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Wittgenstein vs. Philosophy // 80 · PlasticPills Critical Theory & Philosophy

• 0:05
  Hey, the Libs are back. We're all together. How did you How
• 0:09
  was your vacation from us whatever you call us, the rats, the like
• 0:16
  the postmodern edge lords. I just called him. You went and talked to
• 0:20
  like a right wing guy. Yeah, it was fun. We had our
• 0:23
  interview with a bunch of people. Actually, and Greg, Greg Surgeon and
• 0:29
  Nate. Well we are. We've reassembled the Avengers from our solo films and
• 0:38
  yeah, we're back. We're back for another Yeah, we only have to
• 0:42
  tolerate each other for one hour and fifteen minutes. A riveting one hour and
• 0:47
  fifteen minutes we have for you today. Indeed, so we're talking about Vickenstein.
• 0:53
  And here's what I was thinking about. Vickenstein, who Matt will call
• 0:57
  Wittgenstein. He knows the correct pronunciation, but you will still refuse to do
• 1:00
  it. He chooses to do it just just because that's what he likes.
• 1:04
  Issue a language acknowledgement at the beginning of this some kind of speech acknowledgment.
• 1:11
  I would prefer not to. That's the thing. I will call him what
• 1:12
  I want to call him. Matt would like to acknowledge that that it is
• 1:15
  pronounced Wickenstein. But yet he will choose to continue to call it him Wickenstein.
• 1:21
  He's lucky that I don't just call him mister w So he's moving to
• 1:23
  America, so he's practicing not pronouncing anything correctly. Yeah, yeah, League
• 1:29
  Van Whitegenstein White Constein, and pronounce for the listeners. We have to now
• 1:34
  to get into our zoom call. Click a land acknowledgment from the institution which
• 1:41
  is hosting the zoom call. And we're just kind of talking about this,
• 1:44
  the speech act of land acknowledgment, and how it's purely a speech act.
• 1:49
  We're still going to accrue the value of the property that we you know,
• 1:53
  we stole your land, but you don't get it back. Yeah, and
• 1:57
  it's interesting that my institution doesn't do that. That's like a new thing I've
• 2:00
  never seen without naming institutions. It's the first time i've seen it where it
• 2:05
  pops up and you have to agree. Not only do you have to like
• 2:07
  see that land acknowledgement, but you also have to like say accept, like
• 2:10
  agree with it. It's like a little language game, a compelled a compelled
• 2:15
  language game with no material effect. Oh my god, you sound like Jordan
• 2:20
  Peterson right now. I wonder if it is compelled speech. Example of the
• 2:24
  language game that we're all kind of starting to play these days. Land acknowledgments.
• 2:30
  I mean, I guess, I guess they'd have to have a particular
• 2:32
  use. We'll get we'll get into. He gives different examples if it Constein
• 2:38
  does. I think Matt and I disagree Onitkenstein, But I'm going to open
• 2:42
  up with my take. You know, when a lefty suddenly decides, you
• 2:46
  know, they've had it with cancel culture, and then they go over to
• 2:50
  the right and they're like, I used to be a leftist. They begin
• 2:53
  every sentence with that. I'm sure there's examples. I don't really know them,
• 2:55
  but basically over the section of YouTube and they're they're welcomed in to their
• 3:01
  to their grift over there, and they get money from all the the Peterson
• 3:07
  sns Elon Musk actually pulled off something fairly similar recently, uh when he went
• 3:10
  on his big Reira being like, I voted Democrat my entire life because I
• 3:15
  thought they were the nice party, but now cancel culture is a threat to
• 3:17
  civilization, and I'm going to vote Republican for the first time in my life.
• 3:23
  And more or less everybody on the left was like, bye, if
• 3:25
  you did if you did that, match your income, your income would probably
• 3:30
  go like like increase by a factor of five if you decided to become a
• 3:34
  right wing grifter. Anyway, it's a matter of time. We're gonna we're
• 3:37
  gonna get the we're gonna run out of philosophers that are leftist, and then
• 3:40
  we'll have to switch over to Dugan. Yeah, I was gonna say Nick
• 3:46
  Lan nick Land and Dugan podcast. Anyway, I brought up this example because
• 3:51
  Vickenstein was on the analytics people, the analytic team, and he was the
• 3:55
  champion of the act of the analytic team. Bertrand Russell said, he's perhaps
• 4:00
  the most perfect example of a genius that I've ever known. And then Vickenstein
• 4:05
  switched and said, you know what, analytic philosophy is bullshit, So we
• 4:10
  welcome him with open arms. And then Bertrand Russell said, oh, I
• 4:15
  got another quote. He said, the later Vickenstein seems to have grown tired
• 4:20
  of serious thinking and to have invented a doctrine which would make such an activity
• 4:25
  unnecessary. Pills is, of course, referring to the famoush distinction between early
• 4:30
  Vickenstein and late Vickenstein, the Vickenstein of the Tractatus and the Vickenstein of philosophical
• 4:39
  investigations. Wickenstein's rebut was also you should have you should color code all of
• 4:46
  bertrand Russell's books. All of the ones on mathematics should be required reading,
• 4:49
  and everything on ethics and politics should be in blue. And then they should
• 4:55
  all be burned or something like that, all the blue ones. That's something
• 4:58
  well this, I mean you can you can just search online for good videos
• 5:02
  that describe his life. But this guy lived a pretty interesting life and was
• 5:08
  a pretty interesting guy in his own right. He's very strange. He was
• 5:13
  born into a incredibly rich family like Roches, obscenely like even even beyond the
• 5:20
  Rockefellers, beyond any of the they were obscenely rich. He gave all his
• 5:28
  money away, like he's just very straight. He gave away his entire inheritance.
• 5:31
  Like you just get things like that in his life that are like whoa
• 5:34
  this guy is. And he also tried to move to the Soviet Union to
• 5:38
  just be a worker, and they like tried to get him to be a
• 5:40
  professor, I think, and he was like, no, I just want
• 5:42
  to be a worker. Yeah, like he voluntarily enlisted in the Army's he's
• 5:46
  crazy. Just give you a sense to the scale of how wealthy he was.
• 5:49
  I was reading a biography of Wittenstein. It wasn't the Ray Monk one,
• 5:53
  but it was another one where he was taking a vacation in Sweden and
• 5:58
  he had he didn't travel first class, he didn't even have a trained carriage.
• 6:01
  He had a train just for him and his friend. Like that'll give
• 6:05
  you a sense of like how mega wealthy this guy was. You know,
• 6:08
  it's the equivalent of having you know, a private jet or even a fleet
• 6:12
  of private jets just at your becka, y'all. And Cambridge was like the
• 6:16
  building of Cambridge to him was like his living room. Like it's this guy
• 6:21
  was just on another planet with how wealthy his family was, the Wvickenstein family,
• 6:28
  they were obscenely wealthy. But Ludwig himself was given to some strange behavior,
• 6:33
  very much had a kind of purity, almost like a Messiah complex.
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  Going with his towards his philosophy, he would often isolate himself in really really
• 6:44
  far away places, like he would go to Norway. I think he started
• 6:47
  the Tractatus in Norway. And he would stay in little huts out in the
• 6:50
  middle of nowhere, and even the people who live in the middle of nowhere
• 6:56
  on the way to his hut would be like, whoa dude, why are
• 6:59
  you going out that far? That's the middle of nowhere. Like, this
• 7:01
  guy was a real kind of ascetic I guess the best way to describe him
• 7:05
  is gives away all his money, focuses his life on obtaining truth and how
• 7:11
  to get to truth. And this guy was just a strange dude I like
• 7:15
  him though, and not great people's skills by all accounts. No, no.
• 7:18
  And he also he also designed a house too, Like he he got
• 7:23
  into like architecture and interior designed for a while, and like designed a house
• 7:27
  for one of his sisters, I think, And it took him so long
• 7:30
  because he was so obsessive about every single detail, like even like the height
• 7:33
  between like where the door handle is, and like the bottom and like the
• 7:36
  way the windows open. And he would spend like months at a time just
• 7:40
  like obsessing over like each of these fine details. Oh yeah, he went
• 7:45
  into engineering and aeronautics at first. He even designed a jet engine like he
• 7:50
  did all kinds of stuff like that too. He actually produced a movie on
• 7:56
  Wintenstein that was quite good. Eccentric, but quite good. Till the Swinton
• 8:01
  sentate. I had really this kind of curious anecdote where Cambridge was kind of
• 8:05
  in a weird situation at the beginning in the middle of the twentieth century where
• 8:09
  they were just starting to accept some working class applicants and giving them scholarships to
• 8:13
  study there, and apparently people got furious at him because whenever Wickenstein had a
• 8:20
  working class student who would come in because they were trying to aspire to a
• 8:24
  kind of higher quality of life by coming to an institution of this caliber,
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  he'd sit there and be like, why are you doing that? You should
• 8:28
  just go back and work in your motorcycle factory because that was a much more
• 8:31
  pure quality of life than what you found here. It was a mistake for
• 8:35
  your parents to send you here. So then you have all these working class
• 8:39
  students just going back to their houses being like well, I talked to like
• 8:41
  the greatest living philosophery at Cambridge, and he told me that what we're doing
• 8:45
  is just fine. And the parents would just write these furious letters to Cambridge
• 8:48
  being like the fuck are you doing? Like we saved money for decades to
• 8:52
  Sendric Sun here, and now you're telling me that we shouldn't bother to begin
• 8:56
  with, Like the hell. Yeah, he was known for having little strategies
• 9:00
  thin out as students like that. He's one of the first ideas don't matter
• 9:03
  philosophers. Yeah, that's yeah, it's true. I mean, I think
• 9:09
  it's interesting that pills you kind of said he switched teams, and I think,
• 9:13
  like he probably wouldn't. I don't even know if like was the analytic
• 9:16
  continental divide, like the way that they framed it back then, Like I
• 9:20
  know, because it's not like he started reading Heideger and stuff like that.
