I say this too because I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

:lol: You're not wrong.

Did you see my post <here>? Specifically the paper, "Schopenhauer and Wittgenstein on Self and Object."

Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

I don't know that much about Wittgenstein, but I have noticed a lot of strange intransigence among those who rely heavily upon him. 'Thing is, historically speaking Wittgenstein's approach to philosophy is very weird and idiosyncratic, and when this is combined with gatekeeping what results is something that is comically absurd. There is something guru-ish about the whole phenomenon.

(Maybe this should be in the Lounge.)

That is painting with a broad brush. Are you assigning all who evince interest in the writings as gatekeepers?

For my part, the work is an interesting kind of argument and not a Prolegomena for any future Metaphysics. If I resist that latter conclusion, am I, too, a gatekeeper?

I notice a tendency whereby when you question Wittgenstein's ideas, the only answer that seems to be legitimate to the majority who jump on these threads is to quote another line from Wittgenstein.. As if you cannot refute Wittgenstein, you can only have varying levels of understanding of Wittgenstein. — schopenhauer1

Help me understand why it is SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein where I see this?? — schopenhauer1

For what its worth, Wittgenstein was a complex philosopher. His methodology was methodological nominalism, and when you apply methodological nominalism towards philosophy as therapy, you get a complex relationship between examples elucidating/clarifying a way out of the bottle for the fly.

Compound the fact that the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus was meant as a preface to the Philosophical Investigations, then you might have a lot of questions about what the TLP and then the PI meant. In my opinion, if people started with the Blue and Brown Books, which were presented in a university setting where Wittgenstein taught for a brief while, you might find it easier to understand Wittgenstein.

:lol: You're not wrong. — Leontiskos

:up:

- It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. Thoughts?

That is painting with a broad brush. Are you assigning all who evince interest in the writings as gatekeepers?

For my part, the work is an interesting kind of argument and not a Prolegomena for any future Metaphysics. If I resist that latter conclusion, am I, too, a gatekeeper? — Paine

No not at all, I am in a thread on Schopenhauer right now, for example.. I don't think I am "gatekeeping" it. Gatekeeping is deciding who gets to participate.. And it seems a certain kind of engager-with-Wittgenstein is seen as legitimate.. And this engagement takes the form of only refuting Wittgenstein with varying levels of better or worse or informed or uninformed interpretations of Wittgenstein. There is an implicit idea that whatever it is, you can't directly refute Wittgenstein, because you see, you simply don't "understand" him.. And this gets compounded because since you don't "understand" him, they will ignore you, or sideline you for the ones who they agree with who are informed.

It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. Thoughts? — Leontiskos

I mean... :yikes:

For what its worth, Wittgenstein was a complex philosopher. His methodology was methodological nominalism, and when you apply methodological nominalism towards philosophy as therapy, you get a complex relationship between examples elucidating a way out of the bottle for the fly, which is the whole of the Philosophical Investigations. Compound the fact that the Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus was meant as a preface to the Philosophical Investigations, then you might have a lot of questions about what the TLP and then the PI meant. In my opinion, if people started with the blue and brown books, which were presented in a university setting where Wittgenstein taught for a brief while, you might find it easier to understand Wittgenstein. — Shawn

There's a lot of complex philosophers...

Are you suggesting that I am 'gatekeeping' that thread? I didn't have much to say about Wittgenstein anyway.

Sorry if it seemed like it.

:lol: :lol: :lol: Daring thread

Are you suggesting that I am 'gatekeeping' that thread? I didn't have much to say about Wittgenstein anyway.

Sorry if it seemed like it. — Shawn

Ok. I just don't understand why Wittgenstein seems peculiarly treated like a prophet who one must just "read better" rather than one can have a critique of.. If someone critiques Schopenhauer, many take that as a matter of course.. Or Aristotle, or Plato.. But Wittgenstein.. woe woe wait a minute. Did you not read his blue and brown books IN ORDER???

And the same I must say happens when it comes to Nietzsche and his great mustache.

Daring thread — Lionino

:smirk:

I mean... :yikes: — schopenhauer1

Usually thinkers have successors, but it seems like Wittgenstein doesn't have any clear-cut successors, perhaps because the meaning of his thought is not determinable. At that time in history there was a revolutionary attitude that swept through many disciplines, and also reached beyond academia. Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru).

Wittgenstein strikes me as someone who was trying to be original, to such an extent that he becomes opaque and even somewhat mystical (again, almost like a guru). — Leontiskos

I think you are getting closer to it.. The aphoristic style lends itself to people reading it like a prophet.. holy writ almost. And again, Nietzsche's style does the same.. Clever. Clever.

For what its worth, Wittgenstein wasn't a system builder like most of the other greats in the history of philosophy. He simply had a personality and charisma like none other philosopher.

So, since this matters so much to the individual, then I suppose there's some aura always around the appeal of Wittgenstein, as with other perplexing characters of philosophy (like Socrates or Kant)...

