I find it very interesting that in philosophy of language circles we deliberately separate the “first Wittgenstein” from the “second Wittgenstein,” consistently, like they’re two different people, because his theses changed so much between the publication of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations that analytical philosophy struggles to establish continuity between the first and the second, but really, it’s mostly because analytical philosophy thinks of itself as separate from history, decontextualized, and truth-seeking. Of course it’s uncomfortable with what the Investigations have to say about our beloved Tractatus: that our endeavors of mapping epistemological truth to language are futile, that they’re a maladaptive coping mechanism for the horrors of life.

Wittgenstein wrote the Tractatus in the midst of volunteering in World War I, being captured as a war prisoner because he had a suicidal crisis while at the front after his brother killed himself (the third of his brothers to go that way), having decided to give away all his earnings and possessions to his family when he was released, and dedicating himself to teaching in an elementary school. Of course he focuses on the clarity of communication and workings of propositional logic; he’s teaching children in the hopes that they will not make the same mistakes his generation did. He has to believe in the idea that there is some truth and that that truth is good. that if you teach the right lessons, that if there’s no room for ambiguity when you define truth, then there is no room for suicide or war.

But the Investigations were written during another world war that his teachings could not prevent. After the disillusionment with the idea of a universal, logically ruled universe where the idea of good was a constant that we could angle ourselves towards, he just thinks abstraction is bullshit. that philosophy can’t change the world in the ways he hoped it would because it’s too far removed from the subjects it analyzes. And yes, he volunteers in the war again, but this time he’s not a soldier; he volunteers at a hospital. Philosophy was a comfort to the patients he nursed, those who knew death, who weren’t hypothesizing whether truth could save humanity from its own immolation. Of course the Investigations are about language in history. About how the same propositions he tried teaching as great truths didn’t prevent his students from going to war, but they comforted the people that were dying. That hope was only true when you accepted that there was war, suicide, and death, and yet people continued surviving. living, even. that language was a leap of faith between speakers, not some great magnifier of universal reality, and that these games we played with words were the most important thing in life: attempting communication when there’s still a possibility of failure and learning from that failure so that context may inform further attempts. Still imperfect, yes, but ever increasingly clear. not a universal truth to save humanity for generations, just a game to save one soul for a few decades. That’s as good as it gets. and it’s pretty damn good.

This ramble was entirely prompted by the framed duckrabbit in Severance, which is one of the thought experiments in Wittgenstein’s Investigations.

I’m thinking a lot about how Wittgenstein’s ideological shift happened in the context of a failed attempt at educating children, his faith in the gospels unraveling, being practically disowned by his own family, in a house he emptied in search of clarity, seeing his students go to war and die the same way his generation did, and how he decided to refer to the contextualization of logic as language games. how his maturity came through embracing the childhood folly he readily gave up to become a soldier, and how it was more of a kindness for those patients than any dogma.

I have high hopes for Seth Milchick, whose office is empty and utilitarian except for the duckrabbit and a reminder of Svalbard’s coastal landscape, who tries to be kind despite handbook rules and the promised order in a chaotic nightmare, who is berated for using a linguistic register that was not meant for people like him, and who rebels by playing with syllable count.