Time & Perspective Quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein

The line lands like a slap at the habits of “common sense.” Wittgenstein takes the most comfortingly predictable event imaginable - tomorrow’s sunrise - and demotes it to an “hypothesis,” a word that suddenly makes the everyday feel scientifically provisional, even faintly absurd. The point isn’t that the sun probably won’t rise. It’s that our certainty about it is not knowledge in the strong, philosophical sense; it’s a grammar of confidence we inherit, repeat, and rarely inspect.

The subtext is a critique of how language smuggles in authority. When we say we “know” the sun will rise, we’re often doing something closer to staking a social claim (“I’m sane; I’m not playing word games”) than reporting a verified fact. Calling it an hypothesis exposes the scaffolding: prediction relies on patterns, induction, and trust in regularity, none of which can be conclusively proven from within experience. That’s Hume lurking in the background, and Wittgenstein enjoying the way a simple sentence can unsettle an entire epistemology.

Context matters: in his later work, Wittgenstein is preoccupied with the limits of justification and the bedrock “hinges” our reasoning turns on. Some beliefs aren’t conclusions; they’re starting points. The irony here is that labeling the sunrise a hypothesis treats a hinge like a testable theory, and in doing so reveals how much of what we call knowing is really a form of life - practical certainty, not airtight proof. The sentence works because it weaponizes banality: it turns the ordinary into a philosophical trapdoor.