11 ms·

The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017)

152 points by neonate 8y ago

mrleiter 8y ago
Wonderful article for a short introduction into his work. He was a fascinating personality and his writings are extraordinary. He „only“ published two books in his lifetime, one being tractatus logico-philosophicus, the other being a dictionary for school children. Philosophical Investigations was published post-humously, but it is an excellent view into his mind. As mentioned in the article, there are no subsections, no table of contents. It consists of almost 700 paragraphs. You have to read it from beginning to end. Why I find that great in its own way? Maybe the analogy with the movie >Being John Malkovitch< may help: you are like a visitor in his head. Our thoughts are not tidy and ordered into sections. When you think about a problem (like he does with language and what it is and what it can do and what not), your mind wanders; you come across different issues, tackle them, then come back. It‘s like a written thought process. I can really recommend this book. Its language is easy. As soon as you get used to its style, you can follow.
- halfjew22 8y ago
  I completely agree with your sentiment on our thoughts. They aren't neat and tidy. People like to pretend they are, but this simply isn't true. It's also interesting to think about exactly where these thoughts come from. Where did the thought come from for example that invoked you opening up hacker news at the time you wrote this? Where does great intuition come from? It's all fascinating whether you prescribe to a theory that likens consciousness to that of thinking rocks or if you're incredibly spiritual and think of consciousness more as a radio signal that were tuned into at some arbitrary frequency when we're alive in Earth. If you're interested in being a visitor in ones mind, could I humbly request you check out my comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685
  - mbrock 8y ago
    “I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.” (Preface to Philosophical Investigations)
    - mrleiter 8y ago
      The preface is actually very fun to read. Very honest, quite cynical, too. >"[...] mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it." Such bare honesty! I love it.
noir-york 8y ago
Excellent article. Thanks for posting!
turingspiritfly 8y ago
Is it bad to have expected to the article to be all about how his alleged virtue help become the famed figure he is today? This was just another portrait of his work.
codeulike 8y ago
My favourite Wittgenstein quote: "A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."
- wallace_f 8y ago
  He's right. Modern intellectual and political aversion to open competition and experimentation is, at best, unethical.
  - halfjew22 8y ago
    And is certainly a reflection of people's lack of REAL confidence in themselves. This, combined with our ironically deteriorating ability to communicate in a digital age is leading down not such a bright road.
  - danharaj 8y ago
    Could you elaborate?
    - pjc50 8y ago
      I suspect he's talking about people's refusal to "debate" whether they should be subjected to suffering, discrimination, abuse, etc.
    - halfjew222 8y ago
      As the other comment points out, people aren’t willing to challenge themselves but also feign a confidence about themselves due to various factors such as economic and societal pressures. Admitting you have no idea most of the time is probably more accurate (estimate is obviously a reasonably afauirable skill) but that’s not what boss man is looking for. I think this also evidences itself in the prevalence of imposter theory, especially in younger generations. The reason the saying goes, “that feeling never goes away” is because we all operate outwardly as if we are more expert than we are and begin to believe that lie. Does that clarify?
halfjew22 8y ago
I've been told on exactly one count that my thought process echoes Wittgenstein. Here's a recording of the comment as kind of a proof of why I think this is interesting to do. Very Meta. Watch Community of you enjoy this kind of thing: Part 1: https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo Part 2: https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs I also do live thought explorations, record them, and put them on YouTube. Please come tell me why you disagree with some of my most honest thoughts. https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8 https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8 are a couple of videos I could find off the bat. For anyone interested in just reading rather than watching the entire thought process, I've posted links in the descriptions to the final text produced. I'll also link my Medium page below. I record the entire thought process because I think we are in dire need of honesty today. It's too easy to pretend we know more than we do. I have lots of theories I'd like to share and talk with people about and have an incredibly hard time finding any kind of audience, yet constantly find people taking about our suffering from problems I believe I can solve. I know this comment is all over the place, but just like the current top comment describes, I find it fascinating looking inside people's thought process as it is the most raw thing we can do with language. I also believe as I hammer away on these keys that I could just keep typing and eventually bring it all back together, which I will now. I believe developing trust amongst individuals is vital in a digital age if we are to maintain any degree of community as society. Wittgenstein style thought explorations (and now with new technology recording the process therein) are the most raw, unidealogically possessed form of thought we can share. Any level of rehearsal or editing, while they certainly improve the finished product, both waste time and present an opportunity for those idealogical possessions to creep back into play. In previous human times, we had much less diverse information flux. This enabled us to more easily understand our environment and those around us. We saw the same people every day, knew our place, and knew what to expect more or less. Today, we don't know anyone we talk to online. Pair that with the difficulty of forming a strong community and that leads to some pretty serious problems. I mean ABSOLUTELY no disrespect to anyone with what I'm about to say: suicide rates in youths, as well as what appears to be an identity crisis where people are latching on to whatever made up concepts please them are caused by a theory I call "Information Radiation." "Information Radiation" effects a culture of people much like nuclear radiation effects a single individual. It makes them sick and die. Our culture is dying. There's so much new information coming in (most of it being of little importance) that it is crowding out the old information we have stores about the value of our cultures precious stories. The ones that got us here. Those stories aren't true, but hey, we're here! And very few intellectuals respect that. We are arrogant to think now that these stories of religious proportioms are just simply not a representation of physical events that happened in our space time that they aren't important or helpful. If this was true, television and movies such as Game of Thromes, Harry Potter, and the Avengers simply would not be popular. This is not a religious claim at all by the way. There's no man in the sky dictating things. There are in my opinion human spiritual happenings, but those are unimportant to include here to pursuade you of my opinions. Lastly, I want to plug my website knophy.com that I'm working on. TLDR on it is that it's a website that values competency and the comprehension of content. My utlimate goal is to pay both creators for creating content and consumers for forming comprehension about content. I believe I have invented a sound business model for doing that. Details are below https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT Thanks for reading. Honest yours, Michael Lustig.
