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I love his attitude that people talk in the same kind of compulsive way that a squirrel stores nuts for the winter. Not to say it is mindless but that it isn’t

• deleted 5y ago
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• bangkoksbest 5y ago
  That was Socrates' point. He was asking questions to expose how brittle the claims of knowledge and certainty were. I do find it strange that Wittgenstein—a man who considered Kierkegaard (who wrote an entire book on irony and Socrates) as one of his favorite thinkers—seems not to have realized that Socrates' quest for a certain, clear meaning of a team was ironically intended to always finish unresolved. It makes me a bit curious what he took from Kierkegaard, who was every bit as much of an ironist, if Plato's rather blunt representations of Socratic irony alluded him. Of course the irony is that Wittgenstein asks "why?" again and again like Socrates and for very much the same purpose (to show that it gets us caught in circles), thus representing even more ironic loops than the previous circles. Wittgenstein turns to philosophy to repudiate it and show as much to his students (show the fly out of the bottle), but in so doing he affirms a central Socratic lesson, but with far less irony. And I would say irony wins out: rather than quiet philosophy into therapy, Wittgenstein became the most influential 20th century philosopher who attracts by far the most published academic and popular commentary.
  • kibwen 5y ago
    Ah, but perhaps Wittgenstein was being ironic in pretending not to understand Socratic irony; Wittegensteinian irony. And perhaps zwkrt was being ironic in pretending not to realize Witgensteinian irony; zwkrtatic irony. And perhaps you are being ironic in pretending to misinterpret zwkrtatic irony; bangkoksbestic irony. I assure you, however, that this comment is not ironic, nor is the one after this.
    • kozd 5y ago
      Maybe your assurance is ironic. I assure you that my assurance is not ironic.
  • syntheweave 5y ago
    As tends to be true of much of philosophy, the core insight of Wittgenstein is not too big, I think. His argument, at least in his later work with language games, revolves around "why is it that we look for truth with such unclear language? Is it even possible to clarify our language?" And that's both Socratic and also more specific than Socrates. It's done in a very down-to-business and direct tone, which gives it that ironic sensibility, since it projects confidence in an investigation that we can easily see is going to start reducing itself to the tiniest scraps of truth by assuming so little a priori. Within the context of his mathematical investigations this question makes a lot of sense, though: the younger Wittgenstein was studying logic under Bertrand Russell and therefore had a lot of exposure to the idea of a formalized logical totality as represented by Principa Mathematica - this was the world he lived in. And he did not seem to feel that the incompleteness theorems settled the limitations of logical formalism either.