An Introduction to Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an Austrian logician and philosopher of language responsible for the “linguistic turn” that directed philosophy’s attention to the relationship between words and the world. Regarded by many as the greatest thinker of the 20th century, Wittgenstein was a peculiar man who eschewed fame and fortune and spent long periods of time in modest vocations that many felt were beneath him. Nevertheless, he authored seminal works on the structure and limits of language that offer insightful lessons to the technical and layperson alike.

Wittgenstein was born on April 26th, 1889 in Vienna, Austria to the second richest family in Europe. His father Karl was an impassive businessman who made his fortune in the steel industry. Karl lorded over his four daughters and five sons unimpeded by his submissive and anxious wife, Poldi. Karl held a dim view of public schooling and had Ludwig and his four brothers educated at home, where he could prepare them to take over the Wittgenstein industrial empire. The children’s environment was culturally rich, with famous artists and composers such as Brahms and Mahler frequenting the Wittgenstein home to exhibit and perform their work. Ludwig and his siblings received a strict Catholic upbringing, in particular from their devout grandfather.

At 14 years old, Wittgenstein was freed to attend high school. It was during this time that he began questioning his faith. Wittgenstein divulged his skepticism to his sister Gretl, who gave him the infamous atheistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Wittgenstein soon after renounced his belief in God. Interestingly, he continued to practice the Catholic ritual of confession and admitted that, “I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.” Later in life, he described God as a stand-in for the meaning of the world and prayer as its contemplation. Wittgenstein believed that the real way to God lay not in empty words but in actively helping others.

Wittgenstein graduated primary school with decent but by no means exceptional grades. As fate had it, his highest mark was in religion, where he scored a perfect five. Surprisingly, he received only a three in mathematics. Nonetheless, he went on to a technical university in Berlin to study mechanical engineering. He became interested in aeronautics and began working on aircraft.

Wittgenstein’s interest in logic was piqued while designing a propeller that required sophisticated calculations. He quickly became obsessed with the discipline, devouring Frege’s The Foundations of Arithmetic and Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics. Wittgenstein sought out Frege and met with him multiple times. After asking to study under him and being redirected to Russell, Wittgenstein journeyed to Cambridge to seek out the British professor. Russell had a poor first impression of Wittgenstein but quickly came to regard him as a genius and his successor.

This affirmation may have saved Wittgenstein’s life. A serious tendency toward depression ran in the family, with three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committing suicide. Wittgenstein also experienced suicidal thoughts and had spent the years leading up to Cambridge in isolation and despair. This was due to both his fanatical work on logic, which he remarked was driving him mad, and his turbulent personal life. He once lamented that he “felt the curse of those who have half a talent.” His temperament was sensitive and neurotic and his sexuality was queer at a time in which gayness was still absolutely unacceptable. Despite the taboo, he maintained at least two serious relationships with men in his life and travelled extensively with one of them — a fellow mathematician named David Pinsent.

After a productive stay with Pinsent in Norway, Wittgenstein decided to temporarily move there to concentrate on his writing. Before long, however, World War I called him to duty. Wittgenstein enlisted despite being eligible for medical exemption and participated in nearly the entirety of the war, save for a brief leave in the summer of 1918 in which he completed his sole major work published during his lifetime, the Tractatus. While active, Wittgenstein fought fearlessly and spent nine months as a prisoner of war — acts that earned him the admiration of his fellow soldiers and several awards for courage. During his service, he read and reread Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and returned home in August 1919 with, according to Russell, a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude.

Wittgenstein had experienced tremendous loss over these years, both on the battlefield and in his personal life. Toward the end of the war, he fought on the front lines and came face to face with death on multiple occasions. Following the war, his uncle, his brother Kurt, and Pinsent all passed away within months of each other.

