I’ve been trying to make the point that Wittgenstein was not someone who spent his time exorcising any personal demons. He grew up in a rich family, met with and spoke with people who had a fair understanding of the political, intellectual, and cultural situation in Europe and the world, in general.
Wittgenstein expressed interest in literature that raised issues about the world. Ivan Karamazov spoke about how God could allow evil in the world.
I believe Wittgenstein did not slink away from these issues in order to worry about his own pimples.
I am saying something controversial. The point of Wittgenstein’s work in philosophy, his “linguistic turn,” was to somehow undermine the influence of philosophical theories like the Allegory of the Cave, the Allegory of the playground, and zombification, as I describe them, among others.
His attack on these theories was different than how other philosophers dealt with them.
So, for example, Marx was interested in what the Allegory of the Playground had to say about people’s lives. What it said was that there is always the very rich and the very poor and that the rich take advantage of the poor. Marx saw that this situation made the poor suffer. Instead of standing by and not doing anything about this travesty, Marx wrote books to persuade people that the solution for the poor would be for them to organize themselves together and defend themselves from the rich. This strategy was being tested in the Soviet Union during Wittgenstein’s lifetime. It was still up in the air, at that time, whether Marx’s strategy would actually stop the rich from taking advantage of the poor.
In a related example, the argument was being developed that the problems the poor have are not because of the rich. The rich are just successful poor people, according to this argument. Everyone, on this view, wants to be rich. The danger for the poor are those who argue that it’s the rich who have to be hobbled and imprisoned, because in order to do that one has to eliminate or severely restrict freedoms that, when acknowledged, allow the poor to become rich. So, on this view, it is the people pushing Marx’s strategy who are the real dangers to society. They want to take away freedom, in order to gain power for themselves.
It is this conflict between the left, represented by Marx, and the right, represented by Mr. Hitler and his variants, which interested Wittgenstein. This conflict around which the wars of Europe were based is based on the philosophical theory that, well, we are like kids on a playground run by bullies.
The unique thing about Wittgenstein was that he went about dealing with these theories differently than Marx or Hitler. He did not want to accept the theory, or any of the philosophical theories, as Marx and Hitler had done in their writings.
Wittgenstein wanted to argue that instead of trying to figure out what to do about the rich taking advantage of the poor, or the Marxists undermining freedoms, he wanted to say that the Allegory of the Playground, and other related theories, were nonsense. The problem with them was that people did not understand how language worked and, specifically, they did not understand how words had meaning.
This was the point of making the “linguistic turn.” It was to make the argument that the Allegories that gave meaning to the basic conflicts of our lives, for example, the conflict between the left and right, were nonsense, and should not be the basis of any conflict.
The attack Wittgenstein was trying to make is based on the observation that people can get involved in arguments that don’t have any real reason for occurring. For example, we might overhear an argument about how bad Joe Schmoe must be for beating his wife. One guy says he must be evil because he beats his wife. Another guy says that, even though it’s a bad thing to beat one’s wife, sometimes his wife can be annoying. But, you say, this can’t be. Joe Schmoe isn’t even married. He has no wife. What are you talking about? It turns out that a vicious rumor got started by one of Schmoe’s business rivals that he beat his wife when he really has no wife. In the same way, Wittgenstein wanted to argue that the conflict between the left and the right is generated by the mistaken belief that the Allegory is true, that we are like kids on a playground run by bullies. Once we realize this, so Wittgenstein would have argued, our understanding of political conflict would have to be rethought. It would be hoped that, given the undermining of the philosophical theories that gets this conflict started, i.e., the conflicts between left and right, and so on, would not be revisited.
One might wonder, if Wittgenstein was so concerned about things like political, religious, or cultural conflict, in general, why didn’t he talk about these conflicts. The crux of his argument, the “linguistic turn,” had to do with his claims about language and theories of meaning. If he couldn’t make the case that we have had a lack of understanding of meaning, and that is what has generated these philosophical theories, then there would have been no point to his bringing up all these other kinds of conflict. This is the goal of his writing the Tractatus, then the Investigations, and the notes he took for On Certainty. He was trying to show how our confusions about language and meaning generated bad theories whose role gets then blown all out of proportion in our civilization at large.
He kept going from one explanation to another because he wasn’t getting a good enough answer to the questions he posed himself. That is, how does what we understand about language and meaning get us to do crazy things in our real lives? And, how do we stop that?
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