Lou Wei (Zhang Jinghua).
Wittgenstein, the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, is an indispensable figure for every philosophical researcher. And the average reader has often heard some golden sentences from his writings, or learned about some of his quirks as a genius. Lou Wei, a professor at the School of Philosophy of Zhejiang University, has been engaged in Wittgenstein research for a long time, and is the author of Wittgenstein: Annotations on Philosophical Studies, and has translated Philosophical Studies, *Transformation and Value, and Blue Book and Brown Book. He recently published Ten Lectures on Wittgenstein (Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2023 edition), which interprets Wittgenstein's philosophical thoughts in ten lessons. In an exclusive interview with the Shanghai Review of Books, he talked about the significance of language in Wittgenstein's philosophy and the inspiration that Wittgenstein's way of thinking can inspire us.
Wittgenstein's Ten Lectures, by Lou Wei, Guangchen Yiwen Zhi Eons, published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, May 2023, 232 pages, 6800 yuan.
Wittgenstein.
Can you please talk about the origins of writing this book and what is the status of Wittgenstein's extant writings?
Lou Wei: When I was Wittgenstein, I usually dealt with researchers, exchanged views, and discussed with each other, but after a long time, I wanted to jump out of the small circle of researchers and write a concise, popular, and framework book to introduce Wittgenstein's philosophical views to the public. In 2013, I was teaching in the Department of Philosophy at Xiamen University, teaching Wittgenstein to graduate students, about 16 times a year, and I picked some of them and rewrote them, and I had this book "Ten Lectures on Wittgenstein".
As for Wittgenstein's surviving works, in fact, he published only one book during his lifetime, A Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic, published in English in 1922, and an essay entitled Some Commentaries on Logical Forms. Before his death in 1951, Reese was appointed executor, and Ainscom and von Wright were the custodians of his works, all three of whom were close students. Von Wright also wrote a long essay on where, when, and in what content Wittgenstein's work existed. Wittgenstein's other works, with the exception of Treatise on Logic and Philosophy, were edited and published by these students after his death. Wittgenstein did not like to write long, well-structured essays, and always wrote down paragraphs of comments in his notebook, which made up all of his manuscripts. On the basis of these manuscripts, he had typists produce some typescripts, revising and editing the original content in the process, the most famous of which is Typescript No. 213, the so-called "Big Typescript".
The process of editing and collating Wittgenstein's writings was lengthy. The first to be published was the most mature Philosophical Investigations (1953), the first part of which was edited by Wittgenstein himself, typed, and clearly intended to be published. After that, the editors edit and organize the remaining manuscripts and typescripts. The fourteen collections of Wittgenstein's writings published by Basil Blackwell in England spanned forty years from the original Philosophical Studies to the final Treatise on the Philosophy of Psychology (Volume II). In addition, one of the more representative anthologies is the eight-volume German edition of Wittgenstein's Collected Works (Werkausgabe) published by Surkamp Publishing House in Germany in 1984, and the other is the electronic version of Wittgenstein's Collected Works (Wittgenstein's Nachlass: The) jointly edited by Oxford University Press and the Wittgenstein Archives of the University of Bergen in Norway in 2000 Bergen Electronic Edition), which contains all of his manuscripts, typescripts, and dictated notes, all in machine-readable electronic format, are available online. The project is led by Alois Pichler, professor of philosophy at the University of Bergen and director of the Wittgenstein Archives. While this collection of e-papers is useful to researchers, it is too professional for most readers.
Since the publication of the Chinese translation of Ray Munch's biography "Genius as Responsibility", there has been a "Wittgenstein fever" in Chinese mainland, and to some extent, it is also because Wittgenstein's life experience as a genius exudes a unique charm. How should we understand his attitude towards life?
Lou Wei: I have summarized four of Wittgenstein's spiritual qualities. First, he has been fond of ** and machinery - the so-called "piano and steel" - all his life. Second, he dislikes pretentious people and things, such as the style of many philosophical works. 3. He retains a pure love for the spiritual life and is willing to devote himself to it. Fourth, he has a critical and detached attitude towards his own times. To understand these four spiritual qualities is to understand almost the entire life of Wittgenstein. I have discussed in detail in the first lecture of Wittgenstein's Ten Lectures, "I Have Had a Good Life", which you can refer to.
Interestingly, Wittgenstein was disdainful of many philosophical classics, and was also indifferent to the history of philosophy, and he loved to read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, as well as detectives and detective films. What is his own interest in reading?How does this relate to his philosophical thoughts?