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  He just kind of was like, I'm not a I'm not going to care
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  about like logical foundations or one. They're like not going to be findable.
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  So you know, but I think a lot of analytic philosophers still kind of
• 9:31
  claim him. I always remember this story. When I was an undergrad,
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  I had this like really eccentric like Swiss Italian professor Aos Carazza, and he
• 9:41
  would always talk shit. So he was a philosopher of language, and he
• 9:43
  would always like warn his undergrad students. He'd be like Wickenstein is very important,
• 9:48
  but you have to be careful because he gets co opted by French bullshitters.
• 9:52
  Yeah. Last, his last work on uncertainty, one of the one
• 9:58
  of something to writ from lectures near the end of his life. That's been
• 10:01
  interpreted as an anti Enlightenment statement because he talks about the Enlightenment demand for certainty
• 10:09
  and he believed that certainty was never possible, and so that's taken as a
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  kind of postmodern, like very early post like the fifties might even be way
• 10:18
  too early for talking about postmodernism in philosophy, but he seemed to be almost
• 10:24
  like a precursor in that sort of way. He questioned certainty in his later
• 10:28
  career, but earlier on. Obviously, in the Tractatus and his work with
• 10:33
  Russell, he was very much in the logical positivist tradition, which is a
• 10:39
  new land that I am parachuting into. So take take what I say with
• 10:43
  a grain of salt, but I'm on the journey. Have you guys tried
• 10:46
  to read the Tractatus. Yeah, I mean I read about thirty pages of
• 10:52
  it, but it was brutal. Yeah. If you're not familiar with the
• 10:54
  logical notation, then a lot of the technical details aren't really of much vou
• 11:00
  but I think the overall message is really interesting, and there's no doubt that,
• 11:05
  like a lot of it is actually just beautifully written. I mean,
• 11:09
  there are passages in it that are not just evocative, but I would say
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  haunting, like people tend to remember very distinctly, even the f production,
• 11:16
  but certainly the ending passages about of what one cannot speak one must pass over
• 11:20
  in silence, or the opening kind of assertion that the world is all that
• 11:26
  is the case. I think it's like a beautiful book in a lot of
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  ways. Yeah, he was a great stylist. Well. Vickenstein himself hated
• 11:33
  it and only referred to the author himself in third person by the end of
• 11:39
  his life and rejected it, he wrote, he wrote critiques of his own
• 11:43
  book several Yeah, I mean, and people pointed out that in some ways
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  he is distinct in the history of philosophy in that respect, because while most
• 11:52
  philosophers who have lengthy careers can be periodized, you talk about the early Hidiger
• 11:56
  or the late Hidiger. But Wiggenstein developed two pretty distinct philosophies which are quite
• 12:01
  fundamentally incompatible with one another. Although I would argue that there is an overlap,
• 12:07
  in fact, a very serious overlap between the two outlooks very much in
• 12:13
  keeping with like the spirit of what Pills was talking about, because I think
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  the one continuous theme you see throughout his work is the idea that philosophy doesn't
• 12:22
  really matter all that much. It's a kind of idle, unimportant discipline,
• 12:28
  and he just goes about proving that in very different ways. In the early
• 12:31
  period in the late period. That quote you brought up is really central,
• 12:37
  just to establish kind of because I'm sure there's people listening who have never heard
• 12:39
  of this guy before, but we're talking about kind of Eric's area actually.
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  But logic plus language plus truth, how does language lead to truth? How
• 12:50
  do you use language? Can language even get to truth? And then how
• 12:54
  do we use language and play it in different areas of life? So Vickenstein
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  wrote this best book of analytic philosophy of language, which is early Witckenstein,
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  and then late Vickenstein he becomes more of a I think the term that's usually
• 13:13
  used is he's a philosopher of everyday life or everyday language, and the meaning
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  of language comes from its practical use, the way ordinary people use it.
• 13:22
  And the philosophers what they have to say about language is most of the time
• 13:28
  wrong. So that's our division split here. Yeah, I'd like to put
• 13:33
  it even more basically, which is, if you've seen that scene in Arrival
• 13:37
  where the guy is telling, you know, the linguists like, look,
• 13:41
  just ask him the question like why are you here? It's really straightforward.
• 13:45
  We don't need you to like diddle doddle around with like all this word shit.
• 13:48
  And she sits there and she's like okay, and then underword it's the
• 13:50
  word why, And it's like, so, what does exactly this mean?
• 13:54
  You know? It could be that I'm asking them a motivation question. It
• 13:58
  could also mean that I'm asking them a verbal question about the basis for their
• 14:01
  action. Then kind of goes through that. Wickenstein is that kind of guy
• 14:05
  where you want to ask yourself these big high falutin questions, and he's always
• 14:09
  there saying, eh, I'm not exactly sure that we're even capable of doing
• 14:16
  that, at least not in the kind of way that philosophers who don't pay
• 14:18
  attention to language want to be able to ask those questions. Yeah, I'm
• 14:22
  gonna I'm gonna let Eric give me some of the frame here, but Philosophical
• 14:28
  Investigations opens up with what vicken Stein calls the kind of Western view of philosophy
• 14:35
  and language, and he quotes Augustin, Saint Augustin and Augustin's theory of language.
• 14:41
  Of course it's written in whatever three hundred kind of rudimentary. He says,
• 14:46
  there are things in the world, and there are names of those things
• 14:50
  in the world, and then we group up sentences of names, and that's
• 14:54
  what language is. I think we're if we're gonna begin by looking at his
• 15:00
  later stuff. I tried to just get a broad overview when I was trying
• 15:03
  when I was researching this, so I didn't focus on me. Better to
• 15:07
  kind of start early and then move forward, don't you think, because it's
• 15:09
  hard to understand the later work unless you understand what he's responding to. True.
• 15:15
  Yeah, look, loo, look, look, I'm playing host Dudy.
• 15:18
  So here's my strategy for this. We're going to open up with his
• 15:22
  opening from Yeah, a later book. But that whole opening of the later
• 15:26
  book brings up, first of all, what is this overview Western understanding of
• 15:33
  what language is? Beginning with Augustine, and then he'll go on to say,
• 15:37
  oh, and by the way, I finished off that view. I
• 15:41
  brought that view as far as it could go. So I think if we
• 15:45
  just start with the kind of what has language been thought to be? One
• 15:50
  end of that, he puts himself as the book end, and then he
• 15:54
  brings it into somewhere completely different. So yes, I am starting with a
• 15:58
  late book, but he's talking about he's giving a historical overview and putting himself
• 16:03
  in it. That's why I brought that up. And of course the common
• 16:07
  view would be this representational or correspondence theory, and then his new and then
• 16:15
  his own contradiction of that is going to be with something called language games.
• 16:19
  Yeah. Yeah, well language games, yeah. When that really indicates his
• 16:26
  later work. But if you look at his earlier work, the main thing
• 16:32
  is his picture theory of language. That's what runs through the Tractatus, and
• 16:37
  the picture theory of language is something he sort of develops off of the basis
• 16:42
  of you know, Principia Mathematica, Whitehead and Russell's three volume works. I'm
• 16:51
  not sure if the all three volumes are out, but by the time he's
• 16:55
  reading them, but he wrote that early work, the Tractatus over seventy years,
• 17:00
  right during the nineteen tens. It was published just before nineteen or around
• 17:04
  nineteen twenty. And then he kind of just fucked off and like went left
• 17:11
  Cambridge and left England for a long time and didn't come back. But that
• 17:15
  you go to Austria and like beat school children. Yeah, like he got
• 17:19
  involved in World War One, he was he volunteered to fight. He then
• 17:25
  he wanted to become a school teacher and he taught elementary level students for a
• 17:30
  while, which was but constantly I saw in his letters he's constantly complaining about
• 17:34
  Austria being very sort of the people are all disheartened and nobody seems to have
• 17:40
  any kind of spirit. He can't talk to anybody. He felt very isolated.
• 17:44
  But that's all background information that the Tractatus is really like this picture theory
• 17:48
  of language, where where pictures correspond to states of affairs what he calls facts.
• 17:56
  And I mean, you got you really got to know if you want
• 18:00
  to read this book, you've got to be really familiar with the logical notation
• 18:03
  that that Bertrand Russell and and and Alfred Whitehead come up with for their for
• 18:11
  their Principia mathematica so it's you know, the tractatus. You know, if
• 18:17
  you take any couple things from it, so far from what I've seen,
• 18:19
  you should take that. It's based on this picture theory, which Ramsey describes
• 18:26
  in his review of it. Ramsey's another young, brilliant guy from Cambridge.
• 18:32
  He says, a picture is a fact and as such has a structure and
• 18:36
  a form, you know, So it has a there's a form of representation,
• 18:41
  and that makes possible structure of representation, and the elements of the representation
• 18:48
  correspond to the elements or objects involved in the fact. So it was a
• 18:52
  kind of correspondence theory of truth as well in his picture theory. And of
• 18:56
  course Matt brought up that very important quote. You know, we can say,
• 19:03
  very roughly paraphrasing it. You know, there are certain things we can
• 19:06
  put in the form of philosophical propositions logical propositions, and there are certain things
• 19:11
  we cannot put into logical propositions. Those things that we cannot those are things
• 19:15
  we must remain silent on. So and and Vickenstein kind of said it,
• 19:22
  he'd completed all of the problems of philosophy after this tractatus that was his self
• 19:26
  evaluation of the work is that he had finished philosophy, that he solved all
• 19:30
  the problems, and that now we could get onto other things. Because the
• 19:34
  Tractatus solved all the problems. What you cannot speak of in the form of
• 19:41
  logical propositions, according to the picture theory, those are just things that we
• 19:45
  can't speak about. They're they're the silence, they're the they're something you know,
• 19:51
  religion, values, ethics, all sorts of things. Right, he
• 19:55
  was kind of a semanticist at this point, before he became interested in pragg
• 20:00
  of language later in his life. Right. Well, this is why I
• 20:03
  want to say, I think the book is something of a literary masterpiece,
• 20:04
  though, because it is structured in an extraordinary way in a sense that is
• 20:11
  later books are not because they're all published posthumously and other people had to organize
• 20:14
  them and they were never completed to his satisfaction. But what's remarkable about this
• 20:18
  book is he runs through this brilliant logical argument talking about the picture theory of
• 20:23
  language, basically describing how it is that words can hook on to the world
• 20:27
  and provides you with the correspondence theory not just of language but of knowledge.
