Wittgenstein in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Beschreibung

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the great philosopher of language. With his famous "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" he brought about an epoch-making shift in philosophy: the "Linguistic Turn" from consciousness and Being toward speech. For our speech alone (so runs his key idea) determines how we see the world and ourselves. No one, philosopher or not, is able to form even a single thought without using words and phrases to do it. We learn language as small children and from then on it forms our whole worldview. Therefore, says Wittgenstein, philosophy's first and most important task is to understand language to be the most basic tool of all its knowledge. In the "Tractatus" he gives a precise analysis of what we can - and cannot - say about the world by using words and language. The result he arrives at is radical: we may not say anything that cannot be precisely logically expressed and tested by experiment. And "what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence". But Wittgenstein also makes a second great discovery: in his later work he shows that it is only "language games" - i.e. everyday conversations between various communities of speakers - that give words their meanings and influence our whole way of seeing the world. Is our reality so completely formed and pervaded by "language games" as Wittgenstein claims? And if so, of what use to is this great discovery today? The book "Wittgenstein in 60 Minutes" explains both Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" and his fascinating theory of language-games, using around 100 key quotations from both works. It appears as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Contents

Wittgenstein’s Great Discovery

Wittgenstein’s Central Idea

What is the World? The World Consists Only of Facts Which We Picture to Ourselves in Propositions

Propositions About Facts Must Make Sense!

What We Cannot Speak About We Must Pass Over In Silence!

Wittgenstein, Popper and the Poker

The World as Language-Game

You Are What You Speak: Words, Propositions, Forms of Life

Of What Use Is Wittgenstein’s Discovery For Us Today?

Courage to Change: Replacing One Language-Game and Form of Life With Another

Wittgenstein’s Brilliant Linking of Language and Form of Life – Recognize the Interaction!

“One Empire, One People, One Leader!” – Political Language-Games for the Manipulation of Forms of Life

Wittgenstein’s Heirs: How Communication Coaches Use Language and Grammar to Change Reality

Recognizing the World to Be a Language-Game and Critiquing It as Such: The ‘Sting in the Tail’ of Wittgenstein’s Descriptive Analysis of Language

Bibliographical References

Wittgenstein’s Great Discovery

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) is known as the great pioneer of what is called “linguistic philosophy” and counts, for this reason, among the most powerfully influential thinkers of the 20th century. The “linguistic turn” that he initiated was an epoch-making turning point in human culture: the turn, specifically, of philosophy away from its traditional focus on such topics as “being” and “consciousness” toward a concern above all with language.

Whereas, before Wittgenstein, the answer given to the question as to “the meaning of life” had tended to be a speculative or a materialistic one – one couched in terms of the “self-unfolding of the World-Spirit”, the “development of human history through class struggle”, or “the will to power” – Wittgenstein turned, for the first time, to consider language as the most important phenomenon shaping and forming human life. Language – so ran Wittgenstein’s core insight – is absolutely decisive for our understanding of the world.

This, Wittgenstein’s discovery of language as that through which all knowledge of the world is focussed put into question all philosophy prior to his day. Because, as Wittgenstein now argued, quite regardless of what it was that each individual philosopher, from antiquity up to Wittgenstein’s own day, may have recognized to be “essential reality”, it is and remains a fact that these philosophers could acquire their respective insights into this “essential reality” always only within the limits set by language. Except by means of words and verbal propositions, he pointed out, no philosopher, nor indeed any human being, is able to form any meaningful thought at all:

There is in the end no escape from the “cage of language”, no matter how hard one might try to conceive, even once, of a thought without recourse to words or sentences:

Even the common saying “one’s thoughts are one’s own” expresses only a subjective illusion because thoughts can only ever be expressed through language. Beyond language there is nothing:

For language to be the “vehicle” of our thought means that everything, absolutely everything that goes on in our head – every notion, every insight and every idea – comes to pass only in and through words and sentences. We begin to learn language already in our earliest childhood and from this point on language determines our whole perception of the world and everything that we know about it. This is why, so argues Wittgenstein, the first and most important task of philosophy consists in finally setting about analysing and understanding language as the most basic tool of all its knowledge. We need to find out what mankind can logically grasp by means of language and what it cannot. Because it is only in this way that it is possible to distinguish false and meaningless statements about the world from meaningful ones:

For thousands of years, Wittgenstein contended, philosophers had done nothing but build mental constructions that were open to misunderstanding or even self-contradictory without first having clarified the logical preconditions of what they were doing:

By finally setting about analysing this “logic of language”, he went on, and achieving understanding of what can meaningfully be said and what cannot, the multitude of philosophical problems are either demoted to the modest rank they deserve or even dissolved altogether:

And indeed with this demand that philosophers finally set about examining language itself Wittgenstein inspired new philosophical currents all over the world: “ordinary language philosophy” in England; “speech act theory” and the “theory of communicative action” in Germany; structuralist “semiotics” in France; the Neo-Positivist philosophy of the Vienna Circle in Austria; and the “theory of linguistic relativity” in America.

