Stupid people should strive to become smarter. They should not proclaim themselves to be the norm for being stupid and smart people to be somehow inferior for failure to conform with that norm and for failure to communicate the complex thoughts they have to people who are incapable of taking in complex thoughts.
It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
It's a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it's certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein's and Russel's day. -- It's one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.
It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard). That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers. That's true by construction. Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.
I actually disagree with the idea that incomprehensible philosophy comes from philosophers so smart that their readership can't understand them. Smarter philosophers could say things that would permit more people to gain greater understanding, wouldn't you say? Assuming of course that philosophers are trying to say things that support understanding.
Further,I think philosophical quality ultimately has to do with its ability to produce positive outcomes. Plato is not definitive -- but reflecting on Plato is deeply enriching. Incomprehensible and miserable philosophy is just that and only that.
Let me preface that I do find Wittgenstein very interesting and I enjoyed reading his works. But your critique of the article is really bad.
> It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
How is this related to the article? You have some (potentially correct) grievance about imbalanced power relationships in the workplace leading to stupid person winning argument. But this is not the situation here. I don't think the blog author has some power over Wittgenstein.
> It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand
Russel is a great example of a very clear philosopher. Heck, Russel's main complaint with Hegel, for example, was failure to use clear logic.
> That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers.
This is a hard sell. I've ready many books and research papers by great physicists and mathematicians. People who are as "smart" as the best of philosophers (and certainly smarter than me), but mostly their works are quite clear.
----
I think there is a tendency among, especially, austrian and german philosophers to write in sentences that are hard for modern Americans to parse. I suspect this is not a function of "intellect" but rather the prevalent writing style. A lot of philosophical works used lots of indexical references and non-linear patterns. Yet, we are now taught to write with direct, short sentences. Books and other media we read are full of such language. Even our long sentences usually have only dependent clauses. This makes it hard for us to parse out things like:
"Thus the word “is” appears as the copula, as the sign of
equality, and as the expression of existence; “to exist” as an intransitive verb like “to go”; “identical” as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening." (3.323, picked somewhat at random by opening a book and looking for a long sentence on the page)
With no particular loss of meaning (but with greatly improved comprehension, albeit somewhat more verbose, the fault being all mine as it is too late) we could have:
"Thus the word "is" forms a copula that can have two meanings: a sign of equality or an expression of existence. When used to mean "equality," it links an adjective with the object. But, when used to mean "existence," it is an intransitive verb unbound to an object. Thus "is" allows us to speak of something (an object) but also of something happening (no object)."
The article starts with a hit against Philosophical Investigations, which is actually some of his most approachable and interesting work. His concept of language-games is both fascinating & insightful. [0] The systematic way he laid out the contextual nature of meaning in language was groundbreaking at the time, demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences. In fact this understanding of meaning in many ways probably laid the ground work for aspects of computational linguistics like word-sense disambiguation.
I don't know if he fomented conflict among his "disciples" or if they came to it among themselves, and I'm sure not all of his work was equally insightful, but this article is far from an even-handed assessment of his work.
> demonstrating that meaning was neither atomic nor discrete, with interlocking contingencies that span multiple words and sentences.
How is that original? Of course, the exact meaning of a word and a sentence depends on the context.
If I remember correctly my studies about Mesopotamia, in one the oldest bilingual dictionaries of the world there was a word with two translations, which mean the author knew that there was two distinct meanings for the same word. Centuries later, many of the various authors of the Bible were fond of playing with words. Their writings are full of double-entendre and of reusing the same word in a different context to change its meaning. Aristophanes wrote parodies of the classical Greek tragedies, and he certainly knew how to instill comedy into plain or epic words. It's hard to imagine none of these processes were conscious. More recently, Littré's dictionary at the end of the 19th century had a stress on the context: most definitions include many examples of use across time and places, to show the intrinsic complexity of words.
Because that's what the world needs more of: Pitchfork Over/Under-styled hot takes about dense philosophy.
Perhaps there are things that are worth trying to understand, even if they are difficult to comprehend. You can miss out on a lot if you're in the habit of dismissing things out-of-hand.
And yet you're guilty of exactly that which the article admonishes against: celebrating the cult of Wittgenstein on the basis of its inscrutability, not its merit.
