BCC Intro Philosophy
Eric Gerlach
5/6/2010
LECTURE ON WITTGENSTEIN
Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is one of the most important thinkers in academics today. His early book, the Tractatus, and his later book, the Philosophical Investigations, are considered two of the most important influences for the American and British Analytic school of philosophy, the dominant school of philosophy in America.
In an end of the century poll in 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When all of the results were tallied up, the Philosophical Investigations was #1, and the Tractatus was #4. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study.
Wittgenstein’s thought can be divided into his early, middle and later work. His early work is the book the Tractatus, the book which gave the world truth table logic. This tool, as Wittgenstein later came to see it, remains the mathematical system taught as logic today. Just as Wittgenstein became famous for his truth tables, he switched positions in his thinking and came to reject his earlier work. He wrote in notebooks that were only published after his death, and the Philosophical Investigations is the most celebrated of these.
The Life and Thought of Wittgenstein:
Wittgenstein’s Father was the Austrian Carnegie, making a fortune in Steel. Though his father was Protestant, and his mother Jewish, Ludwig was baptized Catholic because of antisemitism at the time. In his early years, Ludwig was a proud atheist but by the time he was working on his Tractatus he had a mystical transcendental outlook which he kept for the rest of his life. Though never religious, and though he had to bribe Nazis later to smuggle his “Jewish” family from Austria, he was buried as a Catholic.
The Wittgenstein family was known for intense criticism, musical talent, depression, and suicide. Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide, and he himself considered suicide for awhile before launching into his late period. Unfortunately, suicide was considered romantic for Austrian elites at the time.
Wittgenstein was in Hitler’s elementary school, 2 days younger, but because he was put forward a grade and Hitler was held back a grade he was 2 years ahead. Both he and Hitler hated the school and the lessons.
He began studying at university in Berlin to become an engineer with an interest in flight (the Wright Brothers had recently invented the motorized glider, but flew it in France and Germany until 1907 as the US Army did not believe them). After failing in his attempt to build a better propeller, he began studying mathematical theory and philosophy of mathematics, becoming entranced with two thinkers who are along with Wittgenstein foundational for Analytical philosophy and logic: Russell from Britain, and Frege from Germany. Wittgenstein went to see Frege, who did not fully understand his questions and advised him to go see Russell, which he did in 1911.
He showed up unannounced to Russell’s room at Trinity College, impressed him with his intense and brilliant arguments. Russell became convinced that the young Austrian was going to carry his work forward and be his successor, solving the remaining problems of logic that Russell’s work on the foundations of mathematics had left open. As mentioned last lecture, Russell had shown there were contradictions unresolved in Frege’s work with set theory, but Russell had become frustrated trying to solve these contradiction with his theory of types.
Wittgenstein, an eccentric and difficult personality, was never fully comfortable at Cambridge, and often got into disagreements with Russell and threatened to leave many times before fleeing to Norway where he believed he could finish his work on Logic. While some still disagree, it is generally accepted that Wittgenstein was gay, developed a relationship with Pinsent, a young graduate student, and some believe that Russell encouraged the relationship if he did not introduce the two with the purpose of keeping the emotional and unstable genius with him at Cambridge.
When WWI broke out, he served for Austria, at the same time as he was developing the material for the Tractatus. Learning of Pinsent’s death in the war in Italy, he became suicidal, moved in with his uncle and finished the Tractatus which he dedicated to his ‘friend’ Pinsent. He tried to get it published, but no one would take it. Remember: this book went on to be the #4 influence in the US and Canada according to the poll, the book that gave modern logic truth tables, the method that replaced Aristotle’s syllogisms.
Russell intervened back in Cambridge, and had it published and wrote and introduction for it. This was the start of the end. Though Russell saw the work as genius, he did not completely understand much of it and his introduction reflected this. Wittgenstein read the introduction and realized Russell had great misunderstandings of his work. Believing that his Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein left Russell and Cambridge again and went to be a school teacher in Austria. He gave away his portion of the family fortune, anonymously to writers but also to his family. Since his family was already wealthy, he wrote in a letter, “they won’t be corrupted by it”. He left the school after a short while (not a good fit, and parents thought he was crazy). He became a gardener’s assistant, and then his sister had him design her a house.
