Open Mike: The Trouble of Thinking

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I believe I only really like three philosophers. There are many of them who are interesting, of course. Some are repellent: Nietzsche had only one good idea, and I forget what it is. (A joke, son, a joke.) Some have so girded themselves with opacity that one lifetime is not sufficient to understand them and also do other things too (I'm looking at you, Immanuel*). Some are too loaded: Marx's critiques of capitalism should be required reading for any educated individual, yet his speculative flights are notoriously unsuccessful, and in any case he has been tainted by persistent demonization. Like Wagner, he was liked by the wrong people. Others, such as Chomsky, seem fractured by their preoccupations. Some, like Adam Smith, I would like to like (How the Scots Invented the Modern World is one of my top dozen or so favorite books, and in my opinion should be mandatory reading for every high school student). And I am drawn again and again to David Hume in the same way that a man can be hopelessly attracted to a woman he cannot possibly have, and yet...well, the problem with Hume seems to be that he wrote in my language, and I have to read him in the original. (You're laughing again? Good.) I would much prefer to be a speaker of a different language and thus find it necessary to read him in translation. (Original texts are timeless, whereas translations are of our own time and culture: that is, they become dated, and need to be periodically refreshed.) I really wish someone would translate Hume into English for me.

The three I like are Schopenhauer, the patron saint of depressives; Socrates, who to my mind is the prototype of the teacher, which is to say, my type (Plato his Boswell); and Wittgenstein, who was the last major philosopher to try to make things clear. Perhaps I like Ludwig because I'm simply anti-dogmatic too—in the same way that perhaps I like the Scots book because my heritage is Scottish, and I identify. (I was born in Indianapolis, an American locus of the Scottish diaspora.) In any case, middle-period Wittgenstein is a delver's delight: there is a Wittgenstein quote for every occasion. He articulates my creed: "Everything that can be said can be said clearly." He even has many wonderful pronouncements that either are, or might be, applied to photography, among them: "Don't think, look!", "Only describe, don't explain," and, of course, the famous "a picture is a fact."

You might have noticed that I have some strong opinions about books. For example, I think Richard Wright's Black Boy should not include "The Horror and the Glory," despite the fact that those of a wonkish cast of mind like that part best. Separate book, sez me. Similarly, I wish I knew of an edition of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations that separated out Part II, which really shows a separate phase of his thought. Bookishly, I like Hacker and Schulte's 4th Wiley-Blackwell edition for this reason; they at least assign Part II its own title (Philosophie der Psychologie —Ein Fragment).

The meaning of Wittgenstein is permanently unsettled, I admit, but we need to look upon that as an asset.

In any case my opinion is that Philosophical Investigations should be the "Kind of Blue" of philosophy, the one book everyone who only reads one book of philosophy should read. (Those whose eminently understandable ambition is to read no works of philosophy might enjoy Ray Monk's books, for instance this short one.) Another of my flagrant little opinionations is that Wittgenstein is the only philosopher other philosophers actually love. How can you not love a guy who prefaces his own work by saying "I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking"?

His certainly doesn't.

Mike

*And don't think you're getting away with anything either, Thomas Hobbes—I've fished in your ocean, and been driven, Ahab-like, nearly out of my mind.

P.S. On a completely different subject, we heard from the real John Sexton this morning. Don't miss his "Featured Comment" on the Richard ≠ John post.

"Open Mike" is a series of off-topic meanderings, ranging far from your editor's field of expertise, although falling within the sphere of his interests, that appears, sometimes, on Sundays.

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Original contents copyright 2012 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by jginsbu: "English to English translations available here. Hume awaits you!"

Mike replies: It's been done?! I'm honestly astonished. Thank you....

Featured Comment by Lance Evingson: "So it was a most delightful and odd moment when the owner of 'I'll Have Another' quoted Wittgenstein in the post-race interview at Churchill Downs. I thought Bob Costas did a near double-take when he heard it. Will Wittgenstein ever be mentioned at a racetrack again? (That's rhetorical, son....) (This, my first post—about this of all things?!)"

Mike replies: You win the blue ribbon, Lance, for discerning the genesis of this post...I started poking around the Internet to see if I could find that quote. A few hours later, and it's a bouncing baby blog post.

Everything becomes fodder, I guess....

Comments

[Tony McDaniel]

I had completely repressed the memory of reading Hobbes' Leviathan as an undergraduate. :shudder:

I've enjoyed Bertrand Russel's Why I am not a Christian and The Problem of Philosophy. They're very readable, and I highly recommend them.

[Michael]

Amen brother. My daughter went today to visit his grave at Girton in Cambridge. In another age Wittgenstein would have been a saint, and his worship would have been to clean out your head. He makes you heal your pretentious fancies. He lived a life of rigour and struggle, and was obnoxious to philosophers, all in order to let the rest of us do it with less pain. His architecture was the working out in stuff of his thinking.

