As a sweeping particularization, you might say that the history of philosophy in this century is the history of Russell and his pupil Wittgenstein. By philosophy I mean of course not philosophy in general, but the strictly limited discipline which goes under that name mainly in the universities of the Anglo-Saxon countries. Most people, I suppose, know or think they know what philosophy in this specialized sense is. But it’s not easy to put it into words. It’s philosophy-at-large, after all the more grossly substantive and particular elements such as speculation upon the nature of man, society, religion, history, and so on, have been purged away. I’m not sure that it’s possible to define what remains without begging the question. Because what remains is to a considerable extent speculation upon the nature of what remains. One might almost say that philosophy, in this sense, is largely the philosophy of philosophy.
Whatever it is, though, it comes from Trinity College, Cambridge—from Russell, Wittgenstein, and Moore. Above all from Russell and Wittgenstein. For all the major philosophical ideas of this century were initiated, shaped, or inspired by one or the other of these two men, or by both of them together. Their collaboration and influence on each other were extraordinarily fruitful, though two more ill-assorted men can scarcely ever have worked together. Their later estrangement, when Wittgenstein turned his back upon everything they had done up till then, and Russell turned his back upon everything that Wittgenstein did thereafter, marks the ultimate frontier between traditional and modern philosophy. It is also a poignant example of the vicissitudes of alienation and mutual incomprehension to which even the most promising of human relationships are subject.
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Russell is one of those great men who stand like straight roads across the tangle of time, connecting us directly with the remoteness of the past. He was born in 1872; his character and associations take us back much further still. That beaky aristocratic profile in itself suggests the generations of enlightened but unquestioned privilege: what Russell calls his family’s “peculiar brand of aristocratic liberalism.” His godfather was John Stuart Mill. His parents, both freethinkers, died when he was a child, and he was brought up in the house of his grandfather, Lord John Russell. Lord John introduced the Great Reform Bill of 1832; visited Napoleon on Elba; was born at the height of the French Revolution, in the last decade of the 18th century. Bertrand Russell seems close to that time, in the same tradition as his great-great-grandfather, who after studying the depth of the lava on the slopes of Mount Etna announced that the world must have been created earlier than 4004 B.C. as the theologians held, and was cut by the County and ostracized from society as a result. The clear classical daylight of the 18th century shines through Russell’s thinking, and the elegant English prose in which it is set forth. “I like precision,” he wrote in ‘Portraits from Memory. “I like sharp outlines. I hate misty vagueness.”
The light is the light of reason, and it casts clear hard shadows, sharply distinguishing the true and the false. The natural world is brilliantly illuminated. The supernatural evaporates with the morning mists. Only man remains ambiguous. Sometimes he occupies the foreground of the picture, dominating the perspective; sometimes he is a tiny figure lost in the immensity of the landscape—a “groveling animalcule,” as Russell calls him in some moods, crawling upon the surface of “this petty planet.” As a boy, Russell became devoted to Shelley, and there is an oddly pantheistic strain in a letter which he wrote in 1918 to Constance Malleson:
I must, before I die, find some way to say the essential thing that is in me, that I have never said yet—a thing that is not love or hate or pity or scorn, but the very breath of life, fierce, and coming from far away, bringing into human life the vastness and fearful passionless force of non-human things. . . .
But at other times he looks at the universe, and all its grandeur seems to dissolve into something human after all—to be really nothing but the grandeur of the human intelligence through which it is understood:
Academic philosophers, ever since the time of Parmenides, have believed that the world is a unity. . . . The most fundamental of my intellectual beliefs is that this is rubbish. I think the universe is all spots and jumps, without unity, without continuity, without coherence or orderliness or any of the other properties that governesses love. The external world may be an illusion, but if it exists, it consists of events, short, small, and haphazard. Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions, just as are catalogues and encyclopaedias.
(The Scientific Outlook.)
