Ludwig Wittgenstein

Introduction

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the Austrian-British philosopher whose two distinct phases of thought — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (1953, posthumous) — each defined a distinct period of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Few thinkers have so deeply shaped a tradition twice, in directions that the two phases themselves treat as incompatible. The early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus provided the conceptual framework for the Vienna Circle's logical positivism and the broader project of articulating what language can do by clarifying its logical structure. The late Wittgenstein of the Investigations developed an account of language as use organized into language-games, whose later effects on the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mathematics, and the foundations of cognitive science have been substantial.

Wittgenstein's biographical singularity matched the philosophical. Born to one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, he gave away his fortune, lived in a village in rural Norway and on a coastal cottage in Ireland, served in the Austrian army on the Italian front in World War I, taught primary school in rural Austria, designed and built a house for his sister, was first a research student then a Cambridge professor, returned to philosophical work in the 1930s after long withdrawal, and produced almost none of the work for which he is now read in publishable form during his lifetime. The total surviving Nachlass is some 20,000 pages, of which only the Tractatus (and a few short papers) was published while he lived.

Life

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born in 1889 in Vienna to one of the wealthiest families in the Habsburg Empire. His father, Karl Wittgenstein, was an industrialist who controlled most of the Austrian iron and steel industry; his mother, Leopoldine, was Karl's musical and cultural counterweight, presiding over a household that hosted Brahms, Mahler, Klimt, and most of the major figures of fin-de-siècle Vienna. The family was Jewish in ancestry but Catholic in religious practice, and the conversion several generations earlier had been substantial. Three of Ludwig's four brothers died by suicide.

Wittgenstein was educated at home until age fourteen, then at the Realschule in Linz (where he overlapped with Adolf Hitler, though there is no evidence the two interacted). He studied mechanical engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Berlin and then at Manchester, where he worked on aeronautical engineering and the design of aircraft propellers. The engineering work led him to questions about the foundations of mathematics, which led him to Frege's work, and through Frege to Bertrand Russell, with whom he began studying at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1911.

The Cambridge years (1911–1913) brought the relationship with Russell that would define Wittgenstein's early philosophical formation. Russell quickly recognized Wittgenstein as the most original philosophical mind he had ever encountered; the two engaged intensively, both producing work that influenced the other. Wittgenstein left Cambridge in 1913, spent the period 1913–14 in rural Norway working on what would become the Tractatus, and was in Vienna when the First World War broke out in August 1914.

Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian army and served on the Russian front and then on the Italian front, where he was eventually captured. The notebooks he kept during the war became the working materials for the Tractatus, which he completed in 1918 and which was eventually published in 1921 (German) and 1922 (English, with the parallel German text). The book's argument concluded that the propositions of philosophy were senseless and that anyone who had understood the book would throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it. Wittgenstein concluded that he had said what could be said and that the work of philosophy was complete.

The long interregnum followed. From 1920 to 1929, Wittgenstein did no professional philosophy. He gave away his inherited fortune to his siblings, trained as a primary-school teacher, and taught for six years in rural villages in Lower Austria; the teaching was a difficult success and ended in 1926 after an incident with a student. He worked as a gardener at a monastery near Vienna, then designed and built a modernist house for his sister Margaret in Vienna. The 1929 return to Cambridge for what became his second phase of philosophical work was unexpected and the result of Frank Ramsey's persuasion.

The Cambridge years 1929–1947 produced the materials of the Philosophical Investigations and the related writings on mathematics, psychology, and the philosophy of mind. Wittgenstein held a fellowship at Trinity from 1930, succeeded G. E. Moore as the Professor of Philosophy in 1939, and continued teaching until his resignation in 1947. He spent the war years (1941–44) working as a porter at Guy's Hospital and then as a research assistant in a medical laboratory in Newcastle, finding hospital work more meaningful than university teaching during wartime.

The last years were spent variously in Ireland (a cottage on the west coast at Rosroe), Cambridge, Vienna, and finally Cambridge with his doctor Edward Bevan. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1949 and died in Cambridge in 1951. His last reported words were: Tell them I've had a wonderful life.

