Time to date myself, meaning this blog post, by syncing with contemporaneous events. Tucker was in Russia a few weeks ago, yakking with Vlad, and has more recently been comparing notes with Tulsi. Apparently these two bots are running the same viral Kremlin app eh? Just kidding. I'm trying to think more like a "Russians under every bed" DNCer (we've seen both Qanon and Blueanon bedevil the two parties).
That Baltimore bridge was hit this week, a couple days ago, by a container ship rendered unsteerable by a loss of power, resulting in deaths and the structure's collapse.
Speaking of conspiracy theories, there's this scifi fantasy entitled The Jew of Linz, wherein Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, is really a Russian agent, diverting the good boys of Oxford from their God-ordained duties as servants to the Crown or whatever it was.
True, LW was cosmopolitan and didn't see the Brits as especially civilized compared to other peoples i.e. as likewise capable of genocidal cruelty. He did consider taking up a situation in Russia at one point, but that wasn't considered strange for a European back then, given Moscow's long term role as a Euro capital.
The main theory of The Jew of Linz is that young Adolf and Ludwig knew each other, as they both went to the same boys' school and were but a year or two apart, and that Adolf's hatred for Jews (not a religion the Wittgenstein's outwardly professed, but by heritage...) germinated around his hatred for Ludwig in particular, a hatred borne of jealousy of the latter's wealth and privileged upbringing, not to mention smarts and better looks.
The book makes more sense when you tune in the Spanish Civil War, which many don't, and link in Hemingway. Which side was he on? What is the painting Guernica about? What was the history here?
Wittgenstein, for those less familiar with his story, was indeed born within a wealthy family and he stood to inherit a hefty chunk of that wealth if he were to follow in the footsteps of his father. Actually the expectation was he and his sibs would at least uphold the family name as some kind of prodigy. He could be a great inventor or something.
He moved to England to study aeronautical engineering. Only to discover his love of Logic. He transformed himself into a philosopher instead, becoming a protege of Bertrand Russell.
Philosophy is a profession that does not require lots of money for heavy equipment, or to supply a lab. He chose freedom and mobility over comfortable establishment bourgois living, disbursing his fortune among his siblings and I presume arranging for a meager stipend. He worked as a school teacher in rural Austria for awhile.
I believe his sister paid him a commission for designing her a house (somewhat proto Bauhausy in flavor? I'm not the expert).
When duty called, Ludwig joined his Austrian compatriots to serve as an artilleryman. His understanding of language and how it works was shaped by his time in the military, with its emphasis on giving orders. Language is sometimes about commanding (it partitions into a gazillion namespaces). In these language games, those of higher rank boss those of lower rank. One ends up with an entire form of life, and not just "a grammar" in the narrower sense of the word. But in the broader sense...?
A lot of thinkers vested their intellectual capital in Wittgenstein's first pillar work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which Bertrand Russell helped make world famous. The positivists leaned on his reputation as a rising star (like a Tulsi, a new face in social circuits), as did those vesting in the emerging field of propositional calculus, newly vogue within the English speaking world especially, but not exclusively. The Vienna Circle was based in Vienna after all.
So when LW later made a sharp turn, echoing what Richard Rorty would call the Linguistic Turn, prefigured back to Nietzsche at least, a lot of his fans felt thrown for a loop. The plot twisted. Their guy was now off on a new tack, with what would posthumously get published as Philosophical Investigations, a collection of aphorisms that chain together in various expository sections, while criss-crossing a metaphorical landscape, as suggestive sketches.
His points are hard to just say, but are amenable to showing. In this sense, his two philosophies have something in common: they challenge us to "see" in a different way (or to "breath a different air").
His new style of remarking, developed live in front of small cliques of earnest students, was remarkable, rocketing him to fame a second time, but at the cost of losing many from his first wave of early admirers. Bertrand Russell, for example, never got back on the Wittgenstein bandwagon. The new stuff was too alien, and insufficiently calculative and/or computational by his reckoning.
The later Wittgenstein wished to fork the philosophy of language, taking issue with both Nominalism and Platonism, carving out what some would call Operationalism. It's not that words point to either specifics (Nominalism) or general forms (Platonism), but that they don't point at all (despite the appeal of that image). They're closer to musical notes, but shall we say better at inspiring shared mental imagery. Kierkegaard likewise saw music and language on a kind of spectrum, the latter capable of coming closer to God (whatever that meant to him).
The word "horse" associates with what the philosophers call a horse made from "sense data", but as more sense data at the same level, not as higher or lower, not as symbol versus signified. The object points to the word as surely as the word to the object, once the connection is made and "pointing" accepted (arrows, dots and circular blobs being the essence of the "abstract nonsense" known as Category Theory, a more diagrammatic Logic than Russell's or Frege's).
We gain a psychological sense of aloofness with self referential recursivity, and Ludwig is happy to acknowledge our sense of vertigo, but only as a sign that it is language that is making us dizzy, and that's what makes philosophy "deep". It's about the grammar, and the (sometimes novel) gestalts it may induce.
