Wittgenstein was born in Vienna and though originally trained as an engineer became a pupil of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. He returned to Austria to serve in the First World War, and in 1921 published the German edition of the Tractatus Logico—Philosophicus. He then became a schoolteacher in Lower Austria. In this, as in everything else, he was an intense and demanding man, and soon resigned his post. After that, he became involved in the design of a house which still stands in Vienna, a monument to the aesthetic austerity that he championed. Around this time he rejected the Tractatus and began to articulate his later philosophy. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and held the chair of philosophy from 1939 to 1947.
In the Tractatus the essence of language is assumed to reside in its fact-stating function. This is said to rest on the capacity of sentences to ‘picture’ facts. Pictures consist of parts which correspond to the parts of the thing pictured. The parts of a picture stand to one another in a certain relation, and this says how the corresponding objects are arranged if the picture is true. In language the parts are names, and elementary sentences are arrangements of names. More complicated sentences can then be built up by using the rules of Russell’s logic. Wittgenstein may have based his picture theory on the way in which systems of material points have a symbolic representation in sophisticated versions of theoretical mechanics. Certainly the conclusion he drew was that the only meaningful language was the language of science. All attempts to transcend this and express what is ‘higher’—namely, ethics, aesthetics and the meaning of life—are doomed. Even the attempt to state the relation of language to the world tries to go beyond these limits, so the doctrines of the Tractatus itself are meaningless. Those who understand my propositions correctly, said Wittgenstein, will surmount them like a ladder, and then throw them away.
Is this an attack on everything non-scientific? Wittgenstein’s friend, Paul Engelmann, tells us that it is the exact opposite. The aim is not to dismiss what cannot be said, the ‘higher’, but to protect it. The Tractatus is an ethical document which must be understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s involvement with the great Viennese critic Karl Kraus and the influential architect Adolf Loos. Kraus exposed moral corruption which shows itself in the corruption of language. Loos conducted a campaign against aesthetic corruption which shows itself in the confusion of art with utility and the pollution of functional simplicity by needless decoration. The Tractatus likewise expressed the ethics of purity, separation, simplicity and the integrity of silence.
Why Wittgenstein became dissatisfied with this position is unclear, but some light may be shed by relating his shift of opinion to a broad cultural change in which he participated. If the Tractatus addressed the issues that exercised pre-war Viennese intellectuals, the late philosophy addressed the problems that confronted them in the post-war years. We know that the military defeats and economic and constitutional problems in Europe were accompanied by an acute sense of cultural crisis. One symptom of this was the enormous popularity of Spengler’s irrational life-philosophy with its conservative pessimism. Wittgenstein is known to have been impressed by Spengler, and the later work can be seen as a brilliant expression of this form of conservative irrationalism. All the features of this style—the priority of the concrete over the abstract, of practice over norms, life over reason and being over thought—are prominently displayed.
In his later work Wittgenstein rejected the idea that language has a single essential function. It is not structured by correspondence with objects but by its role in the stream of life. There are as many ways for words to carry meaning as there are ways of organizing action. The picture theory gave way to the idea of ‘language-games’. We must not theorize about language but observe its diversity as we name, count, instruct, question, promise, pray and so on. The real heart of the late philosophy, however, is the analysis of rule following. It is tempting to explain human behaviour in terms of our capacity to follow rules. In § 201 of the Investigations Wittgenstein argued that no course of action can be determined by rules, because any course of action could be said to accord with the rule. Any non-standard interpretation of a rule could be justified by a non-standard interpretation of the rules for following the rule. Ultimately it must be said of all rules that they are obeyed blindly. At every point, rules, and the application of the concepts in them, depend on taken for granted practices or customs. Wittgenstein used this insight to bring out the conventional character of all knowledge and discourse, whether it was an introspective report or a mathematical truth.
For the later Wittgenstein, then, the notion of meaning is explained in terms of use. Meaningless or metaphysical discourse is language ‘on holiday’, that is, not employed in a language game that has a genuine role in a form of life. The job of the philosopher is to inhibit our tendency to detach words from their real use. In this the philosopher is like a doctor who must bring language back to its healthy everyday life. What had to be accepted as given, said Wittgenstein, was the ‘form of life’. Other than this all belief is groundless: this is the end-point of all justification. Nothing could be a clearer expression of the conservative thinker’s belief in the priority of life over reason.
It is only now that this European dimension of Wittgenstein’s thinking, both in its early and late phase, is beginning to emerge. This offsets the somewhat narrow readings that have been given them as forms of logical and linguistic ‘analysis’. Nevertheless the full potential of the late philosophy, as the basis of a social theory of knowledge, still awaits exploitation.
David Bloor
University of Edinburgh
Further reading
Bloor, D. (1983) Wittgenstein: A Social Theory of Knowledge, London.
Engelman, P. (1967) Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, Oxford.
Janik, A. and Toulmin, S. (1973) Wittgenstein’s Vienna, London.
Monk, R. (1990) Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London.
Specht, E.K. (1963) The Foundations of Wittgenstein’s Late Philosophy, Manchester.
Winch, P. (1958) The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, London.
As Wittengstein’s unpublished writings gradually appear in print, the corpus of his work now stands at over a dozen volumes. Nevertheless, the main texts of the early and late philosophy, respectively, are still:
Wittgenstein, L. (1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F.Pears and B.F.McGuinness, London.