Just because something is written in a clear and approachable way, it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
I'm also of the opinion that Wittgenstein is the most overrated philosopher of the 20th century (if not ever). I'm honestly not sure why he still has entire undergraduate courses dedicated to him (but Godel, Moore, Russell, etc., don't). Virtually none of his ideas made it into any serious philosophical works (sans a bit of philosophy of language). I have a feeling that his work panders to the "obtuseness of ideas" that so many academics crave.
To put him on the same level as G.E. Moore (and his brilliant naturalistic fallacy) and Bertrand Russell (and his [and Whitehead's] brilliant Principia Mathematica) is deeply misguided.
Hang on : Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I !!! You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you are fundamentally wrong (which Russell and Whitehead were) then you get knocked off your perch. Still, I guess that they were in good company.
Bertrand Russell was a wonderful man, but I still smile when I think of the Principia and the essay he wrote nine years after Godel blew it up :"Why Mr. Hitler will not invade Russia"
I think that reason that Wittgenstein is still taught is that there are ideas in there that have not been successfully extended or refuted, except sometimes by Wittgenstein, and even then... Debatably! Also his "approach" is still used by many people.
If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics; if you want to see where philosophy (and politics and literature) were crippled Paris in the 60's and Yale & Irvine in the 70's would be good places to start. One of it's legacies is the constant and ongoing attack on science - I blame Derrida for climate change denial!*
* I know - this is an act of pure spite, but old people need their fun, and he's dead, and anyway, his friends would just deconstruct my sentence to show that in fact I'm not blaming anyone, blame is not a real concept, things cannot be denied, there is no climate and things can't change.
I can see why someone would think that, it is a reasonable point of view even if I disagree.
I don't get how you can hold Moore and Russell up so highly and then completely discount what they thought of him. I feel they are much better judges of this question than I am.
The article never explains why Wittgenstein is overrated. I've read it twice. All I can gather is that Moore felt he didn't really understand W's philosophical method enough to use it, and that Russell felt that after W, he couldn't do philosophy.
In case anyone wondered, they also maintain a list of underrated thinkers like Bolzano, Spengler, and the Duke of Wellington.
It is generally a better use of time to brush up on the underrated.
Whatever virtues Wittgenstein might have concealed, comprehensibility wasn't among them. If he was right about anything, we can never know, so needn't bother wondering.
I do not feel like this article is engaging with Wittgenstein's arguments or any philosophy in general. I'm extremely tired of these clickbait 5-minute-read articles that somehow attempt to discredit entire lifetimes worth of respected works through ad hominem
I actually like a lot of Kant's arguments (free play and harmony) but he started/amplified the intellectual trend of obtuse writing as a social status marker. And today, philosophy departments-- and philosophy journals -- are very uninspired places.
Philosophy matters. Look at how the lack of it affects politics and individual wellbeing.
If there were someone who would make the argument that 'all philosophy is nonsense' and the person who makes it was respected by a lot of philosophy professors, I would be pretty interested in what he had to say, especially because I have a firm distrust myself of anything that comes out of that discipline.
Not really. He does say in Philosophical Investigations that he had made some mistakes earlier in his career, but there is a thread uniting his earlier and later works: psycho/logical monism, as Imrad Kimhi calls it.
I have zip, zilch, and zero first hand knowledge of Wittgenstein, but I will report on what two of my college profs said:
In college, as a math/physics major, I relented and signed up for a course Philosophy of Science. The course was taught in the philosophy department by a guy from the Bible Department -- the Presbyterian church chipped in some money for the college which however had a good physics department (with some USAF money) and a quite good math department.
So, the course got to Wittgenstein. The prof was traveling or some such so asked a math prof to give the class on Wittgenstein.
As the class started, the math prof winced, hesitated, and said: "I read the Wittgenstein. Uh, let's f'get about Wittgenstein."
That was enough Wittgenstein for me!
The reaction of the Chair of the physics department was "Get your Ph.D. first and philosophize later."
For me, now is "later", and I conclude that his advice was good: Just how math, physics, and the rest of science do or do not work is not simple, and even a first level understanding needs quite a lot of experience, at least observation, of what does or does not work.
Sorry, Ludwig, buddy. Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it! Sorry 'bout that!
> Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it!
