This is precisely the perpetual Catholic slander that Christopher Hitchens referred to regularly. A lie told by believers about several prominent freethinkers.
The only sources for the claim are evangelic Christian websites, and this specific thread. This thread is actually one of the top results for the search now. I've spent a lot of time reading Wittgenstein, and reading about Wittgenstein. This was never mentioned in any credible source I've come across.
It goes both ways. On the one hand the religious want to claim eveyone as one of their own, especially in death-bed conversions. On the other hand, there are the rabidly anti-Catholic types who make up lies about people having been abused without evidence, as we see in this thread. Or the atheists who conveniently forget that quite a lot of "free thinkers" were religious.
Wittgenstein was not a Catholic because he had no faith, but he was respecful of Catholicism, had many Catholic friends, and asked for a priest to be present as he died. There's no evidence he formally converted.
What of it? What would Wittgenstein say to the syllogism, 'Some Catholic priests are child abusers, Wittgenstein was a Catholic in childhood, therefore Wittgenstein was abused by a priest'?
Well, as mentioned in the article, at the time of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was deeply moved by the kind of spirituality found in Leo Tolstoy's work. However, it's the explicit purpose of the Tractatus to draw a demarcation line between propositions of logic (and by this, meaningful sentences of philosophy) and any mystical or spiritual feelings, thoughts, or faith. So it really doesn't matter at all.
I don't see where that article in any way engages with what GP says; it appears to use "confession" in a more metaphorical appeal to religiosity as a concept rather than to a specific spiritual ritual.
Let's suppose this was even true, what would it matter?
There's this weird assumption in popular culture that somehow the moment near death contains more truth than other moments, as if right before passing we have some "ah!" moment. But the opposite seems far more reasonable: as we get closer to death our reasonings will become increasingly distorted.
For example, a common narrative is "on their death bed they had wished they had focused less on career and more on family." Of course that's what you'd think on your death bed! You're likely scared, feeling alone and wish there was someone with you. You also don't have to worry about rent, gaining the respect of your peers, what you're going to do with your free time, retirement etc.
The idea that the moment of death brings some sort of grand understanding only makes sense if you presuppose there is some grand sense behind it all. Otherwise it's just the final moment of a long process of physical, emotional and mental decline.
> Let's suppose this was even true, what would it matter?
Your analysis begs the question. It assumes the secular worldview, but that's precisely what a deathbed conversion repudiates. To a Catholic, deathbed conversions matter a great deal because Catholics don't conceptualize death (or life) in the same way as a secular person.
You're just reiterating my point. Even if this where true, it doesn't add any information. For a Catholic it simply affirms their Catholic worldview, however for someone with a secular worldview it is also perfectly inline with their existing views.
As such the statement "Surprisingly" make no sense, since this information is not "surprising" to anyone, even if it were true (which is it very likely not).
If you're Catholic, it's significant as one's last chance to turn away from sin, discard this life, and join Christ in an eternal life that isn't this one.
If you're not, then think of it like an actuary: at every moment in your life, you have to live with the sum of your past and future choices, adjusted as need be. At the last moment, you have no more uncertain future choices, so it's clear what the optimal path was, so naturally you have regret.
Of course is matters. Not because it indicates some "grand understanding" or "aha" just because it shows how we spend our entire lives trying to look life head-on without flinching but, in the end, we almost all flinch.
I plan on doing that - just in case the pearly gates are truly guarded by someone who requires you believe in a specific God.
It's called hedging your bets
If there are multiple possible gods, and you get punished more for believing in the wrong one than for not believing in one, you might be better off without it.
"Sinner actually going to heaven, not hell" priest declares to grieving family. I wonder how many so called 'deathbed conversions' actually happened, vs how many were completely fabricated.. and not in the sense of some one wearing robes tenting their fingers and laughing maniacally, but instead trying to 'offer salvation' and taking literally any movement or noise as confirmation.
I know Wittgenstein repudiated the Tractatus, but did he ever alight on another vision of the world & the limits of what can be expressed? Or was 'Late Wittgenstein' primarily a more bounded project concerned with the philosophy of language?
He wrote a book after Tractatus. It's called Philosophical Investigations. There he sets up, among many other things, the whole "meaning is use" theory.
One of the most influential books in the last century together with Tractatus.