His conception of philosophy, too, is classical. He sees it as a search for truth, in the way that scientists used to see science as a sort of universal anatomy—a laying bare of the world’s skeleton of natural laws. The picture which scientists and philosophers tend to prefer of themselves today, as builders constructing explanations which may eventually have to be knocked down to make room for road-widening, is alien to his nature. The truth he wished to locate, moreover, was of a special sort. It was the self-guaranteeing truth, the truth that could not be otherwise, which has lured philosophers over the centuries like the prospect of perpetual motion. Looking back upon his life on his eightieth birthday he wrote:
Up to the age of thirty-eight I was troubled by skepticism and unwillingly forced to the conclusion that most of what passes for knowledge is open to reasonable doubt. I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith.
(Portraits from Memory.)
He did not find it. He sought it for a long time in mathematics and logic, but was finally convinced by Wittgenstein that the dead certainties of these disciplines were certainties only because they were dead—because they were tautologies, which said nothing, but merely repeated themselves with more or less complexity. It cost him a good deal of pain to accept this. “The demand for certainty,” he told his biographer, Alan Wood, in later life, “is one which is natural to man, but is nevertheless an intellectual vice.” All the same, this demand for certainty, for truths which somehow come with their own validity stamped indubitably upon them, is fundamental to Russell’s work, and places him firmly in the central tradition of European philosophy. European philosophers—empiricists as well as rationalists—have always been driven by two linked compulsions. One is the obsession with the syllogism as the gold standard of reliability, the model truth process by which all other ways of obtaining information must be judged. The other is the consequent anxiety that all our ordinary knowledge of the world falls short of this ideal, and is therefore illusory, or in need of justification, or of translation into less misleading terms, or of reduction into statements which mention only the raw fragments of our immediate experience. Russell’s own contribution to logic, paradoxically, helped to discredit its claim to be the one valid central currency of truth. But he has never given up the idea that our statements about the world need to be justified by interpretation, and it is this which places him in the direct tradition of Descartes and Leibniz, of Berkeley and Hume, and which cuts him off from the sort of philosophy which is practiced by most other English philosophers today.
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Russell is above all else a logician. He may well be the greatest logician since Aristotle; certainly he is one of the very, very few whose discoveries in logic have had wide-ranging ontological implications for philosophy in general. He came to logic, and philosophy, by way of mathematics, which he read first when he went up to Cambridge in 1890. By the end of three years of undergraduate mathematics he had become very disenchanted with the subject. He felt that too much attention was paid to manipulative dexterity, and not enough to establishing the validity of the manipulations. It irritated him to be confined to operations within mathematics, when he wanted to ask questions from outside, about the system as a whole. What were numbers? How could mathematical proof have validity? How could mathematical operations apply to the world of things in some cases, and in other cases, with certain sorts of numbers, not apply at all?
After he had finished the Mathematical Tripos, he sold all his books and swore that he would not touch the subject again. He did, however, and it was his preoccupation with its foundations which finally launched him into his career in logic. In 1900, he attended the International Congress of Philosophy in Paris. It was the most important event, he said later, in the most important year of his intellectual life. Peano, of Turin, who had been working to prove that the whole of mathematics could be derived from five primitive axioms, was at the Congress, and Russell was deeply impressed by his performance in the discussions. He borrowed Peano’s complete works from him on the spot, and read them immediately.
He was struck by certain logical reforms proposed by Peano which made it possible to show that number was not derived from counting, as philosophers had previously supposed, but that counting was derived from number. On the earlier analysis, it had been difficult to show why any one thing should be counted as one. What was the quality of oneness which inhered in one orange, or in Polyphemus’s one eye? Why not point at Polyphemus’s eye and count “one, two, three”? Or “one, two, three, four, five”?
