Mr. Wittgenstein! What does it all mean?

A Most Merry and Illustrated Minority Report

There are certainly better ways to start a book than the manner in which Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The Tractatus was the only book that Ludwig published in his lifetime and begins as follows:

"This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it or similar thoughts."

So Ludwig starts off telling us is 1) the book is incomprehensible, 2) people have thought of it before, and 3) if people haven't thought of it before, they've come pretty close. We can also guess that there will be as many interpretations of Ludwig's writings as there are readers who, after struggling through this short but difficult volume, will come away sadder but no wiser.

Certainly we won't quibble with any of these statements, particularly Ludwig's own self-assessment. Just get a copy of the Tractatus (on-line copies are available) and open to the first chapter. There you read stuff like:

"The world is everything that is the case."
"The facts in logical space are the world."
"What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts."
"An atomic fact is a combination of objects (entities, things)."

All of which strikes the average reader like the other famous lines of philosophy:

"To be is to do." - Socrates
"To do is to be." - Plato
"Do be do be do." - Sinatra

So perhaps serious philosophers everywhere will forgive the neophyte who tries to tackle the Tractatus or Ludwig's later (and posthumous) Philosophical Investigations and finds them a bunch of pretentious philosophical hooey. Then upon learning more about Ludwig himself and that he is one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, the reader may very well decide Ludwig's fame arises more from the idolatry of fatuous tenured professorial poseurs than from any merit of Ludwig's ideas. After all, as long as someone is a big enough weirdo, there will be plenty of people to say he's a genius. Then with a snort of disgust you'll grab another can of Bud, grab the remote, click back on "Only in America with Larry the Cable Guy", and say to heck with Ludwig.

As understandable as such views are - Ludwig does not really explain his terms, and he really was an oddball - they are not really fair either to Ludwig or the many philosophers (and other people) who have been influenced by him. Actually once you start getting into the details of Ludwig's ideas and read the various books about what Ludwig meant, then you can kind of see what he's saying. And if you really start studying Ludwig and analyzing his logic and language, you realize that there is a lot to what he said after all.

Ludwig came from a rich Austrian family, and after getting an engineering degree from what is now the Berlin Institute of Technology in 1908, he went to study the then fledgling field of aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. But his engineering studies got him interested in pure mathematics which in turn led him toward the then hot topic of mathematical logic. Logic was finally breaking out of the limits imposed by Aristotle, and the mathematicians Giuseppe Peano and Gottlob Frege were beginning to dig rigorously into the derivation of arithmetic and the development of first and higher order formal logics. So in 1911 and on the advice of Frege, Ludwig went to Cambridge to study with Bertrand Russell, then the #1 mathematical logician in the world.

People talk about the early and late Wittgenstein. In the early days - represented in the Tractatus - he was dealing with the questions of analytic logic. He, like Bertie, was working on ways to rid the formal systems of the paradoxes which had been casting doubt as to the whole validity of logic and thought. Because formal logic had various paradoxes - statements that seemed to be true and false at the same time - everyone knew there was a problem but no one knew just where.

In formal logic you analyze arguments by the syntactical structure rather than any definite meaning of the individual words or terms. Therefore you can find out if a statement is true or false with the rigor of a mathematical proof. The truth of an argument then arose from whether it was structured properly rather than the basis of the actual meaning of the words.

Strangely enough, the requirement that statements must be true or false was a key to the problem. Ludwig decided that the paradoxes arose because some formulas were not just true or false. Instead, it was perfectly possible to construct proper formulas which were neither true nor false, but meaningless. This idea was not unique with Ludwig, and Russell had also come to similar conclusions and suggested some solutions. But Ludwig went further than Bertie.

To understand Ludwig's line of thought, we also need first to point out that not only did he feel logical statements could be true, false, and meaningless, but there were two types of meaninglessness (if that's a word). One type of meaningless statement was sinnlos - in German, pointless or devoid of meaning. The other type of meaninglessness was unsinn, which means nonsense, rubbish, or gibberish. Not quite the same thing.

To get a grip on what a sinnlos statement is, we can turn to the type of paradoxes like the one Bertie found. Although Bertie was mostly worried about set theory, we can go to a simpler example which is the famous "liar's paradox".

Go ask someone if you are lying when you say "I am lying." If you are lying when you say "I am lying", then you are clearly telling the truth. On the other hand, if you are telling the truth when you say "I am lying", then you are certainly lying. So you're telling the truth if you're lying and lying if you're telling the truth. In other words, the statement "I am lying" is simultaneously true or false. But statements, philsophers tell us, have to be one or the other.