gulda 8y ago
I recommend Monk's biography [1] and a short lecture by Wittgenstein [2] [1] https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5 https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526
- mbrock 8y ago
  There’s a nice book by Edward Kanterian called “Ludwig Wittgenstein” from Reaktion Books Critical Lives series which is quite good, and shorter than Monk’s biography.
halfjew22 8y ago
https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU >But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree. That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement. In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate partner: “would you like to be owned by me?” Employing Kant’s categorical imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved. Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt as language to describe anything close to resembling reality. At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely resembling a “universal truth”, truism, true objective fact, etc. After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does, true doesn’t mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn’t necessarily make it less useful, it’s just something we need to keep in mind. On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it’s been a fascinating listen thus far. http://a.co/49lwAZNb http://a.co/49lwAZNb
- 0db532a0 8y ago
  Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.
sramsay 8y ago
I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations, but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part). These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought. I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb. One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener. I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it. [edits for typos]
- mrleiter 8y ago
  Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life" [0]https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...
  - mbrock 8y ago
    I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted." "The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'." "When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together." "Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."
voidhorse 8y ago
Wittgenstein is one of those rare, inimitable thinkers. I get a sensation reading his work that I rarely get reading the work of others: that he truly was someone who thought about the world with great incisiveness and depth, beyond the confines of any particular discipline or outlook—a logician with a mystic's underbelly. Each one of his pithy notes exudes the degree of exhaustiveness with which he's contemplated the topic—it's a great experience. I highly recommend checking out some of his writing. Aside from the Tractatus it's not systematic, and as such I do not think there's any particular reason to study it systematically. Philosophy as analysis, philosophy as therapy—Wittgenstein's writings present the collision of both of these perspectives.
wolfi1 8y ago
There was a documentary on his life in the 80s, mentioning his life as teacher in a rural primary school (they even interviewed some of his pupils) and his acting in a silent movie [1]. It is these anecdotes which make history and biographies so vivid. 81] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/
deleted 8y ago
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harwoodjp 8y ago
I've noticed Wittgenstein is mentioned quite a lot on HN threads about philosophy. I suspect he's a favorite of engineer types because his conceptions nullify large swaths of philosophical activity and thinking. This conclusion allows the untrained student to feel as if they've entered a cheat code to reach the end of the discourse -- it's all a language game, so I need not waste my time with further inquiry.
- skrealing 8y ago
  Strongly disagree. Wittgenstein clears the way for traditional philosophy topics (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) to be taken seriously. 'Engineer types' may react to ethical discussions by pointing out that you can't define right and wrong, and may then wrongly conclude that they don't exist. But Wittgenstein shows that this is an isolated demand for rigor.
  - bobthechef 8y ago
    You can't define right or wrong? Tell that to an Aristotelian. You can most certainly define it and ground a natural law theory in it.
- sramsay 8y ago
  I hope that's not true. Wittgenstein certainly led me deeper into the subject, not away from it. "It's all a language game so why bother" is about as intellectually barren (and misinformed) as saying, "Well, Turing demonstrated that all programming languages are 'equivalent,' so it doesn't really matter."
loganfrederick 8y ago
It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein. I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon. http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html
- mbrock 8y ago
  Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position, since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak. Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus: > When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. > But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was implicit in Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls function predicates.
dschuetz 8y ago
Thanks to that post I discovered after a short research that I share a lot with Wittgenstein personality-wise. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad sign. Never heard about him before.
gtycomb 8y ago
a passing remark -- by all means read Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' because it is readable as the article says. In the metaphysical world it can be hard cut through the work of its great thinkers. A sensible way to approach Wittgenstein is to start with a college level introductory book on Metaphysics to get the foundational ideas, Categories and Forms of Aristotle and Plato. Some modern philosopher writers can walk us through this nicely (Michale Loux from U of Chicago, his introductory writings or some other perhaps). What might be modern now (Trope Theory, World of States of Affairs, Stage Theory etc), their instigators first came to reject the basics of the ancients but in the end they actually dissect the work of the ancients for us. Travel to Wittgenstein along this path, read him only towards the end. One needs numbers and algebra before calculus.
- sramsay 8y ago
  I agree with that completely. Wittgenstein's "simplicity" is only apparent, because he tends to write as if he's the first person to ever do philosophy. But he knows he's not, and his grasp of classical metaphysics (like most philosophers of his era) was basically flawless. He is way more interesting to read with that background in place.
bobthechef 8y ago
"The early Wittgenstein on scientism"[0] and "Goodill on Scholastic Metaphysics and Wittgenstein"[1] for more on Wittgenstein. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-on-scientism.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-... [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholastic-metaphysics-and.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholast...
woodandsteel 8y ago
I have a mixed feeling about this article. On the positive side, it does a good job of explaining the ideas in Wittgenstein's two books. On the negative side, the author fails to explain that there are similar ideas in Pragmatism and Existential-Phenomenology. Also, the author fails to explain, as Roy Monk's book makes clear, that Wittgenstein had a highly dogmatic and rather irrational set of religious and cultural views.

