Ludwig Wittgenstein
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951, Austria, United Kingdom) : analytic philosophy. Many problems of philosophy come from a misunderstanding of how our language works. The early Wittgenstein (Tractatus, 1921) draws the limit of what can be said: the facts of the world. On AskPhilosophy: 6 reconstructed arguments, 5 quotes checked word for word against the original texts, and 4 common beliefs examined; every text carries an authenticity badge (written by the author, posthumous, student notes, reported, apocryphal).
Two Wittgensteins
The Tractatus, written during the First World War: a proposition is a picture of a fact; what is not a fact cannot be said. He then thinks he has solved the problems "in essentials". The Philosophical Investigations, finished around 1945-1946 and published after his death: language is a toolbox, made of varied games bound up with our activities. In their preface he writes that he was forced to recognise "grave mistakes" in his first book, and wishes both to be published together: the new thoughts get their meaning only by contrast with the old ones.
Why he matters
He inspired two great opposed currents of the 20th century: the Vienna Circle read the Tractatus as a machine against metaphysics; Oxford "ordinary language" philosophy started from the Investigations. His images have become tools for thinking: the ladder thrown away after climbing it, language-games, family resemblances, the beetle in the box, the fly in the fly-bottle.
His times
Born into one of the richest families in Vienna, he studied engineering, then joined Russell in Cambridge in 1911. A volunteer in the Austrian army in 1914, he wrote the Tractatus during the war and sent the manuscript to Russell from a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. He then gave away his fortune and became a primary school teacher in Austrian villages. Back in Cambridge in 1929, he taught there until 1947, but never published another book in his lifetime.
His positions
click a row to see the evidenceHe calls himself neither a believer nor an atheist. For him "God does not reveal himself in the world", and religious language, like ethical language, tries to say what cannot be said. But he refuses to mock it: it is a tendency of the human mind he "respects deeply".
Neither empiricist nor rationalist in the classic sense. Logic is known without experience, but it says nothing about the world: its propositions are tautologies. Everything that says something about the world belongs to natural science.
He does not refute radical scepticism: he finds it "senseless", since doubt can exist only where a question can be asked. In 1918 he even holds the truth of his book "unassailable and definitive", before calling it into question.
Neither dualist nor materialist: he wants to dissolve the question rather than settle it. He denies that there is a "thinking subject" in the world (Tractatus), then criticises the idea that our sensation words name private inner objects (Investigations), while refusing to be a "behaviourist in disguise".
A position of its own. In the Tractatus, belief in the causal nexus is "superstition", and freedom of the will consists in the fact that future actions cannot be known now. But the world itself is independent of our will.
Neither realist nor relativist. No fact in the world has absolute value, so there are no "ethical propositions". But he also rejects Hamlet's formula ("thinking makes it so"): a state of mind, as a fact, is not good or bad either. Value lies outside the world.
Scientific reason can neither prove nor refute ethics and religion: even if all scientific questions were answered, the problems of life would remain untouched. They are not matters of proof.
The sense of the world may exist, but it lies "outside the world" and cannot be said. Those who found it "could not then say wherein this sense consisted": the problem of life is solved by vanishing.
He does not deal with this question in our texts.
He wrote no political philosophy.
Neither an ethics of duty nor of consequences: ethics "has nothing to do with punishment and reward in the ordinary sense". It lies in a way of seeing the world as a whole: "the world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy".