Publisher's Synopsis
Wittgenstein said, "Don't try and shit higher than your arse." He was the expert in the subject. Wittgenstein pulled off the greatest hoax in philosophical history. By sheer force of personality, he managed to get all the philosopher dweebs to swallow his brilliantly contrived joke to expose the idiocy and gullibility of modern philosophers. Wittgenstein wrote, "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical... The right method of philosophy would be this: To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. the propositions of natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy..." Being the comedic genius he was - the finest humorist of his era - Wittgenstein stayed in character as an idiot savant all his adult life and never once revealed his ingenious joke to his credulous target audience.They say that Stanislavsky regarded Wittgenstein as the consummate actor and based his "method" on how brilliantly Wittgenstein, a member of the super-rich elite, pulled off his lifelong act as a shambling, incoherent fan of cowboy movies and musicals, pretending to be a serious, world-historic philosopher, and completely fooling British toffs such as Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell.In the movie "Being There", the character of "Chance", played by Peter Sellers, was inspired by Wittgenstein.Wittgenstein's biggest fan was Andy Kaufman, the notorious prankster and comedian who tried never to tell a joke - as his homage to the great Austrian straight man. Kaufman wanted to pull off a ruse as big as Wittgenstein's, resulting in many people believing Kaufman faked his own death as his grandest hoax. Like Wittgenstein, Kaufman was eager to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences, leaving them in a state of bafflement and disorientation. One rumor was that Kaufmann styled his persona as the obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton on Wittgenstein. At one point, Kaufmann considered basing the villain he played in his professional wrestling act on Wittgenstein so that he could insult his audience in German, using cryptic Wittgensteinian utterances. At the last moment, he chose to wrestle women and posture as the "Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World". His shows were especially appealing to philosophers. It would be easy to imagine Wittgenstein writing a treatise on it, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Postmodern Wrestling in the light of Hyperreal Language Games."Actually, we're only joking. Sadly, Wittgenstein wasn't. His Tractatus is one of the most pernicious texts in modern philosophy. It amounts to an attempt to assassinate philosophy. All serious philosophers - philosophers in the grand tradition - need to arm themselves against the irrationalism preached by modern philosophy. It's time to see through the con. It's time for the rebirth of grand philosophy. This time, it will be centered on the ontology of mathematics, the language of reality. The reign of manmade language - which does nothing but falsify reality - is over.The time for the second and final Enlightenment has come: the Age of Mathematical Rationalism.