152 points by neonate 8y ago

Wonderful article for a short introduction into his work. He was a fascinating personality and his writings are extraordinary. He „only“ published two books in his lifetime, one being tractatus logico-philosophicus, the other being a dictionary for school children. Philosophical Investigations was published post-humously, but it is an excellent view into his mind. As mentioned in the article, there are no subsections, no table of contents. It consists of almost 700 paragraphs. You have to read it from beginning to end. Why I find that great in its own way? Maybe the analogy with the movie >Being John Malkovitch< may help: you are like a visitor in his head. Our thoughts are not tidy and ordered into sections. When you think about a problem (like he does with language and what it is and what it can do and what not), your mind wanders; you come across different issues, tackle them, then come back. It‘s like a written thought process. I can really recommend this book. Its language is easy. As soon as you get used to its style, you can follow.

halfjew22 8y ago
I completely agree with your sentiment on our thoughts. They aren't neat and tidy. People like to pretend they are, but this simply isn't true. It's also interesting to think about exactly where these thoughts come from. Where did the thought come from for example that invoked you opening up hacker news at the time you wrote this? Where does great intuition come from? It's all fascinating whether you prescribe to a theory that likens consciousness to that of thinking rocks or if you're incredibly spiritual and think of consciousness more as a radio signal that were tuned into at some arbitrary frequency when we're alive in Earth. If you're interested in being a visitor in ones mind, could I humbly request you check out my comment? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685
- mbrock 8y ago
  “I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.” (Preface to Philosophical Investigations)
  - mrleiter 8y ago
    The preface is actually very fun to read. Very honest, quite cynical, too. >"[...] mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it." Such bare honesty! I love it.

noir-york 8y ago

Excellent article. Thanks for posting!

turingspiritfly 8y ago

Is it bad to have expected to the article to be all about how his alleged virtue help become the famed figure he is today? This was just another portrait of his work.

codeulike 8y ago

My favourite Wittgenstein quote: "A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

wallace_f 8y ago
He's right. Modern intellectual and political aversion to open competition and experimentation is, at best, unethical.
- halfjew22 8y ago
  And is certainly a reflection of people's lack of REAL confidence in themselves. This, combined with our ironically deteriorating ability to communicate in a digital age is leading down not such a bright road.
- danharaj 8y ago
  Could you elaborate?
  - pjc50 8y ago
    I suspect he's talking about people's refusal to "debate" whether they should be subjected to suffering, discrimination, abuse, etc.
  - halfjew222 8y ago
    As the other comment points out, people aren’t willing to challenge themselves but also feign a confidence about themselves due to various factors such as economic and societal pressures. Admitting you have no idea most of the time is probably more accurate (estimate is obviously a reasonably afauirable skill) but that’s not what boss man is looking for. I think this also evidences itself in the prevalence of imposter theory, especially in younger generations. The reason the saying goes, “that feeling never goes away” is because we all operate outwardly as if we are more expert than we are and begin to believe that lie. Does that clarify?

