In this day of divisive discourses and competing realities, the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein—the enigmatic iconoclast whose 75th death anniversary will be observed next week—have never seemed more pertinent. Despite his obscurity, the philosopher’s unconventional views on language, meaning and truth have had an enormous impact on later European philosophy. Wittgenstein’s writings are among the densest and most challenging in modern philosophy to interpret. And his ideas—which engaged with topics as diverse as logic, ethics, religion, aesthetics, culture, philosophy of science and political thought—have been frequently misinterpreted, even by those who professed to be his disciples.
I first came across Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) while scouring through the shelves of the Ambedkar Central Library in Jawaharlal Nehru University on one of my expeditions during law school internship breaks. I struggled to make sense of it. But what struck me was the sheer audacity of the book’s attempt to draw the limits of what can be meaningfully said—an ambition Wittgenstein later repudiated as fundamentally misguided.
Much like his writing, the man himself was a puzzle, having published only Tractatus, an article on logical form, a book review and a children’s dictionary during his lifetime. Curiously, following the completion of Tractatus, he became firmly convinced that he had nothing further to contribute to philosophy as he had ostensibly solved all its problems and chose to distance himself from the field for roughly a decade.
During this time, he worked variously as a primary school teacher, a gardener’s helper and practised as a novice architect. Born into a life of wealth and high cultural status, his childhood amid the opulence of fin-de-siècle Vienna casts an unlikely backdrop to the starkly ascetic philosophy he would pioneer as an adult. Ludwig’s father, Karl Wittgenstein, had amassed a great fortune through his involvement in the steel industry and regularly hosted prominent intellectuals, musicians and writers of the era such as Gustav Klimt and Johannes Brahms. However, Karl was a strict patriarch with little tolerance for his children’s infractions or ambitions.
Having developed a passionate interest in mathematical logic while an engineering student at the University of Manchester, Wittgenstein repeatedly sought out philosopher Bertrand Russell at Cambridge to discuss the latter’s works. Russell, despite initially finding the passionate young man odd, quickly began to appreciate his brilliance.
While Russell believed ordinary language was logically deficient and needed to be replaced by a formal logical language, Wittgenstein held that ordinary language was logically in order. He believed that language disguised thought so that the outward form of the clothing didn’t reveal the form of the body beneath. During this early phase, Wittgenstein focused on the correlation between propositions (statements that people can consider or discuss whether true) and the world, claiming that by explaining the reasoning behind this correlation, he had resolved all philosophical issues on all essential points.
Tractatus sets up an ambitious attempt to uncover reality through thorough linguistic analysis and suggests that propositions are combinations of words that mirror the structure of the world. Wittgenstein’s underlying claim was radical: propositions are logical pictures of facts. An elementary proposition is a concatenation of names that stands in a projective relation to a state of affairs. In other words, it’s not just that words are ‘combined’ but that the logical form of the proposition is identical to the logical form of the fact it depicts. According to him, that identity of form is what makes representation possible. While ordinary propositions are in perfect logical order, the everyday form of language makes it difficult to perceive that logical structure.
By the time Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929 after a long hiatus from philosophical studies, his impact was already significant. Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife: “Well, god has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.” This ‘new’ Wittgenstein, however, seemed to have rejected his first aspiration in Tractatus as fundamentally incorrect. Though he would not publish another work during his lifetime, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) put out a highly unconventional viewpoint that rejected the idea of essentialism.
While the early Wittgenstein was concerned with the same problems as Gottlob Frege and Russell, the later Wittgenstein was difficult to place within existing traditions. Philosophers from the early modern era, especially those of the Cartesian tradition, believed that the ‘mental’ or ‘inner’ of a person are characteristics of a substance that is not physical, but something that is incorporeal. They believed that the defining quality of this substance is its ability to think.
Wittgenstein, on the other hand, believed that the mental is a unique logical category. Thinking, according to him, is not a characteristic of the mind, body or brain, but can be better compared to the speed and manner of running and to the soundness of digestion, the quickness of breath, the irregularity of heartbeat. It is a characteristic of the human with a unique set of logical and grammatical traits different from physical attributes.
According to him, meaning cannot be directly linked to fundamental objects or essences. Philosophical Investigations examined the notion of ‘language games’, contending that the significance of a word is contingent upon the context. Take the example of ‘water’. When used with an exclamation, it may be a command, request, or response to an inquiry, too.
The acknowledgement of language as a social endeavour closely linked to human activities has laid the foundation for contemporary linguistics, cognitive science and the philosophy of language. It diminished the appeal of constructing a solitary, strictly rational framework to encompass the boundless intricacy of human communication and perception.
The focus on context also has far-reaching consequences. In the era of rapid communication and widespread use of social media, where misconceptions can quickly spread over the internet, Wittgenstein’s concepts provide a vital structure for effective and unambiguous communication. By emphasising the importance of shared practices and conventions in creating meaning, he urges us to use more accurate language and be more aware of the communication context. Wittgenstein’s concepts also pose a challenge to legal textualism and originalism, which treat the written letter of the law and the original intent of its framers as sacrosanct determinants of judicial interpretation.
Ultimately, Wittgenstein demonstrated that engaging with philosophical inquiries involves accepting and confronting challenging and conflicting ideas. He shattered our lofty dreams of unravelling the profound enigmas of reality through definitive and unchanging systems. Instead, Wittgenstein demonstrated a willingness to embrace and explore the inherent contradictions and diverse perspectives within language and life, without hesitation or avoidance.
Saai Sudharsan Sathiyamoorthy | Advocate, Madras High Court
(Views are personal)