Is Wittgenstein an overestimated philosopher?

[Tractatus 4.003] Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language.
(They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.)
And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really no problems.

Biography

This biographical notice is mostly based in the book “Wittgenstein”, by Henar Lanza González, published by RBA.

Wittgenstein, born in Vienna in 1889, was not a salon theorist but held various jobs, including volunteering in World War I in the Austrian army, where he sought frontline combat to discover the limit of life and was decorated twice for his bravery. It was during this time that he wrote his first major work, making notes in several notebooks, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (a name suggested by philosopher George Edward Moore, referencing Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus).

He was not a systematic student of philosophy, as he did not consider it highly valuable for thinking better about the truly important matters of everyday life. Before fully dedicating himself to logic, he had been working in aeronautical research and wavered between dedicating himself to engineering or logic. However, Bertrand Russell, after reviewing a logic paper Wittgenstein had sent him, encouraged him to devote himself entirely to this subject. This perhaps saved him from suicide, as he often contemplated it, torn between wanting to do something great or nothing at all. However, I believe he would have been happier as an engineer or inventor, building things with tangible and visible results for himself and others to see their value, as an airplane is visible, tangible, and appreciated.

[Wittgenstein, RBA, p125] “My father was a business man, and I am a business man; I want my philosophy to be like a business, to make something, to found somehting”

After the war, he renounced a large paternal inheritance and dedicated himself to teaching primary school in a small town in Austria, Trattenbach. Just before that, after obtaining his teaching certificate and waiting for the start date, he worked as a gardener in a monastery.

As a teacher, he sought to encourage students to think for themselves; rather than providing them with answers, he guided them through questions, and encouraged learning by doing: inventing a steam engine, designing a tower, drawing moving human figures. All of this followed his principle that the task of philosophy was to help clarify thought. He also offered extracurricular classes for free, which caused problems with the locals as it took away time from children's work on farms, at a time when achieving good harvests and food security was much more uncertain than it is today, post-biotechnological revolution and with more crystallized capital.

In another teaching position, he created a dictionary for primary schools, well-received for its scarce features: medium size (neither large and expensive nor small and cheap but less useful) and focusing on the German dialect of Austria.

Despite problems with his methodology and strange personality, a mysterious event occurred that ultimately led him to resign from teaching: he was taken to court for hitting a student on the head, causing him to faint; Wittgenstein was acquitted and claimed he had not hit the student. What could the truth be? Hitting students would seem to go against his teaching methodology; however, given his high tendency towards negative feelings and his social interaction problems, it wouldn't be surprising if some feeling of frustration led to a lapse of violence that he didn't intend to be serious.

He then attempted to enter a monastery but was rejected; he returned to work as a gardener for the Hospitaller monks. During this period, his mother died, after which Wittgenstein began participating in Christmas celebrations with the rest of the family again.

He also participated, slightly modifying designs from an architect friend, in the construction of his sister's house.

He became a professor of philosophy at Cambridge in 1939, which facilitated his later acquisition of British nationality. During almost a year of World War II, he distinguished himself as a pharmaceutical technician, helping doctors think better and inventing a device to better measure pulse based on breathing: once again, showing that he might have been better off working as an engineer or inventor.

Ironically, Wittgenstein's type of influence led to his influence in academic production during this period being almost unnoticed because his intellectual influence also caused his students to drift away from traditional teaching. Additionally, his fragmentary character, which could jump between various topics, contributed to the lack of something specific or systematic. The exception was Maurice O. Drury, who published a collection of philosophical and psychological essays: The Danger of Words.

He didn't come to enjoy the atmosphere of Cambridge University, or academia in general, and left teaching in 1947. He continued to write things that would not be published in his lifetime, and first went to Ireland, then to the United States, and then returned to Vienna to say goodbye internally to his sister, as he didn't tell her he would soon die from cancer. He finally died in England in 1951.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations

[Tractatus 4.112] The object of philosophy is the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a theory but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. The result of philosophy is not a number of “philosophical propositions”, but to make propositions clear. Philosophy should make clear and delimit sharply the thoughts which otherwise are, as it were, opaque and blurred.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein was published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922. It is short (around 20,000 words) but not a light read due to its themes and its method of exposition in short sentences branching into sub-branches: it has seven main propositions branching into explanatory or expansive propositions, most of which further branch out to expand on these latter ones.

It addresses the topics of epistemology, ontology, logic, aesthetics, and ethics, based on the theory of meaning as representation, or the pictorial theory of meaning: that language consists of propositions representing the world.

