
The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein (2017) - neonate
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/ludwig-wittgenstein-honesty-ground/
======
sramsay
I've been a big fan of Wittgenstein since college, and have at this point read
just about all of his work. I might suggest that people new to Wittgenstein
start neither with the _Tractatus_ nor with _Philosophical Investigations_ ,
but with the _Blue and Brown Books_ (you want the Blue part).

These are lecture notes toward what would later become the _PI_. They're way
less systematic than the big two, but they'll give you a great feel for
Wittgenstein's thought.

I'll also second Monk's biography, which is just superb.

One of my favorite things about Wittgenstein, is that there's a powerful
strain in his thought that regards philosophical speculation as essentially a
form of "madness." That is to say, if you're sitting around wondering what
"justice" is or trying to figure out the mind/body distinction, you're
engaging in a kind of nonsensical behavior. It is the purpose of philosophy to
resolve these problems -- which, in Wittgenstein's case, often meant showing
why they're nonsensical questions in the first place -- _so you can go back to
living your life._ In Monk's biography, you often see him revolutionizing
modern philosophy and then afterward going to work as a gardener.

I think this explains, in part, why he is more admired than influential in
modern analytical philosophy. He is one of the many twentieth-century
philosophers to suggest that the proper outcome for philosophy is to stop
doing it.

[edits for typos]

~~~
mrleiter
Yes, absolutely! He even explicitly stated that in a letter to Norman Malcolm,
dated November 1944 [0]:

"What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to
enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of
logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important
questions of everyday life"

[0][https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=f...](https://books.google.de/books?hl=en&lr=&id=JfnyUT7Oo_wC&oi=fnd&pg=PP9&dq=wittgenstein+letters+to+malcolm&ots=g-RabyHrG9&sig=1uGiP9_mkFpO6JE92UnBIyLeIkE#v=onepage&q=use%20of%20philosophy&f=false)

~~~
mbrock
I enjoy Richard Rorty's writings along similar lines, like in his essay
"Trotsky and the Wild Orchids":

"I decided to major in philosophy. I figured that if I became a philosopher I
might get to the top of Plato's 'divided line' \- the place 'beyond
hypotheses' where the full sunshine of Truth irradiates the purified soul of
the wise and good: an Elysian field dotted with immaterial orchids. It seemed
obvious to me that getting to such a place was what everybody with any brains
really wanted."

"The more philosophers I read, the clearer it seemed that each of them could
carry their views back to first principles which were incompatible with the
first principles of their opponents, and that none of them ever got to that
fabled place 'beyond hypotheses'."

"When I am asked (as, alas, I often am) what I take contemporary philosophy's
'mission' or 'task' to be, I get tonguetied. The best I can do is to stammer
that we philosophy professors are people who have a certain familiarity with a
certain intellectual tradition, as chemists have a certain familiarity with
what happens when you mix various substances together."

"Despite my relatively early disillusionment with Platonism, I am very glad
that I spent all those years reading philosophy books. For I learned something
that still seems very important: to distrust the intellectual snobbery which
originally led me to read them. If I had not read all those books, I might
never have been able to stop looking for what Derrida calls 'a full presence
beyond the reach of play', for a luminous, self-justifying, self-sufficient
synoptic vision."

~~~
vertline3
I guess in math they found it just gets more complex, as you go deeper?
eventually you need new tools, upon new tools? Is this like philosophy? you
just find you need more tools? I'm no expert. And that's why I'm putting
question marks around.

~~~
contravariant
Often in maths you build higher and higher abstractions until you've finally
succeeded in an abstraction high enough to encode the very axioms you started
with, at which point you're back where you started, if a little wiser for the
journey.