Repudiated is a bit strong. In some sense Wittgenstein hated everything he had written. However, Wittgenstein did believe that his friend had shown the system he laid out in Tractatus as unworkable:
The so-called "late" period his scope was no more bounded than the early Wittgenstein, but he changed his method of analysis from strict conceptual analysis to something more conversational. His study of language is not really interesting for what it contributed to philosophy of language, but because of the implications to the methods of philosophy itself.
To me (and not only to me) it looked like "<" meant "is less than", which would be a strange and flamebaity sort of putdown.
If you meant "is derived from", that wasn't clear. It wouldn't have been flamebaity if you'd explained what you meant!
In that case, though, you should have added something about why you think the lineage derives that way.
(Side remark, not moderation-related: Wittgenstein read Schopenhauer as a young man but later rejected him as not a great thinker, so there's a certain burden of proof if you want to draw that line.)
I read the first 100 pages or so of Philisophical Investigations before giving up since I had lost track of the lines of reasoning. Here's what I got out of what I did read though:
Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?
There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).
There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.
I think we're interpreting that in different ways. I'm assuming you read it as something like "words can't be used to communicate (knowledge)", which you're seeking to disprove by showing me that I only gained that knowledge through Wittgenstein's words. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's not what I meant though. I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing. We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself. We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real". Not all words or sentences point to anything, or anything meaningful. And the trap we sometimes fall into (as philosophers especially?) is assuming that they always mean something.
Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it. The mistake is reversing that, by thinking that by creating new words or combinations of words, we can bring something into existence.
Just to put a button this excellent summary, the classic example of "rearranging words to form a sentence that we think has meaning" that Wittgenstein uses in Investigations is the question: "What is the meaning of life?"
We think intuitively that because we constructed this sentence with words, that it must have meaning, and must have an answer - as you say, it is flipping the causal relationship between starting with a sign and using language versus starting with language and trying to find a sign. This question is ultimately the latter.
Would my opinion be that you are wrong, it would not imply that:
- I'm right about you being wrong;
- my own view is right and spread it would be an act of correction.
> I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing.
Nothingness doesn't point at anything real by definition.
> We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself.
Nor the sign with an interpretation act stimulated by some sign.
> We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real".
Words don't exist outside some interpretation process, by the way.
>Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it.
That's a bit trickier. Because before someone use a word to refer to something, this word didn't exist. Naming things is a performative action. Through words, not only can you gain new knowledge that you can challenge through non-verbal actions, but they change the reality itself as it introduces new relationships in the world that where not present before there were used as a reference tool.
This is the exact sort of question that Wittgenstein addresses and created a terrifying argument to press a wedge into. In the Investigations he formulates the Rule Following Argument which in many aspects mirrors the underdetermination argument for computational anti-realism; any physical state embodies any computational function under some arbitrary description (also known as pancomputationalism or computational trivialism). Wittgenstein intended to show-- and I think succeeded-- that meanings are underdetermined logically, and thus non-rational (not irrational) forces determine how one means something. Thus, causal structures of social bodies that holistically determine meanings.
This argument was initially somewhat ignored until revived by the great Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I take this to be one of the great epistemological problems, joining the ranks of similar challenges like Descartes' demon. Like Descartes, Wittgenstein offered a solution, albeit a much less religious one than Descartes.
Philosophical Investigations is not exactly hard to read, but the style of argument Wittgenstein uses is very slippery. He's trying to poke holes in the conceptual pictures and assumptions we use, and which often lead us to nonsense or philosophical debates that can be dissolved through conceptual clarification. It's nothing less than a full on broadside against an entire tradition of philosophical thought extending back to Plato.
I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.
There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:
- Language is a form of behavior.
- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.
- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.
- Understanding is akin to an ability.
- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.
- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.
To me the most intriguing ideas that have been explored by Wittgenstein are related to his notion of a "private language" (and the question of whether it is simply possible or meaningful). You can ask for instance what is the difference between your body pain, which seems to be a kind of "internal object", that only you can possess and access, and the blue of the sky, when you look at it, which doesn't feel like an internal sensation (rather like an external fact), even though it can be construed as one, if needed.
In my understanding, this was much a vehicle for what figures as the mystical in the Tractatus: spiritual insight, personal revelation, faith and believes, ethics, internal evidence. If we can't share or even show them, how do we arrive at any consent? How are they even a thing between us?
This short article is by Ray Monk, who in 1990 published a biography of Wittgenstein, which I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the guy's life and thought. Monk also wrote an excellent 2-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This article seems to contain nothing not in his 1990 book. I found it a little depressing for him that the New Statesman is apparently paying him for an article that's a very condensed summary of part of what he wrote 30+ years ago..
On the other hand, you might consider that it means that what he wrote 30+ years ago hit the mark so well that it’s still worth paying for a summary of part of it. Less depressing that way.
Well, I think they're both definitive biographies, yes. But I guess it's like big rock bands travelling the world, having to play their big hits forever after. Good for the fans, depressing for the musicians.
Thank you for sharing this! You should post it to HN as its own post-- I work to classic music and this is a very interesting list that others would enjoy, too.
I'll second the recommendation of Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. There's a fantastic clarity to his exposition of Wittgenstein's philosophy that made it very readable. Going to track down the Russell biography now...
I have read the Bertrand Russell biography(its a 2 part set) and absolutely loved the first part. Ray Monk the author describes various ideas in analytic philosophy extremely clearly and does an amazing job on what ideas were circulating during that time in regards to philosophy. I couldn't recommend it enough, in fact I enjoyed the author so much I also got his bio of Wittgenstein and hope to start it in the next few weeks.
My rule of thumb summary of Wittgenstein: If you can spend an entire book on the meaning of a concept (IE Truth-with-a-capital-T, The meaning of life) then you may be confusing an artifact of grammar and language with something that exists in actual reality.
In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.
I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
My advisor at university, a philosophy professor, said the same thing about Wittgenstein. During the initial part of his graduate studies, philosophy left him empty, and depressed. Discovering, and focusing on, Wittgenstein, changed his life.
Agreed, I actually read that one first. I was bummed to find out that he recently divorced his second wife who he talks about so highly in both his books.
Wittgenstein had this effect on me too. But not the Tractatus. What calmed me down was the Philosophical Investigations and Kripkes Naming and Necessity.
This was the case with my advisor as well. In his course on Wittgenstein, we read the Tractatus, but the focus was on The Philsophical Investigations as response to the Tractatus.
In a nutshell, Wittgenstein showed (or, attempted to show) that much like we can't gain information from logic, we can't gain transcendental meaning (das Mystische) from logic – even, if (or, more precisely, provided that) we discard any meaningless propositions. (Mind that this is in sharp contrast to Kant, who engaged in his Critique of Pure Reason in order to address pure ethics.)
It's a bit like "Gödel for transcendentals". But this has been mostly ignored, while the tools used by Wittgenstein have been an inspiration to many.
Or, if you like it this way, the Halteproblem for transcendental reasoning is universal. There are no computable propositions regarding the mystical. ;-)
Interesting way to put it: "Gödel for transcendentals" - probably only able to put it that way with the benefit of time.
The relationship between the Russell/Gödel camp and Wittgenstein is complicated - In some ways at odds (as they grew apart Russell thought Wittgenstein was dedicating his life to not thinking) but I think they were concerned with the same questions.
Gödel and Wittgenstein would probably both agree that you can't describe the system from within the system. Gödel was more interested pulling the threads and exploring the edges of that, whereas Wittgenstein took that to mean philosophy (at least as it pertains to living) was a lost cause and distraction from reality. In other words, I feel they were on the same page but had completely different ultimate interests.
And ultimately, the Russell camp won - a modern echo of that is the search for the one equation that will describe all of reality, or at least a belief that even if we never find it there is still one out there. Wittgenstein would probably believe that no man made system could fundamentally describe reality.
It's largely been ignored, yes, because where do you go from there? Someone who believes in Wittgenstein is probably more likely to join the army or become an architect than become a philosopher, which guarantees that it will be ignored. Evolutionarily it's an idea that doesn't fit into the ecosystem.
You may say that Wittgenstein in his later phase (W II) was more interested in pulling the threads, when he explored concepts like pain as a stand-in for internal evidence (or, as W I put it: the mystical). However, this was also on an entirely different page, as in comprehending the subject as a social process.
Mind that I do not mean to suggest any kind of parallelism in a strict sense (hence the emoticon.)
