The Evolution of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy Before Language Games

Before Ludwig Wittgenstein introduced the idea of language games – one of the most influential concepts in 20th-century philosophy – his thinking went through a dramatic earlier phase that helped reshape the entire direction of Western philosophy. To understand where Wittgenstein ended up, you need to understand where he and his contemporaries started: with a deep, urgent question about language, meaning, and how words connect to the world. This question didn’t appear out of nowhere. It was the product of a long philosophical buildup, driven by thinkers from Brentano to Russell, and it culminated in Wittgenstein’s early masterwork, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Philosophy turns toward language 🔗

For much of Western intellectual history, philosophy concerned itself with questions about reality, God, mind, and ethics – with language treated as little more than a transparent vehicle for conveying ideas. That changed dramatically in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The linguistic turn – a major shift in Western philosophy – repositioned language itself as the central object of philosophical inquiry, asking not just “what is reality?” but “how does language relate to reality, and what can it meaningfully say?”

This transformation didn’t happen suddenly. It grew out of a cluster of philosophical problems about meaning, reference, and mental content, problems that several key thinkers were grappling with simultaneously. The central figures in this story include Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, G.E. Moore, and Bertrand Russell – and they collectively created the intellectual conditions that made Wittgenstein’s early philosophy possible.

Brentano and the problem of intentionality 🔗

The story begins with Franz Brentano (1838-1917), whose work on the philosophy of mind set the stage for nearly everything that followed. Brentano revived the medieval concept of intentionality – the idea that mental states are always “about” something, that every thought is directed toward an object. This meant that meaning wasn’t just a property of words; it was bound up with the directedness of the mind itself.

The Brentano school pursued a unique research programme in which the analysis of meaning was treated as inseparable from philosophical inquiries into what goes on in the mind and what there is in the world. This fusion of psychology, ontology, and language would echo through the work of his students and, indirectly, through Wittgenstein’s early philosophy.

Brentano’s school included Edmund Husserl and Alexius Meinong, both of whom pushed this tradition in distinct and philosophically significant directions.

Meinong’s objects and the puzzle of reference 🔗

Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) tackled a problem that had long unsettled philosophers of language: what happens when we speak meaningfully about things that don’t exist? If you say “the golden mountain is tall,” you seem to be talking about something – but there is no golden mountain. If meaning depends on reference, how does this sentence mean anything at all?

Meinong suggested that such expressions denote entities that “subsist,” but do not exist, granting them a sort of reality outside the actual universe. This was a controversial move – most philosophers found it deeply problematic – but it forced a crucial conversation about the relationship between language, thought, and the objects we refer to. The debate Meinong triggered made it clear that the philosophy of meaning couldn’t be separated from careful analysis of language itself.

Husserl and the phenomenology of meaning 🔗

Edmund Husserl (1858-1938) approached the problem from another angle. The philosophical tradition that began with Brentano reached its high-point in Husserl’s Logical Investigations, where Husserl developed a detailed account of how meaning is constituted in conscious experience. His concept of intentionality was more refined than Brentano’s, and he distinguished carefully between the act of meaning something and the object meant.

Husserl’s phenomenology – the systematic study of structures of experience – placed meaning at the center of philosophical analysis. Though Wittgenstein would ultimately move away from phenomenology, Husserl’s insistence that meaning is tied to how we experience and engage with the world left a lasting mark on the broader tradition Wittgenstein was working within.

Moore and Russell: the revolt against idealism 🔗

In Britain, the philosophical situation was different but equally urgent. By the late 19th century, British philosophy was dominated by absolute idealism – the Hegelian-influenced view that reality is fundamentally mental. The seeds of modern analytic philosophy were sown when Russell and Moore broke with idealism at the turn of the 20th century.

G.E. Moore (1873-1958) was the first to rebel. His insistence on common sense and on the precise analysis of ordinary language introduced a new philosophical method. With Moore, philosophy seemed to be recast as the practice of linguistic analysis applied to isolated issues – a move that was eventually recognized not just as a new school of thought, but as a revolution in philosophy itself. Moore argued that many philosophical confusions arose from losing sight of the natural meanings of words, and that rigorous attention to language was the cure.

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) carried this further with the tools of formal logic. His famous paper “On Denoting” (1905) offered a new way to analyze expressions like “the present King of France” – phrases that seem to refer to something but don’t. Russell’s work kick-started analytical philosophy in the English-speaking world, providing a rigorous method for dissolving philosophical puzzles through logical analysis of language. By 1910, both Moore and Russell had abandoned propositional realism – Moore in favor of a realistic philosophy of common sense, Russell in favor of a view he would later develop with Wittgenstein: logical atomism.

Wittgenstein enters the scene 🔗

It was into this charged intellectual environment that Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) arrived. He began his studies in aeronautical engineering at Manchester University, where his interest in the foundations of mathematics led him to Gottlob Frege. On Frege’s advice, in 1911 he went to Cambridge to study under Bertrand Russell, working on the foundations of logic and the nature of philosophy under Russell and Moore’s direction.

