Now, about Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For the
non-philosophers, it’s pretty complex.
In a BBC 4 Great Lives radio program about Wittgenstein, the host, Matthew Parris, warned that, if the
philosophy discussion ever got too deep, he would blow a whistle, which would
be a sign that they should stop talking about philosophy and get back to
talking about Wittgenstein’s life. I can’t blow a whistle in this post, but I
will heed Parris’s warning, and will metaphorically blow my whistle if I feel
that we are getting bogged down in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.
Wittgenstein’s masterpiece is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which is considered one of the most
important philosophical works of the century. However, its preface contains the
statement, “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have
themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it – or similar
thoughts. It is therefore not a text-book.” And he is so right; the lay reader
is in trouble even before starting the book. I certainly am.
The Tractatus is
an extremely cryptic book. It is not prose; rather, it is eighty or so pages of
numbered propositions. Wittgenstein did not use much technical terminology, but
short words do not make the Tractatus
any easier to understand. It begins with proposition 1, “The world is all that
is the case,” and doesn’t get much better from there. If one can get one pearl
of wisdom from the Tractatus, it
would be its proposition 3, “A logical picture of facts is a thought.”
Wittgenstein felt that the world could be understood in terms of pictures; put
another way, “sentences are logical pictures of the world.” And with that, the
whistle blows, and we will move on.
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