• 20:33
  And then at the end of it, he says, if you really think
• 20:36
  about it, what's interesting about my book is the fact that my philosophy itself
• 20:41
  is nonsensical according to the terms that I've laid out within it, because what
• 20:45
  I'm doing isn't describing as state of affairs in the world, but describing how
• 20:49
  it is that language can represent a state of affairs in the world, which
• 20:52
  is not the same kind of thing. Ergo, my approach is rather like
• 20:56
  a ladder, that's the metaphor he uses. So once you understand how pointless
• 21:00
  this entire exercise I just engaged in, is drop the latter aside, and
• 21:03
  you can see more clearly and what you also recognize, as Eric put it
• 21:07
  very beautifully, is that a lot of the kind of things that I just
• 21:11
  described as nonsensical, ethics, syesthetics, religion, all the kind of stuff
• 21:17
  that we really want to know about can never be set according to this philosophy,
• 21:21
  which is another reason why we should chuck this philosophy and just dedicate ourselves
• 21:25
  with a kind of quiet dignity towards approaching life with an aesthetic and ethical sensibility
• 21:32
  that can never be put in the terms that are demanded by certainty, and
• 21:37
  a lot of people didn't really get this snakelike quality to the book where it
• 21:40
  eventually swallows itself out the end. And he allegedly got into these huge arguments
• 21:45
  with people at the Vienna School who appreciated the first two thirds of it and
• 21:49
  said, yeah, we really want to carry on with exactly this project,
• 21:52
  just tinker a bit around the edges. And he said, you know,
• 21:56
  you've entirely missed the point of it. You shouldn't be reading people like Popper
• 22:00
  or following all this kind of scientific bs. Read Dostiski and Kyirkergard instead.
• 22:03
  They'll tell you where the real action in life is. And you know,
• 22:07
  they were all just like, who are you exactly? You're not exactly the
• 22:11
  guy that we thought you were gonna be. Yeah, he picked up a
• 22:15
  book during the war, right that Tolstoy. I think he picked up a
• 22:18
  Tolstoy book during the war and it changed him and sort of shifted him into
• 22:22
  a more into being interested in questions of mystical and religious topics. He famously
• 22:29
  said that Kirkergard was the deepest person who had ever lived, far too deep
• 22:33
  for him, and kind of made the same kind of comment that Dostievsky made
• 22:37
  made about Dustievski that Kreguard was far too deep for him, and he was
• 22:41
  one of the few people that he could learn from in terms of his own
• 22:45
  personal philosophy of life. And it's really quite telling, right. But again,
• 22:49
  I think the book is a literary masterpiece because it really does end on
• 22:52
  this remarkable kind of self swallowing moment where you are just amazed at the kind
• 22:57
  of intellectual audac of what's been achieved. And then he seemed immediately willing to
• 23:03
  discard it and saying, why bother at that, Let's move on to something
• 23:06
  else. Well, I was just gonna say, I think one thing that
• 23:08
  would be interesting to maybe do actually in a future episode, if we want
• 23:11
  to do more Wickenstein is like, because what he ends up going with,
• 23:15
  I think in the investigations is to basically argue that when you do an analysis
• 23:21
  of like the way language functions in everyday life, a lot of the traditional
• 23:25
  philosophical problems of like the history of philosophy dissolve. And that's what a lot
• 23:30
  of people call like the therapeutic approach to philosophy, which is almost which I
• 23:33
  think is kind of an interesting topic in itself that could be explored, which
• 23:37
  is like, in what way is philosophy therapeutic rather than trying to like find
• 23:42
  fundamental questions of reality? Instead it's supposed to do you know. And I
• 23:48
  find it interesting that he we use that language, you know, act as
• 23:52
  a kind of therapy so that we can stop stressing, because I think that
• 23:55
  one of the things, given his personality type, that drove Wickenstein crazy was
• 23:59
  like this thirst for truth and that he can like settle the questions and then
• 24:03
  and then when he realized he couldn't, it makes sense to me that he'd
• 24:07
  be like, well, no, so philosophy is not about truth anymore.
• 24:10
  It's about therapy. It's about making me not have to worry about these dumb
• 24:14
  problems like what is truth? You know, what is reality? Like these
• 24:18
  these questions that he describes as being language going on holidays, right, that
• 24:23
  you're using language in a way where it's not tied to its everyday use.
• 24:30
  And that's what he thinks. Philosophy traditionally is like asking these weird questions that
• 24:33
  don't belong that make us think there's like this deep question to be solved,
• 24:38
  but really we need to do philosophy to make us realize that there is no
• 24:41
  question there, that it's just And you know, that might be an episode
• 24:45
  topic of its own, but I thought it's kind of an interesting shift,
• 24:49
  and I think a lot of the shift can be framed as kind of psychological
• 24:53
  in a way. And one of the one of the most common quotes are
• 24:57
  statements that he was if we understood what language actually is. I don't know
• 25:03
  if he says ninety percent, I have it in my head as ninety percent,
• 25:06
  but he said ninety percent of philosophy would just disappear into irrelevance if we
• 25:10
  actually understood what we're doing with the material there. And of course, anyone
• 25:15
  who read the first two thirds of the Tractatus doesn't want to hear in the
• 25:21
  last chapter, oh, by the way, it's done now, and that
• 25:25
  was bullshit. Yeah yeah, And I mean, I will say there's a
• 25:29
  really famous anecdote that I think is true because Raymond and Terry Ego them book
• 25:33
  pointed out, which is apparently Piero Strafa had been reading Grams Sheet at the
• 25:37
  time and when Wickenstein was defending his picture theory of language to Strafa. I
• 25:41
  think it was Strafa Strafa kind of gave him the middle finger, and he's
• 25:45
  like, what is the picture behind this? And it drove Wickenstein nuts because
• 25:49
  he just wasn't able to figure out a way to actually link that to his
• 25:53
  theory in a way that would settle the whole thing, and apparently went off
• 25:56
  on around threatening to kill himself and let's you can actually figure out the way
• 26:03
  to incorporate the meaning behind this gesture into the picture through your language, and
• 26:07
  then decided to give it up. There is a kind of through line between
• 26:11
  his earlier and later stuff in the sense that when you read the Tractatus,
• 26:15
  you get the sense that, you know, all the philosophy's problems are caused
• 26:18
  by words being used with different meanings, right equivocation through words. He thinks
• 26:22
  that's where most of philosophical issues come from, so you know, words are
• 26:33
  a kind of component of propositions. In that first phase in the Tractatus,
• 26:40
  he wants to take all the propositions and reduce them to a kind of atomic
• 26:45
  a set of atomic propositions which would point to these atomic facts you can then
• 26:49
  this is sort of Russell's logical atomism coming through. So there is already a
• 26:55
  sense that all of philosophy's problems come through equivocation in the use of words.
• 27:00
  And we have to understand words. If you know, if you walk into
• 27:02
  a room and just say green hat bug like, you can't use disconnected words.
• 27:07
  You have to form proposition, subject, predicate saying something about something,
• 27:11
  and then later on, you know, you get the more sense that the
• 27:15
  equivocation comes from what Gilbert Ryle will call category mistakes, where you use words
• 27:22
  from one language game and you mix them up with words from another language game.
• 27:27
  So you can, I heard this great example. You can you can
• 27:30
  describe the game of cricket, the British game of cricket right as it bowlers.
• 27:37
  It has wickets, it has the batter, it has the mound,
• 27:41
  it has all that stuff, but them you talk about. But then what
• 27:45
  about team spirit? And then they're okay, you have a category mistake.
• 27:49
  Team spirit is not a part of the game. Team spirit is part of
• 27:52
  a different language game. And if you try to bring team spirit into the
• 27:56
  description of cricket, you're going to be making this catategory mistake. And so
• 28:00
  one of the things is to separate language into these individual language games. What
• 28:06
  is teen team spirit or teen spirit nirvana. I don't get what you mean.
• 28:11
  I don't get what you mean by the connection though, you mean the
• 28:15
  cricket players have team spirit. Well, that's the that's the problem, right,
• 28:19
  It doesn't make sense in the context of the game of cricket. What
• 28:23
  is the game of cricket as players, as batters, as these, this
• 28:27
  and that. Does it have team spirit? No, because that's a totally
• 28:30
  different that's a totally different language game. When we're discussing things like motivation,
• 28:36
  team spirit, cohesiveness, those it's a different language game. It's a category
• 28:41
  mistake to say team spirit is part of the description of what cricket is.