At this point I'm fairly sure going deeper (or higher) in mathematics is a
dead end, you should instead try to go sideways, to the 'ground level'
questions that aren't answered yet, or to the questions that aren't yet
mathematical.

~~~
vertline3
Great insight. and thanks for taking the time to clear things

I was likely butchering the Godel incompleteness theorem.

------
mrleiter
Wonderful article for a short introduction into his work. He was a fascinating
personality and his writings are extraordinary. He „only“ published two books
in his lifetime, one being tractatus logico-philosophicus, the other being a
dictionary for school children. Philosophical Investigations was published
post-humously, but it is an excellent view into his mind.

As mentioned in the article, there are no subsections, no table of contents.
It consists of almost 700 paragraphs. You have to read it from beginning to
end. Why I find that great in its own way? Maybe the analogy with the movie
>Being John Malkovitch< may help: you are like a visitor in his head. Our
thoughts are not tidy and ordered into sections. When you think about a
problem (like he does with language and what it is and what it can do and what
not), your mind wanders; you come across different issues, tackle them, then
come back. It‘s like a written thought process.

I can really recommend this book. Its language is easy. As soon as you get
used to its style, you can follow.

~~~
halfjew22
I completely agree with your sentiment on our thoughts. They aren't neat and
tidy. People like to pretend they are, but this simply isn't true.

It's also interesting to think about exactly where these thoughts come from.
Where did the thought come from for example that invoked you opening up hacker
news at the time you wrote this?

Where does great intuition come from? It's all fascinating whether you
prescribe to a theory that likens consciousness to that of thinking rocks or
if you're incredibly spiritual and think of consciousness more as a radio
signal that were tuned into at some arbitrary frequency when we're alive in
Earth.

If you're interested in being a visitor in ones mind, could I humbly request
you check out my comment?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18814685)

~~~
mbrock
“I should have liked to produce a good book. This has not come about, but the
time is past in which I could improve it.” (Preface to Philosophical
Investigations)

~~~
mrleiter
The preface is actually very fun to read. Very honest, quite cynical, too.

>"[...] mainly because I was obliged to learn that my results (which I had
communicated in lectures, typescripts and discussions), variously
misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down, were in circulation. This
stung my vanity and I had difficulty in quieting it."

Such bare honesty! I love it.

------
harwoodjp
I've noticed Wittgenstein is mentioned quite a lot on HN threads about
philosophy. I suspect he's a favorite of engineer types because his
conceptions nullify large swaths of philosophical activity and thinking. This
conclusion allows the untrained student to feel as if they've entered a cheat
code to reach the end of the discourse -- it's all a language game, so I need
not waste my time with further inquiry.

~~~
skrealing
Strongly disagree. Wittgenstein clears the way for traditional philosophy
topics (ethics, aesthetics, etc.) to be taken seriously.

'Engineer types' may react to ethical discussions by pointing out that you
can't define right and wrong, and may then wrongly conclude that they don't
exist. But Wittgenstein shows that this is an isolated demand for rigor.

~~~
bobthechef
You can't define right or wrong? Tell that to an Aristotelian. You can most
certainly define it and ground a natural law theory in it.

------
voidhorse
Wittgenstein is one of those rare, inimitable thinkers. I get a sensation
reading his work that I rarely get reading the work of others: that he truly
was someone who thought about the world with great incisiveness and depth,
beyond the confines of any particular discipline or outlook—a logician with a
mystic's underbelly. Each one of his pithy notes exudes the degree of
exhaustiveness with which he's contemplated the topic—it's a great experience.
I highly recommend checking out some of his writing. Aside from the
_Tractatus_ it's not systematic, and as such I do not think there's any
particular reason to study it systematically.

Philosophy as analysis, philosophy as therapy—Wittgenstein's writings present
the collision of both of these perspectives.

------
codeulike
My favourite Wittgenstein quote:

"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never
goes into the ring."

~~~
wallace_f
He's right. Modern intellectual and political aversion to open competition and
experimentation is, at best, unethical.

~~~
danharaj
Could you elaborate?

~~~
halfjew222
As the other comment points out, people aren’t willing to challenge themselves
but also feign a confidence about themselves due to various factors such as
economic and societal pressures. Admitting you have no idea most of the time
is probably more accurate (estimate is obviously a reasonably afauirable
skill) but that’s not what boss man is looking for.

I think this also evidences itself in the prevalence of imposter theory,
especially in younger generations. The reason the saying goes, “that feeling
never goes away” is because we all operate outwardly as if we are more expert
than we are and begin to believe that lie.

Does that clarify?

