I’ve just started reading the Philosophical Investigations for my Philosophy of Language module and am enjoying it tremendously. It’s written in a very loose and approachable style, with each thought following on more or less from the last, as a series of meditations on the nature of meaning and language. So far, the thesis is that far from being a single integrated and coherent system for describing the world, underpinned by the sort of precise logical structure articulated by Frege and Russell, language is a collection of ‘games’ (Sprachspielen), each of which has its own rules and objectives. Thus any attempt to systematise natural language is doomed to failure because there simply is no one system, logical or otherwise, that describes the whole gamut of linguistic expression. Rather, language has evolved alongside our need for expression and communication, and plays a variety of roles that depend as much upon context and custom as formal unifying principles.  In this, Wittgenstein is expressing a fundamentally pluralistic view of language, which is seen as a kind of repository for knowledge and communication of human social practices.

I’ve been interested in Wittgenstein for some time now and it’s great to finally have the chance to read some of his work. After wading through pages of articles on contemporary philosophy of mind, which I have to say leave me entirely cold, even though I am normally quite fascinated about questions of consciousness, memory, personal identity, and so on, I have the feeling of “Finally, a philosopher that actually makes some sense!”. It’s as if somebody just turned on the light, and many of the philosophical opinions—or ‘intuitions’, as philosophers like to call them—that I have been holding onto in the face of almost uniform opposition from almost everything I’ve read since starting to study philosophy have finally found a voice, which is a bit of a relief as I was starting to think that I was the only one to think like that! (One example would be the existence of everyday macroscopic objects, which Wittgenstein thinks—if I interpret him correctly—is relative to our methods of describing them. A perfectly coherent and sensible position, but one that seems to be rejected by most modern philosophers, who want to insist that the way the world appears to us is how things really are; i.e. objects are things in themselves rather than just lumps of matter that fit our contingent descriptions of them.)

One final comment. I was struck by the humble tone and relatively minor ambitions of what has to be one of the most influential philosophical works of the 20th Century. Whatever one might think about the man, it is difficult not to feel some emotion upon reading the last line of the introduction, written in 1945, which states: ‘I should like to have produced a good book. This has not come about, but the time is past in which I could improve it.’ Although the end of the last sentence is undoubtedly true, I think there is little doubt that Wittgenstein succeeded in his aim of having produced ‘a good book’, even though it only made it into print two years after his death.