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Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Mind on Fire
- michjedi 5y agoSurprisingly for many, Wittgenstein had a deathbed conversion to Catholicism.
- question005 5y agoNot true, other sources say he was actually molested by Catholic priests as a child and on his deathbed he finally named his tormentors.
- Veen 5y agoTo whom did he reveal this? The Catholic friends and the Dominican priest at his bedside? Which sources are you referring to?
- leephillips 5y agoThis is precisely the perpetual Catholic slander that Christopher Hitchens referred to regularly. A lie told by believers about several prominent freethinkers.
- trutannus 5y agoThe only sources for the claim are evangelic Christian websites, and this specific thread. This thread is actually one of the top results for the search now. I've spent a lot of time reading Wittgenstein, and reading about Wittgenstein. This was never mentioned in any credible source I've come across.
- Veen 5y agoIt goes both ways. On the one hand the religious want to claim eveyone as one of their own, especially in death-bed conversions. On the other hand, there are the rabidly anti-Catholic types who make up lies about people having been abused without evidence, as we see in this thread. Or the atheists who conveniently forget that quite a lot of "free thinkers" were religious. Wittgenstein was not a Catholic because he had no faith, but he was respecful of Catholicism, had many Catholic friends, and asked for a priest to be present as he died. There's no evidence he formally converted.
- gverrilla 5y agohttps://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c9z6w6n469et/catholic-church-sexual-abuse-cases https://www.bbc.com/news/topics/c9z6w6n469et/catholic-church...
- Veen 5y agoWhat of it? What would Wittgenstein say to the syllogism, 'Some Catholic priests are child abusers, Wittgenstein was a Catholic in childhood, therefore Wittgenstein was abused by a priest'?
- goto11 5y agoThe comment about abuse is obviously a tongue-in-cheek retort to the claims he converted on his deathbed.
- coldtea 5y agoFunny you should say that, as Christopher Hitchens in his deathbed, converted to Catholicism himself.
- masswerk 5y agoWell, as mentioned in the article, at the time of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein was deeply moved by the kind of spirituality found in Leo Tolstoy's work. However, it's the explicit purpose of the Tractatus to draw a demarcation line between propositions of logic (and by this, meaningful sentences of philosophy) and any mystical or spiritual feelings, thoughts, or faith. So it really doesn't matter at all.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jamiek88 5y agoMany lies are surprising.
- psychoslave 5y agoBut it is rarely as surprising as actual truth. :D
- michaelsbradley 5y agoLudwig Wittgenstein Confesses (1992): https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/06/ludwig-wittgenstein-confesses https://www.firstthings.com/article/1992/06/ludwig-wittgenst...
- InitialLastName 5y agoI don't see where that article in any way engages with what GP says; it appears to use "confession" in a more metaphorical appeal to religiosity as a concept rather than to a specific spiritual ritual.
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoLet's suppose this was even true, what would it matter? There's this weird assumption in popular culture that somehow the moment near death contains more truth than other moments, as if right before passing we have some "ah!" moment. But the opposite seems far more reasonable: as we get closer to death our reasonings will become increasingly distorted. For example, a common narrative is "on their death bed they had wished they had focused less on career and more on family." Of course that's what you'd think on your death bed! You're likely scared, feeling alone and wish there was someone with you. You also don't have to worry about rent, gaining the respect of your peers, what you're going to do with your free time, retirement etc. The idea that the moment of death brings some sort of grand understanding only makes sense if you presuppose there is some grand sense behind it all. Otherwise it's just the final moment of a long process of physical, emotional and mental decline.
- Veen 5y ago> Let's suppose this was even true, what would it matter? Your analysis begs the question. It assumes the secular worldview, but that's precisely what a deathbed conversion repudiates. To a Catholic, deathbed conversions matter a great deal because Catholics don't conceptualize death (or life) in the same way as a secular person.
