The central thesis of this book is that it is impossible to look at Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy without considering the milieu in which the man was raised. By only considering his Cambridge days onward, after he had met Bertrand Russell, one is missing the uniquely Viennese aspects of his thought. As such, this book is as much a history of thought in fin de siecle Vienna as it is an encapsulation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
It was the beginning of the end for the Hapsburg Empire, where traditional culture and mores were transforming, yet Emperor Francis Joseph futilely sought to stem the tide of progress. “The values which this society cherished were reason, order and progress, perseverance, self-reliance, and disciplined conformity to the standards of good taste and action. The irrational, the passionate, and the chaotic were to be avoided at all costs.” Yet there was a burgeoning intelligentsia that was willing to go against the established grain. Karl Kraus in writing, Arnold Schoenberg in music, Adolf Loos in design, Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka in painting were all leaders of this rebelling artistic wave. This new literati were also polymaths who dipped their toes into adjacent fields, notably philosophy (on which every learned Viennese felt he was entitled to have an opinion). There were dozens of intellectual circles that met regularly to recite, debate, present, sing, drink, and gossip at the many cafes of Vienna. And there was one over-arching problem which kept cropping up, “the nature and limits of language, expression, and communication.”
Seen in this light the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” might, at first glance, seem less original, but not so, as it fused together prevailing Viennese thoughts to come up with a logical answer to the “problem” of language. And the genius of Wittgenstein was not only what was in the “Tractatus,” but what he deliberately left out, the essence of life that for him was of most import, “that skeptical resignation, insight into the incompatibility of reality, is not merely another negation among others. It is our best knowledge.” Wittgenstein’s project was to map out the limits of reason in the tradition of Kant, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Tolstoy. It was to build a wall between fact and value, to assert that the first might be public in a sense, while the other was intensely individual. His message was at the same time anti-metaphysical and anti-positivist. As Paul Engelmann insisted, “positivism holds—and this is its essence—that what we can speak about is all that matters in life. Whereas Wittgenstein passionately believes that all that really matters in human life is precisely what, in his view, we must be silent about.”
The “Tractatus” was so revolutionary because it got out of the way what could be justifiably said, what could be communicated adequately, so that one could instead focus on what was not spoken. Wittgenstein felt, “ethics is transcendental… How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher.” Again, “the fundamental point of this whole critique was to underline the ethical point that all questions about value lie outside the scope of such ordinary factual or descriptive language… [The] Tractatus becomes an expression of a certain type of language mysticism that assigns a central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can express the meaning of life. Only art can express moral truth, and only the artist can teach the things that matter most in life… It did not, of course, claim that morality is contrary to reason; merely that its foundations lay elsewhere.”
Wittgenstein was not trying to solve the problem of language because to him it was not a problem, but an unsolvable riddle. As Wittgenstein professes in his penultimate aphorism, “my propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions and then he will see the world aright.” This is philosophy not written in stone, but as plastic utensils. If it serves its purpose correctly, then it can be discarded.
However, Wittgenstein feared he would be inevitably misunderstood. In fact, he admitted, after reading Russell’s preface to the first edition, that Russell had badly misunderstood the whole thing. Wittgenstein came to the view that the only man who would understand the “Tractatus” was he who “has himself already had the thoughts which are expressed in it.” Or as he would later write to Engelmann (in a slightly different context), “how could I expect you to understand me, when I barely understand myself!”
Wittgenstein is clearly a tough nut to crack. I think it would be fair to say that he was an ethical individualist. He viewed values as something intrinsically personal and, therefore, incapable of being truly expressed through language. “Collective morality is an illusion. The only hope for the individual is to find, and save, his own soul; and even this he can do only by avoiding worldly attachments.” His philosophy was so revolutionary in its modesty. Although later in life he would come to amend some of his positions in the Tractatus, his general gist would remain, “to say nothing except what can be said… and then, whenever someone else wants to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions.”
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