Wittgenstein

What kind of change are we sensing or expecting? Nothing, it seems, in the nature of new ideas, new scientific discoveries, or new religions ...

The change we are speaking about is an epochal change that will be at once subtle and all-pervasive ...

This kind of change has occurred only two or three times in the course of Western civilization - at its beginning in 5th and 4th century B.C. Athens, at the beginning of the Christian world in the 4th century of this era, and in the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Philosophy, even radically changed as we will see it to be, is fundamentally important now, for its task is still "to make sense out of the world" or, as Wittgenstein put it, to help us "find our way about." When, as is happening today, the world in which we find ourselves, and which we ourselves have so largely created, begins to appear unreal, imprisoning the human spirit in arbitrariness, this is the signal that the guiding principles and ideas by which we have been living are no longer adequate and will undergo profound transformation.

We may not expect the change, which seems to be seeping from many different directions, to be forecast or presaged by any one particular philosopher or prophet. However, the thinker who is attuned to his or her own time as well as to deeper currents may pick up the seismic tremors well before others do and may express some critical formative ideas in advance of the more general historical changes. Such a thinker, in the opinion of many, is Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 - 1951) who was born in Vienna, but spent much of his time as an influential teacher of philosophy at Cambridge University, England.

Wittgenstein was a thinker of such originality that no one claimed to understand him fully during his lifetime and the attempt to comprehend his "new way of looking at things" and make it available to the mainstream continues. What we do have, and what the present writer shares with a good deal of conviction, is the sense that Wittgenstein's philosophy points to way into the next century and that it is likely to be most influential fifty or seventy years from now.

[Prof. H.L. Finch - WITTGENSTEIN : Element Books Inc, 1995, at pages 6 - 7]