Why we need Wittgenstein

A philosopher for the age of abstraction

By Tom Knight

The economist John Maynard Keynes wrote to his wife in 1929 that “God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”. The deity in question was the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was returning to the University of Cambridge after spending 16 years outside the academy.

In the preface to his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), Wittgenstein wrote that he had found “on all essential points, the ultimate solutions to problems”. With no further questions left to answer, the philosopher left academia in 1920 and became a primary school teacher in rural Austria.

At fewer than one hundred pages long, the Tractatus firebombed Western philosophy with unique insight and brutal accuracy, demonstrating that philosophical questions such as “why do we exist?” and “how can I be good” were unanswerable. Rather than offering solutions to philosophical problems, Wittgenstein’s novel approach demonstrated that such problems did not exist in the first place.

A century after the Tractatus was first published, we seem to have forgotten its lessons. The idea that philosophy should dispel problems, not try to answer them, has lost all traction. If you visit the philosophy section of a Waterstones, you’ll find titles such as How to Live, How not to be Wrong and How to Love. Wittgenstein would shudder at books that claim to say something meaningful about topics that philosophers have struggled with for millennia.

Wittgenstein wanted to cast aside armchair speculation on life’s eternal truths. But his Tractatus was not just an act of philosophical arson. It also laid out an innovative model for untangling seemingly intractable problems. In an age where politicians and commentators invoke grand concepts about “democracy” and “sovereignty” to sow division, Wittgenstein’s approach is precisely the antidote we need.

After an unsatisfying stint studying aeronautics at the University of Manchester in the late 1900s, Wittgenstein gravitated towards philosophical logic, the discipline that establishes universal “laws” of truth. From the moment the young philosopher arrived in Cambridge in 1911, he hounded the leading logician Bertrand Russell. “My German friend threatens to be an infliction,” Russell wrote to a lover. But it didn’t take long for Russell to feel the heat of Wittgenstein’s insight; after a couple of months, he declared, “I love him and feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve.”

Their burgeoning relationship was cut short by the First World War. Wittgenstein immediately signed up for the Austro-Hungarian army, and spent the war volunteering for the most dangerous jobs in the trenches. On the Russian front, he found himself alone in the middle of no-man’s land, loading artillery and dodging shrapnel. “Only death,” Wittgenstein wrote in his diary at the time, “gives life its meaning.” Despite the horrors of war, the philosopher continued to write about logic. In 1918 Wittgenstein returned to Vienna with the manuscript of the Tractatus, the book that would define his career.

The Tractatus proposed a simple theory: language can express reality, because language and reality share the same structure. The world is composed of facts, which are made up of states of affairs, which are themselves made up of objects. The world maps onto language, giving us a framework to depict reality. If this sounds confusing, think of this: “Sugar is sweet” expresses something because its grammar depicts reality – sugar, an object, has the property sweetness. “Sugar is tomorrow” doesn’t express anything, because it flouts the grammar of reality.

Wittgenstein concluded that language cannot do justice to certain things, and our ethical and metaphysical propositions are meaningless. Questions such as “what is a good life?” do not relate to facts, so our language fails to “picture” these aspects of the world. In one fell swoop, he dismissed the concerns of traditional philosophy.

So what can philosophy do? In one sense, nothing: the Tractatus ends with a damning rebuttal: “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent”.

But in disarming philosophy, Wittgenstein gave it a new role. If philosophers can’t answer “philosophical” questions, what they can do is provide clarity and guidance, untangling problems and exposing muddled thinking.

Words such as justice, freedom and goodness do not refer to anything concrete – all they do is confuse and provoke emotion. Wittgenstein wanted philosophers to banish abstractions and instead untangle problems. There is not a “single philosophical method,” he later wrote, just “different therapies”.

Today’s social and political discourse is in desperate need of such therapies. Social media, partisan news coverage and reckless politicians have all contributed to a political vocabulary of grand statements and absolutist declarations. As a result, arguments get inflated into battles. Discussions have become “head-to-heads” framed as “culture wars”.

This inflated language results in people speaking past one another and failing to engage in meaningful conversation. In a discussion billed the “debate of the century” in 2019, thinkers Slavoj Žižek and Jordan Peterson threw around wild ideological assertions as they debated “Happiness: Communism vs Capitalism”.

The Brexit referendum offered a prime example of this philosophical inflation. Political conflict was hinged on “democracy” and “sovereignty”– concepts that are impossible to pin down to a version of reality. This rhetoric has ruled out the possibility of ever finding mutual ground. Rather than rooting political disagreements in reality, the Brexit debate became wildly detached from the original issues at stake – such as immigration and trade.

Wittgenstein can help us here. He wanted us to do away with vague abstractions, and instead clarify ambiguities. He was a disarming philosopher in two senses: the Tractatus robbed philosophy of its traditional powers, but it also focused on deflating the intractable mess of meaningless abstractions.

Our political discourse needs such insight more than ever.