The Man Who Solved Philosophy (Twice)

A man who solves philosophy twice has a problem with the word solved. The second solution ought to disqualify the first. In philosophy it improves the reputation: you get credit for the final answer, then more credit for explaining why it was wrong. An excellent arrangement for everyone except the reader who believed you the first time.

Ludwig Wittgenstein earned both reputations. With the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he believed he had settled philosophy’s problems by showing what language could say. With the Philosophical Investigations, he dismantled the account of language that had made the settlement possible. Solving philosophy would be like solving politics or grief. Human beings keep producing situations that yesterday’s answer cannot digest. The nuisance is permanent. Even the most elegant system eventually meets a person.

Wittgenstein’s two attempts are valuable because he went back and broke his own certainty. First he looked for meaning in the logical structure of a proposition, a picture of how things could stand in the world. Later he looked at what people actually do with words. There he found something that our century has become exceptionally good at exploiting: the use of a word can be governed.

The Heir

He was born in Vienna in 1889 into one of the empire’s richest families. His father’s company held a steel monopoly; Brahms played at the family’s palace. Industrial power paid for exquisite music. It could not buy a tolerable life for the sons: three of Ludwig’s older brothers took their own lives.

Ludwig went into engineering, followed its problems into mathematics, and then followed mathematics into logic. In 1911 he appeared uninvited in Bertrand Russell’s rooms at Cambridge and proceeded to make the foundations of the subject Russell’s immediate personal problem. Russell eventually decided he was dealing with a genius. This was presumably some consolation for having to deal with him.

When war came, Wittgenstein volunteered. The family name could have spared him the worst; he requested the most dangerous post available. He had read William James on religious experience at the edge of death and took the proposition seriously enough to put himself there. He carried Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief until he knew it by heart. The man remembered as the high priest of logic went to war carrying a gospel. His later disciples might have saved themselves some embarrassment by noticing.

By the time the Italians captured him, the manuscript of the Tractatus was already complete. From the prison camp he wrote to Russell announcing, in effect, that the problems of philosophy had been worked out. Keynes, then a treasury official at the Versailles negotiations, helped get the manuscript to Russell. Europe was sorting out the wreckage of one catastrophe; a prisoner was posting notice that an older human difficulty had been disposed of.

While the book was making him famous, Wittgenstein taught in Austrian mountain villages. He is said to have compared the relief teaching gave him from philosophy to pressing a hot water bottle against a toothache: one pain drowning out another. Apparently solving philosophy did not include learning how to stop doing it.

He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and submitted the Tractatus as his doctoral thesis, with Moore and Russell as examiners. Academia thus certified the work he would spend the next sixteen years taking apart. During the Anschluss years, his family, classified as Jews under the Nuremberg laws, bought reclassification as Mischlinge with a vast payment in gold and assets. Historians still dispute the details. A regime claiming to discover race in blood found room for negotiation when the blood belonged to people who could pay.

During the Second World War, Wittgenstein left teaching again to work as a hospital dispensary porter in London. He delivered medicine to the wards and preferred shifts long enough to exhaust thought. In 1946 came the ten-minute Cambridge confrontation with Karl Popper, allegedly involving a fireplace poker, the only occasion on which Wittgenstein, Russell, and Popper shared a room. The details remain contested. Philosophers had at least discovered an object whose use required little explanation.

He retired in 1947 and died of cancer in 1951, at sixty-two. His last words were: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.”

The Philosophical Investigations appeared in 1953. Its first part contains six hundred and ninety-three numbered sections, drawn from sixteen years of work. In the preface he describes the book as “sketches of landscapes” made during long, crisscrossing journeys through thought. Attempts to force the remarks into a tidy sequence had killed what he wanted to say. He left the disorder alive.

The First Solution, and Its Theft

The Tractatus treats a proposition as a picture. Names stand for objects; the arrangement of those names represents a possible arrangement of things. Logical analysis should distinguish statements that picture possible facts from tautologies and from attempts to say what cannot be said. Whatever can be said can be said clearly. Where speech reaches its limit, silence follows.

The Vienna Circle saw an opportunity for a thorough clear-out. In the tradition of Hume’s fork, its program admitted logical and mathematical propositions, and assertions that could be tested by experience. Theology and metaphysics failed the entrance examination; ethical and aesthetic pronouncements could not pass as statements of fact. Hume had supplied the invitation to commit offending volumes to the flames. The Circle’s manifesto quoted Protagoras, man is the measure of all things, and assigned philosophy the job of clarifying scientific concepts. The ancient occupation of seeking wisdom had acquired a cleaning contract.