• 28:47
  What you find with this argument that we do in kind of philosophical anthropology is
• 28:51
  a kind of anti essentialist claim, not just about you know, what it
• 28:53
  is that language does, but also about who human beings are, because it's
• 28:57
  rejecting the idea that we have what ordikard a kind of glassy essence, and
• 29:03
  that the primary thing we do with language is just painted description of the world,
• 29:07
  a picture of the world, if you will. Wickensteiden says that sometimes
• 29:11
  that is what we're doing with words. We're just describing the world, and
• 29:15
  we're trying to describe it as accurately as possible. But that's not what we're
• 29:18
  doing. We're playing a language game, like going on a date with someone
• 29:22
  and talking about how you feel about them, or even describing a game of
• 29:26
  football right that you might happen to witness, uh, but also talking about
• 29:29
  how you felt at the game. Right. There are different kind of uses
• 29:33
  that we put words to in those circumstances, And so again the job of
• 29:37
  philosopher then is to just engage in a kind of higher order reflection on the
• 29:41
  different way that these games are played, but not to criticize them or to
• 29:45
  say that they're not representing the world accurately, just to understand the meaning that
• 29:49
  these different words assume in these forms of life. Well, isn't isn't,
• 29:55
  But isn't the broader point that he's making that like the picture theory of Lange
• 30:00
  language has like a lot tries to offer like a logical positivist account of like
• 30:03
  what language is that there's like, But then I think that like what he's
• 30:08
  trying to do later is to be like, well, you're not going to
• 30:11
  find the answer of like what language is in its essence by just looking at
• 30:15
  it. As like logical positivism, which is I thought where he comes in
• 30:18
  with, like, the meaning of a language is is is to understand the
• 30:22
  form of life, and like form of life is I think this important concept,
• 30:26
  and like he makes a couple moves in the investigation and kind of argue
• 30:29
  why like your kind of logical positivist story of language is just being like a
• 30:33
  symbol to like describe the world breaks down, and that like language is actually
• 30:38
  rooted to like an intersubjective social element, that like you can't talk about language
• 30:44
  without talking about that, and like that's where, for example, something like
• 30:48
  the private language, which maybe it's too much to get into now, but
• 30:49
  I know, Pills, you sent us a little summary about private language,
• 30:55
  And basically what he's doing there is just saying that, like it would be
• 30:57
  impossible to come up with a private language in your mind where only you knew
• 31:00
  the meanings of the words, because fundamentally language requires another to have reciprocity with.
• 31:08
  And like one of the ways he argues for that is he says,
• 31:11
  how would you even know that that was the meaning of the word that you
• 31:14
  decided you might forget if it's private, there's no criteria of reliability that you
• 31:22
  need another It has to be social, otherwise it's meaningless. I just want
• 31:26
  to slow this down and just get to the term language game. It's the
• 31:32
  main term, and it will kind of explicate this. So this representational view
• 31:38
  of language that we have words that refers to a world that is never going
• 31:44
  to get at what the essence or I shouldn't say that word. That's actually
• 31:47
  wrong word. It won't get to the meaning of words. If we want
• 31:51
  to find out what the meaning of words are, we need to look at
• 31:53
  how they're used and how they're being used at a specific time. So he
• 31:59
  gives like sixty examples of different language games, and philosophy is one of those.
• 32:05
  Philosophy is not like to be thrown out. It's an activity. It
• 32:07
  has its rules. Analytics philosophy is like doing a Sudoku puzzle, I guess.
• 32:14
  But also when you go into a bar to order a beer, that's
• 32:19
  also a language game, and they have different rules. So it's it's not
• 32:25
  rude to just walk up to a bartender and start the sentence, Yo,
• 32:31
  can I get a Miller light? In any other context, you know your
• 32:36
  your wife comes home from work. If the first thing you said to her
• 32:38
  was, yo, can I get a Miller Light? It wouldn't work in
• 32:44
  that game. That game would would fall apart. But if you're ordering a
• 32:46
  Miller Light, you're probably an asshole anyway. So I mean, if you're
• 32:51
  living in like Sunnydale trailer Park, that wouldn't be like out of like on
• 32:55
  keeping. But I want to say absolutely yeah, And I'm not done yet.
• 32:59
  I'm not. It's not just about rudeness and acceptability. It's about like
• 33:05
  there is a code that makes things sensible in contexts that you can't just move
• 33:10
  to a different context. And his critique, the general critique of this representational
• 33:16
  kind of language use you could just call the whole history of philosophy, is
• 33:22
  pretty pretty much that. Of course there's exceptions, but it's like we're sitting
• 33:27
  there in our chair wondering what is a concept and then giving a whole bunch
• 33:32
  of explanations definitions of what a concept is, furnishing it with examples, and
• 33:37
  then you have like a Daycartes book, for example. But what Daycartes is
• 33:42
  doing, according to Wickenstein, late Witckenstein is taking all these other words that
• 33:46
  belong to different language games where their meaning is quite clear, like miller Lite
• 33:51
  has a very clear meaning, and then trying to move them all over into
• 33:54
  philosophy and then they're bastardized, they are taken out of their home, and
• 34:00
  then you can basically do whatever you want with them, and it's not useless.
• 34:05
  Sometimes you can get like insights or interesting theories from doing that, but
• 34:12
  you're never gonna get to what is language. If you only do philosophy,
• 34:15
  you just you have to go to a bar. There you go. Yeah,
• 34:20
  And I think again there's a nice anti foundationalist dimension to this, because
• 34:23
  I think that you're right in saying that one can do philosophy if one is
• 34:29
  willing to be a kind of humble philosopher and engage in the kind of philosophical
• 34:32
  anthropology that you're just describing. Right, asking yourself, what is the meaning
• 34:37
  of the word miner light miller lite in the context of going to the bar
• 34:39
  and offer and asking for, frankly a mediocre beer. Right. But the
• 34:43
  problem in the history of philosophy as he understands it, and philosophical investigations has
• 34:49
  some ruminations on this, although it becomes clear and uncertainty is that philosophy can
• 34:52
  have this kind of imperial ambition, where what the philosopher will do is either
• 34:57
  try to appropriate the different words from the forms of life and say this is
• 35:01
  what people think they mean, but this is what they really mean if we
• 35:05
  break them down and analyze them carefully enough, or even worse it, I'll
• 35:08
  say things like people are going to church and they're talking about things like God
• 35:13
  or the soul, and they're making metaphysical or cosmological claims to that in that
• 35:17
  respect, and these are actually just nonsensical claims. They're basically doing from a
• 35:22
  pop pairing perspective. Let's use that example, shitty science. And Wickenstein is
• 35:27
  going to say, no, if you look at the claims made by somebody
• 35:30
  who is talking about the Book of Genesis in church and say they're just doing
• 35:35
  shitty science, like Richard Dawkins, right, then you fundamenttally misunderstand. He
• 35:39
  thinks, at least that they're just playing a very different kind of language game
• 35:44
  than what Richard Dawkins is doing when he's writing a book about selfish genes,
• 35:47
  or Stephen Hawking is doing when he's writing about black holes. Well, isn't
• 35:52
  also one of the points though, that like to get more concrete about,
• 35:55
  like philosophical problems that he thinks are like kind of nonsense and a result of
• 36:00
  language. It's like, okay, like you use this word truth or you
• 36:04
  use this word mind in everyday language to like refer to something really specific that's
• 36:07
  like contextual, to like, oh, I'm losing my mind and it means
• 36:12
  you know that, like you're all out of sorts and you're confused, or
• 36:15
  like you you know, but then you know, philosophers come about and be
• 36:17
  like, well, what is mind? What is it? Right? And
• 36:22
  then like, I think one of the points that Wickenstein is trying to make
• 36:24
  by dissolving these philosophical problems is to be like, no, there's no mystery
• 36:29
  here, Like like the way that you're posing that question is making it seem
• 36:34
  like there's some onto logical question of like what is a mind, when really
• 36:38
  it's just a word that's being used in specific context to mean something very contextual,
• 36:44
  and philosophers are coming along and fucking it up just like truth, right,
• 36:47
  Like yeah, that's truth. Like a lot of more modern philosophers who
• 36:51
  are definitely inspired by Wickenstein take this approach to like deflationary approach, to be
• 36:55
  like there is no philosophical confusion here you're justusing you're using the word in a
• 37:00
  different context. Like Simon Blackburn I think, has this deflationary view of truth
• 37:05
  and he says, you know, to understand what truth is, all you
• 37:08
  need to ask is like what's at stake here? Like is it Like so,
• 37:13
  for example, you could just say, you know, whatever, this
• 37:15
  person is guilty of murder, and you don't need to say is true at
• 37:21
  the end of that statement, because all you need to say is the statement
• 37:23
  itself. But then philosophers come in and be like, oh, there's this
• 37:27
  property that is truth. That's like a mystery that we like have to understand.
