David Peat

84 From Certainty to Uncertaintyor up the chimney. It is only when he turns around that he realizes thatthe door has been open all the time.In 1947 Wittgenstein resigned his chair at Cambridge, his onlysource of income, to spend his remaining years at a guesthouse nearDublin and at a cottage in Galway. It was only the need for medicaltreatment for cancer that caused him to return to England, where hedied in 1951.Wittgenstein never published any major works after his return toCambridge; neither did he build a great philosophical structure orcome to any grand conclusions that could be taught in a course onphilosophy. His approach has been called a psychotherapy of philosophy,for it offers a way to unravel philosophical confusions, or asWittgenstein put it, a way to let the fly out of the bottle. His philosophicalcontributions, following the Tractatus, were gleaned from thenotes taken from his lectures and dictations or from notebooks he kept.It was only after his death in 1951 that these various works were collectedand published to form a remarkable second phase of work.Bohr and LanguageIn many ways Niels Bohr complements Wittgenstein, particularly withhis remark that we are suspended in language in such a way that we donot know which way is up and which is down. Wittgenstein, in hisearly years, argued that philosophy can only speak clearly about whatis “in” the world. It should avoid making statements that are “about”the world, such as its meaning, or the nature of life and death. Bohr, forhis part, restricted the limits of this “world.” We human beings are creaturesof a certain size and with lives of a particular duration and so ourlanguage evolved in such a way that it reflects these conditions. We areso deeply embedded within language that we may not even recognizethat we are using concepts about space, time, and causality that belongto our large-scale world. This is a world in which quantum featureshave already been averaged out. It is when we try to talk about thequantum world, and apply our models and ideas, that confusion arises,for our very tools of communication are inappropriate to such a world.