It seems to me that Wittgenstein was very much interested in the political goings on of his time. He was interested in the conflicts that had been causing great suffering in Europe and the world in general. I take it, his interest in Dostoevsky and his novel The Brothers Karamazov stoked this interest. The following example taken from an essay arguing that Wittgenstein was interested in the world, supports this claim.
from
Philosophy as a Service Industry, or, Reintroducing the Philosophical Life
by
ESA SAARINEN & T. P. USCHANOV, Department of Philosophy, University of Helsinki
…In the autumn of 1939, Wittgenstein and his friend Norman Malcolm were walking along the river Cam in Cambridge when they saw a newspaper vendor's sign announcing that the German government had accused the British government of instigating an attempt to assassinate Hitler. When Wittgenstein remarked that it wouldn't surprise him at all if it were true, Malcolm retorted that "the British were too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand, and . . . such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character'." Wittgenstein was furious, and the incident broke off his relations to Malcolm for some time (Malcolm, p. 30). Five years later, he wrote to Malcolm:
Whenever I thought of you I couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. . . . you made a remark about 'national character' that shocked me by its primitiveness. I then thought: 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, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends. (Malcolm, p. 93)
What is the use of studying philosophy if it doesn't improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life? Contradicting the standard academic account of what Wittgenstein was up to, we believe that this is the pressing question he asked himself throughout his philosophical career. It was also a question Wittgenstein thought of as outweighing any specific philosophical theses or theories. But it is also exactly the question that has been forgotten and even laughed at by the mainstream of today's professional philosophy.
Why does Wittgenstein refer to Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer, of all possible philosophers, as paragons of philosophical depth? Why does he have nothing but abuse for most of his contemporaries? Why does Wittgenstein reject his professorship in Cambridge? Because in Wittgenstein, as in Kierkegaard and in Schopenhauer, the ancient promise of philosophy lives on, defining the self-conception of the philosopher. According to this conception of philosophy, the philosopher does not see himself as an expert among experts, a commander of his specific square millimetre, a producer of academically respectable and academically meriting results, or a scientist of arguments and concepts.
Rather, the philosopher seems himself in terms of his impact vis-à-vis the grand themes of a good life, the questions of everyday life that everyone - including the philosopher himself - is addressing in his own daily living. There is a long tradition in philosophy of forcefully criticizing approaches in philosophy that "wished to stand out by making an ostentatious display of their philosophical discourse, but did not exercise themselves in the things of life" (Davidson, p. 21). This tradition, so prevalent in ancient Greek philosophy, has been completely neglected by present-day academic philosophy. Most philosophers are currently simply not interested in the Socratic question of a good life, but to us it is as central as it can be. We shall return to it in more detail later.
We believe that the philosophical mistake of the century has been an all too encompassing tie between philosophy and the sciences, the academia and the scholarly life, as opposed to a tie between philosophy and everyday life. As philosophy has struggled to live within the university institution it has come to endorse more and more implicit metaprinciples which have not come to any good. Even if such academic metaprinciples have been appropriate in many areas of knowledge-production they have narrowed the scope of philosophy, amounting to a philosophy which defines itself as a production-force and market-force of trivialities.
Here we have an example showing that Wittgenstein had Hitler in mind and was thinking about the conflicts in Europe, enough so, that he broke of relations with Malcolm, whom he might have claimed as a friend.
We are not given much in the way of background information that might help understand what made Wittgenstein so perturbed at Malcolm. Was it that Malcolm seemed to be just repeating what he had heard on the radio or read in the British press? Perhaps Wittgenstein was perturbed that Malcolm did not seem to have a mind of his own on what Wittgenstein took to be a very important issue?
Maybe Wittgenstein didn’t care where Malcolm got his ideas about the British, but he was concerned that the ideas themselves seemed so naïve, or “primitive.” Wittgenstein had fought in the first world war and he may have there thought that it was begun and it had persisted because the leaders of each side held similar notions about British, French, German, or Austrian character. It was naiveté and primitiveness that killed so many, Wittgenstein may have thought. And Malcolm had not realized this. This may have frustrated Wittgenstein. How is the next war going to be prevented if we have learned nothing from the last one?
Wittgenstein spoke about some particular incident and how it contributed to his reaction to Malcolm’s remark. We are not told about this incident, at this time. One can imagine that it could have been an experience Wittgenstein had with someone else who got hot and bothered about “national character.” Maybe Wittgenstein thought that whereas the public was lead to believe one thing about their national character, or the national character of others, he knew from personal experience as a member of an influential family, that the leadership of a nation was capable of all kinds of shenanigans and foolishness that you wouldn’t expect from the given “national character.” Maybe he thought that talk about some nation’s “character” was a powerful way to get a war going.
Maybe Wittgenstein wanted his friends to have a solid understanding of the world’s events in order to be able to bounce his own ideas off of them, to be able to improve his own views, and Malcolm’s naïveté and “primitiveness” did not seem to be the kind of counterweight Wittgenstein was looking for.
