▲ Wittgenstein walking with friends (Ludwig Wittgenstein on the right holding his clothes)
"The biggest difference between a philosopher and a sophist is that a sophist evades understanding by shifting the main points, while a philosopher tries to reach an understanding by dominating the main points."
It's hard to understand
Text: Zhou Lian
"Well, God has arrived. I picked him up on the train at 5:15. On January 18, 1929, the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in a letter home.
"God's" name was Wittgenstein, and he was 40 years old, having just returned from a decade of self-imposed exile to return to Cambridge to pursue philosophy. Wittgenstein was already a legend at Cambridge at this time, and everyone was talking about him and his Treatise on Logic and Philosophy.
Keynes was careful and caring for this genius. As early as the First World War, as a citizen of a hostile country, he wrote to Wittgenstein, who was a Austria soldier, and the first sentence was: "I hope you have become a prisoner of war", not out of loyalty to the British Empire, but out of the protection of Wittgenstein's personal gifts, because only by being a prisoner of war can it be possible to avoid death and have the opportunity to rethink philosophical questions. Obviously, for Keynes, there was a more eternal value beyond war and national honor.
When Wittgenstein finally decided to return to Cambridge, Keynes knew exactly what he needed to do to protect him, and in a letter he wrote: "I understand that fatigue can be devastating. I must not let him talk to me for more than two or three hours a day. ”
Unfortunately, Wittgenstein himself was a man who was accustomed to exhausting himself and others. As an interlocutor, he was an absolute disaster, even if it was against a child.
"We spent the afternoon arguing – he's a very nasty guy, and every time you say something, he says, 'No, no, that's not the point.'" That may not be his point, but that's our point. It's too tiring to listen to him. This is the diary of a 14-year-old boy, and the "he" in it is none other than Wittgenstein. Sometimes you have to feel that a child's intuition is more penetrating than the most genius philosopher, and that it is difficult to "understand" and why "misunderstanding" occurs.
We will always encounter this kind of annoying person in life, when you talk to him about humanity, he talks to you about the law, when you talk to him about the law, when you talk to him about the law, he talks to you about the party, when you talk to him about the party, when you talk to him about the party, he talks to you about the miracle. In short, every time you say something, he can move the point to another place, and such a person is called a "sophist".
As an interlocutor, Wittgenstein was indeed quite annoying, but he was not a sophist, but a philosopher. The biggest difference between a philosopher and a sophist is that a sophist evades understanding by shifting the main points, while a philosopher tries to reach an understanding by dominating the main points.
In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein gave an example of a "rabbit's head":
"Imagine I show this picture to a child. He said, 'It's a duck,' and then suddenly he said, 'Oh, it's a rabbit.'" So he recognized it as a rabbit – an experience of identification. ”
The secret of this recognition experience is the transformation of the face, you can see a duck from this face, and you can see a rabbit from that face. For Wittgenstein, changing the face of a particular object is the key to understanding.
There is an example of what actually happened to Wittgenstein that is worth mentioning. During World War I, Wittgenstein went to war as a volunteer and was forced to live with soldiers from below, and because of the huge difference in background, he found himself "almost always surrounded by people who hated me." These people are "vicious" and "ruthless", and "it is almost impossible to find a trace of humanity in them". In response to the stress, Wittgenstein involuntarily began to hate them, but soon he began to urge himself: "As soon as you feel that you hate them, turn to trying to understand them", and when he finds it difficult to do so, he concludes: "It is not so much that the people around me are inferior, but that they are intimidatingly narrow-minded." …… Because they always misunderstand. These people are not stupid, but narrow-minded. They are smart enough in their field. But they lack quality and thus breadth. ”
This is a successful case of understanding achieved by changing facets, and of course, "understanding" is not the same as "accepting", and Wittgenstein still "hates" them, but he no longer "hates" them.
Throughout his life, Wittgenstein felt himself struggling with shallowness and inflatability, both his own and someone else's. But anyone who has learned Wittgenstein's fighting spirit will have lingering fears. Some good deeds even wrote a poem about it:
“…… Who has seen it on which issue
Ludwig couldn't resist promulgating the law?
Whoever goes to them, they will shout at us,
interrupted us and stammered his sentences;
Never-ending arguments, harsh, irritated and noisy,
Of course he's right, proud of his rightness......"
The poem was widely circulated among young Cambridges, who read it and laughed, but this did not mean that Wittgenstein was a clown in their hearts, on the contrary, as one of the onlookers put it: "It releases the tension, resentment, and even fear that has accumulated." Because no one has ever been able to turn the tide in front of Wittgenstein and return the favor with a tooth for a tooth. ”
Someone once commented that Wittgenstein's return was "a disaster for Cambridge" because he was "a man who was completely incapable of discussing it." "I don't agree with that at all. On the contrary, I agree with Munch that Wittgenstein's intolerance at Cambridge was more due to "the conflict between the consciously 'cultured' aestheticism peculiar to England and Wittgenstein's harsh asceticism and sometimes merciless honesty." ”
The change of physiognomy may alleviate this conflict, but it is more of a reconciliation than an understanding, because understanding requires both parties to comb their parts, ties, and greet each other politely, but also to embed their respective expressions in the same stream of life, which may be the root of the difficulty of understanding. (ENDS)