures or collections of pictures. One is a way of conceiving of the inner and the outer: our subjective inner lives and our outer behaviour in a world of others. We think of our inner lives as being like an internal space in which there exist various things, states and processes: thoughts, emotions, sensations. What we do is merely the outward sign of this inner reality: behaviour.
The other picture or set of pictures is a way of conceiving of how language works. We think that language is primarily a matter of naming things. And that all the other diverse uses to which we put language – detailed at length through the text – are trivial compared to the primal, foundational act of naming things.
Wittgenstein shows how these two sets of pictures mutually reinforce each other in myriad ways. One way is this: because we think language is fundamentally about naming things, we think that psychological concepts must also be names of things, but of things in an inner space. So we model the reality of the inner on the existence of physical things with the peculiar property that these mental objects are only visible to and nameable by their owner. But we are also puzzled about how words can function as names at all. How they can reach out to what they name? Words are, after all, just arbitrary sounds or squiggles. We think then that it must be something special indeed which enables words to have meaning. It must be some special set of the psychological states and processes, a picture of which we already have. Our words mean because we mean. And we can mean because we are in possession of inner, essentially private psychological states that can intrinsically reach out to the world. Language is really a collection of private, inner acts of meaning and naming, a collection of private languages that happen, more or less imperfectly, to overlap.
In this way, Wittgenstein seeks to trace the deep connections between our mistaken conceptions of mind and meaning. In their place, he offers an entirely different vision. He insists that intrinsic meaning, on which representational capacities depend, only gets going in and through the shared practices and interactions of living, embodied beings and is only visible in and through the lives and activity of such beings. These activities operate in and through language – in what Wittgenstein calls “language-games”. In the beginning is not the word at all. But the deed. A consequence of that position is that we no longer think of the inner versus the outer in the same way. The idea of public language as rooted in a prior private language is demonstrated to be an illusion. One that fails to recognize that we are social, communicating beings and that we are so all the way down.
Say that we become puzzled about money. Here is something that people deeply desire, spend and risk their lives acquiring. People are “worth” so much money and so on. But perhaps we are struck by the fact that coins and notes are, in themselves just worthless bits of metal or paper. How can they have value? (Note that we have already slipped, even at the moment we first become puzzled, into thinking of “value” as a kind of property something has.)
Imagine that someone replies like this: it is true that actual cash is arbitrary – just stuff. What matters is that cash is backed by something that really does have value. The “promise to pay the bearer on demand” on UK notes. The gold in the bank is what really has value. The money is just an outward sign of that true value.
But gold is also just a kind of metal. Why should it have value? The same question we asked about the cash can now be asked about the gold.
Someone else might interject: gold is rare and hard to acquire. That’s why it has value. But lots of things are rare without being valuable. And in any case, no one actually trades in their money for gold. Banks won’t even let you do that. Yet we go on treating the money as valuable.
Here of course we will want to say this: actual money (coins and notes) isn’t intrinsically valuable. What matters is only that it is in fact used in trade and exchanges. The value lies in the use of the money. It’s not that the exchanges use money because the money has value. Rather the money has value because the exchanges have value. Or rather what we mean by monetary value is made manifest in and through the activities of exchange and the myriad things we do with money. And once we see things that way round, it will now seem rather strange to say that money is just worthless stuff. It looks that way and we became puzzled in the first place only because we tricked ourselves into separating out the notes and coins from their use in exchange. Our problem was how to explain how certain stuff – notes and coins – had value. So we started looking for another kind of stuff to carry that value. That is, we already committed to a particular view of what an explanation would look like. The solution was to change our view of what would count as an explanation or indeed whether one was actually needed at all. We solve the problem when we dissolve the source of our puzzlement.
The analogy is between the values of notes and coins and the meaning of words and sentences. We see that particular sounds and squiggles in a particular language, say English, are in themselves arbitrary, having no intrinsic connection to the things they stand for. So we think there must be something standing behind the words which gives them the real meaning. What could that be? Well, we might suggest idea, thoughts and intentions. We mean things by our words. Others understand us because they know what we mean by the sounds or marks we make. The words are arbitrary but the thoughts are not. Their meaning is laid up in the vaults of the mind.
But just as gold was not the real explanation of the value of money, thoughts are not the explanation of the meanings of words. It is not that gold or thoughts don’t exist. Of course they do. But if it’s a problem to explain how words have meaning, it is equally a problem to explain how thoughts have meaning.
We see people using money and words in all their forms, buying and selling, speaking and listening. Nothing is hidden. Nothing stands behind all the activity. The value – or meaning – lies in the activity. We might note too that, in our analogy private money – a currency that one alone could use – would be nonsensical. Similarly, a private language, the words of which only an individual could understand is equally senseless. And a philosophical theory of mind and meaning, which implied the possibility of such a private language, would, for that reason, be mistaken.
This set of exchanges and twists of thought is, or is something like, what is going on in this passage from the Philosophical Investigations:
How does it come about that this arrow ➔ points? Doesn’t it seem to carry in it something beside itself? – “No, not the dead line on paper; only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that.” – That is both true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living being makes of it.
This pointing is not a hocus-pocus which can be performed only by the soul.
We want to say: “When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture (of any kind).” We go up to the thing we mean.
“When one means something, it is oneself meaning”; so one is oneself in motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe oneself rushing ahead. Indeed not.
Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone.
In this passage, the arrow serves of course as the paradigmatic meaningful sign. Wittgenstein’s opponent wants to stress the passivity of the sign in itself and thinks that therefore some account must explain how it is that thoughts (“the psychical thing”) actively reach out to the things to which they refer as if they were going up to someone to shake his hand. Wittgenstein agrees with this opponent that meaning something is like going up to someone. But, he suggests, this is not true, as his opponent intends, in a merely metaphorical sense. Rather, our meaning something is literally like going up to someone. Meaning gets going because we move around and act on a world of other objects and agents; pragmatic engagements in the world, which logically precede language. It is these practical engagements, rather than the shared logical form of the Tractatus, that enable meaning. We do not mirror reality. We are enmeshed in it.
Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times.