• 37:31
  And I think bick Enstinian inspired approaches to philosophy say that that doesn't that
• 37:37
  that's just a confusion over like how the words are used in different language games,
• 37:43
  and truth just means something contextual and it's there's not going to be some
• 37:47
  capital T truth. That's just like a weird confusion as a result of our
• 37:52
  misusing language, I think. And it's not even it's not even philosophy's job
• 37:57
  to look at the truth of statements like that famous example, the cat is
• 38:01
  on the mat, right. The point of that is that the logical structure
• 38:06
  of that proposition would mirror the logical structure of the fact. Right, a
• 38:12
  fact is a state of affairs, and so the state of affairs would be
• 38:17
  mirrored in the statement the cat is on the mat. And the role of
• 38:21
  philosophy is really just to clarify the use of words. So a question like
• 38:27
  just to expand what Victor was saying, a question like what is the meaning
• 38:31
  of life? Like that kind of question. It's not that that question is
• 38:36
  not important. It's actually even more that question is meaningless. There's no sense
• 38:40
  to that question. And this is the early Vickenstein because there's no empirical verifiability
• 38:49
  to the question of what is the meaning of life? You can't bring it
• 38:53
  into an empirical analysis. But later on, I imagine Victim's seine would say
• 39:00
  questions like what is the meaning of life? Or you know, that would
• 39:02
  be like a language game you'd play in a religious setting. You'd be discussing
• 39:07
  the meaning of life in you know, a religious context, But in a
• 39:12
  scientific context that question doesn't come on because science still uses empirical observations and principles
• 39:19
  of verification. That's a totally different language game. If you ask a scientist
• 39:23
  to solve the question of what is the meaning of life? They can't do
• 39:27
  it. They might try to do it, but really it's not part of
• 39:30
  their language game, and you'd be confusing categories and mixing up words from different
• 39:35
  language games, and then creating that confusion again that the whole project is supposed
• 39:39
  to dispel. I would argue, though, that even in the tractatas you
• 39:44
  do see this kind of attitude. So, for instance, you know,
• 39:46
  he has these remarkable ending sentences where he talks about how in the Tractatus the
• 39:52
  answer to the riddle of the space and time is we found outside of space
• 39:55
  and time, right. And so one of the ways that we can kind
• 39:59
  of approach the question of the meaning of life is to recognize that the quest
• 40:01
  for certainty on the meaning of life is itself meaningless, and that the closer
• 40:07
  you get, the more you realize that the whole endeavor is senseless, you
• 40:10
  know, the ratter that you have to throw away. And so once you've
• 40:15
  kind of come to this standpoint, you can coroach questions like what should I
• 40:20
  set myself towards with a level of wisdom and a capacity for self reflection that
• 40:24
  you didn't have before, right, So again I would even interpret the tractatus
• 40:29
  is Winkenstein offering a kind of therapeutic aid to people who need certainty on the
• 40:35
  question of what the meaning of life is, because it kind of shows you
• 40:37
  that this is as close as you can get. And then you realize you're
• 40:39
  never going to get there when it comes to all the important things, So
• 40:43
  just drop it right, move on, dissolve the kind of problem. And
• 40:46
  what he says in the Philosophical Investigations is that this is kind of nonsensical way
• 40:53
  of looking at things. That the idea that you can just create ever more
• 40:58
  philosophical rules that will tell you how to use words properly, so that you
• 41:01
  can kind of move from a very general level of speaking about things to a
• 41:07
  particular level while speaking about things with absolute certainty. It's never going to come
• 41:12
  about because there are a wide variety of different rules that you can use when
• 41:15
  speaking about things. And he makes the argument that these are set by social
• 41:21
  demands, not by anything like an aspiration towards truth or certainty. So you
• 41:27
  know, again to use Tell's example of Miller LT. When I ask myself,
• 41:30
  how can I be certain I will get a Miller LT. If you
• 41:34
  just go to is n random person on the street and say give me a
• 41:37
  Miller lt, then we know, because of social rules, that that person
• 41:40
  is going to say, what the fuck are you doing? Right, I
• 41:43
  would say that if you want to get a Miller Lite, you go to
• 41:45
  a bar, and there is a rule and that social setting that if you
• 41:49
  make the statement I would like a Miller Lite, the bartender will give it
• 41:52
  to you. But that's not a true statement as a rule that gets too
• 41:57
  close to the truth of something. It's just recognition that this is the social
• 42:00
  convention that we've established when it comes to the use of those words in that
• 42:02
  particular situation. So philosophy, or at least the philosophy of language is in
• 42:10
  this sense kind of parasitical on common life, everyday life, but then pretends
• 42:16
  like it's not, and then it calls itself, you know, the Queen
• 42:20
  of the Sciences or whatever. And that's just he's saying. If you ask,
• 42:24
  like, how do we get to truth in language, you've already shot
• 42:29
  yourself in the foot. There's no answer to that question. That's not what
• 42:31
  language is for. And I just wanted to bring up with respect to rules
• 42:37
  and why he says language games in the first place, it's kind of a
• 42:42
  nightmare to come up if you ask we're talking about what is truth, what
• 42:45
  is the meaning of life? All these deep questions. But he just asked
• 42:49
  the question what is a game. There's no way of answering the question what
• 42:53
  is a game because there are so many different types of games. There are,
• 42:58
  you know, card games, the Olympic games. If kids are just
• 43:02
  throwing a ball against the wall, that's also considered a game. And then
• 43:08
  the first answer is, well, it's something that there are rules too.
• 43:13
  And he goes through the example of every possible response to what is a game
• 43:19
  and kind of says, well, it doesn't apply in this case. Doesn't
• 43:21
  apply in this case, Like if if kids are throwing a ball against the
• 43:25
  wall, yeah, it's a game. Are there any rules there? No,
• 43:30
  if you're playing a game, can I who can throw the ball the
• 43:34
  highest? It counts as a game? I think everyone would say, but
• 43:37
  there's no rules. There is a game. Fun. Well, if you're
• 43:43
  a if it's your job, are you having fun with it? Is it
• 43:45
  always fun? If you're like one of these dudes grinding doda or something,
• 43:51
  are they having fun every single time they play. So anyway, anytime you
• 43:54
  try to give here's the final definition of game, you're always gonna find an
• 44:00
  exception to that rule. And then he says, this is where the term
• 44:05
  family resemblances, which I'm sure people have heard with reference to to Wickenstein is,
• 44:09
  and he says the meaning of terms comes in this vast, socially created
• 44:15
  network of resemblances. Some things are true in one case not in another,
• 44:20
  but it's a shifting, vague, fuzzy sort of conceptual web that underscores language,
• 44:30
  not a clear picture, as someone like Frega would have said. Frega
• 44:34
  said, like, if you've got a fuzzy concept, then it's not a
• 44:37
  real concept. And Wickenstein's response to that is, well, if you say
• 44:45
  go stand roughly over there, that's a completely acceptable use of language to say
• 44:51
  go stand somewhere over there, and there's no clear reference. Somewhere over there
• 44:54
  is not clear. So that's where the that's why we say games that it's
• 45:00
  the other term family resemblance, which I would be remiss if we didn't actually
• 45:02
  just touch on in this episode. Yeah, no, that's important, And
• 45:07
  I think you know there's a word that actually, I don't think has come
• 45:09
  up yet as pragmatism, and which I know Eric is, you know,
• 45:14
  heavily involved in. And I think there's a way in which you could call
• 45:15
  this Eric's breathing fast a pragmatic view of language in the sense that, like,
• 45:21
  really what it's pointing to is, if you want to understand language,
• 45:23
  you have to look at what is it doing, right, Like that's the
• 45:25
  whole point of like connecting into forms of life. But I didn't want to
• 45:29
  actually point out I was looking in the book. I've got my copy of
• 45:31
  the Investigations right here, and I was looking for like one of my favorite
• 45:36
  aphorisms, which really speaks to what Pills was just talking about. And what
• 45:39
  I really like about it is he's kind of confessing his own intellectual and psychological
• 45:45
  struggle with what he was trying to do in the tractatus, and then what
• 45:50
  he realizes he needs to do, which is to like really bring out the
• 45:54
  pragmatic use of language, the way it's connected to just like everyday ways of
• 45:58
  doing things. So afrosm. One oh seven. He says, the more
• 46:04
  closely we examine actual language, the greater becomes the conflict between it and our
• 46:08
  requirements for the crystalline purity of logic was of course not something I had discovered.
• 46:15
  It was a requirement. Right, So he's saying he needed language to
• 46:17
  be logical, and then he says the conflict becomes intolerable. The requirement is
• 46:22
  now in danger of becoming vacuous. We have got onto slippery ice where there
• 46:27
  is no friction, and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal.
• 46:30
  But also just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want
• 46:35
  to walk, so we need friction. Back to the rough ground. So
• 46:38
  I think what he's saying there, right, is like you're looking for this
• 46:42
  logical structure where just like what Pills was talking about, where like you want
• 46:45
  to find the perfect reference to everything. But then when you look at it,
• 46:49
  you're like, well, I can't do anything with this, Like it's
• 46:52
  not actually showing me the kind of truth about how language functions, which is
• 46:57
  like pragmatic. It's vague, right, that's the example that Pills to use.
• 47:01
  Right, go stand over there, it's like not giving you up.
• 47:04
  So it's kind of rough, right, It's not this beautiful pure structure because
• 47:07
  it's so rooted in its context. So I think that's uninteresting. And the
• 47:13
  Investigations, by the way, is full of these examples where it's RN anaphorisms
• 47:19
  where you can see him kind of like coming to this admission that what he
• 47:22
  was looking for before doesn't make sense and this emphasis. I'm just like,
• 47:25
  well, look at how the language actually works in practice. Yeah. I
• 47:30
  suggested earlier that you could understand what vicken Stein was doing in the Tractatus as
• 47:37
  a as a kind of semantics, whereas what he's doing in the in the
• 47:39
  later work is a kind of pragmatics of language. Right. If you're familiar
• 47:45
  with Charles Morris's famous distinction and what was it syntactics, semantics and pragmatics,
• 47:52
  right, focus on the first two. Leave pragmatics out. Vickenstein moved into
• 47:57
  the pragmatics sphere and is later thing, and he read William James's Varieties of
• 48:04
  Religious Experience, and he was in contact with other people who were familiar with
• 48:08
  the pragmatist tradition as well, and I think that influenced him after the Tractatus
• 48:14
  to move towards this you know meaning instead of a picture theory of meaning,
• 48:17
  it's the meaning of words is meaning in use or he says most words anyway,
• 48:23
  So ninety nine percent who knows? Yeah, And there's this no social
• 48:28
  dimension to this, because I really like his depiction of philosophers is a fossessed
• 48:32
  with making language into a rule governed activity and framing it in that way.
• 48:37
  You know, you think about somebody like Cant, you can see Kant is
• 48:40
  basically saying, well, if you want to talk about empirical objects, then
• 48:45
  I've devised these rules. You have to follow them. Right. You can't
• 48:47
  just talk about things in themselves. I'm telling you that you need to describe
• 48:52
  them in transcendental terms. Or you can think about the logical positivists as doing
• 48:58
  something that's analogous to this. Right, if you want to talk about objects,
• 49:01
  then they need to be talked about. We need to talk about objects
• 49:05
  of sense. We can't talk about nonsensical things like God or spirituality or aesthetics
• 49:09
  or whatever. All that's pushed aside. And the quote that Victor is coming
• 49:14
  up with is really nice because he's saying, why approach the study of language
• 49:19
  that way? Why be somebody who's there to give rules to social life,
• 49:22
  especially because that seems so removed from a lot of the purposes that people actually
• 49:28
  use their language for. And it seems to be working. You know,
• 49:30
  you go to the bar, you want a Miller Lite and you say,
• 49:34
  I'd like a middle of light please, because you have shitty taste in beer,
• 49:36
  and lo and behold, all of a sudden you have one, probably
• 49:38
  five, because that's what it takes to enjoy it, right, what's wrong
• 49:43
  with you? You can only enjoy the sixth? Six? Like? Why
• 49:49
  sit there and bring Emmanuel Can't into this and have him say, well,
• 49:52
  you know, when he was talking about that Miller lte, he wasn't really
• 49:57
  talking about a Miller Lite in and of itself. He was talking about the
• 50:00
  phenomena of Miller light. There might be a Miller light there, but there
• 50:04
  might not be. It just seems like kind of a waste of time.
