This has been a disorienting year.
North Korean troops are on European soil, helping to invade an EU applicant country. A convicted fraudster, backed by the world’s richest man, got elected US president on a platform of representing the common man. The Ponzi scheme known as cryptocurrency is going mainstream a few short years after the last economic crash. Disgraced TD Michael Lowry has emerged as a kingmaker of the next government.
Behind these and other head-spinning developments has been an upending of language. In our topsy-turvy world, regulating business corporations in the public interest is “red tape”. Criticising the Israeli government’s breaches of international law is “anti-Semitism”. Consumer products are “iconic”, and everyone from second-wave feminists and climate campaigners to Christian conservatives are now, it seems, “fascists”.
It is as though we are living through another stage of history “when language goes on holiday” – to borrow a phrase of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Austrian philosopher, who sporadically resided in Ireland, spent a lifetime mulling over the meaning of words.
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Along with Bertrand Russell, his mentor turned critic, Wittgenstein was central to a hugely influential series of debates in Europe following the second World War on the limits of knowledge and the nature of truth.
Russell and Wittgenstein may sound familiar to you if you read Sally Rooney’s 2024 blockbuster, Intermezzo. The epigraph to the book is a quote about chess from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Ideas from both philosophers surface at key points in the book.
In one scene, Ivan – one of the two brothers at the centre of the novel – gets into a discussion with Rooneyesque Trinity academic Sylvia about Russell’s concept of “vacuous truth”. “It goes to show, Ivan thinks, that the difference between truth and lying is complicated ... Reality is actually one thing and language something else,” Rooney writes.
Ivan, like Wittgenstein, is socially awkward, sensitive and occasionally petulant. Peter, like Russell, is worldly wise and sociable, with a well-honed moral conscience
Later, his brother Peter turns to a quote by Wittgenstein to try to make sense of his complicated love life. What’s the difference between a friend and a girlfriend? When do you know if you’re in a throuple?
For Wittgenstein, words didn’t have a preordained meaning. Rather, they acquired meaning through their use.
He urged us to be wary of analysts using sleight of hand to smuggle in their own interpretations: “The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.”
Rooney knits such conceptual allusions into a deeply affecting storyline in a demonstration of her remarkable writing skills.
An uncanny feature of the novel is how Ivan and Peter represent different qualities of the two philosophers. Ivan, like Wittgenstein, is socially awkward, sensitive and occasionally petulant. Peter, like Russell, is worldly wise and sociable, with a well-honed moral conscience. The brothers’ falling-out also has its parallel in Wittgenstein and Russell. A significant age gap in each case meant both Peter and Russell acted as partial father-figures for the younger men.
Explaining the source of their estrangement, TCD political scientist Peter Stone says: “Wittgenstein initially embraced Russell’s goal of analysing the logical structure of language. That was the aim of his book the Tractatus – to show that all meaningful sentences could be analysed in this way so as to reveal their truth or falsity. But he later came to believe that language does many things aside from make assertions that can be true or false, like ‘What time is dinner?’ or ‘Go to hell!’ This led him to reanalyse language as a series of games, many of which have nothing to do with truth or falsity.”
With Russell now a theoretical enemy, the “later” Wittgenstein declared: “Bad philosophers are like slum landlords. It’s my job to put them out of business.” Russell replied in kind, accusing Wittgenstein of turning common sense into a cult. “We are now told that it is not the world that we are to try to understand but only sentences, and it is assumed that all sentences can count as true except those uttered by philosophers,” an exasperated Russell wrote.
Stone, who has been decorated by the international Bertrand Russell Society for his writings on the philosopher, says “the mature Wittgenstein was notorious for believing that there were no philosophical problems. What we call philosophical problems were simply caused by our misuses of language. Russell deplored the idea, and thought it was taking philosophy in terrible directions.”
As well as arguing Wittgenstein had made a conceptual wrong-turn, Russell believed the Austrian’s “linguistic doctrine” narrowed the scope of inquiry and forced philosophers out of the fields of politics and law – something Russell would never accept.
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Russell went to prison for his pacifism during the first World War. His view on political violence changed over time, however, and he supported a war effort against the Nazis that featured the British propaganda slogan “Careless Talk Costs Lives”. Today, Wittgenstein is the more celebrated philosopher – his aphorisms reaching for the profound inspire new readers. Yet Russell may be the more necessary thinker for our age.
History suggests that protecting our freedoms, and treating each other with greater humanity, starts with taking more care in how we speak.