Few philosophers have written two works so different that one seems to refute the other — and yet have seen both become classics. Ludwig Wittgenstein is the paradigm case. The young man who in 1921 published the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, convinced he had definitively solved the problems of philosophy, is the same man who, three decades later, left in the Philosophical Investigations a meticulous critique of his own early theses. Between the two works lies not only a theoretical turn but one of the most singular intellectual stories of the twentieth century. To understand Wittgenstein is to understand two opposed ways of thinking about what language is and what philosophy can do.

1. Context and biography

1.1 Vienna, engineering, and the road to logic

Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna in 1889, into one of the wealthiest and most cultivated families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Wittgenstein household was frequented by figures such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler; his father’s industrial fortune secured a refined education and, later, an independence that would allow the philosopher to give away his inheritance.

Wittgenstein’s path to philosophy was indirect. He studied engineering in Berlin and then in Manchester, England, where he worked on aeronautics and on research into propellers and jet propulsion. His interest in the mathematics underlying engineering led him to the foundations of mathematics and, finally, to logic. It was thus that he came to Bertrand Russell at Cambridge around 1911. Russell at once recognized the young Austrian’s genius; he would soon declare that knowing Wittgenstein had been one of the most striking intellectual experiences of his life.

1.2 The war and a book written in the trenches

When the First World War broke out, Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian army. He served on the Eastern and Italian fronts and was taken prisoner of war. It was during this period — in field notebooks and finally in a prisoner-of-war camp — that he completed the text he would publish as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The work appeared in German in 1921 and, the following year, in a bilingual English-German edition with an introduction by Russell.

1.3 Abandonment and return

Persuaded that the Tractatus had, in essentials, solved the problems of philosophy, Wittgenstein abandoned it. He became a primary-school teacher in rural Austrian villages, worked as a gardener at a monastery, and designed, with almost obsessive rigor, a house for his sister in Vienna. Only in the late 1920s did contact with members of the Vienna Circle and the recognition of unresolved problems draw him back to philosophy. In 1929 he returned to Cambridge, where he would eventually hold a chair. He died in Cambridge in 1951, leaving unpublished the manuscripts that would become the Philosophical Investigations.

1.4 The relationship with the Vienna Circle

The Tractatus was read with fervor by the Vienna Circle — the group of philosophers and scientists gathered around Moritz Schlick that developed logical positivism. Wittgenstein conversed with some of its members, above all Schlick and Friedrich Waismann. It is a mistake, however, to count him as a member of the Circle: he never embraced the group’s anti-metaphysical program and held that the positivists had misunderstood his book. For the Circle, what lies “beyond” language is simply meaningless and disposable; for Wittgenstein, the ineffable — ethics, the meaning of life, the mystical — was precisely what mattered most, even though it could not be said.

2. The early Wittgenstein: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

2.1 The picture theory of meaning

The core of the Tractatus is the so-called picture theory of meaning. A proposition, for Wittgenstein, is a picture (Bild) of a possible state of affairs. Just as a map or a scale model represents a situation by sharing a certain structure with it, a proposition represents a fact by sharing with it a common logical form. The names in the proposition correspond to objects in the world; the way the names are arranged in the proposition pictures the way the objects are arranged in the state of affairs.

From this follows a bold thesis: language and world possess the same underlying logical structure. The world is the totality of facts, not of things (proposition 1.1); language, decomposed into its elementary propositions, mirrors that structure. Logical analysis reveals, behind the misleading grammar of everyday speech, the genuine logical form of propositions — a program Wittgenstein inherits and radicalizes from Russell’s logical atomism.

2.2 The sayable and the showable

The subtlest distinction in the Tractatus is the one separating what can be said from what can only be shown. What can be said are meaningful propositions: descriptions of facts, that is, the propositions of natural science. But there is much that language cannot say and yet shows. The very logical form that language shares with the world cannot be represented by any proposition — it shows itself in the way propositions function. The propositions of logic, in turn, are tautologies: they say nothing about the world but display the logical structure of language.

What shows itself cannot be said: this is one of the densest formulas of the work. Trying to say what can only be shown produces pseudo-propositions — and Wittgenstein admits, at the close of the book, that the propositions of the Tractatus itself are of this kind. Whoever has understood him must recognize them as nonsensical and, so to speak, throw away the ladder after climbing up it.

