David Egan Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein was my first great love in philosophy and the main focus of my doctoral research. Preparing an online talk about him last month, I realized I hadn’t spoken about Wittgenstein to a public audience in a while. I also realized I haven’t written an essay exclusively about him in any of my newsletters. So I thought I’d change that.

Wittgenstein was incandescently intelligent. He had never undertaken formal study in philosophy until he met Bertrand Russell in 1911. Within half a year, Russell—at the time, one of the world’s leading philosophers—realized that the roles of teacher and pupil had been reversed. Wittgenstein was 22 years old at the time.

And yet, Wittgenstein thought that intelligence wasn’t the most important quality in a philosopher. He remarked to one of his students that “in philosophy character will often make up for a lesser degree of intellect and talent—whereas it doesn’t hold the other way: a more powerful intellect but want of character.” And he wrote that the real difficulty in philosophy isn’t a matter of intellect but a matter of courage and will.

When I give my two-minute version of what makes Wittgenstein great, I tend to describe him as the anti-philosopher. Most philosophers are known for some big theory or idea about how things are or how they ought to be. Wittgenstein’s contribution—at least at first blush—seems deflationary in contrast. He argues that there’s less than meets the eye to the big theories and big ideas in philosophy. What seem to be the great problems of philosophy turn out to be puzzles we create for ourselves by misunderstanding the language that we use. The peculiar predicament of philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is that we speak under the illusion that we’re making sense when in fact we’re mouthing empty words. The illusion of saying something profound is beguiling, which is why puncturing it, as he sees it, requires strength of character more than it requires intellect.

By way of example, consider the problem of other minds. Ordinarily, I suppose that the people I encounter have thoughts and feelings and desires and sensations in roughly the same way that I do. But there seems to be a stark disanalogy between my knowledge of my own mind and my knowledge of other minds.

Consider a case that’s familiar to you if you’ve ever watched professional soccer (or football as people call it on this side of the Atlantic). A player running with the ball seems to get clipped in the ankle by an opposing defender and falls to the field, writhing in agony. It seems doubtful that he’ll ever walk again. And then, as soon as a free kick is awarded, he hops to his feet and gets on with the game as if nothing had happened.

The scenario is one instance of a familiar phenomenon: people can fake their own pain. And not just pain: we can fake anger, sadness, joy, compassion, and understanding. How is this possible? One natural explanation is to distinguish between the inner feeling and its outward expression. There’s the pain itself and then there’s the wincing, the crying, the clutching at the wounded limb or the ginger limp. The outward expression is a sign of the pain but the pain itself—the inner feeling—is private to the person experiencing it. The rest of us can only infer the pain from the behaviour, and our inference can be mistaken.

This possibility of misattributing inner states to others is the thin end of a philosophical wedge that some thinkers have driven very deep. If all I can know for certain is the outward expression of your inner states, I can never know those inner states with certainty. What’s more, I can’t even know those inner states exist. If someone else were a cunningly designed robot or lifelike zombie who had all the outward behaviour that corresponds to my own but no corresponding inner experience, I would be none the wiser. Strictly speaking, this thinking goes, I can’t ever claim to know about the inner experience of others at all.

Setting aside the more dramatic conclusions of this line of reasoning, it still seems to point to a troubling, even tragic, conclusion. My knowledge of other minds is always imperfect. While I have direct access to my own feelings, I can only at best infer the feelings of others from their behaviour, as it were trying to glimpse their feelings through the veil of their bodies. An insuperable barrier separates us from full intimacy with one another.

Wittgenstein wants to honour the basic facts that motivate this reasoning—for instance, the fact that we can be mistaken about the thoughts and feelings of others—while disrupting the temptation to generalize them into any kind of theory about the nature of our knowledge of other minds.

One of his moves against this generalizing tendency is to question the idea that I have knowledge of my own experience. “It can’t be said of me at all (except perhaps as a joke) that I know I’m in pain,” he writes. “What is it supposed to mean—except perhaps that I am in pain?” My experience of my own pain, you might say, is too intimate for questions of knowledge to get a grip. When I claim to know something, there’s usually a story I can give about how I found out the thing I know. But, for the most part, I don’t find out that I’m in pain. I just am in pain. The language of knowledge—which involves notions of learning, investigating, doubting, evidence, and so on—gets no grip when it comes to talking about my own pain. There’s no work there for the word “know” to do.

And if it doesn’t make sense to say that I know my own pain or other inner states, my knowledge of other people’s thoughts or feelings no longer seems second-rate. The skeptical move toward saying that I can never really know what’s going on with other people contrasts my supposedly imperfect knowledge of other minds with my certain knowledge of my own. But if my relation to my own thoughts and feelings isn’t one of knowledge, then my access to others’ thoughts and feelings doesn’t fall short of this impossibly high standard for knowledge.

The point isn’t that we can always know what’s going on with other people—we can misread others, and they can deceive us. The point is, rather, that sometimes we can know and sometimes we can’t. And that’s all there is to be said about the matter.

The impulse that motivates so much philosophy is to push beyond this sometimes-we-can-and-sometimes-we-can’t to a more general question about what’s really going on. People talk about making choices but when you examine the matter more closely it turns out that really free will is an illusion. People credit some actions as selfless but really all actions are selfish at their root. People talk about touching objects but a physicist can tell you that two objects never really touch—electron repulsion always maintains some space between the atoms.

As that last example shows, this tendency to talk about how things “really” are is hardly the unique province of philosophy. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that we all have at least a seed of that philosophical impulse within us. Wittgenstein writes of the perceived contrast between “the essential, great, universal” problems—the problems that address things as they “really” are—and “the non-essential, quasi-accidental problems,” before affirming that, as he sees it, “there is no such thing as a great, essential problem.”

Wittgenstein isn’t advocating a form of realism, according to which things really are the way they seem to us in ordinary life. Nor is he advocating a kind of pragmatism that counsels us to focus on practical issues rather than worrying about unanswerable questions about the ultimate nature of reality. Both realism and pragmatism accept that there’s a question to be asked about ultimate reality but either say that the answer doesn’t conflict with ordinary experience (realism) or that the answer doesn’t matter (pragmatism). Wittgenstein is saying something more radical: the very idea that there’s a question to be asked about ultimate reality is itself an illusion.

As I said, this can feel deflationary. But I think it’s actually profoundly edifying. There’s a temptation to think that the things that trouble us, and the solution to those troubles, float somewhere above our ordinary lives. Here I am in the thick of things, dealing with difficult relationships, imperfect knowledge, uncertainty about what I ought to do and why. Philosophy sometimes seems to offer a higher order of apprehension on these problems. If I could get some grasp on knowledge as such, meaning as such, what’s right and wrong, then I might find some solace.

This fantasy that we might step outside our own skins and transcend our earth-bound, time-bound, life-bound selves manifests an impatience or dissatisfaction with the homely existence that we have. That impatience and dissatisfaction makes us prone to inattention. In resisting the move toward abstraction and generalization, Wittgenstein tries to keep our feet on the ground and our attention focused on the life and world that is our proper home.

That’s one rough sketch of what I find special about Wittgenstein. If you want to read more, I’ve written a couple other pieces on Wittgenstein for public consumption. For Aeon, I took Wittgenstein’s remark that one can step into the same river twice as a prompt for thinking about the distinctive spiritual tenor of his work. And for The Point, I wrote about the humour that sometimes pops up in Wittgenstein’s work, and how it’s philosophically significant. 

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4. According to WHO estimates, one in twenty deaths worldwide is linked to alcohol. (source)
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