So I just finished my final essay for my Wittgenstein class. I think it’s a good essay, and I’ll publish it here after I submit it for a grade. But at the end of the class (well, I still have a final to take, but the writing part is over). I’m a little restless. Reading Wittgenstein is a lot of work, and the class has been taxing intellectually in a lot of ways. Also, I am now going to run out of people to talk with about it. There are some discord groups I am on, but they have a degree of asynchrony to them that makes having conversations difficult. But part of it is climbing the mountain and being confused at the top of it.
Ultimately, at the end of the day, Wittgenstein doesn’t offer a lot of answers. You can question whether or not that is the purpose of philosophical study (and Wittgenstein certainly does), but I think that, and a love of arguing, are what attracts a lot of people to studying it.
A lot of people are fond of quoting the final proposition of the Tractatus “About things we cannot speak of we must keep silent”, and it is a fucking banger of a quote. But the broad implication of both the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations is that there is a *lot* we cannot talk about. For Wittgenstein, most of philosophy is ‘solved’, in that there’s a lot of it we cannot communicate effectively about. The “why” of this changes between the two works, but the main activity of philosophy, for Wittgenstein, remains clarifying what we cannot talk about. And it’s a big chunk of what we would consider “philosophical”. Ethics, metaphysics, other great swathes of thought are all ‘off the table’ in some sense in Wittgenstein’s world. He felt that these things could be ‘shown’, but not discussed. But it remains unclear, at least to me, what that would look like.
I’m far from an expert. There are yards and yards of writing about Wittgenstein’s work, and it’s entirely possible that I am missing something but what it all seems to be is an abandonment of a search for any sort of universals, and a kind of mystical awakening alluded to near the end of the Tractatus :
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 surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.
Presumably, Wittgenstein ‘saw the world rightly’, but it doesn’t seem to have resulted in much. He quit philosophy, taught children, worked as a gardener, helped design a house. From the biographical information I have, it didn’t seem to create in him any sense of satisfaction. Indeed, the previous proposition in the Tractatus spells this out:
The correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said, i.e. propositions of natural science—i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy—and then, whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his propositions. Although it would not be satisfying to the other person—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—this method would be the only strictly correct one.
So, yeah, I am a tad unsatisfied. Wittgenstein has a way of writing, particularly under close reading, that gives one the impression that there’s something under the words; the Tractatus reminded me in parts of Zen Koans, though I later came to think that it’s sort of one long koan, you can’t really quote it in isolation, there’s an interconnected nature to it that defies the surface nature of the aphoristic structure.
“But Wittgenstein repudiated the Tractatus!”
Well, straw man, you’re not really correct. From what I can tell, he never ditched the conclusion. He came to see the method with which he came to the conclusion as incorrect, and sort of thought of “the activity” of philosophy as now having different forms. But they both are critiques of the way that we communicate, and both draw lines about what we can effectively communicate. And yes, I’m still a prep cook in the kitchen of philosophy, but this is akin to leaning that the guy running the kitchen is microwaving everything. Maybe the food even tastes not bad, but it’s kind of disappointing, even to the chef.
So where to go from here? I am not certain. I’m done with the class, but I suspect I am not done with Wittgenstein. We’ve got some more work to do.
The Lithole 
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