Wittgenstein was more of a mystic than a logician, though he tried to dress up his mysticism in what may at first glance appear to be logical garb in the Tractatus.[1] This is something the early Logical Positivist analytics of the Vienna Circle, perhaps willfully, did not understand. He was championing the very thing that they abhorred: religious mysticism.
When Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." He meant it in a respectful way, as a defense of religious mysticism. The Logical Positivists assumed that attitude in the exact opposite direction: to attack religious mysticism and religion in general. They labeled it as meaningless nonsense. No wonder Wittgenstein wanted nothing to do with them, despite their (misplaced and misunderstood) hero-worship of him.
I'm really not sure what any programmer would get out of reading the Tractatus... at least not for anything programming-related.
[1] - The full title being the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", just in case you missed that it was supposed to be logical and philosophical. Wittgenstein starts by labeling some of his statements as "axioms" and constructing what might appear as derivations.. which don't actually follow. On superficial inspection it might look like some kind of logical treatise, but that impression vanishes if you actually try to read and make sense of it.
Not the OP, but I've gone through your (very well written and well thought) answer and it reminded me of what it was that turned me away from Wittgenstein (even though at some point I was a big fan of his, in some regards I still am): I'm talking about the tautology that you also remarked about. I couldn't get over it once I realized it was there. At least Hegel (which I'm not a fan of, that's for sure) had the "courage" to surpass said "tautology" by inventing a conflict (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) that at least looked like it was carrying the conversation, that was carrying us, closer to the truth, with Wittgenstein you feel like nothing like that happens, you're just left sitting there. I'm not criticizing him or anything of the sorts, just stating what I felt.
It is also true that with age (I've now approached my late 30s) I've started to become less and less interested in inquiring about the "truth", or what "truth" means, or what "words" mean, i.e. the topics mostly related to philosophers like Wittgenstein and Heidegger (haven't read anything by Derrida yet), and instead I've started becoming more and more interested (and even obsessed) by what us, humans, really are and what we think. As such, I've started reading more and more political philosophy, and as such I can say that (at least for people like me) philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau are a lot more interesting and thought-provoking compared to the subjects approached by the likes of Wittgenstein or Heidegger.
Later edit: Because I just remembered later after writing most of the above comment: what also drove me away from modern/contemporary philosophers like Wittgenstein was reading a collection of the Heraclitus fragments. After reading them I realized that "truth" was, well, multi-faceted, polyvalent, taken at the limit truth was everything and nothing at all (which you could say that approaches some of Wittgenstein's views as well). More important of all, according to Heraclitus (or to my understanding of his sayings) "truth" and other philosophical-important concepts were on the same "level" as other, less important (from a philosophical point of view) concepts, i.e. that (again, taken to the limit) truth was falseness and falseness was truth. Once I realized that I was no longer interested in pursuing what "truth" is.
I think that Heidegger was more concerned with the human condition than you give him credit for, at least in Being and Time anyway. Given what you said, I think Derrida will certainly be of interest to you.
Not really, at least not until now (I’m in my late 30s). Technically the most “Eastern” philosopher that has had an influence on me was Lucian of Samosata (afaik Samosata was close to the present border between Syria and Turkey), but other than that I didn’t have the “inner drive”, so to speak, to immerse myself into Eastern philosophy. At least not until now. From a distance I do find some parts of it pretty interesting, but, again, that’s just a “guess”.
Come to think of it, I was pretty impressed by Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, who I think are the closest “Western philosophy” got to “Eastern philosophy”, even though I found that they’re not that much discussed in the Anglosphere.
Thank you for your detailed, thorough reply. It deserves a thorough response in return, but I must respectfully leave that to someone else, as my interest in Wittgenstein is not nearly enough to sustain such an effort. So I'll confine myself to commenting on just a few of your points:
First, if Wittgenstein was a logician, then I have to ask what his contribution to logic was. As far as I can tell, he never made one... certainly nothing even approaching Godel, who actually revolutionized logic. Wittgensteins impact on logic, on the other hand, was on all accounts nonexistant.
Maybe Wittgenstein was, as you say, an anti-logician and a philosopher. I won't dispute that.
You write:
"I see nothing mystical in these portions of the Tractatus, and I think it is a bit of a leap to call him a mystic on the grounds that he technically did not reject mystical/ethical statements as being false, only nonsensical and thus on par with tautologies of any kind."
How about these parts of the Tractatus:
5.621 The world and life are one.
5.63 I am my world. (The microcosm.)
6.432 How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for
what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.