This is pretty laughable. Math/physics and philosophy may both involve logic, but they are so different. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to be good in one to do well in the other. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in your own philosophy classes, but I've found that understanding some of the basics of philosophy (utilitarianism, natural rights, etc.), have vastly helped me understand why people in the STEM fields are motivated to work on one project versus another.
[+] [-] stakhanov|6 years ago|reply
It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
It's a cultural norm that may exist in the tech world today, but it's certainly not a cultural norm that existed at Cambridge back in Wittgenstein's and Russel's day. -- It's one of the many cultural attitudes that are working together to create the post-truth society we live in today.
It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand (just think of Kierkegaard). That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers. That's true by construction. Because the reason you read is because you start out stupid and want to end up smart.
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
Further,I think philosophical quality ultimately has to do with its ability to produce positive outcomes. Plato is not definitive -- but reflecting on Plato is deeply enriching. Incomprehensible and miserable philosophy is just that and only that.
[+] [-] ivalm|6 years ago|reply
> It's a type of transaction that I bet takes place every single day in every single tech-sector business between a smart-guy code monkey and a dimwit pointy-haired boss and, for some reason, it's always the pointy-haired boss who walks away with his overconfidence in tact and the code monkey that walks away having been made to feel bad about themselves, when it should be the other way around.
How is this related to the article? You have some (potentially correct) grievance about imbalanced power relationships in the workplace leading to stupid person winning argument. But this is not the situation here. I don't think the blog author has some power over Wittgenstein.
> It is true about pretty much any philosopher of note that they are thought of as being hard to understand
Russel is a great example of a very clear philosopher. Heck, Russel's main complaint with Hegel, for example, was failure to use clear logic.
> That's not because those philosophers are altogether so very overrated. It's because the readership is mostly comprised of people who are not as smart as those philosophers.
This is a hard sell. I've ready many books and research papers by great physicists and mathematicians. People who are as "smart" as the best of philosophers (and certainly smarter than me), but mostly their works are quite clear.
----
I think there is a tendency among, especially, austrian and german philosophers to write in sentences that are hard for modern Americans to parse. I suspect this is not a function of "intellect" but rather the prevalent writing style. A lot of philosophical works used lots of indexical references and non-linear patterns. Yet, we are now taught to write with direct, short sentences. Books and other media we read are full of such language. Even our long sentences usually have only dependent clauses. This makes it hard for us to parse out things like:
"Thus the word “is” appears as the copula, as the sign of equality, and as the expression of existence; “to exist” as an intransitive verb like “to go”; “identical” as an adjective; we speak of something but also of the fact of something happening." (3.323, picked somewhat at random by opening a book and looking for a long sentence on the page)
With no particular loss of meaning (but with greatly improved comprehension, albeit somewhat more verbose, the fault being all mine as it is too late) we could have:
"Thus the word "is" forms a copula that can have two meanings: a sign of equality or an expression of existence. When used to mean "equality," it links an adjective with the object. But, when used to mean "existence," it is an intransitive verb unbound to an object. Thus "is" allows us to speak of something (an object) but also of something happening (no object)."
[+] [-] ineedasername|6 years ago|reply
I don't know if he fomented conflict among his "disciples" or if they came to it among themselves, and I'm sure not all of his work was equally insightful, but this article is far from an even-handed assessment of his work.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_game_(philosophy)
[+] [-] idoubtit|6 years ago|reply
How is that original? Of course, the exact meaning of a word and a sentence depends on the context.
If I remember correctly my studies about Mesopotamia, in one the oldest bilingual dictionaries of the world there was a word with two translations, which mean the author knew that there was two distinct meanings for the same word. Centuries later, many of the various authors of the Bible were fond of playing with words. Their writings are full of double-entendre and of reusing the same word in a different context to change its meaning. Aristophanes wrote parodies of the classical Greek tragedies, and he certainly knew how to instill comedy into plain or epic words. It's hard to imagine none of these processes were conscious. More recently, Littré's dictionary at the end of the 19th century had a stress on the context: most definitions include many examples of use across time and places, to show the intrinsic complexity of words.
[+] [-] eindiran|6 years ago|reply
Perhaps there are things that are worth trying to understand, even if they are difficult to comprehend. You can miss out on a lot if you're in the habit of dismissing things out-of-hand.
