Science & Tech Quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s jab lands like a paradox dressed as common sense: the very enterprise we treat as the engine of discovery can, in the wrong mood, become a sedative. The line hinges on “awaken to wonder,” which isn’t a call for more facts but for a certain posture toward the world - a startled, ethically charged attentiveness. Wonder, for him, is not the appetizer to explanation; it’s the condition that makes life feel real and morally urgent.

“Science is a way of sending him to sleep again” isn’t anti-science so much as anti-narcotic certainty. Wittgenstein watched modernity replace older metaphysical consolations with a new kind of comfort: the belief that once something is explained, it’s metabolized, filed away, no longer capable of troubling us. Scientific description can shrink the world to what can be measured, predicted, and controlled - a flattening that turns astonishment into a solved problem. The subtext is a warning about how easily explanation becomes evasion.

The “peoples” clause widens the target from individual complacency to cultural anesthesia. In an era shaped by industrial rationality, war machines, and the prestige of technical expertise, it’s not hard to see what he’s resisting: a society that mistakes operational mastery for wisdom. Coming from a philosopher obsessed with the limits of language, the provocation stings: what matters most (value, meaning, the “mystical” in his earlier terms) can’t be captured by scientific grammar, and treating it as if it can is precisely how we fall asleep.