James Klagge on Wittgenstein
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This is Philosophy Bites with me, David Edmonds. And me, Nigel Warburton. If you enjoy Philosophy Bites, please support us. We're unfunded and all donations will be gratefully received. For more details, go to www.philosophybites.com. Ludwig Wittgenstein is a philosopher whose ideas and way of expressing them are genuinely illuminated by a fuller understanding of his life and the historical context in which he was writing.

James Clarke has devoted many years to explaining the relationship between Wittgenstein the man, his times and his philosophy.

This episode is part of our mini-series, BioBytes, which focuses on the lives of philosophers. Jim Klager, welcome to Philosophy Bites. Thank you. I'm always happy to have a chance to talk about Wittgenstein. We're talking today about, as you say, Wittgenstein and the only book, I should say the only philosophy book, that he published in his lifetime, which is the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But perhaps you can begin by telling us a little bit about Wittgenstein's background.

Well, he grew up in one of the richest families in Vienna. His father was a manufacturing businessman, comparable to the Krupps in Germany or the Carnegies in the United States. Although on the other hand, the family was very cultural. They knew Brahms, Mahler. Klimt painted a wedding portrait for one of Ludwig's sisters. So they're a funny combination of things. He went on to study engineering.

and then aeronautical engineering, where he patented a kind of propeller. His interest in engineering and then math led him to an interest in logic, and that's sort of what brought him into philosophy.

So he goes from the University of Manchester to Cambridge, and that's where he meets Bertrand Russell. In fact, he had first probably talked to Gottlob Frege, a German logician who maybe steered him to Cambridge and Russell. But both Russell and Frege were very important in his background. You mentioned that he's from a very wealthy background. His father was famously domineering.

Yeah, he had two older brothers who I think the father wanted to go into business following him. Both of them committed suicide, perhaps because of the emotional pressure. So Wittgenstein Ludwig was the youngest in the family and maybe his father had lightened up a little bit by then, but allowed him to study engineering instead of going into the family business.

Can you say something about his character? Was he warm, cold? Was he likable, unpleasant? Tell us about Wittgenstein the man. What sort of character was he? Since we're talking about the Tractatus, which he wrote during World War I, I was going to quote two people who knew him right during the war and

that he met in the prisoner of war camp after the war. One of them, Franz Peric said, "The really striking thing about him was his manner of speaking. It conveyed an extraordinary definiteness. There was a characteristic movement of the head. Usually it was bowed, but from time to time he would throw it back and direct his gaze into the distance."

And then his other friend Ludwig Hensel said, "I have made the acquaintance of a young logician whose intellectual significance surpasses that of any man I have met until now, serious of noble naturalness, nervous with a childlike capacity to take pleasure in things." So he definitely struck people with his character. It's sometimes suggested that he was maybe on the spectrum, maybe it was something like Asperger's syndrome.

So yeah, he was extremely serious, maybe hard to get along with, cold maybe. And before we get to the story of the Tractatus itself, and this may be an unreasonable request, but can you give us a quick summary of the book? What was the project? What was he trying to achieve?

The project, I think, grew out of his background in engineering. In engineering, they make scale models of things in reality to test them out. And I think that idea really struck Wittgenstein. You might say that the main project that he had, at least to start with in the Trachtat, is to figure out how language could be about the world. For that, he used models as a way of thinking about this, that models represent parts of reality, just like sentences.

represent parts of reality or pictures represent parts of reality. And so he sometimes said to have a picture theory of meaning. And so he sort of focuses on those aspects of language that describe the world.

But then that leaves a lot of other bits of language unaccounted for. And so the first project then leads to other side projects. What is logic like? What are we going to say about ethics? Things like that. By picture theory of meaning, you mean that

a sentence somehow is an image, a picture, a representation of reality? Well, he thinks that a representation has to share a form with whatever it is that it represents or a structure. And so he thinks that language is structured

in a way comparable to how reality is structured and so he's interested in analyzing reality down to its minimal bits and language down to its minimal bits and showing how there's a connection at that most basic level and then how language and reality can be built up from that most basic level

The book wasn't written in a vacuum. What individuals influenced Wittgenstein and the book? We've already mentioned Bertrand Russell. I guess I'm principally thinking about Russell here.

Well, as I said, his engineering background was really important. And so Boltzmann and Hertz were both German physicists whose ideas about models, for example, influenced Wittgenstein. But when he came to the philosophy part, it was certainly Bertram Russell, I guess, that was the most influential. Russell, along with Alfred North Whitehead, had published Principia Mathematica, which was a three-volume

account of the nature of logic. And Russell had finished that when Wittgenstein came to Cambridge in 1911 to work with Russell. Russell had finished Principia Mathematica, and he was now trying to figure out how this might apply to various philosophical issues. And that really is the context in which Wittgenstein started on his project, kind of picking up the issues that Russell was interested in.

coming up with an account of the nature of logic also, which led to some differences between him and Russell. And what's Wittgenstein's conception of logic?

