Ludwig Wittgenstein was born into one of Vienna's leading families. His father, Karl, was a wealthy steel industrialist and his mother, Leopoldine, a concert pianist. Johannes Brahams, Gustaf Mahler, and Pablo Casals were frequent houseguests of the Wittgensteins. Educated at home by tutors, Wittgenstein showed great promise in mathematics and engineering. According to one report, he built a working sewing machine from matchsticks at age ten.
Wittgenstein remained home until age fifteen, when he enrolled at the Linz Realschule, where he studied engineering for two years before transferring to Berlin. In 1908, Wittgenstein enrolled at the University of Manchester, England, for studies in aerodynamics. While designing a propeller, Wittgenstein developed an interest in mathematics, which led him to Cambridge. There, from 1912-1913, he studied with Bertrand Russell. Russell later recalled one of his first encounters with Wittgenstein:
At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said, "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?" I replied, "My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?" He said, "Because if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher." I told him to write me something during the vacation on some philosophical subject and I would then tell him whether he was a complete idiot or not. At the beginning of the following term he brought me the fulfillment of this suggestion. After reading only one sentence, I said to him, "No, you must not become an aeronaut."
Wittgenstein immersed himself in philosophical studies, filling notebooks with ideas. When World War I began in 1914, he enlisted as a machine-gunner in the Austrian army. While in the army he continued his philosophical work, writing a short treatise in 1918 based on his notebooks. That same year he was captured by the Italian army. In captivity, he managed to send a copy of this treatise to Russell, who considered it a work of genius and arranged for its publication as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). This was the only philosophical book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime.
Wittgenstein believed his Tractatus gave the definitive answer to all philosophical problems. Following the war, therefore, he left philosophy completely. After a course at a teacher's training college, he spent the next six years as a schoolteacher in remote Austrian villages. But teaching did not suit his temperament and he was desperately unhappy. He resigned in 1926 and worked as a monastery gardener before moving back to Vienna to design a house for his sister. While in Vienna, Wittgenstein began talking philosophy again with Moritz Schlick, professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, and with other professors who admired his Tractatus.
Philosophically revived, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929, and, after submitting his now famous Tractatus as a doctoral dissertation, he became a research fellow of Trinity College. Again, Wittgenstein filled notebooks with philosophical reflections and prepared them for publication. But, with the exception of one paper, Wittgenstein never saw any of his new ideas in print; he always considered his newest thoughts incomplete or not yet adequately formulated.
For the rest of his life, Wittgenstein continued his association with Cambridge--though he never felt completely comfortable with academic life. On several occasions he left the university, sometimes living in isolation in his hut in Norway. In 1939, he was appointed professor of philosophy at Cambridge, succeeding G.E. Moore. But before he could take the chair, World War II began, and he volunteered as a hospital orderly in London. He returned to Cambridge following the war, but he found his job so dreadful he resigned after two years. Living alone in Ireland he completed his second major work, Philosophical Investigations, though again he could not bring himself to publish it. (It appeared posthumously in 1953.)
During a visit to the United States in 1949, his health began to deteriorate. On his return to Cambridge, doctors discovered prostate cancer, and he died eighteen months later, in 1951. Since his death, his literary executors have published over a dozen books of uncompleted manuscripts, notes, lectures, and letters.
Throughout his adult life, Wittgenstein was interested in philosophy as an activity rather than as a set of theories. He believed that the goal of philosophy is to remove or "dissolve" problems, and the primary means for doing this is analysis of language. According to Wittgenstein, most philosophical problems can be traced to a misuse of language. In one of his early notebooks he wrote:
Philosophy gives no pictures of reality and can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations. Philosophy teaches us the logical form of propositions: that is its fundamental task.
Thirty-five years later, he still maintained this philosophical position: "Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language."
But despite this theme, Wittgenstein developed two different ways to understand language. The early Wittgenstein created a "picture theory of meaning" that held that language consists of statements or propositions that picture the world. Just as a picture has something in common with that which it pictures, so language has a logical form in common with the world it pictures. This logical form is usually obscured by ordinary language, so the philosopher's job is to clear up ordinary language by crafting a language that more perfectly pictures the world. This perfected language will have to exclude many propositions (such as those in ethics, metaphysics, or religion), consigning them to silence.
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE: EARLY THEORY
Wittgenstein's early theory was adopted and modified by Moritz Schlick and his "Vienna Circle." This group developed a philosophy that came to be called "logical positivism." Like Wittgenstein, they worked on an ideal language, free from the ambiguities of ordinary discourse, that would clearly exhibit its logical form. They also held that such a language would exclude the propositions of ethics, metaphysics, and religion.
The early Wittgenstein, and the logical positivism that adapted many of his ideas, had a profound impact on the philosophy of the mid-twentieth century. But Wittgenstein himself moved to a different understanding of language: a "language game" theory. This theory found the earlier picture theory too narrow; a perfected language is neither possible nor desirable. As he explains in the Philosophical Investigations, there are many kinds of meaningful sentences that share certain characteristics, but not others. Just as there is no one characteristic common to all games, so there is no one theory to explain all language uses. The proper way to understand a sentence is not to break it down into its constituent parts and analyze its logical form. Instead, we should examine the "forms of life" out of which the sentence arises, to see what "game" it is playing. "The meaning of a word," Wittgenstein wrote, "is its use in the language."
THE NATURE OF LANGUAGE: LATER THEORY
The later Wittgenstein was not interested in creating a perfect language. He sought rather to expose the underlying assumptions of language and the forms of life out of which our sentences arise. By understanding language in terms of the social environment that gives it birth, the later Wittgenstein encouraged a sociological understanding of language. Accordingly, Wittgenstein argued against the idea of a private language--a language apart from communal interactions.
The influence
of Wittgenstein's early work peaked in the 1950s. But his later understanding
of philosophy and his lifelong conception of philosophy as activity are
still influential, particularly in the English-speaking world. For example,
feminist philosophers have used Wittgenstein's insights to show how patriarchal
language both influences and is influenced by social structures, and theologians
have tried to understand the language of sacred texts by explorations
of their historical contexts. Wittgenstein's belief that the aim of philosophy
is to dissolve problems--"To shew the fly the way out of the fly-bottle"--has
continued to impress, or, as critics would say, to depress, philosophy.
ENDNOTES:
1. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), pp. 26-n-27.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916 (London: Basil Blackwell, 1961), p. 93.
3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1958), no. 109, p. 47.
By Forrest Baird © 2000 by Prentice Hall from Philosophic Classics, Volume V