Philosophical Investigations

Thisd just is the key text of 20th century philosophy. Written in aphoristic style and heavily reactive to the conversation between Frege Russell and the early Wittgenstein that gave birth to contemporary analytic philosophy it is a must read (in company with some of the texts from those three authors). Nobody should remain unchanged in their thinking by reading and striving to understand this work.

`Philosophical Investigations' by Ludwig Wittgenstein is arguably the most important philosophical work of the 20th century, followed close behind by Wittgenstein's earlier work, the `Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'. While the earlier work was heavily influenced and endorsed by Bertrand Russell, who was always better known than his Austrian colleague in the world at large, the latter work is a complete departure from the logic based philosophy of Russell and the Logical Positivists, for whom the Tractatus was their bible. Although I have never seen this in any philosophical or historical analysis of Wittgenstein's work, the `Philosophical Investigations' were much closer to the `common sense' style of philosophy of G. E. Moore than to the thinking of Russell. All three were Cambridge dons and it is certain that Wittgenstein and Moore knew one another very well. The only thing which may have prevented Moore's ideas from influencing Wittgenstein is that the latter man was a much deeper thinker whose ideas still shape modern philosophy while Moore has become something of a footnote in the history of philosophy, best known for his common sense defense of the real world and his `naturalistic fallacy' invention in his pretentiously titled `Principia Ethica'. Wittgenstein and Moore certainly were the joint parents of modern English and American academic philosophical style and doctrines. While Wittgenstein did not publish very much in his lifetime, his influence is widespread and deep due to his long tenure as a teacher at Cambridge, from the early thirties to his death in 1955. As abstruse as Wittgenstein's philosophy may seem at first look, it is really exceptionally applicable to everyday thinking. One of my favorite stories about Wittgenstein is in a memoir written by the American philosopher and Wittgenstein student, Norman Malcolm. During World War II, Wittgenstein and Malcolm were chatting about something the Germans had done and Malcolm said it was against the English character to do any similar action. At this comment, Wittgenstein lost his temper at how his student, Malcolm could make such a statement which so totally went against Wittgenstein's teachings. A much less anecdotal application of his thought is his notion of `family resemblences' expounded early in the `Philosophical Investigations' as a tool for analyzing the meanings of words. His example was the notion of games. Try as you might, someone can probably find a counterexample to virtually any definition of games which will fit into a reasonably sized dictionary definition. Wittgenstein's solution was that everything which can be called a game has a `family resemblance' to other games and does not have a family resemblance to most things which are not games. This is just one tool and two examples of the extreme empiricism in Wittgenstein's thought. While there is a world of difference in the styles of Wittgenstein and the great Scottish philosopher David Hume, there is a strong `f

it would probably say something about The Tao. What does the Tao have to do with Wittgenstein? Very little. I bring it up because there are three books of philosophy which I believe everyone should struggle with at some point in their lives. The first is Plato's Republic, for what I hope are obvious reasons. The other two are The Tao Te Ching and Philosophical Investigations. These two books have common threads that are often unremarked on, but perhaps the most pertinant point to this review is the fact that both are often mistaken, by people who should know better, for being much more esoteric than they actually. The Tao Te Ching is in many ways a manual for surviving in tumultuous times, and most of it's advice, stripped of it's poetry, is nothing if not practical. Similarly, Philosophical Investigations is a user's guide for the urge to philosophize. Throughout the book, Wittgenstein instructs the reader on not what to think, but how to go about thinking. If there is a thesis at all in this book, it is that we must be cautious about how we use language. He goes to great lengths to illustrate why this is, and exactly what sort of nonsense happens "when language goes on holiday." Unfortunately, it is not a lesson that everyone in the philosophical community learned from Uncle Ludwig. One suspects that the history of philosophy in the 20th century might have gone quite differently if folks like Quine, Lewis, Nagle, Harman, and Ryle had spent a little more time putting together Wittgenstein's puzzles. There is a great deal of confusion in the world of philosophy, a great deal of disagreement, and a great deal of nonsense. Wittgenstein's legacy is that he realized that this was the first problem that must be faced by anyone at all tempted by the questions of philosophy. Was he right? Are all philosophical problems reducible to linguistic puzzles? Are we led astray by our picture of the world as it is presented to us by our language? Is there an important distinction between an empirical and a grammatical truth? I, for one, was convinced by this book. Others are not. But to possess an interest in philosophy at all and to not have at least engaged this book is unforgivable.

This book inspires heartfelt testimony. My own experience is that it liberates. Wittgenstein introduces a method that's fitted to the questions he treats, so that anyone who is bothered by the same questions can finally get a decent grip on them. The questions I mean are the usual philosophical ones: what is value? what is a fact? what is logic? what makes a thing what it is? what is essence? what is explanation? what is thinking? and so on. But (and this is a clue to his method) the basic question among all of these is about meaning: what is it, what conditions it, and what is the relationship between meaning and world (it turns out to be intimate). A couple of "warnings": Wittgenstein is not a philosopher who likes jargon, in fact the tendency to jargon cuts directly against his philosophical point that language is just fine the way it is. But he can be weirdly hard to read anyway and very smart people walk away from him bewildered all the time. Mostly (I think) that's because the questions are uniquely "close to us" and Wittgenstein's approach is totally unlike familiar approaches to problem-solving (in science, math, politics, car mechanics, etc.) It's as though we are used to inspecting things at arm's length but what's at issue in these questions changes at arm's length, the problem is only right at our noses. So he takes another approach which you'll have to see first-hand - what he himself called his "new method". Now every rule must have an exception, and that brings me to the second point. Actually Wittgenstein does rely on some technical vocabulary - nothing far-out, but it can present an obstacle to deeper reading. Words like "sense", "reference", "assertion", "truth-value", "concept", and "object" stem from logic and the theory of meaning as Frege developed them. To go more deeply into PI, a person would have to read - or somehow be comfortable with ideas from - at least two of Frege's articles: "On Sense and Reference" and "On Concept and Object" [collected in The Frege Reader, Beaney ed.]. These articles are practically the fountainhead of analytic philosophy and also clear, precisely written, and intensely brilliant. More to the point, they contain many of Wittgenstein's insights in germinal form, and many of Wittgenstein's most significant moves are implicit or explicit criticisms of Frege. So to really get to the bottom of PI you'll probably need to read Frege. Anyway, the bottom line is: if you've come this far, it's for you.