Peano suggested that the oneness was not a property of Polyphemus’s eye at all—it was a property of the property of being Polyphemus’s eye. In other words, the objects in the world which are defined by the property of being Polyphemus’s eyes form a class; and one of the properties of this class is that it has only one member. After Ulysses has put it out, Polyphemus has no eye. This is not to say that he has an eye which is to be counted as nought because it is the sort of eye in which the quality of noughtness can be perceived to inhere; the noughtness is clearly not the property of an eye, since an eye is just what there isn’t. To say that the Cyclops has no eye is to say that the class of objects defined by the property of being Polyphemus’s eyes has no member.
In fact this ground had already been covered sixteen years before by Frege, though Russell believes that Peano almost certainly didn’t know it. Ironically, Russell himself had been given a copy of Frege’s book, but had never read it.
Russell saw that Peano’s concept of number as a property of classes could be used to offer a definition of number in terms which were not mathematical but logical. Logic is the geometry of language. Its material is propositions, and its values are truth and falsity. Russell interpreted the properties which qualified things for class-membership as incomplete propositions, which could be completed by a certain range of subjects to make true propositions. In the case of Polyphemus, the incomplete proposition “is an eye of Polyphemus” can be truly predicated of one subject. Russell expressed this in terms of what he called “propositional functions,” based upon the familiar idea of functions in mathematics. In mathematics, y=x2 + 1, for example, is a function of x; the value of x2 + 1 depends upon the value given to x. So, proposed Russell, in the prepositional function “x is an eye of Polyphemus,” the value given to x determines the logical value (true/false) of the proposition. As we know, “x is an eye of Polyphemus” is true for one value of x. The propositional function “x is an eye of Ulysses” is true for two values of x. And so on. In other words, the notion of possessing a property has been subtly abstracted from the physical world of giants and eyes, and moved into the realm of language, where it is governed by the laws of logic.
Russell then showed that it was possible to enumerate the values of x for which a propositional function was true without using numbers, and employing only logical formulae. A class with one member is defined as a class with a member x, where if y is a member, then y is identical with x. Similarly, increasingly complex formulae cover classes with two members, three members, etc.
What Russell has defined here is not the numbers one, two, three, and so on, but specific cases of oneness and twoness. By a brilliant second application of the concept of classes he offered the general definitions in terms of the specific cases. One, he said, was the class of all classes with one member. Two was the class of all classes with two members. And so on. The mystery of mathematics—and the mysticism which it had evoked from philosophers—was over. Russell had shown that mathematics and logic were of the same flesh.
He had met Peano in July. On the last day of December (the last day, too, of the 19th century) he finished the draft of a book setting forth his system, under the title The Principles of Mathematics. “The months since the previous July,” he wrote later, “had been an intellectual honeymoon such as I have never experienced before or since. Every day I found myself understanding something that I had not understood the previous day. I thought all difficulties were solved and all problems were at an end.”
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The 20th century, and further work on the subject, brought disillusionment. Russell rewrote part of The Principles of Mathematics and began work with Whitehead on Principia Mathematica, a complete axiomatic systematization of mathematics on the basis of the new theory of number. It ran to three volumes, and involved Russell and Whitehead in ten years of the most grueling intellectual labor. Early in 1901, fundamental logical difficulties began to show up which weighed heavily upon Russell, who was mainly responsible for the philosophical aspects of the work. In the end these problems evoked from him solutions of great ingenuity, which influenced not only mathematical logic but the whole course of philosophy over the next forty years.
The difficulties were a series of paradoxes generated by terms and propositions which referred to themselves. One of the oldest and best-known of them is the paradox of the Cretan liar, to which St. Paul refers in the Epistle to Titus. Epimenides the Cretan said that all Cretans were liars. Or, as he might have said, to bring the paradox out more sharply, “I am now lying.” Is he lying? Or is he telling the truth? If he is lying, then he is doing what he claims, and is therefore telling the truth. If he is telling the truth, the truth is that he is lying.
