Wittengstein is among the most challenging philosophers for academics, students, and philosophical laymen alike. These pages explain some of his most important ideas.
It’s almost a cliché to say that Wittgenstein is arguably the greatest philosopher of modern times, yet his influence has been so strong and extensive, especially in the Anglo-sphere, that it is very difficult not to agree. He is also among the most difficult to understand. This is partly because his theories were tentative, not dogmatic, often telling how not to see things, rather than saying beyond doubt how to actually see them. He has been described as a “philosopher’s philosopher”, because much of what he deals gets to the heart of the very activity of philosophy.
This article explains some of his work, but makes no claim to being the sole interpretation. In order to understand Wittgenstein, one has to be aware of the broader academic context of his thinking. This means a little knowledge of his contemporaries, especially Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. The work which Russell was engaged in especially, was aimed at overcoming scepticism (i.e. philosophical scepticism is the idea that we don't know anything). That's why in the Tractatus Wittgenstein tries to construct a seamless way in which language (and hence thought) and the world fit together perfectly. He wanted to make it a logical necessity that language (most of it anyway, he does discuss 'nonsense' in that book too) was meaningful, that is was about objects that really exist.
Wittgenstein’s seminal work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, is an analysis of how language is able to reveal the relationship between a thought and reality, and, by revealing the essential structure of those thoughts, we become aware of the limits of thought. Tracatus picks up from where Frege and Russell left off in their respective works. For Frege, the meaning of a sentence must be settled by an awareness of the situations that could make it emerge as true or false. Russell held that the sense of any sentence will be understood only with a knowledge of what each word refers to. Wittgenstein’s conclusions in the Tractatus are a synthesis of these two ideas, and make new deductions from them.
Two main ideas
First, that the essential character of every sentence is pictorial. Second, that every sentence can be analysed into more fundamental sentences whose words pick out simple objects i.e. objects that have no internal structure, and are thus indubitably fundamental. One might compare this idea to how a scientist can break down an object into its component parts to the point of molecules, then atoms, then subatomic particles. To Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, ideas can be splayed in the same way through sentences. An analysis of sentences in this way, he argued, would reveal that some sentences had “sense” and others were in fact nonsense. Those sentences that are “nonsense”, he added, do not even express real thoughts. It was an extremely strong conclusion, and one which he abandoned in his later thinking.
One of the difficulties of this idea is the notion that there are “simple” ontological objects. This theory of simple objects has its roots in Russell, though Wittgenstein made it very much his own. Unlike Russell, Wittgenstein does not posit that for a sentence to have meaning, each of the words it names must match up to the object such names pick out. Instead, Wittgenstein was more concerned with the requirement that the sense of a sentence be derived either from the objects designated by the names occurring in that sentence, or, if analysable, from the objects designated by the names in its analysis.
It seemed to him that an analysis driven by this requirement must terminate with simple objects. A sentence, he assumed, must either be true or false, and for this to be possible, the sense of the sentence had to depend on the correspondence between the structure of a complex object, and the logical structure of the sentence. Such a complex object must be separable into basic, fundamental objects, which correspond with basic fundamental facts about the world. In short, he was looking for nothing less than a theory that made a seamless interplay between thought, reality and language, possible and necessary. Unlike Immanuel Kant, Wittgenstein did not seek to say what things we can and cannot know, but rather how we are able to know things.
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