Wittgenstein

[anonymous66]

I've read about his life - and sometimes I just didn't like him, because he just seems mean. There was the incident when he was a schoolteacher - and he treated several other people rather poorly.

But, I suppose he did grow up with a tyrant for a father. I can imagine it must have been hard for him to be decent when he had so few role models himself.

I wonder if the main reason that he gave up his fortune was because he knew that if he was in control of so much money, he would do terrible things with it. Instead he devoted his life to philosophy, and arguably made the world a better place - or at least did less harm than he would have, if he had been a wealthy man.

[promethean75]

"There was the incident when he was a schoolteacher - and he treated several other people rather poorly."

Staunch Viennese intellectuals playing teacher have no time for school room tomfoolery, and if you are one of the dumb kids that can't get the answer right, you will get your ears boxed. It is what it is.

[Impenitent]

Ludwig changed his mind

-Imp

[Alexiev]

"There was the incident when he was a schoolteacher - and he treated several other people rather poorly."

Staunch Viennese intellectuals playing teacher have no time for school room tomfoolery, and if you are one of the dumb kids that can't get the answer right, you will get your ears boxed. It is what it is.

Well, he may or may not have threatened Karl Popper with a fire poker. Accounts differ.

[iambiguous]

On the other hand, perhaps this...

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

...might be applicable here.

"His later belief was that language is an elastic, social, and sometimes ambiguous structure that necessarily defies simplistic definition because of its scope and complexity. Language's meaning, he believed, is defined by how it is used in daily life rather than by any logical structure that underlies it." NIH

He seemed to be more about exploring the limitations of philosophical language itself. And needless to say, there are some here who really, really, really don't want to hear that.

[Veritas Aequitas]

I've read about his life - and sometimes I just didn't like him, because he just seems mean. There was the incident when he was a schoolteacher - and he treated several other people rather poorly.

But, I suppose he did grow up with a tyrant for a father. I can imagine it must have been hard for him to be decent when he had so few role models himself.

I wonder if the main reason that he gave up his fortune was because he knew that if he was in control of so much money, he would do terrible things with it. Instead he devoted his life to philosophy, and arguably made the world a better place - or at least did less harm than he would have, if he had been a wealthy man.

While I made reference to W, I am not a fan.

W did not have thorough moral system but merely made statement related to ethics.
W did not contribute to make the world a better place; what he did was to facilitate and reinforce analytic philosophers to become zealots and bigots.

[Iwannaplato]

On the other hand, perhaps this...

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"

...might be applicable here.

So, we don't really know for sure what was going on in Wittgenstein's mind, so perhaps we should be silent about that. A reasonable position.

But then, ironically.....

And needless to say, there are some here who really, really, really don't want to hear that.

So, you know what is 'really' going on in other people's mind and that they don't/wouldn't like this message from Wittgenstein (early Wittgenstein, which was quite different from the later Wittgenstein).

"His later belief was that language is an elastic, social, and sometimes ambiguous structure that necessarily defies simplistic definition because of its scope and complexity. Language's meaning, he believed, is defined by how it is used in daily life rather than by any logical structure that underlies it." NIH

He seemed to be more about exploring the limitations of philosophical language itself. And needless to say, there are some here who really, really, really don't want to hear that.

Right, but then he would then, more or less, eliminate the conundrum of determinism and responsibility. Wittgenstein’s idea of forms of life supports the notion that certain concepts are embedded within the practices and activities that make up human life. Responsibility is one such concept that is deeply rooted in social practices, moral judgments, and legal systems. It operates meaningfully within these practices regardless of whether we think about the metaphysical underpinnings of free will or determinism. So, the entire go over and over what it might mean if things are determined and could we hold someone responsible is trying to talk about things using everyday language where it is not appropriate: metaphysical issues. He would find no reason NOT to hold people responsible for their actiions. This doesn't make him a compatibilist, since that includes positive statements about metaphysics, but it in no way supports and in fact would likely make him critical of assuming that and worrying that determinism means we can't hold people responsible or there being something wrong with that morally.

In the language game of everyday moral and legal talk, the question of whether we are determined by physical laws or possess libertarian free will rarely comes into play. The concept of responsibility functions within this game as a way of holding people accountable, setting social norms, and guiding behavior. Wittgenstein might argue that this use of language is what gives responsibility its meaning, not any metaphysical foundation.

