Wittgenstein's Thought in Transition

Conclusion: Wittgenstein's Philosophical Legacy

CONCLUSION IWittgenstein's . Philosophical Legacy In a certain sense one cannot take too much care in handling philosophical mistakes, they contain so much truth. - Wittgenstein, Zettel §460 \Wittgenstein stands at the crossroads oftwo major trends in contemporary philosophy. Although his place in both traditions has frequently been oversimplified, Wittgenstein's early philosophy remains among the most enduring paradigms of logical-philosophical analysis, and, with due qualifications, of the logical and methodological program of logical positivism. Wittgenstein's later lectures and posthumous writings at the same time continue to inspire a second Wittgensteinian philosophical revolution in ordinary language philosophy. Wittgenstein's thought is more complex than either of these descriptions suggests. The logical positivists ofthe Vienna Circle who took the Tractatus as a guidebook were disappointed to find that Wittgenstein, despite agreements on certain matters oflogical form and literal significance, had little sympathy for positivism as a philosophical movement. Many philosophers today profess greater affinity with and loyalty to Wittgenstein's early formalistic approach to logic and philosophy than with his later emphasis on the practical cultural contexts oflanguage games in forms of life. Yet many modern-day proponents ofWittgenstein's early philosophy do not accept his semantic transcendentalism, ofwhich they are either unaware or which they find ideologically embarrassing. Thus, there is a philosophical predisposition for some commentators to interpret the Tractatus as a purely extensionalist theory of sentence meaning, without acknowledging its underlying Kantian-Schopenhauerian transcendental idealism, nor seriously integrating the text's religious and ethical-aesthetic dimensions with its logic, metaphysics, and semantics. In Wittgenstein's early philosophy, meaning is abstract; in the later philosophy, it has a very human pulse. Many philosophers I 321 322 leo N C L U S ION who by contrast believe themselves to be philosophically more sympathetic to the later Wittgenstein, who identify themselves as Wittgensteinian in their own work, often misunderstand, misapply , or simply ignore some ofWittgenstein's most important methods and conclusions in the later philosophy of language. There are various movements in recent analytic philosophy that claim to follow the later Wittgenstein, but that do not make use of anything like Wittgenstein's framework for investigating the philosophical grammar of language games in forms of life. Wittgenstein 's later discovery of the praxeological foundations of language admittedly takes much of its data from ordinary ways of speaking, and assumes as does the early philosophy that everyday language is somehow logically correct. But the concept of a Wittgensteinian philosophy of language is sometimes implausibly made to cover virtually any philosophy of ordinary language in. the most general sense. Wittgenstein's later philosophy has a specific content and a characteristic way of selecting and handling examples that cannot be reduced to and is not adequately practiced by any and every attempt to shake off philosophical problems by refining definitions ofterms from their occurrence in ordinary language. In the later period,Wittgenstein rejects his early logical atomism and picture theory semantics. He seems thereby to leave behind any trace ofpositivism along with the rest ofthe Tractatus wreckage. Yet Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations insists that there can be no private mental naming or private mental describing of private mental objects, precisely because there can be no publicly verifiable criteria of correctness for naming private mental objects. The later philosophy in its antitranscendentalism no longer supports a transcendental solipsism of the metaphysical subject or philosophical 1. But Wittgenstein's obsession with solipsism and the impossibility of a private language in the later philosophy appear to be different expressions of much the same philosophical yearning for nothingness. The self vanishes into thin air in Wittgenstein's early philosophy if there is no logically possible language in which anything intelligible can be said about the transcendent metaphysical subject or philosophical I, or about the subjective propositional attitude states of the psychological ego, self, or soul. The person equally disappears in the later philosophy when Wittgenstein concludes that there can be no private mental naming or private mental describing of private mental occurrences. By excluding all discourse about irreducible subjectivity from any possible language game, Wittgenstein again but in quite a different way reduces everything about 323 I Wittgenstein's Philosophical Legacy the human condition to the world of facts in what he -refers to in the early philosophy as "superficial psychology." I have tried to explain the evolution of Wittgenstein's' thought as a transition from transcendental idealism to empirical realism. The remarkable...