Russell quickly recognized Wittgenstein’s extraordinary ability. Less than a year later, after Russell declared he had nothing left to teach him, Wittgenstein left Cambridge to work alone in a wooden hut near a fjord in Norway, where he continued contemplating the underlying logical structure of language. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Wittgenstein enlisted in the Austrian army, and it was during the war – as an active soldier and later as a prisoner of war – that he worked on drafts of what would become his defining early work.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the picture theory 🔗

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in German in 1921 and in English in 1922 with an introduction by Russell, is one of the most ambitious philosophical works of the 20th century. It attempts nothing less than a complete account of the relationship between language and the world.

At its core is what became known as the picture theory of meaning. Wittgenstein argued that a meaningful proposition “pictured” a state of affairs or atomic fact. The idea was that language and reality share a common logical structure: just as a painting represents a scene by mirroring its spatial arrangement, a proposition represents reality by mirroring its logical form. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein proposed that propositions are pictures of reality, representing states of affairs by sharing a logical form with what they depict.

This meant that a sentence is meaningful if and only if it can be mapped onto a possible state of affairs in the world. The picture theory states that statements are meaningful if, and only if, they can be defined or pictured in the real world. Anything else – metaphysical speculation, ethical assertions, claims about the nature of logic itself – falls outside the boundary of what can be meaningfully said.

What can be said and what can only be shown 🔗

This leads to one of the Tractatus‘s most striking distinctions: the difference between saying and showing. In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein makes a distinction between what can be said – propositions of natural science – and what can only be shown, namely the logical form of reality. Things like ethics, aesthetics, and the mystical cannot be captured in propositional language; they can only be shown through experience and action.

The philosophy of language in the Tractatus attempts to demonstrate precisely what the limits of language are – to delineate what can and cannot be sensically said. Among the sensibly sayable are the propositions of natural science; to the nonsensical or unsayable belong the traditional subjects of philosophy – ethics and metaphysics.

The self-undermining paradox 🔗

Here the Tractatus arrives at a remarkable and deliberate paradox. If the propositions of the Tractatus are nonsensical, then they surely cannot put forward the picture theory of meaning, or any other theory. Wittgenstein was aware of this. He famously characterized the paradox by depicting the Tractatus as a ladder that readers can climb to “see the world rightly” but must throw away once they have reached the top. The final proposition of the book – perhaps the most quoted line in analytic philosophy – states that whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

This wasn’t a failure or an oversight. It was Wittgenstein’s way of showing that the very attempt to theorize about language from the outside runs into incoherence, and that philosophy’s real task is the clarification of thought, not the production of doctrines.

Influence on logical atomism and beyond 🔗

The Tractatus had immediate and far-reaching impact. Even before its publication, Wittgenstein’s work had influenced Russell’s own views on language, logic, and reality, which Russell summarized in a series of papers entitled “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism” (1918-19). The Vienna Circle of logical positivists also drew heavily from the Tractatus, particularly its idea that philosophy is an activity aimed at clarification rather than the discovery of facts.

Wittgenstein is generally considered to have changed his thinking considerably over his philosophical career. His early work culminated in the Tractatus with its picture theory, and then – after a period of withdrawal from philosophy – he returned to Cambridge and began to see serious problems with everything he had built. Wittgenstein’s later investigations, laid out in the Philosophical Investigations, refuted and replaced his earlier picture-based theory with a use theory of meaning. That shift – from picturing to using, from structure to practice – is what eventually gave rise to the concept of language games.

Why this early philosophy matters 🔗

Understanding Wittgenstein’s early philosophy is not just historically useful – it is philosophically essential. The picture theory represents a serious, rigorous attempt to solve the problem of meaning by anchoring language firmly to the world. Its failure – or rather, its self-acknowledged limits – is what pushed Wittgenstein to abandon the idea that language has one fundamental essence, and to develop instead the radically different view that meaning is rooted in use, context, and community practice.

The contributions of Brentano, Meinong, Husserl, Moore, and Russell were not simply background noise. They were the problems Wittgenstein was responding to: the young Wittgenstein took on the framework, ideas and assumptions of Frege and Russell in his philosophical deliberations while also being critical of them. Each of these thinkers helped narrow the philosophical focus onto language, meaning, and reference – and together they created the conditions for the Tractatus, which in turn created the conditions for Wittgenstein’s later and even more influential work.

What do you think? If language can only meaningfully describe facts about the world, does that mean all ethical and aesthetic statements are simply beyond rational discussion – or does it suggest that philosophy needs a richer account of meaning than logical form alone can provide? And if the Tractatus is, by its own logic, ultimately nonsensical, can a philosophical work still illuminate something important even if it cannot coherently state it?

References

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn
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4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_philosophy
5. https://iep.utm.edu/lang-phi/
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7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/analytic-philosophy/History-of-analytic-philosophy
8. https://egyankosh.ac.in/bitstream/123456789/38442/1/Unit-2.pdf
9. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus
10. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_theory_of_language
11. https://philarchive.org/archive/KARTPO-42
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