I'm obviously not an expert, but I've always wanted to study up on him a little bit. It is hard to pin him down, because there is a lot of disagreement about him. His early views are different from his later views. And some people think his later views were kind of an argumentum ad absurdum and didn't reflect what he really thought. I think that might be the case. Or maybe he was just brain storming. During WWI he was actually somewhat of an evangelist. But I get the feeling he later lost his faith.
But the postmoderns picked up on his later thoughts having to do with language. What they take from him is that all of creation is just a linguistic construction. Both personally and in community we create our own reality. This gets to a really deep level for some people. Some people with more extreme views would say that the computer I'm using, the house I'm in, and the food I'm eating also only has existence as we create that existence with our words. Is there really an objective reality of an apple apart from the language I've used to talk about it. Those are extremes, and it gets kind of weird, but when it comes to morality it is easy to see how some people would say that those ideas are just linguistic creations.
I've thought about this a lot, and as with any good deception, I think there at least a hint of truth in that idea. I think all of creation is linguistically created. But we aren't the creators. "In the beginning was the WORD, and the WORD as with God, and the WORD was God."
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