Has Wittgenstein changed your life?
I have spent [inject useless quantifier here, for undefinable quantity] time reading Wittgenstein's Tractatus predominantly. I believe He ended philosophy with it. I have spent some time reading His 'On Certainty' and think it is a wonderful book. But, I still feel that His Tractatus was His magnum opus despite its brevity. I think His picture theory of meaning is a little two dimensional as the rest of the Tractatus, and doesn't account for cultural norms that evolve through time in Hegelian/dialectical manner, which he expanded on in great length in the Investigations.
But, this isn't the crux of the matter. Philosophy felt, for me, complete with His Tractatus. There was something final and of relevant Truth that can be said about the world from a subjective perspective devoid of emotions, feelings, and uncertainty. To me it was almost as if grasping the Platonic form in words, as I am a Platonist for the matter; but, suffer tremendously from not being able to understand mathematics in its entirety.
Many people compare His Tractatus as a form of Zen art. It feels very grounding and at the same time liberating conceptually.
Finally, I have found His work to, well how should I put it, calm me... His work is beyond therapeutic in that it make the resolution of issues to seem irrelevant because the issues themselves were ill formulated. I can't say it has been a mind altering experience; but, has fundamentally changed the way I see the world in that not differently; but, as it is, wholly, completely, and truthfully.
But, this isn't the crux of the matter. Philosophy felt, for me, complete with His Tractatus. There was something final and of relevant Truth that can be said about the world from a subjective perspective devoid of emotions, feelings, and uncertainty. To me it was almost as if grasping the Platonic form in words, as I am a Platonist for the matter; but, suffer tremendously from not being able to understand mathematics in its entirety.
Many people compare His Tractatus as a form of Zen art. It feels very grounding and at the same time liberating conceptually.
Finally, I have found His work to, well how should I put it, calm me... His work is beyond therapeutic in that it make the resolution of issues to seem irrelevant because the issues themselves were ill formulated. I can't say it has been a mind altering experience; but, has fundamentally changed the way I see the world in that not differently; but, as it is, wholly, completely, and truthfully.
Comments (72)
Personally, TLP has taught me a kind of deflationary skepticism - I read Wittgenstein as a Pyrrhonist, dissolving philosophical problems and achieving ataraxia by the suspension of judgement.
Quoting Question
Quaint to say for an admirer of Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was thoroughly anti-Platonic.
(Bergson, funnily enough, thus counts as perhaps one of the philosophers closest to Wittgenstein in this regard, even though the two couldn't be further apart on matters of speculative ostentation - but where Wittgenstein was an utter philosophical neurotic, Bergson treated philosophy as innocent from the beginning).
I have had a hard time seeing this argument as true. My reasoning goes;
1.Meaning requires truth to have meaning. (circular but true)
2.All objective statements obtain their meaning from the state of affairs they are (subject and object) in the world.
3.For objective statements to be true, a grounding argument/reason is required.
4.A grounding argument can be provided that all that is real is Platonic. Nothing comes before the Platonic forms. (No infinite regress or issues with 'interpretation' of meaning, there is a language at play of 'mathematics' and everything simply is in motion due to it) addendum (it would seem paradoxical that what is Platonic is in some sense 'grounding', however, that seems to be the case given the instrumentality of mathematics in describing the world)
5.Thus truth is grounded in the extravagant nuances of mathematics at play in the world presenting itself in the state of affairs everything is in in moments of time throughout time.
I'm also of the opinion that the Tractatus is horribly written. Philosophical Investigations is well-written, on the other hand, but I disagree with a lot of his views.
Circularity isn't the only issue. Meaning doesn't require truth to have meaning at all. Truth is a property of propositions. Propositions are true if they represent an actual state of affairs. Propositions have meaning even when they are false. The only time when they lack meaning is when they are tautologies or contradictions - then they are nonsense.
Quoting Question
No. They obtain their meaning from the relations they portray between objects as being the case. If this relationship is identical to the one found in the world, then they are also true. But the meaning is the picture they create - whether that picture is true - ie corresponds to the facts - is a different story.
