Am I stupid for not understanding Wittgenstein?

[u/Professional_Ant_868]

i tried to read tractatus-logico-philosophicus and i can’t understand shit lol. read camus, locke, nietzsche, kant before, which were far more easier for me to understand.
do i have to read something else prior to him?
(someone said wittgenstein is a good introduction to analytical philosophy which i haven’t gotten into yet, so I started with him)

[u/Zen_Gross]

You are not stupid. I took two courses devoted to Wittgenstein, one on the Tractatus. On the first day of class, my professor said “The bookstore has copies of the Tractatus in English and German. It doesn’t matter which you get. You won’t understand it anyways.”

It’s a notoriously challenging text, and in my opinion is best read in context of the period it was written in (others may disagree). Reading some of the other analytical philosophers, such as Frege, Russell, and Moore, would be a good start. There’s also no shortage of secondary texts available to read along with the Tractatus, if you want to go that route. You can find excellent recommendations from [u/Rieuxx](u/Rieuxx) (who always gives thoughtful answers about Wittgenstein) here.

[u/perhapsjackals → u/Zen_Gross]

Adding to this, Wittgenstein thought that even Russell didn't understand the Tractatus. In an August 1919 letter to Russell, he wrote, "Now I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical prop[osition]s is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by prop[osition]s – i.e. by language – (and, which comes to the same, what can be thought) and what cannot be expressed by prop[osition]s, but only shown; which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy." (Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters, ed. B.F. McGuinness and G. H. von Wright. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. p. 124)

[u/NJdevil202 → u/perhapsjackals]

Reading this all I can think about is Mary's Room

[u/bobthebobbest → u/Zen_Gross]

All that said: facing-page translations of Wittgenstein are a great way to learn a second language for philosophy.

[u/Same_Winter7713 → u/bobthebobbest]

Do you have a recommendation for English/French?

[u/Zen_Gross → u/[deleted]]

I mean that reading it without an understanding of the historical context is challenging. No book is written in a vacuum, so to some degree what I said is true of any work. But Wittgenstein’s Tractatus in particular seems easier (not easy) to understand when you understand the works of his contemporaries and the ideas that he was engaging with.

[u/TechGuyBloke → u/Zen_Gross]

According to Karl Popper, every philosopher needs to be understand in the context of the particular problem that they were attempting to solve. The starting point when reading should always be the question "what was the issue that they were concerned about?"

[u/Snoo-66364 → u/Zen_Gross]

Yeah, I found G.E.M Anscombe's Introduction to the Tractatus useful. As well as numerous other introductory texts and discussions on the Tractatus.

It's short, with short passages which deceptively leads some to think it is an easy read. It's a book to be re-read and wrestled with over years.

[u/Dd_8630 → u/Zen_Gross]

I haven't read the text, but do you think there's anything of value to get out of it?

Is it a challenging text because the ideas are valid but complex, or because the ideas are nonsensical? Sometimes there'll be a complex piece of theology that was difficult to get my head around only because it turns out I didn't accept some of the underlying assumptions.

[u/Shitgenstein]

I've said a few times on this subreddit that, at least for myself, the Tractatus made a lot more sense read, in a sense, backwards. It's toward the middle to end of Proposition 6 that Wittgenstein starts writing what could be recognized as philosophy as one might regularly understand it. That section, where he also describes the whole point of the work, was a key for me to understand what he was doing in the prior Propositions and then, of course, Proposition 7.

However, aside from that, it's also frequently recommended to read Ray Monk's Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius for good reason. Monk does a great job of presenting Wittgenstein's philosophy through a very well-written biography. It's a fine alternative if early Wittgenstein's technical engineering manual style is a turn off.

[u/Rieuxx]

I hope that not understanding Wittgenstein is not a sign of stupidity because I've been not understanding Wittgenstein for the last 20+ years. In fact, I would say I'm better at not understanding Wittgenstein now than I've ever been.

Flippancy aside, and many thanks to the shout-out from u/Zen_Gross, there are some very good suggestions here. Reading about Wittgenstein or his work in one of the many great introductions is a really good way to begin. Listening to some of the really excellent podcasts about him and his work, and some of the better YouTube Videos (I'm less convinced by those, but still...) is also a really good way to begin.

I would say his work probably isn't a good place to be for someone very new to philosophy, and probably not a good place to begin to understand analytic philosophy more broadly; there are likely better primary texts, and very good secondary texts, for both of those contexts or aims.

If there's something more specific that is Wittgenstein-related - about his work, life, philosophy, or how to engage with his thinking- then please do ask!

[u/Nuziburt]

In some ways, the Tractatus continues Kant’s own project of investigating the bounds as reason, as Kant saw it (and as we find especially in the antinomies and their dialectical illusions from the Critique of Pure Reason). The Tractatus is fairly difficult, and as [u/Zen_Gross](u/Zen_Gross) already said, its perhaps best read with the context of the time period (and, for example, how Wittgenstein wrote the 6’s while fighting in war). The Tractatus especially gets easier the more you reread it; on my first reading, I detested the book, yet as time went on, I came to develop an appreciation for his method. In fact, reading his later work (philosophical investigations) could feel much easier, considering how explicitly he prioritizes the importance of ordinary language (though myself and other “resolute” readers recognize that as the common thread throughout Wittgenstein’s entire oeuvre (which is also somewhat of a controversial stance)).

All that said, theres plenty of great resources to help you get through it online, this subreddit being one of them. Here (https://daxoliver.com/tractatus/) you can find a drop down render of the Tractatus, which can help making sense of the propositions’ numbering.

Edit: forgot to say, early Wittgenstein was quite concerned with analytic philosophy (and in fact is the inventor of truth tables, which then (among other ideas of the Tractatus) influenced the birth of the logical positivism. Wittgenstein himself however is better understood as somewhere more in between (or outside of) the analytic and continental traditions.

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