Austria/UK, 1889–1951
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Austrian-born philosopher who twice changed the course of analytic philosophy — first with the Tractatus, then with the Philosophical Investigations.
Ludwig Wittgenstein in 52 lines
Every Ludwig Wittgenstein passage in thinkr's library, with the theme each one speaks to.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
“If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.”
“I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.”
“One often makes a remark and only later sees how true it is.”
“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”
“Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”
“My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.”
“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”
“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
“One of the most difficult of the philosopher's tasks is to find out where the shoe pinches.”
“Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.”
“It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.”
“What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.”
“It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.”
“The whole sense of the book might be summed up the following words: what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.”
“The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)”
“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)”
“The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)”
“Though a state of affairs that would contravene the laws of physics can be represented by us spatially, one that would contravene the laws of geometry cannot. (3.0321)”
“The thought is the significant proposition. (4)”
“It is quite impossible for a proposition to state that it itself is true. (4.442)”
“A tautology's truth is certain, a proposition's possible, a contradiction's impossible. (Certain, possible, impossible: here we have the first indication of the scale that we need in the theory of probability.) (4.464)”
“Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions. (An elementary proposition is a truth-function of itself.) (5)”
“If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)”
“The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)”
“The world of the happy is quite different from the world of the unhappy. (6.43)”
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)”
“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)”
“For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.”
“What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?”
“The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.”
“To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth.”
“I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.”
“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”
“Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”
“A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.”
“Burning in effigy. Kissing the picture of one's beloved... it aims at nothing at all; we just behave this way and then we feel satisfied.”
“The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.”
“We must plow through the whole of language.”
“An entire mythology is stored within our language.”
“The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.”
“Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”
“People are deeply imbedded in philosophical, i.e., grammatical confusions. And to free them presupposes pulling them out of the immensely manifold connections they are caught up in.”
“The aim of philosophy is to erect a wall at the point where language stops anyway.”
“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult What is that?”
“This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.”
“We are asleep. Our Life is a dream. But we wake up sometimes, just enough to know that we are dreaming.”
“What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.”
“Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein: To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby. That is what I would have liked to say about my work.”
“Make sure that your religion is a matter between you and God only.”
“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word white?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”
Where Ludwig Wittgenstein lands on a hard choice
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what a position does when it meets a situation where every option costs something.
A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.
You are protecting attention as a condition for thought. The risk is romanticizing refusal when adaptation would be wiser.
Reading Ludwig Wittgenstein today
Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1889–1951, from Austria/UK — a world with different assumptions about authority, death and what a life is for. That distance is useful rather than a problem: it is what lets the ideas cut against assumptions you did not know you were making.
In thinkr, Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of 44 thinkers you can put a real question to, and the answers come back in that thinker's own voice and commitments rather than as a neutral summary. The 52 passages above are what the app draws on.
Working at roughly the same time
- Albert Camus — France/Algeria, 1913–1960
- Arthur Schopenhauer — Germany, 1788–1860
- Bertrand Russell — UK, 1872–1970
- Carl Jung — Switzerland, 1875–1961
- Friedrich Nietzsche — Germany, 1844–1900
- Hannah Arendt — Germany & United States, 1906–1975
Argues the same cases
Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Aristotle, Ralph Waldo Emerson take positions on the same dilemmas as Ludwig Wittgenstein, which is usually where the disagreements become concrete.