Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)

Nicholas C. Burbules and Michael Peters

(for 100 Key Thinkers on Education, Joy Palmer and David Cooper, eds.)

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London....a rather bad guide.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was born to an aristocratic family in Vienna, April 26 1889. He was the youngest of eight very precocious children, and was preoccupied all his life with questions of genius, artistic creativity, and suicide (three of his brothers died that way). In 1911, on the advice of Gottlob Frege, he went to meet Bertrand Russell at Cambridge, after which he was admitted to Trinity College. Russell was impressed by Wittgenstein, and urged him to study mathematical logic. They worked as colleagues, even though Wittgenstein was technically an undergraduate. Over time, however, the relations between Wittgenstein and Russell became strained, and in 1913 Wittgenstein left Cambridge. He enrolled in the Austrian army just a few days after WW I was declared; he was eventually taken prisoner in Italy, but during these years he managed to write the one philosophical book published during his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The manuscript was sent to Russell while Wittgenstein was still a prisoner, and with Russell’s (somewhat equivocal) support and Introduction it was eventually published in 1922, exerting an enormous philosophical influence, particularly on the positivists of the Vienna Circle, which included Rudolf Carnap, Herbert Feigl, Moritz Schlick, and Friedrich Waismann, with whom Wittgenstein became acquainted.

Wittgenstein, on the death of his father in 1913, had inherited a substantial part of his family’s fortune. In 1919 he gave it all away and went to work as a teacher in the small Austrian villages of Trattenbach, Hassbach, Puchberg, and Otterthal during the years of 1920-26. Following a series of short stints, he resigned his post in Otterthal under a cloud of suspicion over allegedly striking a female student (not the first student he had struck during his teaching years, apparently). After working as a gardener and helping to design and build a house for one of his sisters, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. His Ph.D. was granted based on the Tractatus as his thesis, he was given a five year fellowship, and he taught at Trinity College until 1935, when he left again, spending time in Russia, Norway, Austria, and Ireland. By 1935 Wittgenstein was having serious doubts about the value of philosophy, and was actively counseling his students to find a more "useful" line of work. Yet in 1938 he returned to Cambridge, becoming a Professor in 1939.

During the 1930s and 40s he wrote a great deal in the form of remarks, aphorisms, and fragments; but none of this work was published during his lifetime. A major part of what was to become his second major work, the Philosophical Investigations, was compiled by 1945, but was not published until 1953, two years after his death. In the Investigations, Wittgenstein criticized, and to a large extent rejected, the views developed in the Tractatus , specifically in developing a more "anthropological" and pragmatic view of language – and so we have the remarkable phenomenon of someone giving impetus to two major, and opposed, philosophical movements during his lifetime. Wittgenstein resigned his professorship in 1947, continuing to work on the Investigations and other projects until his death from prostrate cancer in April 1951. Throughout his career, Wittgenstein struggled with self-doubt about his worth as a philosopher and the value of philosophy itself; about his identity and moral character; and about his sexual and amorous relationships.

Wittgenstein is rarely considered an educational thinker per se. Except for a few comments and aphorisms, he wrote very little about the topic. But it is also clear that he thought very seriously about education. It is well-known, for example, that he taught in a highly idiosyncratic manner, and that for years after young philosophers at Cambridge mimicked his habits and style. It is less well-known that he taught in rural Austria during the "wilderness years" of the 20’s, during which time he wrote a school textbook. We have also been struck by Wittgenstein’s frequent use of pedagogical examples and analogies to make philosophical points in his writing. Indeed, we have argued elsewhere that Wittgenstein’s style of writing and doing philosophy is fundamentally pedagogical: that is, premised on teaching a way of thinking about philosophical problems or – in certain instances – on unlearning certain bad philosophical habits.

There are at least three ways, then, to explore Wittgenstein’s educational thought and practice: First, through his university teaching; second, through the accounts of his experiences as a primary and secondary school teacher in Austria; third, through his style of writing and composing his philosophical ideas, particularly in his later work.

