I'm a senior in high school and an assignment in my English class was to respond to "the words around you," meaning literally words, phrases, etc that we see every day. I chose to respond to a quote that my teacher had put on one of the walls by Ludwig Wittgenstien. Please let me know what you think of my essay and if there's anything that I've missed (be gentle I'm new to objectivism and philosophy in general) Thanks!
As I sat down at my desk in my senior English class for the first time, I pondered what this new class, headed by my new goatee-clad teacher would be like. When I looked across the room and saw the quote printed boldly on the opposite wall, I quickly became pessimistic. Written by an unstable (most likely due to three of his brothers committing suicide) Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein, it read, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." What an awful world that must be!
This quote and Ludwig's philosophy in general (which seems to just be an extension of Kant's) belittle the grandeur of human experience. His philosophy rests on the idea that the world is simply a collection of true statements and if you could somehow write down every true fact, it would be a sufficient description of the universe. He claimed that all aesthetic and ethical judgments are irrelevant and unnecessary because they aren't facts and can't be proven. In Ludwig's world, there is no right or wrong, true or false; only what is a fact and what isn't. He also said that all propositions are of equal value; that a concept is nothing more than a bunch of arbitrarily grouped facts, so there is no hierarchy of thought. Dear God, was this philosophy going to dominate my English class as it dominated the beige wall in front of me? I hoped not.
If, as Ludwig believed, there are no concepts as such, then the only means of differentiating between concretes one has is the words we use to describe them. The only thing, in Ludwig's mind, that separates a stone from a tree is the fact that we have different words for each . He thought that because one cannot, for example, definitively pick the point at which the color spectrum changes from orange to red, that the entire concept of color should be discarded. The quote in question is an extension of this idea. He thought that the world is not a collection of objects, but words. In his mind, the extent of one's world depends on how well one can describe it.
Perhaps I'm missing something, but there seems to be a gaping hole in this logic. If there are no concepts, how did language evolve? Language is simply a collection of symbols (sounds) that represent concepts. If there is no objective way to divide the world into concepts, how did pre-verbal man create words? If the only thing separating a tree from a stone is the words we use to describe them, why did prehistoric man decide to call them different things in the first place? Ludwig's philosophy completely discredits man's ability to volitionally change the metaphysical - the facts - through means of his conceptual faculties. In order to develop the first spears, early man must have had a conceptual understanding of the principal that a sharp object is more effective at piercing animal hide than a blunt one and been able to integrate that concept by sharpening a stick. Concepts existed and were understood long before we had words for them.
I sincerely hope that this quote was found by my teacher typing "language quotes" into Google rather than in the pages of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig's only philosophical book (and I use the world philosophical very liberally here.) The book is full of contradictions and flat out stupid statements such as “All philosophical propositions are nonsense,” and “whereof one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent.” By his own logic, he said, “The book is an attempt to express what cannot be expressed, and, therefore, nonsense.” He also said, “This book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it — or similar thoughts.” So to get anything out of his book, I must already know everything in it? Is this really what philosophy has come to? In the words of Ayn Rand, "People would not employ a plumber who’d attempt to prove his professional excellence by asserting that there’s no such thing as plumbing—but, apparently, the same standards of caution are not considered necessary in regard to philosophy." It is sad that this philosophy, or lack there of, has so thoroughly infiltrated our schools and society as a whole.
note: sorry if the formatting got messed up