These losses added to the 1913 death of Wittgenstein’s father — an event that had left Wittgenstein unimaginably wealthy via an inheritance. Yet Wittgenstein felt ill at ease with his fortune, initially using it to patronize little known artists before giving it away to his remaining siblings. He subsequently retreated from public life and relocated to rural Austria to work variously as an elementary school teacher and a monastery gardener. After nearly becoming a monk in 1926, Wittgenstein was lured out of seclusion by one of his sisters to help design her new Viennese townhouse. Wittgenstein supervised the architecture with almost pathological meticulousness, spending a year each on the door handles and the radiators. He delayed the home’s completion considerably by insisting the ceilings be raised, at great expense — by three centimeters.

All the while, Wittgenstein’s reputation in Europe had been growing. The Tractatus had been published in 1921 and had quickly made a name for Wittgenstein. The dense 75-page text argues that “what can be said at all can be said clearly” and places all propositions into one of three categories:

1. Sense: propositions that can be assigned a truth value by looking at or otherwise sensing some aspect of the physical world. Example: “The White House is white.”
2. Senseless: propositions whose truth values can be deduced by virtue of words’ meanings. Example: “All bachelors are unmarried,” given that the word bachelor means a man who has yet to be married.
3. Nonsense: propositions that are neither sensible nor deducible and thus cannot be assigned a truth value. Example: “Justice consists in each getting what they deserve.”

Wittgenstein affirms both sense and senseless propositions as meaningful because they generate mental “pictures” that can be corroborated by observation or reason. Anything that cannot is “unpicturable” and consigned by Wittgenstein to the category of nonsense. This includes metaphysics, religion, morality, and all matters that cannot be ascertained empirically or logically. Wittgenstein argues that in theorizing about such topics, philosophers err in attempting to answer the unanswerable. Philosophy’s job, according to Wittgenstein, is not to solve problems by generating positive theories but to dissolve problems by clearly delineating what is and is not solvable. As Wittgenstein asserts, “what one cannot say, one must pass over in silence.”

Just how Wittgenstein was able to arrive at these conclusions is a matter of dispute. Concepts such as objectivity, reality, and even logic itself are not themselves empirically or logically provable. How then can we draw conclusions about them? In this light, the Tractatus is apparently self-undermining — but perhaps this is by design. Wittgenstein writes,

“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.)”

However paradoxical this statement may be, it did not stop intellectuals from embracing the Tractatus. In fact, the Vienna Circle of logical positivists, who held that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful, formed in response to it. The work generated so much buzz that Wittgenstein agreed to return to Cambridge in 1929 to continue his academic career. There, he made a thesis defense of the Tractatus and was awarded a Ph.D. for it, which allowed him to lecture at Trinity College. He taught in Cambridge for nearly 20 years, periodically taking time off to write or work stints as a hospital porter and a research assistant.

In 1947, Wittgenstein resigned his University post to focus solely on his writing only to be diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer fewer than three years later. Yet Wittgenstein faced his own morality with grace. In the lead-up to his death, he continued to work on his philosophy and spent quality time with his family and friends. Wittgenstein peacefully succumbed to his cancer on April 29th, 1951. His last words were “tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

In his mature years, Wittgenstein became disillusioned by the rigid logic of the Tractatus and developed a view of language and meaning grounded in use. His writings on the subject were compiled and published posthumously in texts such as The Blue Book and Philosophical Investigations. In them, Wittgenstein rejects the long-standing philosophical notion that in order to know a word’s meaning one must identify its quiddity, or its essential trait that is present in all of its applications. According to Wittgenstein, language is not that tidy and requires real-life examination rather than abstract theorizing:

“The idea that in order to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has shackled philosophical investigation; for it has not only led to no result, but also made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him understand the usage of the general term.”

To illustrate this shackling, Wittgenstein draws on the word “game.” He shows that all attempts to define game fall prey to inconsistencies. For instance, one could say that a game is a rule-based activity that people compete in together for fun. Yet there are innumerable examples of games that violate one or more of these premises. A game of imagination does not follow rules but can be whatever the imaginer desires. A game of pattycake is collaborative, not competitive. A game of solitaire is played alone rather than together. And a war-game is certainly not conducted for fun but for military readiness. With this example, Wittgenstein demonstrates that the universal definition approach does not help us “get clear” about a word’s meaning.

