Simply Wittgenstein

James C. Klagge

• Publisher: Simply Charly
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781943657049
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosopher Biographies

"There are many introductions to the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, but I think James Klagge has produced the very best. Taking as his premise that his reader may know nothing about Wittgenstein or, for that matter, about philosophy, Klagge gives a lucid, charming, and wholly convincing account of Wittgenstein's basic ideas, his way of thinking, his views on religion, culture, ethical behavior, and so on. He is especially good at explaining the root concepts like "language game, " "form of life, " and "private language." But perhaps the highlight of this book is its set of applications: that is, how do Wittgenstein's concepts and writings help us to understand the events of our time from courtroom cases to the bombing of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Wittgenstein, Klagge shows, literally helps us to live our lives: he is the philosopher par excellence of the twentieth—and now the twenty-first—centuries. Klagge's own clarity is exemplary: he never condescends to the reader and yet makes Wittgenstein's thought wonderfully clear."
—Marjorie Perloff, Sadie Dernham Patek Emerita Professor of Humanities at Stanford University

Born in Vienna into an extremely wealthy and highly cultured family, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) grew up surrounded by art, music, and a disturbing amount of dysfunctional behavior. After studying mechanical engineering and developing an interest in aeronautics, he became obsessed with mathematics and logic, which led to his life's work exploring the relationship between language, philosophy, and reality.

In Simply Wittgenstein, James Klagge presents a fascinating portrait of this brilliant and troubled man, while exploring his two extraordinary books—the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations —in which he gave concrete form to his singular and perplexing ideas. Drawing on 30 years of teaching about Wittgenstein at both the undergraduate and graduate level, Klagge provides a clear and accessible introduction to these seminal works, helping the reader understand the revolutionary nature of Wittgenstein's insights and the reason they continue to resonate in our own time.

Though Wittgenstein himself was convinced that he would never be properly understood, Simply Wittgenstein shows, with brevity and lucidity, that his ideas have had a profound and enduring effect on how we think about language and life.

5

The Philosophical Investigations

The only visual similarity between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations (PI) is that both begin with the number 1. After that, the differences accumulate.

The Investigations is much longer, with numbered sections sometimes extending over a page or more. Concerning the brevity of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein remarked to a friend in 1949: “Every sentence of the Tractatus should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition. My present style is quite different; I am trying to avoid that error” (CW, p. 159).

Although the Investigations consists of numbered sections, there are no decimals and no clear sense of organization. Wittgenstein addressed this in the Preface: “my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination.—And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought.” In one of his course lectures, he explained this by comparing himself and his job to that of a tour guide:

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a tour guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you [on] many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times—each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a born Londoner. (GJ, p. 143)

Even if, after reading the Investigations, you don’t find your way about language like a native, at least you know what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish and how he had gone about it. Familiarizing someone with a city is a very different project from laying out the steps of a proof.

For a few years in the early 1930s, Wittgenstein worked with a member of the Vienna Circle, Friedrich Waismann, to write a book on his new ideas. Waismann tried to lay out Wittgenstein’s views in a well-organized fashion, explaining everything carefully as he went along. But Wittgenstein was never satisfied with the outcome—partly because his views were changing, but also because Waismann’s expository format was simply not how Wittgenstein thought his views were best conveyed. This book you are reading now tries to do what Waismann failed to do, so reader beware!

The Tractatus consists of assertions. The Investigations, on the other hand, contains not just assertions but also 784 questions of which only 110 are answered, and 70 of those answers are intentionally wrong (AW, p. 235). It is not immediately obvious that many of the answers are meant to be wrong—and this is often confusing to readers.

In fact, the Philosophical Investigations is really a sort of dialogue. In certain ways, it is like a Socratic dialogue by Plato. Different points of view are expressed, and a final resolution of them is not always reached. The dialogue format is clear in Plato from the fact that contributions to the discussion are always ascribed to a particular character, as in a play. In Wittgenstein’s work, however, there are no named “characters.” Sometimes he prefaced a statement with “Suppose someone said” (PI §14), sometimes he simply included a sentence in quotation marks (PI §27) or surrounded by dashes, and sometimes he asserted a sentence without quotation marks around it, yet didn’t mean to endorse it, such as: Thinking is surrounded by a nimbus (PI §97). So it is much less clear that it is a dialogue.

It is crucial for the reader to see that the Investigations is a tentative discussion of ideas. Wittgenstein endorsed some of these ideas, but it takes some practice to see when he did and when he did not. I think you can see the discussion as similar to what happens in a classroom, with points being made, questions being asked, and answers being commented on. But some scholars see the discussion as more of an internal conversation in which we hear different voices inside Wittgenstein’s head: a voice of “temptation,” a voice of “reason,” and even perhaps a voice of “ironic commentary” (AL, p. 71; WP, p. 22). In any case, it is not helpful to see the Investigations as a presentation of Wittgenstein’s beliefs at that time. Instead, imagine that he is showing us ways to think through these issues—in other words, how to do philosophy. While working on the Investigations Wittgenstein wrote: “One could call this book a textbook. But not a textbook in that it imparts knowledge, but in that it stimulates thought.”

