“his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, at once an austere work of analytic philosophy and—for some readers, Wittgenstein apparently included—an almost mystical experience. In it, he claimed charmingly and not without reason to have solved all the problems of philosophy.”
“This was because of the book’s famous “picture theory of meaning,” which held that language is meaningful because, and only because, of its ability to depict possible arrangements of objects in the world.”
“Any meaningful statement can be analyzed as such a depiction. This leads to the book’s most famous conclusion: that if a statement does not depict a possible arrangement of objects, it doesn’t mean anything at all.”
“Ethics, religion, the nature of the world beyond objects … most statements of traditional philosophy, Wittgenstein contended, are therefore nonsense. And so, having destroyed a thousand-year tradition, Wittgenstein did the reasonable thing—he dropped the mic and found a real job teaching kids to spell.”
“We all struggle to form a self. Great teaching, Wittgenstein reminds us, involves taking this struggle and engaging in it with others; his whole life was one great such struggle. In working with poor children, he wanted to transform himself, and them.”
“The style reflects Wittgenstein’s new aim, which was pedagogical. In his later writings, Wittgenstein still held that philosophical questions are meaningless, and that they often result from looking for definitions of terms outside the contexts in which they’re used. But he was no longer content to simply state this. He wanted to make specific questions actually dissolve for his reader, to bring about a change in perspective that shows that the questions mean nothing. “The real discovery,” he wrote, “is the one which enables to stop doing philosophy when I want to—the one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions.””
“This is why his later writing is so intense; it engages you directly. To work, it has to actually make you engage in the same radical introspection he did. If one is receptive to them, these books are potentially transformative. I think that’s why Wittgenstein, almost uniquely among modern analytic philosophers, has such a strong literary appeal.”
“In an unpublished remark, Wittgenstein wrote that “any explanation has its foundation in training. (Educators ought to remember this.)” It’s good advice. I remember, for example, teaching a unit on “energy.” At some point, after I’d offered some unhelpful definition of energy—“the capacity for an object to do work”—and walked through its different forms, a student stopped me. “But what is energy?” It was clear she was asking me to name some thing, visible or not, that she could call “energy.” But the expectation that there’s something out there bearing the name energy is more confusing than helpful. I flailed. But as my lesson continued, the word kept coming back. “The flame added energy to the heat.” “That car had more energy than the other.” With training, the kids started to use the word right of their own accord. Their confusion was gone. There’s a big chunk of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy in stories like this. I can easily imagine him, in his devotion to clarity and truth, leaning down to show a student, and himself, that some such question need not torture them anymore.”