2.3 Proposition 7 and silence

The book ends with its most famous proposition, number 7: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen). It is a single statement, without comment, that closes the treatise. Far from devaluing what cannot be said, the silence marks a respectful limit. Everything that truly matters for human life — ethics, aesthetics, the meaning of the world, the mystical (das Mystische) — lies outside the limits of propositional language. It is not a matter of denying it, but of recognizing that it cannot be spoken of with sense. “The mystical,” Wittgenstein says, is not how the world is but that it is.

3. The transitional period and self-criticism

The Wittgenstein who returned to Cambridge in 1929 soon came to doubt his first system. The decisive shock was the realization that the picture theory could not account for the very diversity of language. One example he relates: a remark by the economist Piero Sraffa, who answered a Tractarian thesis with a Neapolitan gesture of contempt and asked what the “logical form” of that might be. How could the picture theory accommodate a gesture that communicates without picturing any fact?

In the transitional texts — among them the material gathered in The Blue and Brown Books (dictated 1933–35, published 1958) — Wittgenstein begins to dismantle the idea that all meaningful language describes facts. Orders, questions, pleas, thanks, curses, calculations: none of these uses “pictures” a state of affairs, and all are full-fledged language. The notion of a single essence of language, capturable by an ideal logical form, begins to collapse.

4. The later Wittgenstein: the Philosophical Investigations

Published posthumously in 1953, the Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen) open with a quotation from Saint Augustine describing how he supposedly learned language as a child — by pointing at objects and hearing their names. Wittgenstein takes this account as the emblem of a tempting and misleading conception: the idea that the essence of language lies in naming objects, and the meaning of each word lies in the object it designates. This “Augustinian” picture is the inaugural target of his critique — and, at bottom, it was also the picture that sustained his own Tractatus.

4.1 Meaning as use

Against the picture theory and against the Augustinian picture of language, Wittgenstein proposes a radical reorientation. We should not ask which object a word names, but how it is used. In the famous formulation of §43 of the Investigations: “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.” The qualification “though not for all” is important and is often dropped in citations: Wittgenstein was not stating a general theory of meaning but offering a method of investigation — to look at use rather than search for an entity behind the word.

4.2 Language-games (Sprachspiele)

Language is not a single, homogeneous system but a multiplicity of practices Wittgenstein calls language-games (Sprachspiele). Giving and obeying orders, describing an object, reporting an event, forming hypotheses, telling a joke, praying, translating, thanking, cursing — each is a “game” with its own rules, interwoven with actions and contexts. The notion of “game” is no accident: just as there is nothing common to all games (board games, card games, ball games, games of chance), so too there is no single essence shared by all uses of language.

4.3 Family resemblances

Hence the concept of family resemblances (Familienähnlichkeiten). Why do we call all these games “games” if they share no common property? Because among them there is a network of overlapping and crisscrossing affinities — like the traits that recur among members of a family (build, the shape of the eyes, temperament), without a single trait being present in all. Many of our most ordinary concepts work this way, without definition by genus and specific difference. The demand for exact definitions of every concept is itself one of the philosophical illusions Wittgenstein wants to dissolve.

4.4 Following a rule

One of the most discussed points of the Investigations is the reflection on what it means to follow a rule. Every application of a word or a formula follows, in some sense, a rule; yet the rule itself cannot, on pain of infinite regress, contain the instructions for its own application to each new case. Wittgenstein formulates the paradox: it seems that no interpretation by itself determines correct use, since any course of action can be made to accord with the rule on some interpretation. The way out lies not in a further interpretation but in there being a way of following the rule that manifests itself in practice — in a custom, a training, a shared way of acting. Following a rule is a public practice, not a solitary mental act.

4.5 The private-language argument

From this analysis follows the celebrated private-language argument. Wittgenstein examines the hypothesis of a language whose terms would refer to private sensations, accessible only to the one who has them — a language no one else could, in principle, understand. By means of the thought experiment of the diarist who records a recurring sensation with the sign “S,” he argues that such a language is impossible: without a public criterion of correct application, there is no difference between following the rule correctly and merely believing one is following it — and where that distinction vanishes, there is no rule at all. The consequence is profound: meaning is constitutively public; even the language with which we speak of our inner experiences depends on shared criteria.

