A century ago Ludwig Wittgenstein changed philosophy for ever
Written in the trenches, his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” still baffles and inspires
OF ALL THE innovations that sprang from the trenches of the first world war—the zip, the tea bag, the tank—the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” must be among the most elegant and humane. When the conflict began, this short treatise was a jumble of ideas in the head of a young Austrian soldier and erstwhile philosophy student called Ludwig Wittgenstein. By the time he was released from a prisoner-of-war camp during the Versailles peace conference, it had taken rough shape over a few dozen mud-splattered pages in his knapsack. In 1921 Wittgenstein found a publisher, and philosophy was changed for ever.
That the book ever made it into print was miraculous. Before the war, as a student at Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s talent was clear to his contemporaries, who begged him to put his many thoughts into writing. He refused, fearing that an imperfect work of philosophy was worthless. His mentor, Bertrand Russell, made a habit of taking notes when the two spoke, lest his protégé’s genius be lost to memory. Wittgenstein himself had other preoccupations, principally suicide.
He was in Vienna visiting his family when the conflict began. Then aged 25, Wittgenstein answered the call for troops and was sent to the Eastern Front to fight for the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Largely cut off from his British friends, he was left with his own thoughts and a copy of Leo Tolstoy’s “The Gospel in Brief”;he would mimic its pared-down, staccato structure in the “Tractatus”. “If I don’t live to see the end of this war,” he confided to a friend, “I must be prepared for all my work to go to nothing.” He resolved, finally, to write.
Stuff and nonsense
He drew on the work of Gottlob Frege, a German logician. Still, the “Tractatus” was revolutionary in its naivety. What, Wittgenstein asked simply, is language? Why and how do the squawks a person makes, and the squiggles they draw, conjure up all that is in the world? Anthony Quinton, a British philosopher, compared his instincts to those of Sir Isaac Newton, who had troubled to ask why stones fall to the ground when others had been content enough to say, “They just do.”
Wittgenstein’s answer was the picture theory of language, a neat demonstration of the relation between words and the real world. He argued that all meaningful thoughts that people have are arrangements of pictures, which, when expressed in language as “propositions”, can be communicated to others. This is what “the cat sat on the mat” has in common with sophisticated sentences. At least in the cases of tangible things like felines, that might seem obvious. But Wittgenstein was breaking new ground. The idea came to him as he read a report about a court case involving a car crash (still a relatively novel occurrence). Learning that a lawyer had used toy cars and dolls to explain the smash, he grasped the pictorial basis of language.
He applied this view to the central problems that had perplexed philosophers for millennia: God, morality, beauty. He concluded that, since philosophy largely discusses things that are not demonstrable in the world and cannot therefore be pictured, many of its propositions are not meaningful. Instead, most philosophy is “nonsense”. He preferred to focus on the few areas that could be meaningfully discussed with language. That led him to a final, definitive proposition: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or, as he put it elsewhere in the “Tractatus”, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” In his preface Wittgenstein claimed to have found “the final solution of the problems” of philosophy.
Readers have been dazzled and puzzled by this brazenness for a century. The appeal is not only the originality of the ideas but their forthright expression. Fewer than a hundred pages long, the book is structured around seven enigmatic main statements, beginning with: “The world is all that is the case.” These are followed by supplementary points ordered in a decimal sequence. Wittgenstein offers little justification and almost no evidence. He intended his statements to be inarguable.
It may not be coincidental that the “Tractatus” was published a year before three seminal works of modernist literature: T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Virginia Woolf’s “Jacob’s Room” and James Joyce’s “Ulysses”. Initial reviewers appreciated Wittgenstein’s literary flair while often misconstruing his philosophy. Even Frege, one of his heroes, considered the slim book to be “an artistic rather than a scientific achievement”.
For Wittgenstein, convinced of its brilliance, this was not enough. He felt Frege, along with his mentor Russell, had missed the ramifications of the “Tractatus”. He retreated from academia to rural Austria where he taught at a primary school for most of the 1920s. For the brightest children, his influence was life-shaping. He ignored the less able, unless he was so incensed by their ignorance as to cane them.
While Wittgenstein was away, the import of the “Tractatus” sank in. By the time he returned to Cambridge in 1929 he was the most vaunted philosopher in the world. John Maynard Keynes ran into him on the way from London. “God has arrived,” Keynes wrote to a friend, “I met him on the 5.15 train.” A young Alan Turing attended his lectures. Like his writing, Wittgenstein’s teaching flouted tradition. He sat among his students, rattling off questions on the lines of “Why might we think that blue is closer to green than red?”
As in the primary school, the slower students floundered; the quick-witted worshipped him. Taking his claim to have “solved” philosophy to its logical end, one disciple left Cambridge to work in a canning factory. Another went into toolmaking. Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer, reckons no other university would have allowed him to lecture undergraduates.
Still, he tired of what he called “the stiffness, the artificiality, the self-satisfaction” of university life. After a few years he rediscovered the iconoclasm of the “Tractatus” and began to pooh-pooh his own ideas. How far he repudiated the book is disputed. After his death in 1951 some of his later thoughts were collated as “Philosophical Investigations”, but he never published another book in his lifetime. The “Tractatus”, reckons Constantine Sandis of the British Wittgenstein Society, “contains the seeds of a philosophical outlook that informed all his thought throughout his life”.
To mark its centenary the society is hosting an international symposium of philosophers. The Wittgenstein Initiative in Vienna is curating a virtual exhibition of his life and work. Luciano Bazzocchi, a Wittgenstein scholar, has edited new editions in German and English. But the influence of the “Tractatus” extends beyond academia. Its author’s admirers include Jasper Johns, an American abstract painter; Iris Murdoch, whose debut novel centred on a line from the book; Derek Jarman, who directed a Wittgenstein biopic; and the film-making Coen brothers. Modern readers have spotted new resonances. “Wittgenstein literally wrote his books in tweet form,” a fan joked recently on Twitter.
In philosophy itself, the legacy of the “Tractatus” is complex. In the middle of the 20th century it was a lodestar for philosophy professors in English-speaking universities; a band of devoted Wittgensteinians still carry the torch. But over the decades, Wittgenstein’s pronouncements on the end of philosophy and the meaninglessness of many of its debates came to seem less convincing. “All the branches of philosophy that Wittgenstein thought would get shut down have flourished,” acknowledges Mr Monk. Advances in the philosophy of mind and political theory, and in the emerging field of “public philosophy”, have undermined his claims.
The enigmatic man himself might not have set too much store by those developments. “Wittgenstein had complete contempt for academic philosophers,” says Mr Monk. “How highly regarded he was by them didn’t matter to him.” ■
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "The rest is silence"
From the May 22nd 2021 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contentsExplore the edition
More from Culture
A museum on a Kenyan island glosses over slavery
Sometimes, history is told not by the winners, but by the funders
“Swarm” asks whether online fan culture has gone too far
The new comedy-horror series, co-created by Donald Glover, is inspired by Beyoncé’s acolytes
Commentators are underrated sporting heroes
Try living without them to see why