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoYou're just reiterating my point. Even if this where true, it doesn't add any information. For a Catholic it simply affirms their Catholic worldview, however for someone with a secular worldview it is also perfectly inline with their existing views. As such the statement "Surprisingly" make no sense, since this information is not "surprising" to anyone, even if it were true (which is it very likely not).
- mbg721 5y agoIf you're Catholic, it's significant as one's last chance to turn away from sin, discard this life, and join Christ in an eternal life that isn't this one. If you're not, then think of it like an actuary: at every moment in your life, you have to live with the sum of your past and future choices, adjusted as need be. At the last moment, you have no more uncertain future choices, so it's clear what the optimal path was, so naturally you have regret.
- klik99 5y agoI plan on doing that - just in case the pearly gates are truly guarded by someone who requires you believe in a specific God. It's called hedging your bets
- InitialLastName 5y agoIf there are multiple possible gods, and you get punished more for believing in the wrong one than for not believing in one, you might be better off without it.
- samhw 5y agoThe answer is clearly to believe in all of them! With a bit of possible-worlds logic it should be doable.
- burnished 5y ago"Sinner actually going to heaven, not hell" priest declares to grieving family. I wonder how many so called 'deathbed conversions' actually happened, vs how many were completely fabricated.. and not in the sense of some one wearing robes tenting their fingers and laughing maniacally, but instead trying to 'offer salvation' and taking literally any movement or noise as confirmation.
- lordleft 5y agoI know Wittgenstein repudiated the Tractatus, but did he ever alight on another vision of the world & the limits of what can be expressed? Or was 'Late Wittgenstein' primarily a more bounded project concerned with the philosophy of language?
- nabla9 5y agoHe wrote a book after Tractatus. It's called Philosophical Investigations. There he sets up, among many other things, the whole "meaning is use" theory. One of the most influential books in the last century together with Tractatus.
- jhickok 5y agoRepudiated is a bit strong. In some sense Wittgenstein hated everything he had written. However, Wittgenstein did believe that his friend had shown the system he laid out in Tractatus as unworkable: https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/43904/_HANDOUTS/tractatus-color-incompatibility.pdf https://www3.nd.edu/~jspeaks/courses/2007-8/43904/_HANDOUTS/... The so-called "late" period his scope was no more bounded than the early Wittgenstein, but he changed his method of analysis from strict conceptual analysis to something more conversational. His study of language is not really interesting for what it contributed to philosophy of language, but because of the implications to the methods of philosophy itself.
- iechoz6H 5y agoWittgenstein < Schopenhauer < Nagarjuna < Buddha
- qsort 5y agomain.hs:1:14: error: * No instance for (Ord Philosopher) arising from a use of `<'
- iamcurious 5y agoGood point, funny and goes along with user name. 10/10 would read again.
- nabla9 5y agoWittgenstein ⟂ { Nagarjuna, Buddha }
- KhoomeiK 5y agoIf we're talking about philosophy of language, Buddha himself didn't have much formal reasoning in that, did he?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dang 5y ago"Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- iechoz6H 5y agoIn what way was it shallow? I was simply hinting at a potential lineage of Wittgenstein's philosophy.
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- ctw 5y agoI read the first 100 pages or so of Philisophical Investigations before giving up since I had lost track of the lines of reasoning. Here's what I got out of what I did read though: Language is far more important in philosophy and life than we think. The biggest takeaway I got from the part of this book I read is a way of looking at problems with the limitations of language in mind. Ask yourself: to what extent is thinking speaking? What is thinking without language? Is it even possible, or is that something else? There's this interesting idea that has stuck with me, which is that when we say words, "pictures" are "brought before" our mind. Is language (speaking, reading/writing) simply a way for us to conjure up these mental images in other people's minds? If so, how can we be sure that what they see is what we intended for them to see? I think it's clear from experience that the images are mostly right, most of the time. But when they're not, we have misunderstandings. Another interesting statement made in the book (iirc) is that we only need more language when we feel there is a misunderstanding. The word "more" is important in the previous sentence. The idea here is that when we speak, we have some desired outcome from the outset. Once we feel that our speaking has led to the outcome we wanted, we are satisfied to stop speaking. It is only when the person we're speaking to isn't doing what we want, or seems to be getting the wrong mental picture that we need to continue speaking (this is what I meant by "more language": to continue speaking). There's another interesting area Wittgenstein explores (which I can't admit to following very well), but I'll try to conjure a mental image in your head of it ;). Basically, so far his argument (if I understood correctly) is that "the truth" is the mental images we see and the actions we take, and language is just a means to those ends. He then argues (again, if I understood him correctly) that we usually run into trouble when we take language as the starting point of knowledge. That's not very clear, so what do I mean by that? It's sort of like, words work well when we're using them to achieve some outcome. But they start to confuse us when we use them without a desired outcome from the outset: when we use them to gain knowledge. Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge.