The language of causality and determinism belongs to one type of discourse (e.g., scientific or metaphysical), while the language of choice and responsibility belongs to another (e.g., social or moral), and so he might well have, and it seems in his life had a pragmatic resolution: From a Wittgensteinian standpoint, one could argue that the concept of responsibility is meaningful and functional in everyday life, regardless of whether determinism is true. This resembles the compatibilist view that free will and determinism can coexist because moral responsibility depends on the practical use of concepts rather than their metaphysical basis.

Remember, Wittgenstein directly disagrees with the idea of wrestling with metaphysical truths (determinism vs. free will, objective vs subjective morals) and would see any obsession with such ideas and trying to figure out what they indicate about how one should live
as Philosophical Confusion and Misuse of Language. Looking up his thoughts around these ideas might be something you might not want to hear. Because I don't think you quite understand how his thoughts about the limitations of language actually undermine, if believed, the entire project of many of your threads. Are you trying to stretch the use of these words beyond what they mean in everyday life and causing yourself problems? You might want to look also at his ideas about philosophy as therapy. IOW if you want to refer to Wittgenstein as an authority critical of what philosophers here are doing, you might want yourself to see what he would think about how they way you think about these very abstract issues is causal in your suffering and follow his recommendations about your own language use and focus. Your positions on these issues and how you suffer, relate directly to using metaphysical ideas and trying to squeeze these into everyday life.

“Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.” (Philosophical Investigations, §109)

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known.” (Philosophical Investigations, §109)

“What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” (Philosophical Investigations, §116)
Here saying that the role of philosophy is not to construct grand theories but to remind us of how language works in practice. When words like freedom, morality, or truth are lifted into the realm of metaphysics, they can lead to confusion and the creation of problems that do not exist in their everyday application.

“Think of the tools in a toolbox: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a screwdriver, a rule, a glue-pot, nails, and screws.—The functions of words are as diverse as the functions of these objects.” (Philosophical Investigations, §11)

This is an issue I have long thought of raising with you and perhaps tried once long ago. You treat words as containers - as do most of us, most of the time, rather than in the Wittgensteinian sense of things that do things. But that's a very paradigm focused area and we can't seem to manage to get anywhere with much easier topics.

In any case, as a philosopher he's hardly fractured and fragmented, for example, about the objectivity of morals:

“Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 2.1)

[anonymous66]

Maybe I just have this odd belief that when reading the work of someone who was kind of a jerk, if I take his work seriously, I might be "infected" by his jerkiness, and become a jerk myself.

I feel the same way about Kierkegaard. From what I read of his life, he was totally stressed out, and died very young as a result of the extreme stress in his life. I'm afraid if I read his work and take it seriously, I'll see life in such a way that I will get totally stressed out myself.

[Impenitent]

either/or...

-Imp

[anonymous66]

On the other hand, I've recently come to realize just how many movies I've seen that were based on the writings of Philip K. Dick...(Predestination, Blade Runner, The Man in the High Castle tv series, Minority Report, The Matrix series of movies, Total Recall, A Scanner Darkly, The Adjustment Bureau) and I recently finished the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and I'll probably read more of his novels. Now Dick lived a rather messed up life - and yet I don't feel like I've been "infected". It's more like I'm just observing his view of the world. I suppose I can do the same thing with the writings of Wittgensetein, Kierkegaard and other philosophers whose lives I may find unappealing.

[promethean75]

Yeah, W came out of the emerging Ordinary Language philosopher trend that was initiated by positivism and the summary reduction of most philosophical talk to nonsensical codswallop. His time was a time when continental philosophy had already exhausted its creativity, and academia was just floundering and mulling over the same traditional metaphysical problems again. W and his ilk wanted to fiddle with hard logical problems. The culminating philosophical angst of WW2 and the existential struggle with meaning post-Nietzsche had all of Europe stuck in an intellectual malaise and the Vienna circle was like okay we're going over here now to do something else. Work on some problems in propositional logic or something.

"I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again 'I know that that’s a tree', pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: 'This fellow isn’t insane. We are only doing philosophy." - W