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wittgenstein The Blackwell Great Minds series gives readers a strong sense of the fundamental views of the great western thinkers and captures the relevance of these fi gures to the way we think and live today. 1 Kant by Allen W. Wood 2 Augustine by Gareth B. Matthews 3 Descartes by Andr é Gombay 4 Sartre by Katherine J. Morris 5 Charles Darwin by Michael Ruse Schopenhauer 6 by Robert Wicks edited by Steven Nadler blackwell great minds 7 Shakespeare ’ s Ideas by David Bevington 8 Camus by David Sherman 9 Kierkegaard by M. Jamie Ferreira 10 Mill by Wendy Donner and Richard Fumerton 11 Socrates by George H. Rudebusch 12 Maimonides by T.M. Rudavsky 13 Wittgenstein by Hans Sluga blackwell great minds wittgenstein Hans Sluga A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication This edition fi rst published 2011 © 2011 Hans Sluga Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientifi c, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Offi ce John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offi ces 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offi ces, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Hans Sluga to be identifi ed as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sluga, Hans D. Wittgenstein / Hans Sluga. p. cm. – (Blackwell great minds ; 13) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-1847-7 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4051-1848-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. I. Title. B3376.W564S58 2011 192–dc22 2011009297 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs ISBN: 9781444343281; Wiley Online Library ISBN: 9781444343311; ePub ISBN: 9781444343298; Mobi ISBN 9781444343304 Set in 9 on 12 pt TrumpMedieval by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited 1 2011 contents preface vi abbreviations x 1 the situated thinker 1 2 the world and its structure 20 3 the limits of language 39 4 the prodigious diversity of language games 57 5 families and resemblances 76 6 our unsurveyable grammar 95 7 visible rails invisibly laid to infi nity 112 8 what is the use of studying philosophy? 131 index 151 p reface Ludwig Wittgenstein is, without doubt, a decisive fi gure in twentieth- century philosophy. In the radicalness of his questioning, in his determination to reshape the philosophical landscape, and in the power of his thinking and language he can be compared only to Martin Heidegger, who was his exact contemporary and came from an adjoining region of Europe. Why the two most original philosophical thinkers of the last century stemmed from related back- grounds can be understood only when we realize that all great philosophizing originates from a context of (social, political, cultural) endangerment. Plato and Aristotle shared such a context and so did Descartes and Hobbes, and so did, fi nally, our two twentieth- century thinkers. Wittgenstein and Heidegger lived through a particularly turbulent age in which European world domination came to an end in a series of painful con- tractions; they were born as Europe ’ s cultural crisis (the crisis of modernity) was becoming acute, and grew up in an area particularly exposed to its disrup- tions. These developments affected the two philosophers, however, in some- what different ways. In a previous book I have sought to characterize Heidegger ’ s philosophizing in the historical and political context of his time. Here I am looking at Wittgenstein’ s philosophical thought with an eye to our political realities. The circumstances of Wittgenstein ’ s life are, certainly, of the greatest interest in this respect. The philosopher belonged to a talented and successful family that occupied a pivotal place in the Austro - Jewish culture of late imperial Vienna – at a moment of last fl ourishing and incipient disintegration. Many of Austria ’ s cultural elite were associated with the Wittgenstein family and with the philosopher himself (Johannes Brahms, Gustav Mahler, Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Karl Kraus). When he took up philosophy, Wittgenstein also came to know some of the most creative philosophical thinkers of the age, men like Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G.E. Moore, Moritz Schlick, and Rudolf Carnap. In England, where he spent large parts of his adult life, he became in addition acquainted with leading intellectuals like John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey, and Alan Turing. This glittering background stands, however, in sharp relief to Wittgenstein ’ s foreboding sense of the darkness of his time and to his feeling of alienation from European and American civilization. While his work incor- porates all the impulses he had received from this civilization he sought at the same time to overcome it in his thinking. An heir to the rich heritage of modern European philosophy and culture, he saw himself nonetheless as a man alone at the crossroads. My primary goal in this book is to make Wittgenstein ’ s thought transparent for readers who have as yet little or no familiarity with it. I begin with an account of Wittgenstein ’ s life in order to illuminate the historical, political, and personal conditions from which his philosophical work emerged. The chapters that follow seek to identify some of the key concepts and ideas in Wittgenstein ’ s work. Given the scope of that work, I will have to omit much detail. My exposition will also more or less bypass what the experts have said about Wittgenstein ’ s thought. I will seek to present Wittgenstein ’ s thought, instead, predominantly in my own words. Knowledgeable readers will come to understand very quickly that the selection of topics and the emphases I have chosen in this book are very much my own. Philosophical texts are, after all, like the puzzle pictures that interested Wittgenstein so much. They can always be seen in more than one way. I will argue in Chapter 8 that because of the cultural and political changes that Wittgenstein and his contemporaries lived through, and in consequence of the no less dramatic changes in the way we live now, our deepest and most pressing problems must concern the condi- tions and the possibility of our human social and political existence. In exam- ining Wittgenstein ’ s ideas and concepts I am therefore particularly interested in asking how they relate to the historical and political context in which they arose and how they might be used in understanding that context. In the last chapter I will try to summarize these observations by asking how Wittgenstein ’ s thought may help us to face the peculiar problems of our contemporary social and political existence. Wittgenstein is best known for two of his writings. The fi rst is the dazzling and precocious Tractatus Logico - Philosophicus – a work he composed while serving as a soldier in World War I. Written in short, numbered propositions that range from technical discussions of logic to refl ections on the meaning of life, the book represents a challenge even to readers trained in philosophy. After completion of that work, Wittgenstein abandoned the active pursuit of philosophy for almost 10 years. When he returned to the subject, he began to revise his earlier assumptions and this new work eventually crystallized into his Philosophical Investigations , composed between 1936 and 1947 but pub- lished only in 1951 after Wittgenstein ’ s death. Since then, a large body of other writings has come to light such as the Blue and Brown Books of the early 1930s as well as Wittgenstein ’ s philosophical notes from the last years of his life, published now under the title On Certainty. Other volumes range from philosophical Notebooks written during World War I through the Philosophical Remarks , the Philosophical Grammar , the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics , and Zettel containing material from the 1930s, to extensive writings on the philosophy of psychology from the 1940s. The development of philosophy in the twentieth century would, certainly, have taken another course without that work. Wittgenstein infl uenced, in the preface vii fi rst instance, two generations of philosophers. In the 1920s he was of particu- lar importance to thinkers like Bertrand Russell and F.P.

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