Wittgenstein’s silence had a different purpose. Ethics, God, the meaning of a life: these were the things his mysticism led him to regard as too important for the kind of statement the Tractatus allowed. The Circle treated the boundary as grounds for dismissal. He had marked the limit of speech; they installed a waste chute there.

They took his razor and shaved off the reason he had picked it up.

The Second Solution

The Investigations opens with Augustine’s account of learning language. Adults name objects and turn toward them; the child learns which sound belongs to which thing. Words name, sentences combine names, and meaning is what the name stands for. Wittgenstein examines this picture of language by asking where it works, then looking at all the places it does not.

Consider his builder and assistant. Their language has four words: block, pillar, slab, beam. The builder calls one out and the assistant brings the corresponding stone. “Slab!” does the work of bring me a slab. A surgeon saying “scalpel” does much the same. Naming the object is part of an activity; the assistant needs to know what to do when he hears it.

The shopkeeper handed an order for five red apples opens the appropriate drawer, checks the colour, and counts out five. Nobody needs to excavate the essence of five before the customer can leave with the fruit. Wittgenstein’s toolbox makes the same trouble for a single theory of meaning. A hammer, pliers, a saw, and a glue pot have different jobs. Announcing that they all “modify something” achieves the level of abstraction at which a lecturer can sound correct while helping nobody fix a chair.

Then he asks what games have in common. “Don’t think, but look!” Board games resemble card games in some respects; card games resemble other games in others. Solitaire dispenses with an opponent. A child throwing a ball against a wall need not be trying to win. What you find is “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing”. He calls it family resemblance. The concept works without an essence shared by every member.

It can also work with blurred edges. “Stay roughly here” is a usable instruction. Insisting on a surveyed boundary would improve the precision while destroying the purpose. The person asked to wait needs somewhere to stand, not a cadastral dispute.

This is the setting for the sentence: “the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” Wittgenstein applies it to a large class of cases, not every case.

For the political words this blog keeps examining, the observation cuts deep. An origin or a dictionary entry cannot by itself settle what people are doing with democracy or safety. You have to watch the use. The respectable label may be attached to something its earlier users would have fought.

Rules Do Not Interpret Themselves

A signpost seems to tell you where to go. Yet the sign alone cannot settle every possible question about how to follow it: along the road or across the field, toward the pointing finger or away from it. Add an interpretation and someone can ask how to interpret that. Another explanation buys you another question.

Imagine a supreme court interpreting the constitution, then a super-supreme court interpreting the supreme court, then another court to settle what the second court meant. Infinity would provide excellent career prospects for clerks. It would still fail to explain how anyone follows a rule. The court sequence is our example; the regress is Wittgenstein’s problem.

His answer takes us out of the stack of interpretations and into practice. There is a way of grasping a rule that consists in following it, rather than supplying another explanation. Teaching and training bring a person into a custom. “To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to have mastered a technique.”

A language-game belongs to a form of life. Speaking happens among other activities: ordering, reporting, thanking, cursing, praying. Words do their work within those practices. You do not learn a greeting by extracting a proposition from it. You learn when to say it, to whom, and what response to expect.

The Weapon

Take this account into politics and the managers look considerably less mysterious. They are trying to govern the practices through which their words acquire meaning. They need no interest in Wittgenstein to know how to do it.

When democracy comes to mean the protection of policy from voters, its etymology will not send the administrators home. The struggle takes place where the word is used and where people learn what it authorizes. A manager who says democracy while insulating a decision from an election is teaching a use of the word. Let that use become normal and the dictionary becomes a souvenir of the defeat.

The same contest runs through safety, sustainability, extremism, and misinformation. Official users establish criteria, apply the labels, and teach others to recognize the approved cases. Every repetition makes the terminology more familiar. Eventually the administrator can invoke the word as if the decision were already contained in it. You asked who gets to decide; he explains that he is protecting safety. Congratulations on your answer.

The paperwork of the Managed Estate and the agreeable apparatchik govern use this way. The assistant that agrees with the current window offers a training environment for two billion players. You learn which question gets an answer, which gets a correction, and which gets a small lecture on your defective attitude. After enough repetitions, some questions stop occurring to you. A habit has formed. Nobody had to defeat you in an argument.

This is the political consequence I draw from Wittgenstein’s account of learned practice. He described how rules come to be followed. Institutions can arrange the lessons.

His discussion of truth is easy to conscript into an even cruder doctrine: “It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life.”

A vote cannot turn five apples into six. Section 241 distinguishes shared language from agreement in opinions; section 242 brings in shared judgments and the practices that make communication possible. People must know what counting is before they can disagree about the count. Wittgenstein has not given the majority permission to manufacture a fact.

