Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language, Meaning, and the Limits of Philosophy

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Language, Meaning, and the Limits of Philosophy

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who is widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Vienna, Wittgenstein studied engineering at the University of Manchester before turning to philosophy under the influence of Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. His two major works — the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) and the Philosophical Investigations (published posthumously in 1953) — represent two radically different philosophies of language, each of which has had profound implications for the philosophy of religion. For AQA A-Level Religious Studies (specification 7062), Wittgenstein is essential for understanding debates about religious language, the meaningfulness of God-talk, and the relationship between language and reality.

The Early Wittgenstein: The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Tractatus (1921) is one of the most compressed and enigmatic works in the history of philosophy. Written while Wittgenstein served as a soldier in World War I, it consists of a series of numbered propositions (1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, etc.) and attempts to determine the logical structure of language and its relationship to reality.

The central idea of the Tractatus is the picture theory of meaning:

• Language is a picture of reality: A meaningful proposition is a logical picture of a possible state of affairs in the world. Just as a picture represents a scene by having elements that correspond to objects in the scene and an arrangement that corresponds to the arrangement of those objects, a proposition has elements (names) that correspond to objects in the world and a logical structure that corresponds to the way those objects are arranged.
• The limits of language are the limits of the world: We can only talk meaningfully about states of affairs that can be pictured — that is, about empirical facts. Anything that cannot be pictured in a proposition cannot be said.
• The mystical: Ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of life, and the existence of God lie beyond the limits of what can be said. They are not nonsensical, but they are unsayable — they belong to “the mystical.” Wittgenstein wrote: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” (Tractatus 6.522)

The final proposition of the Tractatus is one of the most famous sentences in philosophy:

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” — Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 7

For the philosophy of religion, the Tractatus has both negative and positive implications. On the one hand, it implies that religious language (talk of God, the soul, eternal life, etc.) is strictly meaningless in the logical-positivist sense — it does not picture any possible state of affairs. On the other hand, Wittgenstein himself suggested that the mystical (including ethics and religion) is the most important aspect of life, even though it cannot be expressed in language. He wrote in a letter to his publisher: “My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.”

The Later Wittgenstein: Philosophical Investigations

After completing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein believed he had solved all the problems of philosophy and withdrew from academic life, working as a schoolteacher, a gardener, and an architect. He returned to Cambridge in 1929 and gradually developed a completely new philosophy of language that repudiated the central claims of the Tractatus. This new philosophy was presented in the Philosophical Investigations (1953), which many regard as the most important philosophical work of the twentieth century.

The key ideas of the Investigations include:

Language Games

Wittgenstein abandoned the picture theory of meaning and replaced it with the concept of language games (Sprachspiele). Language, he now argued, does not have a single, unified function (picturing reality). Instead, language is used in a vast variety of ways, each of which constitutes a different “language game.” Examples include:

• Giving orders and obeying them
• Describing an object or giving its measurements
• Reporting an event
• Making up a story
• Telling a joke
• Asking, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying

Each language game has its own rules and its own criteria of meaningfulness. What counts as a meaningful utterance in one language game may not count in another. A scientific hypothesis is meaningful in the language game of science; a prayer is meaningful in the language game of religion. To understand the meaning of a word or sentence, you must understand the language game in which it is being used. Meaning is not determined by the relationship between words and objects (as the Tractatus had suggested) but by the use of words in particular contexts and practices:

“For a large class of cases — though not for all — in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.” — Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §43

Forms of Life

Language games are embedded in forms of life (Lebensformen) — the broader patterns of human activity, culture, and practice within which language functions. Language is not an abstract, self-contained system; it is part of the way human beings live. To understand a language game, you must understand the form of life in which it is situated.