These are the kinds of issues I’d like to have clarified.
But, we do get the idea that Wittgenstein thought that studying philosophy should help one understand the world and its problems better.
Just how, I want to ask, is the study of philosophy going to help one’s understanding of the world and its problems? Don’t we discover once we look at philosophy that it is nothing but a bunch of academics arguing over their theories which get them nowhere because no one can agree on anything? How does Wittgenstein hope to show that it is any different?
The difference, I want to say, has to do with his argument involving the foundation story, put forward again by Frege, and the story he puts forward about how certain “philosophical theories” are the root cause of central conflicts in the world, and how those conflicts, according to his argument, can be be eradicated by showing those “philosophical theories” are “disguised nonsense.”
In making this claim I am pointing out that Wittgenstein relies a lot on what Frege said about logic and logical arguments. In the big picture where Wittgenstein wants to expose the meaninglessness of these “philosophical theories,” it is not so important that he promotes two or more theories of meaning in the Tractatus and Investigations, but that both together go to show that certain “philosophical theories” are “disguised nonsense. Some people make a big point that Wittgenstein seems to have refuted the first account of language and meaning in the Tractatus with another account of language and meaning in the Investigations. I just think he wanted to make the point that whatever theory one relies on to explain language and meaning, there are these “philosophical theories” which turn out to be meaningless.
In making this claim I am also making a point that it was important to Wittgenstein that these “philosophical theories” were to be contrasted with “scientific theories,” whether one thought of language and meaning as explained by the Tractatus or the Investigations. Scientific theories were all about being backed up by facts. The winning scientific theory was the one backed up by the most facts about the world. In contrast, the “philosophical theories” that troubled Wittgenstein were not backed up or got started by being associated with facts in the world. One way to put this would be to remind ourselves of unicorns. We think we understand something about unicorns. They are horse-like creatures with a single horn in the middle of their foreheads. We think we might know something about unicorns but what we also have to know is that there are no such things as unicorns. We have to realize, Wittgenstein tells us, that we might know things about these “philosophical theories.” But, what we should also know is that nothing that these theories claim is true about the world we live in. There are no philosophical unicorns, so to speak.
According to Wittgenstein, at the bottom of many serious conflicts in the world there are disputes generated by these “philosophical theories.” These disputes go on and on because people believe the “philosophical theories tell them something true and also troubling about the reality we all like in. So, for example, one such theory is that there are two kinds of substances in the world: mind and body. Wittgenstein wants to show that these theories about contrasts like that between mind and body have as much sense as someone claiming to have seen unicorns, or that unicorns have existed. Wittgenstein tells us that if we just point out that these theories are “disguised nonsense,” then people will have no reason to continue their conflicts.
The point of Wittgenstein’s work, then is not to make some new theory about language and meaning, as an end all and be all, which the above writers would characterize as the narrow academic pursuit opposed by Wittgenstein, but instead to show how certain “philosophical theories” rampant in our understandings of great issues in the world, are really “disguised nonsense” and should be exposed as such and eradicated from our consideration. This way, we can then focus on real conflicts and some work can be done to resolve them. In this way we can have better lives.
I am reminded of the planet Vulcan and how the Vulcans were once a warlike race. But, after a lot of wars and suffering, and then a lot of effort, the Vulcans were able to burn out the emotional part of their psyche so that the only part left to govern their thinking and conduct was logic. Remember Spock often remarked how difficult it was for him to understand human behavior. Humans were often times emotional and Vulcan’s were bred not to be. Wittgenstein had a very similar idea. He thought that we should be able to locate, isolate, expose, and eradicate certain ideas which originated in confusions and misunderstandings but lived on as “disguised nonsense.” Zombie-ideas or toxic ideas that looked like they made sense, looked like they were real ideas, but deep down were really dead nonsensical ideas.
Wittgenstein wanted to point out how little like Vulcans we humans were in the 20th century. He wanted to come up with the argument that would make the Vulcanization of humanity desirable.
Vulcanization may be misleading. It’s not like the “philosophical theories” that concerned him were based on emotions, or to be understood in the way that human emotional character was portrayed in Star Trek. Wittgenstein thought of these theories in contrast to scientific theories. Whereas science was about facts. Philosophical theories were not. They were about mistakes, or overgeneralizations, or misconceptions.
Another way that one might think about what Wittgenstein intended is to look at “conspiracy theories.” “Conspiracy theories” are another way of talking about “toxic ideas.” These “theories” are also to be contrasted with scientific theories. Whereas a scientific theory is supposed to be invalidated or disconfirmed or shown to be wrong with experiments and the exposure of some new facts or understandings of its material, these “conspiracy theories” cannot be disconfirmed or shown to be wrong by coming up with any relevant facts. This is why people who propose and push “conspiracy theories” never give them up even in the face of many facts intended to disconfirm or show these theories to be wrong. I may know about Joe Schmoe who thinks the powers that be are out to get him because of what he knows. You could show that no one really knows about Joe, and that no one lurks behind his bushes, and that the police are not spying on him, but to Joe, all of that makes no difference. He knows that the powers that be would make their intentions very difficult for anyone to discover until, for Joe, it was too late.This is the character of “conspiracy theories,” as they are discussed in the media.
