This is pretty much a straight biography of Wittgenstein, dealing in equal measure with the personal details of his life and expositions of his philosophy. It does great work putting his ideas into the context of his life. Though Wittgenstein reneged on much of his previous work in the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus in his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, some of his basic philosophical tenets remained unchanged throughout his life. In Notes on Logic, Wittgenstein states, “In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite of philosophizing.” His philosophy was always concerned with language, meaning, grammar, and propositions. Monk states, “A proposition serves as a model, or picture, of a state of affairs, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world. The way in which the parts of the proposition are combined—the structure of the proposition—depicts a possible combination of elements in reality, a possible state of affairs…. Wittgenstein developed the consequences of this idea, which he called his ‘Theory of Logical Portrayal’. Just as a drawing or a painting portrays pictorially, so, he came to think, a proposition portrays logically…. It is this commonality of structure which enables language to represent reality.”
One neglected area of Wittgenstein’s life that Monk brings into focus is his strained relationship with religion. He was brought up a Catholic in a secular Viennese household. However, depending on who you ask three (or two) of his grandparents were Jews. He seemed to have never wavered in his belief in God, although his conception of the deity might have been unique to himself. Wittgenstein wrote in his diary, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world—and so in a certain sense master it—by renouncing any influence on happenings.” Later, he would further interrogate his own belief, “To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life. To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. The world is given to me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there. (As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.) However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world—which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I…. When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.” Later in his diaries, Wittgenstein again wrestles with the meaning of life, “The solution to the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem. Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?” More than just keeping a belief in a deist God, Wittgenstein continued to consider himself a faithful Christian, though no longer a Catholic. “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened and will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through faith.”
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein famously states, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” Ethical truths, for him, were unspeakable. But they were the most meaningful part of life. Of many important things, they cannot be said, they can only be shown. Monk remarks, “The nonsense that results from trying to say what can only be shown is not only logically untenable, but ethically undesirable.” Wittgenstein explains of the Tractatus, “It is quite strictly speaking the presentation of a system. And this presentation is extremely compressed since I have only retained in it that which really occurred to me—and how it occurred to me…. The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it.” He never tried to prove his statements or defend himself. He cut out everything until only the core of his philosophy remained. Monk continues, “Whereas the Tractatus deals with language in isolation from the circumstances in which it is used, the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning: a ‘language-game’ cannot be described without mentioning their activities and the way of life of the ‘tribe’ that plays it.” Wittgenstein was intent that he had no theory. He tried to dig towards what he called atomic propositions, realizing that he had not, and probably would never, reach them. “We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions. We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions.”
Wittgenstein was worshipped by the positivists of the Vienna Circle led by Moritz Schlick. Despite this, he was highly skeptical of them and of positivism more generally. He feared it led to scientism. In a speech to the Heretics at Cambridge he expounded, “Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.” In Vienna, speaking to Schlick and Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein repeated, “I think it is definitely important to put an end to all the claptrap about ethics—whether intuitive knowledge exists, whether values exist, whether the good is definable.” Going back to the Tractatus, Wittgenstein is clear, “The correct method of philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.” Wittgenstein did not have much faith in modernity. “It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.”
For Wittgenstein, the hard questions were the ones that cannot be said, much less written about. These problems were hard enough just to think to oneself about. Writing to one of his proteges, Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein beseeches, “I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it’s nasty then it’s most important…. If we live to see each other again let’s not shirk digging. You can’t think decently if you don’t want to hurt yourself. I know all about it because I am a shirker.”
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