My own understanding of the word Philosophy places it in opposition to the word Physics. The difference is between Life and Matter. This difference can be thought of as the difference between the experience of being life and the question: What is it that's doing the experiencing? In the former, call it the experience of life, the tool of investigation is language. In the latter, call it physics, the tools of investigation are math and the many branches of science.
Wittgenstein, who in his more solitary moments, and there were many of them, saw himself as owning the responsibility of genius. He had something to offer the world. To concentrate his mind he gave up the fortune he was due to inherit and followed a heart that wanted to belong to something untouchable and golden. Imagine the challenges a disappointment netted him when at the end of an investigation he was forced to admit that he'd basically killed philosophy by concluding: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." He was Austrian, his English very precise, his famous statement liberally translates into: There was a limit to language as an exploratory tool, you could describe something, which would be true in a picture made with words so long as it was true in the real world and as a result of this tautology language was a pretty, bloody useless tool for accurate investigation into anything much beyond maybe Geography.
Was there a but?
There's always a but with Wittgenstein. In the First World War he volunteered for front line service in the Austrian Army, he got medals for courage, was taken prisoner by the Italians and while a prisoner he worked on his early reckoning with language, an account which is referred to as The Tractatus - posh for The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, a title that translates into spell-check friendly English as The Logical and Philosophical Treatise.
Between the First World War and the Second World War, Wittgenstein finished his Tractatus, got himself into trouble for whipping one of his ten year old pupils while teaching primary school somewhere in the Austrian Alps, he spent time in Norway with a friend, he designed a huge house for his sister, worked as gardener, got himself a job as a lecturer at Cambridge University, where he focused on Ordinary Language, a subject that concentrates upon the everyday, man in the street confusions in language. In 1939 he became a Professor at Cambridge University. During the Second World War Wittgenstein preferred to get a job as a porter in a London Hospital, and later he went North to work as a research technician in Newcastle. He was 62 when he died on April 29th 1951, ten months before I entered the world.
Two years after his death, Wittgenstein's most influential book Philosophical Investigations was published. It revealed the details of his second theory of language, his Game Theory of Language which developed out of his early investigations into the Picture Theory of language.
Let's put it this way: Following rules is a public practice, rules are learned from others, they are not internal subjective interpretations. Language has shared rules. The second point in Wittgenstein's Game Theory of Language reflects an idea that meaning is contextual, the meaning of a word depends on the context in which the word is uttered. Here, uttered means spoken, not written. The meaning of a word is always uncertain, until, not the rules of the game, but the context of a game is established. Contexts or games aren't static, they are not rules. Wittgenstein's second theory of language opened the gates his early theory had closed. The world wasn't a List of Facts, far from it, however, the danger for philosophy is misunderstandings from wandering contexts and the uncertainty of meaning contained in words. He suggested you can reasonably and necessarily discuss something like ethics where there are no facts, so long as you grasp that words, the tools of your trade, are fluid, constantly defining and redefining themselves. In short the language game you're engaged in isn't science and it's not logic in the traditional monolithic sense of logic, rather language has it's own kind of diverse, heterogeneous logic that can be frightfully useful in cutting the red tape and broadening the horizon of Facts but very difficult to trust with a mission to Mars.
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