[the first part is here]

At first he tried to do this by showing them that there is a perfect match between our language and our world. That is, every time we say something meaningful, we say something which is either true or false about the world. But philosophical problems are not about anything in this world, so they cannot even be expressed, let alone answered, in meaningful language.

Why did he say that philosophical problems are not about this world? This is a good question to start with. Well, by ‘this world’ he perhaps meant something like our physical world, or what we feel, or what science speaks of. The world, Wittgenstein believed, is what happens arround us.

From the scientific point of view, all that happens is connected with previous and future happenings by causal chains. In other words, any event has a cause and will, in its turn, cause some effects.

But when philosophers want to understand something, they want to go beyond the causal connections between things. I can think of hot ice, even if it is against the natural laws. Perhaps there will never exist a piece of hot ice, but I can still think of it.

I can picture it quite vividly in my mind. Were I a philosopher – one who is weird enough to ask philosophical questions about ice, I must add – I could ask: “What is the essence of ice?”. In other words: “What is ice, apart from what it is in our universe, given our physical laws and all?”

But this is to ask: “What are the characteristics of ice if it is not cold, slippery, translucent, made of frozen water and perhaps not even solid?” But then, this is like asking: “Who am I if I am not myself?”, which is pure nonsense.

Are you still with me?

Then you might be saying to yourself: “‘Got it. What this guy tried to say was that we should give up asking philosophical questions and busy ourselves with something serious like doing science or maybe making money, getting married, having a family and so on.”

This would be a big misunderstanding. First, what I’ve just said had nothing to do with making money, getting married or having a family. Where did you get it from? Secondly, Wittgenstein wasn’t much impressed by the scientific achievements of the last century or by science itself, although he had some serious scientific training.

Instead, he thought that what really mattered was art, religion, music, ethics, poetry, literature and perhaps some other stuff which I don’t remember right now.

He was deeply and sincerely troubled by moral and religious problems – problems concerning what we are and who we are, how can we better relate to each other and to God, what is good and what is bad, what is the essence of art and so forth.

But an event isn’t good or bad in itself. In the same vein, God is not an object from the world around us and the same is
true for each one of us. As subjects or persons we are not part of the world we witness. Everything I sense is a sensation
of mine, but not myself.

To put it briefly, everything which Wittgenstein took to be important is not a part of the sensible world which surrounds us. We could, of course, imagine a world which is not sensible and lies behind this one. But this won’t solve our problems.

We are not objects, no matter how special, hidden, insensible and so on. And it is the same with God, assuming that He is a person. To conclude, all that is important is not a part of any sort of world. But our whole language is nothing else but the mirror of the world.

Not only of this world, but of any world, of course, no matter how strange or how different from ours, whether sensible or not. It should be clear by now why did Wittgenstein claim that all the important matters cannot be captured by our talk.

But what are we left to do, in this case?