For my first post, I want to write about something that has become near and dear to my heart. It’s philosophy, but I promise I have done my best to make it palatable.

My chief philosophical interest this year has undoubtedly been the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. I ignored him for so long– mostly out of fear, but partly out of allegiance to one of my philosophical saints, Bertrand Russell, with whom he had vigorous disagreements. This was a great mistake. While challenging, Wittgenstein’s works are incredibly rewarding. Today I want to share just a humble slice of one of his many great ideas.

Without going very deep into Wittgenstein’s history, I’ll say that he rose to prominence in the early 20th century during the birth of what would later be called Analytic Philosophy, and he got his start under the tutelage of the reigning king of analytic philosophy, Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein was deeply saturated in the mathematical philosophy of the day, and he was obsessed with finding the solutions that the analytics all sought, which was nothing less than to understand and justify the foundations of mathematics and logic itself. Russell viewed Wittgenstein as something of a chosen one — the one to lead the next generation of philosophy in the quest for which Russell was getting too old. But Wittgenstein went to war, and, according to Russell, the war changed him.

Wittgenstein wrote his small but great work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a soldier in World War I, and sent it to Russell for publishing in 1921. The book is a truly magisterial blend of mysticism, logic, and language, and it’s as difficult to understand as it is humbling to behold. Wittgenstein even claimed Russell never understood it. To do any sort of justice to the ideas in the Tractatus, I would need to take much more time than I am willing to spend here (and probably even then I would do it no justice), so I will just be writing about one very important idea. 

In the TLP, Wittgenstein famously presents what has become known as the show/say distinction.

4.1212. What can be shown, cannot be said.

This distinction, Wittgenstein believed, was the key to healing our philosophical ailments. How? To get a better grasp of this distinction, we will briefly need to look into some of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.

In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein develops three categories that sentences may fall under. These are sense, senselessness, and nonsense. These categories connect, in varying degrees, to what some view as the crucial doctrine developed in the Tractatus and the subject of this article: the distinction between what can be shown and what can be said. To see how this is so, we need to look at some examples. 

Sentences with sense express thoughts and correspond to the world. These are the ordinary sentences of language‒ sentences like “He cast the ring into the fire”. It is a sentence which has something plain in the world that corresponds to it; and, by virtue of this fact, it says something. But, in addition to saying something, this sentence, by virtue of its well-formed structure, also shows something. But what could this mean? Let’s look at the so-called “senseless” propositions to find out. 

Other than sentences with sense, there are also sentences with no sense, i.e. that are senseless. These, according to Wittgenstein, are all the pure propositions of logic‒  propositions like p or ~p. These sentences say nothing but do show something by virtue of their form. For Wittgenstein, the “form” or structure of logic mirrors the structure of the world.

Lastly, there are the nonsensical propositions. These sentences fail by trying to express that which can only be shown. To this category belongs anything that matters in life, including but not limited to all metaphysical propositions, all statements about ethics, and any statements about the form of our logic or our language. So, for Wittgenstein, questions like “Does God love us?”, or “why is murder wrong?” ‒ or about pretty much anything in life which is of deep interest to the philosopher or the spiritualist or just the regular person ‒ are to be viewed as utter nonsense. That is, the questions or statements are nonsense, not the things or experiences in themselves. 

What ought we to do upon realizing this? According to Wittgenstein, we ought to abandon our attempts at trying to talk about or explain these things– which includes abandoning philosophy itself, the sole purpose of which is to clarify the language problems that Wittgenstein has, in this book, now solved once and for all.  

At the very end of the Tractatus, he writes:

6.54. My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

He then ends his book with the following proposition:

7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.

~

After the publication of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein gave up his work at Cambridge and abandoned philosophy. He moved to Austria and became a school teacher– at least for a time. His philosophical mind would never rest, and he would eventually return to philosophy. And what a return it was.

To end, I want to leave you with a short poem. Not just any poem, but the very poem that Wittgenstein thought perfectly exemplified the distinction between what can be said and what can only be shown. See what you think.

“Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn”

Count Eberhard Rustle-Beard,

From Württemberg’s fair land,

On holy errand steer’d

To Palestina’s strand.

The while he slowly rode

Along a woodland way;

He cut from the hawthorn bush

A little fresh green spray.

Then in his iron helm

The little sprig he plac’d;

And bore it in the wars,

And over the ocean waste.

And when he reach’d his home;

He plac’d it in the earth;

Where little leaves and buds

The gentle Spring call’d forth.

He went each year to it,

The Count so brave and true;

And overjoy’d was he

To witness how it grew.

The Count was worn with age

The sprig became a tree;

‘Neath which the old man oft

Would sit in reverie.

The branching arch so high,

Whose whisper is so bland,

Reminds him of the past

And Palestina’s strand.

Why did Wittgenstein think this poem showed something which could not be said? As you can probably imagine, he didn’t say.

-AW

Where It Came From

Nearly five years ago, I launched a blog called Dauntless Thoughts. I named it “Dauntless Thoughts” because the questions and ideas I was considering at that time were terrifying to me, and the thought was that if I was to seriously engage them, I would need to be dauntless. Plus, to be honest, I really like that word.

Since then, I wrote on pretty much anything that interested me, but the spirit of the blog remained the same; I was using it as therapy for my spiritual angst. Each post told the story of a young man who was lost and who was using his writings to find some solid ground. The public platform simply made sharing my ideas and feelings with my friends and colleagues all the easier. But now, however, something has changed: the spirit of the blog no longer matches the spirit of the man.

I don’t mean that I’m suddenly free from all existential angst −I definitely do not mean that− but rather that it no longer takes such a prominent role in my life. Five years isn’t much, but enough has happened to me and within me to make me feel very far from the man who began that blog. In fact, in my most recent post, something just felt wrong. I felt like I was an imposter, pretending to be Dauntless when in fact I was not. So, then, who am I?

The answer came to me during one of my classes last semester, where we were discussing Edmund Husserl, a 19th- 20th-century German philosopher. The professor referred to Husserl’s view of what constitute mental acts, and I thought hey, that sounds like Mental Axe! That’s really cool that those words sound similar. 

And, voila! Mental Axe was born.

Mental Axe was conceived without dramatics. And I think this communicates something closer to the tone I hope to strike in this new blog. I’m not so lost as I once was. I’m not using this blog as therapy. I’m here to write about things I think are cool and to share them with you.

That being said, Mental Axe is more than just a cool name; each word plays a role in what I want this blog to be about.

MENTAL:

I like thinking about intellectual things. I like thinking about thinking. I want to write about things that are true and good and beautiful. I want to talk about what I know well: philosophy, politics, religion, history, literature, education, and fitness; but I might also engage in those things I know less well or not very much at all: visual art, movies and television, music, nutrition, and popular culture in general. This will be a blog about the so-called higher things.

AXE:

I want to help others think about these things, so I plan on sometimes posting instructional, meta-content. Also, I’m a passionate person who doesn’t shy away from a fight, and I like the symbol of an axe to represent my general aggression toward ideas and toward life. To extend the symbol even further, I want this blog to be more precise, more careful, and to provide reading material that is as pleasant, easy, and informative as possible. I aim to sharpen the mental axes of others; but, as the Book teaches, iron sharpens iron. I expect to grow as a result.

My direction will become clearer as I begin to write, but I will say that while not exhaustive, these are my highest ranking goals:

• Produce intellectual yet accessible content
• Write to be read
• Post at least every month

I hope I can stick with it!

– AW