Lou Wei: Famous philosophers like Frege and Russell were of great interest to Wittgenstein and read a lot. Fraser's "The Golden Bough" was a thick tome, and he read it very carefully. He loved to read the works of writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and philosophers like Augustine and Pascal, and he also read Plato. And Hegel he never liked – Hegel drove him crazy. Of course, as advocated in our country, Wittgenstein certainly did not have the habit of systematically studying the history of philosophy first, for the simple reason that he liked to grasp problems from the philosophical roots. From Wittgenstein's view of language, we can conclude that many philosophies in the past were actually misunderstandings, for example, metaphysical propositions actually misunderstood the logic of language. Broadly speaking, he held this negative attitude towards many early philosophies, and in his own time, he considered many of them to be a "philosophical disease", which is why he was not interested in systematically studying the history of philosophy.
How to understand that Wittgenstein once had a very strong desire to emigrate to the Soviet Union?
Lou Wei: When Wittgenstein was in Cambridge, he told people that he was a leftist at heart. However, he is not the kind of salon leftist who talks about it, but does it himself. He donated all his inheritance because he thought it was a chance – and it was by chance that he became the son of a wealthy man. What he pursues is a life of inevitability, and this inevitability lies in the fact that only when you contribute to society or a certain community can you have a bite to eat. He went to work as a primary school teacher in the poor mountains of Austria and as a gardener's assistant in a monastery, just to obtain his own means of subsistence through labor. In his view, the Soviet Union at that time represented this life that he considered to be inevitable, different from the life of the European bourgeoisie, which he hated.
The Vienna School or the Vienna School, which advocated logical positivism and analytical philosophical research, was greatly influenced by the Treatise on Logical Philosophy, although Wittgenstein's view of them seems to be more nuanced. How do we understand this?
Lou Wei: Among the members of the Vienna School or the Vienna School, such as Schlick and Weismann, Wittgenstein had a good relationship with them and would discuss them regularly, and Weissmann once wrote a book very similar to "On the Philosophy of Logic", trying to explain Wittgenstein's ideas clearly, but the length was much thicker. If you want to understand the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy, it is also very helpful to read Weismann's book, which is equivalent to expanding on Wittgenstein in detail, and then adding a lot of arguments and rewriting part of the content. Although the Vienna School has a manifesto, it is actually more like a loose circle, and it can hardly be said that it is a uniform school, and members like Neurath and Carnap have different ideas. What they have in common is that they promote the spirit of science and sneer at traditional metaphysics, that is, what is not clear to them. To a considerable extent, they responded to the advances of physics and mathematics in the twentieth century through philosophy, as is evident in Carnap, whose philosophy is entirely scientific and analytical.
Wittgenstein was not very interested in the Vienna School. In the case of Schlick and Weismann, Wittgenstein argues that they only understood half of the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy. Wittgenstein did argue in his Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic that meaningful language can only speak of "possible facts" in the world. However, in Schlick's and Weismann's view, the ineffable realms of religion, ethics, and beauty that Wittgenstein spoke of do not exist or are meaningless. Actually, what Wittgenstein meant was that there were no facts in these fields, so it was impossible to say that there was no such thing as a function of language. According to Schlick and Weisman, beauty and morality, which are really important or valuable things in human history, are suddenly removed. This is why Wittgenstein did not like the Vienna School, in their view that beauty and morality that cannot be verified by experience are unimportant, and Wittgenstein happens to think that these are important. The role of language has boundaries, language is more humble, it can only do what it can, and some of the more important things are precisely what language cannot say.
There is a classic saying that there is a distinction between "early Wittgenstein" and "late Wittgenstein", and now it has been suggested that there is also a "Wittgenstein in transition", and three Wittgensteins have been created at once. What do you think about this?
Lou Wei: Now there is a "final stage of Wittgenstein", if you really want to look into it, there are about five Wittgensteins. While many people will certainly not agree, it seems to me that there is only one Wittgenstein – the early, middle, and late stages are all the same. He himself told his students that his thinking took shape very early and did not change after the age of twenty. For me, although Wittgenstein dealt with different issues later than in his earlier period, the core of his thought remained practically unchanged. When I read Treatise on Logic and Philosophy, I can see that Wittgenstein's very subtle approach to problems is consistent with Philosophical Investigations on many levels.