Quoting Question
Why would an argument be required? "Outside is raining" doesn't require a grounding argument/reason at all to be true. All that is required is that such a situation obtains in the world.
It changed the way I think about philosophical problems. Now the first step, as Streetlight said, is to get the question right.
It showed me that it's what we do that counts. As a guide to ethics, there i nothing better.
And it teaches philosophical humility.
Every objective statement is a proposition verified by science.
Quoting Agustino
That's the same thing I said just said a different way. Facts are always true.
Quoting Agustino
If you apply the principle of sufficient reason, then everything can be reasoned away ad infinitium. Platonism is the fundamental truth upon which all else stands.
But not only about the world. After all, although the world is everything that is the case, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. So, there are things about which we cannot speak
The Tractatus is also about that of which we must be silent, despite saying nothing on the topic.
The Investigations is also about that silence.
Wittgenstein realised the limitations of the Tractatus, resulting in the Investigations; which starts with a critique of the approach taken in the Tractatus. The Investigations lays out the background of language against which a work such as the Tractatus must take place; and shows it to be a word game; in the process Wittgenstein makes use of analytic tools showing the limitations of philosophical enquiry.
He turns the Tractatus, and other philosophical systems, into parlour games.
Including scientific theories?
Not only by science. "It is raining" is an empirical proposition that is verified by looking outside your window.
Quoting Question
This would be considered a category error even by Wittgenstein. Facts aren't true. Truth is a property not of facts, but of propositions.
Quoting Question
This is merely a cop-out. I went through your argument and showed you why your premises don't stack up, especially on Wittgenstein's premises.
8-) yes!
A life changing revelation indeed!
Facts are always true.
Quoting Agustino
Not at all. The PoSR applies to any statement made about the world.
Actually, the Investigations was an elaboration on the Tractatus. Wittgenstein says it himself in the opening pages of the Investigations.
So long as that's not naive falsificationism, because as Popper pointed out, falsification is logically possible either.
Quoting Question
Facts as true propositions are true. Facts as the situations that true propositions describe aren't the sort of things that are true. Except when they are, like with true feelings or the true heir.
This is where Wittgenstein comes to shine. You want to know what it means to be true (or a fact)? Look to the many ways in which we use the word "true" (or "fact"). There isn't just one way.
Is it a true fact that the Sun appears the way it does because its interior is a giant fusion reactor?
Is it a true fact that the grass is wet because it rained earlier?
Or, is it the case that all observations theory-laden thus fallible?
I don't know if this reading "changed my life", but would say that Wittgenstein and Austin, especially, influenced the way I read and think in certain cases. You may be surprised to hear that I've found the techniques employed by them and others helpful in practicing law; especially when analyzing and writing briefs and making oral argument.
As for "ending philosophy" I don't think Wittgenstein ended it, perhaps because I have a broader view of philosophy than he did, at least in his Tractatus phase. I would agree that Wittgenstein, Austin and others did useful work in establishing that certain problems of philosophy and answers to them were flawed--even in some cases that they were not problems at all, properly speaking. But there's quite a bit to think about in philosophy; none of the philosophers I've read including Wittgenstein can be said to have "ended" ethics, for example, in my opinion.
For all I know, Oxford may have been and might still be the very center of banality, its axis mundi. But it seems to me peculiar to speak of OLP as banal. It was quite extraordinary in its time. Russell couldn't understand it (Wittgenstein of course thought he didn't understand the Tractatus, either), the pragmatists largely ignored it. Then consider the Continentals, Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, etc.; the idealism of Royce and Green; before them Hegel and then down the line to Plato. OLP was something new in philosophy I think, quite original to it, though consistent with the anti-metaphysical tenor of a large part of the 20th century.
Yes because it was ultimately his writings that changed how I approach conversations and questions.
No, because like most philosophical writings I did not understand a majority of what he wrote (I find it is actually quite the endeavor to read a philosophical work sincerely). I relied on Banno's cryptic chatter to enlighten me on his ideas so I suppose, in a sense, I'm more indebted to him than to Wittgenstein.