- psychoslave 5y ago> Words are not facts that we can logically make deductions from to discover new knowledge. Did you acquire this conviction through thoughts arisen by Wittgenstein’s words?
- cjauvin 5y agoTo me the most intriguing ideas that have been explored by Wittgenstein are related to his notion of a "private language" (and the question of whether it is simply possible or meaningful). You can ask for instance what is the difference between your body pain, which seems to be a kind of "internal object", that only you can possess and access, and the blue of the sky, when you look at it, which doesn't feel like an internal sensation (rather like an external fact), even though it can be construed as one, if needed.
- masswerk 5y agoIn my understanding, this was much a vehicle for what figures as the mystical in the Tractatus: spiritual insight, personal revelation, faith and believes, ethics, internal evidence. If we can't share or even show them, how do we arrive at any consent? How are they even a thing between us?
- yesenadam 5y agoThis short article is by Ray Monk, who in 1990 published a biography of Wittgenstein, which I'd highly recommend to anyone wanting to know more about the guy's life and thought. Monk also wrote an excellent 2-volume biography of Bertrand Russell. This article seems to contain nothing not in his 1990 book. I found it a little depressing for him that the New Statesman is apparently paying him for an article that's a very condensed summary of part of what he wrote 30+ years ago..
- leephillips 5y agoOn the other hand, you might consider that it means that what he wrote 30+ years ago hit the mark so well that it’s still worth paying for a summary of part of it. Less depressing that way.
- yesenadam 5y agoWell, I think they're both definitive biographies, yes. But I guess it's like big rock bands travelling the world, having to play their big hits forever after. Good for the fans, depressing for the musicians.
- jhickok 5y agoLess depressing is that Ray Monk put together a Spotify playlist of Wittgenstein's favorite music, so he must still enjoy it a little bit. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4v540LW145G9MpAQSkmVWK https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4v540LW145G9MpAQSkmVWK
- mi3law 5y agoThank you for sharing this! You should post it to HN as its own post-- I work to classic music and this is a very interesting list that others would enjoy, too.
- frereubu 5y agoI'll second the recommendation of Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. There's a fantastic clarity to his exposition of Wittgenstein's philosophy that made it very readable. Going to track down the Russell biography now...
- klik99 5y agoMy rule of thumb summary of Wittgenstein: If you can spend an entire book on the meaning of a concept (IE Truth-with-a-capital-T, The meaning of life) then you may be confusing an artifact of grammar and language with something that exists in actual reality. In other words, just because you can construct a correct sentence with a word doesn't mean it actually makes sense. Statements can be true or false, but can a heart be true? My understanding is the Tractatus was meant to "end philosophy" by implying that most of philosophy arises from the confusion between these grammatical artifacts and reality. I read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person.
- bmj 5y agoI read a lot of philosophy in my 20s, but I think only Marcus Aurelius and Wittgenstein actual made me into a better, happier person. My advisor at university, a philosophy professor, said the same thing about Wittgenstein. During the initial part of his graduate studies, philosophy left him empty, and depressed. Discovering, and focusing on, Wittgenstein, changed his life.