4.6 Forms of life (Lebensformen)

At the deepest level lies the notion of forms of life (Lebensformen). Language-games do not float in a void: they are embedded in ways of living, in patterns of activity, reaction, and culture. “To imagine a language,” Wittgenstein says, “means to imagine a form of life.” To accept a language is to accept a set of shared practices, and it is on this ground — not on ultimate logical foundations — that the possibility of mutual understanding rests. The agreement that makes language possible is not agreement in opinions but agreement in form of life.

5. Philosophy as therapy

In both the Tractatus and the Investigations, Wittgenstein does not conceive of philosophy as a science that produces theories and doctrines. In the later period this conviction takes on a therapeutic cast: philosophical problems are not questions to be answered but confusions to be dissolved. They arise when “language goes on holiday” — when words are torn from the games in which they have a use and employed in a vacuum. In the formulation of §109 of the Investigations, philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of language. The philosopher’s task is not to build a system but to return words to their everyday use and, thereby, to make the problem disappear. “Philosophy,” he writes, leaves everything as it is.

Critical analysis

The most debated question in the reception of Wittgenstein is that of the relation between his two phases: rupture or continuity? The traditional reading sees a sharp break — the “later Wittgenstein” refuting the “early Wittgenstein” point by point. The Investigations themselves seem to confirm this, insofar as the preface suggests that the book can be properly understood only in contrast with the “grave mistakes” of the Tractatus. Other interpreters, however, stress deep continuities: in both phases, philosophy produces no theories but clarifies; in both, there is a limit beyond which language must not be forced; in both, the task is therapeutic before it is doctrinal.

To this debate has been added, more recently, the so-called resolute reading of the Tractatus (associated with commentators such as Cora Diamond and James Conant). On this reading, there is in the Tractatus no ineffable doctrine that the book tries to suggest by skirting the limits of the sayable; the propositions of the treatise are plainly and simply nonsensical, and their purpose is therapeutic from the start — to lead the reader to abandon metaphysical temptation. The resolute reading, contested by the “traditional” interpretation (which admits a significant ineffable in the early Wittgenstein), brings the two phases closer by projecting the therapeutic vocation of the Investigations backward. The debate remains open and is one of the liveliest in the specialist literature.

There are also disagreements about the very soundness of the arguments. The private-language argument, for instance, has been read in very different ways — and Saul Kripke’s famous reconstruction (see below) has itself become an object of controversy, to the point that many commentators doubt whether “Kripkenstein” coincides with the historical Wittgenstein.

Legacy

Wittgenstein’s influence is vast and ramified. In the immediate term, the later Wittgenstein was decisive for the ordinary-language philosophy developed at Oxford and Cambridge: Gilbert Ryle, whose critique of Cartesian dualism in The Concept of Mind (1949) echoes the Wittgensteinian anti-essentialist impulse, and J. L. Austin, with his theory of speech acts in How to Do Things with Words (1962), share an attention to the actual use of language. His student Elizabeth Anscombe, translator of the Investigations, was central to the transmission and diffusion of his work.

In the philosophy of language and mind, Saul Kripke took up the reflections on rule-following and private language in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982), formulating a “sceptical paradox” about meaning whose attribution to Wittgenstein is contested but whose fruitfulness is undeniable. The theses about the public character of meaning and about forms of life had wide reach in the social sciences and anthropology as well, feeding debates about rationality, rules, and cultural practices. Even currents far removed from the analytic style — from hermeneutics to social theory — have engaged with the idea that to understand a language is to participate in a form of life.

What remains, in the end, is the double legacy of a thinker who taught, first, to respect the limits of what can be said and, then, to distrust the very question “what does this word mean?” In both phases, Wittgenstein invites the reader less to acquire doctrines than to change the way one looks at language.

  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) — the work of the early Wittgenstein; read the bilingual edition with Russell’s introduction.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953, posthumous) — the central work of the later Wittgenstein.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (dictated 1933–35; published 1958) — transitional texts between the two phases.
  • Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (1969, posthumous) — final reflections on knowledge and doubt.
  • Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language (1982) — the famous and controversial reading of the rule-following problem.
  • Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (1990) — the standard intellectual biography.

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