A lot of unhappiness comes about in this world, because we can't let other people know what we mean clearly enough. One of the philosophers who can help us with our communication problems is Ludwig Wittgenstein.
He was a recluse. He had a stutter, paused for ages in the middle of his sentences
and had a habit of storming out if he didn't like what people were saying. It was weirdly the ideal background for someone intent on studying how easily communication between people goes wrong.
Ludwig Wittgenstein was born Vienna in 1889. The youngest child of a wealthy, highly cultured but domineering steel magnate.
Three of Ludwig's four brothers took their own lives, and Ludwig himself was frequently troubled by suicidal thoughts. When he was young, he was interested in engineering.
After studying at Cambridge, his father died and he inherited a lot of money. He gave it all away, mainly to his already very rich relatives and went to live in spartan solitude in Norway.
Then he started writing a book published in 1921 called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was a short, beautiful and baffling work.
The big question that Wittgenstein asks in it is How do human beings manage to communicate ideas to one another? And his answer, which felt revolutionary,
is that language works by triggering within us pictures of how things are in the world. Wittgenstein thought of this while reading a newspaper article about a Paris court case in which,
in order to explain with greater efficacy, the details of an accident that had taken place a road junction, the court had arranged for the accident to be reproduced visually using model cars and pedestrians.
