A WITTGENSWELCOME: The Ramblings of a Quasi-Philosopher

Ludwig Wittgenstein was many things. He was a philosopher. An architect. A soldier. But his most germane was that he was a weirdo. 

A Big. Fricken’. Weirdo. 

He once built a house for his sister, which is “weird” in a wondrous sort of way but not the weird I speak of. You see, Wittgenstein obsessed over every painstaking detail of this house. The door handles took him a year to design. The radiators, an additional year. And once the house was almost done, he halted everything to raise the ceiling two inches higher. But that was Wittgenstein's nature. He obsessed over things at an atomic level until he saw a resolution.

What is relevant to our discussion is Ludwig’s obsession with communication. Or rather, what happens when communication goes wrong. It was said that anytime an argument broke out in his vicinity, he would abruptly rush out of the room like a madman. And I guess it’s this hypersensitivity to raucous disagreement that got Wittgenstein’s mental gears turning. 

Rather than learn to tell people arguing near him to “shut the hell up” like any regular human being would, Wittgenstein wrote a whole damned book to try to solve the problem of miscommunication. The book was called Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, a title too uninspiring to even bother translating.  What Wittgenstein essentially came up with in this book, at least according to the oracle of wisdom known as Wikipedia, is Picture Theory.

Our words, this theory holds, paint certain pictures about the world and different people see different pictures hidden within our words. On Facebook, your friend posts a lengthy description of his bad day, sharing every gruesome detail. Some see a struggling soul in need of help. Others, an attention-hungry egomaniac inviting you to his pity party. 

Same words. Different pictures.

This speaks to the idea of this blog. To try to create alignment between the pictures people paint with their words and the pictures people see. About the world. About philosophy. About viewpoints across the spectrum of imagination. And to do it in an atomic way. The Wittgensteinian Way. 

Welcome to Wittgenstein’s Web.