One difficulty of this work is that Wittgenstein engages in dialogue with the works of Bertrand Russell and Alfred Whitehead, and with that of Gottlob Frege, especially in Chapter 5, making things difficult for those who are not familiar with the works of these eminent mathematicians and logicians who sought to demonstrate that the foundation of mathematics was in logic, contrary to Kant, who thought that both disciplines were separate.

The Tractatus was enthusiastically embraced by positivist scientists, especially those at the center of this movement, the Vienna Circle, in reviews, lectures, and seminars, and works that started from its premises to solve the problems it left open; they saw it as a great work against the metaphysics they despised and for its logical analysis of language, and they held Wittgenstein in high esteem, considering him a positivist peer before meeting him.

However, when some members of the Vienna Circle met him in person and had meetings with him, they saw that in personality and interests Wittgenstein was more like the subject of the latter propositions of the Tractatus: from proposition 6.41 onwards, Wittgenstein mostly abandons the questions of deep logic he had been developing and moves on to talk about "the mystical": life, immortality, time, and other topics that he qualifies as those about which nothing meaningful can be said and therefore one must be kept silent, yet he considered these topics precisely as the most important, contrary to the Vienna Circle. And indeed, the path of the Tractatus leads in the penultimate proposition to his revelation that the subject who has come this far must now "throw away the ladder" by which he has climbed.

Additionally, Wittgenstein would soon begin to change his thinking after the publication of the Tractatus, which would ultimately lead to his posthumous book Philosophical Investigations.

The Philosophical Investigations is also written in the form of sentences, although not in branches or with sub-sentences within sub-sentences like matryoshka dolls. While in the Tractatus Wittgenstein focused on the language of logic, here he addresses all languages, but not as a treatise like Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, compiled by the linguist's students, but as an exposition of observations and examples about linguistic uses, becoming repetitive and even heavier than in the already weighty Tractatus.

I gave up reading all the sentences because I read up to 105 and then asked ChatGTP which were the most important ones from the Investigations; it still gave me too large a number for me to judge that it was worth the opportunity cost of spending time reading so many, but I did read a few of those: 1-105; 200-208; 239-264 are all the sentences I read, in addition to skimming through several more.

[Investigations] 39 Philosophical problems arise when language goes on holiday

What is not a holiday at all is reading that book, but anyway, the most important concept here is that of language games. In the Tractatus, the meaning of propositions was sought by breaking them down as much as possible to capture the correspondence of propositions with the world; truth or meaning depends on the correspondence with the world of what is said. Here it is shown how truth or meaning depends on the context in which words are used, on what language game they are inscribed in at a given moment of use, and this does not refer to only different languages but to everything that can be done with one: giving orders, thanking, telling a joke, describing something, etc. Language is a toolbox.

[Investigations] 43. "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word 'meaning', though not for all, this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.And the meaning of a name is sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer."

Where, in his first work, "the limits of my language mean the limits of my world" had a solipsistic character, now each language implies or is a form of cultural and social life, and rejects the idea of a private language (something only oneself speaks or understands). In the Tractatus, nonsense arises from going beyond the limits of the logical world; in the Investigations, nonsense arises from going beyond a specific language game or trying to say things with it that the language game does not have the capacity to say.

Conclusions

Why has Wittgenstein had such an impact? Because he addresses the topics that mattered most to important intellectuals of his time and due to the style of writing he used, rather than for his semantic content. His style of sentences, combined with the highly abstract themes he addresses, favors multiple interpretations and discussions; and also because that same sententious style, combined with Wittgenstein's bringing things to speak about what cannot be spoken about, to the mystical or quasi-mystical, has a great capacity to provoke in the reader the sensation that there is something very profound but difficult to decipher submerged among the sentences or in a correct interpretation of them.

So, in my opinion, the main thing about Wittgenstein was having created a couple of works that, like religious texts, lend themselves to multiple interpretations and discussions. His lack of clarity, a demerit for philosophy, and I mean being able to be clear even when discussing complex topics, has been evolutionarily good for the impact and survival of the works over so many that are quickly forgotten; also, he also has impactful sentences which are very good for being cited.
However, I do not find particularly valuable the semantic content of his works because what is valuable in them can be found written with more depth, detail, and clarity in other texts and authors, so I do not recommend reading his works. If it is to know about them specifically, surely a summary from books on the history of philosophy will suffice, although I do recommend RBA's book on Wittgenstein, which has this summary of his ideas mixed with his interesting biography.

[Tractatus, 6.53] The right method of philosophy would be this. To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy: and then always, when someone else wished to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had given no meaning to certain signs in his propositions. This method would be unsatisfying to the other—he would not have the feeling that we were teaching him philosophy—but it would be the only strictly correct method.