"Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one"
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Wittgenstein is warning you off the intellectual equivalent of rearranging deck chairs: the temptation to treat philosophy as a series of tidy, local “issues” you can fix with a clever patch. “Partial problems” sound practical, even modest, but in his universe they’re often traps set by language itself. You inherit a vocabulary, you inherit its confusions, and soon you’re “solving” puzzles that exist only because words have been misfiled.
The directive to “take flight” is revealing. It’s not gradual accumulation; it’s a hard change of altitude, a refusal to stay inside the problem’s usual framing. That move echoes his career in miniature: the early Wittgenstein searching for the single, crystalline structure of sense (the big Problem with a capital P), and the later Wittgenstein insisting that clarity comes from surveying the whole “language-game” and the forms of life that give words their job. Either way, zooming out is not escapism; it’s diagnosis.
The kicker is the permission to hold an “unclear” view. Wittgenstein distrusts premature precision. He’d rather you see the terrain vaguely than map one neighborhood in high resolution and mistake it for the world. Subtext: philosophy’s progress isn’t mainly new facts but new perspectives - dissolving pseudo-problems by relocating them in the wider grammar of our practices. The “whole single great problem” is less a final answer than a stance: keep your bearings on what makes meaning possible, and don’t confuse local technical victories with understanding.
The directive to “take flight” is revealing. It’s not gradual accumulation; it’s a hard change of altitude, a refusal to stay inside the problem’s usual framing. That move echoes his career in miniature: the early Wittgenstein searching for the single, crystalline structure of sense (the big Problem with a capital P), and the later Wittgenstein insisting that clarity comes from surveying the whole “language-game” and the forms of life that give words their job. Either way, zooming out is not escapism; it’s diagnosis.
The kicker is the permission to hold an “unclear” view. Wittgenstein distrusts premature precision. He’d rather you see the terrain vaguely than map one neighborhood in high resolution and mistake it for the world. Subtext: philosophy’s progress isn’t mainly new facts but new perspectives - dissolving pseudo-problems by relocating them in the wider grammar of our practices. The “whole single great problem” is less a final answer than a stance: keep your bearings on what makes meaning possible, and don’t confuse local technical victories with understanding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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