World Cup Wishes

From: ‘Metamorphoses: Great Minds who Changed their Mind’, an unfinished philosophy thesis by Yuval Freed

What caused Wittgenstein, who asserted that words have value only if they represent reality, suddenly to say years later: I made a mistake, concrete reality is not at all relevant, the meaning of words derives entirely from the ‘game of a specific language’ in which they take part, and therefore, contrary to my earlier claim, it is not important to ask to what extent words fit the world, but: what do people do with words?

Was it, as is customarily believed, a slow, gradual metamorphosis that led to this sharp shift in Wittgenstein’s thought? Or was there a particular moment in which he clutched his forehead and said: Grösser Gutt!? Did this change of mind occur while he was building his sister’s house in Vienna, or did it happen during one of the lessons he gave as a not-very-popular school teacher in an Austrian village? Or perhaps the insight came to him while he was watching one of the ballgames he so loved to use as metaphors in elucidating his ideas? I picture him sitting in the Centre Court at Wimbledon in 1934, watching that year’s championship game between Fred Perry and Jack Crawford. The spectators’ heads move from side to side, following the white ball from side to side, from side to side. When suddenly one head stops moving: Wittgenstein realises that he has made a mistake.

And I am curious to know: was the word ‘mistake’ projected onto the screen of his mind before he broke into a sweat of panic, or did he first break into a sweat of panic and only then did the word ‘mistake’ appear?

And how much courage does it take for a person to deny his own ideas? (Especially those that have become public. And have admirers. And earned Wittgenstein the respect of scholarly philosophers all across the continent.)

How much courage, or despair, or honesty with oneself that is brutal to the point of despair, does it take for a person to toss away all of that? And start from the beginning?