Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.
This is probably one of most
quoted adages of all time
and it was written by this man.
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A philosopher who, by many, is considered
the greatest of the 20th century.
His role in the development of analytic
philosophy wasn’t just central,
but also pivotal.
For he devoted his life
in the examination
of one of the most cognitively
demanding areas of human interest,
that of language.
Language constitutes the most
powerful tool we have invented
in order to communicate
with each other,
express ourselves, and
evolve our perception.
But the essence of words and the use
of language can be quite perplexing
and can lead to anomalies in the way
we operate within our social systems.
Language is like a living organism.
It changes, it evolves,
it has different forms,
and it can be interpreted
in different ways.
Wittgenstein was fascinated by that
and he truly believed that
with the use of logic,
language can become more
clear and more useful.
This was his obsession, but also what
tormented him throughout his life.
His ideas possessed a gravity
that felt unprecedented to
almost all of his readers.
Most didn’t understand him,
but the ones that did,
opened their minds to a world
full of clarity and reason.
Wittgenstein was born in
1889 in Vienna, Austria.
His family was one of
the richest in Europe
and he inherited a fortune
after his father died in 1913.
Money, however, wasn’t
of interest to him
and he gave away most of it
to relatives and artists.
Philosophy was according to him
“the only work that gave
him real satisfaction.”
He went to Cambridge in 1911 to study
logic with the great Bertrand Russel,
who, after getting to know
him, realized his genius.
His life was quite tumultuous,
since his involvement with
logic almost drove him mad.
His mental anguish led
him away from Cambridge.
He went to Norway for a while
and then he volunteered for
the Austro-Hungarian army
in the First World War.
War changed him.
He became more mystical
and more ascetic
and this could be
identified in his behavior.
In 1918, he took military leave and he
completed his first important work,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
The Tractatus was
published in 1922
in an attempt from Wittgenstein
to present a solution
to the problems of philosophy
that are connected with language,
thought, and representation.
It is a short, mind-boggling,
and mind-bending work.
Very few have managed
to understand it
and even Wittgenstein himself
had trouble making sense of
the purport of some of his
statements, later in his life.
The way he writes
is quite austere,
in that he uses small sentences
but with great intensity.
Some of them are almost
incomprehensible
for a reader not
accustomed with the topic:
“The sense of a proposition is
its agreement and disagreement
with the possibilities of the existence
and non-existence of the atomic facts.”
“Empirical reality is limited
by the totality of objects.
The boundary appears again in the
totality of elementary propositions.”
Others, however, ooze
meaning and awe:
“Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.”
“We feel that even if all possible
scientific questions be answered,
the problems of life have still
not been touched at all.”
“Ethics and aesthetics are one.”
The main point that he
wants to address is
what can really be
expressed through language
and to what extent philosophical
problems have a reason to exist.
World, thought, and
language are intertwined
and Wittgenstein manages to
create a philosophical system
that identifies how all
three are connected.
Through the use of
logical propositions,
he develops an advanced
technical framework
that investigates the limits of
world, thought and language;
in other words, distinguishes
between sense and nonsense.
In a nutshell, he puts
forth a heroic attempt
to explain that the way we
approach language is wrong
and that especially talking philosophy
is bound to be a senseless procedure.
Thoughts and utterances are true
when they map onto the world.
Saying, “this is a pineapple on a
table,” makes sense, it is a fact.
But saying “This is a very
pleasant pineapple” is senseless,
since this proposition is open
to multiple interpretations.
It is the use of the
word in our way of life
that gives meaning to our words and
not how we feel inside about it.
If a lion could speak we wouldn’t
be able to understand it
because we can’t know
what its world is like.
Wittgenstein’s point
is to show that
misunderstanding of how language
works leads to pseudo-problems
and that most problems of
philosophy are like that.
Are you saying there are
no philosophical problems?
There are linguistic
mathematical
ethical logistic
and religious problems,
but there are no genuine
philosophical problems.
You're trivializing philosophy?
Philosophy is just a byproduct
of misunderstanding language.
I have searched a lot for a meaningful
interpretation of Wittgenstein’s words.
In my regard, the
philosopher provokes us
in order to be more careful with
the accurate use of language,
since its senseless use
can lead to many interpersonal and
perceptual problems in our paradigms.
Moreover, his last paragraphs
illuminate a sense of nihilism
since he urges us to not take
seriously any of his words.
“My propositions are
elucidatory in this way:
he who understands me finally
recognizes them as senseless,
when he has climbed out through
them, on them, over them.
(He must so to speak throw away the
ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)
He must surmount these propositions;
then he sees the world rightly.