Wittgenstein was concerned to show that the difference between the “philosophical theories” that concerned him and meaningful theories and ideas was to be understood in terms of the theories of meaning that he had developed. Based on the understanding of meaning he had written about, he thought he could show that some theories or ideas were connected to facts in the world, or alternatively, followed the rules that were associated with how language operated, and were thereby meaningful. On the other hand, if theories or ideas were not related to facts in the world, or followed the rules governing language, then they would, on his account of language and meaning, be meaningless, or “disguised nonsense.” In any typical account of “conspiracy theories” there was no interest in showing that the basis of these theories was any kind of correspondence of their words or ideas to facts in the world, or to rules governing the use of their language. “conspiracy theories” are usually nonsense, according to those who are concerned to expose these things, because of the absurdity of thinking, for example, that many people are in on a plot to kill some innocuous individual, or that the government was involved in some event, and no such government involvement would be possible without being exposed. Or, that aliens are involved in historical events and everyone is either under their power, or is too scared to talk. A ‘conspiracy theory” usually is absurd because of the wild ideas the purveyor needs to have us believe in to keep it going.
Wikipedia puts this another way,
The term "conspiracy theory" is used to indicate a narrative genre that includes a broad selection of (not necessarily related) arguments for the existence of grand conspiracies. The term is frequently used by scholars and in popular culture to identify secret military, banking, or political actions aimed at "stealing" power, money, or freedom, from "the people". Conspiracy theories are based on the notion that complex plots are put into motion by powerful hidden forces. Less illustrious uses refer to folklore and urban legend and a variety of explanatory narratives which are constructed with methodological flaws or biases. Originally a neutral term, since the mid-1960s it has acquired a somewhat derogatory meaning, implying a paranoid tendency to see the influence of some malign covert agency in events. The term is sometimes used to automatically dismiss claims that are deemed ridiculous, misconceived, paranoid, unfounded, outlandish or irrational. A proven conspiracy theory, such as the notion that Nixon and his aides were behind the Watergate break-in and cover-up, is usually referred to as something else, such as investigative journalism or historical analysis.
The political scientist Michael Barkun holds that a conspiracy theory is a belief which explains an event as the result of a secret plot by exceptionally powerful and cunning conspirators to achieve a malevolent end. According to Barkun, the appeal of conspiracism is threefold: First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what institutional analysis cannot. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing. Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents. Third, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracy theorists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracy theorists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions.
Some scholars argue that conspiracy theories once limited to fringe audiences have become commonplace in mass media, contributing to conspiracism emerging as a cultural phenomenon in the United States of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the possible replacement of democracy by conspiracy as the dominant paradigm of political action in the public mind. According to anthropologists Todd Sanders and Harry G. West, evidence suggests that a broad cross section of Americans today gives credence to at least some conspiracy theories. Belief in conspiracy theories has therefore become a topic of interest for sociologists, psychologists and experts in folklore.
In an essay on conspiracy theories originating in the Middle East, Daniel Pipes notes that "[f]ive assumptions distinguish the conspiracy theorist from more conventional patterns of thought: appearances deceive; conspiracies drive history; nothing is haphazard; the enemy always gains; power, fame, money, and sex account for all." According to West and Sanders, when talking about conspiracies in the Vietnam era, Pipes includes within the fringe element anyone who entertains the thought that conspiracies played a role in the major political scandals and assassinations that rocked American politics in the Vietnam era. "He sees the paranoid style in almost any critical historical or social-scientific analysis of oppression."
Noam Chomsky, linguist and scholar, contrasts conspiracy theory as more or less the opposite of institutional analysis, which focuses mostly on the public, long-term behavior of publicly known institutions, as recorded in, for example, scholarly documents or mainstream media reports, rather than secretive coalitions of individuals….
Another difference between the “philosophical ideas” and “theories” that concerned Wittgenstein and the “conspiracy theories” that have concerned people was the role the “philosophical ideas” and “theories” have played in serious conflicts throughout history, whereas “conspiracy theories” have been said to be marginal phenomena, where most people have been reasonable enough not to engage in such thinking.
For myself, Wittgenstein seemed to be concerned about theories like the Allegory of the cave, and other allegories like the allegory of the playground, of the zombie hordes, and of the absentee landlord. These ideas have played a role in the thinking of people on various central issues throughout history and they all are related to both the foundational story I’m attributing to Socrates and our understanding of reality. It is these theories that could be at the bottom of real life conflicts and also not be related to facts in the world or rules of language in the same way as scientific theories and common observations.
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