Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein's Logic of Language -


What "manner of man" was Wittgenstein? From the point of view of his logic of language, it does not matter. The Philosophical Investigations, whether written by Ludwig Wittgenstein or by Josef Stalin ("Some of the young comrades have asked me whether grammar is a[n ideological] superstructure on the [economic] base"), must stand or fall to the test of reason (criticism) on its own.

On the other hand, we do hope that the study of a man's life (character) will help us to understand his work in philosophy. But this is in some cases a delusion. Either a man's work is to be judged independently of the man himself (as in the case with mathematical-logic e.g.), or, as in the case of Socrates, the man is an embodiment of his philosophy (in which case by 'philosophy' we mean not only a use of reason but also a way of life; even then, however, Platonic-Socratic logic must stand on its own). Wittgenstein's work in the logic of language belongs to the first category.

What, then, is the point of this page? It is an historical aside, nothing more. (If it is suggested that there is a relation between Wittgenstein's religion and his philosophy that may explain why he set the limits to his philosophical inquiries where he did, I would be uncertain.) But, on the other hand, much of this page is as much about Wittgenstein's philosophy as about Wittgenstein the human being.

Note: nothing I have written here is intended to denigrate Wittgenstein, for whom I feel deep respect. But many of Wittgenstein's perceptions belong to a past age, one prior to the revolutions in the West that have allowed the common man to "forget his place", and therefore there is bound to be dissonance between Wittgenstein's views and my own. Wittgenstein was born in 1889, my grandfathers in 1887 and 1888. An historian (I'm sorry, I don't recall which) wrote that those who came before us doubtless had their prejudices -- but maybe their prejudices were different from our own.

Note: this page has been superseded in parts by other papers about the Philosophy of Religion.


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Wittgenstein's Religion - "What manner of man was he?"
Preliminary: Contrary to what Parak wrote, Wittgenstein was not following the Gospel by giving away his fortune, because the Gospel says that the rich man's possessions should be given to the poor. And Wittgenstein left his inherited wealth to his own brothers and sisters, who were far from poor. He did not assign his wealth e.g. to a pension fund for the workers, or to a fund for the education of the workers' children, in the industries from which his father had acquired his wealth and his father's children their privileges.

Wittgenstein was several times decorated for bravery in World War One, but there a great difference between serving in the infantry (as Socrates did) and serving in the artillery (as Wittgenstein did): it is one thing to kill men or be killed face to face, quite another to kill faceless men at a distance. Also, to me it seems that by far the bravest military act is to say "No" [i.e. to disobey an illegal or immoral order], and in this context I respect Keynes and Russell in a far different way than I do my great-uncle, a soldier slaughtered by a German H. E. Shell (which might as easily have been Austrian) in Malancourt, France, during an otherwise quiet day's advance of 27 September 1918, in a war Pope Benedict XV condemned as "useless carnage". Like sheep to the slaughter they went ...

Further, Wittgenstein seems to have entered the war for entirely personal reasons -- i.e. to face death in order to be shocked into becoming the "decent human being" he wished to be. Where in his philosophical writings -- or even in those remarks which he separated from his work in logic (now collected under the English title Culture and Value) -- does Wittgenstein mention Austria? Does a philosopher take "patriotic duty" as a matter of course, or does he give the deepest reflection to that question? There is no evidence that Wittgenstein did.

I make these remarks in order to show that I myself do not know "what manner of man" Wittgenstein was.

"... I doubt whether his disciples knew what manner of man he was."

Bertrand Russell about Wittgenstein. [Note 1]

Wittgenstein worked as a gardener's assistant at a Benedictine monastery near Vienna after he left school teaching, and, according to von Wright, he more than once considered becoming a monk [Note 2]. Whether one finds it plausible that Wittgenstein was correctly understood by Parak may depend on the picture one has of the kind of priest Wittgenstein would have wanted to be, of what the priests he respected were like.

"... in every village someone who stood for these things." In times of superstition someone like that could do a lot of good as a teacher and as an example. But in later times maybe not. But there really have been priests like that, and in other backward places there still are priests who are able to teach that:

Religious faith and superstition are quite different. One of them results from fear and is a sort of false science. The other is a trusting. (Culture and Value p. 72)

A friend of Wittgenstein's, a Dominican priest said prayers beside Wittgenstein's death-bed and at his graveside, and this gave rise to gossip after Wittgenstein death. But I think Wittgenstein's own attitude to all this was shown by what he told Drury in 1944: "I seem to be surrounded now by Roman Catholic converts! I don't know whether they pray for me. I hope they do." (Recollections p. 148) And this was in fact one of the remarks that Drury had remembered at the time of Wittgenstein's death and that had led to inviting the Dominican. (ibid. p. 171)

But although Wittgenstein said to Drury, "There is a sense in which you and I are both Christians" (ibid. p. 114) and it was the view of Wittgenstein's sister Hermine that her brother was a Christian, someone who wrote that "The way you use the word 'God' shows not whom you mean -- but instead what you mean" (CV p. 50) could not have reconciled himself to any of the Christian denominations with their required assent to various dogmas, e.g. to God the Creator, a doctrine which Wittgenstein said played no part in his own thinking (see Norman Malcolm's Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Memoir, 2nd ed. (1984), p. 59).

