Posted by autrus on November 04, 1999 at 12:15:43 PM EST:
In Reply to: Re: "Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there. " posted by Autre on November 04, 1999 at 12:13:43 PM EST:
: In his view a philosophical problem is not something for which a solution must be sought: no theorem is to be proved nor any hypothesis tested. Instead, the problem is a confusion, an entanglement of one's own thoughts. "Why is philosophy so complicated?" he wrote. "It ought to be entirely simple.--Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking that we have, in a senseless way, put there. To do this it must make movements that are just as complicated as these knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its method cannot be if it is to succeed. The complexity of philosophy is not a complexity of its subject matter, but of our knotted understanding." The result of philosophical thinking of the right kind is not a truth discovered but a confusion dissolved. In all of his conceptual studies, Wittgenstein was searching for das erlösende Wort, the word that unties one's knotted understanding.