But Wittgenstein’s discovery of the great significance of language has not been without consequence even for our daily lives. Whereas for centuries language had been looked upon merely as a direct means for human beings to make themselves understood, today it is deployed in a targeted manner to influence private and public discourses and to manipulate entire forms of life. An army of communication coaches, marketing strategists and political consultants tries, day by day, to influence our reality by the targeted use of words and phrases. Be it in the form of advertising or propaganda campaigns, speech therapies, self-motivation courses or prayer meetings – it is only since Wittgenstein that language has been recognized for what it really is, namely a force field which reflects, but also influences, our lived reality in its entirety:

Wittgenstein himself wanted only to analyze language, never to instrumentalize it. He even warned against its instrumentalization. Nonetheless, with his discovery of the connection between language and life-form he opened, one might say, Pandora’s Box. Once the profound significance of language for our daily life was recognized, efforts were made to a greater degree than ever before to manipulate human beings by targeted use of language.

Today, Wittgenstein’s name is normally mentioned beside those of Kant, Heidegger or Sartre, even though he was, initially, sharply critical of philosophy and had planned originally to become an engineer. One might even say that he became a philosopher “despite himself”. The eighth child of the leading Austrian steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein, his interests lay initially in the direction of technology and mathematics. Like his father before him, he did his university studies in the field of engineering.

But in the midst of making the calculations needed for a new aeroplane motor he was suddenly, against all his plans, seized with such a passion for philosophical questions that his sister became worried for his health. “At this time,” she later wrote, “Ludwig was suddenly consumed, powerfully and against his own will, by meditations on philosophical problems so that he began to suffer severely from the inner conflict between this vocation and the vocation he had already resolved upon […] All through this period he was constantly in an indescribable, almost pathological state of excitement.” 9

The young Wittgenstein simply had no choice, then, but to pose to himself the great philosophical questions: What is the world? How can I know it and make true statements about it? From this point on he devoted himself entirely to the study of the logicians Frege, Russell and Moore. And already before he had completed this second self-formation in philosophy he was able to propose to the world, in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an answer. This small treatise comprised barely eighty pages, something more than unusual for a work of philosophy. But it made Wittgenstein famous already in his own lifetime.

The secret of the Tractatus’s success, which it would doubtless have enjoyed at any point in philosophical history, lies in its razor-sharp structure. Like a surgeon with a scalpel Wittgenstein answers the question “what is the world?” in seven theses that follow logically on from one another. He numbered these like Bible verses, expanding each of them with equally rigorously sequentially numbered sub-theses, so that the general impression made by the book’s seven strictly scientific theses was that of a dogmatic or even messianic proclamation. Starting from his core idea that all our knowledge of the world must necessarily be formulated in words and sentences, Wittgenstein goes on to explain, point by point, how human beings can produce absolutely correct and indubitable propositions about this world. Henceforth, he concluded, the scientist may formulate only propositions which make logical sense and can be checked against and confirmed by reality. All other propositions he must recognize to be literal “nonsense” and refrain from enunciating. This is the gist of the final often-cited seventh thesis of the Tractatus:

This final thesis was so provocative because it permitted, basically, the enunciation of no propositions at all about the world except the propositions of the natural sciences and thus invalidated philosophy entirely:

For Wittgenstein, then, philosophy was bound to “pass over in silence” even such matters as had always traditionally belonged to its domain as questions of justice and of ethics. Because one can never check and confirm, experimentally, against reality such moral propositions as “You must not steal” or “You should act always only in such a way that the maxim of your action might be expanded to become a law that is valid for all”, since such propositions refer to the future and are thus by their very nature insusceptible of such checking and confirming:

By declaring in this way, in his Tractatus, all those questions and theories that could not be answered and demonstrated in natural-scientific terms to be literal “nonsense” the young Wittgenstain believed that he had rid both the world and himself, once and for all, of the tormenting problems of philosophy:

But this was not the end of the story. Wittgenstein was later himself to call into question the rigorous position that he had taken up in his first book. After five years working as a schoolteacher in rural Austria he made a second discovery about language, this one of even broader ramifications. Language, as he came to observe among his pupils, certainly does not, in its daily use, serve the one narrow purpose of describing what he had called in the Tractatus “states of affairs”, let alone the even narrower one of distinguishing scientifically between correct and incorrect propositions. In its everyday use language is utilized in a much more various and extensive way. For example to announce one’s intentions, or to wish, to promise, to command, to threaten, to curse, to praise, to exhort, or to demand – in short, as a way of bringing about actions to be performed by oneself or by others. These observations led Wittgenstein to his famous theory of “language-games” which was expounded in a larger book published only after his death under the title Philosophical Investigations:

In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein describes, for example, dissimulation, lying, mimicry, sign-language, emotional outbursts and numerous other phenomena of linguistic expression. The theory of “language-games” that emerges from these descriptions opens up entirely new dimensions as compared to the theory developed in the Tractatus. For this reason, a distinction is generally made between “the early” and “the late” Wittgenstein. In his late work Wittgenstein recognizes that it is always only the concrete “language-games” in which they occur – i.e. the innumerable everyday conversations that go on between children, workmen, theologians, scientists or football players – that give words their meaning. The “games” in question, he emphasizes, follow their own rules and conventions. Philosophical analyses of these “language-games” are so important because they serve to throw light on the atmosphere of these latter, that is to say, on the underlying “forms of life” of language’s various speakers. This atmosphere, these “forms of life” Wittgenstein argues, often determine our sense of what it is we are living – that is to say, what counts as “reality” for us – far more than does any scientifically correct description of the world: