Behold my use of "Wittgenstein" in this blog post title

I've been hanging onto my copy of the October 19 issue of The New Yorker because it contains a book review ("Losing Propositions") about the state of philosophy in Europe after the First World War.

The review has numerous mentions of Ludwig Wittgenstein, "perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century." So this gives me the opportunity to use Wittgenstein in the title of this post -- which in my utterly subjective opinion, elevates the profundity of this blog to an even higher level.

What I liked most  about the book review were the parts dealing with language that seems to say something about reality, but which actually says nothing. 

This is the problem I have with religious, spiritual, mystical, and metaphysical writings that I used to enjoy, yet now strike me as saying a lot about not much at all. 

"God" "Soul" "Spirit" "Heaven" These sorts of words have meaning only in the sense that people use them in sentences that sound meaningful, but actually lack any substance grounded in reality.

"God is in heaven" is a proper English sentence, yet there is no way to tell whether what it says is true. On the other hand, "Joe Biden soon will live in the White House" is a statement that can be tested as of January 20, 2021. 

Read on for some excerpts from The New Yorker piece that, if nothing else, will enable you to throw some mentions of Wittgenstein into your own conversations and communications.

For Wittgenstein, the renovation of philosophy had to begin with language. Since the Greeks, Western thinkers had tried to understand the world using terms such as "being" and "becoming," "substance" and "essence," "real" and "ideal." 

But these abstractions gave rise to complicated arguments that went around and around, never reaching any definite conclusion. Now, in the early twentieth century, relativity and quantum theory were redrawing the map of reality in ways that could be verified by experiment and given precise mathematical expression.

In an age of triumphant physics, did philosophy still need to bother with metaphysics?

By declaring the answer to be no, Wittgenstein set modern thought on a new course. For the analytic philosophy he helped inspire, many of the discipline's traditional problems are actually just misunderstandings, based on an erroneous use of language. 

What philosophers need isn't profundity but clarity: as Wittgenstein says in the "Tractatus," "Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly."

...In most cases, determining whether a statement is empirically true or false is fairly straightforward. If someone says that the moon is made of green cheese, there are various ways to check: you could look at the moon through a telescope, or examine a moon rock, or calculate how a moon-size ball of green cheese would behave in outer space.

Even if false, "The moon is made of green cheese" is still a meaningful proposition, because it makes an assertion about the world that can be tested. 

Some statements, however, can't be proved true or false, because they are constructed in a way that violates the rules of language. Carnap labelled these "pseudo-statements" -- "a sequence of words [that] looks like a statement at first glance," but whose syntax or vocabulary renders it meaningless. 

He gave as an example "Caesar is and": if someone said this to you, you wouldn't say that she was right or wrong, just that she didn't know English syntax. 

For the Vienna Circle, the best hunting ground for pseudo-statements was metaphysics, the branch of philosophy that deals with fundamental concepts like being and essence, time and space.

...The problem with metaphysical statements is that they are generally unverifiable, which to the logical empiricists meant they are meaningless. 

In Carnap's 1932 essay "The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language," he asks us to imagine a man who invents a new adjective, "teavy," and who, when we ask him how to tell whether or not something is teavy, replies that "there are no empirical signs of teaviness." In that csse, Carnap says, "we would deny the legitimacy of using this word."

The same principle, he argues, should apply to metaphysical terms, from Plato's "Idea" to Kant's "thing-in-itself." Such impressive words may provoke "associated images and feelings," Carnap writes, but they have no actual meaning, so any explanation that relies on them is saying nothing at all.

Comments

[Lemony Snicket]

Mechanical, logical, sequential, mathematics, science, control. That isn’t a sentence but I put a period after it anyway.

Creative, imaginative, crazy, free, fiction, fun.. Again, not a sentence and I put two periods after it.

If only Dr. Seuss had written a book on philosophy.