One way out of the liar's paradox is simply to say what you've really done is not found a paradox at all, but simply proven with "mathematical rigor" that "I am lying" is simply not a statement. After all, we've just shown that "I am lying" is both true and false - that is, it is a contradiction - and by definition a statement must true or false. So using the principles of indirect proof or reductio ad absurdum, we know that the assumption must be false. Ergo, "I am lying" cannot be a statement.

But on the other hand, we use the sentence in normal conversation with no problem. And it certainly looks like a statement, it sounds like a statement, and it walks like a statement. So why isn't it a statement?

The problems is we are using "I am lying" to refer to itself. This makes it meaningless - sinnlos. This will be evident if you step out of the philosophy classroom, walk up to a Joe or Josephine Blow on the street and say, "I am lying". Of course they will simply ask, "Lying about what?" Then when you try to explain that you are posing a clever philosophical paradox that the greatest minds in the world have studied, they'll look at you like you're an idiot and tell you to - well, they won't know what you're talking about.

So the ordinary man or woman on the street will immediately recognize something the analytic philosophers of the early twentieth century spent years coming to grips with. "I am lying" is really a two part statement and requires a second sentence to answer the question "About what?" Only then can the whole statement be true or false.

For instance, you can say "I am lying when I say I stayed late at the office" and it makes sense. So does something like "I am lying when I say Joe Blow is lying" provided Joe Blow is lying about something that must be true or false. So in colloquial speech, "I am lying" is simply an abbreviation of a longer sentence, "I am lying about such and such a statement". Otherwise, "I am lying" by itself is incomplete and hence meaningless - ergo, sinnlos.

Bertie got around his paradox by restricting the ways you can use the formulas of the logical system - an ad hoc solution that even he wasn't completely satisfied with. But Ludwig said the best way to remove the paradoxes is to develop a language that does not permit them to be formed in the first place. Or more exactly, the paradox must be incapable of being constructed in the formal language in which you express your statements. Easier said than done? Not necessarily. In the Tractatus, Ludwig showed it could be quite easy.

To clarify what Ludwig was saying - how to create a language which makes the paradox impossible - we first have to point out "I am lying" is not the same thing as the paradox like "This statement is false" which is a bit trickier to deal with. "I am lying" has as one of it's input arguments a person making a statement, and recognize there is something he is said that can in fact be lied about. So we must express "I am lying" as a properly constructed logical formula. In logicese, this sentence comes out as "It is true or false that person 'x' is lying about sentence 'y'". But formulaically this is represented simply as L(x,y)=(T, F). That is, "lying" is a binary relation relating a person with a statement and assigning the statement to a truth value. But until we assign specific values to "x" and "y" - that is we identify the person who is doing the lying and the statement he is lying about - we have an open formula, and we can't determine the truth value - whether it's true or false - of the function.

So if you are asserting the statement "Joe Blow is lying" but don't assign a value to the second variable - that is you don't say what Joe Blow is lying about - then that means you are saying L("Joe Blow", [blank] )=T. But the formula is without meaning without the second variable. You have the same problem if you say "I am lying" since you're saying simply L("I", [blank])=T. Again, no meaning.

So what about the liar's paradox, that is, the sentence "I am lying" when you use the sentence itself as the second variable? That is, "I am lying" is lying about "I am lying".

Well, you can write that - quote - "sentence" - unquote - down very easily as L("I", L("I, [blank] )). But it's still an incomplete formula! And so it is still sinnlos.

So the liar's paradox - that is, the rendition of "I am lying" in natural language - represents a formula that looks syntactically correct. But unless the context of the conversation has established the value of the second variable, the sentence will be sinnlos. So in a properly constructed formal language which uses formulas like L(x,y), you can't even create the paradox. So in the end the paradoxes which have been puzzling people for thousands of years arise from our misuse of language, and it is the context of the sentence that gives it meaning. We'll go more into this when we talk about the later Wittgenstein.

When Ludwig began to study with Bertie, Bertie couldn't tell if Ludwig was a towering genius or an idiot. Ludwig was, though, often a pain in Bertie's logical rear end. A major point of disagreement between the two men was on how certainty can be acquired. Ludwig felt that nothing certain could be known from material experience. Bertie disagreed and once told Ludwig that he was certain there was no rhinoceros in the room. Ludwig refused to rule out the possibility even though Bertie went around the room looking under tables and chairs and found no rhinoceros.

In any case, Ludwig felt he had solved philosophy's problems, and in 1914 he left Cambridge without bothering to take a degree. He made a living by teaching grade school and gardening plus a little help from a large inheritance from his father. Although we read he gave his money away, we suspect he had some extra squirreled away and could draw on the family resources when needed.

