Who Was Ludwig Wittgenstein? The Philosopher Who Refuted Himself

Born in Vienna in 1889 into one of the wealthiest families in the Austro-Hungarian empire, in a house where Brahms and Mahler were guests, he studied aeronautical engineering in Manchester, became interested in the mathematics behind it, and went to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Bertrand Russell, who within a year regarded him as his successor. He served in the Austrian army through the First World War, volunteering for the most dangerous positions, and was carrying the manuscript of his book when he was captured in Italy in 1918. After publication he gave his entire inherited fortune to his siblings, on the reasoning that giving it to the poor would corrupt them, and spent the 1920s teaching in remote Austrian villages, where he was competent, harsh and eventually left after an incident with a pupil. He designed a house in Vienna for his sister, still standing and severely plain. He returned to Cambridge in 1929, held a chair there, worked as a hospital porter during the Second World War, resigned his professorship in 1947 and died of cancer in 1951, reportedly saying that he had had a wonderful life.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1921, is about eighty pages of numbered propositions, each elaborating a numbered parent. Its argument is that language works by picturing facts: a proposition has the same logical structure as the situation it describes, in the way a model of a traffic accident maps onto the accident, and this is the only thing language can do. From that follows a strict limit. Statements of natural science describe facts and can be true or false; statements about ethics, aesthetics, God and the meaning of life are not describing facts at all and are therefore, in his technical sense, nonsense, along with almost all of philosophy including his own book, which he compares to a ladder to be thrown away after climbing it. His last proposition, that whereof one cannot speak one must be silent, is usually read as dismissive and was not meant that way: he regarded what lies beyond language as the important part, and thought the mistake was trying to speak about it.

The second philosophy, published posthumously in 1953 as Philosophical Investigations, abandons the picture theory entirely. Its central move is to stop asking what a word refers to and ask instead how it is used:

• •Meaning is use, so a word's meaning is its role in the practices of a community rather than an object it labels
• •Language games, the idea that language consists of countless different activities, giving orders, joking, praying, reporting, thanking, each with its own rules, and that assuming all sentences work like factual descriptions is the source of most philosophical confusion
• •Family resemblance, the observation that the things called games share no single defining feature but overlap in a network of similarities, which undermines the search for necessary and sufficient definitions
• •The private language argument, which holds that a language whose terms refer to sensations only the speaker can access is impossible, because there would be no standard for using a word correctly and therefore no difference between being right and seeming right
• •The rule-following problem, which shows that no rule determines its own application, so what counts as following it is settled by shared practice rather than by the rule itself
• •Philosophy as therapy, whose aim is not to build theories but to dissolve confusions by showing how language misled us, and whose goal he described as showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle

Both books are unusual to read. The first is austere, numbered and declarative; the second is a sequence of several hundred short remarks, many of them questions, many in dialogue with an imagined interlocutor who keeps raising the objections a reader would raise, with almost no conclusions stated as results. This is deliberate. If philosophical problems are confusions rather than questions, then presenting a theory would reproduce the error, and the method has to be one of examples, comparisons and reminders that bring the reader to see the confusion themselves. It makes the book unusually resistant to summary, which is why accounts of it differ so widely and why it has generated commentary in every direction. It also makes him one of the few philosophers whose prose is quoted for its own sake.

The two phases founded two schools. The Tractatus was taken up by the Vienna Circle and shaped logical positivism, which made verifiability by observation the criterion of meaning, though Wittgenstein attended their meetings and disagreed with their reading of him, on occasion reading them poetry instead of arguing. The later work founded ordinary language philosophy at Oxford and reshaped the philosophy of mind, of psychology and of religion, and it fed into anthropology, sociology and the sociology of scientific knowledge through the idea that concepts get their content from shared practices. His influence on cognitive science is oblique and real, since the private language argument bears directly on any theory that treats meaning as an internal mental item. The reception is still contested, with one camp reading him as advancing substantive doctrines and another, the resolute reading, insisting he was doing nothing of the kind, which is an argument about a philosopher who spent his career warning that the urge to find a theory where none is offered is exactly the problem.

The Viennese engineer turned philosopher published one book in 1921 arguing that language works by picturing facts, that anything not a factual description is strictly nonsense, and that philosophy was therefore finished, then left the subject for a decade. Returning, he replaced that with the view that meaning is use, that language consists of countless different activities with their own rules, that a private language is impossible and that philosophical problems are confusions to be dissolved rather than questions to be answered. Each phase founded a separate school.