Ludwig Wittgenstein: Doing

Ludwig Wittgenstein was Austrian-British philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: 456   quotes 284   likes

“Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

6.4311
Der Tod ist kein Ereignis des Lebens. Den Tod erlebt man nicht. Wenn man unter Ewigkeit nicht unendliche Zeitdauer, sondern Unzeitlichkeit versteht, dann lebt der ewig, der in der Gegenwart lebt. Unser Leben ist ebenso endlos, wie unser Gesichtsfeld grenzenlos ist.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Variant: Death is not an event of life. Death is not lived through.
If by eternity is understood not endless temporal duration but timelessness, then he lives eternally who lives in the present.
Our life is endless in the way that our visual field is without limit.

Life , Death , Way

“94. I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

World , Falseness

“What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (11 June 1916), p. 72e and 73e
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916
Context: What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.
The meaning of life, i. e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.
To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

Life , God , World

“If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

5.5571
Original German: Wenn ich die Elementarsätze nicht a priori angeben kann, dann muss es zu offenbarem Unsinn führen, sie angeben zu wollen.
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)

“Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 5e
Context: Man has to awaken to wonder — and so perhaps do peoples. Science is a way of sending him to sleep again.

People

“If people did not sometimes do silly things, nothing intelligent would ever get done.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Variant: If people never did silly things nothing intelligent would ever get done.
Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

People , Intelligence

“467. I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell them: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

Source: On Certainty (1969)

Tree

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (13 October 1914), also in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (§ 5.47)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

“If I have exhausted the justifications, I have reached bedrock and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 217
Source: Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“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.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Lectures of 1946 - 1947, as quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein : A Memoir (1966) by Norman Malcolm, p. 43
1930s-1951

Dreams , Way , Feeling , Thinking

“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Journal entry (1 May 1915)
1910s, Notebooks 1914-1916

Question

“370. But more correctly: The fact that I use the word "hand" and all the other words in my sentence without a second thought, indeed that I should stand before the abyss if I wanted so much as to try doubting their meanings — shows that absence of doubt belongs to the essence of the language-game, that the question "How do I know…"”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

drags out the language-game, or else does away with it.
On Certainty (1969)

Game , Question

“310. A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning for words, etc. The teacher says "Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts don't make sense at all."”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book On Certainty

On Certainty (1969)

Sense , Teachers

“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word "white"?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Philosophical Remarks (1991), Part III (27), pp.66-67
Attributed from posthumous publications

Men , Search , Question

“You always hear people say that philosophy makes no progress and that the same philosophical problems which were already preoccupying the Greeks are still troubling us today. But people who say that do not understand the reason why it has to be so. The reason is that our language has remained the same and always introduces us to the same questions…. I read: "philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of 'Reality' than Plato got,…". What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 15e

People , Understanding , Question , Problem

“What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 116
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“When I obey a rule, I do not choose.
I obey the rule blindly.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein book Philosophical Investigations

§ 219
Philosophical Investigations (1953)

“If you want to go down deep you do not need to travel far; indeed, you don't have to leave your most immediate and familiar surroundings.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Source: Culture and Value (1980), p. 50e

Travel