The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein Book

So what could an esoteric collection of essays about Ludwig Wittgenstein have to do with Donald Trump and modern politics?

Quite a bit, actually, and I'll answer that first before delving more into the book itself.

One of Wittgenstein's main points, elaborated in several of these essays by prominent Wittgenstein scholars, is that language consists of many subsets, which he calls "language games." These games all have different "rules" -- that is, the words actually can have different meanings depending the game. (For example, in some youth subcultures, the word "sick" means "excellent" in a particular language game; obviously, the word means something quite different when you're telling your boss you won't be coming in.)

There's also an issue of being "wrong," and what it means to say something that's incorrect, or breaks a rule. Donald Trump, as is well known, has a slippery relationship with many call "truth," but it's important to note that "truth" varies from language game to language game. For example, traditionally political speeches that refer to facts and statistics are supposed to have a direct correlation to the "truth" of those facts and statistics, and in that language game, Trump breaks the rules on a regular basis.

But consider a different language game, one that Trump has mastered, one in which feelings are more important than facts. This language game is as legitimate as the political language game (which is why Trump was elected), and it ignores political correctness and fact-checking and is often filled with stereotypical generalizations that we all make at one point or another. Those generalizations could be as harmless as "Maids never clean behind couches" to as misleading as "Crime rates would be way lower if there weren't any immigrants." It is true, however, that people talk this way, participate in this kind of language game, and that's the one that Trump uses to deliver his populist message.

Those who do not understand the rules of these wildly different language games cannot understand why Trump's support remains steady despite the cascade of what many would call "lies" that he spoken in public because they miss the sense in which saying things like "The Chinese have stolen all our jobs" rings true to many listeners.

In short, philosophy, even at its most esoteric, can sometimes illuminate the world around us, and though most of "The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein" is demanding, the majority of the essays shine a light on the nooks and crannies of our language, and how our conception of what our language really is misses important aspects of the underlying structure.

Of course, we can't really get too far in our grasp of what language really is because we swim in that sea, and we literally cannot even think without using language -- which means there is really nowhere outside language we can stand in order to look at it objectively.

But better understanding is something to strive for, as the Trump example illustrates, and this book not only helped me understand Wittgenstein's philosophy and way of thinking more clearly, it also did the same for my understanding of the world around me.