Wittgenstein’s later writings on “seeing (and hearing) & Doing Things with Words

“It is impossible for me to say in my book one word about all that music has meant in my life. How then can I hope to be under- stood?”

As Wittgenstein explains, some- times understanding a sentence means sorting out your experience of it, seeing how it cannot be replaced by any other sentence, just as understanding a musical theme means hearing how it cannot be replaced by any other musical theme.

Wittgenstein turned away from a life of wealth and privilege to pursue profoundly difficult things on an untraditional path. As a young man he was drawn to philosophy by way of engineering. His fascination with the foundations of mathematics led him to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics and, in 1911, to study with Russell at Cambridge. After he wrote the Tractatus (1921), the only work published in his lifetime, Wittgenstein decided he had solved all of philosophy’s problems and moved on.

But he returned to Cambridge in 1929, and until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein set aside the systematic philosophy with which he concerned himself in the Tractatus to focus instead on how philosophy creates its own problems when it considers words (such as “knowledge,” “being,” “object,” and “name”) apart from their original, everyday use. He dedicated himself to doing away with philosophical problems by showing that puzzle- ments arise when language “goes on holiday.”