~~~
danharaj
No, not really. It's still rather vague to me. Could you give me a concrete
example?

~~~
halfjew222
Sure!

If you look at the levels of reported 'imposter syndrome', there is a noted
rise over the last few years.

I'm assuming here that you are aware of imposter syndrome and perhaps have
felt it at times yourself. I certainly have.

To our peers, we pretend we know more than we do to feign this confidence that
has almost emerged as necessary since there are so many that can do our jobs
as programmers.

This feigned confidence manifests as imposter syndrome. Since we can't be
honest (and risk management firing us because we're incompetent), we never
quite feel like we're 'good enough' for our jobs.

Does that help?

------
loganfrederick
It's interesting and informative that a lot of the commenters here have
positive reviews or experiences with Wittgenstein.

I have not read any of his work but remember Paul Graham had a mixed take on
Wittgenstein in his essay "How to Do Philosophy". Wittgenstein helped shake up
philosophical thought, but his later focus on philosophy of language led his
followers to turn philosophy into a field of jargon.

[http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/philosophy.html)

~~~
mbrock
Whether philosophy has been a useless waste of time is a commonly recurring
question. I think it's asked from a kind of historically privileged position,
since we have already mostly gotten it over with, so to speak.

Another perspective is that these naive thoughts have a curious tendency to
pop up, and philosophy as the work of critiquing and developing such thoughts
is a crucial part of intellectual culture. There's a fascinating case in the
history of AI research, as described by Hubert Dreyfus:

> When I was teaching at MIT in the 1960s, students from the Artificial
> Intelligence Laboratory would come to my Heidegger course and say in effect:
> ‘‘You philosophers have been reflecting in your armchairs for over 2000
> years and you still don’t understand intelligence. We in the AI Lab have
> taken over and are succeeding where you philosophers have failed.’’ But in
> 1963, when I was invited to evaluate the work of Alan Newell and Herbert
> Simon on physical symbol systems, I found to my surprise that, far from
> replacing philosophy, these pioneering researchers had learned a lot,
> directly and indirectly, from us philosophers: e.g., Hobbes’ claim that
> reasoning was calculating, Descartes’ mental representations, Leibniz’s idea
> of a ‘universal characteristic’ (a set of primitives in which all knowledge
> could be expressed), Kant’s claim that concepts were rules, Frege’s
> formalization of such rules, and Wittgenstein’s postulation of logical atoms
> in his _Tractatus_. In short, without realizing it, AI researchers were hard
> at work turning rationalist philosophy into a research program.

> But I began to suspect that the insights formulated in existentialist
> armchairs, especially Heidegger’s and Merleau-Ponty’s, were bad news for
> those working in AI laboratories—that, by combining representationalism,
> conceptualism, formalism, and logical atomism into a research program, AI
> researchers had condemned their enterprise to reenact a failure. Using
> Heidegger as a guide, I began looking for signs that the whole AI research
> program was degenerating. I was particularly struck by the fact that, among
> other troubles, researchers were running up against the problem of
> representing significance and relevance—a problem that Heidegger saw was
> implicit in Descartes’ understanding of the world as a set of meaningless
> facts to which the mind assigned values, which John Searle now calls
> function predicates.

------
gulda
I recommend Monk's biography [1] and a short lecture by Wittgenstein [2]

[1]
[https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5](https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-02-921670-5)

