Wittgenstein’s New Traditionalism

Abstract

Towards the end of his life Wittgenstein wrote: “Men have judged that a king can make rain; we say this contradicts all experience. Today they judge that aeroplanes and the radio etc. are means for the closer contact of peoples and the spread of culture”.¹ This remark is a rather clear allusion to what Wittgenstein, in my opinion, always believed: that man’s so-called historical progress, and especially the positive role reason is supposed to play in it, is an illusion. The same conviction is reflected in Wittgenstein’s choice of the motto for his Philosophical Investigations, a quotation from Nestroy: “Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist”. That this motto refers to the social-historical progress of mankind and not, say, to Wittgenstein’s own progress in philosophy, becomes obvious when viewed together with the Foreword written to the Philosophical Remarks, dated 6.11.1930, where Wittgenstein states that the spirit of his work is different from that of the mainstream of European and American civilization, since the latter is characterized, as the former is not, by the idea of a constant progress. Wittgenstein’s attitude towards the liberal idea of progress is that of a conservative. This attitude is, actually, not conspicuous in the Philosophical Remarks, to which the Foreword was written subsequently; but it was already there, I believe, at the time of the Tractatus and it becomes quite manifest in Wittgenstein’s later writings.