Why Wittgenstein Was Right About Silence
- sciart0
- Jun 5
- 2 min read
Excerpt: "My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean. I will confess that this can be a frustrating task at times because I feel as though I can never get to the essence of these sublimities; words always feel inadequate. For a long time, I believed that at some point—maybe after writing a million more words—I would finally arrive at the ability to adequately express what it is that I’m seeking.
The philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, probably would have told me I was barking up the wrong tree. The writer and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein’s work “perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating,” yet Wittgenstein did not leave us much of it. He published only one book of philosophy in his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which itself is only about 75 pages long. In it, Wittgenstein explained that language can never convey the fullest understanding of life. “The limits of my language,” he wrote, “mean the limits of my world.”
Wittgenstein was no doubt conscious of the irony of making this argument through language. But in so doing, he offered a path to getting beyond words and to apprehend, after all, the ineffable essence of what we seek.
Human communication is rife with misunderstanding, as social scientists have long observed. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 showed that people misunderstand the intended meaning of what others say, especially among close acquaintances such as family and friends.
The scholars found that those who spoke with strangers communicated more clearly than with close associates, believing—incorrectly—that the latter would understand ambiguous phrases by virtue of their intimate affiliation.
So what are the odds that you’ll grasp correctly the next thing your spouse tells you? Digital communication makes the situation worse because it eliminates nonverbal cues."