The aphoristic style lends itself to people reading it like a prophet.. holy writ almost. — schopenhauer1

Yep. But there's also the strange juxtaposition with the analytic context, which is different from Nietzsche.

I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question.

Second, clearly Nietzsche is the king when it comes to devotees citing his words as Scripture. Thomists do this too, but they at least tend to only do it to other Thomists. Marxists are infamous for this as well.

Certainly, there is a tendency for hardcore Wittgensteinans to denigrate the value of many areas of philosophy. This stems from the idea that they can't meaningfully be spoken about.

You might find Rorty's typology of Wittgenstein's descendents interesting here. In general, it's going to be the "therapeutic Wittgensteinians," who see a good deal of philosophy as simply time wasting incoherence, which he sort of gets at.

But because of his early work Wittgenstein also attracts people who find a natural home in analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy has its own problems with labeling whole huge swaths of philosophy as "incoherent," and thus not worthy of discussion. Also, you get the problem of people mistaking complexity for good argument—pointing to the characteristics of formal systems when the question at hand has to do with metaphysics, epistemology, etc. I have attorneys in my family and they do this all the time in political conversations , pointing to what the current law is, special legal terminology, etc., when the issue being discussed is really "what is just in this case" (i.e., what the law ought to be).

This is hardly unique though. Eliminitivists very often seem to confuse presenting an avalanche of facts and the complexity of neuroscience with good argumentation, and this can lead to the tendency to fall into a pernicious habit of equating mastery of complex terminology with sound reasoning or even intelligence (you can see this with Continental philosophy at times too).

Since I find Russell to be particularly uncharitable, I don't mind calling him out as an exemplar of someone who used to point to cutting edge mathematics that few people understood in his day to try to put his arguments over the top by simply making them impossible to understand and then only time and the dispersion of knowledge in these areas has allowed people to point out that some of his appeals to mathematics are simply not very good arguments.

I think it might be fair to say that a bit of hubris overflows into the audience too. I mean, this is a guy who claimed to have "solved philosophy," and IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime.

It seems like Wittgenstein's work is inherently resistant to interaction with the rest of philosophy. — Leontiskos

There are a lot of philosophers who are "in-house baseball," such that they are only accessible to those who have read them at some length (and this is particularly true of much of the continental tradition). There are others who are not enigmatic, and can be read profitably even by those who are unfamiliar with them. This latter group are most conducive to public philosophy forums.

Wittgenstein is a strange animal in that he appears to be publicly accessible, and his adherents genuinely believe that his thought will be easy to access. But then when someone less familiar with Wittgenstein starts reading him and asking obvious questions, the weather suddenly changes and Wittgenstein becomes this enigmatic figure whose thought one must be initiated into by special rituals. It seems to me that this is just a defense mechanism that intervenes whenever Wittgenstein looks to be wrong. To consider a real objection to Wittgenstein would require accepting the possibility that Wittgenstein's paradigm and presuppositions might be incomplete. It would require a mental distance where Wittgenstein and, say, Schopenhauer are placed on equal footing, and such things cannot be tolerated by those who are truly loyal to Wittgenstein!

I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Let's say X is decidedly not acting in good faith. How should we engage with X? With good faith or bad faith? Forget morality — we don't think about how to bring about the greatest amount of welfare when we discuss with someone, let's not pretend otherwise —, what is strategically more sound?

Antonia Soulez (sorry, I cannot find a public link to it) makes interesting observations that Wittgenstein's references to Plato, Kant, Russell, etcetera are not designed to solve their problems but as instances of what concerns his views and development. That suggests a conscious departure from the "philosophy of history" discussion.

Some have made that departure to be a parting shot, an assassination in Deleuze's view or a trip to the couch for various expressions of "therapy."

As an opponent of the means of 'natural sciences" to explain everything, I think it is helpful to compare Wittgenstein to others who did something seemingly similar but chose to wear the ermine of The Philosopher of History.

Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein.

I would question whether this is a particularly helpful or good faith way to pose the question. — Count Timothy von Icarus

He's frustrated and he's posting out of frustration, but in this case I think there is a legitimate reason for the frustration. Perhaps it's okay to exorcise the Wittgenstenianism of the forum, if it truly is getting out of control. I want to say that whenever excessive gatekeeping occurs on a public forum it should be checked, and unfortunately the checks that occur naturally are also somewhat infelicitous. Maybe that's okay.

What is it about SPECIFICALLY Wittgenstein that it elicits the worst forms of elitism and gatekeeping in this forum? — schopenhauer1

Maybe because no one understands (or accepts)

(1) Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.

(2) I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition.

(3) The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know.

(4) A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.

(5) The classifications made by philosophers and psychologists are like trying to classify clouds by their shape.

(6) Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in 'philosophical propositions', but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.