Well, the kind of language he was focusing on is about the world. Logic, on the other hand, doesn't fit that model. For him, logic tells us something about the structure of the world, but it doesn't describe the world. It, you might say, shows the structure of the world. And so while the sort of language that Fickenschein focuses on mostly says things about the world or describes the world, logic does something different. It shows the structure of the world, he thought.

The style of the book is very unique, isn't it? In the numbered system it deploys. Tell us a bit about that. Well, to understand why it has the structure and style it does, you have to realize that he was writing it during the First World War, while he was in the trenches, so to speak. And he was working from notebooks that he kept with him.

And over time, he would try and distill some of the ideas from the notebooks down into a sort of organized form. To do that, he couldn't really cut and paste the way you might ordinarily in your office, especially with the computer. But even literally, he couldn't cut and paste. All he had with him was some notebooks and pens. The numbering system comes from Principia Mathematica. Bertrand Russell tells a story that the reason they numbered the

proofs the way they did in Principia Mathematica was because it would allow them to insert other proofs in between without having to renumber the whole thing. In fact, Russell said that as he was constructing Principia Mathematica, he kept a file of proofs. And if he came up with a new one, he would put it literally between other ones. So the numbering system allowed an organization that

would allow you to insert things as you go along. And that's really what Wittgenstein was doing in constructing the Tractatus. He was coming up with a bunch of propositions and trying to figure out how to organize them and reorganize them. And I think that accounts for the numbering system.

On the other hand, there's also the question of style. This is written in very short sentences. Wittgenstein was impressed by writers who had an aphoristic style. People like Goethe, Schopenhauer, Lichtenberg.

Krauss, all of these were authors that Wittgenstein was interested in, who at least sometimes wrote in aphoristic form. And that approach really interested Wittgenstein. He said one time to a friend in the prisoner of war camp, "The language is everything."

And I think the suggestion is that he cared as much about the form that his ideas were presented in as he did about the content of those ideas. Is that because he had a poetic or novelist sensibility? I don't know if I want to go that far and say he had a novelist or poetic sensibility, but he did have a desire to write well.

So he was not writing this at his desk in his study at home. He wasn't writing this in a library. He was writing this during World War I and he was fighting on the Austro-Hungarian side. Set the scene.

Yes. Well, he volunteered to fight in the war. He could have gotten out of it because he had a medical deferment with a hernia. He could have gotten out of it or gotten a better assignment because of his family's wealth. But in fact, he volunteered. He said that it was a kind of trial by fire of his soul. He was assigned to work in the artillery.

In that sense, he wasn't really on the front lines all the time, but he always wanted to be on the front lines. And he, in fact, volunteered a couple of times to switch the infantry, but they wouldn't let him because he was so useful with the artillery. But eventually he was assigned to be an artillery spotter. This came in the spring of 1916 and put him right in the way of the Russian Brusilov offensive.

This happened in June and July of 1916 and really had quite an effect on Wittgenstein. Whereas he had been thinking about logic and the nature of language and things like that, he now began thinking about God and death and the meaning of life and the will and good and evil. All these things we know because of his keeping a private notebook in addition to his philosophical notebook.

He wrote it in reverse alphabet code. So we know a lot about what he was doing and thinking while he was fighting. So he's beginning to think about life, death, God, ethics because of what he's going through. Does that shape the text in any way?

Very much so, it shapes, I would say, the last two dozen propositions in the Tractatus. Yes. In a way, if he hadn't fought in World War I, the Tractatus would have been pretty similar to what it is up to about the last two dozen propositions. But his experience in World War I was so profound that he felt like his philosophy needed to encompass all of his experiences.

not just the thoughts that he had had from his engineering background and working with Russell and so forth, but now he has all these other experiences and he feels that his book needs to encompass all of them. He had previously used the distinction between saying and showing to help explain how logic operates, because logic doesn't say anything, rather it shows certain kinds of structures. And this notion of showing then Wittgenstein used

to come up with a way to understand his experiences about God and aesthetics and ethics and death and so forth. He now felt like the language that we use to talk about these things aren't saying things that might be true or false, but rather they're showing something about our feelings, about our attitude. That's interesting because there were some people who interpreted the Tractatus to be saying that discussion of ethics

ethics is meaningless and so unimportant, but that's not what Wittgenstein meant. Right. He thought that ethics and God and religion were among the most important things, and he thought that they were demeaned by talking about them. In fact, I think the background in Vienna at that time struck Wittgenstein as a bunch of people babbling or, as we might say now, paying lip service to

ethical issues or religion or something like that without any seriousness behind it. He was extremely serious about these kinds of things and thought that the best way to respect them was to be silent about them. And so his philosophy sort of makes that silence appropriate. Can you just contrast that approach with the logical positivists of Vienna who come after Wittgenstein and after the Tractatus?

