What Ludwig Wittgenstein Actually Said About Mind
All 14 Ludwig Wittgenstein passages on mind, in full — what each one claims, what holds them together, and who argues the other way.
Ludwig Wittgenstein returns to mind 14 times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. Austrian-born philosopher who twice changed the course of analytic philosophy — first with the Tractatus, then with the Philosophical Investigations.
What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is mind for, and what does it ask of you?
Every Ludwig Wittgenstein passage on mind
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
“I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.”
“My difficulty is only an — enormous — difficulty of expression.”
“Language is a part of our organism and no less complicated than it.”
“What cannot be imagined cannot even be talked about.”
“It is clear that the causal nexus is not a nexus at all.”
“The logical picture of the facts is the thought. (3)”
“The thought is the significant proposition. (4)”
“It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists. (6.44)”
“What should we gain by a definition, as it can only lead us to other undefined terms?”
“Every explanation is after all an hypothesis.”
“An entire mythology is stored within our language.”
“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.”
“This is not for me, I want an entirely rural spot.”
What holds these together
Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Ludwig Wittgenstein is not offering 14 opinions about mind; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “Every explanation is after all an hypothesis” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.
Ludwig Wittgenstein applied to a real decision
Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts one such case to Ludwig Wittgenstein.
A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.
Argued as self-reliant restraint: You are protecting attention as a condition for thought. The risk is romanticizing refusal when adaptation would be wiser.
Work through these yourself
- A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data. — argued from self-reliant restraint and several competing positions
Who disagrees
Aristotle, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Seneca all address mind too, and they do not converge. Reading Ludwig Wittgenstein alone gives you a coherent position; reading Ludwig Wittgenstein against Aristotle shows you what the position is actually choosing against.