(1) Much of what we have from Wittgenstein relies upon recollections or reconstructions of his teaching by his university students. Many of his posthumous "works" are actually transcriptions, discussions, course notes, or lectures recorded by his students and colleagues. His styles of teaching and thinking in performance, therefore, constitute a significant proportion of his extant works. These accounts of his teaching confirm his intensity of thinking and his honesty as a thinker and teacher. If he was unforgiving in his treatment of his students, it is because he was unforgiving with himself. The long painful silences that interspersed his classes, his disregard for institutional conventions in pedagogy, and his relentless criticism (and self-criticism) were an essential part of his teaching style.

Accounts of Wittgenstein as a teacher of philosophy are legendary. D.A.T. Gasking and A.C. Jackson report the following description Wittgenstein gave of his own teaching:

In teaching you philosophy I’m like a guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times – each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a Londoner. Of course, a good guide will take you through the more important streets more often than he takes you down side streets; a bad guide will do the opposite. In philosophy I’m a rather bad guide.

This passage indicates Wittgenstein’s penchant for comparing doing philosophy with making a journey.

Gasking and Jackson focus on the "technique of oral discussion" Wittgenstein used, a technique they describe as, at first, bewildering:

Example was piled up on example. Sometimes the examples were fantastic, as when one was invited to consider the very odd linguistic or other behavior of an imaginary tribe....Sometimes the example was just a reminder of some well-known homely fact. Always the case was given in concrete detail, described in down-to-earth everyday language. Nearly every single thing said was easy to follow and was usually not the sort of thing anyone would wish to dispute.

The difficulty came from seeing where this "repetitive concrete" talk was leading. Sometimes he "would break off, saying, ‘Just a minute, let me think!’...or he would exclaim, ‘This is as difficult as hell.’’’ Sometimes the point of the many examples became suddenly clear as though the solution was obvious and simple. Gasking and Jackson report Wittgenstein as saying that he wanted to show his students that they had confusions that they never thought they could have and admonished them by saying, "You must say what you really think as though no one, not even you, could overhear it."

Karl Britton reports that Wittgenstein thought there was no test one could apply to discover whether a philosopher was teaching properly: "He said that many of his pupils merely put forward his own ideas: and that many of them imitated his voice and manner; but that he could easily distinguish those who really understood." Indeed, this degree of influence made Wittgenstein wonder whether he was a good teacher at all:

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me.

G.H. Von Wright, a far from unsympathetic observer, thought that Wittgenstein’s concern was well-founded:

He thought his influence as a teacher was, on the whole, harmful to the development of independent minds in his disciples....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 his tone of voice, his mien and gestures, was almost impossible.

Doing philosophy always took priority for Wittgenstein, whether this was in oral or written form: it was important to show the deep puzzles in our language (and our culture and thinking) as well as dissolving them. Doing philosophy let the fly out of the fly-bottle: it cured our buzzing confusion and allowed us to lead useful and practical lives. Wittgenstein said "a philosophical problem has the form ‘I don’t know my way about.’" His style of teaching philosophy was designed to enable listeners to shift their thinking, to think differently about a problem, which was often in his view the only way to "solve" it. In this respect, one can teach only as a "guide."

(2) Ray Monk, one of Wittgenstein’s primary biographers, devotes a chapter ("An Entirely Rural Affair") to Wittgenstein’s years as a school teacher during the 1920s. His account of Wittgenstein’s teaching service in the village schools of rural Austria paints Wittgenstein as a teacher with exacting standards and little patience, one who was given to violent outbursts against his students.

These are significant biographical details. Indeed, it is suggested by Fania Pascal that it was an episode in Wittgenstein’s career as a teacher that involved hitting one of his girl pupils (and which he later denied to the principal), that "stood out as a crisis of his early manhood" and caused him to give up teaching. Rhees, commenting upon this same episode, quotes from a letter from Wittgenstein to Russell: "how can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!"

Monk describes Wittgenstein’s misgivings about Glöckel’s school reforms and the publication of Wittgenstein’s Wörterbuch für Volksschullen – a spelling dictionary – in 1925, and yet does not recognize the significance of Wittgenstein’s experiences as a school teacher for his later philosophy. William Bartley is one of the few scholars to devote any space to Wittgenstein’s development during the 1920s. His major historical claim is that there are "Certain similarities between some themes of Glöckel’s program and Bühler’s theories on the one hand, and ideas which infuse the later work of Wittgenstein." Otto Glöckel was administrative head of the socialist school-reform, which had attacked the old "drill" schools of the Hapsburgs based on passive rote learning and memorization, to argue for the establishment of the Arbeitsschule or "working school" based on the active participation of pupils and a doctrine of learning by doing. Bartley conjectures that the themes of the school-reform movement and, in particular, the views of Karl Bühler, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna and at the Vienna Pedagogical Institute, who was invited to Vienna by Glöckel and his colleagues in 1922, in large measure accounted for the profound change in Wittgenstein’s philosophizing in the late 1920s. He bases this claim upon the "striking similarities" between their ideas and some historical circumstantial evidence. Bartley also provides some textual evidence; he quotes Wittgenstein in Zettel: "Am I doing child psychology?....I am making a connection between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning." He recounts a story that Wittgenstein used to tell his pupils in Trattenbach from 1921 concerning an experiment to determine whether children who had not yet learned to speak, locked away with a woman who could not speak, could learn a primitive language or invent a new language of their own. Bartley asks us, by way of corroboration, to consider that the Investigations begins with a critique of St. Augustine’s account of how a child learns a language.

Yet Bartley’s work has also been criticized. Eugene Hargrove, for instance, argues, with Paul Englemann, that it was the direct effect of Wittgenstein’s contact with children rather than the school reform movement or Bühler’s ideas that influenced Wittgenstein’s views about language:

I believe we can see the influence of Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher on almost every page of the Investigations, for there are very few pages in a row that do not make some reference to children. Throughout his later philosophy, Wittgenstein often supported the points he was making by citing personal observations about children. It is these observations, which he made as a school teacher and used as a pool of data later, that, as I see it, are the true influence on Wittgenstein’s work, and not principles taught at the teachers college or waved in his face by the school reformers.

C.J.B. Macmillan terms this Wittgenstein’s "pedagogical turn": "we often find him turning from a consideration of the meanings of a term or concept to ask, ‘How was this learned?’ or ‘How would you teach it?’"

(3) Wittgenstein’s way of "doing philosophy," as we have noted, differed from traditional attempts to do philosophy: it is aporetic but not Socratic; it is dialogical but not in the traditional philosophical sense. Wittgenstein writes, "Reading the Socratic dialogues one has the feeling; what a frightful waste of time! What’s the point of these arguments that prove nothing and clarify nothing." Moreover, Wittgenstein expresses his impatience with the game of eristics:

Socrates keeps reducing the sophist to silence, – but does he have right on his side when he does this? Well, it is true that the sophist does not know what he thinks he knows; but that is no triumph for Socrates. It can’t be a case of "You see! You don’t know it!"–nor yet, triumphantly, of "So none of us knows anything!"

Hence it should be no surprise that Wittgenstein says that his approach is the opposite of Socrates’. Where Socrates, professing his ignorance, sought to disabuse others of their mistaken beliefs, Wittgenstein, through his dialogical forms of teaching and writing, sought to externalize his own doubts and questions, showing the nature of certain problems as he tried to work them through in his own mind: "Nearly all my writings are private conversations with myself. Things that I say to myself tête-à-tête." (Much the same might be said of his teaching, as we have tried to show.)

The Philosophical Investigations is Wittgenstein’s primary example of a dialogical work; yet clearly it is not dialogical in the sense established by Socrates. And judging by Wittgenstein’s comments on Socrates it is evident why the Investigations does not follow or try to emulate the Socratic form or method. While the Investigations is written in the form of a dialogue, it draws upon a repertoire of dialogical strategies and gestures. Terry Eagleton recognizes this when he calls the Investigations

a thoroughly dialogical work, in which the author wonders out loud, imagines an interlocutor, asks us questions which may or may not be on the level...forcing the reader into the work of self-demystification, genially engaging our participation by his deliberately undaunting style.

The Investigations self-reflectively mirrors and models the multiplicity of language-games and gestures it attempts to describe. It functions as an exemplary pedagogical text the aim of which is for Wittgenstein’s students to think these problems through for themselves (an aim, it must be said, which he did not feel had always been successful, as we have seen). Wittgenstein’s adoption of the dialogue form, along with his innovations with form and composition in writing, were part of his deliberate experimentation designed to shift our thinking. He certainly did not want his readers or audience to imitate him in either the forms or the contents of his thought. Nor did he think that there is only one way to "do" philosophy.