While finishing the house, he was contacted by members of the Vienna Circle, positivists using Hegel’s logic and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to give a solid foundation for science and mathematics. This was what Russell had hoped for, minus the Hegel who Russell hated. While Wittgenstein had been away, the Tractatus had become famous, and central to many already inspired by Frege and Russell. Many came to visit and discus and progressively Witt became disgusted. He began to realize that there were fundamental problems with his Tractatus and truth tables, and got into intense arguments with the Vienna Circle members, at one point turning his back on his guests and reading Tagore, an Indian transcendental poet out loud. For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein thought logical positivism (the analytic school of philosophy) misunderstood his Tractatus.
In his early period, Wittgenstein believed he had fully solved the problems of a complete system of logic. He saw it like Schopenhauer, a big early influence: logic is a perfect crystal tool of analysis, life is a messy chaotic ocean, and so logic is perfect but unfortunately never fits perfectly with life. This is like having the perfect tool for an impossible and continuous job. In conversations with positivists he started to change his thinking around and continued to write until he died. These writings were published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations and other books. In his later thought, Wittgenstein saw logic not as a perfect crystal castle in the sky but as rules and games that are imperfectly lived in the real world imperfectly and without complete definition. He no longer believed that logic could provide a foundation for mathematics, science or philosophy. He denied that contradictions are necessarily false, or disprove a mathematical-logical system.
In 1929, he decided to return to Cambridge to correct his thinking and teach. To his horror, when he arrived at the train station he was greeted by a vast crowd of intellectuals as the new hero, the author of the Tractatus, the work he now thought was exactly wrong.
The famous economist Keynes wrote to his wife: ‘Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train’. Wittgenstein continued to lecture at Cambridge, developing his ideas.
In 1934, he defected to Soviet Russia, wanting to be a plumber or work with his hands. When he was told that according to the Soviet system he would be put to work as a philosophy professor in Moscow, he defected back to Britain.
In 1937, Hitler annexed Austria. Wittgenstein had to bribe Nazis to get his Jewish family passage out and spend the equivalent today of $50 million in gold and foreign currency. Since he had given away his own portion of the family fortune, he had to get much of this from his collegues at Cambridge and other admirers of his work.
THE TRACTATUS
In his early thought, expressed in the pages of the Tractatus, reality consists of atomic facts, states of affairs that are true. Thought, expressed grammatically in language, ‘pictures’ the world with these atomic facts. The world does not perfectly fit this atomic language, but because it is the way the head makes sense of the world we cannot understand things otherwise. Wittgenstein said that it is the part of the book that is unwritten that is important, the part where life itself goes beyond this logic and makes the world what it is. Of the world beyond logic, he wrote “Of what one cannot speak, one must remain silent”, which is in fact a quote from Confucius. Our logic and the world are two things that do not fit, yet mysteriously (and mystically) the two are one.
If we boil logic with truth tables down to its tautologies, the necessary and basic workings, and leave the rest open as the world which always is beyond our thoughts, we can have the perfect system of logic and grammar that we use to understand things spelled out even if it cannot perfectly predict the world or tell us how the world works. Think of logic as a set of reading glasses, and the world as something one looks at through the glasses. Wittgenstein believed that with the Tractatus he had spelled out the perfect crystal form of the glasses, and beyond this nothing can be said for certain.
Logic consists of things that are always necessary or impossible. For instance, if one knows A is necessarily true, then one also knows that it is impossible that A is false. Notice that in his early thought Wittgenstein follows Russell and Frege in believing the principles of non-contradiction and the excluded middle, and from these alone we can build the perfect interlocking system of necessary truths that is logic.
THE MIDDLE AND LATER THOUGHT OF WITTGENSTEIN
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein put forward a system of tautologies structured by truth tables, arguing that basic elements like ‘true’, ‘and’ and ‘or’ have a necessary structure but do not mean anything in themselves while propositions that have meaning are always contingent, dependent and possible. In this early period, Wittgenstein believed that ‘and’ always has exactly the same structure but no meaning in itself, while a proposition like ‘I have an apple and a pear’ has a meaning but is only true if I have both an apple and a pear. This is why Wittgenstein became upset with positivists, like his teacher and friend Russell, who tried to use his system to discover primary and necessary facts in the world.
