Academics From Austria

"Dr J. O. Wisdom once observed to me that he knew people who thought there was no philosophy after Hegel, and others who thought there was none before Wittgenstein; and he saw no reason for excluding the possibility that both were right."

"This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know."

"What is it about the study of philosophy that tends to make brilliant minds stupid when it comes down to what are known as actual cases? Consider Martin Heidegger, Bertrand Russell, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, the four great names in twentieth-century philosophy: the first was a Nazi, the second died certain that America was responsible for all the world's evil, the third was a Stalinist long after any justification for being so could be adduced, and the fourth lived on the borders of madness most of his life. Contemplation of the lives of philosophers is enough to drive one to the study of sociology."

"Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, “Which newspaper do you represent?” I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question. Wittgenstein's response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, “WITTGENSTEIN.” To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible."

"Some will say that in the longer run, Wittgenstein's legacy will prove to be the more valuable. Perhaps it will. Wittgenstein, like any other charismatic thinker, continues to attract fanatics who devote their life to disagreeing with one another (and, presumably, with my brief summary) about the ultimate meaning of his words. These disciples cling myopically to their Wittgenstein, not realizing that there are many great Wittgensteins to choose from. My hero is the one who showed us new ways of being suspicious of our own convictions when confronting the mysteries of the mind. The fact remains that one's first exposure to either the Tractatus or Philosophical Investigations is a liberating and exhilarating experience. Here is a model of thinking so intense, so pure, so self-critical that even its mistakes are gifts."

"When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation."

"The general method that Wittgenstein does suggest is that of 'shewing that a man has supplied no meaning [or perhaps: "no reference"] for certain signs in his sentences'. I can illustrate the method from Wittgenstein's later way of discussing problems. He once greeted me with the question: 'Why do people say that it was natural to think that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth turned on its axis?' I replied: 'I suppose, because it looked as if the sun went round the earth.' 'Well,' he asked, 'what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the earth turned on its axis?' This question brought it out that I had hitherto given no relevant meaning to 'it looks as if' in 'it looks as if the sun goes round the earth'. My reply was to hold out my hands with the palms upward, and raise them from my knees in a circular sweep, at the same time leaning backwards and assuming a dizzy expression. 'Exactly!' he said. In another case, I might have found that I could not supply any meaning other than that suggested by a naive conception, which could be destroyed by a question. The naive conception is really thoughtlessness, but it may take the power of a Copernicus effectively to call it in question."

"Whereas Wittgenstein had imagined an indefinite multiplicity of language-games, incommensurable with each other, so paving the way for the particularist doctrine that the signification of sentences could only lie in their heterogeneous usages, Frege understood that language is by its nature a system, competence in which presupposes a tacit grasp of certain general principles that are never reducible to a mere tally of local utterances. At the same time, Frege's philosophy, for all its emphasis on meaning, was not only systematic, but critical. For it retained a stringent concern with truth, where the laxity of Wittgenstein's eventual pragmatics—his notion that all language-games can find their warrant in culturally variable ‘forms of life’, as apprehended by Spengler—was inevitably to afford a franchise for intellectual relativism. Initially close to Wittgenstein's legacy, Dummett came through his prolonged work on Frege to a reaffirmation of the central importance of the assertoric dimension of language—the specificity and necessity of its claims to accurate report of the world—as against the performative functions so favoured by Austin, for whom there could be no critique of current usages. Wittgenstein's basic programme thus had to be rejected: ‘philosophy cannot be content to leave everything as it is,’ for ‘linguistic practice is not immune to, and may well stand in need of, revision.’"

"It was Wittgenstein who evacuated time from language, and thereby converted it into an ahistorical absolute. He was able to do this because he lacked any notion of contradiction. The idea that linguistic change proceeds by an internal dialectic generated by incompatibilities between different rule-systems within it, which give rose to radically new concepts at determinate historical moments, was beyond his horizon. It presupposed an idea of language as neither a monist unity (Tractatus) nor a heteroclite plurality (Investigations), but as a complex totality, necessarily inhabited by different contradictions. It is striking that today, French philosophy is largely concentrated on the problem of the conditions of appearance of new concepts—precisely the problem that English philosophy is designed to avert. The work of Canguilhem and Bachelard is a close study of the historical emergence in the west of the scientific concepts which revolutionized biology and physics. Such an inquiry is a diametric opposite of the whole drift of Wittgenstein's philosophy, and indicates its parochialism. To emphasise the social nature of language, as he did, is not enough: language is a structure with a history, and it has a history because its contradictions and discrepancies themselves are determined by other levels of social practice. The magical harmony of language affirmed by English philosophy was itself merely the transcript of a historically becalmed society."