Finally, while the Tractatus is a finished work, the Philosophical Investigations is not. Wittgenstein was never completely satisfied with what he wrote in the Investigations, which is why he never published it himself; but it is not even exactly clear what material he saw as constituting the Investigations. What Wittgenstein thought of as the book he was working on is closest to what was published in 1953 as Part I of the Philosophical Investigations. The editors at that time also included additional material that they labeled “Part II,” which comprised later on-going reflections on related material. (In the 2009 edition of the Philosophical Investigations, this material was labeled “Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment.”) But it is not obvious how much of “Part I” should be included. For example, Wittgenstein worked on and revised the material up through §421 more extensively than the material that follows.

Nevertheless, despite major differences between the form of these two books, and, as we will see, also in Wittgenstein’s positions, there are continuities in the topics he considered to be significant. It is important to know where he began, in the Tractatus, to appreciate where he travels to, in the Investigations.

Language

Once Wittgenstein began thinking about philosophy again in 1929, it did not take long for him to realize that tinkering with the Tractatus would not suffice. Soon he saw the need for bigger shifts in his viewpoint. It was in thinking about language that these changes were clearest.

In November of 1929, Wittgenstein ended his lecture on ethics by talking about “the tendency of all men who have ever tried to talk or write Ethics or Religion … to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.” Yet, a year later, when he was meeting once again with members of the Vienna Circle and discussing religion, he said: “Running against the limits of language? Language is, after all, not a cage” (VC, p. 117).

This was a big change. What accounted for this transformation in his view of language? Here is part of the story, as told by one of Wittgenstein’s friends:

Wittgenstein and [Piero] Sraffa, a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas of the Tractatus. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, … Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ Sraffa’s example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same ‘form’. This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.” (MM, pp. 57-8)

The gesture Sraffa used was akin to giving someone the finger. Sraffa’s point was that a gesture could convey meaning in the way language does, and yet it does not do so by representing a state of affairs. It does not get meaning by sharing a logical form. Language does not have to be representational. Another friend said Wittgenstein’s “discussions with Sraffa made him feel like a tree from which all branches had been cut” (MM, p. 15). And Wittgenstein himself testified to Sraffa’s impact on his thinking in the Preface to the Investigations.

Even if ethical judgments, say, do not describe reality, the language in which they are expressed may serve other functions. Wasn’t the account in the Tractatus of how language has sense correct? “Yes,” he says, “but only for [a] narrowly circumscribed area, not for the whole of what” we call language (PI §3).

When Wittgenstein set out to write about his new views, he began by contrasting them with a picture of language he found in St. Augustine’s Confessions (PI §1). He told a friend that he chose to begin the Investigations with this passage from St. Augustine “not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it” (MM, pp. 59-60). In fact, the passage has important things in common with his own view in the Tractatus: “The words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names…. Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI §1).

During the war, Wittgenstein’s understanding of language had been shaped by the use of a model in a legal court to represent a traffic accident. But now he was prompted by a different comparison: “One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football [in the US: soccer] game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words” (MM, p. 55). This seems to be the origin of Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games.”

Language Games

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein offered a picture theory of language, which accounted for the saying (or describing) and the showing uses of language. In the Investigations, he imagined a number of different uses of language, to begin with through scenarios where people are shopping (§1) or building (§2). Then he went on to mention the great variety of language games in this brain-stormed list:

Giving orders, and acting on them—Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements—Constructing an object from a description (or drawing)—Reporting an event—Speculating about the event—Forming and testing a hypothesis—Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—Making up a story, and reading one—Acting in a play—Singing rounds—Guessing riddles—Cracking a joke, telling one—Solving a problem in applied arithmetic—Translating from one language into another—Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI §23)

In each of these kinds of activities language is involved, but also other kinds of gestures and reactions that have meaning are used. They have meaning in the context of their use. Perhaps a good example of a language game is how people interact in a classroom setting. Depending on the kind of class—lecture, discussion, lab—certain people have a role of authority, certain gestures are used to indicate request or permission to speak, certain expectations exist as to the topics addressed and the length of time one may speak. All of these rules, roles, and expectations are part of the language game of the classroom. Describing the rules, roles, and expectations spells out the “grammar” of that language game. Such rules, roles, and expectations can differ from one language game to another, and they can change over time within a given language game. Certainly, the language games of the classroom have changed in my 33 years of college teaching.

Wittgenstein prefaced his list by asking “how many kinds of sentences are there?” and replied, “there are countless kinds.” Three years after the Investigations was published, an Oxford philosopher, J. L. Austin, gave a talk on BBC radio, in which he made fun of this reply:

Certainly there are a great many uses of language…. I think we should not despair too easily and talk, as people are apt to do, about the infinite uses of language. Philosophers will do this when they have listed as many, let us say, as seventeen [Wittgenstein lists eighteen]; but even if there were something like ten thousand uses of language, surely we could list them all in time. This, after all, is no larger than the number of species of beetle that entomologists have taken the pains to list. (PU, p. 234)

Austin approached language much as an entomologist classifies insects.

Wittgenstein did ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Table Of Contents
• Praise for Simply Wittgenstein
• Other Great Lives
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• The Tractatus
• Some Complications
• The Great War
• Interlude
• The Philosophical Investigations
• Wittgenstein's Applications
• The End
• Sources
• Suggested Reading
• About the Author
• A Word from the Publisher