The paradox of self-reference which harried Russell in his work on mathematical logic was one involving the concept he had introduced of classes of classes. One of the classes of classes, clearly, is the general one—the class of all classes. And since the class of all classes is a class, it must be a member of itself. Most classes, however, are not members of themselves—the class of oranges is not itself an orange—and there is plainly a class of all these classes which are not members of themselves. Now it occurred to Russell to ask: Is this class—the class of all classes which are not members of themselves—a member of itself? If it isn’t it is, and if it is it isn’t. Something, somewhere, had gone wrong.
Russell says that he felt this as almost a personal challenge, and would, if necessary, have spent the rest of his life in an attempt to meet it. He wrote to Frege to tell him about the paradox. Frege was stunned by it. He wrote: “Mathematics is tottering.” He did his best to repair the damage, but in the end gave up his life’s work on mathematical logic as misguided, and turned to geometry instead.
Russell himself regarded the problem at first as an irritating triviality, a mere detail to be set to rights before the main work could continue. But like a piece of grit which brings a great machine to a halt, it persistently blocked the progress of Principia Mathematica. Throughout 1903 and 1904, Russell’s work was almost entirely devoted to solving this paradox, without any sign of success.
“Every morning I would sit down before a blank sheet of paper,” he writes of this period, in the volume of autobiography which he published recently. “Throughout the day, with a brief interval for lunch, I would stare at the blank sheet. Often when evening came it was still empty.”
Eventually, as often happens, he came upon the start of a solution almost accidentally, as a by-product of his work on another set of problems. These were problems connected with the idea of existence. Philosophers had traditionally treated existence as a property, like yellowness or squareness, which a thing either possessed or did not possess. This conception of existence was the basis of the old ontological argument for the existence of God. Since God is defined as having all possible properties, the theologians argued, and existence is a property, God must by definition exist. The weirdness of this notion is brought out even more sharply if one considers what things are like when they fail to include existence among their properties. Meinong argued that even nonexistent things must exist in some strange sense, or we shouldn’t be able to talk about them, as we obviously can. If we can say that fairyland does not exist, and we can, then fairyland must have some sort of being, however tenuous, for us to be able to assert the property of non-existence of it.
Russell shone the light of the new logic upon this world of ghosts, and it vanished forever. Once again, he used the apparatus of propositional functions. Just as he had dissolved the concept of number by treating it as an attribute of classes defined by propositional functions, so he dissolved existence and non-existence by treating them as the truth or falsity of a propositional function for at least one value of the variable. In other words, he removed the concepts of existence and nonexistence from the physical (or metaphysical) world, and located them as logical concepts in the realm of language, as special cases of the logical concepts of truth and falsity.
All this is implied in Russell’s theory of descriptions, which he set forth in a paper entitled “On Denoting” for publication in Mind. “This doctrine struck the then editor as so preposterous,” says Russell, “that he begged me to reconsider it and not to demand its publication as it stood. I, however, was persuaded of its soundness and refused to give way. It was afterwards generally accepted, and came to be thought my most important contribution to logic.”
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The theory of descriptions was designed as a piece of technical equipment for the logician, but its general implications in philosophy were as radical and far-reaching as those of the thermionic valve in communications. It killed the simple assumption that where there was a word there was also a something that the word denoted. It discouraged what one might call the botanical view of philosophy—the idea that the purpose of philosophy was to discover what things were and what things were not in the realm of metaphysics, in the way that 19th-century botanists catalogued the varieties of plant life. It encouraged the idea, which has characterized philosophy in one way or another ever since, that the study of language and its logical topology is a primary source of philosophical insight.
These were long-term consequences. In the short term it suggested to Russell one way out of his difficulty with the class of all classes which are not members of themselves. It suggested that classes might go the way of fairyland, and indeed of numbers. It suggested that classes were not themselves things, but expressions by which one indicated the range of values of the variable for which a propositional function was true.
