The family Wittgenstein
I had heard about the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein back in college. The sum total of what I knew about him was that he said something or other about how we can’t speak about things we have no words for.
But the other day I got curious about him, and it struck me that I really knew next to nothing about Wittgenstein, who is supposed to be one of the biggest philosophers of the 20th century.
Well, I still don’t know much about Wittgenstein’s philosophy—which seems somewhat impenetrable, so I won’t speak about it. But the family—the family!! I don’t think I’ve ever read of a more astoundingly brilliant, eccentric, troubled, complex group of people.
Note, also, the history of Ludwig’s brother Paul.
I won’t bother to describe further. Just read.
Three of the five brothers would later commit suicide?
Well, that certainly gives me second thoughts about the benefits of of home schooling.
Still, a remarkably accomplished family.
What caught my attention in Neo’s post was this part: “… he said something or other about how we can’t speak about things we have no words for.” As I was reading those words,…. Bam! it hit me: the flash of recalling a concept I had been taught back in 1971 or so: the Sapir—Whorf hypothesis. The meaning I took away from it then is that if human beings don’t have a word for something they can’t even conceive of it. Until reading Neo’s post I hadn’t thought about this hypothesis in over 40 years….
The hoity-toity types at Wikipedia remind me that there are two versions of the Sapir—Whorf hypothesis : (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour.
Similar to what I understand Wittgenstein’s observations to have been (“Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully, and therefore the limits of what can be thought”). Hmmm. And these guys seem toi have been contemporaries.
Reading Neo’s post and links and recalling the S-W hypothesis reminded me how impressed I was by this insight “back in the day”. I bet I even thought ( and might had said), “Wow man, that’s heavy”.
LOL, that Neo is a veritable bag of virtual-psychedelic surprises! This is not the first time that something she’s written gave me a flashback.
One of the oddest things I ever learned about Wittgenstein was that he was a passionate fan of Carmen Miranda movies.
carl in atlanta:
As an anthro minor, I remember Sapir-Whorf quite well, too, although I could only have answered it correctly at this point in a multiple-choice exam.
I thought it interesting, but odd. We keep coining new words, for example. But I think most people’s thoughts are formed and shaped at least to a large extent by the language to which they’re born (weak version, I guess).
We think and convey all the time things for which we have no words. Poetry, images, music, sound effects, similes, metaphors, parody, satire, gestures and acting, those countless complexes we recognize sometimes long before the neologism or phrase captures it.
When Shakespeare said ““The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from heaven to Earth, from Earth to heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.”–the things aren’t really “unknown”–the phantom is there, the localized shimmer, hovering, before the embodiment in poem, gesture, phrase, new term, melody, or image. And even when captured, the complex spreads out to exceed the envelope of the habitation.
Isn’t this one of the reasons it is so problematic to design hardware/software that translates well, or that can communicate with facility and flair? We recognize the aptness and the art in the new because we experienced its antecedents, inchoate as they might have been.
Interesting article here about a visit Wittgenstein made to Ithaca, New York, in 1949.
From a letter he wrote while there:
Strange guy.
Ann:
I guess Wittgenstein was prefiguring Spiegelman’s Maus series.
Minta Marie Morze has said what I was thinking, though far more eloquently than I could. Never having studied Wittgenstein or Sapir-Whorf, it seems to me that both have things exactly and obviously backward. Of course we can conceive of things we don’t yet have words for; that’s why we make new words. If people couldn’t conceive of things they didn’t have words for, language could never have gotten started because, without language, no one could have conceived of anything. The concept must come first as the reason for the formation of the word — how would we go about creating a word for a concept we didn’t have yet? Think of Helen Keller with her hands in the water: she recognized that the letters Annie Sullivan was spelling into her hand meant “water” — and in fact, that the letters were a word and that the word had meaning — only because the water came first; she was already experiencing the wordless concept of water in her hands and mind before she encountered the word, and it was the concept of water that gave meaning to the word.
This seems so self-evident that there must be something about this whole idea that I am completely failing to understand.
Mrs Whatsit…
While I’m in your camp… Over the years I’ve found that I had to invent all of the new words for my employees.
For the vast bulk of the population really is dependent upon others to coin new terminology.
Wider adoption of given terms also seems to require social dominance on the part of the naming person.
Neo, have you ever heard Monty Python’s “Philosopher’s Song”? I had the pleasure of seeing them perform it live at the Hollywood Bowl in ’79.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_WRFJwGsbY
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There’s nothing Nietzsche couldn’t teach ya’
‘Bout the raising of the wrist.
SOCRATES, HIMSELF, WAS PERMANENTLY PISSED…
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will,
On half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.
Plato, they say, could stick it away;
Half a crate of whiskey every day.
Aristotle, Aristotle was a bugger for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart: “I drink, therefore I am”
Yes, Socrates, himself, is particularly missed;
A lovely little thinker but a bugger when he’s pissed!
And once more, via tragedy, art blooms.
When you can, please enjoy the lovely Ravel Concerto for the Left Hand, written for brother Paul. There are scads of versions on YouTube, of course. If you love Ravel’s music (and I do), you will love this. A noble and dramatic work, it begins with a solo for the contrabassoon, of all things. It explores the nether regions of the tonal palate, since that’s where the left hand does its work on the piano.
Anyone with an interest in learning about Wittgensteint should see Ray Monk’s biography, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius.” It’s first-rate — about both the man and his philosophical views.
Going from the sublime to the … well, considerably less sublime, one could also spend 5 minutes on a short review of mine of a book about Wittgenstein and Popper (which is, I think, accessible to non-subscribers to the Weekly Standard):
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/001/090nluzu.asp