- jhickok 5y agoWittgenstein has a reputation for being a "therapeutic philosopher", in the same vein as Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, etc. There is a fantastic book that I recommend along these lines: https://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Story-John-Kaag/dp/0374154481 https://www.amazon.com/American-Philosophy-Story-John-Kaag/d...
- yamrzou 5y agoOne of the highly underrated contributions of Wittgenstein that doesn't get the attention it deserves is his book "On Certainty". It's a book on philosophical skepticism and the nature of doubt which he wrote late in his life. It has a unique writing style, which feels like a thought dump, but it was eye opening for me. Edit: If you want to read a bit more about it, you might be interested in this series of posts by Sam26 on the (now gone) philosophy forums: Wittgenstein's Early and Later Philosophy - With Emphasis on "On Certainty": https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.philosophyforums.com/threads/wittgenstein-a-summary-41631.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160304215023/http://forums.phi...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- reggieband 5y agoI absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree" while looking at a tree. Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends. I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.
- routerl 5y agoTo give a little bit more context: "On Certainty" is about the foundations of empiricism and how they relate to the foundations of logic. It takes as a starting point that logical deduction is the one truly certain mode of inference we humans have, then asks "how does this apply to physics?". But it does this while being extremely indirect, and presupposing knowledge of every major philosophical/scientific debate of its time, particularly the centuries-long debate over the nature of empirical inductive reasoning. Wittgenstein sometimes seems to be talking only about, say, how a certain type of sentence works, but is actually making extremely broad statements about how all of language (and linguistic communities (like scientists)) work. As with all of Wittgenstein's writings, it only seems simple on the surface. The reason this stuff is still read and thought about is because it has a lot of implications. Here's my software engineering metaphor: Wittgenstein's method is to point out particularly poignant problems in the implementation of a class, in an object-oriented system, that are meant to demonstrate problems in the underlying architecture. According to him, the way most of us think about language is wrong, and that includes science, politics, and philosophy (even though he is unwilling to say much about those subjects directly).
- codeulike 5y agoFavourite Wittgenstein quote: A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring
- advanced-DnD 5y agoHave that changed to politics... These discussions never went outside of its scholastic bubble and have not shape the society in the past decades.
- reggieband 5y agoAs an aside, if you like graphic novels and philoshopy then I highly recommend Logicomix [1]. This work heavily features Ludwig Wittgenstein. I can't claim it is historically accurate but I do think it is quite an interesting read. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logicomix
- 30f0fn 5y agoAs a historical narrative it's pretty shameless, e.g. inventing out of whole cloth a second visit to Frege. I also felt that it did not convey well the personalities (let alone the ideas) of the early analytical trinity.
- musesum 5y agoMy takeaway was that Concepts have Contexts. The problem is that the Context may vary from person to person. Kinda like an n-gram, where n can vary between people. Later, I read Lotfi Zadeh who treated Concepts as a kind of probability distribution. Such as mapping someone's height, described as "short", "tall", "very tall", to a range measured in centimeters. Pygmies and Belgians may vary. Now days, I guess we'd use word embeddings.
- bserge 5y agoWittgenstein was a tortured soul in a garbage world, much like a lot of other people who did not have the means or will to organize all of their thoughts in writing. I do wonder how many "great philosophers" were and are out there, not writing down their thoughts.
- prvc 5y agoThe Gospel in Brief seems to be somewhat obscure nowadays, but is available here: https://archive.org/details/cu31924029339078/ https://archive.org/details/cu31924029339078/ Does anyone who has read it have any insight as to what it was about it that was so captivating to Wittgenstein?
- neonate 5y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20210924010155/https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2021/09/ludwig-wittgenstein-a-mind-on-fire http://web.archive.org/web/20210924010155/https://www.newsta... https://archive.is/Q11Yq https://archive.is/Q11Yq
- cjohansson 5y agoPhilosophical Investigations has a lot of bug fixes that was in Tractus, when people want to discuss Wittgenstein they only want to discuss his early and not his more mature later work