The problem he worked on

The early Wittgenstein and the late Wittgenstein worked on different problems. The early problem was the articulation of the logical structure of language and the consequent demarcation of what could be meaningfully said from what could not. The Tractatus answered: meaningful propositions are pictures of states of affairs; the apparent propositions of philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are not pictures of anything and therefore senseless; what cannot be said meaningfully must be passed over in silence (the famous closing proposition 7).

The late problem was the dissolution of the very philosophical confusions that produce the apparent need for such systematic theories of meaning. The Investigations answered: meaning is use, organized into language-games whose rules are public practices; the philosophical confusions arise when we abstract words and concepts from their actual use and treat them as if they had timeless essences; the proper work of philosophy is therapeutic — the dispelling of the bewitchments of intellect by means of language.

The two phases share a substantive continuity: both are anti-metaphysical, both treat the philosophical project as a kind of clarification rather than discovery, both are deeply concerned with the limits of what can be said. They differ in what kind of clarification is required and in what stance toward the apparent systematic theories of meaning is appropriate.

Contributions

The Tractatus

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (composed during World War I; published 1921 German, 1922 English) is one of the most influential single philosophical books of the twentieth century. The book is organized as a series of numbered propositions whose decimal numbering indicates their logical relations; the seven main propositions are each elaborated by sub-propositions that are themselves elaborated, producing a tree structure in which the main argument is enriched by progressively detailed commentary.

The central doctrines: (1) the world is the totality of facts, not of things; (2) propositions are pictures of facts that share their logical form; (3) logical propositions are tautologies that say nothing about the world; (4) what cannot be said can sometimes be shown; (5) the propositions of the Tractatus itself are, on its own terms, senseless — they are the ladder to be thrown away once climbed.

The Tractatus was immediately influential on the Vienna Circle, who took it (despite Wittgenstein's protests) as a manifesto for logical positivism. The book's emphasis on the truth-functional analysis of complex propositions, the demarcation of meaningful discourse, and the dissolution of metaphysics shaped logical positivism through the 1920s and 1930s. Wittgenstein himself distanced from the positivist appropriation and, eventually, from much of the Tractatus's own systematic theory.

The Philosophical Investigations

The Philosophical Investigations (composed in the 1930s and 1940s; published posthumously in 1953) is the canonical text of the later Wittgenstein. The book is organized in a deliberately non-systematic way — numbered short paragraphs that proceed by example, analogy, philosophical dialogue, and constant return to particular cases rather than by the systematic argument of the Tractatus.

The central doctrines: (1) meaning is use — the meaning of a word is not a mental entity it stands for but the role the word plays in our linguistic practices; (2) language is organized into language-games — the various practices in which words have their use, each with its own rules and conventions; (3) following a rule is not a matter of internal mental processes but of participating in a public practice; (4) the apparent essences philosophy seeks (the essence of meaning, the essence of intention, the essence of language) are illusions produced by abstracting words from their use and treating them as if they had timeless natures; (5) the proper work of philosophy is therapeutic — the dispelling of the bewitchments of intellect by means of language, the showing of the fly the way out of the fly bottle.

The famous private language argument (sections 243–315) argues that a language whose words refer to private mental sensations that could in principle be known only to the speaker is impossible — there are no criteria by which the speaker could correctly use the words. The argument has been continuously contested and continuously engaged.

On Certainty

The late notebooks composed in the last 18 months of Wittgenstein's life and published posthumously as On Certainty (1969) develop a account of the structural features of doubt and certainty. The argument: certain hinge propositions (the world has existed for more than five minutes, this is my hand) are not themselves subject to doubt in the same way ordinary empirical propositions are; they are not justified by evidence in the way ordinary empirical propositions are; they constitute the framework within which doubt and justification can operate at all. The position has been influential on subsequent epistemology, especially the work on contextualism (Keith DeRose) and on the relation between certainty and practical agency.

Philosophy of mathematics and psychology

The writings on the philosophy of mathematics (Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, posthumous 1956) and the philosophy of psychology (the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology) are less widely read than the Investigations but contain original work. The philosophy of mathematics challenges the foundationalist programs (logicism, formalism) that had dominated the early twentieth century; the philosophy of psychology develops the analysis of mental concepts (intention, sensation, understanding) that the Investigations had introduced.