At first Wittgenstein thought that he had solved all the problems of philosophy with the Tractatus truth table system (we do still use it today to teach formal logic), so he left philosophy and Cambridge behind, went to war, had many experiences, and then later decided that his earlier thinking contained horrible problems. He no longer believed that logic could be crystallized in the head as a truth table matrix, but rather it existed as a complex out in the world, as arrangements of people, thoughts, symbols, and objects. He continued to work on notebooks, progressing in his thought until his death, after which his notebooks were published.
In the early thought of his Tractatus tried to lay the ground for a complete system of logic, such that ‘and’ always has the same, perfectly defined meaning. In his later thought, Wittgenstein argued against this view. Just as he argued against positivists that there are no necessary facts in the world, he came to argue that no individual thing, not even ‘and’ or ‘true’ in logic, can have a single or necessary meaning. He came to see that, like the positivists, he had attempted to provide singular meanings for things that merely have common uses.
There is an excellent passage from Lectures and Conversations that illustrates the turn nicely. This work was taken not from Wittgenstein’s notebooks but from the notes of his seminar students in the years leading up to his work on the notebooks which would be published after his death as the Philosophical Investigations. At this time Freud’s ideas had stormed onto the academic scene, infuriating Wittgenstein who now had come to hate the idea that things in the world, even logical operators and systems, can be boiled down to a single essential element or factor like sex, power or truth. It is this skepticism, which can be called the “problem of essences”, which marks the turn from his earlier thinking to his more influential later thought.
Wittgenstein attacked Freud’s psychoanalysis and dream interpretation of Freud for boiling everything down to sex. In the Lectures and Conversations (20-21), Wittgenstein proposes a thought experiment for consideration. If we cook a human being down to carbon ash in an oven, are we left with the essence of the human being? A human being is a “carbon-based” life form, so carbon is a dominant element. Consider that we could cook a human down to water in the same oven, and claim that because humans are 3/5ths water we have the essence of the person.
Would it be correct to say that humans are essentially ashy, or essentially wet? Why not? We would not say that a human is essentially ashy or wet because the human being is a complex situation that is not reducible to a single element. The properties of carbon or water do not in themselves explain how humans behave or what they mean to us. If we cooked people down to ashes or water, we have destroyed the situation and can no longer investigate how they work.
In the same way, Wittgenstein had come to believe that neither facts in the world nor logic in the head can be reduced to a single element or necessary structure. Facts and logic are not true in themselves, but true in real situations of the world which are irreducibly complex. Wittgenstein says in the Lectures and Conversations that we have to avoid the “lure of the secret cellar”, the urge to boil situations down to a single element like Freud had tried to boil human relations and the mind down to sex or he himself had tried to boil logic down to its necessary truths.
The task of philosophy, logic and science is not to fully or completely explain anything, but to investigate things. Thought never fully defines things but rather describes and re-describes things. If science is thinking about the world, then science has endless work to describing and re-describing things. Likewise, if philosophy and logic are ‘thinking about thinking’, and if thinking is merely a possibly description of things, philosophy and logic have endless work to do describing our descriptions, describing and re-describing the ways that we describe things.
One favorite way to approach this today is to describe how cultures of thought, perspectives, facts and models, are gathered together and lived in institutions. Thought ceases to be completely abstract, but is rather a culture and situation in the real world that involves people, buildings and money. The cryptanalysis of algebra worked so well as a modeling language that we came to believe that the mathematics was not in our practices and text books but rather sewn into the fabric of the world itself. As we look over the history of thought in the wake of Wittgenstein’s later work, it becomes evident that mathematics and logic are tools and lenses, not the hidden structures of things operating at secret levels out of our immediate sight.
THE PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS
In this monumental work, one of my favorites, Wittgenstein is arguing for a middle way between two extreme positions, between the objectivist position of positivism and the subjectivist position of skepticism. He argues against scientific positivism/realism (facts are in the world), and also psychological skepticism (meaning is in the head). He presents each position in quotes again and again, and then argues against each quote in a three stage process. First he states a position (either that there are facts given in the world or meaning is all in the head), then shows situations in which the position works, then shows situations in which the position does not work. He shows us that taking either position to extremes would be understandable given particular ways we think and act, but neither position explains all the ways in which we think and act.
