Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, and autism.

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I stopped reading the thread at this point... you cannot propose a theory, and then refuse to clarify when people need more information to discuss it...

step one: underpants
step two:
step three: Profit!

This is a brilliant book, although quite intense. For perhaps an easier read, I would suggest You Are Not So Smart by David McRaney. His follow up, You Can Beat Your Brain, is also a worthwhile read, though less so if you are already up to your elbows in Kahnemann and Taleeb and Silver.

That's "Wittgenstein I". During the second half of his career, he changed greatly and decided that he had been entirely in error. He concluded that language is inherently imprecise and that it is a mistake to insist that it must be precise. Instead, we are to be open to imprecision and conscious of it--we need to stop believing that language is or should be precise. Instead, we need to be always aware that what I mean is unlikely to be exactly what you mean and work with that knowledge. He replaced the "true value" model with "mean plus or minus confidence intervals" model. So long as we keep this in mind when we try to communicate, we can more easily avoid knee-jerk hostile responses.

Yes, you are right, in Philosophical Investigations he rejected such a theory and thought, as you say, that Language is not always pictorial and many people can interpret things in a multitude of ways. Still though, the obsession with language and linguistic clarity I still find something that has an air of aspergers about it. I don't know where his hypothesis that all philosophical problems could be solved by linguistic clarification would fit into the two different modes of his thinking since they seem to fit into both.

They are fully Wittgenstein I. He would have rejected this hypothesis completely in his Wittgenstein II period.

Just out of interest, why? Assuming that language is not a commonly shared picture open to interpretation, does that still not mean that problems could be solved by bringing more clarification to our language?

Wittgenstein concluded that the attempt at "clarification", itself, produced greater disagreement, misunderstanding, and mutual hostility. Who is going to surrender being "right" or being "more clear"? If it's a matter of "By secretase gamma complex do we mean a four-protein or six-protein complex?", the issue is trivially simple. Just keep looking at the complexes with gamma secretase activity and eventually it will be sorted out. But what about "What would be a truly just outcome?" or "Should people be given a minimum standard income no matter how lazy and parasitical they are?"? Who gets to define "lazy" and "parasitical" in an absolute sense and who has to surrender and shut up? The attempt to "clarify" ends up producing more conflict.

I intentionally chose extreme examples to starkly illustrate. At times, clarification is the problem, not a solution. Instead, there are times when one simply needs to accept vagueness and work with it. Likewise, even if "clarification" is workable in a given situation, what if the "clarification" boils down to "sort of kind of with error bars and wiggle room" in the first place? In other words, "clarification" is often a distraction. Meaning is a matter of rough agreement, and when there is difficulty in agreement, there is compromise, and any compromise is ad hoc, without universal standing and without eternity.

It's like the universe as a whole--nothing permanent, nothing really solid, nothing lasting, just dancers on the edge of the abyss.

Ah, okay yes that makes sense to me. Many of the words from which philosophical problems arise are completely subjective and can be relatively defined in a variety of ways and thus by clarifying such words, the differences in the interpretations of them become highly aggrandized and the problem increases. Although, I suppose one could say that the words that are overly abstract and vague such as 'lazy' and 'immoral' should be scrapped from the our language all together so that our language solely consists of words that refer to something concrete and fixed, things to which we can refer in physical reality through our senses.

I find Epictetus' Stoicism more useful than anything Wittgenstein and Nietzsche have come up with.

Friedrich Nietzsche was a genuine nut ball and later in life a tertiary syphillitic with rotted out brains.

Wittgenstein as a real genius and a polymath. He design one of the first turbojet (jet with a J) airplane engines in 1911 well before mettalurgy was advanced enough to make such engines practical. After which he invented truth tables and did some very odd philosophizing. He had a great many talents.

ruveyn

In what way was he a nuttball? I have read a few of his writings and none of them seem odd to me at all. Also, the fact that he had syphilis is irrelevant since most of his writings I believe were written before he contracted it. I agree about Wittgenstein though, he possessed much genius, not only in philosophy but also his exceptional talents in engineering.

This is interesting. Care to expand at all?

Thanks for the replies everyone. Sorry to not come back and answer for a while, I lost my password and just found it again on an old email.

You can dowload Mencken's translation of The AntiChrist at Project Gutenberg. A few things:

He tells people to 'speak only to truth.' In other words, don't even start down the road of guessing what other people want to hear, because you'll always corrupt your thinking no matter how hard you try to compartmentalize it (my interpretation).

