Imagine, for a moment, a philosopher who, having penned what he believed to be the definitive solution to all philosophical problems, promptly abandoned the field.
I’ve always been fascinated by Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory. For me, it’s not just philosophy. It’s a tool I use every time I write. Whether I’m breaking down a court case or digging into questions of international law, I find that this theory helps me turn abstract arguments into something clear, almost like holding up a picture for the reader. In my latest posts, I share how I use Wittgenstein’s logic to make legal analysis clearer and more engaging.
The therapeutic metaphor cuts deeper than usually noticed. Wittgenstein said the philosopher shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. But what happens when the bottle itself keeps changing shape?
Borges imagined a Library containing every possible book. The horror wasn't the absence of meaning but the presence of all possible meanings simultaneously. No shared game to distinguish signal from noise. The digital information environment creates something similar: an explosion of language games that no single community can encompass.
Wittgenstein grounded meaning in "forms of life," the shared practices of a community. But what happens when those forms of life fracture faster than language can adapt? We're not just playing different games with the same words anymore. We're generating new games faster than we can learn the rules, then arguing about whether the old rules still apply.
The crisis of meaning you describe isn't just about misapplication of categories. It's temporal. The rhythm of language game formation has accelerated beyond what traditional forms of life can absorb. Therapy works when there's a shared sense of health to return to. What if the fly-bottle is now an infinite regress of bottles?
In noting that we do not perceive ‘reality’, itself, but, rather, only what we see-it-AS, linguistically-speaking, W. declared that Philosophical-Metaphysics was impossible.
I’ve always been fascinated by Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory. For me, it’s not just philosophy. It’s a tool I use every time I write. Whether I’m breaking down a court case or digging into questions of international law, I find that this theory helps me turn abstract arguments into something clear, almost like holding up a picture for the reader. In my latest posts, I share how I use Wittgenstein’s logic to make legal analysis clearer and more engaging.
The therapeutic metaphor cuts deeper than usually noticed. Wittgenstein said the philosopher shows the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. But what happens when the bottle itself keeps changing shape?
Borges imagined a Library containing every possible book. The horror wasn't the absence of meaning but the presence of all possible meanings simultaneously. No shared game to distinguish signal from noise. The digital information environment creates something similar: an explosion of language games that no single community can encompass.
Wittgenstein grounded meaning in "forms of life," the shared practices of a community. But what happens when those forms of life fracture faster than language can adapt? We're not just playing different games with the same words anymore. We're generating new games faster than we can learn the rules, then arguing about whether the old rules still apply.
The crisis of meaning you describe isn't just about misapplication of categories. It's temporal. The rhythm of language game formation has accelerated beyond what traditional forms of life can absorb. Therapy works when there's a shared sense of health to return to. What if the fly-bottle is now an infinite regress of bottles?
“Seeing-As” — The end-of ‘Metaphysics’.
Care to elaborate?
In noting that we do not perceive ‘reality’, itself, but, rather, only what we see-it-AS, linguistically-speaking, W. declared that Philosophical-Metaphysics was impossible.