6.44 It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it
exists.
6.45 To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole--a
limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole--it is this that is
mystical.
6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.
6.54 My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me
finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them,
on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he
has climbed up on it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he
will see the world aright.
7 What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
These are the statements that W chose to culminate his Tractatus with. They are what the rest led up to (6.432 combined with 6.522 and 7 are especially telling -- to take just 7 and use it in an anti-religious, anti-mystical way as the Logical Positivists did is a perversion of Wittgenstein's obvious intent here), and they are both explicitly and implicitly mystical.
Explicitly because he talks about mysticism itself. He addresses what is mystical, he defines it, it (and the transcendent) is what he at the crowning point of his book concerns himself with.
They are also implicitly mystical because the language and process he advocates are in the mystical tradition. The mystics often talk about the transcendent reality and God as something that can not be spoken of because it transcends human conception, words, and naming, and rather approach it apophatically (as that which it is not). So too does W approach what is of greatest concern to him.
The metaphor of using what one says as a ladder to climb up to the transcendent, at which point the ladder is no longer of use, is another common mystical metaphor. As the transcendent or God is beyond words, then what one says can only at best be a means to get there, and is not itself the point at all.
At the very least, I think you could say that W appropriated mystical and religious language to talk about his philosophical concerns, but I think there is more evidence (apart from the already cited sections of the Tractatus) that his concerns are actually primarily religious rather than philosophical. W himself said that "I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view", that "Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbüchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work." W's close friend Norman Malcolm wrote "Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers."
The last thing I want to address is your question (in regards to the statements in the Tractatus) "in what sense do they not follow?"
In a logical derivation, propositions follow one another based on axioms and using the rules of logic (like modus ponens, modus tollens, double negation, etc). Though there do seem to be some sort of axioms and maybe propositions in the Tractatus, they do not follow one another using the rules of logic. There is no such explicit connection between them. It is in that sense that they do not follow.
> First, if Wittgenstein was a logician, then I have to ask what his contribution to logic was. As far as I can tell, he never made one... certainly nothing even approaching Godel, who actually revolutionized logic. Wittgensteins impact on logic, on the other hand, was on all accounts nonexistant.
This might not be a satisfactory answer, but I always found it a fun fact: Wittgenstein is often credited for the invention of truth tables, having used them in the Tractatus.
As a sidenote: though Peirce is widely known as a Pragmatist, he was also a logician, and truth tables were but one of the many contributions he made to logic.
Thanks for the link, didn't know this was a "concept" per-se, so to speak, even less so that it had its own wikipedia page and that Wittgenstein had written about it. I've started thinking about this concept ever since I read Wilhelm von Humboldt's "The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind", where at some point he mentions that, taken at the limit, each of us speak our own, very private language (the book was written in the early 1800s).
That idea has stuck with me ever since and I've tried ways of both disproving and affirming it, now I'm mostly in the "affirming it" phase. As a quick example, one can just think of a sentence like "I love you", which means different things for different people, even if spoken in the same language, and, most important of all, it might mean (and in many cases it does mean) different things to different people who have lived together for decades (as husband and wife, for example, or as parents and children). On the other hand, more "neutral" sentences like "turn off the lights" seem to mean the same thing for a larger proportion of speakers.
Thanks for the Humboldt reference, haven't been that way and did not know of it. I'd guess it is a fairly common doubt, I remember wondering, as a schoolboy, if what everyone called green was perceived identically.
All this ends up being a centuries long conversation, and the current reference is merely the latest overlay. For instance, Wittgenstein mentioned that one must "throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it", riffing on Schopenhauer's scorn of those who carried books on their backs instead of leaving them behind as climbed ladder steps, and apparently it was Plato who spread the idea that there was a knowledge ladder to be climbed ...
When Wittgenstein said "Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent." He meant it in a respectful way, as a defense of religious mysticism. The Logical Positivists assumed that attitude in the exact opposite direction: to attack religious mysticism and religion in general. They labeled it as meaningless nonsense. No wonder Wittgenstein wanted nothing to do with them, despite their (misplaced and misunderstood) hero-worship of him.
I'm really not sure what any programmer would get out of reading the Tractatus... at least not for anything programming-related.
[1] - The full title being the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", just in case you missed that it was supposed to be logical and philosophical. Wittgenstein starts by labeling some of his statements as "axioms" and constructing what might appear as derivations.. which don't actually follow. On superficial inspection it might look like some kind of logical treatise, but that impression vanishes if you actually try to read and make sense of it.