halfjew22 8y ago

I've been told on exactly one count that my thought process echoes Wittgenstein. Here's a recording of the comment as kind of a proof of why I think this is interesting to do. Very Meta. Watch Community of you enjoy this kind of thing: Part 1: https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo Part 2: https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs I also do live thought explorations, record them, and put them on YouTube. Please come tell me why you disagree with some of my most honest thoughts. https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8 https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8 are a couple of videos I could find off the bat. For anyone interested in just reading rather than watching the entire thought process, I've posted links in the descriptions to the final text produced. I'll also link my Medium page below. I record the entire thought process because I think we are in dire need of honesty today. It's too easy to pretend we know more than we do. I have lots of theories I'd like to share and talk with people about and have an incredibly hard time finding any kind of audience, yet constantly find people taking about our suffering from problems I believe I can solve. I know this comment is all over the place, but just like the current top comment describes, I find it fascinating looking inside people's thought process as it is the most raw thing we can do with language. I also believe as I hammer away on these keys that I could just keep typing and eventually bring it all back together, which I will now. I believe developing trust amongst individuals is vital in a digital age if we are to maintain any degree of community as society. Wittgenstein style thought explorations (and now with new technology recording the process therein) are the most raw, unidealogically possessed form of thought we can share. Any level of rehearsal or editing, while they certainly improve the finished product, both waste time and present an opportunity for those idealogical possessions to creep back into play. In previous human times, we had much less diverse information flux. This enabled us to more easily understand our environment and those around us. We saw the same people every day, knew our place, and knew what to expect more or less. Today, we don't know anyone we talk to online. Pair that with the difficulty of forming a strong community and that leads to some pretty serious problems. I mean ABSOLUTELY no disrespect to anyone with what I'm about to say: suicide rates in youths, as well as what appears to be an identity crisis where people are latching on to whatever made up concepts please them are caused by a theory I call "Information Radiation." "Information Radiation" effects a culture of people much like nuclear radiation effects a single individual. It makes them sick and die. Our culture is dying. There's so much new information coming in (most of it being of little importance) that it is crowding out the old information we have stores about the value of our cultures precious stories. The ones that got us here. Those stories aren't true, but hey, we're here! And very few intellectuals respect that. We are arrogant to think now that these stories of religious proportioms are just simply not a representation of physical events that happened in our space time that they aren't important or helpful. If this was true, television and movies such as Game of Thromes, Harry Potter, and the Avengers simply would not be popular. This is not a religious claim at all by the way. There's no man in the sky dictating things. There are in my opinion human spiritual happenings, but those are unimportant to include here to pursuade you of my opinions. Lastly, I want to plug my website knophy.com that I'm working on. TLDR on it is that it's a website that values competency and the comprehension of content. My utlimate goal is to pay both creators for creating content and consumers for forming comprehension about content. I believe I have invented a sound business model for doing that. Details are below https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT Thanks for reading. Honest yours, Michael Lustig.

gulda 8y ago

I recommend Monk's biography [1] and a short lecture by Wittgenstein [2] [1] https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5 https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5 [2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526

mbrock 8y ago
There’s a nice book by Edward Kanterian called “Ludwig Wittgenstein” from Reaktion Books Critical Lives series which is quite good, and shorter than Monk’s biography.

halfjew22 8y ago

https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU >But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others should disagree I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree. That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement. In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate partner: “would you like to be owned by me?” Employing Kant’s categorical imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved. Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt as language to describe anything close to resembling reality. At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely resembling a “universal truth”, truism, true objective fact, etc. After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does, true doesn’t mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn’t necessarily make it less useful, it’s just something we need to keep in mind. On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it’s been a fascinating listen thus far. http://a.co/49lwAZNb http://a.co/49lwAZNb