You really should have Montaigne on your list. And by the way: Nietzsche was the logical result of your hero Schopenhauer. If he had a problem, it wasn't having one idea, it was having too many.

Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. Whew.

[Bahi]

Wittgenstein was the only philosopher to make sense to me as a student — all the philosophers I read who were said to have been influenced by him were disappointing. I was delighted to see his picture here and initially surprised but shouldn't have been, really.

[Zeeman]

Speaking of Wittgenstein-- ever encountered any Piero Sraffa characters in your life?

It's always nice to have friends capable of giving us the finger in ways thoughtful enough to make us reexamine our views. I'm lucky to have one such friend.

[Tom higgins]

In my humble and not-well-read opinion, several books I've encountered ponder the human condition better than out and out philosophy (he typed, deliberately ignoring the point of the original post). "The sound and the fury", by Faulkner is a difficult read, but very rewarding. "Nostromo"' or "The Secret Agent" by Joseph Conrad also knock it out of the park for me, and pretty much anything by Truman Capote. Westons "Daybooks" not bad either. I guess my point is, (to me at least) the best philosophers weren't philosophers. That said, it's your Sunday dude.

[David Brookes]

Mike

If your antecedents are Scots, should your surname have a final "e". My mother was a member of the Johnstone clan (originally, I believe, a lowland clan of cattle thieves or border reivers).

As to philosophy, can I remind you of A E Houseman's line "It is thinking lays lads low"!

[Mike Johnston]

David,
"Johnston" and "Johnstone" are just alternate spellings. Same clan.

Mike

[hugh crawford]

"I was thinking about thinking about thinking, but it changed my mind"

[Dave Kee]

"Like Wagner, he was liked by the wrong people."

Wagner deserved his Nazi "friends". He was a virulent anti Semite.

[Stephen S. Mack]

And let's not forget Samuel Johnson. I'm not referring to his writings, which are in many cases a difficult read, but to his conversation. Also, let's include Mark Twain. Both of those gentlemen are philosophers of a different order. And while I am at it, let's add H. L. Mencken! (I'm suggesting these in the spirit of Tom higgins post, above.)

With best regards.

Stephen

[Bob Rosinsky]

Saul Kripke has had a thing or two to say about Wittgenstein.

[Wade Chafe]

You reminded me of Monty Python's "The Philosopher's Song".

[Mike Johnston]

Ah, yes, the Kripkenstein monster....[g] All that is quite beyond me, or should I say over my head.

(Or, to be a little more fair to myself, I should say I've never "felt" Wittgenstein's rule-following paradox as applied to mathematics, but I sense it naturally with regard to language.)

Mike

[Don]

I tried reading a bunch philosophy in my youth, seeking an "answer", but found much of it impenetrable.

Now I'm older I realise that a) there is no answer, and b) a failure to communicate is more often a failure of the author, not the reader.

I did give philosophy another try 8 years ago and enjoyed reading Karl Popper.

[J. Robert Lennon]

Have you read Bruce Duffy's wonderful novel THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT? It is about Wittgenstein, and is one of my favorites.

[John Haines]

My favorite Wittgenstein book is his "On Certainty," ed by G.E.M. Anscome and G.H. von Wright, transl. by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscome, 192pp (alternate pages are in English and German), Harper, 1969.

If you haven't read it I think you would enjoy it immensely. One quote: "A doubt that doubted everything would not be a doubt."

[Earl Dunbar]

How the Scots Invented the Modern World indeed should be required reading for everyone.

Slainte

[David Dyer-Bennet]

The Philosopher's Drinking Song.

[Richard Tugwell]

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent" - obviously he was thinking about the analogue/digital debate

[David H.]

Hume is more difficult to understand than the English translation of Marx's Das Kapital? I can't imagine. I read Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto in college as part of a Marxism course (well after Marxism was dead and communism was breathing its last) and remember reading and rereading pages and paragraphs over and over to try to figure out what he was saying. Fortunately, the professor, who looked like Lenin, "translated" it into something we could understand.

My clearest memory of the course now is that Marx was reputed to have hated potatoes. Marxism sounded wonderful though. Too bad it couldn't work in the real world. Later, as a Libertarian, I concluded the same thing about Libertarianism.

[Mike Johnston]

"remember reading and rereading pages and paragraphs over and over to try to figure out what he was saying."

David,
Curiously, some philosophers have that effect on me and others don't. It seems to depend not on their actual language, but whether I'm in sync with their line of thought...or even their basic way of thinking. It's almost like a personality thing. Can't really explain it.

Mike

[Ray Hudson]

My favorite - and one I recognize and accept in my own life, 'how small a thought it takes to fill a whole life .

