Early versus Late

One thing that has always puzzled me is how shocked and indignant some people become when they realize that a philosopher has changed his or her mind about something. It is as if people forget that every philosopher is a human being who lives through a wide array of experiences throughout the course of his or her life and who goes through a continuous process of philosophic (and personal) maturation. Really, we should be surprised when someone doesn’t change his or her ideas over a long period of time because it would be indicative of either extreme stubbornness or an unusually good theory that cannot be improved.

People make a particularly big fuss over the way in which Wittgenstein openly criticizes his own Tractatus in his later writings. There are clear passages in which Wittgenstein criticizes his former views, yet there are other passages that seem to rely on ideas that are at least extremely similar to his early views. Many critics seem to be quite disconcerted by these inconsistencies; they are frustrated because Wittgenstein cannot be reduced to a three-paragraph summary of “his position” (not “positions”) for an introductory textbook. A lot of ink has been spilled over the question of the similarities and differences between the early and late Wittgenstein.

Yet it seems to me that whether or not Wittgenstein changed his mind is neither an important nor an interesting question. What we should really be asking is whether or not he was right in any of his writings; all concerns about how those writings relate to each other must be secondary. It is a strange and parasitic kind of philosophy to sit around arguing about whether someone has changed his mind without actually assessing any of his ideas.

I think that one of things that Wittgenstein said that was right—regardless of when he said it—is that philosophers often make the obvious seem obscure. He does not seem to know whether these philosophers have intentionally “muddied the waters to make them appear deep” (as Nietzsche said of Kant) or whether they are honestly confused; I think that there have been instances of each kind. Philosophers tend to be people who either love knowledge and devote their lives to understanding everything as deeply as possible, or who despise knowledge and enjoy undermining it through sophistry and skepticism. It seems to me that the first type of philosopher might be prone to accidentally overlooking the obvious, while the second type is more likely to obscure the obvious intentionally for the sake of deceiving others.

Hegel strikes me as a philosopher who loved knowledge so much that he tried to see things as deeper than they are. I think Wittgenstein would have agreed with me that Hegel’s philosophy is the kind of nonsense that one cannot help loving and admiring despite its lack of sense. Sartre, on the other hand, sometimes seems to be deliberately complicating that which he writes in order to make other people feel that their existence is somehow unstable or absurd, that somehow there is a question about the fact that we “are”.

Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophers who make things seem deeper than they are provides an extremely helpful way to heal oneself from the potentially dangerous effects of some philosophers, who may or may not have produced those effects intentionally.