[2]
[https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526](https://www.jstor.org/stable/2183526)

~~~
mbrock
There’s a nice book by Edward Kanterian called “Ludwig Wittgenstein” from
Reaktion Books Critical Lives series which is quite good, and shorter than
Monk’s biography.

------
halfjew22
[https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU](https://youtu.be/ermZKgG4htU)

>But what is most strikingly original about Wittgenstein’s account in the
Tractatus is his drawing out of the implications – which are to a degree
disturbing – of this conception. One implication is for values. If I think or
claim that the car is in the garage, then, built into that claim is the idea
that this may be true or false. But when I think that, say, slavery is morally
wrong, I think something that could not be otherwise than true (even if others
should disagree

I believe the solution to this lies in collective subjectivism with a fancy
twist. Underlying every disagreement about such a claim, we have an implicit
agreement. If I say slavery is wrong and you say you disagree, then we
actually agree about something; the fact that we disagree.

That agreement underlying the disagreement gives rise to new conversational
opportunity to approach a new, more fundamental point of agreement.

In this example, we could ask something like the following to our debate
partner: “would you like to be owned by me?” Employing Kant’s categorical
imperative (or the golden rule or bowever else this idea has been named) to
demonstrate to your opponent indeed no, they would not like to be enslaved.

Following that train of logic, we can begin to piece together agreements from
the disagreements that we unavoidably come across when using a tool as blunt
as language to describe anything close to resembling reality.

At some point, given the good faith participation of both partners in
conversation, we will be able to form more agreements, phoenixes rising from
the ashes of our disagreements, that will lead to something more closely
resembling a “universal truth”, truism, true objective fact, etc.

After all, true is just the word we have for something that cannot be proven
false. In the same way that we just pretend money has value and so it does,
true doesn’t mean anything beyond the word itself. That doesn’t necessarily
make it less useful, it’s just something we need to keep in mind.

On that note, this author does a fascinating job introducing a hypothesis that
an alphabet causes a society to lean to value masculine thought processes more
highly. Not sure what I think about the hypothesis yet but it’s been a
fascinating listen thus far.

[http://a.co/49lwAZNb](http://a.co/49lwAZNb)

~~~
0db532a0
Collective subjectivism does not lead to universal truth even closely. There
is no universal truth, but only your personal experience and perception. This
is true both for things which you see, and also for morality. In
Wittgenstein’s world, your subjective morality is neither true nor false.

~~~
halfjew222
What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to all
languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an accurate
description of their subjective experience?

I'm digging underneath Wittgenstein's ideas of subjective morality a little
bit. Humor me here and let me know what you think. I'm truly curious.

~~~
kansface
> What would you say of a hypothetical claim that was ideally translated to
> all languages that everyone, when asked, unforced, agreed that it was an
> accurate description of their subjective experience?

We don't actually learn anything fundamental here.

------
bobthechef
"The early Wittgenstein on scientism"[0] and "Goodill on Scholastic
Metaphysics and Wittgenstein"[1] for more on Wittgenstein.

[0] [https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-
wittgenstein-...](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2010/06/early-wittgenstein-
on-scientism.html)

[1] [https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-
scholast...](https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/12/goodill-on-scholastic-
metaphysics-and.html)

------
woodandsteel
I have a mixed feeling about this article. On the positive side, it does a
good job of explaining the ideas in Wittgenstein's two books. On the negative
side, the author fails to explain that there are similar ideas in Pragmatism
and Existential-Phenomenology.

Also, the author fails to explain, as Roy Monk's book makes clear, that
Wittgenstein had a highly dogmatic and rather irrational set of religious and
cultural views.

------
wolfi1
There was a documentary on his life in the 80s, mentioning his life as teacher
in a rural primary school (they even interviewed some of his pupils) and his
acting in a silent movie [1]. It is these anecdotes which make history and
biographies so vivid.

81]
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013619/)