When World War I came along, Ludwig joined the Austrian army. After a stretch on the Russian front, he was transferred to Italy where he was captured and ended up at as a prisoner of war. His life in the Italian POW camp at Cassino couldn't have been too tough since it was there he finished writing the Tractatus. But after the War he began to think maybe there was more to philosophy than he thought, and he needed a bit more work to finally solve all philosophy's problems.

In fact, Ludwig had decided his early work was wrong or at least incomplete. It wasn't just that some sentences used to discuss philosophy were sinnloss, he felt that philosophy itself was complete unsinn, that is, nonsense. A strange position for a philosopher to take, particularly one who was returning to a university to study it.

That people talk drivel might seem like nothing new (tune into political debates or Sunday morning television if you doubt it). Sometimes people can talk for hours and say nothing, and yet their listeners believe they are discussing weighty issues of the highest import. Instead they are just using buzz words, glittering generalities, and high falootin' fatuous phrases that give people warm fuzzy feelings. George Orwell, in his essay "Politics and the English Language", came down hard on such people who wrote sentences like "The immediately striking thing about Mr. X's work is its peculiar deadness", or "The outstanding feature of Mr. X's work is its living quality." The phrases "peculiar deadness" or "living quality" have no real meaning, George said, and good writing - and clear thinking - requires us to only use words that are unambiguous. But Ludwig thought there was more to communication than that, and that George had actually got things backwards.

After his self imposed hiatus from formal studies, Ludwig returned to Cambridge in 1929. Ludwig's teacher, G. E. Moore, brought Bertie in as an unofficial advisor (Bertie was no longer a fellow at Cambridge). Bertie and G. E. decided that Ludwig's earlier time at Cambridge was enough residency for a degree and all he needed was a thesis. Bertie pointed out that Ludwig had already written up his ideas in the Tractatus which Bertie had helped get published, so why shouldn't he submit that?

It was a forgone conclusion that the thesis would be accepted. By that time, both Bertie and G. E. were convinced Ludwig was one of the best philosophers to come out of Cambridge, and so they spent the examination sitting around shooting the breeze. In his report to the faculty, G. E. wrote that the thesis was fully in accord with the standards of a Cambridge thesis. Despite that, he added, he recommended acceptance. G. E., as you can tell, was something of a wiseacre.

(What seems particularly odd is that in a day when many college professors had no earned degree higher than a bachelors, Ludwig's degree appears to actually have been a Ph. D. even though he had never received an undergraduate degree. Although this situation is rare, this isn't unheard of - Jane Goodall, for instance, has a Ph. D. from Cambridge University but never got an bachelors when she graduated high school. Strictly speaking, graduate schools accept a student if they think he or she is qualified and most, if not all, don't actually specifically require a lower degree. For practical purposes, they expect a bachelors, but want to be able to accept the exceptional albeit non-mainstream student.).

With a thesis in his pocket, Ludwig became a Fellow of Trinity college and in 1939, Professor of Philosophy - by American standards, department chairman. From comments of students and other faculty members, they mostly regarded Ludwig as a genius, although they may have been falling for the trap that if someone is strange enough, he must be smart. His lectures were sometimes him spouting off his disconnected thoughts between long periods of silence. Whether he was really helpful as a teacher is questionable, particularly since he could take a belligerent and combative attitude toward questions. Supposedly Alan Turing was one of the few students who was unintimidated.

Ludwig's personality was decidedly odd, and he was excitable to the point of instability. When the famous philosopher of science, Karl Popper, gave a talk at Cambridge, Ludwig made a complete ass of himself, throwing out disruptive questions and claiming Karl was just confusing everyone. Ludwig got so worked up as the lecture progressed that he finally grabbed a fireplace poker and told Popper to give him a concrete example of a moral directive. "Not to threaten an invited speaker with a poker", Karl replied. As Ludwig stormed out of the room, Bertie shouted it was Ludwig who was causing the confusion.

Despite his (probable) lack of effectiveness as a teacher, Ludwig continued to develop his philosophical ideas, and it was after his return to Cambridge we get into the distinction between the "early" and the "late" Wittgenstein. What Ludwig had now decided was that ordinary language had virtues that logical rendering did not. Formal logic separated out form and meaning and tried to develop exact formulas that represented logical arguments more precisely. The hope was that you could then determine if a statement was true or false just by manipulating symbols according to well defined rules, just like proving a theorem in math.

But the "later" Ludwig said that in ordinary language meaning and context were linked. You did not need - even desire - a precise all-encompassing definition of an word for it to have meaning. Meaning is determined by use, and as long as you can converse intelligibly with someone, don't worry, the words have meaning enough. So even if you see a color as red and a friend sees it as blue, it's completely pointless, Ludwig said, to argue who is seeing the "real" color. All real world conversations have this link between meaning, use, and context, and this is why ordinary conversations make sense.