Regarding the lost cause as a distraction, I'm not so sure about that. I guess, Wittgenstein would have insisted on this being about all, which was important to us, but nevertheless being out of reach of any kind of theory in the strict sense.
(And this is, because – according to Wittgenstein – it is essentially outside of any reality, which is accessibly to us. On the other hand, it may have still reality beyond this, "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole." [6.45], "Die Anschauung der Welt sub specie aeterni ist ihre Anschauung als-begrenztes-Ganzes." However, there are no legitimate question that may be actually posed regarding this limited whole, which is reflected just as a feeling from the inside; hence, the proposed riddle – which is really about existence – doesn't exist on any level of disciplined discourse.)
Regarding evolutionary fitness, there may have been a niche: According to the Tractatus, the mystical arises, which might have been further explored by some theory of emergence. But this developed only much later and – as far as I know it — a connection was never made.
Yeah, what I meant was Godel was poking at the edges of the logical systems, eventually logically proving that we can't know everything about them, but even afterwards he was still into (simplifying it a bit here) logic-for-it's-own-sake, even though he was exploring how logic is inherently incomplete (not in the Godel sense of incomplete, I just couldn't think of a better word....)
Whereas W II does get more specific and deeply explores the real-world implications, partly as a rejection of W I's tendency to speak in abstract, high-level ideas. But W II doesn't dwell on the implications of the inherent fallacy of logic as Godel does, just uses that as a rung in the ladder to somewhere else.
And I didn't take it as you making a direct like to Godel, but it's interesting to think about because they were all part of the same zeitgeist which is still strongly echoing in our culture. They didn't see eye-to-eye in their life despite some common threads, and it got me thinking about WHY that was.
Kant's critiqe of pure reason was what the title suggests actually, he also argued that logic (i.e pure reason), cannot hammer out ethics (what one ought to do) nor metaphysics (what ultimately is). It's only practical reason which can determine morality, i.e. his point of departure for his ethical theory is the acting being, not pure logic.
And you could even say that Wittgenstein took a somewhat similar route, when he shifted his interest from the unanswerable riddle of existence and its implications to the exploration of meaningful existence as a human being, which is inevitably involved in a social process. (Mind that this is not suggesting any substantial similarities beyond this.)
I wonder if it affects the theory of computation in any way. Is it an argument against the church Turing thesis? Is it reason to believe in the existence of computational oracle TM such as a halting oracle TM? To me these questions are related to strong AI. Are creative inputs to normal algorithms fundamentally more effective than normal inputs to creative algorithms? Is there a high degree of intricacy of information such that inputs to the algorithm is somehow more powerful than any algorithm?
Not really, as it is on an entirely different level. According to the Tractatus, any transcendental questions are really about existence. As this is outside of what is graspable inside the world (and only accessible as a concept by the impossible position from looking at the world from outside), it is simply beyond theoretical reach. As any propositions about the real, factual world belong to the natural sciences, this leaves no genuine propositions to philosophy. The subject of these philosophical questions just arises, but can't be argued about – at least, not in a meaningful way in the strict sense. So computation doesn't promise any meaningful answers, nor do these questions lend themselves to computation. Even more so, as nothing genuinely arises from logic (but logic structure).
(While some of this may remind of Kant's thing in itself, it is comes from an entirely different direction, namely, a proposed teleology of philosophy, while Kant addresses this from the fundamentals of perception.)
A not so small portion of philosophy can come down to defining words and bits of grammar in robust ways or at least coming to an agreement how terms are used differently by different people. Importantly, much philosophy fails to point this out and gets a bit lost failing to accept that all words are made up and can have arbitrary meanings - picking meanings shouldn’t be so contentious sometimes.
So let’s say we pick the meanings for consciousness. Will that settle the debate over the nature of consciousness? Would David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett agree on qualia? Evidence is that they would not. Both are quite capable of understanding and using each other’s terms. But yet they fundamentally disagree, as do many others.
This suggests, as Chalmers has pointed out, that the disagreement is not semantic. It’s rather a substantial philosophical issue. No linguistic analysis will resolve the debate. Science might someday, if the matter can be settled empirically.
