[asta e ultimul post din seria asta, fiindca m-am plictisit sa scriu 🙂 celelalte posturi sunt aici, aici, aici si aici]

According to Wittgenstein, there is not an essential difference between using the language and doing other activities. In fact, linguistic activities and extra-linguistic ones are often intertwined.

So we can no longer learn to avoid philosophical nonsense (Wittgenstein was still holding that it’s bad to rise philosophical questions) by looking at a general and abstract picture showing the perfect relation between our language and the world.

Things are a little bit more difficult now. Philosophical questions are meaningless, Wittgenstein would say, not because they are not about the world, but because they appear due to a wrong usage of our language. It is not as if we were using the screwdriver instead of the hammer, but as if we were fiddling with the tools without having anything specific in mind.

Aimlessly, as it were. Indeed, what is a philosopher aiming at? Is he trying to express his feelings, or a certain attitude about this or that? In this case, art or literature will do better. Is he trying to achieve some practical goal? Then he could use scientific generalisations and common sense observations. They will certainly help him deal with things.

But really, there is no philosophy involved in achieving practical purposes. We could pretend that it is, of course, but it would be a pretension and nothing else.

But how does Wittgenstein think he could show the other philosophers the way out of their tormented striving for nonsense? Many of his later writings contain nothing else than (sometimes boring) descriptions of every day situations and dialogues.

Sometimes some strange situations are imagined as well. Roughly speaking, he is just trying to remind his fellows philosophers how we use the language in every day situations and how odd their formulations sound in comparison with these usual situations.

On the other hand, he is trying to show them that other uses of the same words which bothered them could be imagined. It is not as if every word or phrase has a certain essence, and the philosopher could grasp it once and for all.

In a way, this is what he himself thought and spoke of in his earlier writings. Let’s look at an example. We are used to speak of time running too fast or too slow, of the time left until the beginning of the race and so on. There is nothing strange with asking what time is it.

The problems arise when we change the order of the words and, instead of asking what time is it, we ask: ‘what is time?’ Or better: ‘Time!… What is it?’ This makes no sense.

Think of any similar case – asking: ‘what are you here?’ instead of: ‘why are you here?’ Or: ‘what is therefore referring to?’ (my favourite example is this: a very young child is told that: ‘Peter, your older brother, is going to school. Therefore is studying.’ he takes the two sentences to be somehow similar in structure and says: ‘I know Peter, but who this Therefore is?’)

Now, let’s accept, for the sake of the argument, that the person who asks that strange question about time just wishes to grasp the meaning of the word ‘time’, say, to give its definition. She might say: ‘Even if I know how to use the word ‘time’ in everyday conversation, it is important for me to have a clear concept of time, an accurate definition etc.’

Wittgenstein questions even the assumptions which lie behind this sort of discourse. When we think of a clear concept of time, we are guided by a scientific ideal. Generality, clarity, rigour and other similar words come to our mind.

Science extends our daily use of words to some new use, which is somehow related with the initial one. It is as if an old city grows into a new one by the addition of new quarters. The streets of the old city are tortuous, unequally shaped, while the streets of the new quarters are symmetrical, the buildings are all constructed in accordance with certain principles etc.

Each new quarter complements an old one. There is nothing wrong with a concept of time explained within some scientific theory. If the theory is successful we might even be able to improve our lives in respects we will certainly describe by using expressions like ‘time’, ‘soon’, ‘later’, ‘future’, ‘past’ etc.

The philosopher, by contrast, just wants to reform our ordinary talk about time. This can be done, he says, by grasping the ‘essence of time’. It is as if he wants to replace the streets of the old city with completely new streets and quarters. The old city will be replaced, in this analogy, with an ideal one.

It is obvious that such a thing cannot be done. So, our usual concepts cannot be grasped better by such philosophical attempts, says Wittgenstein.