For instance, ask a simple question like "What's today's line on the Dodgers - Yankees game?" We have words like "Dodgers" and "Yankees" and "game". Here the context clearly defines what the words mean. "Dodgers" and "Yankees" are the two groups of men who are meeting that day. "Game" is the activity they will be involved in. Everything is well defined and we can give a real answer like "6 to 5, Pick 'em".

Then consider, Ludwig said, what happens if you ask a philosopher the same question. He'll lean back in his chair, gaze at the ceiling, and ask just what do we really mean by "Dodgers"? Just who are the "Yankees"? Can we even define what a "team" is? When exactly is "today"? Just what are we saying when we call something a "game"?

But look what he's done! He's taken the words out of context and so stripped them of any real meaning. Then he goes ahead and asks what the friggin' words mean! So the discussions and questions themselves are nonsense - unsinn - and there are no answers to the questions either.

The same thing is true, Ludwig said, for the more - quote - "profound" - unquote - philosophical and theological questions. "What do we mean by 'good' and 'evil'"? "What is 'morality'"? "Who are the 'righteous'"? "How can mankind best assimilate the universal aesthetic manifestations of inner self to self-actualize the syntactical being to raise consciousness to higher levels of collective ethicality without removing the inherent independence necessary to manifest well being and fulfillment?" Once more there is no answer to any of these questions because we have removed any real meaning from the words by taking them from their context.

In the end Ludwig said the deep meaningful philosophical, religious, and ethical debates that have taken up so much time of philosophers, theologians, and cartoon websites are all nonsense and are simply due to the misuse of language. And the more you think about it, the more that what Ludwig said makes sense.

Huh! "Liberal theology" you snort. By no means. Even the popular writer and everyman's theologian, C. S. Lewis (known as Jack to his friends) decided toward the end of his life that probably half of the great theological questions were no more meaningful than asking things like how many hours are there in a mile or if yellow was square or round. A very Wittgensteinesque theology, indeed.

But was Ludwig the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century? Today more and more people rate him that way. After all he ended up destroying the entire field of philosophy as it existed since the days of Socrates. So he must not only be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, he must be the greatest philosopher ever.

Here CooperToons has to dissent. After all, it took Ludwig decades of thought, a number of books, volumes of commentary by other philosophers, and hundreds of hours of debate to conclude what the Greatest Guru of the 1960's decided in a single flash of genius. In one short, three word sentence, Mr. Natural - certainly Philosopher #1 in anyone's eyes - summed it all up. When Flakey Foont looked over the fence and cried, "Mr. Natural! What does it all mean?", Mr. Natural gave his famous reply.

Well, we all know what Mr. Natural said. And his answer is in accord with Ludwig's in all respects.

References

Wittgenstein, William Warren Bartley, Lippincott (1973). The first real biography of Ludwig.

Wittgenstein: A Life, Brian McGuinness, University of California Press (1988).

Two brief introductions to Ludwig are:

Wittgenstein in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern, Constable and Robinson (1996). This covers Ludwig's life and philosophy in a fairly straightforward and traditional manner. This is also available as an audiobook which does play for - yes - 90 minutes.

Introducing Wittgenstein John Heaton and Judy Groves, Icon Books (1994). Sometimes listed as Wittgenstein for Beginners this is of the same format as the other ---- for Beginnners books (not to be confused with the famous ---- for Dummies books) with the subject told among cartoon type illustrations. A less conventional introduction than the 90 minutes series.

The Modern Intellectual Tradition: From Descartes to Derrida, Lawrence Cahoone, The Teaching Company. A survey of modern philosophy and Ludwig's early philosophy is discussed in part of one lecture and the later Ludwig is devoted to a later lecture.

The Case of the Philosophers' Ring, Randall Collins (writing as Dr. John H. Watson, M. D.), Crown (1978). Sad to say, this is the book that introduced CooperToons to Wittgenstein.The story is that Sherlock Holmes - and this is no joke - was hired by Bertrand Russell to investigate why Ludwig was acting so strange. So Sherlock and his trusty sidekick, Dr. Watson, hurried to the University of Cambridge and met such philosophical luminaries and other Edwardian personalities as Bertie, G. E. Moore, Alfred North Whitehead, G. H. Hardy, Ludwig, Srinivasa Ramanujan (who is erroneous depicted as dying in England), Aleister Crowley, Leila Waddell, Annie Besant, Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. The author, by the way, is currently the Dorothy Swaine Thomas Professor in Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.