The Last Philosophy Book You’ll Ever Need

Imagine a philosophy book with the ghastly title: The Last Philosophy Book You’ll Ever Need. The title is ghastly because it isn’t the last philosophy book that you’ll ever need. Philosophy is not a destination; it is a never-ending process of arguments and counterarguments, propositions and refutations; it is marked by chaos, conflict, and detours which result in unexpected theories. But modern philosophers have been motivated by the ambition of writing the last philosophy book that humans will ever need. The Enlightenment philosophes wanted to write it; Hegel was convinced that he had written it, so were Marx and Auguste Comte; the twentieth-century figures like Wittgenstein, the logical positivists, and the analytic philosophers wanted to write it, while Jean-Paul Sartre was convinced that he had written it.

Thoughts on Wittgenstein’s Legacy

Wittgenstein is eulogized by most contemporary academics as a profound and brilliant philosopher of the 20th century. But was of the level of Edmund Husserl, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Karl Popper? These philosophers were Wittgenstein’s contemporaries but they did not use his theories in their philosophy. Russell and Moore have praised Wittgenstein, but they never made use of his philosophy. They disagreed with him on every philosophical issue. I find it puzzling that Wittgenstein is regarded as a great philosopher when all his philosophical claims were rejected in his lifetime.

Wittgenstein on Ethics and Religion

In statement 6.43 of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein says that the good or bad acts of the will do not alter the world, but rather they “alter only the limits of the world”—in other words, they lead to a change in how the world appears to the moral agent. To a good-willed agent the world will appear differently from how the world appears to a bad-willed agent. In the same statement, Wittgenstein goes on to say: “The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.” This means that a good-willed agent can achieve happiness or that for a good-willed agent the ultimate moral value is happiness. In the statement preceding 6.43, statement 6.422, Wittgenstein suggests that good-willing contains its own reward—happiness—while bad-willing leads to the opposite. He writes, “There must indeed be some kind of ethical reward and ethical punishment, but they must reside in the action itself.”

In his Tractatus, Wittgenstein posits that the realms of facts and value are distinct because the matters of value concern the world as a whole and are unrelated to the facts within it. In statement 6.431, he says, “So too at death the world does not alter, but comes to an end.” In statement 6.4311, he says, “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death… Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.” In statement 6.4312, he says, “How things are in the world is a matter of complete indifference for what is higher. God does not reveal himself in the world.” In two statements which follow, he suggests that the consideration of God being the source of value is entirely related to world as a whole and with matter of value: in statement 644, he says, “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists”, and in statement 6.46, he says, “To view the world sub specie aeterni is to view it as a whole—a limited whole. Feeling the world as a limited whole—it is this that is mystical.”

These statements in the last four pages of the Tractatus lead to the book’s famous last statement 7: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.” This statement is a reassertion of Wittgenstein’s belief that nothing can be said about the ethical and religious matters, since they lie outside the world.

On Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the only book-length work that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime, is a short book of 145 pages but it covers a wide range of philosophical problems. While the book's main argument is on the structure of language and the world and the relationship between the language and the world, Wittgenstein also talks about subjects like the purpose of philosophy; solipsism; the nature and form of logic; probability theory; the theory of number; induction and causality; and the matters related to religion, ethics, and life. The perspectives that he offers on these subjects is short, almost aphoristic, and this has earned the Tractatus the reputation of an obscure treatise. But he has drawn an intimate linkage between the position that he takes on various issues and his main argument—everything that he says in the book is a consequence or corollary of his main argument and this brings some clarity on his sayings in the book.

Is Ludwig Wittgenstein Overrated?

Crispin Sartwell, in his article, "Overrated: Ludwig Wittgenstein," says that Wittgenstein "inspired decades of needless self-destruction among his disciples." Here's an excerpt:

"Wittgenstein’s reputation for genius did not depend on incomprehensibility alone. He was also “tortured”, rude and unreliable. He had an intense gaze. He spent months in cold places like Norway to isolate himself. He temporarily quit philosophy, because he believed that he had solved all its problems in his 1922 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and worked as a gardener. He gave away his family fortune. And, of course, he was Austrian, as so many of the best geniuses are.

"He intimidated and disabled very smart people besides Russell. Wittgenstein convinced G.E. Moore that he’d been using the wrong philosophical method, and that he had a much better one. The new method had only one drawback for Moore: “I’ve never been able to understand it clearly enough to use it.”

"Famously, Wittgenstein’s ideas about language and logic had been transformed by the time he returned to a fellowship in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1929. Or perhaps not: the point is controversial, as is all interpretation of his work. Early Wittgenstein was replaced by the Late Wittgenstein, whose views are most fully expressed in his Philosophical Investigations, and who is the Wittgenstein beloved of most Wittgensteinians."