How should we understand the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy?What is its place in Wittgenstein's philosophical thought?
Lou Wei: "On Logic and Philosophy" touches on many problems that Frege and Russell have studied, but have not solved, or encountered difficulties in solving. Wittgenstein finally solved these problems. So, a lot of the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy is actually a response to Russell and Frege, but to remove these things from the history of philosophy, its own framework is: "Language is the picture of the world." In this way, all possible states of affairs in this world are contained in language. In the same way, language is enclosed in a depictional relationship with the world. Since it is enclosed in this descriptive relationship, there are many things that cannot be said, and it can only speak of possible facts in the world. In such a language system, it has basic propositions, logical constants (e.g., "if, then"), and then with the help of these logical hooks, it constructs an increasingly complex language system. What is possible in the world also makes sense in language;What is impossible in the world is meaningless in language. If you understand this system of description, you will see that there is no such thing as a so-called fact in the fields of ethics, aesthetics and religion, because according to Wittgenstein, facts are all accidental, and their opposites are possible, for example, I am a man, which is a fact, but I can also be a woman, which is logically perfectly fine, so it is accidental, and there are no facts in the fields of aesthetics, religion and ethics (facts can have opposites), such as the opposite of "man should not do evil", that is, "man ought to do evil" , no matter how you say it, it is not true.
In this way, Wittgenstein declares that he has solved all philosophical problems, because all previous philosophical writings have used such a language, which, according to his ideas, must have misunderstood the logic of language, or rather, is indeed a language of meaninglessness. He argues that previous philosophies tried to use language to talk about religion, ethics, and beauty, which were actually ineffable.
Wittgenstein said that logic is the essence of thought, and then you also mentioned that for the early Wittgenstein, logic was what brought thought, language, and the world into perfect order. What should we make of this?
Lou Wei: This one is more complicated, let me try to put it simply. Wittgenstein said in his Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic that thought promulgates its laws to the world and to language at the same time – a strong flavor of German philosophy. For him, language is the expression of thought, and thought may be something that is inside us, and language is something external and blatant. All possible situations in the world can be considered, so that the mind promulgates its laws to language and the world at the same time, so that they are in a perfect order. The "perfect order" here actually means that what is possible in language is possible in the world, and what is possible in the world is also possible in language. Any possible situation corresponds to a meaningful language, and any meaningful language corresponds to a possible situation. We can take the example of driving a car, you are driving on the road, you turn left is one turn signal, turn right is turn another turn signal, go straight and don't turn on the lights, and other than that, there is no other possibility - you can't fly, right?These three situations can be perfectly expressed in the expression system of the car turn signal, and it is impossible to appear that it cannot be expressed in the future, because the traffic rules have long been stipulated, and there are only three symbols of left turn light, right turn light and no light on in the expression system of the car turn signal, and then these three symbols only correspond to the left turn, There are three cases of turning right and going straight, so it is a perfect expression system, and there is no such thing as a possible situation, which cannot be expressed by this expression system, or expressed by the expression system, and the car cannot be executed. In fact, language and the world are in such a relationship, but the relationship is much more complex.
What is Wittgenstein's role in the evolution of the history of philosophy from a focus on ontology to a focus on epistemology to a focus on language?
Lou Wei: I quote Peter Hacker, a professor at Oxford University and one of the most influential interpreters of Wittgenstein's ideas. Haacke commented that Wittgenstein gave philosophy a linguistic direction that had never been done before. The emphasis on symbols and language, probably beginning with Russell and Frege, reached a new level here in Wittgenstein. For Wittgenstein, the most important thing is language, and he even encapsulates the whole world in language – in his Treatise on Logic and Philosophy, he says that all possible situations in this world are contained in a meaningful set of languages (the sum of basic propositions) and their combinations. In this sense, Wittgenstein was the most decisive figure in the linguistic turn of philosophy.
You mentioned that Russell was racking his brains to understand Wittgenstein's Treatise on Logic and Philosophy. Why is it so difficult for a great philosopher like Russell to understand Wittgenstein?
Lou Wei: I always felt that Russell (and Frege) couldn't understand the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy, precisely because they thought that language has no boundaries, that language should be almighty, and that I couldn't use language to express anything I wanted to expressWittgenstein, on the contrary, believed that language had boundaries. I vaguely feel that this is the biggest difference between Russell and Wittgenstein, Russell's very optimistic idea of language, while Wittgenstein is very pessimistic – there is a fundamental difference in the spiritual characteristics between them. A lot of people are very interested in the feud between Russell and Wittgenstein, and I think they don't really have any grudges, and Wittgenstein has a lot of respect for Russell, and he criticizes Russell's philosophical views a lot because he knows better. In the ninth lecture, I summarized the fundamental differences in their philosophical lines.
Speaking of which, let me think of your mention of Hume's farmer problem in the ninth lecture of Wittgenstein's Ten Lectures, which also involves Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell
Lou Wei: This involves the issue of induction. For example, if you believe that the sun will rise tomorrow, if someone asks you, why do you believe that?Actually, the only answer you can give is: because the sun used to rise every day. If a strong skeptic asks you: why will the sun continue to rise tomorrow, even if it used to rise every day before?At this time, you will find that from today to tomorrow, you will not have a channel to cross. This is the question of induction: why do you use a thing that has happened so often before as a basis for its subsequent occurrence?It's easy to imagine that it doesn't happen next, right?
So, what to do at this time?Russell's idea was that what happened a lot before could be the basis for what happened next, and he thought that our language game had a rational basis, and that foundation was his principle of induction. Wittgenstein is the opposite, and it seems to me that Russell's principle of induction has been thoroughly refuted by Wittgenstein. He argues that there is no need to defend the language game we play, and that it is not necessary to try to give it a basis. Why should we play this game?Why do we play this game like this?None of this needs to be explained. The reason why we say that something has been happening in the past and will continue to happen in the next is actually unfounded, we just play this game like this.
The reason why Wittgenstein argues that language games, or our language, have no foundation, or that they do not need to be defended and explained, is actually very simple: to explain language also requires the use of language, so how do you explain the language you use to explain?He believes that there is no point in explaining language in words, this is a point of no return, just like a puppy chasing its own tail, which cannot be chased.
This brings us to what you said at the beginning, Wittgenstein thinks that a lot of philosophy asks the wrong question, or rather, a misunderstanding of language.
Lou Wei: For Wittgenstein, if you really want to play philosophy like that, then that's fine, you can just play like that, but you don't take it as a serious philosophy. So he said that philosophy can be made up entirely of jokes. You can also play with philosophy as a kind of talk show.
The oft-quoted saying, "Whatever can be said, can be said clearly;Whatever cannot be said, we must remain silent". You complain that people keep quoting this sentence, but they keep misunderstanding it. What is the exact understanding of this phrase?
Lou Wei: "Whatever cannot be said, we must remain silent", this sentence points to the higher realms of religion, ethics and aesthetics, in other words, it has a specific point, not something that can be quoted casually. What Wittgenstein wants to say is nothing more than that we cannot speak about these higher realms, and that language can only deal with things within the realm of language, and the Treatise on Philosophy of Logic deals with the question of what exactly is within the realm of language. I think Wittgenstein's famous quote is like a finger that ends all the discussion, pointing to the higher realms of the unspeakable beyond the demarcated realm of language.
You have made a very interesting analogy about Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and the Blue Book and the Brown Book, and you have made a very interesting analogy to say that Wittgenstein's views on language, from the Treatise on Logic and Philosophy to the Philosophical Studies and the Blue Book and the Brown Book, are like going from "smooth ice" to "rough ground".
Lou Wei: Doesn't everyone say that "Treatise on Logic and Philosophy" and "Philosophical Studies" are opposites?Wittgenstein himself said that he should not publish his earlier and later ideas together, which seems to reflect a kind of opposition. So, I simply summed up this opposition as "smooth ice" and "rough ground".
Later there was another analogy, which might have been better. Wittgenstein's early philosophy regarded language as a picture of "possible facts", and regarded language as an undifferentiated, singular, and abstract thing, which is like looking at the city through a map, whether it is Chongqing or Shanghai, from the map, it is actually the same, all of which are abbreviated into dots and lines. And Wittgenstein's later philosophy, I think, is a feeling of walking around the city, so that you see richer details and coarser grains, and walking in Shanghai is certainly not the same as walking in Chongqing, right?As a result, you will find that the various areas of language are very different, for example, adjectives and nouns are very different.
Speaking of analogies and examples, you talk about many interesting examples in the book, some of which were used by Wittgenstein himself. For example, he summarizes his teaching goals to his students by quoting a sentence from King Lear: "I will teach you to see the difference." "What is Wittgenstein's approach to teaching students to see the difference?