I have to turn in a paper on Karl Marx tomorrow. I think humans for the most part adopt beliefs that give them a sense of control or feeling of safety. Sometimes these beliefs are grounded in reality and sometimes they’re not. Control. There are so many rules in academia that I like to violate them as much as possible when I’m not doing school work.

Anyway, Wittgenstein... how nice. :)

He wasn’t exactly a poet. Nonetheless, his contribution is noted.

[um]

Did not Wittgenstein write!?:
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

IMO that means that the reality as a whole is other than can be described with language and language can only describe a part of it.

That part is related to the senses, brain and nature, in the form of culture.

God in heaven ... is the only way of saying that there is something and it exists somewhere, like man recides on earth and has a place to live. How would one otherwise convey such an thing?

Many or maybe most concepts have no reality in the sense that it can be seen, touched , smelled.

Science, hypothesis, courage, love, inteligence, democracy, politics, republicans, socialism, kapitalisme, hystory etc etc etc etc. Boundries do not exist but in the mind, like homeland and fighting for these things that are abstract.

In nature there is no culture and if nature is the relity, all culture is FAKE to speak with your president, peace be upon him.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Wittgenstein

[Familienähnlichkeit]

“If you and I are to live religious lives, it mustn't be that we talk a lot about religion, but that our manner of life is different. It is my belief that only if you try to be helpful to other people will you in the end find your way to God.”
― Ludwig Wittgenstein

[Ron Krumpos]

Just because something is not empirically verifiable does not mean that it is wrong. Albert Einstein wrote about this mysticism:
“The most beautiful and profound emotion we can experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and most radiant beauty - which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive form - this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of all religion.”

You do not have to be religious or believe in God to be a mystic. In 1959 I was introduced to mysticism by Nobel astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. He was an atheist who once wrote:
"God is man's greatest invention."

[Tim Rimmer]

First heard the name Wittgenstein from Bruce the Aussie:

‘…. Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as sloshed as Schlegel….’ :-)

I get the point that a type of clearer language is required. One that cuts out ‘erroneous’ use particularly in regard to metaphysical concepts. It’s interesting that for the Vienna Circle such concepts are described as fundamental. Do we mean fundamental to metaphysics or in a more general sense? I.e. they are considered basic to civilisation so to speak? And what are the rules of language? Who made them and for what language?

This got me wondering about the intertwining of language and thought. How our life experience relates to language. Are not our minds and sense of self created out of the dialogue (language) going on inside our heads? Much of this is discursive – probably less connected to clear thinking than it is to such things as memory remnants of major events, childhood traumas, images, social conditioning etc.

Another thing concerns how language achieves social conditioning. For example, business terminology – ‘targeting markets’, ‘trophy houses’, talking about people as ‘social capital’ or describing a business network as an ‘ecosystem’. Examples of language being taken out of its original context to further a particular world view/cultural norm.

I guess what I’m saying is that we really need to get a grip on our thinking and how it is culturally and discursively constructed before we can get hold of what Wittgenstein is on about.

As a final comment re culture and language, I return to Australia to a ‘story’ about the early contact Aboriginal people had with the first Europeans. Some say it’s a bit of a myth like the Hundredth Monkey Story… It’s about Aboriginal fishermen not noticing the arrival of European sailing ships. One interpretation is that they did not PERCEIVE them because nothing in their culture/language recognised/described them.
My point: just because we don’t have the right word for something doesn’t mean it’s not there.
Best wishes

[S]

@Tim

😯 that was somewhat profound... I think I just created a few new synapses in my brain while reading that.

Now I’m going to turn on telly and see who Trump fired today. 🙄😒😖

[Vinny]

You can test this statement in afterlife " The blogger will be dead / not alive by 2200 AD " . You cant argue with a cunning liar even if he pretends to be a great blogger.

[Tim Rimmer]

Hey S
Ha Ha - I reckon some synaptic enhancement happened to me too!
If you didn't make the connection with the the starting quote see this:https://youtu.be/l9SqQNgDrgg
BFN

[Ron Krumpos]

I had a synapse once, but I'm feeling better now. LOL