Wittgenstein and the Beginnings of Adventure

The patron of the chapter is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was one of the first, and certainly the one who proposed the still valid approach, to work on the mutual relations of language and the world, understood as knowledge. His subtle analyses, referring to the classics of philosophy, led to a new understanding of knowledge as an autonomous and spread substance. Wittgenstein deconstructed the image of language as a logically coherent structure, which he initially believed, in favor of free and dynamic play. The world thus viewed revealed itself in a completely new order, which was explained by new structures such as a network, a system, or a general idea of complexity. These ideas resonated with the idea of the dynamics of language, as described by Michel Foucault, as well as John Langshaw Austin and Jacques Derrida. Complexity turned out to be a paradigmatically new way of perceiving and describing the world, liberated from a naive causal order. This way reveals the necessity of reasoning both at the level of direct insight into the world and at the level of the conditions and circumstances of this insight. Such an approach, on the one hand, shows the relativization of knowledge in relation to the research context, i.e., the potential dispersion and differentiation of knowledge, while, on the other hand, it makes knowledge an equal subject of contextual research reflection. At the same time, complex systems exhibit specific emerging effects to understand phenomena such as digital transformation.