Download Wittgenstein World History Name: E. Napp Date: Biographical

Wittgenstein
World History
E. Napp
Name: _________________
Date: _________________
Biographical Context:
“Ludwig Wittgenstein… (Born April 26, 1889, Vienna, Austria-Hungary [now in Austria]
– died April 29, 1951, Cambridge, England) was an Austrian-born English philosopher,
regarded by many as the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. Wittgenstein’s two major
works, Logisch-philosophische Abhandlung and Philosophische Untersuchungen have
inspired a vast secondary literature and have done much to shape subsequent
developments in philosophy, especially within the analytic tradition.
Wittgenstein was born into one of the wealthiest and most remarkable families of
Habsburg Vienna. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was an industrialist of extraordinary
talent and energy who rose to become one of the leading figures in the Austrian iron and
steel industry. Although his family was originally Jewish, Karl Wittgenstein had been
brought up as a Protestant, and his wife, Leopoldine, also from a partly Jewish family, had
been raised as a Catholic. Karl and Leopoldine had eight children, of whom Ludwig was
the youngest. The family possessed both money and talent in abundance, and their home
became a center of Viennese cultural life during one of its most dynamic phases…
As might be expected, Wittgenstein’s outlook on life was profoundly influenced by the
Viennese culture in which he was raised, an aspect of his personality and thought that was
long strangely neglected by commentators…
In the summer of 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein was staying with his
family in Vienna. Unable to return to Norway to continue his work on logic, he enlisted in
the Austrian army. He hoped that the experience of facing death would enable him to
concentrate his mind exclusively on those things that mattered most – intellectual clarity
and moral decency – and that he would thereby achieve the degree of ethical seriousness to
which he aspired…
While serving on the Eastern front, Wittgenstein did, in fact, experience a religious
conversion, inspired in part by Leo Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief (1883), which he bought
at the beginning of the war and subsequently carried with him at all times, reading and
rereading it until he knew it practically by heart. Wittgenstein spent the first two years of
the war behind the lines, relatively safe from harm and able to continue his work on logic.
In 1916, however, at his own request, he was sent to a fighting unit at the Russian front. His
surviving manuscripts show that during this time his philosophical work underwent a
profound change. Whereas previously he had separated his thoughts on logic from his
thoughts on ethics, aesthetics, and religion by writing the latter remarks in code, at this
point he began to integrate the two sets of remarks, applying to all of them the distinction
he had earlier made between that which can be said and that which must be shown. Ethics,
aesthetics, and religion, in other words, were like logic: their ‘truths’ were inexpressible;
insight in these areas could be shown but not stated. ‘There are, indeed, things that cannot
be put into words,’ Wittgenstein wrote. ‘They make themselves manifest. They are what is
mystical.’ Of course, this meant that Wittgenstein’s central philosophical message, the
insight that he was most concerned to convey in his work, was itself inexpressible. His hope
was that precisely in not saying it, nor even in trying to say it, he could somehow make it
manifest. ‘If only you do not try to utter what is unutterable,’ he wrote to his friend Paul
Engelmann, ‘then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained
in what has been uttered.’
Near the end of the war, while he was on leave in Salzburg, Austria, Wittgenstein finally
finished the book that was later published as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In the preface
he announced that he considered himself to have found ‘on all essential points’ the solution
to the problems of philosophy. ‘The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated,’ he
wrote, ‘seems to me unassailable and definitive,’ and, ‘if I am not mistaken in this belief,
then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is
achieved when these problems are solved.’ For the most part, the book consists of an
austerely compressed exposition of the picture theory of meaning. It ends, however, with
some remarks about ethics, aesthetics, and the meaning of life, stressing that, if its view
about how propositions can be meaningful is correct, then, just as there are no meaningful
propositions about logical form, so there can be no meaningful propositions concerning
these subjects either. This point, of course, applies to Wittgenstein’s own remarks in the
book itself, so Wittgenstein is forced to conclude that whoever understands his remarks
‘finally recognizes them as senseless’; they offer, so to speak, a ladder that one must throw
away after using it to climb…
Philosophers, Wittgenstein believed, had been misled into thinking that their subject was
a kind of science, a search for theoretical explanations of the things that puzzled them: the
nature of meaning, truth, mind, time, justice, and so on. But philosophical problems are
not amenable to this kind of treatment, he claimed. What is required is not a correct
doctrine but a clear view, one that dispels the confusion that gives rise to the problem.
Many of these problems arise through an inflexible view of language that insists that if a
word has a meaning there must be some kind of object corresponding to it. Thus, for
example, we use the word mind without any difficulty until we ask ourselves ‘What is the
mind?’ We then imagine that this question has to be answered by identifying some ‘thing’
that is the mind. If we remind ourselves that language has many uses and that words can
be used quite meaningfully without corresponding to things, the problem disappears.