He's a more extreme example of Voltaire attitude ("Monsieur l'abbé, I detest what you write, but I would give my life to make it possible for you to continue to write."). Voltaire wanted the security to say what seemed correct without fear of retaliation. Nietzsche went a step farther and favored proactive use of force to defend it.

Well, I have to say I am somewhat surprised that someone does talk about Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in juncture, as I hardly ever heard of a connection between them (as acknowledged by others, I mean), but, actually, I favour both of them extremely. Even though their ideas are somewhat different.
And, yes, I really find their thought helpful and refreshing to me. Because, Nietzsche, for example, talks about overcoming pain and suffering and becoming stronger in spite of it, what, I guess, is a helpful notion to many people, not only Aspies. Secondly, he urges one to 'be who one is to be', that is, seek your own way and not succumb to the herd mentality, that is so luring. That again, I think, could help, as, being autistic or Aspie means you are constantly pushed to the edge by society, demanding you to 'conform' and 'obey'. What he proposed, in fact, was questioning openly about things, for instance, morality, behavior and normativity. I feel this idea is kind of 'aspie', since such people have a bigger intelectual freedom, an urge to question things, that seem 'obvious' to the multitude. So, Nietzsche talks about 'being one's self', 'questioning', 'being on a mission', by this I mean, that he says, as if people who are 'the higher kind', need to seek their goals and work on their 'big project', not giving into the triviality of our casual life. And what Nieztsche says that I think is valuable is that he emphasises the idea of not demeaning others, hating others, teaching others, preaching to others, but 'turning away' from things you dislike, not engaging in hate and demeaning other's thoughts or actions. Here he clearly takes something from another great philosopher who is somehwat 'Aspie', Spinoza.
As to Wittgenstein, he has this peculiar way of thinking, writing, stating what he thinks and he uses language and logic to see the world thought it, what I like about this guy is both his way of thinking from 'outside', looking on what is a thing (language, say) that we use and thus we do not even 'feel' like 'doing' something important, as we cannot understand ourseves without it, and as well, his personality, because when I read about his life, I felt as if that's in so much respects 'my kind'. I think his way of seeing the world and acting in it is somewhat 'Aspie', it is a bright alternative to mindless engagement in 'everyday life', to 'doing what should be done' and 'thinking like everyone else'. And I like, how he said in 'Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus', that if there is a thing, in our way of understanding, that we can call 'eternity', it is LIVING NOW, since the 'now' is eternal and we never get to touch neither the past, nor the future and that death is 'not a life event' as such, because it never takes place in our life. So, after all, both philophers were thinking 'out of the box' and were opposed to to dictatorship of our everyday life, the herd, the majority, that is blind and deaf, and never ever 'reflected' anything.

RobsPlanet,
No one, except myself, has helped me find a fulfilling life with AS as much as Wittgenstein and Nietzsche have.
Wittgenstein's greatest contribution to my life has been the almost-solipsism that Russell talks about in the introduction to the Tractatus. This arrises from the idea of language as a picture, along with the subject's senses as the mechanisms for relating language to the world. This has helped me look directly at the world and stop looking at myself in the mirror that is other people. It helps me feel that the world is mine to live in as I feel is good.
Nietzsche has helped me with the same thing, the becoming who you are and the throwing out of cultural norms that are damaging to the individual.
I would love to hear more about your thoughts on this, guys and gals.

Didn't go through the thread to see if any of this is covered, but here it is anyway:

1. Could you define relevant in a much more specific manner? There are some aspects of both that I find relevant to my personal life philosophy, and some that just seem like way too much of a stretch to even be taken seriously (especially Nietzsche; some of my favorite and some of my most hated portions of philosophy).

2. If it is published and contains words, I am generally interested. If it has numerical data that goes double.

3. Could you again clarify relevant? In addition to those two, I live by some of the aspects of Bach (utilitarianism is more or less what ties most of my patchwork of personal beliefs together), many aspects of Christ as written in the first 4 New Testament books (and/or the Jewish mysticism traditions of the time), and a healthy dose of Frankfurt (on Bullsh*t) just to keep it grounded. But I also temper my philosophy with a large helping of modern psychology, particularly in the irrational behaviors line (Ariely, Brafman and Brafman, etc.) and the latest and greatest in the realm of physics and neurophysiology.