Consciousness being one of the fundamental hard problems of course, it is not just a matter of coming to terms. My point was not that philosophical issues don’t exist and of course one of the biggest philosophical issues isn’t just definitions :)
In this case it comes to something also very common in philosophy, discussions that can be questioned as “are we discussing terms or philosophy or both at the same time?” and often the case is “both” making it very hard to have a philosophical discussion when opposing sides disagree both on the terminology and the philosophy and don’t separate the two disagreements very well.
I've seen that disagreement all the time online with philosophical discussions where opposing sides use different definitions and refuse to accept the same terminology. I wonder though if professional philosophers are more careful and exact. My interpretation of most online philosophical argument is that semantic disputes are somewhat intentional, because people do not want to give the other side any ground to stand on. Agreeing to terms could mean the arguments based on those terms have some merit.
> I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
How about Epicurus?
I'm not at all in the philosophy realm, so I don't know who is revered or reviled. Maybe he's not noteworthy enough, too idealistic or just plain wrong? Perhaps he's passed over for some other reason.
The few things I've read about his philosophies seem like they're focused on finding basic happiness. Am I just oversimplifying?
One problem with reading Epicurus is that there is not so much surviving Epicurus to read. The second-hand story from Lucretius is about as good as you can get.
> My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.
Apologies in advance as I haven't read any Wittgenstein myself, but am I wrong in thinking this is what the Philosophical Investigations was about (as opposed to the Tractatus)?
In Investigations Wittgenstein realized that he went perhaps too far in Tractatus, and that words can be meaningful also “by consensus” not only “from first principles”.
The relationship between the arguments in Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations (PI) is quite complex and, while there is some disagreement over the the degree of his renunciation, it's generally understood that by the time of his writing much of the notebooks that ended up as PI Wittgenstein had altered his understanding of philosophy and language quite a bit.
Both had a sort of "end philosophy" ambition, to a degree. The Tractatus, with its ambition to address the ways that language touches the world in a picture theory, was more akin to the idea of "solving" philosophy in a sense. In PI, he makes a change in his view of philosophy towards anthropology and remarks on language that is rooted in behavior and use. PI "ends philosophy" more in the sense of dissolving philosophical issues, by revealing the conceptual underpinnings of a number of philosophical debates as nonsense. Philosophy's job, thus, becomes conceptual clarification.
So to answer your question, yes, though there is some overlap.
Well put, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." is a call to cut through the crap of philosophy, rather than to end it. Whatever differences there may or may not have been, no one can deny they were both incredibly ambitious.
Buddhist philosophy also has a strong focus on showing that arbitrary conventions shouldn't be taken too seriously, and that a great deal of suffering arises as a result of believing too strongly in useful fictions.
Nāgārjuna is one particularly impressive philosopher of the Madhyamaka school, a school which he set the groundwork for in his book Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Madhyamaka means middle way, a kārikā is a work composed of verses that concisely formulate some doctrine). There's a great translation and explanation by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura if anyone is interested.
I think there are a lot of parallels with Wittgenstein's philosophy, and it speaks to Wittgenstein's genius that he was able to conceive of a similar philosophy largely independently.
Tractatus was written when Wittgenstein was still suffering from the "disease" of philosophy. When he still pursued the positivist program of reducing all reality to logical statements. It was after he had left philosophy for a bit and came back to it again that he realized his old ambitions were wrongheaded abuse of meaning. That second phase of his thinking, where he begins thinking in terms of Language Games, is found in Philosophical Investigations.
Yeah, people say that, but Tractatus clearly contains those ideas, though he talks about them mostly in the high-level, abstract, general form.
"2.12: The picture is a model of reality", "3: The logical picture of the facts is the thought.", "4: The thought is the significant proposition.", "4.001: The totality of propositions is the language.", "4.002: Language disguises the thought", "4.003: Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language."
The problem he had with Tractatus was the absurdity of trying logically construct an argument against logic - Tractatus was strongly influenced by Russell. But he wasn't trying to define a universal logic system like Russell or poking at the limits of one like Godel. He makes that clear at the end:
"6.54: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out
through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw
away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world
rightly.", "7: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
The difference between "early Wittgenstein" and "late Wittgenstein" is mostly (though not entirely) about form, he's just much clearer about and does deeper dives into his ideas in Philosophical Investigations and other later writing. He started hating the whole idea of writing a "general, abstract form", but doesn't shift the fundamental thrust of his worldview.
Of course, the Tractatus is pretty dense and there's a lot of disagreement about interpretation, this is just my opinion on it. It's a really wonderful book if you spend time with it, the structure is very fascinating, it feels like a puzzle. I assume anyone on HN trends nerdy, and though it might be more difficult that Investigations, I think Tractatus appeals more to my nerdy side.
One of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty".
It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.
It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.
Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...
I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree" while looking at a tree.
Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends.
I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.
"On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?".
But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning.
Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work.
As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications.
Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).
As an aside, if you like graphic novels and philoshopy then I highly recommend Logicomix [1]. This work heavily features Ludwig Wittgenstein. I can't claim it is historically accurate but I do think it is quite an interesting read.
As a historical narrative it's pretty shameless, e.g. inventing out of whole cloth a second visit to Frege. I also felt that it did not convey well the personalities (let alone the ideas) of the early analytical trinity.
My takeaway was that Concepts have Contexts. The problem is that the Context may vary from person to person. Kinda like an n-gram, where n can vary between people.
Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.
Wittgenstein was a tortured soul in a garbage world, much like a lot of other people who did not have the means or will to organize all of their thoughts in writing. I do wonder how many "great philosophers" were and are out there, not writing down their thoughts.
Philosophical Investigations has a lot of bug fixes that was in Tractus, when people want to discuss Wittgenstein they only want to discuss his early and not his more mature later work
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 217 ms ] threadWittgenstein was not a Catholic because he had no faith, but he was respecful of Catholicism, had many Catholic friends, and asked for a priest to be present as he died. There's no evidence he formally converted.
Edit: This one went over my head.
https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/06/ludwig-wittgenst...
There's this weird assumption in popular culture that somehow the moment near death contains more truth than other moments, as if right before passing we have some "ah!" moment. But the opposite seems far more reasonable: as we get closer to death our reasonings will become increasingly distorted.
For example, a common narrative is "on their death bed they had wished they had focused less on career and more on family." Of course that's what you'd think on your death bed! You're likely scared, feeling alone and wish there was someone with you. You also don't have to worry about rent, gaining the respect of your peers, what you're going to do with your free time, retirement etc.
The idea that the moment of death brings some sort of grand understanding only makes sense if you presuppose there is some grand sense behind it all. Otherwise it's just the final moment of a long process of physical, emotional and mental decline.
Your analysis begs the question. It assumes the secular worldview, but that's precisely what a deathbed conversion repudiates. To a Catholic, deathbed conversions matter a great deal because Catholics don't conceptualize death (or life) in the same way as a secular person.
As such the statement "Surprisingly" make no sense, since this information is not "surprising" to anyone, even if it were true (which is it very likely not).
If you're not, then think of it like an actuary: at every moment in your life, you have to live with the sum of your past and future choices, adjusted as need be. At the last moment, you have no more uncertain future choices, so it's clear what the optimal path was, so naturally you have regret.
One of the most influential books in the last century together with Tractatus.
https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/43904/_HANDOUTS/...
The so-called "late" period his scope was no more bounded than the early Wittgenstein, but he changed his method of analysis from strict conceptual analysis to something more conversational. His study of language is not really interesting for what it contributed to philosophy of language, but because of the implications to the methods of philosophy itself.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If you meant "is derived from", that wasn't clear. It wouldn't have been flamebaity if you'd explained what you meant! In that case, though, you should have added something about why you think the lineage derives that way.
(Side remark, not moderation-related: Wittgenstein read Schopenhauer as a young man but later rejected him as not a great thinker, so there's a certain burden of proof if you want to draw that line.)
Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else?
There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking).
There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.
Did you acquire this conviction through thoughts arisen by Wittgenstein’s words?
That's not what I meant though. I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing. We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself. We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real". Not all words or sentences point to anything, or anything meaningful. And the trap we sometimes fall into (as philosophers especially?) is assuming that they always mean something.
Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it. The mistake is reversing that, by thinking that by creating new words or combinations of words, we can bring something into existence.
It links nicely with the positivists' ideas about meaningful/non meaningful statements as well - which I believe were inspired by Wittgenstein.
We think intuitively that because we constructed this sentence with words, that it must have meaning, and must have an answer - as you say, it is flipping the causal relationship between starting with a sign and using language versus starting with language and trying to find a sign. This question is ultimately the latter.
Would my opinion be that you are wrong, it would not imply that:
- I'm right about you being wrong;
- my own view is right and spread it would be an act of correction.
> I meant that words are like signs; they point at the real thing.
Nothingness doesn't point at anything real by definition.
> We must be careful not to confuse the sign for the thing itself.
Nor the sign with an interpretation act stimulated by some sign.
> We can't simply rearrange words and assume that what this new sign, this new combination of words points to, is "real".
Words don't exist outside some interpretation process, by the way.
>Edit: First the thing exists, then we use a word to refer to it.
That's a bit trickier. Because before someone use a word to refer to something, this word didn't exist. Naming things is a performative action. Through words, not only can you gain new knowledge that you can challenge through non-verbal actions, but they change the reality itself as it introduces new relationships in the world that where not present before there were used as a reference tool.
This argument was initially somewhat ignored until revived by the great Saul Kripke in his book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. I take this to be one of the great epistemological problems, joining the ranks of similar challenges like Descartes' demon. Like Descartes, Wittgenstein offered a solution, albeit a much less religious one than Descartes.
I would say the first 100 or so pages of the book are a form of conceptual cartography around language. Later, he uses that "grammatical analysis" to look at psychology, vision, pain, and many other topics.
There are a lot of incredibly consequential arguments and thought experiments in the book, but you can pare them down to some generalizations:
- Language is a form of behavior.
- Language is public and cannot be fundamentally private. As are rules and rule following.
- For almost every case, meaning is use in a form of life (there are some caveats, like color, which also rely on an ostensive definition). An explanation of the "grammar" of a word, is an explanation of a rule for the use of the word in a particular context.
- Understanding is akin to an ability.
- Many of our complex mental and cognitive and cogitative abilities, are manifest in our behavior, the most rich and complex being language.
- Fundamental skepticism, of a Cartesian sort, is nonsense. Humans are social animals with the ability for an enormously complex language rich in concepts; the mind/body, inside/outside, distinction is a false picture that leads to nonsense. Do not mistake the personal for the private.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4v540LW145G9MpAQSkmVWK
In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality.
I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
My advisor at university, a philosophy professor, said the same thing about Wittgenstein. During the initial part of his graduate studies, philosophy left him empty, and depressed. Discovering, and focusing on, Wittgenstein, changed his life.
There is a fantastic book that I recommend along these lines: https://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Story-John-Kaag/d...
It's a bit like "Gödel for transcendentals". But this has been mostly ignored, while the tools used by Wittgenstein have been an inspiration to many.
The relationship between the Russell/Gödel camp and Wittgenstein is complicated - In some ways at odds (as they grew apart Russell thought Wittgenstein was dedicating his life to not thinking) but I think they were concerned with the same questions.
Gödel and Wittgenstein would probably both agree that you can't describe the system from within the system. Gödel was more interested pulling the threads and exploring the edges of that, whereas Wittgenstein took that to mean philosophy (at least as it pertains to living) was a lost cause and distraction from reality. In other words, I feel they were on the same page but had completely different ultimate interests.
And ultimately, the Russell camp won - a modern echo of that is the search for the one equation that will describe all of reality, or at least a belief that even if we never find it there is still one out there. Wittgenstein would probably believe that no man made system could fundamentally describe reality.
It's largely been ignored, yes, because where do you go from there? Someone who believes in Wittgenstein is probably more likely to join the army or become an architect than become a philosopher, which guarantees that it will be ignored. Evolutionarily it's an idea that doesn't fit into the ecosystem.
Mind that I do not mean to suggest any kind of parallelism in a strict sense (hence the emoticon.)
Regarding the lost cause as a distraction, I'm not so sure about that. I guess, Wittgenstein would have insisted on this being about all, which was important to us, but nevertheless being out of reach of any kind of theory in the strict sense.
(And this is, because – according to Wittgenstein – it is essentially outside of any reality, which is accessibly to us. On the other hand, it may have still reality beyond this, "The contemplation of the world sub specie aeterni is its contemplation as a limited whole." [6.45], "Die Anschauung der Welt sub specie aeterni ist ihre Anschauung als-begrenztes-Ganzes." However, there are no legitimate question that may be actually posed regarding this limited whole, which is reflected just as a feeling from the inside; hence, the proposed riddle – which is really about existence – doesn't exist on any level of disciplined discourse.)
Regarding evolutionary fitness, there may have been a niche: According to the Tractatus, the mystical arises, which might have been further explored by some theory of emergence. But this developed only much later and – as far as I know it — a connection was never made.
Whereas W II does get more specific and deeply explores the real-world implications, partly as a rejection of W I's tendency to speak in abstract, high-level ideas. But W II doesn't dwell on the implications of the inherent fallacy of logic as Godel does, just uses that as a rung in the ladder to somewhere else.
And I didn't take it as you making a direct like to Godel, but it's interesting to think about because they were all part of the same zeitgeist which is still strongly echoing in our culture. They didn't see eye-to-eye in their life despite some common threads, and it got me thinking about WHY that was.
(While some of this may remind of Kant's thing in itself, it is comes from an entirely different direction, namely, a proposed teleology of philosophy, while Kant addresses this from the fundamentals of perception.)
This suggests, as Chalmers has pointed out, that the disagreement is not semantic. It’s rather a substantial philosophical issue. No linguistic analysis will resolve the debate. Science might someday, if the matter can be settled empirically.
In this case it comes to something also very common in philosophy, discussions that can be questioned as “are we discussing terms or philosophy or both at the same time?” and often the case is “both” making it very hard to have a philosophical discussion when opposing sides disagree both on the terminology and the philosophy and don’t separate the two disagreements very well.
How about Epicurus?
I'm not at all in the philosophy realm, so I don't know who is revered or reviled. Maybe he's not noteworthy enough, too idealistic or just plain wrong? Perhaps he's passed over for some other reason.
The few things I've read about his philosophies seem like they're focused on finding basic happiness. Am I just oversimplifying?
Apologies in advance as I haven't read any Wittgenstein myself, but am I wrong in thinking this is what the Philosophical Investigations was about (as opposed to the Tractatus)?
Both had a sort of "end philosophy" ambition, to a degree. The Tractatus, with its ambition to address the ways that language touches the world in a picture theory, was more akin to the idea of "solving" philosophy in a sense. In PI, he makes a change in his view of philosophy towards anthropology and remarks on language that is rooted in behavior and use. PI "ends philosophy" more in the sense of dissolving philosophical issues, by revealing the conceptual underpinnings of a number of philosophical debates as nonsense. Philosophy's job, thus, becomes conceptual clarification.
So to answer your question, yes, though there is some overlap.
Nāgārjuna is one particularly impressive philosopher of the Madhyamaka school, a school which he set the groundwork for in his book Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (Madhyamaka means middle way, a kārikā is a work composed of verses that concisely formulate some doctrine). There's a great translation and explanation by Mark Siderits and Shōryū Katsura if anyone is interested.
I think there are a lot of parallels with Wittgenstein's philosophy, and it speaks to Wittgenstein's genius that he was able to conceive of a similar philosophy largely independently.
"2.12: The picture is a model of reality", "3: The logical picture of the facts is the thought.", "4: The thought is the significant proposition.", "4.001: The totality of propositions is the language.", "4.002: Language disguises the thought", "4.003: Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language."
The problem he had with Tractatus was the absurdity of trying logically construct an argument against logic - Tractatus was strongly influenced by Russell. But he wasn't trying to define a universal logic system like Russell or poking at the limits of one like Godel. He makes that clear at the end:
"6.54: My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.", "7: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."
The difference between "early Wittgenstein" and "late Wittgenstein" is mostly (though not entirely) about form, he's just much clearer about and does deeper dives into his ideas in Philosophical Investigations and other later writing. He started hating the whole idea of writing a "general, abstract form", but doesn't shift the fundamental thrust of his worldview.
Of course, the Tractatus is pretty dense and there's a lot of disagreement about interpretation, this is just my opinion on it. It's a really wonderful book if you spend time with it, the structure is very fascinating, it feels like a puzzle. I assume anyone on HN trends nerdy, and though it might be more difficult that Investigations, I think Tractatus appeals more to my nerdy side.
It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life.
It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me.
Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...
Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends.
I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.
"On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?".
But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning.
Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work.
As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications.
Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).
A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix
Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary.
Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.
Does anyone who has read it have any insight as to what it was about it that was so captivating to Wittgenstein?
https://archive.is/Q11Yq