Wittgenstein, Language Games, and Human Nature
The basic proposition of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s analytic take on metaphilosophy states that all philosophical conundrums stem from a fundamental misappropriation of language.
What Wittgenstein called language games referred to the very orderings of linguistics, and when one brings them out of their own specific and proper context it results in their losing their original meaning, thereby creating unnecessary problems.
Regardless if one agrees with his peculiar assertion or not, which seems to shake the entire discipline’s make-up to its core, the conceptual take is nonetheless interesting. What he really seems to be saying is that when something is deracinated and uprooted from some clearly delineated frameworks of significance, an intellectual mess of confusion is brought about, leading to needless discussions of subject-matter that ought to be long settled already.
Essentially, the world does not make sense when logical reason, based on approaches like common sense and empirical observation, is abandoned.
At first glance, it may look like Wittgenstein is nothing but a positivist on steroids, rejecting the humanities as belonging to the realm of futility, if you will, but in fact the opposite is true. He wanted to protect the trinity of special subjects, namely religion, ethics and aesthetics, from what he viewed as the corrosive nature of both the natural and social sciences.
He was referring to their respective methodologies with the core principle being the arithmetic-inquisitive mechanic logic of subjecting objects of research to rationally explained phenomena through deduction, induction and hermeneutics. In their interminable search for corroboration, human nature experiences a loss of intuition, beauty and the ingenuity of authentic spirit, what man can make with his bare hands apart from looking at everything through an explanatory lens.
What one misses here is an appreciation for the humanly, the political and the philosophical in their unique manifestations as both secular and spiritual, emotional and rational, genuine and fake: the full range of man’s repository for purposeful expression.
Constructivism and science certainly have their places, too, by uncovering institutional malpractice, demonstrating the role of subjectivity, offering useful approaches as well as providing objective expository power, but that should be their proper limits. Human nature, of course, needs its integrated and fully-fledged elementary high seat with the respect that it deserves.