(7) What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle — Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wow, this is an excellent response and analysis with specific examples. Good job! :up:

Second, clearly Nietzsche is the king when it comes to devotees citing his words as Scripture. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:smirk:

Certainly, there is a tendency for hardcore Wittgensteinans to denigrate the value of many areas of philosophy. This stems from the idea that they can't meaningfully be spoken about. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh god, how many times is this going to be dragged out as the definitive, conversation killer :roll: :lol:. In a way, it was perfectly designed for the smug personality types :lol:. I mean, the fact that you can misconstrue "non-sense" with "nonsense" and the play with words there alone is rife for dbaggery when it comes to engaging with others who might have a different notion of metaphysics and its place in philosophy.

You might find Rorty's typology of Wittgenstein's descendents interesting here. In general, it's going to be the "therapeutic Wittgensteinians," who see a good deal of philosophy as simply time wasting incoherence, which he sort of gets at. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Oh, I have to get acquainted with his reading there- he even has "types" of Wittgenstein descendants :). Someone was paying attention...

But because of his early work Wittgenstein also attracts people who find a natural home in analytic philosophy, and analytic philosophy has its own problems with labeling whole huge swaths of philosophy as "incoherent," and thus not worthy of discussion. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ugh.

Also, you get the problem of people mistaking complexity for good argument—pointing to the characteristics of formal systems when the question at hand has to do with metaphysics, epistemology, etc. I have attorneys in my family and they do this all the time in political conversations , pointing to what the current law is, special legal terminology, etc., when the issue being discussed is really "what is just in this case" (i.e., what the law ought to be). — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yep.. I can see that.

This is hardly unique though. Eliminitivists very often seem to confuse presenting an avalanche of facts and the complexity of neuroscience with good argumentation, and this can lead to the tendency to fall into a pernicious habit of equating mastery of complex terminology with sound reasoning or even intelligence (you can see this with Continental philosophy at times too). — Count Timothy von Icarus

For sure.. I think this can pervade any type of academic or abstract thinking.

Since I find Russell to be particularly uncharitable, I don't mind calling him out as an exemplar of someone who used to point to cutting edge mathematics that few people understood in his day to try to put his arguments over the top by simply making them impossible to understand and then only time and the dispersion of knowledge in these areas has allowed people to point out that some of his appeals to mathematics are simply not very good arguments. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up: Good observations there.

I think it might be fair to say that a bit of hubris overflows into the audience too. I mean, this is a guy who claimed to have "solved philosophy," and IIRC from some biographical thing I read he never bothered to read Aristotle in his lifetime. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yeah, hubris appeals to those with a similar hubris?

I think as another commenter was saying, the style of Wittgenstein, might have a lot to do with this as well. Nietzsche does a similar thing.

Antonia Soulez (sorry, I cannot find a public link to it) makes interesting observations that Wittgenstein's references to Plato, Kant, Russell, etcetera are not designed to solve their problems but as instances of what concerns his views and development. That suggests a conscious departure from the "philosophy of history" discussion.

Some have made that departure to be a parting shot, an assassination in Deleuze's view or a trip to the couch for various expressions of "therapy."

As an opponent of the means of 'natural sciences" to explain everything, I think it is helpful to compare Wittgenstein to others who did something seemingly similar but chose to wear the ermine of The Philosopher of History.

Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein. — Paine

Thanks, very interesting. :up:
This all makes sense to me.

Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

THIS I agree with. But when one tries to treat philosophy as an activity and engages with people who treat it as rather static doctrine that can only have levels of understanding... Activity becomes dismissed, because it is not adherent-like (accepted) hermeneutics over the sacred text...

Wayfarer and I were talking about how Schopenhauer can be taken as phenomenology, although Schop himself didn't seem to think of it that way. We know Witt read Schopenhauer. The Tractatus contains language that's very reminiscent of Schopenhauer, and it can be taken as a warning about stepping beyond phenomenology into theory. You read the assholedness into that. There wasn't any intended.

Spot on. But, I see the point here as with the person Wittgenstein, not his writings, no?

You know, the guy who wrote what you said during World War I, actually on the front lines, and baffled Bertrand Russell with his intelligence, and gave away all his money to his family, and designed a house and built it, and was always in his conception a logician (more so than a philosopher), and yada yada...

Heidegger is the true antipode to Wittgenstein. — Paine

Interesting..Care to elaborate?

What are your main disagreeances or suggestions for alternate interpretation you think could lead to greater understanding or utility of his works in the simplest most direct way and why?

eg. Debater A believes when Wittgenstein claims/makes reference to X it alludes to Y, while I believe X is actually a case against Y in favor of Z... etc, etc.

You can't convince everyone of your view. If it's not well-received, one might consider that ought be the end of it. If you're right or have something to offer the discussion those involved are choosing to ignore, their loss, no? You can lead a horse to water. No need to beat it to the death if it's not particularly thirsty. :chin:

“My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.54

That sounds deep, and there is wisdom in it - words really do get in the way of what they are trying to do, sometimes - but I sum up Wittgenstein as saying "Let me explain to you how there is no such thing as an explanation."