Transcript Later Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein thought that his influence as a teacher
was, on the whole, harmful to the development of
independent minds in his disciples. I am afraid that he
was right. And I believe that I can partly understand
why it should be so. Because of the depth and
originality of his thinking, it is very difficult to
understand Wittgenstein's ideas and even more
difficult to incorporate them into one's own thinking.
At the same time the magic of his personality and style
was most inviting and persuasive. To learn from
Wittgenstein without coming to adopt his forms of
expression and catchwords and even to imitate his tone
of voice, his mien and gestures was almost impossible.
- G. H. von Wright
Am I the only one who cannot found a school or can a
philosopher never do this? I cannot found a school
because I do not really want to be imitated. Not at any
rate by those who publish articles in philosophy
journals. (CV, ?)
Working in philosophy - like work in architecture in
many respects - is really more a working on oneself. On
one's own interpretation. On one's way of seeing
things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 16)
The solution of philosophical problems can be
compared with a gift in a fairy tale: in the magic castle it
appears enchanted and if you look at it outside in the
daylight it is nothing but an ordinary bit of iron (or
something of the sort). (CV, p. 11)
Two Forms of Inside Baseball
• The Philosophical Subject-Matter:
– Fregean-Russellian ‘logicist’ program;
– Frege’s conceptual realism;
– Russell’s logical atomism; logical positivism.
• Wittgenstein’s Duty of Genius:
– Genius or talent;
– art and ethics;
– romanticism and modernism.
• Socrates is mortal
• Bruce Wayne is Batman
• The present King of France is bald.
– (For all x there is some x)(x is KF)(x is bald)
• 1+1=2
– (read the first 200 pages of Principia
Mathematica)
Important Tractarian notions:
• Isomorphism of thought-language-world.
• The need for ‘simples’.
• Language already in order as it is.
This sort of thinking is often thought to be reductive –
positivistic! (And it is.)
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
Nope. “There are fewer things in heaven and earth
than are dreamt of in your non-philosophy.”
• “The world is all that is the case.” (1)
• “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must
remain silent.” (7)
– the notorious say/show distinction.
If any philosophy is going to work, rationally, it’s going to be Frege-Russell style
philosophy. From the fact that Frege-Russell style analysis is rather sterile and
deflationary in spirit, we deduce that, at best, philosophy isn’t worth much. (But
we can’t say that, strictly.)
“And now I must say that if I contemplate what Ethics
really would have to be if there were such a science,
this result seems to me quite obvious. It seem to me
obvious that nothing we could ever think or say should
be the thing. That we cannot write a scientific book,
the subject matter of which could be intrinsically
sublime and above all other subject matters. I can only
describe my feeling by the metaphor, that, if a man
could write a book on Ethics which really was a book
on Ethics, this book would, with an explosion, destroy
all the other books in the world.” (PO, p. 40)
Later Wittgenstein
(non-technical;
holistic; pluralistic)
• Language-games.
• Meaning as ‘use’.
• Rule-following
considerations
If any philosophy is going to work,
it’s going to be Frege-Russell style
analytic philosophy. From the fact
that it doesn’t work, we learn that
you can’t really do philosophy.
Philosophy consists of showing how
philosophy always fails.
The problems arising through
a misinterpretation of our
forms of language have the
character of depth. They are
deep disquietudes; their roots
are as deep in us as the forms
of our language and their
significance is as great as the
importance of our language. Let us ask ourselves: why do
we feel a grammatical joke to
be deep? (And that is the
depth of philosophy). (PI,
§111)
The effect of making men think in accordance with dogmas,
perhaps in the form of certain graphic propositions, will be very
peculiar: I am not thinking of these dogmas as determining
men's opinions but rather as completely controlling the
expression of all opinions. People will live under an absolute,
palpable tyranny, though without being able to say they are not
free. I think the Catholic Church does something rather like this.