Key works

Published in Wittgenstein's lifetime:

• Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921 German, 1922 English)
• Some Remarks on Logical Form (1929, a short paper Wittgenstein later disavowed)

The work of the second phase was published posthumously:

• Philosophical Investigations (1953)
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (1956)
• The Blue and Brown Books (1958)
• Notebooks 1914–1916 (1961)
• Zettel (1967)
• On Certainty (1969)
• Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (volumes 1 and 2, 1980)
• Culture and Value (1980, the more personal remarks)

The standard scholarly edition is Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (Oxford, 2000), which makes the entire surviving manuscript available in searchable form. The standard English text of the Investigations is now the Hacker-Schulte fourth edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), which replaced the older Anscombe translation.

Influences and influenced

Influenced by: Frege (whose work on logic and the foundations of mathematics led Wittgenstein to philosophy); Bertrand Russell (his Cambridge teacher and the early influence); Arthur Schopenhauer (whose engagement with the mystical and the ineffable shaped the Tractatus's ethics and aesthetics); Leo Tolstoy (whose religious writing Wittgenstein read intensively during the war and whose ethical-religious sensibility shaped him); William James (whose Varieties of Religious Experience and Principles of Psychology Wittgenstein engaged in the later period); Hertz, Boltzmann, and the Viennese scientific culture of his youth.

Influenced: the Vienna Circle and the logical positivist movement of the 1920s and 1930s (especially Schlick, Carnap, Waismann); the Cambridge analytic tradition through F. P. Ramsey, G. E. Moore, John Wisdom, Norman Malcolm, Elizabeth Anscombe (his student and literary executor), Peter Geach, and Saul Kripke (whose Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 1982, has been a major reading); the broader analytic philosophy of language and mind through Gilbert Ryle, J. L. Austin, P. F. Strawson, and many others; the philosophy of psychology and contemporary cognitive science through engagement with the private language argument; the ordinary language philosophy movement of Oxford in the 1950s; the contemporary engagement through Robert Brandom, John McDowell, Charles Taylor, James Conant, Cora Diamond, and the New Wittgensteinians; the broader cultural reception in literature, anthropology, and the social sciences.

Reception

Wittgenstein's contemporary reception was across two distinct phases. The Tractatus was immediately recognized as important by Russell (who wrote the introduction) and by the Vienna Circle (which took it as a foundational document for logical positivism, against Wittgenstein's protests). The two-phase Wittgenstein himself complicated the reception — his own work in the 1930s and 1940s explicitly criticized aspects of the Tractatus and the positivism it had inspired.

The posthumous reception of the Investigations has been and continuous. The book has been read across analytic philosophy (Kripke's reading; the Pittsburgh school of McDowell and Brandom; the recent New Wittgenstein readings of Cora Diamond and James Conant), across continental philosophy (Stanley Cavell's engagement; the engagement by Derrida and others), in theology (Phillips, Kerr, Cavell), and in the social sciences (Peter Winch's The Idea of a Social Science, 1958).

Continuing engagement

Major recent scholarly work includes the Hacker-Schulte edition of the Investigations (Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Severin Schroeder's Wittgenstein: The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle (2006), Hans Sluga and David Stern's Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (2nd edition 2017), the work of Cora Diamond, James Conant, and the New Wittgenstein school, Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason (1979) and This New Yet Unapproachable America (1989), Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990, the standard biography), and the work of Marie McGinn, Hans-Johann Glock, and Anat Biletzki. Active scholarly debates concern the precise interpretation of the Tractatus (resolute vs. standard readings), the relation between the early and late Wittgenstein, the contemporary applicability of the private language argument, Wittgenstein's relation to phenomenology and the continental tradition, and the religious and ethical dimensions of his thought.

Further reading

• Analytic Philosophy — the tradition his two phases shaped
• Frege — the predecessor whose work on logic brought him to philosophy
• Russell — his Cambridge teacher and early influence
• Belief Systems — the broader concept On Certainty's hinge propositions help articulate
• Coherence Without Certainty — the epistemic posture On Certainty most directly articulates
• Logos — the rational principle whose linguistic transformation Wittgenstein continued

The Austrian-British philosopher whose two phases of thought each defined a distinct period of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.