The Imponderable Wittgenstein

“Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.”

It seems that I am forming the bad habit of spending Sunday afternoons reading stuff wildly irrelevant to my current research work. In all honesty, I didn’t remember why I picked a book about Wittgenstein from the shelf this time. As usual, I started the book from its middle without much clue.

Thanks to the accessible style of Ray Monk’s writing, I was lost in thought of my own experience more than in a possible language game . As a non-native English speaker, I am forced to hover on the edge area between two languages— the worry of speaking or writing incorrect and awkward English has been plaguing me intermittently since my first day of learning this language. I understand my mother tongue is sometimes an inertial force posing difficulty in my acquiring a second language. (Technically speaking, this “inertia” is what Noam Chomsky calls “negative evidences”). Time and again when new ideas (maybe in the shape of pictures) crossed my mind I was simply unable to verbalise them –I felt suppressed and overwhelmed.

 

  Witt-Gen-Stein

 

However, my inability to verbalise does not always come as negative experience. I gather I am becoming a bit more introspective than before. Here comes the oft-quoted aphorism by Wittgenstein: “(1) What can be said at all can be said clearly; (2) and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.” The corollary for me is obvious in an intensified case: since I am not able to do (1) in English then I have to opt for (2).

At least I hesitated a lot until I really wanted to say something really important (in one verbal form or another). To some extent, I, as a foreigner, was more likely to be discouraged from uttering “unassailable and definitive” truthful propositions which are said to be tautological and nonsensical as well. This happens not because I choose to do so but my lack of linguistic ability prevents me. (Ignorance is bliss?)

 

On a day of 1930, Wittgenstein felt very distressed and said to his friend Drury:

I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud, and Einstein. A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years.

(Recollections of Wittgenstein, ed. Rush Rhees Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 112) Trivia: A literary critic challenges how Wittgenstein can compare Einstein to Chopin?!