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Wittgenstein

Don’t Panic! It’s the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Mathias Brochhausen envisages Wittgenstein Hitchhiking around the Galaxy.

There are probably many people who have had the following experience in recent years: When confronted with the question of the meaning of life, the number forty-two automatically and almost compulsively crosses their minds – only to be banished in favour of a long and elaborate answer containing an array of ideas taken from the jigsaw puzzle that is the philosophical and religious legacy of humankind. This short numerical answer to one of life’s perennial questions was famously proffered by Douglas Adams in his book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. However, this answer is not only a good example of humorous literature; it can also be seen as an illustration of some central thoughts in Wittgenstein’s philosophy.

In the first volume of his five volume Hitchhiker’s Guide trilogy (sic) Douglas Adams recounts the following story: In the distant past a hyper-intelligent pan-dimensional species became fed up with the interminable discussions and quarrels regarding the fundamental questions of existence, and decided to solve these problems once for all. In order to accomplish this they created a mighty supercomputer called ‘Deep Thought’, who after seven and a half million years was to present them with the answer to The Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

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