Instead, Wittgenstein advocates looking at a word’s “concrete cases” in order to piece together a practical, if imperfect understanding of its meaning. While observing the ways in which a word is used, one begins to identify common concepts among them. One then assesses whether a given application of the word is appropriate by comparing it to other applications and checking for relatedness. This is done largely intuitively. Take again the example of game: one does not need to procure an exhaustive list of game concepts and pore over it to determine whether, say, hacky sack is an appropriate application of the word game. Rather, we can instinctively feel that it is once we observe it. Wittgenstein compares this process to “family resemblance”: just as we are able to recognize that someone belongs to a given family tree without necessarily knowing how to describe the resemblances, we are able to identify that something belongs to a given category even if we cannot precisely articulate why.

This highlights Wittgenstein’s emphasis on participating in language rather than merely thinking about it. As Wittgenstein states,

“Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’” but look and see whether there is anything common to all. For if you look at them, you won’t see something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don’t think, but look!”

Looking involves understanding the context in which a word is used, or its “language game.” Most immediately, this refers to words’ linguistic contexts. Take Wittgenstein’s famous example:

“Water!”

Conveyed alone, the utterance is inscrutable. Depending on what precedes it, it could mean any number of things, including:

• A command, for example a spoiled young boy yells “Water!” at his servile parents.
• A response, for example a teetotaling woman responds with “Water!” when asked by a server what she would like to drink.
• An exclamation, for example a pair of parched desert trekkers happen upon an oasis and cry “Water!”

And so on. With this example, Wittgenstein demonstrates that a word is meaningless in isolation and only becomes meaningful when contextualized with other words.

Words’ meanings are tied not only to linguistic context but also social context. Their denotations and connotations vary across space (i.e. culture) and time (i.e. history). For instance, the word “queer” was traditionally used as a gay slur, but has been reclaimed by the LGBTQ+ community as a positive descriptor. The word “gay” itself used to mean merry until it was repurposed in the latter half of the 20th century to designate homosexuality. Even today, the term “homosexual” ranges from a very positive label to a very negative label depending on the socio-religious context of a given community or region. Wittgenstein describes words’ spatio-temporal variance as “forms of life” and regards them as integral to the function of language.

Wittgenstein holds that language exists for the purpose of communication — its function is to convey information. He uses this observation to reinforce his thesis that linguistic meaning is grounded in use. Words mean what a society decides they mean. As was shown, different societies decide on different meanings. What is common among all societies is that the meaning of their words is intelligible to one another. Without this mutual intelligibility, members of a society could not engage in meaningful communication.

Wittgenstein devises a pair of thought experiments to expose the impossibility of a “private language.” The first asks us to imagine that an individual writes down S followed by a number (S1, S2, S3, etc.) every time that they experience a sensation. This is their only means of describing their sensations. With this limitation, it is clear that only the person writing could ever know the meaning of these esses, as no one else is capable of deriving understanding from an arbitrary letter-number combination. The second thought experiment asks us to imagine that everyone has a box that only they can see into. Each person describes the contents of their own box as a beetle. Yet no one can see into anyone else’s box to confirm that they are describing the same thing. This renders the word beetle incoherent, as no one can know what anyone else means by it. Both of these thought experiments reveal that for language to be meaningful it must afford mutual understanding.

Wittgenstein thus presents language as a shared phenomenon and meaning as a product of how words operate in real life rather than in abstract formulations. He reassures us that although “ordinary language” is imprecise and does not admit of universal definitions, it still allows us to successfully communicate and is therefore “all right.” This consolation speaks to Wittgenstein’s mature view of philosophy “as therapy.” In his latter years, he wrote,

“The real discovery is the one which enables me to stop doing philosophy when I want to. The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question.”