Emerson and Wittgenstein are very different thinkers. The former came was writing in a New England circle in the mid 19th century and is - still - one of the darlings of American letters. Wittgenstein, writing almost 100 years later in Cambridge, is arguably the more "serious" philosopher, a logician and mathematician. However, the two thinkers can be compared in their revolutionary approach to the ordinary. In Emerson's essay "On Self Reliance" he argues for individuals to give more weight and importance to their own ideas: "To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men, - that is genius." Indeed, he precedes even Nietzsche with this sentiment of individual supremacy, which has …show more content…
He is not writing with the same poetic and quotable flair as Emerson, but with more of a mathematical precision and a tightly structured argument. Wittgenstein concerns himself with language as a means by which to analyse the world. Interestingly his Philosophical Investigations, written in 1953, actually finds Wittgenstein arguing against his former theories laid out in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, where he had a more reductive view of language as qualifying everything there is in the world to the extent that we cannot get outside of language. The limits of language are the limits of our world. In Philosophical Investigations he takes a theoretical U-turn. He argues that meaning in language is inextricably linked with its use; there is no a priori meaning of any word, everything depends on how individuals use and understand those words among themselves and within a community. The confusion, Wittgenstein argues, comes from individuals believing that there is logic to language, a kind of platonic idea that meaning is inherent in the language itself, when in fact we have to work in the opposite way, with the assumption that there is no inherent logic, instead individuals create meaning through use: "When we believe that we must find that order, must find the ideal, in our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are ordinarily called "propositions", "words", "signs". The proposition and the word that logic deals with are supposed to be something pure and clear-cut. And we rack our brains over the nature of the real sign.—It is perhaps the idea of the sign? or the idea at the present moment?" (Aphorism 105). Wittgenstein's ideas were revolutionary not only because he refutes his earlier stance, but also because he does away with long-held philosophical assumptions which look for an innate essence in the world (including