In his earlier thought, the world and the head are separated by a Kantian gulf between objectivity and subjectivity. In his later thinking, the world and our heads work together seamlessly as a complex situation. One cannot remove either the head or the world to get the bedrock or anchor of meaning and truth without resulting in absurdities. The clean and ideal side of logic, math and grammar mislead us into thinking that meaning must be anchored entirely on one side, either in the head or (exclusively) in the world, but we gain much more ability to think and describe our heads and our world if we stop looking for meaning and truth to be entirely in one place.
Games and rules gather people together, but also individuals can always variously interpret rules and meanings. Both are only what they are together as a form of life. Notice that this thinking has much in common with Lao Zi’s thinking on the wheel as both empty and solid at the same time, and much like the Zen koans of a rock being not a rock and a rock and the sound of one hand clapping.
Let us turn to the text. In the preface to the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that he now sees grave mistakes in his Tractatus. He says that this book is not to spare thinking, but to stimulate thinking. Notice that the Tractatus had the opposite goal: to put an end to the problems of logic and philosophy.
7- Language games (actions and language are interwoven as forms of life)
11- Language is like toolbox, a complex set of tools that have no absolute necessity
12- cabin in a locomotive, with crank wheel, pump, switch and brake
15- Naming is like attaching a label, and just this (hello my name is sticker).
17- Classification always is with purpose/point of view, like chessmen classes.
18- Language is like an old city, with side streets and squares (vs. logic matrix of Tractatus)
22- vs. Frege’s inner assumption of a sentence is rather the sentence in its place.
57-58- Red exists, yes, but not just in my head or in the world, but in my seeing, using and talking about red here and there with others, not apart from this.
65- no essence other than the family resemblance association.
66- use ‘games’ as example of family, a complicated network.
67- vs. Confucius, not one thread within (compassion as essence) but rather the twist of the chord is itself the only consistent thread that runs all the way through.
69- When we do draw rigid boundaries, it has a use and purpose in a game/culture we share with others. We do not draw boundaries because ‘that is what there is’, nor ‘simply how I see it’.
Read 80- example of disappearing chair
Read 83- Rules to aimless ball game of catch, but unwritten (who do you throw it to?)
Read 84- We don’t need to stop up all the cracks to live games.
85- a rule is like a signpost, not a guarantee in stone.
89- it seemed like the essence lay within the thing, waiting, but in fact we want to interconnect the thing with many other things, expanding it, getting more of its interrelations and possibilities interacting with other things.
90- It is investigating the possibilities of X, not penetrating X. Analysis is comparison and substitution, not getting to secret core. 91- Lang misleads.
99- Trying for definite sense other than sentence is like ‘locking’ man in room with the window open. We want a ‘must’, but too many openings to plug all (HD and Alice).
106- It would be like repairing a torn spider’s web with one’s fingers.
107- A Tractatus logic would be slippery ice, no friction, like ‘being’. Back to rough ground!
108- Need to remove crystalline by reversing investigation (Foucault and capillary)
109- do away with explanation, description takes its place (all we really were doing).
IN FACT, this means that our explanations are descriptions, sketches, not anchors or bedrock.
118- There is no need for final definitions or explanations, and saying this is not a nihilism that can mean nothing but rather CLEARING GROUND for meaning.
133- the real discovery is that we can start and stop philosophizing when we want to
478- fearing hand in flame, 1000 voices/reasons drown each other out together
498- towards nonsense and humor, like philosophy, showing us forms of life.
499- Calling something ‘nonsense’ or ‘no sense’ or ‘crazy’ is setting up a fence for a purpose, in a game/culture with others. It is not just that there is no meaning there.
500- ‘Senseless’ is like withdrawn from circulation (of library)
513- Consider, no sense unless trying to fit on a rollercoaster or something, a context could give it sense, but it sounds funny at first to everyone.
514-515- Rose in the Dark (Dada and Surrealism)
Book II- ‘Jastrow’ (Wittgenstein’s) Duck Rabbit, more towards art next time.