He agonized over the form of his work and he developed very complex methods of composition: "Forcing my thoughts into an ordered sequence is a torment for me....I squander an unspeakable amount of effort making an arrangement of my thoughts which may have no value at all." He wrote philosophical remarks or fragments, and sometimes referred to his procedure of composition as one of assemblage – philosophy "consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose."

Hence we see that the Investigations and later works are interspersed with frequent remarks that begin with asking us to "imagine," as in "Let us imagine a language..." and elsewhere. At other times he constructs this as "Suppose..." or "Think..." or "Ask yourself..." and so on. These thought experiments play a crucial substantive and stylistic role in the Investigations, and they are characteristic of a way of writing about philosophy that is more oriented to triggering a shift in thought than in demonstrating a proof; more to showing than to saying; more to pointing than to leading (note the frequent references in Wittgenstein’s later work to signposts, wandering through a city, being lost, needing a guide, finding one’s way about, and knowing how to go on). This is a conception of teaching, and teaching through writing, far different from the classic Socratic engagement of the Meno, one based on instruction along a specific path of reasoning to a definite conclusion.

Another recurring element in the Investigations is a question Wittgenstein asks to himself, posed by an imaginary interlocutor, with multiple possible answers or a hypothetical response, followed by his typical dissatisfied reply, "But...." Fann notes that Wittgenstein asks on the order of eight hundred questions in the Investigations, yet he only answers one hundred of them and of these the majority (some seventy) are answers that he pointedly rejects. Wittgenstein wants to stop us from asking certain kinds of questions: the sort of "philosophical" questions which require that we provide a theoretical answer abstracted from the context of use and social practice. Instead, his questions and replies serve as reminders, bringing us back to familiar aspects of human language and experience; the significance of the fact that we can identify the related members of a family, for example, even when they do not all share the same features in common.

This mode of dialogue, then, is not one of demonstration but of investigation. Wittgenstein’s use of imagined interchanges, thought experiments, diagrams, pictures, examples, aphorisms, or parables is meant to engage the reader in a process that was, in Wittgenstein’s teaching as well as in his writing, the externalization of his own doubts, his own questions, his own thought processes. His philosophical purpose was manifested, shown, in how he pursued a question; his style was his method, and his writings sought to exemplify how it worked. His concern with matters of form and composition were not only about the presentation of an argument, but about the juxtaposition that would best draw the reader into the very state of puzzlement he himself felt. An appreciation of Wittgenstein’s philosophical style leads us directly to an understanding of the fundamentally pedagogical nature of his endeavor.

Wittgenstein’s Primary Writings

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969)The Blue and Brown Books, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1980) Culture and Value, G. H. Von Wright (Ed.) (in collaboration with Heikki Nyman), trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1979) On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) Philosophical Investigations trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, (Oxford: Basil Blackwell) (3rd Ed. 1972).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1981) Zettel, 2nd Ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, eds. (Oxford: Blackwell), p. 74.

Biographical Material on Wittgenstein

W.W. Bartley, III (1973) Wittgenstein (Philadelphia & New York: J. B. Lippincott).

Paul Engelmann (1967) Letters from Wittgenstein with a memoir (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Norman Malcolm (1984) Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

Brian McGuiness (1988) Wittgenstein: A Young Life, 1889-1921 (London: Duckworth)

Ray Monk (1991) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Vintage).

Rush Rhees (ed.) Recollections of Wittgenstein (Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press).

G.H. Von Wright (1982) Wittgenstein (Oxford: Blackwell).

Secondary Sources on Wittgenstein

G.E.M. Anscombe (1971) An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

G.P. Baker & P.M.S. Hacker (1980) Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

G.P. Baker & P.M.S. Hacker (1985) Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Stanley Cavell (1979)The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press).

P.M.S. Hacker (1990) Wittgenstein: Meaning and Mind (Oxford: Basil Blackwell).

Allen Janik & Stephen Toulmin,(1973) Wittgenstein's Vienna (London: Weidenfield & Nicholson).

Anthony Kenney (1975) Wittgenstein (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books).

Saul A. Kripke (1982) Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press).

H. Sluga and D.G. Stern, eds., (1996) The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).