Jared Marcel Pollen has an interesting article in the Los Angeles Review of Books reminding us that Wittgenstein’s Tractatus is 100 years old.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1921. But, like many things involving Wittgenstein, that fact comes with an asterisk or two.
The book started before World War I, when Wittgenstein built a “hutte” at the end of a branch of Sogne Fjord in Norway. He was trying to escape, not so much from people, as from the society of Cambridge and of Vienna. He thought he needed quiet to work.
But he wrote most of the Tractatus while he was a soldier in the Austrian-Hungarian Army. Key parts were written during major campaigns. Wittgenstein could work with less quiet than he imagined.
The book was essentially done by 1918. But he spent months in an Italian camp for prisoners of war. He continued to fiddle with it in camp.
The book, less than 100 pages long, is on the logic of language. It offers a theory of what can be expressed in language — and therefore a theory of what can be thought.
If you are not interested in philosophy but are wondering what Wittgenstein is about, I can give you an example of how his thought can influence people.
I went to college at 17, having dropped out of high school. I suppose some people are geniuses at 17, but I was not. I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I had the idea that I could learn something of the “laws of beauty” by studying the philosophy of art. Maybe not get to the actual laws themselves, which seemed mysterious and profound. But I hoped to get near enough to improve my writing, to make it more substantial, perhaps even beautiful.
With hindsight, I can see the bad metaphor. Aesthetics is not a science, and so the “laws” I had in mind are not like the causal laws that govern the natural sciences.
If you raise the temperature of water to 100 degrees centigrade, it will boil.
Can you imagine what the laws of aesthetics would look like if we tried to study them scientifically — that is, by assuming there are causal connections?
Picture the musicians of an orchestra sitting down in front of their music stands, which hold musical scores. Can you imagine what the causal laws would look like? Would the notes seize control of the players, causing them to play the notes? Would the science of aesthetics then amount to us judging how close the performance was to the score? Would a causal science of aesthetics even permit musicians to make mistakes?
Music doesn’t work that way. Art in general doesn’t work that way, and neither do a great many important human activities.
The musicians entered the concert hall because they wanted to play music, not because they were under some mechanistic force. Our intentions — and our wants, our thinking and a great deal more — simply don’t follow causal laws in the way that elements in a chemistry lab do.
I began my adult life with an idea that blew up on me when it came in contact with Wittgenstein’s thought. I was astonished and bewildered as only a boy of 17 can be.
I kept reading to see what would happen next.
• Jared Marcel Pollen’s “The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein’s ‘Tractatus’ at 100,” Los Angeles Review of Books, Nov. 7, 2021, is here:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-way-out-of-the-fly-bottle-wittgensteins-tractatus-at-100/
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