Is Wittgenstein always right? (French and Philosophy, Oxford)

If you say so, and I say so, then we both agree, and no more needs be said. Wittgenstein’s argument was that there is no such thing as truth in an ultimate, reducible sense, and that Western philosophers have got waylaid searching for it, hunting it down like scientists at CERN chasing down the ‘God particle’, the Higgs Boson, with their atom smasher. It’s all about language games and shared meanings – well, not all, but partly, as I’ll make clearer.

I must admit I was quite surprised when I first learned a little more about Wittgenstein’s ideas. His ideas seemed so lost in obscurity and high-flown thought that I was surprised to find he even lived in the 20th century. I’d somehow got a picture of him wandering around medieval Germany in a cowl muttering dark and impenetrable remarks that made fools of everyone around, a kind of alchemist of the intellectual. I guess I was going a little Shakespeare then, conflating Hamlet and Wittenberg and Guildenstern.

Yet although I’d got my dates fabulously wrong (he lived from 1889 to 1951), the image wasn’t entirely off the beam. There was something rather Garbo-esque in the glamour Wittgenstein gave to philosophy, and in the apparent moodiness with which he withdrew from the academic life after writing his first book – as if you half-expect him to mutter ‘I vont to be alone!’. When Wittgenstein was in the room, apparently, even the most brilliant speakers somehow felt their words were rather superfluous, and maybe they secretly wished he would keep himself to himself a little more.

Wittgenstein’s point about truth emerged in his first book, translated into English in 1922 as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book published in his life. It’s quite a short book and notoriously opaque. But it seems to have managed a quite thorough demolition job on the whole of Western philosophy, which is perhaps why Wittgenstein gave academic philosophy up after writing the book and turned to teaching in schools, presumably feeling there was no more to be said.

Philosophers, Wittgenstein said, had made the mistake of being like scientists chasing the meaning behind things – truth, mind, time, justice, reality – when none of this really matters, or is even achievable. A philosopher might waste his time wondering how he knew the child with the cut knee screaming her head off was really in pain, while the mother would rush in with comfort and bandages. The philosopher was clearly the one with lessons to learn.

The mistake, Wittgenstein argued, is in thinking philosophy can answer these questions. It comes partly from a flawed view of language that insists that if a word has meaning, there must be a thing attached to that meaning. The philosopher asks, ‘What is reality?’, ‘What is justice?’ or ‘What is the mind?’ and then goes looking with logic for the identity of that thing – and of course can’t find it, because they are just words. That’s why the search has gone on fruitlessly for centuries. But if you remember that language is variable, and words simply mean what people understand them to mean in a particular setting, the problem vanishes. That’s why if you say Wittgenstein is ‘right’ and I understand what is meant by ‘right’ in this context, no more needs be said.

Indeed, Wittgenstein challenged the idea of logic as an ultimate arbiter of truth. 2 + 2 = 4 is not an ultimate truth, he asserted, but just something that makes sense arithmetically. If you were to say 2 + 2 = 97 it would not be false – just nonsense. The philosopher’s task is to reveal such nonsenses.

Deciding whether a proposition is logically true or false is entirely missing the point, Wittgenstein went on to say, since language has many other meaningful uses. This may seem a trivial observation, he admitted, but that’s the point. Philosophy ‘does not teach us new facts, only science does that,’ he wrote. ‘But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities.’

In later, unpublished works, Wittgenstein talked about ‘language games’. People play with language and use it differently in different contexts. They learn an assemblage of changing meanings by association. What matters is the way a word is used, not its meaning. A bad ball means two very different things to a cricketer and a society butterfly. Neither leads to an ultimate truth; they are simply different usages.

Wittgenstein talked about the famous duck–rabbit illusion, first published in the German magazine Fliegende Blätter in 1892. This looks like a drawing of a rabbit – until you suddenly see that it is also a duck – and vice versa. Neither is right or wrong; they are simply different ways of seeing.

In some ways, Wittgenstein was suggesting that poetry and music and art have more to teach us about the meaning of life than science and philosophy, and that their contribution was underrated. Indeed, for him, philosophy was a poetic pursuit rather than a scientific one. So just as there can be no poem that is ‘right’, nor can there be any philosophy which is right – but that’s not to say that either cannot have great power and meaning.

Wittgenstein’s reputation has fluctuated since his death in 1951. At first, there was quite a widespread rejection of his ideas – understandably, perhaps, since his ideas seemed to jettison the ideas of some of the greatest thinkers of the Western world, while at the same time expressing himself so obscurely that many couldn’t understand them entirely, or couldn’t be bothered to wade through them. More recently, though, there has been renewed interest in his ideas.

‘To be or not to be; that is the question,’ posed Hamlet. Perhaps Wittgenstein would have said it depends on the way people understand it. Interestingly, Tom Stoppard wrote an ingenious comedy entitled Dogg’s Hamlet, Cahoot’s Macbeth based on the ideas of Wittgenstein, in which a group of children are rehearsing Hamlet but understand it so little that it may as well be a foreign language. In fact, the children speak in a language called Dogg, which is made up of English words but with entirely different meanings assigned to them than the usual ones. In the play, in a scene based on Wittgenstein’s posthumously published Philosophical Investigations, a builder calls his assistant for such items as ‘slab’, ‘pillar’ and ‘beam’ and the assistant delivers them as if he knows what items these words mean – but he may simply know already what to deliver, and simply understands these words as cues. The words could just as well be ‘one’ ‘two’ and ‘three’. So if you ask ‘Is Wittgenstein always right?’ I might answer, ‘No, he is sometimes all that is left.’