Exasperating, but worth it.The syntax of thehas a jaggedly Asperger’s feel to it. Too often Wittgenstein sounds like a malfunctioning android jabbering its core protocols to itself, pacing in frantic circles, waving its arms in a vexed “Philosophy is the sickness and I’m the cure” manner. The loathsome blend of pedantry and vagueness throughout Part 1 -- hectoring in tone, nebulous in definition -- can be maddening. (As a communicator, Wittgenstein often ranks with Kant or Heidegger, pitiless kraut magi of galling opacity. Your cognitive muscles will feel the burn.) Part 2 is rather less punishing, with enticing stimulants on nearly every page, while large swaths of Part 1 are a morale-stunting crawl through banks of fog. What’s the deal?Keep in mind thatis a posthumous medley of notes and fragments that never benefitted from a final, rigorous copyedit. I’ve also been told that the recent 2009 translation by Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte is less stodgy and peeving than the classic Anscombe version. An editor might be tempted to abridge Part 1 to ashowcase for non-academics, but the moments of profundity strewn throughout that portion (75% of the book) probably require the groundwork of the more wearying fragments to shore up Wittgenstein’s vision.So what’s the payoff? Well, a panoptic voyage into speech and semantics that’s both rousing, emancipatory, and at times, painfully obvious. The latter as we’ve washed ashore in a (post)philosophical age that takes so much of Wittgenstein for granted, but also because his expository style can read like an amnesiac head-trauma patient attempting to reconstruct language-use from scratch, poking and prodding at kindergarten-level grammar to explore how situational semantics weaves and bends through our intricately embodied, moment-to-moment actualities -- all tempered by an uneasy nostalgia for positivist puzzles boxed in the attic, radiant antiques that gave so much (faux) luster to our mental lives.Wittgenstein wants us to detox, to scrape out the arterial plaque of “false problems.” Fundamental confusions about language-use, he fears, have staggered us into an ersatz-world of epistemic mazes and circular obstacle-courses, a bad Philip K. Dick novel of cloying simulacra.aims to unjack us from this Matrix, wrench us back down into our bodies, a homecoming to and abashed rediscovery of the everyday. (Though Darwin is never mentioned in, Wittgenstein’s corrosive presence in the philosophical canon is comparable to evolutionary models preempting theological sleight-of-hand. Post-theist armchair philosophy, in Wittgenstein’s eyes, is still beholden to the system-erecting wankfest of priestly theorizing. To reiterate a familiar story, we’ve displaced ancient Platonic illusions into the matrices of “rationalist” projects which refuse to accept that our universe is non-linguistic, and so can never be mirrored or simulated by our anthropic, earthbound syntax. Our lives are short and our knowledge is crimped and narrow. It’s best we have the humility to concede our limits, pending some dubious, self-immolating “transhumanist” upgrade.) As with Kant, wisdom often means knowing what wedo.“426. A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the picture, seems like something muddied. Here again we get the same thing as in set theory: the form of expression we use seems to have been designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness. For us, of course, these forms of expression are like pontificals which we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the effective power that would give these vestments meaning and purpose. In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.” (pg. 108, Blackwell 2001)To prime yourself, download the two-partpodcast “Wittgenstein on Language”:Episode #55 (1:53:07)Episode #56 (1:53:01)The roundtable discussion throughout is very good. My only niggle pertains to one of the participants bungling the renowned Piero Sraffa anecdote, mistakenly attributing it to G.E. Moore. (The fact that the remaining scholars claim never to have heard of it is equally strange. It’s at least as famous as the Karl Popper fireplace poker episode – Wittgenstein even thanks Sraffa in his Preface. Oh well.)PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS (translated by G.E.M. Anscombe)A+ for substantive vision and historical importance, C- for expository clarity.Special bonus track: Was Wittgenstein Right? by Paul Horwich (NYU), The Stone,Opinionator blog, 3/3/13.