Compos Mentis

Wittgenstein and my Fly-Bottle

I have to admit to being a little upset at my most recent reading material. It's not that it wasn't genius or anything. Wittgenstein was nothing if not a genius. He was a crucial foundation for most contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics, which happen to be the cornerstone of modern philosophy. I read his first book, the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus a while back and I couldn't understand a word of it. Then I read that he presented it as his doctoral thesis at Cambridge University, and at the end of the interview clapped the adjudicators on the back (and they were Bertrand Russel and Alfred North Whitehead- not exactly dumb people) and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it."
I was fine with that. In fact, I used some of his ideas in my draft of what was going to be, eventually, after many hours and many revisions, a book. And then I read Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. These were never published during his lifetime; like Pascal's Pensees, they took a draft he essentially had on his desk and published that. You might think that this would be an inferior work, but I really like the style- as fragments, you can get a hold of a given idea better than you would if the same idea was presented as a chapter. It is more concise and more to the point.
But I have a problem with Wittgenstein. Check these sentences, they don't make sense out of context, but just read them:
"...if someone wished to say:"There is something common to all these constructions- namely the disjunction of their common properties"- then I should reply: Now you are only playing with words"
That sentence put my whole work (20,000+ words, constantly revised, days worth of work) on hiatus as I try desperately to come up with a way around his argument.

posted by Emmett @ 23:23