0db532a0 8y ago
Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

sramsay 8y ago

I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein start neither with the Tractatus nor with Philosophical Investigations, but with the Blue and Brown Books (you want the Blue part). These are lecture notes toward what would later become the PI. They're way less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for Wittgenstein's thought. I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb. One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what "justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- so you can go back to living your life. In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener. I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop doing it. [edits for typos]

mrleiter 8y ago
Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm, dated November 1944 [0]: "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life" [0]https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...
- mbrock 8y ago
  I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay "Trotsky and the Wild Orchids": "I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' - the place 'beyond hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains really wanted." "The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'." "When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's 'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with what happens when you mix various substances together." "Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient synoptic vision."

voidhorse 8y ago

Wittgenstein is one of those rare, inimitable thinkers. I get a sensation reading his work that I rarely get reading the work of others: that he truly was someone who thought about the world with great incisiveness and depth, beyond the confines of any particular discipline or outlook—a logician with a mystic's underbelly. Each one of his pithy notes exudes the degree of exhaustiveness with which he's contemplated the topic—it's a great experience. I highly recommend checking out some of his writing. Aside from the Tractatus it's not systematic, and as such I do not think there's any particular reason to study it systematically. Philosophy as analysis, philosophy as therapy—Wittgenstein's writings present the collision of both of these perspectives.

wolfi1 8y ago

There was a documentary on his life in the 80s, mentioning his life as teacher in a rural primary school (they even interviewed some of his pupils) and his acting in a silent movie [1]. It is these anecdotes which make history and biographies so vivid. 81] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/

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harwoodjp 8y ago

I've noticed Wittgenstein is mentioned quite a lot on HN threads about philosophy. I suspect he's a favorite of engineer types because his conceptions nullify large swaths of philosophical activity and thinking. This conclusion allows the untrained student to feel as if they've entered a cheat code to reach the end of the discourse -- it's all a language game, so I need not waste my time with further inquiry.

skrealing 8y ago
Strongly disagree. Wittgenstein clears the way for traditional philosophy topics (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) to be taken seriously. 'Engineer types' may react to ethical discussions by pointing out that you can't define right and wrong, and may then wrongly conclude that they don't exist. But Wittgenstein shows that this is an isolated demand for rigor.
- bobthechef 8y ago
  You can't define right or wrong? Tell that to an Aristotelian. You can most certainly define it and ground a natural law theory in it.
sramsay 8y ago
I hope that's not true. Wittgenstein certainly led me deeper into the subject, not away from it. "It's all a language game so why bother" is about as intellectually barren (and misinformed) as saying, "Well, Turing demonstrated that all programming languages are 'equivalent,' so it doesn't really matter."

loganfrederick 8y ago

It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein. I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon. http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html

mbrock 8y ago
Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position, since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak. Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus: > When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect: ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000 years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot, directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms in his Tractatus. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program. > But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism, conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was implicit in Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls function predicates.

dschuetz 8y ago

Thanks to that post I discovered after a short research that I share a lot with Wittgenstein personality-wise. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad sign. Never heard about him before.

gtycomb 8y ago

a passing remark -- by all means read Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical Investigations' because it is readable as the article says. In the metaphysical world it can be hard cut through the work of its great thinkers. A sensible way to approach Wittgenstein is to start with a college level introductory book on Metaphysics to get the foundational ideas, Categories and Forms of Aristotle and Plato. Some modern philosopher writers can walk us through this nicely (Michale Loux from U of Chicago, his introductory writings or some other perhaps). What might be modern now (Trope Theory, World of States of Affairs, Stage Theory etc), their instigators first came to reject the basics of the ancients but in the end they actually dissect the work of the ancients for us. Travel to Wittgenstein along this path, read him only towards the end. One needs numbers and algebra before calculus.

sramsay 8y ago
I agree with that completely. Wittgenstein's "simplicity" is only apparent, because he tends to write as if he's the first person to ever do philosophy. But he knows he's not, and his grasp of classical metaphysics (like most philosophers of his era) was basically flawless. He is way more interesting to read with that background in place.

bobthechef 8y ago

"The early Wittgenstein on scientism"[0] and "Goodill on Scholastic Metaphysics and Wittgenstein"[1] for more on Wittgenstein. [0] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-on-scientism.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-... [1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholastic-metaphysics-and.html https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholast...

woodandsteel 8y ago

I have a mixed feeling about this article. On the positive side, it does a good job of explaining the ideas in Wittgenstein's two books. On the negative side, the author fails to explain that there are similar ideas in Pragmatism and Existential-Phenomenology. Also, the author fails to explain, as Roy Monk's book makes clear, that Wittgenstein had a highly dogmatic and rather irrational set of religious and cultural views.