Whereof one cannot speak,
thereof one must be silent.”
A great exegesis to that aphorism
was one from the great Alan Watts
in which he suggests that the
whole task of philosophy
is to really get rid of itself.
The whole task of philosophy is
really to get rid of itself.
I mean in rather the same way
the task of a doctor is to
put himself out of business
because he never succeeds because
people keep getting sick,
but if he was 100% successful,
he would lose all his patients because
they wouldn't be ill anymore.
And so in the same
way a philosopher
of this kind is very
rarely out of business
because there are
still always people
with what we might call
intellectual sicknesses
bothered by fantastic and
non-existent problems.
Philosophical investigations
The years passed and
Wittgenstein changed.
He abandoned philosophy for a while
and he occupied himself
with other activities
like teaching at an elementary
school in rural Austria
and designing the famous
Wittgenstein house.
None of this made him happy.
He eventually returned
to his original calling
and started teaching philosophy
in Cambridge, in 1929.
Abandoning philosophy for a while
seemed to have had a huge
impact on Wittgenstein,
since most of his
former views changed.
A lot of people refer to the
period before the change as
“early Wittgenstein period”
and the one after as 
“later Wittgenstein period.”
What marks the transition of
the one period to the other
is the total rejection
of dogmatism.
Wittgenstein himself referred
to his early work as dogmatic
and worked hard so that he
could be better understood.
The culmination of this change
is reflected on his magnus opus,
titled “Philosophical Investigations.”
In it, he concerns himself with the
concepts of meaning, understanding,
propositions, logic, mathematics, states
of consciousness and other things.
Still, language occupies a very
central role in his adumbrations,
but he abandoned the idea
that language is used to
describe a picture of the world.
The relationship between language
and the world is quite untidy.
There are many different things
we can do with language,
many different language games as
Wittgenstein liked to call them.
The meaning of a word is relative
to the language game that we play.
The real task of the philosopher is
to sort out these language games
in a close analysis of the
language in which it were posed.
Philosophical puzzles
arise because we tend to
mix up one language
game with another.
For example people puzzle,
over the nature of something
they called the soul,
but this may just be because
they're thinking of the soul
along the lines of
a physical object.
They're confusing one way
of talking with another.
The job of philosophy is to
sort out these language games?
Exactly.
Well, they're all perfectly
in order as they are.
Philosophy in no sense
can question them.
Philosophy leaves everything
exactly as it is.
Every explanation is
after all a hypothesis.
Posing grandiose
philosophical questions
produce in us a mental cramp.
A philosopher cannot cure
the cramp completely
but his or her role can
definitely prove therapeutic.
In closing
Wittgenstein died in 1951
and Philosophical Investigations
was published posthumously.
Before dying, he uttered:
“Tell them I've had a wonderful life."
His main issue and the one
that agonized him the most
was the importance
of clarity in thought.
“Don't for heaven's sake, be
afraid of talking nonsense!
But you must pay attention to your
nonsense,” as he used to say.
There is a lot of mental
dirt in this world,
enough to disorient our
already disoriented mind
and he viewed clarity
as the only antidote.
Despite his genius, he was
doubtful of most of his ideas
and he states that explicitly
in all of his works.
He knew that what he wrote
was difficult to understand,
but what he actually wanted
was to stimulate someone
to thoughts of his own.
Wittgenstein’s work was
a plea for reason,
a plea for better communication,
a plea for more clarity.
Few could see that.
After all, most of us find it hard to
see what is right in front of our eyes.
Hi everyone,
I won’t lie to you.
Wittgenstein always constituted
an enigmatic personality for me.
When I first laid my hands on
the Tractatus, I was shocked.
I couldn’t understand
a single word
and I thought that he was probably
an overrated philosopher.
But then I delved deep into
content produced about him
and when I finally managed to peer into
his mind, his world mesmerized me.
I consider language and
its proper use
one of the most critical
issues of our time.
Wittgenstein was
obsessed with that,
and, even though his
ideas are hard to grasp,
when explained properly can
prove incredibly useful.
Today’s giveaway will be the legendary
“Philosophical Investigations.”
Since many of you don’t
have an Instagram account,
we will experiment with
different rules today.
If you want to take
part in the giveaway,
please like this video,
subscribe, get notifications
and comment below why
you want the book,
or suggest a topic
for a future video,
or to be honest any
insightful comment will do.
I will message the winner
and I will announce him or
her in my Instagram account,
in a week from now,
so if you are using Instagram
please follow me there
and mention your Instagram
user id in your comment below.
Good luck to all of you.
Take care.
See you soon.