------
gtycomb
a passing remark -- by all means read Wittgenstein's 'Philosophical
Investigations' because it is readable as the article says. In the
metaphysical world it can be hard cut through the work of its great thinkers.
A sensible way to approach Wittgenstein is to start with a college level
introductory book on Metaphysics to get the foundational ideas, Categories and
Forms of Aristotle and Plato. Some modern philosopher writers can walk us
through this nicely (Michale Loux from U of Chicago, his introductory writings
or some other perhaps). What might be modern now (Trope Theory, World of
States of Affairs, Stage Theory etc), their instigators first came to reject
the basics of the ancients but in the end they actually dissect the work of
the ancients for us. Travel to Wittgenstein along this path, read him only
towards the end. One needs numbers and algebra before calculus.

~~~
sramsay
I agree with that completely. Wittgenstein's "simplicity" is only apparent,
because he tends to write as if he's the first person to ever do philosophy.
But he knows he's not, and his grasp of classical metaphysics (like most
philosophers of his era) was basically flawless. He is way more interesting to
read with that background in place.

------
dschuetz
Thanks to that post I discovered after a short research that I share a lot
with Wittgenstein personality-wise. I'm not sure if it's a good or a bad sign.
Never heard about him before.

------
turingspiritfly
Is it bad to have expected to the article to be all about how his alleged
virtue help become the famed figure he is today? This was just another
portrait of his work.

------
noir-york
Excellent article. Thanks for posting!

------
halfjew22
I've been told on exactly one count that my thought process echoes
Wittgenstein.

Here's a recording of the comment as kind of a proof of why I think this is
interesting to do. Very Meta. Watch Community of you enjoy this kind of thing:

Part 1: [https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo](https://youtu.be/sx7K8O7IGxo)

Part 2: [https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs](https://youtu.be/wZGvJBXOkGs)

I also do live thought explorations, record them, and put them on YouTube.
Please come tell me why you disagree with some of my most honest thoughts.

[https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco](https://youtu.be/buJSby8Eoco)

[https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8](https://youtu.be/z-_6A0nXkX8)

are a couple of videos I could find off the bat. For anyone interested in just
reading rather than watching the entire thought process, I've posted links in
the descriptions to the final text produced. I'll also link my Medium page
below.

I record the entire thought process because I think we are in dire need of
honesty today. It's too easy to pretend we know more than we do. I have lots
of theories I'd like to share and talk with people about and have an
incredibly hard time finding any kind of audience, yet constantly find people
taking about our suffering from problems I believe I can solve.

I know this comment is all over the place, but just like the current top
comment describes, I find it fascinating looking inside people's thought
process as it is the most raw thing we can do with language. I also believe as
I hammer away on these keys that I could just keep typing and eventually bring
it all back together, which I will now.

I believe developing trust amongst individuals is vital in a digital age if we
are to maintain any degree of community as society. Wittgenstein style thought
explorations (and now with new technology recording the process therein) are
the most raw, unidealogically possessed form of thought we can share. Any
level of rehearsal or editing, while they certainly improve the finished
product, both waste time and present an opportunity for those idealogical
possessions to creep back into play.

In previous human times, we had much less diverse information flux. This
enabled us to more easily understand our environment and those around us. We
saw the same people every day, knew our place, and knew what to expect more or
less.

Today, we don't know anyone we talk to online. Pair that with the difficulty
of forming a strong community and that leads to some pretty serious problems.

I mean ABSOLUTELY no disrespect to anyone with what I'm about to say: suicide
rates in youths, as well as what appears to be an identity crisis where people
are latching on to whatever made up concepts please them are caused by a
theory I call "Information Radiation."

"Information Radiation" effects a culture of people much like nuclear
radiation effects a single individual. It makes them sick and die. Our culture
is dying. There's so much new information coming in (most of it being of
little importance) that it is crowding out the old information we have stores
about the value of our cultures precious stories. The ones that got us here.

Those stories aren't true, but hey, we're here! And very few intellectuals
respect that. We are arrogant to think now that these stories of religious
proportioms are just simply not a representation of physical events that
happened in our space time that they aren't important or helpful.

If this was true, television and movies such as Game of Thromes, Harry Potter,
and the Avengers simply would not be popular.

This is not a religious claim at all by the way. There's no man in the sky
dictating things. There are in my opinion human spiritual happenings, but
those are unimportant to include here to pursuade you of my opinions.

Lastly, I want to plug my website knophy.com that I'm working on.

TLDR on it is that it's a website that values competency and the comprehension
of content. My utlimate goal is to pay both creators for creating content and
consumers for forming comprehension about content. I believe I have invented a
sound business model for doing that.

Details are below

[https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT](https://link.medium.com/Hnu2JLZ0aT)
[https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT](https://link.medium.com/nCVtpC00aT)

Thanks for reading.

Honest yours, Michael Lustig.

