Wittgenstein has really made an impact on me, or more specifically, the experiences I’ve had in studying philosophy and the history of ideas has been expressed best by a Wittgensteinian view. I won’t lie to you, he’s kind of a hero of mine (see the title of this freakin’ website). However, the Wittgenstein I have a crush on might not be the Wittgenstein that so many others have had interest in…
The New Wittgenstein is a collection of papers and talks that are linked only in their interpretation of Wittgenstein as being alternative to any contemporary main-stream view. Perhaps I shouldn’t say “alternative”, the editor and author of the introduction describes it as “unorthodox”, and this is the very complex crux of what is “New” about this Wittgenstein.
It seems insanely difficult to explain such a complex problem such as this: that the ‘traditional’ Wittgensteinian view is incorrect, and the criticisms of that view are also incorrect, and the real goal of Wittgenstein’s writings are something different entirely from what has typically been thought.
Let’s back up for a moment and figure out that the hell that even means.
The traditional view of Wittgenstein is that there is a difference between early and late Wittgensteinian thought. Early Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as a soldier during the First World War, and published it soon after. The Tractatus, traditionally speaking, is seen as developing a perfectly logical language to perfectly represent the world around us. This follows that all languages are built atop a logical grammatical structure, and our goal as philosophers is to dissect and make efficient our terms and concepts.
The later Wittgenstein is represented best by the Philosophical Investigations which was published after his death. The Investigations are a collection of notes and lectures by Wittgenstein comprised of two parts. Part I being a completed work ready for publishing yet had never been published by Wittgenstein, and Part II being a series of notes compiled by other editors, people in control of his estate, students, etc. This work is seen as a departure of the early Wittgenstein, and has a variety of interpretations. The most common is that the late Wittgenstein becomes skeptical of the logical perfection of language, and makes a case that philosophy is a kind of anomaly of language, that we can never truly convey the full meanings of our words and concepts of “cat” or “slab”, let alone “free-will” or “truth”. Other interpretations suggest that Wittgenstein makes further his case for the logical perfection of language by furthering the notion of a ‘private language‘.
The framework that Wittgenstein provides in his life’s work and teaching is measured in century of philosophical work that has followed. Nearly every major thinking in the Western world ends up being influenced by Wittgenstein. Some take the original Tractatus view and apply it to the Investigations to produce something like a Jerry Fodor, or Noam Chomsky. Others take the ‘departure’ of the late Wittgenstein very seriously to the extent of socially constructed institutions of language that Richard Rorty would make a case for. The differences between the philosophers mentioned here, or those that exist on either ’side’ of the early/late distinction are far too great and it is difficult to plead all of their cases fairly here, but what is important to understand is that all of the philosophy being done, all the problems and the structures in the past eighty-or-so years have been directly influenced and articulated by the books that have come out of this one man’s brain. This framework, and the setup of the ealry/late dichotomy is what we term in relation to the new Wittgenstein, as the old Wittgenstein.
The new Wittgenstein has little difference between the dichotomy of early and late. Although there are differences between the Tractatus and the Investigations the New view tends to reconsider the Tractatus as purposing something much different than the logical positivist’s project. There is, however, a lack of consistency in the new position except to say that it questions the dichotomy of the ‘perfect language’ or early Wittgenstein, and the ’socially constructed language’ or late Wittgenstein.
“These papers claim that one of Wittgenstein’s main aims throughout his work is getting us to see that the idea of an external standpoint on language is thoroughly confused and that its abandonment is accordingly without consequences for our entitlement to our basic epistemic ideals. Our willingness to insist that abandoning the idea does have such consequences is, by the lights of these papers, a sign that we are still participating in the confusion Wittgenstein seeks to address. This understanding of Wittgenstein as trying to free us in a quite radical manner from the idea of an external standpoint is what licenses talk, in reference to the papers, of a therapeutic aspiration. It is in so far as the papers represent Wittgenstein’s philosophy as therapeutic in this sense - in a sense which, importantly, constitutes a divergence from standard interpretations of his work at both periods - that they suggest a fundamentally different kind of continuity in his thought and thus make a novel contribution to Wittgenstein scholarship.”
from page 4 of the Introduction to The New Wittgenstein by Alice Crary
The reoccurring theme in the new writers is that Wittgenstein’s project has been entirely misunderstood as positing a theory of the world. His work was to manage something entirely different than prescribing solutions to existing philosophical problems. Instead, philosophy’s project is therapeutic. Therapeutic whereby we are in constant question of our epistemic commitments and assumptions, and at all times willing to change them and give them up for new ones. It is, in some sense, a logical positivism and a perfection of linguistic structures, but in knowing that it can never be accomplished in the matter in which we’ve once thought.
The more I read, the more I wonder about how and why Wittgenstein was so misunderstood. Frege’s attempt to implant an idealist in to Russel’s positivist Britain? Russel’s attempt to quell a British idealist uprising? I don’t know about you, but I am fascinated with philosophical love triangles/conspiracies.
There is so much more work to be done with this…
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