"If we spoke a different language, we would perceive a somewhat different world."

"I can well understand why children love sand."

"The sole remaining task for philosophy is the analysis of language."

"It is so characteristic, that just when the mechanics of reproduction are so vastly improved, there are fewer and fewer people who know how the music should be played."

"You must always be puzzled by mental illness. The thing I would dread most, if I became mentally ill, would be your adopting a common sense attitude; that you could take it for granted that I was deluded."

"It seems to me that, in every culture, I come across a chapter headed Wisdom. And then I know exactly what is going to follow: Vanity of vanities, all is vanity."

"For a truly religious man nothing is tragic."

"If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no reason to judge him; but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud."

"A philosopher who is not taking part in discussions is like a boxer who never goes into the ring."

"Philosophy is like trying to open a safe with a combination lock: each little adjustment of the dials seems to achieve nothing, only when everything is in place does the door open."

"Philosophy hasn't made any progress?—If someone scratches where it itches, do we have to see progress? Is it not genuine scratching otherwise, or genuine itching?"

"One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own ugly way."

"The Sabbath is not simply a time to rest, to recuperate. We should look at our work from the outside, not just from within."

"Human beings have a physical need to tell themselves when at work: “Let’s have done with it now,” and it's having constantly to go on thinking in the face of this need when philosophizing that makes this work so strenuous."

"If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained."

"Nothing is more important than the formation of fictional concepts, which teach us at last to understand our own."

"I would really like to slow down the speed of reading with continual punctuation marks. For I would like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.)"

"Ambition is the death of thought."

"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness."

"It's only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems."

"Schiller writes in a letter [to Goethe, 17 December 1795] of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I think I am familiar with it myself. It is the mood of receptivity to nature and one in which one's thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself."

"Is it just I who cannot found a school, or can a philosopher never do so?"

"Animals come when their names are called. Just like human beings."

"Someone who knows too much finds it hard not to lie."

"If life becomes hard to bear we think of improvements. But the most important and effective improvement, in our own attitude, hardly occurs to us, and we can decide on this only with the utmost difficulty."

"You could attach prices to ideas. Some cost a lot some little. ... And how do you pay for ideas? I believe: with courage."

"One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature."

"Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."

"I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around."

"Freud's fanciful pseudo-explanations (precisely because they are brilliant) perform a disservice. (Now any ass has these pictures available to use in "explaining" symptoms of an illness."

"I never believed in God before." — that I understand. But not: "I never really believed in Him before."

"Religion is, as it were, the calm bottom of the sea at its deepest point, which remains calm however high the waves on the surface may be."

"Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion."

"I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)"

"If life becomes hard to bear we think of a change in our circumstances. But the most important and effective change, a change in our own attitude, hardly even occurs to us, and the resolution to take such a step is very difficult for us."

"You could attach prices to thoughts. Some cost a lot, some a little. And how does one pay for thoughts? The answer, I think, is: with courage."

""Fare well!" "A whole world of pain is contained in these words." How can it be contained in them? — It is bound up in them. The words are like an acorn from which an oak tree can grow."

"The less somebody knows and understands himself the less great he is, however great may be his talent. For this reason our scientists are not great."

"A hero looks death in the face, real death, not just the image of death. Behaving honourably in a crisis doesn't mean being able to act the part of a hero well, as in the theatre, it means being able to look death itself in the eye. For an actor may play lots of different roles, but at the end of it all he himself, the human being, is the one who has to die."

"The way you use the word "God" does not show whom you mean — but, rather, what you mean."

"The purely corporeal can be uncanny. Compare the way angels and devils are portrayed. So-called "miracles" must be connected with this. A miracle must be, as it were, a sacred gesture."