~~~
halfjew22
Rather than downvote, can someone point out why they dislike this comment?

On an article on Wittgenstein's honest and fluid thinking style, I posted
something similar to what the current top comment has described as the most
interesting part of W's process.

Thanks in advance.

~~~
wsy
You didn't contribute to the talk about Wittgenstein, but exclusively talked
about yourself and things you do.

In addition, instead of explaining the relationship of your activities with
Wittgenstein (that could have been an on-topic contribution), you ask the
reader to watch recordings.

~~~
halfjew222
How would recommend explaining the relationship of my activities W?

Honest question, I’d love to not come across as such a moron.

Thanks for the feedback.

~~~
wsy
Let me start by saying that it is great to see how you deal with the feedback
you get, this is not an easy feat.

Some more preliminaries: When I write a comment on HN, I first ask myself:
what is the message I want to send to potential readers? And then I put some
effort into expressing it as good as I can. After reading your comment, I had
a hard time identifying any message, and I think the reason is that you
employed the method of giving us your raw thoughts without considering which
message you would like to send. When I first read your comment, I didn't even
bother to dig deep enough to decipher the content; if you don't spend effort
in writing, why should I spend so much effort in reading? Now, after having
watched the first video and read your comment five times, I understand the
structure, but still only fragments of the content.

Let me give one example what I think you could explain, based on the partial
understanding I gained: it seems that you consider it very important for
people to capture and communicate their thoughts 'unfiltered', as they happen.
If you could relate that to Wittgenstein's philosophy, that would be an on-
topic comment. (I am not very familiar with Wittgensteins philosophy and don't
see how that would obviously follow from his philosophy, maybe Wittgenstein
experts immediately see it).

I see the dilemma you are in: you want to exemplify the style, and I ask you
for something which is impossible to do in this style: polishing and refining
a message until it is easy to read and understand. However, I also would say
that your experiment - convincing the reader by exemplifying the approach -
has failed, so it seems you anyway need to reconsider your approach.

Finally - and I hope it doesn't come over as patronizing - I think only few
exceptional people have such clear thoughts that conveying them without any
editing is a win for a large readership. I know for sure that my thoughts are
initially much too chaotic. Maybe Wittgenstein was able to do it. You and me
are far away from that level.

~~~
halfjew222
Absolutely! I truly don't want to come across as that downvote seeking troll.
I really want to share and engage in rich conversations with interesting
people online.

I really appreciate your feedback. I think you touched on a key point of
contention for me that I need to work very hard on:

> if you don't spend effort in writing, why should I spend so much effort in
> reading?

I come at this from precisely the opposite angle: "I could pour my heart into
something and have it ignored because it's too long, so I'm just going to
throw everything at the wall and see what sticks."

Obviously, I know this is a poor solution. I'm actually building a website
instead that I believe solves my problem and many more. That will give me the
motivation required to put in the effort up front to polish things up a bit
more.

The problem, for me, boils down to one thing: we have a content discovery
problem. Low energy bullshit rises easily, while content that takes a while to
parse rises quite quickly.

The saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" is perfect here. It's also
roughly 1,000 times more difficult to read, parse, understand, and provide
feedback for content such as mine than to like a gif on Reddit, for example.

Again, thank you for the feedback. I've copied it into my notes (highly
recommend Bear app for mac / iOS if you're in the market) and will meditate on
it and hopefully improve through it.

If you're interested in the project I'm working on that I believe solves this
problem, here's some stuff I wrote about it:

[https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-
going-t...](https://medium.com/@michaellustig/knophy-or-how-were-going-to-
change-the-world-3a52f866120)

[https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-
explanation-o...](https://medium.com/@michaellustig/step-by-step-explanation-
of-how-to-start-your-page-on-knophy-72c53c8a0e9b)