• 50:07
  Well, I think also, this is this is why my one of my
• 50:10
  professors in undergrad and kind of like my mentor into continental philosophy, she taught
• 50:15
  Wickenstein as a phenomenologist the investigations at least like she said that he was.
• 50:21
  You know, what he's doing is a phenomenology of like the way language actually
• 50:24
  functions in practice. I mean that's a bit of a of another story.
• 50:27
  But just what you were saying there makes me think about just like see take
• 50:31
  it up on its own terms, right, like what is it doing?
• 50:35
  And I think that in a way is a phenomenological task. And this is
• 50:38
  why he kind of I said at the beginning, Oh, he's on our
• 50:43
  team, because I kind of think he is in the sense that like,
• 50:47
  it's not like philosophy ended, because Vickenstein was like, you know, all
• 50:52
  these problems are fake. But what the French guys kind of connect with him
• 50:57
  in terms of semiotics, what they connect with him on is this emphasis becomes
• 51:02
  no longer how do we use philosophy to describe correctly describe the world. The
• 51:07
  question kind of shifts to what can we do with language to think better?
• 51:15
  To make people think better? And that doesn't mean think more accurately. It
• 51:17
  means like what is what is literature? I would include literature in philosophy,
• 51:23
  So I'm thinking, of course, of someone like Deluz. Deluz is like,
• 51:28
  I'm going to use language for everything it can do. But his concern
• 51:31
  is never like am I accurately described? I mean, that's fair to say.
• 51:37
  The main concern I should say is not am I accurately describing the thing
• 51:42
  that I'm purporting to describe with my syllogisms. Well, I would say that
• 51:46
  they're definitely analytical ways of taking this up. And in Oxford, Oxbridge they
• 51:52
  immediately did so with ordinary language philosophy, which produced I think some very boring
• 51:55
  work personally, but it was important, right, and they gave a very
• 52:00
  English approach to the kind of deconstructive or deflationary views of the world that you
• 52:06
  were describing. You know. Rm Hare was a moral theorist, and Derry
• 52:09
  Parfitt once asked him, like, I'm concerned about the meaning of life,
• 52:14
  and arm Hair was like, look around you. Do you see something called
• 52:16
  meaning in any of the objects out there? Do you see ordinary people concerned
• 52:21
  about these questions of meaning? See, meaning of life is no problem.
• 52:23
  Stop wasting your time with like Sartra and all those other kind of fruity French
• 52:28
  people, and just focus on analyzing propositions according to like this ordinary language lens.
• 52:34
  Right. So you can definitely give this a kind of banal reading in
• 52:38
  the sense that all we're doing is trying to dissolve philosophical publish puzzles to more
• 52:43
  or less leave the world as it is, and there's kind of conservative quality
• 52:46
  to this. I just think that the French interpretation you're giving pills is more
• 52:51
  interesting and more exciting and probably also more keeping with the spirit of Wickensign himself,
• 52:55
  who whatever else he was, wasn't going to become a nice bourgeois kind
• 53:01
  of you know, word muncher. You know, he's always going to have
• 53:06
  a deeper project underpinning anything that he was doing. Yeah, if people it's
• 53:07
  like Vickenstein, seriously, there would be no philosophy departments. He would do
• 53:14
  just read literature. Yeah. Maybe maybe I don't know about that, but
• 53:19
  I was gonna say, though, like on this idea of him being like
• 53:21
  on our team, kind of I think, I mean, I think there's
• 53:22
  a certain extent which I agree with that. I mean, I think that's
• 53:25
  true. But I also think like there are a whole bunch of still who
• 53:30
  consider themselves analytic philosophers a live and dead who we could also say are on
• 53:37
  our team too, because they do accept kind of that anti foundationalist like good
• 53:42
  examples would be like Donald Davidson or like John McDowell, Like these are people
• 53:45
  who are in very much and ri Richard Rory, who's I mean he really
• 53:50
  did switch teams, like even like I would say self described in a way,
• 53:52
  he switched teams. But there's like McDowell and Davidson, who are people
• 53:57
  who never switched teams. We're always analytic philosophers. But I think like in
• 54:00
  terms of their philosophical commitments to like what is the nature of language and truth
• 54:06
  and foundations, I think they are on our team as well, in the
• 54:08
  same way that Beckenstein is. Yeah, David Send, just for an example,
• 54:12
  David Send basically said, all languages metaphoric. You're you're never going to
• 54:17
  get to the underside of language, which is something that's close to you know,
• 54:24
  difference or something like that. Yeah. I also got the sense of
• 54:30
  kind of later Vickenstein being almost parallel to certain continental themes in various ways.
• 54:37
  But it's all very superficial in my head right now. I don't know,
• 54:40
  because you know, like the early Vickenstein could be compared to structuralism and their
• 54:45
  sort of privileging of scientific discourse. It becomes a kind of master discourse into
• 54:51
  which everything either has to be dissolved or thrown out if it can't be dissolved
• 54:53
  into it. And then later he seems to give license to the idea of
• 55:00
  well, this idea of meaning in use and language being a social phenomenon at
• 55:06
  its core seems to give license to the more sort of you know, Derridian
• 55:12
  kind of spirit where meaning is constantly deferred. Right, You never get there,
• 55:17
  you never get to the endpoint. It kind of just keeps going round
• 55:21
  and round in circles, and we can't get a sense of it. We
• 55:23
  can't get an idea of it. It just kind of slips between the cracks
• 55:28
  all the time. But I mean, any further than that, I don't
• 55:31
  think I could go. I don't think Vickenstein is completely skeptical that words have
• 55:37
  meanings. I think he believes words have meanings. I think there's a bit
• 55:42
  of controversy over whether Vickenstein actually arrives at a kind of human skepticism or whether
• 55:47
  that's just a kind of cheap interpretation to kind of hold Wvickenstein back from going
• 55:52
  full pomo. But otherwise, I mean, he does seem to lurch very
• 55:59
  far in direction of a kind of you know, critique of Enlightenment, critique
• 56:04
  of meaning as kind of authorial intent versus how meaning works in the world.
• 56:12
  But beyond that, you know I can't travel. I wonder remain silent.
• 56:17
  I wonder whether an int a good like sequel episode to this would be because
• 56:22
  I know, though, you know, when I think about that professor from
• 56:24
  my undergrad who talked about being careful about the French bullshitters, I wonder if,
• 56:30
  like the good French bullshitter for us to look at would be the very
• 56:32
  short book The Postmodern Condition, right by the French guy Leo Tard, because
• 56:37
  that's a pretty short book, and I'm pretty sure a big theme in that
• 56:40
  is language games, is it not. He does discuss Wickenstein a lot.
• 56:45
  Yeah, I mean there's also Alam Bidjo who wrote a pretty influential book describing
• 56:49
  Wickenstein as the kind of peak anti philosopher. That's that's just an idea because
• 56:53
  I know it's a pretty short book and like it might be. Ah,
• 56:55
  I wouldn't mind revisiting. Yeah, that sounds good. I don't like this.
• 57:00
  I don't like that characterization that he's anti philosophy because he obviously is not.
• 57:06
  And I can't I can't really recall bad Yew's argument, but he said
• 57:08
  he's one of the three great anti philosophers. But what Rickenstein said is philosophy
• 57:14
  has a purpose, It's just not what almost all philosophers think it is,
• 57:17
  which is we're explaining something. We're not trying to explain something. We're trying
• 57:22
  to clarify problems. But most of the time philosophy just makes problems out of
• 57:28
  nothing because they're they're not referencing outside of their discipline. They're trying to procustanly
• 57:35
  force language to do something that language just does not do. They're using a
• 57:39
  wrong tool. Yeah, I mean there is a certain sense in his in
• 57:44
  which philosophy during this period is conceived in a very very narrow site, right
• 57:50
  as you do think of philosophy, as you know, we think of philosophy
• 57:54
  as a kind of set of statements about a way of life, a worldview,
• 58:00
  something like bigger right, like what's your philosophy, man like, like
• 58:04
  what's your philosophy about life? Versus this version of philosophy, which is which
• 58:07
  is very very narrowly focused on clarifying the meaning of work. At Cambridge,
• 58:13
  philosophy and philosophy is almost like a handmaid and that runs around and cleans up
• 58:17
  the messes that all the other disciplines are making out of language, because that's
• 58:22
  you know, that's what you get with the philosophy focused on language as opposed
• 58:27
  to philosophy in a broader sense. Right, because remember this is the era,
• 58:31
  well Wickenstein came up in the era of very stringent anti metaphysics. Right,
• 58:37
  Metaphysics is the enemy. It must go, Like what was it the
• 58:42
  big positivist aj Eyer writes in the right in the beginning of the book,
• 58:45
  the destruction of metaphysics or whatever, it's gotta go because all we need is
• 58:51
  logical analysis, you mean logic, truth and method. Yeah. Yeah,
• 58:53
  The first section of that book is just saying why metaphysics is kind of should
• 58:59
  be cast out of philosophy. And so there is a certain narrowing down of
• 59:05
  what philosophy is during this period that I can sympathize with as being you know,
• 59:09
  a little bit again deflationary. You know, treating truth is just a
• 59:15
  function of the meaning of words and context as opposed to capital t truth,
• 59:20
  which is something that's supposed to be universal and unchanging and guide our lives.
