Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951)
Austrian-born philosopher who spent much of his life in England.
What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stood.
At the end of reasons comes persuasion.
It is true: Man is the microcosm:
I am my world.
The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it.
When I met Wittgenstein, I saw that Schlick's warnings were fully justified. But his behavior was not caused by any arrogance. In general, he was of a sympathetic temperament and very kind; but he was hypersensitive and easily irritated. Whatever he said was always interesting and stimulating and the way in which he expressed it was often fascinating. His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his views dogmatically ... But the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment of analysis of it would be a profanation.
If a false thought is so much as expressed boldly and clearly, a great deal has already been gained.
So we do sometimes think because it has been found to pay.
At the core of all well-founded belief, lies belief that is unfounded.
People nowadays think that scientists exist to instruct them, poets, musicians, etc. to give them pleasure. The idea that these have something to teach them — that does not occur to them.
But ordinary language is all right.
Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train. He has a plan to stay in Cambridge permanently.
A man's thinking goes on within his consciousness in a seclusion in comparison with which any physical seclusion is an exhibition to public view.
One might say: art shows us the miracles of nature. It is based on the concept of the miracles of nature.
I squander untold effort making an arrangement of my thoughts that may have no value whatever.
The thought is the significant proposition. (4)
One can mistrust one's own senses, but not one's own belief.
If there were a verb meaning "to believe falsely," it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.
To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.
To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning.
Like everything metaphysical the harmony between thought and reality is to be found in the grammar of the language.
The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)
What I give is the morphology of the use of an expression. I show that it has kinds of uses of which you had not dreamed. In philosophy one feels forced to look at a concept in a certain way. What I do is suggest, or even invent, other ways of looking at it. I suggest possibilities of which you had not previously thought. You thought that there was one possibility, or only two at most. But I made you think of others. Furthermore, I made you see that it was absurd to expect the concept to conform to those narrow possibilities. Thus your mental cramp is relieved, and you are free to look around the field of use of the expression and to describe the different kinds of uses of it.