So Wittgenstein had trouble getting the Tractatus published for obvious reasons, if you're familiar with it. And he finally gave up in disgust and trained to become an elementary school teacher and began to teach elementary school in rural Austria. And he left it to Bertrand Russell, who then left it to his assistant, Dorothy Rinsch, to get the thing published. And it did get published finally in the spring of 1922.

and then published in English translation also in the fall of 1922, it came to the attention of members of the Vienna Circle. And they studied it pretty carefully pretty soon. And they wanted to try and get in touch with Wittgenstein and have him talk to them about it.

And he played kind of hard to get, and they really didn't get an opportunity to meet with him until about 1927. But the Vienna Circle was a scientifically oriented group of philosophers. They were interested in, you might say, the hard facts. And so the first 80% of the Tractatus was right up their alley. They liked what they were hearing and they wanted to hear more. When they got to the end of the Tractatus, I think they just sort of

shut down or averted their gaze or something like that. Anyway, as you say, they took things other than scientific things to be problematic. They had a view of ethics and religion and so forth as not measuring up to the standards of good science or good mathematics. And so they had a dismissive attitude about these issues.

whereas Wittgenstein valued them greatly. So on the few occasions when they did meet, I think Wittgenstein felt like he wasn't connecting with them at all. And so there's a story that they could hardly ever get him to talk about the Tractatus. And on occasion, he would even come and read poetry to them

Rabindranath Tagore, the Indian poet, was one of the things he chose to read. And he would, in fact, turn his back to them while he was reading this. And so, yes, I think this sort of difference between the two was difficult for both sides. That's how the Vienna Circle interpreted it. It's obviously the Tractatus, a quite gnomic text. It's notoriously tricky to understand.

How did it go down elsewhere? How was it received in the UK and in America, for example? The first published review of the Tractatus was done by H. Wilden Carr, who wrote a review for the Times Literary Supplement in December of 1922. And Carr had an extremely positive review. Carr, in fact, had...

arranged a series of lectures in 1918 that Bertrand Russell gave, later published as The Philosophy of Logical Atomism. And I think reading those lectures by Russell, eight lectures on The Philosophy of Logical Atomism, is a great preparation for studying the Tractatus. There are, as far as I know, 17 published reviews of the Tractatus, and some of them are quite positive, a few are quite negative, and a number of them are puzzled. And Bertrand Russell himself, he writes...

an introduction to the Tractatus and obviously regards it as a work of genius but does he fully understand it?

No, and Wittgenstein in fact felt like he didn't really want Russell's introduction to be included at all. Russell came up with the idea as a way of helping Wittgenstein to get the thing published because Russell was known and Wittgenstein wasn't known. I think there's a lot of value in Russell's introduction, but there are ways in which he doesn't appreciate Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was kind of picky about who understood him or not. He thought for the most part nobody did.

A century on, what's its reputation now? That's a good question. I have to answer the larger question, how is Wittgenstein regarded now? Because he had not only published the Tractatus in 1922, but also after his death in 1951, his later thoughts were collected as the Philosophical Investigations published in 1953. And

I think analytic philosophers especially consider Wittgenstein's work to be among the most important work of the 20th century. But there's a different question. How influential is Wittgenstein's work now among analytic philosophers? And it doesn't have that same central role. The Trach taught us maybe more so than the philosophical investigations because of its technical aspects.

You've spent a few years now undertaking a very close contextual analysis of the Tractatus and mapping the philosophy alongside Wittgenstein's life. What's the most surprising thing you've learnt?

Okay, so I've mentioned that the last two dozen propositions of the Tractatus really came to life because of his experiences in the war. So let me say a little bit about three of those propositions. One of them is 6.373, where he says, "The world is independent of my will." And if you hear that line, you think, "What? Can't you decide to scratch your nose?" And then you scratch your nose. Where is that coming from? And it's coming from his experience in the war.

where he is feeling completely unable to control what happens to him. Live or die, it has nothing to do with what he might do. It just happens to be whether a bomb lands near him or not. And he has similar thoughts

that although he can't control what happens to him, he can control how he thinks about his situation. And so proposition 6.43, he says, "If the good or bad exercise the will does alter the world, it can alter it only the limits of the world and not the facts.

The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy man. And so he thinks about how it is that he can be happy even in the circumstances that he's in, that he can't control in other respects. He can control his attitudes even if he can't control what happens to him.

And then he also thinks about death and whether there is life after death. And we ordinarily think about that in terms of living on forever. But he says at 6.4311, if we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration, but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

And Wittgenstein actually got that from Tolstoy and a little book by Tolstoy called The Gospels in Brief, which Wittgenstein found during the war, carried with him and read very carefully. And again, we know this because of the private notebook. So I think there are very direct connections between the experiences that he's having in battle and how he tries to deal with that and what comes out in the Tractatus.

Jim Clagher, thank you very much indeed. And thank you. For more Philosophy Bites, go to www.philosophybites.com. You can also find details there of Philosophy Bites books and how to support us.