Fooloso4
— Sam26Tool 1 is the simplest and, I think, the most important: “Look and see.”
When a philosophical question starts to feel deep, Wittgenstein’s first move is often to stop, and look at how the words are actually used in ordinary situations ...
He isn’t saying every philosophical problem is just language in the sense that we're doing wordplay. He’s saying many problems are really problems about our concepts, and you can spot the trouble by paying close attention to how our words function in real situations.
(Culture and Value)When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there.
We find certain things about seeing puzzling, because we do not find the whole business of seeing puzzling enough.
The question now arises: Could there be human beings lacking the ability to see something as something a and what would that be like? What sort of consequences would it have? ... We will call it “aspect-blindness” - and will now consider what might be meant by this. (A conceptual investigation.)
The importance of this concept lies in the connection between the concepts of seeing an aspect and of experiencing the meaning of a word.
Two uses of the word “see”.
The one: “What do you see there?” - “I see this” (and then a description, a drawing, a copy). The other: “I see a likeness in these two faces” - let the man to whom I tell this be seeing the faces as clearly as I do myself.
What is important is the categorial difference between the two ‘objects’ of sight.
But we can also see the illustration now as one thing, now as another. - So we interpret it, and see it as we interpret it.
The concept of an aspect is related to the concept of imagination.
In other words, the concept ‘Now I see it as . . .’ is related to ‘Now I am imagining that’.
Doesn’t it take imagination to hear something as a variation on a particular theme? And yet one does perceive something in so hearing it.
[Emphasis added]A main source of our failure to understand is that we don’t have an overview of the use of our words. Our grammar is deficient in surveyability. A surveyable representation produces precisely that kind of understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate links.
The concept of a surveyable representation is of fundamental significance for us. It characterizes the way we represent things, how we look at matters. (Is this a ‘Weltanschauung’?)
(CV42)Sow a seed in my soil and it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.
The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.
… our investigation is directed not towards phenomena, but rather, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena.
Fooloso4
... what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.
(7)What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
(T 6.42-6.421)Propositions can express nothing that is higher.
It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words.
Ethics is transcendental.
(Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)
(Blue Book, p. 18).... philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does’
(CV 5).Man has to awaken to wonder . . . Science is a way of sending him to sleep again’
(CV, 24)Work on philosophy -- like work in architecture in many respects -- is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them.)
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