Wittgenstein 1. Discovery

I discovered for myself Wittgenstein. If you never read about him, I highly recommend reading the Wikipedia article at least. He had a fascinating life, full of extremes–great inherited wealth (seven grand pianos in his parents’ house) and volunteered poverty, happiness and depression (three of his five brothers committed suicide), peace and war (four years of front-line action, high wartime honors earned on the Russian front of WWI, and nine months of captivity as POW), celebrity status and obscure life as a countryside school teacher, a broken heart (because of the close friends’ deaths) and cruelty towards the school children (bloody torn ears and even possible death because of the head blow), arrogance (“Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it,”-he told his colleagues about his book) and humility (ruthless chasing of his own scientific and moral deficiencies). He seemed not an easy person to be around, but his ideas are very stimulating.

He worked with many great people of his time. Studied with Bertrand Russell, discussed things with Alan Turing. John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife about 40-years old Wittgenstein in 1929: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.” An interesting and somewhat pleasing fact for me as a Russian: he carried with him The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy and knew almost by heart Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. A fun fact: he was in the same school as Hitler, but they probably never met.

He was definitely an authentic and very unusual character. Bertrand Russell considered him a genius. And true to these characteristics, he challenged the philosophy and the way we understand human thinking to its core, on par with Kant, although not all professional philosophers share such praise.

Whatever other people’s opinions, discovering Wittgenstein enriched my life and helped me to answer the questions I never hoped to be answered.

I never thought about language as the way we push images of reality into other people’s minds. Even without realizing it, this ability made fiction writing attractive to me. Remember, how as a kid you walked out the movie theater back to the boring reality? Why cannot we stay in that exciting fictional world forever? Well, in a way, skillful writers do it for us, shaping our perception of reality. Sometimes, it makes us better. Other times, not so much. I wanted to be a writer who changes lives for the better. It turns out everybody has their own idea of “better.” But that is the discussion for another time. Today, I mentioned it only because Wittgenstein extended this influencing ability to all language usage. Which makes sense, doesn’t it?

Another of his ideas that impressed me as very insightful was that a word meaning comes from the context — from the sentence and from the context of the sentence. I always struggled with traditional word definition that was just a collection of the word usage examples. Wittgenstein’s approach was liberating for me!

All my life I struggled to try to answer the question, why is it not possible to come up with just one word definition? In fact, the Socrates — another character that used to fascinate me a lot, before I read Wittgenstein — did exactly that: he asked people about the definition of some word and then poked a hole in it by finding an object or phenomenon that fitted the definition only technically but was not covered by the word meaning.

I was always sorry for Socrates not able to find an understanding and cooperation with other people. Wittgenstein toppled the Socrates’ activity from the pedestal for me. According to Wittgenstein, the word definition is the whole of its usage. This means that Socrates wasted his talent on trying to find one single definition of a word and irritated so many people for not a good reason. Instead, he could, as Wittgenstein did, accept that such definition was impossible and move on to doing something more useful.

It was also interesting for me how Wittgenstein defines the truthfulness of a statement. He says that there are only three possible outcomes: true statement, lie, or meaningless statement. For a statement to be true, it has to be possible in the world as we know it and verifiable as true. For a statement to be a lie, it has to be possible in the world as we know it and verifiable as false. For the statement to be meaningless, it has to be not possible in the world as we know it. I simplify but I don’t think I lose the essence.

For me, it means that each statement, in order to be truth or lie, can be tested in the real world. It is similar to the word meaning coming from its usage. This means we can act toward the language the same way we do toward events and actions–it can be tested. No more opinion or inaccessible thing in itself. What cannot be confirmed by the experiment is meaningless.

Testing of a statement in itself seems not a big deal. We do it in science every day. But Wittgenstein pushes it further, seemingly stating that mind is in a public domain too, kicking the hard problem of consciousness out of existence. But at this point, I am already out of my depth and have to read more to understand what does he say.

In any case, a language in Wittgenstein view models the real world. He does not account for a syntax though. This reminds me of the situation in software programming when at some point its movers claimed that it models the world. It was one of the main motivations for the development of object-oriented languages. Now, it seems obvious the claim was too bold and the object-oriented programming adopts new features migrating gradually towards functional programming, whose structure does not reflect in any way the structure of real-life objects.

I think the same relations exist between any human language and the world. Language does model it, but the model does not have the same structure. It describes and predicts the outcome, no matter the differences or similarities between the algorithms and the real-life processes. For example, fractals model the shape of a coastline or the mountain skyline very well, but the processes that create those rugged beauties (you just have to see the Canadian Rockies!) have nothing in common with the mathematical procedures.

I will continue reading (about) Wittgenstein and share with you worthy discoveries. Meanwhile, before we part, here are a few quotes from him:

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world.”

“I don’t know why we are here, but I’m pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.”

“Hell isn’t other people. Hell is yourself.”

“The real question of life after death isn’t whether or not it exists, but even if it does what problem this really solves.”

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”