Wittgenstein's early existentialism

When Wittgenstein said early on in his career that 'The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 6.43) he was following his doctrine of 'hard' solipsism to its logical extreme. What he meant, in his inimitable way, was that the life-circumstances of a person - a happy man, say - is entirely informed by personal, privative experience, and that when an unhappy person seeks to solve his or her problems, he or she thinks firstly of the external conditions that go with - or were formative to - the life of the happy person, and secondly thinks that the internal conditions of his own life refer to a ground of experience that is universal (which Kant called 'transcendental apperception') and universally translatable, i.e., the person denies or simply does not recognise the fact that solipsism - that one's thoughts and feelings are in fact one's only concrete reference point - is the actual blunt fact of consciousness. This does not imply that the person is in fact the only 'real' mind in the world, as Cartesian solipsism does, or that knowledge is impossible, as the Pyrrhonists thought.

We recognise in this that we are tied by the neck with the millstone of the experience of our own solipsism and with the frustration of failing to break out of ourselves. Whereas this sounds pessimistic, it is in fact the key to the overcoming of the Angst of existentialism, of the problem of Sisyphus. Sisyphus's problem is that he is trapped in his own consciousness, a consciousness that is shackled to the eternity of a self-defeating object. What will solve Sisyphus's problem is if he ceased to be who he is, either by transforming his identity, or in the extreme sense, by ending his life. The other alternative, the one Camus advocates, is to take to the absurdity and make it part of oneself, as one triumphs over a disability in accepting it. Of course, one may try to transform the material conditions of one's life, but that brings us back to the first point of the unhappy man above, that he projects the conditions of his failing life into a future state of affairs without accounting for the problem of his own solipsism. It is summed up in the proverb: 'When you go on holiday, you take your problems with you'.

What, then, is Wittgenstein's solution? It is one with his view of philosophy - you strive to dissolve it, not attempt to solve it as if it were a problem of mathematics or science. Its dissolution comes from within consciousness and according to the conditions of its existence, but not as a formula, or even as a piece of poetry. It is really rather a feeling, completely pre-linguistic and pre-cognitive. Psychoanalysis fails (and Wittgenstein talked about this at Cambridge in the 1930s - see the book Philosophical Occasions 1912-51) because it attempts to deal rationally with the life-conditions of the individual, as if a series of propositions about that person's experience could untangle the problems of a person's life and show him how best to live on. Wittgenstein tries to show that those classes of propositions dealing with the materiality of the world fail utterly to express the privacy of the mind, which is where the problem lies. Where they succeed, we are talking again about something that you and I can talk about, and what you and I can talk about can be understood, at least in some way, by others, through the mechanics of translation and linguistics.

'The solution to the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of the problem. Is not this the reason why those who have found after a long period of doubt that the sense of life became clear to them have then been unable to say what constituted that sense?... There are indeed things that cannot be put into words' (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 6.521-6.522).