Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Post-Modern Philosopher?

“Struck by this realization, Wittgenstein insisted that the best thing now was simply to stop doing philosophy and to try and find in life what could not be said with certainty.”

Introduction

Calling Ludwig Wittgenstein an important predecessor to the philosophy of post-modernism may strike some as odd, given that, superficially, he has comparatively little to say about cultural issues—let alone morality and politics. This appears to have been intentional on his part; for all the distinctions between his early and later period, Wittgenstein remained committed to the position staked out as early as the Tractatus that philosophy as philosophy could say little of interest about what was most important in life. Instead, we needed to approach such questions as matters of faith and conviction, rather than reason and logic. But this undervalues the implicit concern with such topics that runs through his work, often bubbling up with the striking intensity that was characteristic of both his writing and his personality. In many ways, the limits of language and logic described by Wittgenstein—combined with his ultimately therapeutic insistence that we must be cured of a desire for certainty if we are to be able to live—reflect the day-to-day dilemmas into which post-modern individuals fell better than the epochal but also shrill ruminations of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger.

In the remainder of this essay—drawn from my forthcoming book The Rise of Post-Modern Culture, a sequel to the earlier Rise of Post-Modern Conservatism, I will detail the influence this important figure has had on post-modern theory. This can help us better understand the complex discipline. I will conclude by summarizing why—despite the fact that Wittgenstein himself would likely have been hostile to post-modern theorizing—he, nevertheless, inspired many of its most well-known figures.

The Early Wittgenstein

This emphasis on the therapeutic is at the epicenter of Wittgenstein’s philosophy in all its periods, though always in a curious way. One is never certain whether he wants to cure us of the desire to do philosophy by showcasing how little of interest it can actually accomplish—or if he desires to transform philosophy itself into a cure to liberate us from bad ideas. The answer seems to lie in the typically strict definition of philosophy that underpins Wittgenstein’s work: that it is fundamentally an enterprise that aims to make absolutely certain statements about the world. This is, of course, what Wittgenstein felt that he accomplished in the Tractatus , a mysterious but remarkable text that consists of seven numbered propositions that the author, in the introduction, claims solve the problems of philosophy in a manner which is “unassailable and definitive.” The downside to this closure is that the book also demonstrates in a manner that is equally “unassailable and definitive” that very little of great interest is accomplished by bringing the problems of philosophy to a close. We learn that the world is all that is the case; it consists ultimately in a totality of atomic facts (not of things) and that our thoughts depict a logical picture of the facts as a totality of propositions. Around proposition 4, we come to the assertion that most philosophers, thus far, have reasoned about matters which are senseless, since the questions posed cannot be answered through an appeal to facts about the world. They are thus, literally, nonsensical:

“Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.”