Another closely related source of philosophical confusion, according to Wittgenstein, is
the tendency to mistake grammatical rules, or rules about what it does and does not make
sense to say, for material propositions, or propositions about matters of fact or existence.
For example, the expression “2 + 2 = 4” is not a proposition describing mathematical
reality but a rule of grammar, something that determines what makes sense when using
arithmetical terms. Thus “2 + 2 = 5” is not false, it is nonsense, and the philosopher’s task
is to uncover the multitude of more subtle pieces of nonsense that typically constitute a
philosophical ‘theory.’”
~ Britannica; Ray Monk
What are the main points of the passage?
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2345678910The Article: Was Wittgenstein Right? New York Times: Paul Horwich, March 3, 2013
The singular achievement of the controversial early 20th century philosopher Ludwig
Wittgenstein was to have discerned the true nature of Western philosophy – what is special
about its problems, where they come from, how they should and should not be addressed,
and what can and cannot be accomplished by grappling with them. The uniquely insightful
answers provided to these meta-questions are what give his treatments of specific issues
within the subject – concerning language, experience, knowledge, mathematics, art and
religion among them – a power of illumination that cannot be found in the work of others.
A reminder of philosophy’s embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years: to settle any of its
central issues.
Admittedly, few would agree with this rosy assessment – certainly not many professional
philosophers. Apart from a small and ignored clique of hard-core supporters the usual
view these days is that his writing is self-indulgently obscure and that behind the catchy
slogans there is little of intellectual value. But this dismissal disguises what is pretty clearly
the real cause of Wittgenstein’s unpopularity within departments of philosophy: namely,
his thoroughgoing rejection of the subject as traditionally and currently practiced; his
insistence that it can’t give us the kind of knowledge generally regarded as its raison d’être.
Wittgenstein claims that there are no realms of phenomena whose study is the special
business of a philosopher, and about which he or she should devise profound a priori
theories and sophisticated supporting arguments. There are no startling discoveries to be
made of facts, not open to the methods of science, yet accessible “from the armchair”
through some blend of intuition, pure reason and conceptual analysis. Indeed the whole
idea of a subject that could yield such results is based on confusion and wishful thinking.
This attitude is in stark opposition to the traditional view, which continues to prevail.
Philosophy is respected, even exalted, for its promise to provide fundamental insights into
the human condition and the ultimate character of the universe, leading to vital conclusions
about how we are to arrange our lives. It’s taken for granted that there is deep
understanding to be obtained of the nature of consciousness, of how knowledge of the
external world is possible, of whether our decisions can be truly free, of the structure of any
just society, and so on – and that philosophy’s job is to provide such understanding. Isn’t
that why we are so fascinated by it?
If so, then we are duped and bound to be disappointed, says Wittgenstein. For these are
mere pseudo-problems, the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled
thinking. So it should be entirely unsurprising that the “philosophy” aiming to solve them
has been marked by perennial controversy and lack of decisive progress – by an
embarrassing failure, after over 2000 years, to settle any of its central issues. Therefore
traditional philosophical theorizing must give way to a painstaking identification of its
tempting but misguided presuppositions and an understanding of how we ever came to
regard them as legitimate. But in that case, he asks, “[w]here does [our] investigation get its
importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is
great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and
rubble)” – and answers that “(w)hat we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and
we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.”
Given this extreme pessimism about the potential of philosophy – perhaps tantamount to
a denial that there is such a subject – it is hardly surprising that “Wittgenstein” is uttered
with a curl of the lip in most philosophical circles. For who likes to be told that his or her
life’s work is confused and pointless? Thus, even Bertrand Russell, his early teacher and
enthusiastic supporter, was eventually led to complain peevishly that Wittgenstein seems to
have “grown tired of serious thinking and invented a doctrine which would make such an
activity unnecessary.”
But what is that notorious doctrine, and can it be defended? We might boil it down to four
related claims.
The first is that traditional philosophy is scientistic: its primary goals, which are to arrive
at simple, general principles, to uncover profound explanations, and to correct naïve
opinions, are taken from the sciences. And this is undoubtedly the case.
The second is that the non-empirical (“armchair”) character of philosophical investigation
– its focus on conceptual truth – is in tension with those goals. That’s because our concepts
exhibit a highly theory-resistant complexity and variability. They evolved, not for the sake
of science and its objectives, but rather in order to cater to the interacting contingencies of
our nature, our culture, our environment, our communicative needs and our other
purposes. As a consequence the commitments defining individual concepts are rarely
simple or determinate, and differ dramatically from one concept to another. Moreover, it is
not possible (as it is within empirical domains) to accommodate superficial complexity by
means of simple principles at a more basic (e.g. microscopic) level.
