3 ( a deep dive into ludwig wittgenstein

to many, ludwig wittgenstein is a genius. to some, he is an enigma. i am part of both crowds. ludwig wittgensteins ideas and philosophies have stuck with me, and i've always wanted to read into them in a way that goes in-depth. this is my documentation of the things i've learned about the man himself.

wittgenstein believes that all conflicts of philosophy and religion stem from language. he believes there is an unbridgeable gap between what can be expressed in language and what can only be expressed in non-verbal ways. but what does that mean? for example: when i say "the sentence you just uttered is true" you might be tempted to read it as a simple subject predicate sentence: "the sentence you just uttered" is the subject and the predicate is "is true". presumably, this means that the first expression refers to what philosophers call a proposition, whereas the predicate refers to a property called being true. this leads to all sorts of complications. it is a mistake to treat "the cheese is yellow" and "this sentence is true" the same way just because they look similar. beneath the surface, massive differences lurk. we can see this by examining the use: when i say "the cheese is yellow", indeed, i am asserting of the cheese that it is yellow. but, when i say "that sentence is true", all i am doing (on one plausible theory) is asserting the sentence that you just asserted. i am not asserting of that sentence that the property of being true applies to it. if you just said "the car is red" and i say "that sentence is true", all i am saying is that the car is red. no metaphysics, no propositions, no problematic truth relation necessary. the "problem of truth" dissolved.

one of the foundational beliefs of (earlier) analytic philosophers is that in principle, all philosophical riddles come down to confusions like these. we do not solve them by discovering the right theory, instead, we dissolve them through a reflection on our language.

 wittgenstein has never stated the reasons philosophical problems come from misunderstanding language, rather, he lays out a view of language, (structures, propositions, etc. etc.) and uses this information to prove how philosophical problems start up from getting languages wrong. he describes this method in one of his works, tractatus logico-philosophicus.  6.53 the right method of philosophy would be this. to say nothing except what can be said, i.e the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. this method would be unsatisfying to the other--he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy-- but it would be the only strictly correct method. 

the reason he holds the belief of language affecting philosophy is simple. it's an evolution of his early philosophies. he believes philosophers don't understand language. but that's less important than how they misunderstand language, and this highlights the difference between early and late wittgenstein. 

the early wittgensteins philosophies were similar -- but not the same at all. he once believed that language's function was the name objects, and the meaning of language stemmed from the objects for which it stands. he later rejected these thoughts, and focused his philosophy on how language works and is used, believing that problems of religious language come from misunderstanding its usage. the picture theory of meaning states that statements are meaningful if, and only if, they can be defined or pictures in the real world. wittgenstein does not agree with this view anymore.

i don't know a good way to end this long ramble-y blog post, here are a few quotes written by ludwig wittgenstein ^^

the limits of my language means the limits of my world.

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

if people never did silly things nothing intelligent would be done.

death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. if we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

a man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards; as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

a serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.

the world is independant of my will.

(in-depth explanation of the theory of language according to wittgenstinian philosophy was not written by me.)

inquiries, corrections and additional statements are appreciated^^