How Wittgenstein Can Make You Happier

The Atlantic

05-06-2025

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My preoccupation with writing about meaning, love, and happiness derives from my desire to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean. I will confess that this can be a frustrating task at times because I feel as though I can never get to the essence of these sublimities; words always feel inadequate. For a long time, I believed that at some point —maybe after writing a million more words—I would finally arrive at the ability to adequately express what it is that I'm seeking.
The philosopher Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein, who died in 1951, probably would have told me I was barking up the wrong tree. The writer and fellow philosopher Bertrand Russell called Wittgenstein's work 'perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense and dominating,' yet Wittgenstein did not leave us much of it. He published only one book of philosophy in his life, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which itself is only about 75 pages long. In it, Wittgenstein explained that language can never convey the fullest understanding of life. ' The limits of my language,' he wrote, 'mean the limits of my world.'
Wittgenstein was no doubt conscious of the irony of making this argument through language. But in so doing, he offered a path to getting beyond words and to apprehend, after all, the ineffable essence of what we seek.
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Human communication is rife with misunderstanding, as social scientists have long observed. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2011 showed that people misunderstand the intended meaning of what others say, especially among close acquaintances such as family and friends. The scholars found that those who spoke with strangers communicated more clearly than with close associates, believing—incorrectly—that the latter would understand ambiguous phrases by virtue of their intimate affiliation. So what are the odds that you'll grasp correctly the next thing your spouse tells you? Digital communication makes the situation worse because it eliminates nonverbal cues.
One explanation psychologists offer as a common cause of misunderstanding is motivated reasoning, in which our own desires and beliefs determine what we perceive to be true, rather than what someone else is telling us. For example, when your partner innocently asks what you've been up to today, you might incorrectly apprehend this as an expression of suspicion, because, in fact, you've been up to something they wouldn't approve of.
Whereas psychologists see the problem as one of unreliable narrators and inattentive listeners, Wittgenstein, as a philosopher, saw the very medium of language itself as inherently flawed. Words, he believed, were inadequate to the task of conveying subtle truths, metaphysical ideas, or any subjective experience. This was because language is nothing more than a crude model of the world—a jumble of sounds or symbols that represents the underlying reality of existence about as accurately as a map on your phone represents a forest you're walking through. The sight of tall trees, the smell of pine needles, the solitude you sought have virtually nothing to do with the squiggle on the screen that crudely marks the trail.
Wittgenstein never knew our modern technologies of communication, but he would surely see that they make his point times 10. Consider how much a text-message abbreviation and an emoji really tell you about what is in your beloved's heart. LOL, not much, right?
Wittgenstein's proposition has significant implications for happiness, because misunderstanding lowers our well-being. For example, experiments show how failing to be understood by others reduces the satisfaction that participants report in subsequent activities. Even more profound, his conclusion about the inadequacy of language suggests that we will never comprehend the true meaning of our lives by reading or talking about it.
How are we to escape this thicket of muddle and misunderstanding? To find meaning without words suggests that we need to seek a particular kind of transcendence.
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Wittgenstein's contention resembles Saint Augustine of Hippo's argument that God is what we want, but God's nature also evades human expression—in fact, merely to talk about the divine is to trivialize him. But Augustine did not think that we should therefore abandon the whole project. The trick is to see language as only the beginning of a spiritual journey, not the end. He suggested that we use just one word— Deus (Latin for 'God')—as an audible departure point into the realm of the inexpressible. 'When that sound reaches' your ears,' he wrote, 'think of a nature supreme in excellence and eternal in existence.'
This is, I believe, very close to what Wittgenstein suggested as well. I would recommend a couple of signposts to guide you on your journey beyond words.
1. Think; don't talk.
Many religious and wisdom traditions recommend meditative contemplation on a single concept. Tibetan Buddhists call it 'analytical meditation,' a practice with which the Dalai Lama starts his morning, as he told me, and to which he devotes at least an hour every day. This mode of meditation involves a focused reflection on a scriptural phrase to inspire insight into what it signifies. (The Augustinian version of this practice was, in effect, to make Deus his word to meditate upon.)
If I'm doing this, I might use the phrase 'I love my wife' as my starting point. Then I'd try to engage the right hemisphere of my brain, the region that processes meaningful associations and concepts, in contrast with the left hemisphere's logical problem-solving ability. The idea is to liberate my cognition from the limits of my vocabulary and linguistic ability—easier said than done, but it can be enough to just sit in silence with my phrase or allow my mind to roam on a forest walk.
2. Seek understanding, not answers.
The second step—which is allied with dis engaging our habitual left-brain dominance—is to stop looking for exact answers to difficult questions. The purpose of analytical meditation is not to generate a clean explanation for why I love my wife. Nor is it to compose a precise but prosaic argument for why I do so. That would be to go in the wrong direction, according to Wittgenstein and Augustine, only committing me more to the poverty of language and taking me further from the underlying truth.
As soon as one tries to verbalize an answer to explain this love—'Because she is good to me'—one has belittled the concept and literally understated its truth. Consider how even the greatest love poetry —such as these lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning: 'I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, / I shall but love thee better after death'—essentially restates the Augustinian verity that this deeply complex experience defies utterance. The goal is to gain an understanding of this love, not an answer that's like the solution to a mathematical equation.
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What would Wittgenstein have us do about our ultimate problem of meaning in life? 'Whereof one cannot speak,' he offered as the last proposition in Tractatus, 'thereof one must be silent.' By all means, talk about trivial things, he seems to be saying, but don't waste your time trying to express life's profundities, because you will only fool others and frustrate yourself; better to keep your counsel.
This injunction has generally been understood as a nihilistic statement of the impossibility of expression, and therefore of knowledge. I believe it is nothing of the sort. Being silent is the beginning of a different sort of cognition, a meditational path that does not seek straightforward answers. Allow yourself this silence, and the understanding you gain will be your ineffable reward.