And even if Christian "religious pictures" were those that said most to Wittgenstein [Note 3], his admiration for sincere religious faith was much broader than his respect for the Christian faith alone. To Drury he said: "All religions are wonderful ... The ways in which people express their religious feelings differ enormously." (Recollections p. 102)

Wittgenstein's own faith was austere (or, to use his word, "ascetic"), that is, without dogma, with mythology serving only as life-guiding pictures. To Drury:

I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church....
Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink. (Recollections p. 114, in 1930s)

The symbolisms of Catholicism are wonderful beyond words. But any attempt to make it into a philosophical system is offensive. (ibid. p. 102)

However austere it may have been, however, Wittgenstein's faith must have been deep because it lasted to the end of his life. Two years before his death, he told Drury:

I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God's will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God's will. (ibid. p. 168, in 1949; cf. CV p. 57-58)

Wittgenstein often pointed out Drury's romanticism to him. But Wittgenstein himself was as romantic as anyone, e.g. reading Tolstoy on the Gospels during WW1 ("the man with the book") [Note 4], and wanting to emigrate to the USSR to help build a new way of life there. But, he said, "There is something childish in this, but there is also something good." [Note 5]

Alyosha in Dostoyevsky's romance The Brothers Karamazov undertakes the moral education of the boys of the village. But it is in no way easy for an educated and cultured man to work with peasants [Note 6] if he does not have the common touch. It did not work out for Wittgenstein, and he returned to Cambridge to think again about the logic of language. [Note 7]


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Bertrand Russell's view of Wittgenstein
Note 1: Russell made this remark in the context of polemic. He confessed to his dislike of finding himself "out of fashion", said that it was hard to accept this gracefully, and then went on to accept it ungracefully. Wittgenstein, he wrote,

was a very singular man, and I doubt whether his disciples knew what manner of man he was.

I admired Wittgenstein's Tractatus but not his later work, which seemed to me to involve an abnegation of his own best talent very similar to those of Pascal and Tolstoy.
His followers, without (so far as I can discover) undergoing the mental torments which made him and Pascal and Tolstoy pardonable in spite of their treachery to their own greatness, have produced a number of works which, I am told, have merit, and in these works they have set forth a number of arguments against my views and methods. (Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, New York: 1959, p. 214-215)

Drury replied to Russell in his essay "Madness and Religion" (in DW). For a very different point of view from Russell's, see Engelmann's understanding of his friend Wittgenstein (which applies this "abnegation" also to the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).

Conceptions of Philosophy - Russell versus Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein's impact upon me came in two waves: the first of these was before the First World War; the second was immediately after the War when he sent me the manuscript of his Tractatus. His later doctrines, as they appear in his Philosophical Investigations, have not influenced me at all. (My Philosophical Development, p. 112)

I have not found in Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting .... [This philosophy] remains to me completely unintelligible. Its positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. (ibid. p. 216).

In my view, Russell finds this philosophy unintelligible because -- apart of course from his not wanting to find it intelligible -- he is insisting on understanding (regarding) philosophy as a collection or system of doctrines, and that is exactly what Wittgenstein maintains that his philosophy is not. And, in my opinion, it is not: instead, it is definitions, metaphors and methods -- i.e. in a word, Wittgenstein defined a way of looking at things (i.e. from the point of view of grammar and sense and nonsense) and of asking questions from that point of view -- not a collection of statements (doctrines) about how things "really" are.

Russell conceives philosophy [i.e. defines 'philosophy'] as a collection of speculative theories allied to the sciences (in other words, metaphysics by any other name), whereas for Wittgenstein philosophy is what it was for Socrates: criticism of what you know, or think you know, [although] with clarity [rather than truth] as its ultimate aim. [This view was already expressed in the Tractatus, which Russell should have been aware of: "Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences." (TLP 4.111)] Russell wrote:

... as with all philosophers before [Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations], my fundamental aim has been to understand the world as well as may be, and to separate what may count as knowledge from what must be rejected as unfounded opinion. (My Philosophical Development, p. 217)

But in Wittgenstein's thinking there was a shift away from asking about the truth of philosophical statements (That question was set aside) to asking about the meaning of such statements instead (CV (1998 rev. ed.) [MS 105 46 c: 1929]). Wittgenstein had already written in the TLP that philosophy does not result in a collection of philosophical propositions but in clarity [4.112]. -- But why? Because "philosophical propositions" (Russell: "a proposition is anything that is true or that is false" [The Principles of Mathematics Chapter II, p. 12-13]; Wittgenstein defined 'proposition' as "any expression that can be significantly negated") are not propositions but are instead confusions about the logic of our language: they are expressions of conceptual confusion: they are neither true nor false. [TLP 4.003]

To "understand the world as well as may be" is the task of the sciences [In religion there are religious pictures, and in philosophy there are similarly perhaps metaphysical pictures, but neither type of picture is a proposition in Russell's sense of 'proposition']. Note that this was not Socrates' fundamental aim in philosophy (Phaedrus 229e-230a; Diog. L.), despite Russell's claim about "all philosophers".

As to separating "what may count as knowledge from what must be rejected as unfounded opinion", this is done in all the intellectual disciplines: it is called critical thinking; it is not a use of reason unique to the work of philosophers.

Wittgenstein's work is foreign to Russell's "fundamental aim". And because Russell was demanding to force Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations into a category they do not belong in ("positive and negative doctrines"), he found them uninteresting. That would be a purely philosophical reason for his incomprehension.