[+] [-] xTHA|6 years ago|reply
People were reading their works because it was fashionable (yes, hard-copy, cover to cover). I did, too. Now I think it was a waste of time.
The Tractatus is an unordered collection of pretty mundane observations which do not inspire any useful thought.
And the Tractatus was the work with the highest cult status.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] freyr|6 years ago|reply
Just because something is written in a clear and approachable way, it shouldn't be dismissed out-of-hand.
[+] [-] dvt|6 years ago|reply
To put him on the same level as G.E. Moore (and his brilliant naturalistic fallacy) and Bertrand Russell (and his [and Whitehead's] brilliant Principia Mathematica) is deeply misguided.
[+] [-] sgt101|6 years ago|reply
Hang on : Über formal unentscheidbare Sätze der Principia Mathematica und verwandter Systeme I !!! You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you are fundamentally wrong (which Russell and Whitehead were) then you get knocked off your perch. Still, I guess that they were in good company.
Bertrand Russell was a wonderful man, but I still smile when I think of the Principia and the essay he wrote nine years after Godel blew it up :"Why Mr. Hitler will not invade Russia"
I think that reason that Wittgenstein is still taught is that there are ideas in there that have not been successfully extended or refuted, except sometimes by Wittgenstein, and even then... Debatably! Also his "approach" is still used by many people.
If the GP thinks Wittgenstein is a vandal I wonder what he makes of Derrida and the other French lunatics; if you want to see where philosophy (and politics and literature) were crippled Paris in the 60's and Yale & Irvine in the 70's would be good places to start. One of it's legacies is the constant and ongoing attack on science - I blame Derrida for climate change denial!*
* I know - this is an act of pure spite, but old people need their fun, and he's dead, and anyway, his friends would just deconstruct my sentence to show that in fact I'm not blaming anyone, blame is not a real concept, things cannot be denied, there is no climate and things can't change.
[+] [-] kensai|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freshhawk|6 years ago|reply
I don't get how you can hold Moore and Russell up so highly and then completely discount what they thought of him. I feel they are much better judges of this question than I am.
[+] [-] barce|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ncmncm|6 years ago|reply
It is generally a better use of time to brush up on the underrated.
Whatever virtues Wittgenstein might have concealed, comprehensibility wasn't among them. If he was right about anything, we can never know, so needn't bother wondering.
[+] [-] missingrib|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|6 years ago|reply
Philosophy matters. Look at how the lack of it affects politics and individual wellbeing.
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timwaagh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] aswanson|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marknadal|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeromebaek|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] segfaultbuserr|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|6 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] graycat|6 years ago|reply
In college, as a math/physics major, I relented and signed up for a course Philosophy of Science. The course was taught in the philosophy department by a guy from the Bible Department -- the Presbyterian church chipped in some money for the college which however had a good physics department (with some USAF money) and a quite good math department.
So, the course got to Wittgenstein. The prof was traveling or some such so asked a math prof to give the class on Wittgenstein.
As the class started, the math prof winced, hesitated, and said: "I read the Wittgenstein. Uh, let's f'get about Wittgenstein."
That was enough Wittgenstein for me!
The reaction of the Chair of the physics department was "Get your Ph.D. first and philosophize later."
For me, now is "later", and I conclude that his advice was good: Just how math, physics, and the rest of science do or do not work is not simple, and even a first level understanding needs quite a lot of experience, at least observation, of what does or does not work.
Sorry, Ludwig, buddy. Go sign up for a math/physics major, get a Ph.D. in one of those, get experience for some decades, and then see if you can formulate a clean, simple, solid philosophy for how it all should work! My guess is, even with all the background, you can't do it! Sorry 'bout that!
[+] [-] speedplane|6 years ago|reply
This is pretty laughable. Math/physics and philosophy may both involve logic, but they are so different. It's neither necessary nor sufficient to be good in one to do well in the other. I'm sorry you had a bad experience in your own philosophy classes, but I've found that understanding some of the basics of philosophy (utilitarianism, natural rights, etc.), have vastly helped me understand why people in the STEM fields are motivated to work on one project versus another.
[+] [-] nairboon|6 years ago|reply
You realize that Wittgenstein studied mechanical engineering and aeronautics?