That's how I like to think of it at least.
Yeah, he laughed at Moore and Russel with "You so dumb you don't get this shit."
Then he submitted it as his dissertation and people were like, OK.
Wittgenstein! There can only be one!
It's from a letter Keynes wrote to his future wife Lydia in 1929 when Wittgenstein returned from self-imposed exile to Cambridge philosophy after a 15-year gap. Still Keynes continued to look out for him, though they weren't 'friends' by this time.
Keynes seems to have seen that Wittgenstein was super-smart in 1912 when they first met, and helped to get him admitted to the hallowed group of 'the Apostles', a Cambridge secret society of the self-appointed elite (in the 30's a nest of spies developed at its heart). But Wittgenstein left the group almost as soon as he joined it; he was rude, to English ears, and certainly not afraid to express his honest opinion even if it offended people. Biographer Ray Monk quotes Julian Bell writing a poem in the early 30's about Wittgenstein's God-like bullying demeanour:
No - he fell into the lexiconic mental rabbit hole of his time - what he really addressed was 'communication' - he offered no adequate life-guiding philosophy based on an ultimate objective value - which the world still needs (and which I've developed, just to note it).
In his defense, he did address what still needed philosophical exploration during his time, and he did make a noble effort to elevate the deplorable mental states of his time.
...as if this were a bad thing 8-) .
What he did was to show that such stuff is nonsense. Using this observation to detract from Witti demonstrates a lack of comprehension.
Does this leave us with such a state of affairs that ANY normative ethical theory is flawed?
Certainly every includes any.
Someone's disagreeing with a given normative ethic does not tell us about the truth of that ethic; it tells us about the person.
Even further, truth cannot be derived from normative ethical theories without evoking nonsense.
Hmm. Maybe. There are true normative statements.
That's just contextual-ism said another way and heavily depends on what'ya mean by 'true' here. Give me some examples, if you may?
I ought to follow social and cultural norms(?)
That's all there is to this.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
That is, ethics is shown, not said.
Except that it is, like since you were a little school boy. Do this, don't do that. It's better to share. 10 commandments. A good person does this and not that. Our language is full of ethical entreaties. We have ethical schools of philosophy dating back to pre-Socrates. We discuss ethical dilemmas presented to characters on various shows. It's hard to see how ethics isn't intimately related to language.
We all want to be special. :_)
I don't disagree. I have shown that ethical statements can be true, and stated that ethics involves action.
I don't think that's the issue. Can a an ethical statement be proven to be true an in fact ethical without referencing a normative theory?
Proof - so you are talking about justification. Your question is: how does one justify an ethical statement?
I don't see that ethical statements must be justified in any distinct from other statements. They are just statements.
So, can any knowledge about ethics can be derived from ethical acts?
There are justified true beliefs after all.
Can thus we write about what is ethical?
Change "because" to "and".
We can write about it. But what is important is that we act.
But, Wittgenstein!
He said we must be silent about such things.
[I]Which[/i] things?
Evaluating the validity of ethical propositions of course comparatively to the sum total of people in the state of affairs of the world.
And here there can be silence.
So, who ought have the final word on the matter? The lawyers, judge, or jury?
There are certain things which the Tractatus says we should keep silent about. But I think, as you know from other exchanges, that the Tractatus is not the 'template' for everything Wittgenstein thought: it's the starting point of a man in his twenties who later saw things more broadly, especially in terms of how we use language and what the grammar of philosophical enquiry is. I've just been reading 'Culture and Value' which is a piecemeal, illuminating summary of other remarks by Wittgenstein about, well, matters of culture and value.
He did talk about Ethics. Famously he's said to have thought it was on a par with Aesthetics. He thought that Ethics-talk involved stepping out of the natural into the Supernatural, and therefore our language renders it nonsense - but nonsense which is attempting to express profound meaning, only our language fails us.
Here's a link to the 1929 lecture on Ethics, it's hard to read in this format, oddly enough it's one of the few things I've found easier to read on a phone than on a pc.