The paradoxes led Russell to another extremely fruitful solution as well—the theory of types. All the paradoxes of self-reference disappear if you rule that propositions which refer to other propositions are of a different logical type from the propositions referred to. A hierarchy of logical levels is created. First-order propositions refer to the world outside the hierarchy. Any proposition which refers to a first-order proposition must be a second-order proposition. A proposition referring to a second-order proposition is a third-order proposition, and so on. So we can interpret what Epimenides the Cretan said as an attempt to assert a first-order proposition about a first-order proposition (itself). The assertion is either false—because Epimenides is not, as he claims, asserting a first-order proposition—or, more plausibly, illicit and therefore meaningless. These concepts, both language-levels and meaninglessness as a third alternative to truth and falsity, were entirely new in philosophy. Twenty years later, they became the foundations of logical positivism.
Russell was thirty-eight when he and Whitehead finished the Principia. Logic is a young man’s profession, and his main work as a logician was now over. If he had died then, in 1910, he would have died a Wittgenstein; unknown to the general public, but with an immense and unalloyed reputation in the profession. In which case, would Wittgenstein have been a Wittgenstein?
Russell was disappointed by the reception of the Principia. He wrote once that he used to know of only six people who had read the later parts of it. (Schrödinger suggested that Russell and Whitehead had never read it themselves.) Indeed, it is the archetype of those monumental works which are often referred to with respect, but which are rarely read, and which exercise their influence on men’s minds by some curious form of osmosis through the back of the skull. In the case of the Principia the reason is perhaps not just its length and difficulty. The book is a rare example of a philosophical program which has actually been put into effect. Many philosophers have suggested programs of systematization or analysis. What is interesting about them is not the results, but the methods proposed for getting them. (I suspect that it is the confusion of results with methods which makes Gellner complain about the dullness of modern linguistic philosophy. Galvanized iron nails may be boring, but the process by which they are manufactured may well be unique and full of interest.) It is Russell’s fundamental logical insights—and above all the methods he devised for dealing with the difficulties cropping up along the road—which are the real fire at the heart of those three marmoreal volumes.
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It was probably in the year after the completion of the Principia that Ludwig Wittgenstein arrived at Trinity. His paternal grandfather was a Jew who had been converted to Protestantism, his mother a Roman Catholic. His father was a steel magnate in Austria, and Wittgenstein himself had been trained as an engineer; at Manchester, where he had been studying, he had designed a form of jet aircraft engine. He was also an amateur musician, sculptor, and architect. He became interested in mathematical logic apparently through reading Russell’s earlier book on the subject, the Principles, and at the age of twenty-two, on Frege’s advice, he came to Cambridge to study under Russell.
At first Russell regarded him somewhat quizzically. He wrote in Portraits from Memory:
He was queer, and his notions seemed to me odd, so that for a whole term I could not make up my mind whether he was a man of genius or merely eccentric. At the end of his first term at Cambridge he came to me and said: “Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?” I replied, “My dear fellow, I don’t know. Why are you asking me?” He said, “Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.”
Although Russell was almost twice Wittgenstein’s age, their relationship soon became one of equals, and in his obituary notice in Mind forty years later, Russell described getting to know Wittgenstein as “one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life.” Later still, he wondered if perhaps it hadn’t been a little too exciting. “Wittgenstein’s doctrines influenced me profoundly,” he wrote in My Philosophical Development. “I have come to think that on many points I went too far in agreeing with him.”
These two men, who between them have dominated the philosophical thinking of the English-speaking world in the 20th century, present the most striking contrast in character. Russell—gregarious, witty, dramatic, outgoing; married four times; passionately interested in politics and society. Wittgenstein—costive, solitary, profoundly pessimistic; perpetually in flight from society, from fame, from the exegesis of his disciples; obsessed with sin and the proximity of madness. There is something decidedly comic about this disparity, and Russell’s recollections of Wittgenstein at this period—though unfailingly generous in their appreciation of his “fire and penetration and intellectual purity”—mostly have a tone of humorous indulgence:
He used to come to my rooms at midnight, and for hours he would walk backwards and forwards like a caged tiger. On arrival, he would announce that when he left my rooms he would commit suicide. So, in spite of getting sleepy, I did not like to turn him out. On one such evening, after an hour or two of dead silence, I said to him, “Wittgenstein, are you thinking about logic or about your sins?” “Both,” he said, and then reverted to silence.
