I don't get him. I read Roderick Long's awesome articles about Wittgenstein and his Relationship to Mises. Its weird, it seems like both Wittgenstein and K. Popper have been linked to the austrian school.
I am not quite sure what Wittgenstein is getting at. He seems to be saying that people intellectualize things that shouldn't be intellectualized, and then we end up making up unanswerable questions. That seems true.
"what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence."
See, this is what bothers me, it takes a lot of work to write, and to write in a way in which other people can understand. To communicate certain ideas in the form which you think of them takes extreme skill. This statement seems to imply that all people are equally logical.
How can that be so? People may think within certain restraints, but that doesn't mean they are precise as one another. If we look at the thoughts of mises, we understand that his deductive reasoning skills are superb. The thing is, it is a skill, that he had to developed, and it is a skill that many do not develop. When they attempt to speak about the same subjects, they fail miserably.
So what is the deal? I must have misunderstood this quote, because I don't think he would be all that famous if I could just blow away his ideas in one post.
Here is the German/English special edition that you'll find in stores for like 40 bucks. For free via scribd. Take a look.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/7365540/Ludwig-Witt-Gen-Stein-Philosophical-Investigations
As for tractatus. His quote is often stated as "that of which we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence." It is the very last line.
The tractatus basically tried to reduce language to logical structures. I think due to Russell's influence in logical atomism. Where everything is broken down in to small logical statements. Anything which cannot be part of this rigorous system, must be ignored. It is not as if it is impossible to be illogical, but that we must understand what statements pass muster as logical and thus meaningful. For instance, right before the statement he makes about what he must pass over in silence, he says that it is not meaningful to say that God or heaven solves some problem of death. Because that merely creates another problem to deal with in something like theology. And so it goes. We must avoid such questions. (If Wittgenstein had any religiosity it was mostly inspired by Kierkegaard, I think).
But Wittgenstein had an epiphany it is said when someone flipped him off in traffic. And he couldn't figure out what the logical structure of that gesture is. So he concluded that we merely play games with language. But they are games in many different ways. Similar to how chess and football are both games, but not the same type of game. Or "playing a game" might mean just messing someone. Philosophical problems are then about figuring out the games people play that make them so complicated.
I also recommend the (weird) movie Wittgenstein. Which is on google video.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2608378371506756422#
(warning it also has the dreaded Keynes in it).
Or these shorter clips from youtube:
representing his tractatus-era work
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0cN_bpLrxk
representing his return:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIhl9rVg6mM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILlvG78ZldQ (featuring Keynes)
Brainpolice:... as well as the notion of philosophy as a meta-discipline or science that stands above and critiques the whole of culture. That's why there is this reoccuring theme of statements that seem to attack "philosophy" itself, at least as it has normally been concieved.
Yeah, he takes up "philosophy" as "a therapeutic, rather than cognitive enterprise", somewhat similarly to Nietzsche.
The Tractatus is online here, but the math symbols suck. I got Kolak's recent translation for $9, and it has some helpful notes.
I think Donald's Peterson's book is really good. I would get that before even trying Wittgenstein, or read Janik and Toulmin's book for the historical background.
Usually this is translated more like "Of what we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence."
I think he is referring to the noumenal-phenomenal divide, or Tolstoyan-Kierkegaardian "indirect communication".
Democracy means the opportunity to be everyone's slave.—Karl Kraus.
Brainpolice: Of course not, Wittgenstein. I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve.
Of course not, Wittgenstein.
I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve.
I see. I've been noticing a lot of Wittgenstein dances pretty near some of my own ideas, in that he understands there is a big problem in the area of language vs. thought. But I've never heard a summary of his ideas and I'm really too lazy to read him right now - too many other things to read and think about.
Why anarchy fails
AJ: Brainpolice: Of course not, Wittgenstein. I think that was his point, but with drawn out implications for the enterprise of epistemology, which he wants to basically dissolve. I see. I've been noticing a lot of Wittgenstein dances pretty near some of my own ideas, in that he understands there is a big problem in the area of language vs. thought. But I've never heard a summary of his ideas and I'm really too lazy to read him right now - too many other things to read and think about.
I think the issue is that Wittgenstein is one of the most widely interpreted thinkers of the 20th century. There are so many takes on him that one is easily confused about what he could be said to have really thought. He's been connected to everything from logical positivism to postmodernism. I'm mostly making use of the interpretations and summaries that I've gathered from sources other than Wittgenstein himself, such as the references to him from John Searle, Hillary Putnam and Richard Rorty.
That's a good indication to me that he was on to something that most people don't come near grasping. Hence to them he seemed to be all over the map (and maybe even to himself, heh).