Lou Wei: When ordinary people put forward a point of view, the basis or basis of this point of view is actually some examples of language use. Wittgenstein will give more examples of the use of language in this type of view, and use these examples to show you that your view is not comprehensive, or only partial in nature. The so-called "seeing the difference" can be simply understood as allowing you to see those things that are different. You don't see the difference, you feel like the language is the same. When you see the differences, you feel that each word is a tool, and different tools are used in very different ways. For example, words like "Russell" and "Socrates" all correspond to a person, and on that basis, we wonder if all words should correspond to a person or a thing. That's not seeing the difference.
In fact, Wittgenstein argues at the beginning of his Philosophical Investigations that many words do not have this correspondence, such as numbers, what does the word "3" correspond to, and we cannot find anything that corresponds to it, but it seems to correspond to any three things, three cows, three glasses of water, and so on. Here we can find that without the corresponding Russell, the word "Russell" is meaningless, and the number "3" is not the same as "Russell". Another example is the adjective, what does "red" correspond to, we can't find a corresponding thing to it, but all red things can be spoken by it. For example, the word "today" has nothing to do with it, so doesn't it have meaning?Obviously also makes sense. In this way, Wittgenstein shows us the role of words in our language. As mentioned earlier, every word is a tool. Wittgenstein gave an example, he said that words are like joysticks, each lever looks the same, but when you pull this lever, you turn on the clutch, and when you pull that lever, you step on the brakes, and the basic usage is very different.
It has been mentioned that Wittgenstein was committed to opposing metaphysics, but his work later became a new metaphysics, what do you think of this?
Lou Wei: Because Wittgenstein himself said that philosophy in the traditional sense is futile, and the person who tries to find answers through this philosophy is like a fly trapped in a transparent glass bottle, trying to escape by hitting the side of the bottle, and his philosophy is to give the fly in the glass bottle a way out. As a result, some people commented that Wittgenstein claimed to release flies out of glass bottles, but wasn't he also trapped in his own system?Isn't he himself a fly in a bottle?This is certainly not right. What are the characteristics of Wittgenstein's philosophy?His philosophy is characterized by a permanent premise of how language is actually used. Our lives are always changing, and so is the way we use language, but in fact, Wittgenstein did not establish a one-and-done theoretical system. So, his philosophy is open-ended. In my opinion, he actually provides a way of doing philosophy or a way of thinking, and this way can really be practiced and applied.
Can you talk a little bit about the significance of Wisegenstein's open philosophy as a methodology?
Lou Wei: I remember that there was a news story that caused a sensation when a migrant worker with the pen name Chen Zhi (in fact, the term "migrant worker" is a bit exaggerated, he was a factory worker in Xiamen at that time) translated a book of Introduction to Heidegger and wanted to publish it. Many people questioned: What does Heidegger know about a migrant worker?At this time, in Wittgenstein's way, we can ask rhetorically: do those who say that Chen Zhi does not understand Heidegger, do they themselves understand?Why do they say that Chen Zhi does not understand Heidegger?Suppose the person who questioned it was a university professor, the average person would think that a university professor would know Heidegger better than a migrant worker. In this case, we can go on and ask: why does a university professor necessarily know Heidegger better?Because this professor was judged by experts?Do people who are judged by experts necessarily know Heidegger better?In Wittgenstein's way, you ask what it means to "understand" Heidegger and what does it mean to "understand" Heidegger better?Who will judge whether Heidegger "understands" or not?Once these questions are raised, in fact, many things are deconstructed, as if a knot is loose. Originally, when we saw this kind of questioning in our daily life, we seemed to accept it, indeed, how could a migrant worker understand Heidegger better than a university professor?Often, at the most superficial level, we stop asking, but if you continue to ask, maybe the knot will be untied, and then the situation will change.
I think that's how Wittgenstein thinks. He himself said that he was the child of a businessman, and a businessman always had to get things done, in his exact words, get things done, and his philosophy was the same - to get things done. In fact, this is not the way we understand philosophy in our daily life, the way we understand to do philosophy in our daily life, in fact, you put forward a point of view, I put forward another point of view, everyone publishes articles in magazines and discusses with each other, and makes it into a thriving circle game, and everyone comes to play. And Wittgenstein is different, he likes to get things done, just go to him, talk things through thoroughly, and you get ** after talking. In his own words, it's a **philosophy.
The Paper, for more original information, please **"The Paper" app).