The third main claim of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy – an immediate consequence of
the first two – is that traditional philosophy is necessarily pervaded with
oversimplification; analogies are unreasonably inflated; exceptions to simple regularities
are wrongly dismissed.
Therefore – the fourth claim – a decent approach to the subject must avoid theoryconstruction and instead be merely “therapeutic,” confined to exposing the irrational
assumptions on which theory-oriented investigations are based and the irrational
conclusions to which they lead.
Consider, for instance, the paradigmatically philosophical question: “What is truth?”
This provokes perplexity because, on the one hand, it demands an answer of the form,
“Truth is such–and-such,” but on the other hand, despite hundreds of years of looking, no
acceptable answer of that kind has ever been found. We’ve tried truth as “correspondence
with the facts,” as “provability,” as “practical utility,” and as “stable consensus”; but all
turned out to be defective in one way or another – either circular or subject to
counterexamples. Reactions to this impasse have included a variety of theoretical
proposals. Some philosophers have been led to deny that there is such a thing as absolute
truth. Some have maintained (insisting on one of the above definitions) that although truth
exists, it lacks certain features that are ordinarily attributed to it – for example, that the
truth may sometimes be impossible to discover. Some have inferred that truth is
intrinsically paradoxical and essentially incomprehensible. And others persist in the
attempt to devise a definition that will fit all the intuitive data.
What are the main points of the passage?
12345678910But from Wittgenstein’s perspective each of the first three of these strategies rides
roughshod over our fundamental convictions about truth, and the fourth is highly unlikely
to succeed. Instead we should begin, he thinks, by recognizing (as mentioned above) that
our various concepts play very different roles in our cognitive economy and
(correspondingly) are governed by defining principles of very different kinds. Therefore, it
was always a mistake to extrapolate from the fact that empirical concepts, such as red or
magnetic or alive stand for properties with specifiable underlying natures to the
presumption that the notion of truth must stand for some such property as well.
Wittgenstein’s conceptual pluralism positions us to recognize that notion’s idiosyncratic
function, and to infer that truth itself will not be reducible to anything more basic. More
specifically, we can see that the concept’s function in our cognitive economy is merely to
serve as a device of generalization. It enables us to say such things as “Einstein’s last words
were true,” and not be stuck with “If Einstein’s last words were that E=mc2, then E=mc2;
and if his last words were that nuclear weapons should be banned, then nuclear weapons
should be banned; … and so on,” which has the disadvantage of being infinitely long!
Similarly we can use it to say: “We should want our beliefs to be true” (instead of
struggling with “We should want that if we believe that E=mc2, then E=mc2; and that if we
believe … etc.”). We can see, also, that this sort of utility depends upon nothing more than
the fact that the attribution of truth to a statement is obviously equivalent to the statement
itself – for example, “It’s true that E=mc2” is equivalent to “E=mc2”. Thus possession of
the concept of truth appears to consist in an appreciation of that triviality, rather than a
mastery of any explicit definition. The traditional search for such an account (or for some
other form of reductive analysis) was a wild-goose chase, a pseudo-problem. Truth emerges
as exceptionally unprofound and as exceptionally unmysterious.
This example illustrates the key components of Wittgenstein’s metaphilosophy, and
suggests how to flesh them out a little further. Philosophical problems typically arise from
the clash between the inevitably idiosyncratic features of special-purpose concepts – true,
good, object, person, now, necessary – and the scientistically driven insistence upon
uniformity. Moreover, the various kinds of theoretical move designed to resolve such
conflicts (forms of skepticism, revisionism, mysterianism and conservative systematization)
are not only irrational, but unmotivated. The paradoxes to which they respond should
instead be resolved merely by coming to appreciate the mistakes of perverse
overgeneralization from which they arose. And the fundamental source of this irrationality
is scientism.
As Wittgenstein put it in the “The Blue Book”:
Our craving for generality has [as one] source … our preoccupation with the method of
science. I mean the method of reducing the explanation of natural phenomena to the
smallest possible number of primitive natural laws; and, in mathematics, of unifying the
treatment of different topics by using a generalization. Philosophers constantly see the
method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer in the
way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher
into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything
to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is “purely descriptive.
These radical ideas are not obviously correct, and may on close scrutiny turn out to be
wrong. But they deserve to receive that scrutiny – to be taken much more seriously than
they are. Yes, most of us have been interested in philosophy only because of its promise to
deliver precisely the sort of theoretical insights that Wittgenstein argues are illusory. But
such hopes are no defense against his critique. Besides, if he turns out to be right,
satisfaction enough may surely be found in what we still can get – clarity, demystification
and truth.
What are the main points of the passage?
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78910Analyze the following cartoons: