Let's do a @threadapalooza about Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the greatest minds of the 20th century, a philosophical prodigy who started as a formal logician and ended as a kind of avant-garde artist, sage, and Zen-like monk. Throughout his life, he was obsessed with language.
https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/1358822158466711558
Here is Wittgenstein in the second half of his career, having distanced himself from his Tractatus (the work that launched him to global fame): "Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry." (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) 2/
Wittgenstein started out a #positivist (focused on distinguishing between valid propositions and nonsensical ones). But he ends up concluding that language is far more more robust and meaningful than what the analytic categories of sense and nonsense can say about it. 3
Wittgenstein's journey is a personal inspiration, a kind of Road to Damascus story of conversion. And his late work should be studied and appreciated the way people study the later works of Picasso, Beethoven, Glenn Gould, Heidegger. 4
Having proven his chops in youth, he earns the right to be wildly experimental in his maturity. Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations are poetic fragments, nuggets that cohere like items in a collage. 5
The form of his loosely gathered riffs stand in marked contrast to the sentences in the Tractatus which are written in the form of geometric proof with each numbered conclusion following from a previous numbered premise. 6
It's as if Wittgenstein no longer believes in logic's over-arching authority; language is not a quasi-mathematical system of self-contained propositions, but what he calls "a form of life." 7
A bit of quick biography--Wittgenstein was born in Vienna (1889) to an assimilated Jewish family that had all converted to Catholicism. Despite the Wittgenstein family's support for Hitler, they were all murdered in the Holocaust. 8
Wittgenstein lived and wrote in Cambridge, England. He was homosexual at a time when it was illegal to express it. He was largely closeted and he had a complicated relationship to his sexuality; he suffered from self-loathing. 9
His Jewish ethnicity, Catholic roots, immigrant status and marginalized sexuality may play a role in his interests in language and communication, but we shouldn't over-read or over-determine. Still, it's noteworthy that he thought it was impossible to have "private language." 10
The young Wittgenstein was skeptical of the religious claims into which he was inculcated, but the later Wittgenstein often writes positively of religion and faith. 11
Here he is 1947: "Is what I am doing [my work in philosophy] really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above." Rush Rhees says Wittgenstein said he would like to dedicate his oeuvre to the glory of God. 12
The Tractatus famously ends, "whereof one cannot speak one must be silent." But if philosophy can and must be conducted as poetry, then the later Wittgenstein dares to speak where early Wittgenstein says we cannot. 13
The boundary of language in the Tractatus is whether it describes something real. The boundary of language in the later work is whether it does something meaningful (irrespective of its metaphysical validity). 14
Wittgenstein's later thought is called "ordinary language philosophy" b/c it suggests that philosophy doesn't know better than ordinary language. How we speak day-to -day is already wise even if we can't fathom its wisdom. The philosopher's job isn't to attack mundane speech 15
but to show the ways in which it is meaningful, despite seeming to be odd or nonsensical. 16
You can see how this more generous stance holds a lot of space for believing in matters that a strict logician would find to be weird. Wittgenstein was friends with the atheist Bertrand Russell. Russell hailed the Tractatus a work of genius. But 17
Many of Wittgenstein's students were religious and thought his later work made a strong philosophical or post-philosophical case for the possibility of being both religious and thoughtful. 18
Core to this argument is Wittgenstein's idea of the "language game"--the idea that how we speak should be evaluated not in terms of the propositional content, but in terms of what we are trying to communicate or even "do". 19
In linguistics, this is called "pragmatics." In dialectical philosophy, we might say that the most important thing in a given speech act is the relationship it establishes between speaker and listener(s). 20
You can see this kind of argument btw in the work of both @robinhanson and @nntaleb --don't judge what people say, but rather judge them according to what they are using the words to do or justify. 21
So it's not the job of the philosopher to say that words like "God" or "Resurrection" are meaningless. It's the job of the philosopher, now a kind of linguistic anthropologist, to understand how they are meaningful. Still, religious folk who follow Wittgenstein are odd 22
Because Wittgenstein's philosophy brackets metaphysics and focuses on pragmatics. People who "really believe" may have permission from Wittgenstein to do so, but Wittgenstein's thought doesn't get you to the "really" in any spiritual metaphysical sense. 23
The focus is on what words and phrases do here on earth. 24
This makes his later thought methodologically atheistic and also "post-Kantian": Kant thought we can't know anything other than how our minds constitute and produce knowledge...25
Substitute in "language" for "knowledge" or "cognition" and you have Wittgenstein. We bathe in language and can never get beyond or out of it. Language itself is the matrix. Enlightenment isn't getting out, but through. 26
(Wittgenstein's) Philosophy is useful insofar as it helps us realize that Language is our element. 27
Wittgenstein's sense that language is our element is not new--Aristotle defines us as beings who have language. But his idea that language can't be transcended is new. 28
For Plato, there's a hope of getting outside the cave of shadows; in Hinduism, we hope to break through the veil of illusion; in a lot of meditative practices, the mind is full of noise that needs to be quieted. 29
For Wittgenstein, there is no outside the cave, and whatever silent experience we might have in prayer or contemplation makes sense only against a backdrop or context of having (or being had by) language. 30
Tho LW and Heidegger basically avoided each other, their insights have much in common--and some has been written about it...both emphasize what Heidegger calls a "hermeneutic circle": we can't extricate ourselves from the concepts and grammars into which we are "thrown"... 31
LW and MH didn't talk to each other, but their students and followers did, and in the figures of Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, as well as in the work of American "Language poets" they came together. 32
The common ideas for which they are lauded in a U.S. academic context are 1) language and meaning are communal-->bootstrapped individualism is absurd when it comes to thinking. 2) Every speech act is a kind of revision of language as a whole and a kind of antagonistic event 33
in which the meaning of what came before is being contested. Dialogue is a content between cliche (the floor of meaning) and novel insight appropriate to the moment (the ceiling). 34
3) Interpretation is a game. An author's or speaker's intent is one game we can play, but not the only one. Language is an infinite game--there is no end to interpretation. The rules aren't fixed. We constantly rewrite and negotiate them. 35
It's not exactly a game that can be won--although I suppose some games are of this nature, and this is what the youths today call "flexing." It's a game more in the sense that it playful, even if we take it seriously. The laws are internal to it. There is no outside. 36
Does this smack of "relativism"? In some sense, yes, as no moral judgment is made about which games are good and which bad. Which rules good and which bad. 37
although sympathetic, I've written critically about pragmatism in a bunch of places: whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/whats-the-us… & whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/should-we-cu… 38
Rorty would likely say that relativism is the risk we must take to ensure something "democratic," whereas those who rail against relativism end up being dogmatic and thus authoritarian in their politics and ethics...39
There are guard-rails which are inbuilt into pragmatism, but they are the historically developed ideals agreed upon by a community. Leo Strauss would not be pleased and would worry pragmatism is too weak to protect us from fascism:
https://twitter.com/ZoharAtkins/status/135343077008653516940
Strauss and Wittgenstein both lived through the Shoah, but Wittgenstein's temperament, outwardly, seems more jocular, hence the reigning metaphor of language as a game. LW says “I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” 41
Also this: “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” 42
Not that humor isn't serious, as LW says. Humor can be more hard hitting than saying it plain, and also accords with the figure of the sad clown or jester. 43
One of my favorite contemporary poets is @ChrlesBernstein , a student of Stanley Cavell, and a kind of intellectual grandchild of Wittgenstein. His work is some of the funniest and saddest I know of, often at the same time. 44
But there's a good critique to make of the jesters, namely that they use jokes to avoid something more sincere and heartfelt. Irony and misdirection are usually opposed to the sentimental, though in my experience sentimentality can be its own form of avoidance. 45
Anyways, a pure Wittgensteinian can't prefer one mood to another; all are valid, especially when they are doing what they set out to do--philosophically speaking, we need to evaluate thinkers and artists according to their designs. 46
First seek to know what someone is trying to do, then decide if they're doing it correctly, and then decide if that's what they should be doing, if the aim is noble. 47
Husserl didn't do this when he was reading Heidegger's Being and Time. Instead, he kept writing in the margins of his early draft copy, "This isn't Husserl." 48
Wittgenstein was often cheeky, but his cheekiness was in my view also deep, much like Nietzsche's cutting aphoristic style. Here Wittgenstein is again: "The real question of life after death isn't whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves." 49
This is quintessential LW. Let's accept something that nobody accepts and then show why even if we accept it, it's not as awesome or helpful as we thought. 50
Compare to Nietzsche (cited in Franz Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption). The greatest problem for atheists isn't that God doesn't exist, but "If God exists how can I bear not to be God?" 51
Wittgenstein, like Heidegger (and Nietzsche), has an ambivalent relationship to philosophy. I'll detail the ways in which Wittgenstein is and isn't a philosopher, by his own lights. 51
On the one hand, he's Socratic. Philosophy is dialogical. It's about taking examples from life and thinking harder about them. Philosophy is a form of the examined life. It's enriching and beautiful. 52
On the other hand, philosophy can't aspire to being systematic; it's not a grand theory of everything. It's not a science. It's a kind of spiritual endeavor or discipline, maybe an ethical one, but it's not to be universally privileged as a master discourse. 53
It's not the queen to which all other disciplines are handmaidens, to use the medieval metaphor. 54
the young @paulg concluded that philosophy was less compelling than engineering and wrote about why here: paulgraham.com/worked.html In many ways, Wittgenstein would agree and would give Graham his blessing. 55
You might recall the phrase of Pierre Hadot: "Philosophy is a way of life." This is also true for Wittgenstein, for whom philosophy at the end was a deeply idiosyncratic and aesthetic mode, even if in service of wisdom. 56
The phrase "ordinary language philosophy" captures Wittgenstein's critique of philosophy's pretentiousness. Drop the mask of feeling better than others, of knowing better, he might say. 57
But he still said it philosophically, if weirdly, and he said it mostly to philosophers even though his greatest listeners tended to be artists, linguists, coders, folks from outside philosophy departments. 58
As with Heidegger, there's often a disconnect between the academic followers' style and the spirit of the thinker to whom their careers are devoted. I can't imagine Wittgenstein liking the idea that philosophy should be contained in academic departments and conference papers 59
But we gotta eat and if academia wants to patronize some Wittgenstein scholars, there are worse things...just don't be fooled that writing books on Wittgenstein means following his call to arms, which is a summons to live well, regardless of where. 60
But now I've made LW out to be a kind of badboy hostile to philosophy and that's not quite accurate either. Here he is, defending philosophy: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." 61
The best way I can put it is that he's nondual, like Heidegger. Language is ubiquitous, and so philosophy isn't above it. But philosophy can help us know and internalize the ubiquity and thus be more skilled in the way we live. 62
It can better attune us to our noisy thoughts, to what we say to others and what others say to us; it can give us more agency and more possibility. In this sense, philosophy liberates, at least at the individual level, at least in a stoic sense of feeling internally free. 63
Eastern contemplatives tend to focus on the non-linguistic. They move from "form to emptiness." But if form is emptiness emptiness is also form and you might say that Wittgenstein helps us meditate towards and into language. 64
So this is one of the things that makes Wittgenstein difficult to place. He's a kind of "Frankenstein" in the sense of bringing together two seemingly contradictory things. He's a pragmatist AND a contemplative. 65
Philosophy is about demystifying life while living it; it's not about brooding, or stepping, but about playing a game. And yet it's a game that should help us wake up; unlike other games that are simply immersive. 66
Here's another paradoxical point that Wittgenstein takes on: he's a skeptic and a critic of skepticism at the same time (see his "On Certainty"). 67
There, he says that to be able to doubt anything you have to hold one thing indubitable or constant. (Descartes said the same thing). Wittgenstein isn't going to tell us what should be the anchor of our doubts--but he is going to say that we can't coherently doubt everything. 68
Thus, what we doubt tells us as much about what we believe as it does what we find questionable. There is always some solid ground on which we stand, even if that ground can and does shift. 69
There's a gratitude and a relief that can come from realizing that total skepticism can't get off the ground. There's a gratitude and relief in realizing that however much we feel at odds with the world it is the world itself that allows us to feel this way. 70
Conversely--and this is why Wittgenstein said he was drawn to faith and religion--"At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded." 71
If philosophy's traditional goal was self knowledge, then we can discover it only angularly, by hitting up against the thing which is unfounded in us. 72
If you're putting your values in a mission statement, that's not your values. Your beliefs can't be put into creed. Why? Because what is unfounded eludes you, it's what engenders the statement, but not the statement itself. 73
The finger pointing at the moon isn't the moon. The story I tell about myself isn't me. The theory of language isn't language itself. 74
So that's it? Why all the books, all the lectures? Can't we just get the tweet sized version and be done with the lesson? 75
Well, the same lightweight wise-acre comment can be made about Zen. Why do I need to sit Zazen if everything is enlightened already? 76
The answer is multiple. One is that knowing something is not the same as internalizing it, embodying it, practicing it. Another is that simplicity must be earned. Another is the process is the goal. 77
Wittgenstein says his Tractatus is like a ladder that once climbed can be kicked away. 78
The image, to me, is mystical--much like a mandala. Philosophy is a road to nowhere, but one that requires some painstaking. Language is ordinary, but the ordinary is anything but. 79
Now this sentiment, as I've written about re: Strauss, Arendt, Heidegger, in other mega threads is rather self-serving. It's oracular. It makes the philosopher into someone inscrutable, a kind of cult figure. 80
It can be dangerous to turn the philosopher into a mystic because accountability becomes a case of "I know it when I see it"; what's the contribution? Social scientists and scientists can stand apart from their research. 81
But philosophers like Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Strauss, and Arendt perpetuate a cult of personality because they seem to suggest that the point is the embodiment of wisdom, not the productization of it in the form of a white paper. 82
I agree with them, and so does Socrates, who in the Phaedrus, prefers speech to writing. I'd rather hang out with Wittgenstein than read his books, and so would many of his students who speak of him as a wise man. 83
Publish or perish culture flips the model. Number of citations by other academics matter more than student evals. 84
There are pros and cons to both models; the master craftsman/sage is sacrificed on the altar of bureaucracy and jury by (usually envious) peers. But the alternative is a world where there are 99 quacks for every sage and the ability to draw an audience triumphs over expertise 85
One question to consider is whether the philosopher can be thought of as an expert. Another is what it might mean to be an expert in philosophy in a democratic age? Certainly a specialist or researcher on a topic can be an expert. 86
But can one be an expert in something as visionary and opaque and grail-like as "loving wisdom"? Yogis have asanas. Meditators have techniques. But is there a philosophical technique? 87
I think the answer is somewhat negative, which makes philosophy a singular, idiosyncratic endeavor, closer to art. Of course, one can learn certain kinds of questions and terms from "tradition" but to think is to make it one's own. 88
Like Heidegger, I think Wittgenstein endures as an existential example. What he thought about topic X is not as evergreen as the fact that, in thinking for himself, he showed us we can think for ourselves. 89
There is no private language--says Wittgenstein--and yet philosophy can come close to being one, in the positive sense. It is a prayerful, devotional state, whether or not it clarifies anything about the world. 90
When I was in high school I went to the philosophy section of the public library and took out Wittgenstein in 90 minutes. I don't remember anything from it and the only philosopher I read was Kierkegaard. 91
But I remember feeling awed that there was someone who wanted to rethink the entire history of philosophy--an awe I experienced when I encountered Heidegger. 92
Few have stood at the end of a tradition with simultaneous reverence and irreverence--a grand sense that they know better, but also a humble sense that what they know is so obvious as to be readily available. 93
Wittgenstein and Heidegger are intimidating names whose work is not the easiest to penetrate or make sense of, but both are philosophers turned therapists, philosophers who think the point of philosophy is to grow out of expertise and into awe. 94
They have the credibility to preach "beginner's mind" because they were far from novices. But we do them discredit by venerating their "genius" and leaving them on their lonely mountains of erudition and creativity. 95
Wittgenstein is a rare thinker in that his work inspires two opposite movements--a so called "analytic tradition" that is hyper logical and mathematical and a so called "continental tradition" that sees him as a postmodernist, skeptical of grand narratives. 96
Wittgenstein, like Heidegger, influenced the self-help movement, insofar as he thought our problems in communication and understanding could be resolved simply by changing our attitude to language. 97
But his work also inspires an appreciation for culture and tradition as sources of meaning. If the limits of one's language are the limits of one's world then a rich world is one with an expansive language. 98
Wittgenstein is a modernist in his rejection or bracketing of metaphysics but a traditionalist in the sense that Chesterton declared tradition a "democracy of the dead." 99
Wittgenstein the man is dead, but his language game of finding language to be a game we can't but play continues. Your move. Speak and listen wisely. 100 (fin)
Note of correction--LW's *immediate family wasn't all murdered in the Holocaust. They were able to get out due to a loophole, but spent their fortune saving themselves...Here's a good article. 3 of LW's siblings committed suicide. newyorker.com/magazine/2009/…
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