The political seizure happens in the conditions under which judgments are made and accepted. Institutions govern what a term refers to, what counts as evidence, and which judgments receive official recognition. Once democracy refers to the protection of policy from voters, a statement praising that protection as democratic can follow the new usage perfectly. The speaker need not lie about the arrangement. The word has been made to serve it.

Whoever controls that arena can obtain agreement before the argument begins. The citizen arrives to debate a question and discovers that the language permitted for asking it already grants the official’s premise. There is plenty of room for discussion. The conclusion has been furnished in advance.

That is why the work of the Court matters. Restoring a stolen word requires people to use it again for what the official usage has displaced. An etymology helps expose the theft. Living use makes reclamation possible.

Back to the Rough Ground

Wittgenstein offered philosophy an unusually unprofitable assignment: describe. Stop building a theory to explain everything; look at how the words are working. Bring them back from their metaphysical excursions to everyday use. The result “leaves everything as it is.”

He compared the craving for purity and exactness to trying to walk on ice. Without friction, you cannot move. Back to the rough ground, where language works amid the inconveniences of living.

Section 489 supplies practical questions: on what occasion and for what purpose do we say something? What actions accompany the words? In which scenes do we use them, and what for? Applied to power, those questions lead to others: who is speaking, who gets to answer, and what are you expected to do next?

Ask them when the official says safety. Look at the action that follows. Ask them when he says democracy, particularly if he has just explained why the public cannot be allowed to interfere. Compare the official usage with the thing you live through. Where they diverge, keep the lived meaning in circulation. Say what happened in words that still describe it.

An administrator can survive being called a tyrant. He can put the accusation in a report, classify the accuser, and commission a study of public trust. What complicates his work is a population that keeps asking what his words permit him to do.

Make him explain why freedom requires your obedience. Keep asking while he looks for a more cooperative subject.

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Claims Audit

Per this blog’s publishing doctrine. Confidence: High = primary text or multiply-attested record; Medium = biographical account with contested details. The political application is the author’s argument, not a doctrine attributed to Wittgenstein. English quotation wording varies across editions.

Claim	Source	Date	Anchor	Confidence
”Don’t think, but look!”; family resemblance, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and crisscrossing”	Philosophical Investigations sec. 66-67	1953	Verbatim text	High
”the meaning of a word is its use in the language”	PI sec. 43	1953	Verbatim (scoped: “for a large class of cases”)	High
Builder’s language sec. 2; “Slab!” example	PI sec. 2, 8-19	1953	Text	High
Signpost; rule-following paradox and resolution; “mastered a technique”	PI sec. 85, 198-202	1953	Text; the sequence of constitutional courts is the essay’s analogy	High
Truth: “not agreement in opinions but in form of life”	PI sec. 241-242	1953	Verbatim; shared language and judgments do not make particular truths a majority vote	High
”All explanation must disappear, and description alone must take its place”; “leaves everything as it is”	PI sec. 109, 124	1953	Verbatim	High
Tool-box metaphor; “stay roughly here” blurred edges	PI sec. 11, 71, 76	1953	Text	High
PI: Part I has 693 sections; sixteen years of work; published 1953 posthumously; preface “sketches of landscapes”	PI preface; standard editions	1945/1953	Edition record	High
Life: b. 1889 Vienna, steel fortune, three brothers’ suicides; Russell “genius” verdict 1911-12	Monk, The Duty of Genius; standard biographies	1990	Multiply attested	High
WWI: requested dangerous post (after reading William James); Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief memorized; Tractatus completed before captivity; Keynes assisted manuscript transfer	Monk; Keynes correspondence; Gilpatric’s report, reproduced by Stephen Leach, p. 224	1914-1919	Biographical record; report specifies completion in August 1918 on leave in Vienna	High
Family reclassified as Mischlinge after vast payment, by most accounts ~1.7 tonnes of gold; details debated	Waugh, The House of Wittgenstein; historian debate	1938-1939	Biographical account	Medium
Poker incident with Popper, Cambridge Moral Science Club, 1946; details contested	Edmonds & Eidinow, Wittgenstein’s Poker	1946/2001	Book-length study	Medium
Last words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life”	Drury’s account via Monk	1951	Eyewitness account	High
Hot water bottle / toothache comparison (teaching vs. philosophy)	Reported remark via biographies	1920s	Reported, not verbatim-attested	Medium
Two billion players in the assistant’s training environment	Reach figure retained from the draft; no source supplied	Undated	Requires a source before publication	Unverified

Declined claims: that Wittgenstein literally “solved” philosophy; that the Vienna Circle represented his position; that his account of truth makes facts a matter of majority opinion. The Heidegger and Nietzsche parallels sketched in the source video remain omitted.