Wonderful vocal of this by Reich - totally beautiful.

Ray H.

[Ed]

I will read Witgenstein!

Greetings, Ed

[scott kirkpatrick]

As a descendant of some of the more famous "border reivers" (such as Roger de Kirkpatrick of Dumfriesshire), I am surprised that I never before encountered "How the Scots Invented..." But that will soon be remedied. My son, entering high school and fascinated with history (to defend himself in a family overloaded with professors, mathematicians and scientists) is also looking forward to it. Nice tip, Mike.

scott

[Svein-Frode]

Don't forget to read some of the essays by Wittgenstein's successor at Cambridge, Georg Henrik von Wright. His thought provoking essay "The Myth of Progress" is a sound read.

[Simon Griffee]

Talk of philosophy always reminds me of this classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vV3QGagck

[Ben Rosengart]

Marx was better at description than prescription.

Try Nietzsche again. I think he was brilliant, and lots of fun to read—so long as you shun the egregious Thomas Common translations in favor of Walter Kaufman's.

[Ron Preedy]

Who was it that said "Most people would sooner die than think, and in fact, they do so."

[Richard G]

Mike I do love your column and enjoy your Open Mike diversions and especially liked this one. Another of Wittgenstein's important exhortations was "Don't ask for the meaning, ask for the use" in order to understand a word. His program stalled not long after his death and the radical nature of his philosophy is lost in the fetishism of the biography. He bucks 2000 years of philosophical tradition in negating the notion of the essence of things - that words are not underpinned by ideas but accrete meaning in the world where they are used and a full formal definition of a word is impossible. If I read him for more than a few pages at a time I am inclined to aphoristic utterances, my language already a great source of frustration to my children who forbid me to use the generic fist person 'one'.

[garyi@estreet.com]

sartre : "to do is to be"

socrates : "to be is to do"

sinatra : "do be do be do"

[John Krumm]

I hadn't really considered Chomsky a philosopher. The guy is pretty unique in terms of both depth and scope of thinking, and he'd be the first to tell you that his voluminous writings on U.S. foreign policy is hardly rocket science. Among other things, he's a moralist, the good kind, writing that the responsibility of intellectuals is "to tell the truth," which is one of those things intellectuals were supposed to have learned in kindergarten, but unfortunately unlearned it in later grades.

Thanks for the interesting post.

[Henry Rogers]

Mike, Forgive a bit of pedantry but it is notoriously difficult to be absolutely certain in Plato of the extent to which the "Socrates" character speaks for himself or is merely a mouthpiece for Plato's own development of S's ideas. Some classicists jokingly talk about "Plocrates".

[Adrian]

Although it is about Wittgenstein (and a lot of others as well), and not by him, "Wittgenstein's Vienna" by Janik and Toulmin is an excellent read.

[Nico Burns]

Mike, have you ever looked into Jungian personality types? Based on the theory of Carl Jung, it breaks people down into 16 basic categories, and are supposed to describe the fundemental ways in which we take in the world (perceive) and worked out what we think (judge). It is also the source of the words introverted and extroverted (although the meaning has been distorted in common use)

I mention this because Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein and Plato are all listed as INFJ's (my own type) (all the types have 4 letter combinations to describe them in the form [e/i][n/s][t/f][p/j]):

http://www.celebritytypes.com/infj.php

Which might explain why you like those 3 in particular.

If you are interested in finding out more then I recommend this site: http://personalityjunkie.com/
Personally, I have found the descriptions of my personality based on type to be shockingly accurate. It's certainly very interesting.

Nico

P.S. Personality types are all about how you interact with the world, and nothing to do with how nice you are. Hitler and Gandhi and both also listed as INFJ's.

[Ade]

Might I suggest you read "How To Live - a life of Montaigne" by Sarah Bakewell? (You'll thank me.)

[Emmanuel Huybrechts]

Nietzsche repellent? I wonder why unless you want to interpret him as a Nazi philosopher which he was not. If Schopenhauer is depressing Nietzsche is the antidote. Ecce Homo and the AntiChrist are my favorites.

[James Liu]

I did an awful lot of Wittgenstein while collecting a master's in philosophy back when I thought I was on my way to a PhD. I think that one of the books leading up to the PI (you get to abbreviating things when you study Wittgenstein, people would tell jokes just by mentioning a remark number, although I don't remember the jokes, nor were they funny) are more accessible, if more disjointed. Lots of scholars recommend the Blue and Brown Books, but personally I liked Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, which is much less intimidating than the title sounds, and has this wonderful set of remarks about unfair games and how they are never satisfying even for the winners.

Another Wittgenstein book that a novice might like is Culture and Value. It's Wittgenstein harshing on the popular culture of his time, and very very amusing.