• 59:24
  Right, we got to aim for the truth, We got to draw the
• 59:29
  bow and hold it taught and name it at truth and follow through. But
• 59:31
  we can't do that if truth is outside of philosophy, or if you know,
• 59:37
  science is the province that verifies whether the cat is in fact on the
• 59:40
  mat or not. Right, Well, I don't know. I think that
• 59:45
  you don't have to approach with and stuff in this stpleationary viewpoint. And I'm
• 59:47
  also not really convinced by Kripke's hyper skeptical interpretation of him, even though I
• 59:52
  think it's very interesting. I tend to think that like Terry Eagleton and Brandam's
• 59:58
  Hegelian materialist in terms pretation of Wickenstein is my favorite, because they say,
• 1:00:04
  look, you know, in both Hegel and Marx you find this idea that
• 1:00:07
  your sense of selfhood is very much dependent upon other people because you have to
• 1:00:10
  be associated into a given culture. That includes inheriting the language through which that
• 1:00:17
  culture articulates its worldview and its description of the world. And that language is
• 1:00:22
  also vital in a Hegelian sense for you being able to articulate who you are
• 1:00:27
  because you inherit words like I or matt or myself or I feel or whatever
• 1:00:31
  it happens to be right. And in this sense, I see Wickenstein as
• 1:00:38
  proudly kind of the most modern and clear exponent of a very kind of German
• 1:00:45
  position that has an auspicious history in the nineteenth century, and he might have
• 1:00:50
  approached it from a bit more of a relaxed viewpoint in the end, but
• 1:00:54
  there are definitely ways that you can say extraordinarily radical and interesting things with it,
• 1:00:59
  like Hegel and Mark did. If you wanted to push his view far
• 1:01:01
  them well, there's definitely a basis for that kind of interpretation. Because again,
• 1:01:06
  I think another way you could describe Wickenstein's trajectory is that he moves away
• 1:01:10
  from a correspondence theory of truth in his early work and moves towards a coherentist
• 1:01:17
  philosophy of truth in his later work, right, because it's no longer about
• 1:01:22
  you know, our pictures corresponding with states of things. It's about language games
• 1:01:27
  being autonomous and self sufficient. They're consistent with themselves. They they're not,
• 1:01:32
  but they're untranslatable in a sense into other language games. So you get this
• 1:01:37
  coherence, this coherentist theory of truth, which I believe is due to some
• 1:01:42
  kind of interposition of Hegelian and idealists ideas and Cambridge during the nineteen twenties.
• 1:01:51
  I mean, that's not a speculative. He makes that statement exactly an uncertainty
• 1:01:54
  where he says, language consists of a vast web or vast network, depending
• 1:01:58
  on how it's translated, and you can't kind of chisel off any part of
• 1:02:01
  it and talk about this game in isolation from all the others, because they
• 1:02:07
  do have a family resemblance to others that can allow you to not kind of
• 1:02:09
  reduce one game to another, but allow you to understand or entry into one
• 1:02:14
  of the games knowing that at least understand a little bit because you're familiar with
• 1:02:16
  some of the other things that are adjacent to it. Right, So we
• 1:02:20
  imaginatively kind of carve off language games in order to learn more about language overall.
• 1:02:25
  But in a sense, it's a system, it's a social thing.
• 1:02:30
  It exists in a totality, and beyond any language game is always a form
• 1:02:35
  of life that corresponds to it, right like being a football player is being
• 1:02:38
  a form of life. And it contains certain language games that are autonomous and
• 1:02:43
  self sufficient. But it's still a big fabric that extends beyond those games.
• 1:02:49
  But I guess the reason he says, you know, imagine the Builder game,
• 1:02:52
  for example, and there's two builders and one of them calls out block
• 1:02:57
  or hammer, and the other one and gets the hammer because they kind of
• 1:03:00
  know the rules of the game and they deliver the object. That's a little
• 1:03:05
  that's a little primitive, he calls the primitive language game. We we imagine
• 1:03:08
  carved them up like that. But really, in reality, these language games
• 1:03:13
  are a kind of totality, a kind of like so Surian long Gage almost
• 1:03:17
  straight in a sense, he kind of got what he wanted. I think,
• 1:03:21
  because the way that we talk about philosophy is very rarely in that narrow
• 1:03:25
  correspondence theory of truth sense anymore. We call we call Marx Marxism of philosophy
• 1:03:30
  when it's like mostly economics. We call psychoanalysis philosophy when it's you know,
• 1:03:37
  definitely not about it's its goal is therapeutic, not truth. So I think
• 1:03:43
  if you if you look at the way that we describe philosophy, I guess
• 1:03:45
  we call it theory often too on this podcast. But he kind of got
• 1:03:52
  he kind of got the wish that this would break into different games. And
• 1:03:57
  you know, some people might say this is the only way to see it's
• 1:03:59
  a people might say this is the only way to see it, but it's
• 1:04:01
  all blended a little bit. Yeah. And I would also like to say,
• 1:04:04
  because an episode wouldn't be enough sell without me blaming neoliberalism for everything.
• 1:04:09
  I do think there is a political connotation to this, because once you realize
• 1:04:14
  that are all right, I'm afraid that's all we have time for right now.
• 1:04:15
  Once you realize that a vision of truth is coherentists, and that a
• 1:04:19
  lot of who we think we are is dependent upon other people, you can
• 1:04:24
  understand all the different ways that communication can be vastly distorted under the alienated conditions
• 1:04:30
  of modern neoliberalism. So if we want our true Wikistani in paradise, where
• 1:04:33
  forms of life are allowed to persist with people engaged in democratic and loving association
• 1:04:42
  with one another, then the number one thing that you should take from the
• 1:04:44
  philosophical investigations is neoliberalism needs to be smashed as quickly as possible. I wonder
• 1:04:49
  if we had another time for another episode, I would want to go around
• 1:04:54
  and figure out how realist everybody in here is, as opposed to probably says
• 1:05:00
  that'd be fun. The only realistic option is smashing neoliberalism pills, you know,
• 1:05:05
  then the only thing we should be talking about until we smash neoliberalism is
• 1:05:11
  how to smash neoliberalism, and then we can talk about all the other things
• 1:05:13
  that we want to oh. In a sense, I think both of these
• 1:05:16
  views he adopts are both forms of anti realism in a way. But I'm
• 1:05:21
  not quite clear on it because you have to talk about you know, is
• 1:05:26
  it naive realism we're talking about, or scholastic realism or critical realism. There's
• 1:05:30
  a lot of I mean, there's some clarifications that need to happen so we
• 1:05:34
  don't again cross language games again. Yeah, I mean, realism to me
• 1:05:39
  is just one of those terms that you use when you want to pay homage
• 1:05:44
  to a certain viewpoint, because I would say we can signed in many senses
• 1:05:48
  as very skeptical in some respects, but very realistic in others. As Pills
• 1:05:51
  likes to say, he is continuously pointing to the world of everyday life and
• 1:05:56
  saying, don't get caught up in all these intellectualized apps. Distractions always start
• 1:06:00
  from asking the dude at the bar for a Miller Lite, or how a
• 1:06:06
  bricklayer is talking to his apprentice and teaching them how to lay bricks, or
• 1:06:10
  how two people are playing chess in a Park. You start there and then
• 1:06:14
  you move, and we do not endorse drinking of Miller Lite. Ever,
• 1:06:18
  I would also be interested to be better than that listeners don't drink Miller Lite,
• 1:06:24
  drank Miller High Life. Being a critical theory podcast, it would be
• 1:06:28
  interesting to compare his approach to critical theory, possibly of dairy da and Difference,
• 1:06:34
  because I get the sense that they both start in very very different places,
• 1:06:40
  but they, you know, they they maybe have similar things to say.
• 1:06:45
  You know, you have you have dairy DAW's critique, which usually starts
• 1:06:49
  out very close to somebody's text, like the Sociian text, and then like
• 1:06:54
  kind of works out the contradictions versus Vickenstein, who seems to just be writing
• 1:06:59
  as his own text and bringing in examples quite often. So very different method
• 1:07:04
  they seem to be, but they seem to both be social philosophy in a
• 1:07:08
  certain way. Well, this is the kind of connection that I would drawp
• 1:07:11
  again between the tractatus and the philosophical investigations, because the Tractatus is again sometimes
• 1:07:15
  presented as a look the ultimate form of logical argumentation right where you may step
• 1:07:26
  by step from one proposition from proposition one down to proposition seven, and if
• 1:07:30
  you buy the initial premises, everything kind of flows, except at the end
• 1:07:32
  again he has this remarkable statement where he says, the weird thing is if
• 1:07:35
  you buy into the philosophy that I was just talking about, you'd realize that
• 1:07:40
  all the statements I make aren't concurrent with what I just said. So there's
• 1:07:45
  a self swallowing kind of quality to this, because all I can do is
• 1:07:47
  demonstrate to you how it is that you can think this way. I can't
• 1:07:51
  actually show you in the pictorial way that I've described as the only consistent approach
• 1:07:58
  truth. And I do see something similar to that in the Philosophical Investigations,
• 1:08:01
  where he doesn't sit there and start by saying, I'm going to provide you
• 1:08:05
  with my theory of social reality and language, and then we'll move from there
• 1:08:10
  to some examples. He says, I can only show you the way to
• 1:08:14
  think about this through examples, as pil said, like sixty of them or
• 1:08:18
  so, just these unbelievable numbers of them, And once you see enough of
• 1:08:21
  them, you'll start to get the right idea. And again you'll realize all
• 1:08:26
  the kind of therapeutic implications that he's trying to get you to appreciate. There's
• 1:08:30
  some of his books that I've never read and never got to like. He
• 1:08:33
  wrote a book about color, I think, and one about psychology. I
• 1:08:38
  mean, that'd be interesting. I very rarely see him cited, you know
• 1:08:44
  these days. Well, interestingly, that essay on color is one of the
• 1:08:47
  only other things that he published in his lifetime, in addiction to the Tractatus
• 1:08:50
  and apparently a small book for school children. But he says at that point
• 1:08:58
  that his views on the picture theory of language were starting to change because he
• 1:09:01
  wasn't exactly sure how it is that the picture theory of language could account for
• 1:09:05
  color as color, right, I could account for it in terms of wavelength,
• 1:09:09
  but that doesn't seem to get at what we called in an earlier eisode,
• 1:09:13
  you know, the quality of seeing red or seeing blue, right,
• 1:09:16
  Yeah, the actual sense impressions. Yeah, And I mean that's a very
• 1:09:20
  interesting point, because you know, you don't really think seeing red or seeing
• 1:09:25
  blue is really all that important. But apparently it stimulated him to say,
• 1:09:28
  like, there's something really weird with my picture theory of language, because color
• 1:09:31
  is essential to any picture. For black and white one, I guess,
• 1:09:34
  or the most pictures and yet I can't seem to account for that here.