Wittgenstein did not remain in Cambridge very long. He withdrew to a hut in Norway; the first of many such retreats, some of them to Norway, or to a hut on the West Coast of Ireland, or to a hotel in Dublin. When the nightfall of World War I came down upon Europe, the two men lost sight of each other completely. Wittgenstein returned to Austria and volunteered for the army. Russell threw himself into his passionate opposition to the war, which took up most of his energies for the next four years. While he was in Brixton Prison, serving four months under the Defense of the Realm Act for a disparaging reference to the American army, he wrote another book on mathematical philosophy, on the last page but one of which is this moving footnote:
The importance of “tautology” for a definition of mathematics was pointed out to me by my former pupil, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was working on the problem. I do not know whether he has solved it, or even whether he is alive or dead.
Wittgenstein was not only alive; he was still working on the problem as he served at the front. In August 1918—at almost precisely the same time that Russell was writing his footnote in Brixton—Wittgenstein went to Vienna on leave and finished writing what was later entitled the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his first book, and one of the great cathedrals of Western philosophy. He had the manuscript of it in his pack when he was taken prisoner by the Italians, two days after the Armistice. From his prisoner-of-war camp at Monte Cassino he managed to send copies to Frege and Russell. Eventually he was released, after Russell had pulled strings, and the two men met at the Hague, where they went over the Tractatus together line by line.
In a way the Tractatus is the Word of Russell’s logic made philosophical Flesh. It is based upon three fundamental ideas. One is what Russell called logical atomism—the notion that, logically speaking, the fundamental fabric of the world is not things or thoughts, but facts. These facts are the atoms of logic—mutually independent, located in logical space in the way that atoms of matter are located in physical space. The second idea is that facts are pictured by the propositions of language, so that the complex of facts is reflected in the complex of language, and the logical structure of language shows the logical structure of the world. The third idea is that any attempt to get outside this system, by trying to say what it is that language shows, or by trying to talk about the world as a whole, or by trying to use language in any of the extra-factual ways in which philosophers have to use it—including Wittgenstein himself even as he points this out—is condemned to meaninglessness.
Russell wrote an introduction to the English edition in which he suggested the idea of metalanguages as a way of avoiding this last difficult and implausible conclusion, remarking that “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.” Wittgenstein loathed the introduction, as he loathed almost every attempt to expound or explain his views, however sympathetic, and was persuaded only with difficulty to allow the book to be published.
He did not return to Cambridge after the war. He thought—with what one would have supposed was uncharacteristic optimism—that with the Tractatus he had solved all problems and brought philosophy to a close. He gave away the considerable fortune he had inherited from his father before the war, did a teacher’s training course, and became a village schoolmaster in various parts of Lower Austria. From a village called Trattenbach he wrote gloomily to Russell: “The men of Trattenbach are wicked.”
“All men are wicked,” replied Russell urbanely, to which Wittgenstein wrote back: “True, but the men of Trattenbach are more wicked than the men of any other place.”
Wittgenstein fell out with the authorities and gave up schoolmastering. For a time he worked as an assistant gardener in a monastery, contemplated becoming a monk, and designed a house for his sister in Vienna. Russell himself at this time was trying to reconcile those two ancient sparring partners, mind and matter. Russell’s solution, which he called neutral monism, involved analyzing both into a common material—sensations. The physical world consisted of people’s experience of it; people’s minds were the history of that experience. Neutral monism shares the central assumption of Russell’s earlier work, and of the Tractatus; it takes it for granted that doing philosophy involves analysis. The analogy is with science. Propositions can be broken down into their logically constituent parts, it is assumed, in the way that chemical compounds can be resolved into their elements, and molecules into their atoms. That philosophy was analysis came to seem almost a truism to most philosophers at the time. Later, it seemed as false as only a former truism can.
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The most dramatic, and indeed violent, development from the techniques and concepts which Russell and Wittgenstein had evolved was undoubtedly logical positivism. In the hands of Moritz Schlick and the Vienna Circle, the Principia and the Tractatus were like Marxism in the hands of Lenin. The aim of the positivists was simple. It was to abolish metaphysics, and they did it with one exhilaratingly simple act of legislation. What gave statements meaning, they said, was the existence of a procedure for verifying them. If there was no way, even in theory, by which a statement could be checked, it was meaningless.
The concept of meaninglessness came from Russell, the picture of a world composed of facts from Wittgenstein. It was an authentic revolution; and like most revolutions, it destroyed too much. It swept away not only the vague profundities of the metaphysicians, but also the possibility of understanding ethics and aesthetics as anything more interesting than personal preferences, and most of the propositions of philosophy. These non-factual usages had to be reintroduced over the years, with tortuous complexity, through Russell’s meta-languages. Instead of discussing the forbidden topics themselves, one was forced to speak of the lawfulness of statements made about them. A new casuistry grew up to replace the old; one cannot help thinking of the revolutionary commandments of Animal Farm, which got watered down from night to night, or perhaps of the Wee Cooper of Fife, who wouldn’t beat his gentle wife, but put a sheepskin across her back and beat that instead.
In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge. He submitted the Tractatus as a Ph.D. thesis, and underwent the formality of an oral examination upon it by Russell and Moore, to the embarrassment of all three of them. (According to Braithwaite, Moore’s report to the degree committee concluded: “I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree.”) He began working at philosophy again, and commenced the celebrated lectures in his rooms at Trinity, to which his audience were expected to bring their own chairs and their own ideas.
Now Wittgenstein’s thinking began to undergo a radical change. In the Tractatus he had developed to its ultimate conclusion the classical view of language as a static construction which recorded what was or might be the case. Now he came to see that language was not a natural feature of the world which simply happened to exist, like the Alps; it was something dynamic and purposive—machinery designed and built to perform certain functions, to get things communicated. He came to think that the ways in which language could be used to communicate were very diverse, that the function of a piece of language was not always revealed by its apparent grammatical or logical form, and that the context in which words are uttered is often an inseparable part of their sense. He suggested that to find out how language meant what it meant, it was necessary to inquire into how it was used.
This view of language was entirely new, and it implied a new concept of the function to be performed by philosophy. The model of the syllogism as a pattern to which language and thought were to aspire, which had hung before philosophers’ eyes since the time of Aristotle, had been suddenly bypassed. The anxiety which this model had led philosophers to feel about our knowledge of the world, and about how the world could possibly work if it didn’t work like a syllogism, Wittgenstein treated as pathological. He saw philosophy as a way not of answering puzzles, but of curing puzzlement.
There is an obvious analogy here with psychoanalysis. The philosopher-patient asks a question. Wittgenstein replies: Why do you ask that question? He wishes to locate and allay the root anxieties from which the outward problems spring.1 But the scientific air which philosophy had worn disappeared in Wittgenstein’s hands. All the apparatus which it had up till then often shared with science—laws, proof, rigorousness, technical vocabulary, analysis procedures—were dispensed with. Wittgenstein’s apparatus was analogy and metaphor, suggestion and persuasion, description designed to enable his hearers and readers to fix and order their most elusive experiences. What he brought out was the literary nature of philosophy.
Wittgenstein’s morbid fear of being misunderstood and vulgarized made him keep his teaching as esoteric as possible. He dictated his thoughts to his disciples and colleagues, and circulated his texts among only a chosen few. He refused to allow his works to be published, and during his lifetime nothing was, except the Tractatus and one paper on logical form. Philosophical Investigations, the magnificent work in which he set forth his later thinking, did not appear until 1953, two years after his death. And yet by this time the English philosophical establishment was already well on the way to being thoroughly and completely converted to the new Wittgenstein.