For dogma is expressed in the form of an assertion, and is
unshakable, but at the same time any practical opinion can be
made to harmonize with it; admittedly more easily in some cases
than in others. It is not a wall setting limits to what can be
believed, but more like a brake which, however, practically
serves the same purpose; it's almost as though someone were
to attach a weight to your foot to restrict your freedom of
movement. This is how dogma becomes irrefutable and beyond
the reach of attack. (CV, p. 28)
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5.): "The general
form of propositions is: This is how things are." –
That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to
oneself countless times. One thinks that one is
tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and
over again, and one is merely tracing round the
frame through which we look at it. (PI, §114)
Philosophy simply puts
everything before us, and
neither explains nor
deduces anything. - Since
everything lies open to view
there is nothing to explain.
For what is hidden, for
example, is of no interest to
us. One might also give the
name "philosophy" to what
is possible before all new
discoveries and inventions.
(PI, §126)
“The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately,
was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking,
profoundly aware of difficult problems of which I, like
him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at least
so I thought) of true philosophical genius. The later
Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown
tired of serious thinking and to have invented a
doctrine which would make such an activity
unnecessary. I do not for one moment believe that
the doctrine which has these lazy consequences is
true. I realise, however, that I have an
overpoweringly strong bias against it, for, if it is true,
philosophy is, at best, a slight help to lexicographers,
and, at worst, an idle tea-table amusement.” - Russell
“Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call
them) suffer from what may be called ‘loss of
problems’. Then everything seems quite simple to
them, no deep problems seem to exist any more,
the world becomes broad and flat and loses all
depth, and what they write becomes immeasurably
shallow and trivial. Russell and H. G. Wells suffer
from this.” (Z, §456)
I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when
I said: philosophy really ought to be written only as
a poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be
possible to gather from this how far my thinking
belongs to the present, future, or past. For I was
thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot
quite do what he would like to be able to do. (CV,
24)
I will describe this experience [of ethics] in order, if
possible, to make you recall the same or similar
experiences, so that we may have a common
ground for our investigation. I believe the best way
of describing it is to say that when I have it I
wonder at the existence of the world. And I am then
inclined to use such phrases as "how extraordinary
that anything should exist" or "how extraordinary
that the world should exist." (PO, p. 41)
“Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.” (TLP, 1)
[The world is all that is the case.]
“the highly syncopated pipings of Herr Wittgenstein's
flute.” – C.D. Broad
What can’t be said, can’t be said, and it can’t be
whistled either.
“You are ME!” – Adolf
Loos, to Wittgenstein
“Whoever goes to the
Ninth Symphony and then
sits down to design a
wallpaper pattern is either
a rogue or a degenerate.” –
Adolf Loos, “Ornament and
Crime”
"His assistants cluster about him. He is severe with
them, demanding, punctilious, but this is for their
own ultimate benefit. He devises hideously difficult
problems, or complicates their work with sudden
oblique comments that open whole new areas of
investigation - yawning chasms under their feet. It is
as if he wishes to place them in situations where
only failure is possible. But failure, too, is a part of
mental life. "I will make you failure-proof," he says
jokingly. His assistants pale.
Is it true, as Valéry said, that every man of genius
contains within himself a false man of genius?”
- Donald Barthelme, “The Genius”
The Attraction of Imperfection. Here I see a poet
who, like many a human being, is more attractive by
virtue of his imperfections than he is by all the things
that grow to completion and perfection under his
hands. Indeed, he owes his advantages and fame
much more to his ultimate incapacity than to his
ample strength. His works never wholly express what
he would like to express and what he would like to
have seen: It seems as if he had had the foretaste of
a vision and never the vision itself; but a tremendous
lust for this vision remains in his soul, and it is from
this that he derives his equally tremendous
eloquence of desire and craving …
By virtue of this lust he lifts his listeners above his
word and all mere "works" and lends them wings to
soar as high as listeners had never soared. Then,
having themselves been transformed into poets
and seers, they lavish admiration upon the creator
of their happiness, as if he had led them
immediately to the vision of what was for him the
holiest and ultimate - as if he had attained his goal
and had really seen and communicated his vision.
His fame benefits from the fact that he never
reached his goal.
- Nietzsche