• 1:09:39
  So yeah, maybe there's a problem, and then again nothing until you Yeah,
• 1:09:43
  the things that become problems for him are very strange, Like the middle
• 1:09:47
  finger made him go reef. Someone giving him the finger made him a rethink
• 1:09:51
  is an old philosophy. Oh shit, I just came into color. I
• 1:09:57
  gotta throw the book and start again. Is there a hippopotamus in this room?
• 1:10:01
  I don't know that there's not. Yeah, and I could ever be
• 1:10:04
  searching for He was also weird in the sense that he had I think somewhat
• 1:10:13
  self consciously like anti bourgeois values in terms of his own personal habits, because,
• 1:10:19
  as Eric was saying at the beginning, he grew up in like a
• 1:10:21
  mega rich family that considered itself kind of high brow liberal in the period where
• 1:10:28
  you know, Vienna was in many ways like at the center of Austrian and
• 1:10:30
  even European civilization, you know, Sigmund Freud, variety of different people were
• 1:10:34
  kind of pioneering and breaking down taboos. But in terms of Wickension's own tastes,
• 1:10:39
  he almost seemed to try to cultivate this quasi proletarian sensibility, like apparently
• 1:10:45
  He hated movies that aspire to be excessively artistic. He really liked westerns.
• 1:10:53
  That's what he liked to watch, right, cowboy movies. Today he would
• 1:10:56
  probably be going to see every bit of Marvel trash and saying isn't that and
• 1:11:00
  isn't that good? And if he was watching look at our film, you'd
• 1:11:02
  be like, oh, you know, that pretentious asshole hawks authenticity and integrity.
• 1:11:06
  He's just so far removed from a reading life and would have none of
• 1:11:10
  it. Right, it's hard to make sense of He loved Beethoven. I
• 1:11:15
  think it was a bit of shame so that he wasn't musical. I think
• 1:11:17
  a lot of his family was very musically talented, and he was worried in
• 1:11:23
  his youth that he didn't have any talents. He didn't know what he was
• 1:11:26
  going to do with his life. And then he then he discovered that he
• 1:11:30
  was pretty good at philosophy under Bertrand Russell, so well, did you did
• 1:11:33
  you ever hear how Bertrand Russell described him. He's like, I show this
• 1:11:36
  young man who came up to me, and he sat there and he's like,
• 1:11:41
  I need you to tell me immediately if I am a complete idiot,
• 1:11:45
  because if I am a complete idiot, then actually become an aeronautopre mechanic.
• 1:11:48
  But if I am not a complete idiot, I should I do a philosophy.
• 1:11:53
  So I told him direct me something over the summer break, and you're
• 1:11:56
  reading the first sentence. I said, you are clearly not a complete you
• 1:12:00
  should absolutely become a philosophy. Well. The rest of that story, though,
• 1:12:05
  is Nickenstein wrote a critique of Russell's work. I think he asked him
• 1:12:10
  to, even but he wrote a critique of his of his work, and
• 1:12:13
  Russell's response was I saw that I could never again have a hope of doing
• 1:12:18
  anything in philosophy for the rest of my life. Yeah, just upsetting,
• 1:12:21
  right. And the weird thing about it too, is he really was a
• 1:12:26
  kind of prodigy in a lot of senses, because apparently, again he had
• 1:12:30
  these weird, kind of anti bourgeois sensibilities. Because if you asked a lot
• 1:12:32
  of like Cambridge philosophers or people today, academic philosophers, how they approach their
• 1:12:38
  job, you know, they'd say, it's my nine to five. You
• 1:12:40
  know, I wake up, I read a couple of journal articles, I
• 1:12:42
  read a little bit, I go to a conference, and that's how I
• 1:12:45
  do things. And you know, you got to read and keep up with
• 1:12:46
  the literature and read all the important secondary sources. Apparently he barely read any
• 1:12:50
  work of philosophy. You know, there's that scandal that he'd never even bothered
• 1:12:54
  to read Leristotles or again On or any of the kind of classical works of
• 1:12:57
  logic. He read a little bit of Russell, a little bit of gae
• 1:13:00
  as Eric said, you know, some William James. But he didn't even
• 1:13:02
  really like professional philosophy all that much. And yet he was very, very
• 1:13:08
  gifted at it, and he despised idiots. He went to teach, I
• 1:13:13
  think it was in Australia. He went to teach in this village and he
• 1:13:15
  wrote a letter to I think Russell might have been someone else, but he
• 1:13:18
  wrote a letter and he's like, the people here are twenty five percent animal.
• 1:13:24
  And he eventually had to flee the town because he was like brutally beating
• 1:13:29
  the children that he was supposed to be teaching in like high school, and
• 1:13:32
  send a kid to the hospital and made like this girl's ears bleed, and
• 1:13:35
  then they were going to call the cops on him, and he just skipped
• 1:13:39
  down and left. Well this is the thing. Yeah, I really think
• 1:13:43
  he wanted to kind of cultivate this proletarian sensibility. I mean, as Eric
• 1:13:47
  was pointing out, there's that other period where he wanted to go to the
• 1:13:49
  Soviet Union. Apparently when he petitioned to go, they were like, yeah,
• 1:13:53
  we'll give you a position anywhere you want, like you know, your
• 1:13:56
  famous Western philosophy. If you convert to the Soviet system, that's a fantastic
• 1:14:00
  coup for us. And he's like, no, no, I just want
• 1:14:01
  to do like back baking. I want to work. And they were like,
• 1:14:05
  no, no, no, we can't have you doing that because that'll
• 1:14:09
  just make us look worse. It's like the first thing we did when with
• 1:14:11
  Consider arrived is set him to the Gulag or something like could it be an
• 1:14:15
  important philosopher or nothing. He's like, well not into that then, bro.
• 1:14:19
  But he just had like this kind of weird back and forth sometimes between
• 1:14:24
  his aristocratic and elitist tendencies coming out and just trying to desperately militate against them,
• 1:14:30
  sometimes to the point where he seems to have been torn over that,
• 1:14:33
  like he has been was so many things and he's a fascinating guy. And
• 1:14:36
  we haven't brought this up yet, but he's kind of a snack too.
• 1:14:41
  What do you mean good look nice dark features he does. Yeah, And
• 1:14:46
  apparently I'm like Nietzsche, he did actually have like genuine friendships. Like Nietzsche
• 1:14:50
  had this bad habit of taking friends and turning them into enemies. Marx was
• 1:14:57
  gifted at that also, But like Wickenstein's buddies sometimes found him like difficult to
• 1:15:01
  deal with and they're sometimes just like you gotta fucking like calm down, like
• 1:15:06
  not everything needs to be like ratcheted up to a twenty. But yeh,
• 1:15:09
  a very intense guy. Yeah, But like Kanes and Russell kind of remained
• 1:15:13
  friends with him on and off for his entire life, and his students worshiped
• 1:15:16
  him. And apparently he did actually have genuine proletariat friends, which he was
• 1:15:20
  very proud of, and go see Westerns with them and you know, if
• 1:15:24
  they wouldn't talk about philosophy. And when he was living on that shack,
• 1:15:28
  I think in Ireland, I want to go visit him. When I was
• 1:15:30
  living there, Apparently like all the farmers in the region liked him. He'd
• 1:15:33
  go to the bar but none of them knew who he was because he would
• 1:15:36
  never talk about it, and he found that enjoyable. His his proletarian accessories.
• 1:15:44
  He volunteered at a hospital at one point, maybe during the Second War,
• 1:15:47
  and he and nobody knew who he was, and he didn't tell anybody,
• 1:15:53
  and he was just volunteering, and then he ended up doing some amazing
• 1:15:57
  stuff like designing a new machine for pumping blood or something like that, and
• 1:16:01
  then they kind of ask, oh, who are you. I'm vicken Stein.
• 1:16:04
  Oh you mean the Vickenstein from Cambridge. He's like, yep, that's
• 1:16:08
  the one. Like he was very weirdly humble sometimes just didn't again, that's
• 1:16:12
  that asceticism coming through. He just didn't want worldly possessions. He didn't want
• 1:16:17
  fame, he didn't want money, he didn't want anything. He just wanted
• 1:16:19
  a shack where he could just write and be happy and so somewhat alone but
• 1:16:28
  surrounded by idiots. Phil saying, you know, he had difficulty with that,
• 1:16:31
  and I mean, it takes real balls when you're in your twenties to
• 1:16:34
  write an eighty page book and say I've solved all the problems of philosophy.
• 1:16:41
  None of you have anything to do anymore. So I'm just going to retire
• 1:16:45
  and teach school children because that's a more valuable enterprise than actually assuming the a
• 1:16:53
  Cambridge position teaching philosophy to undergraduates. No point in that, right. You
• 1:16:58
  can only imagine how that must a pissed people. A kind of a weird
• 1:17:01
  combination of ascetic and megalomaniac called called Mozart and Beethoven Sons of God. Weird
• 1:17:12
  weird language to use for a guy who's supposedly an atheist, but you know
• 1:17:15
  who knows he seemed kind of spiritual at the same time. Well, we
• 1:17:20
  made it pretty far through this. I think that was as good of an
• 1:17:26
  intro as any. So'll I say bye with that, and thank you to
• 1:17:30
  the listeners, and thank the three of you, and yeah, catch us
• 1:17:35
  next week. I'm glad to learn about this topic. All right, guys,
• 1:17:42
  that was fun, good talk, See you next time. It was efficient