Russell, however, remained among the unconvinced minority. He detested, and continues to detest, the whole of Wittgenstein’s later work. He has written that Wittgenstein committed treachery to his own greatness, and that he debased himself before common sense in the way that Tolstoy debased himself before the peasants, from an impulse of pride. Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, he says in My Philosophical Development, remains completely unintelligible to him.
Its positive doctrines seem to me trivial and its negative doctrines unfounded. I have not found in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations anything that seemed to me interesting and I do not understand why a whole school finds important wisdom in its pages. Psychologically this is surprising. The earlier Wittgenstein, whom I knew intimately, was a man addicted to passionately intense thinking, profoundly aware of difficult problems of which I, like him, felt the importance, and possessed (or at least so I thought) of true philosophical genius. The latter Wittgenstein, on the contrary, seems to have grown tired of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity unnecessary.
These are harsh and wounding words. They are also sad ones. There is something unusually poignant in Russell’s inability to acknowledge his pupil’s greatest and most original work. Russell has spoken with characteristic frankness about his feelings. Wittgenstein, he says, began as his pupil and ended as his supplanter at both Oxford and Cambridge.
It is not an altogether pleasant experience to find oneself regarded as antiquated after having been, for a time, in the fashion. It is difficult to accept this experience gracefully.
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I suppose great men rarely feel much charity toward a schismatic pupil; they recognize too many of their own ideas being used to reach the unacceptable new conclusions. Wittgenstein’s later work is a reaction against the excessive simplicism of traditional philosophy, particularly of his own views in the Tractatus. But in spite of its novelty, it has something in common with the Tractatus, and the logical positivism which in part derived from it—the assumption of the central importance of language, and of what can or can’t be done with it; the feeling that language is not a mere superstructure, not something you can go round the back of, to see what the world behind really looks like.
This implies a radically new departure from the assumption which philosophers have usually made through the ages. They have tended to think that the world could be understood aright only if language and thought were improved to reflect its structure more accurately. Get rid of its ambiguity and indefiniteness, they have urged, and we shall really see how things stand. What Wittgenstein grasped is that these aspects of language are not incidental flaws, but inherent characteristics without which language either cannot function at all, or cannot function as usefully as it does. Perhaps there is a parallel in another fundamental change of viewpoint which has occurred in this century—the revolution precipitated by Freud in our view of human nature. It used to be assumed that human beings could and should be fundamentally remodeled to fit the moral universe; the urgings of instinct and the appetites of the body could be trimmed away to reveal the ideal man within. Now we tend to feel more interest in reshaping our moral ideas to accommodate human beings as they are; our animal nature, as we now think, is an inherent part of our structure as vital organisms. Of course, moral ideas were adapted to human needs before Freud, and people still are expected to modify their behavior to meet moral codes. But there has been a change of emphasis. And so has there been in philosophy.
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Historians may decide that this rise in the status of language is what chiefly characterizes the philosophy of our time. It seems paradoxical to trace the origin of this trend back to Russell, since he has always thought that language stood in need of analysis, and since he dismisses modern philosophers for being too much concerned with “the different ways in which silly people can say silly things.” All the same, what made logical atomism plausible and attractive in the first place was certainly the success which Russell had with logic in the first decade of this century. And Wittgenstein’s world of facts would surely never have been proposed if Russell had not demonstrated that propositions about being and existing—which direct our attention to what things are—could be dissolved into propositions about the incidence of properties—which suggest that the real question is how things are disposed. The Investigations, and the whole contingent, secular, relativistic world of modern philosophy, have their roots deep in the Principia.
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1 According to his pupil, Rush Rhees, Wittgenstein described himself as a “disciple” and “follower” of Freud. But he was also highly critical. Norman Malcolm, in his Memoir, records that Wittgenstein was greatly incensed by the suggestion that his philosophy was a form of psychoanalysis, and explicitly attacked it. I don't think this touchiness makes the analogy any less valid.
