Philosophy as therapy

For the later Wittgenstein, philosophy is not a theory but a treatment. Philosophical problems, in his view, are not deep facts waiting to be discovered. They are knots in our thinking, tied when we use words outside the setting in which they work. The philosopher's job is to untie those knots by looking closely at how words are actually used, until the problem no longer grips us. Asked what his aim in philosophy was, he answered with an image:

Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

PI §309

In the animation above, a fly buzzes inside a fly-bottle, an old glass trap with an opening at the bottom. It throws itself against the glass again and again, towards the light, and gets nowhere. Then a dotted line shows the way out: back down, through the same opening it came in by. That is the point. The trap is not locked. What keeps the fly inside is the direction of its own effort. Philosophical confusion works the same way: the harder we push in the direction the question seems to point, the more stuck we get.

Where does the confusion come from?

Wittgenstein's diagnosis is that language itself misleads us. Words that look alike on the surface work very differently. "Time flows" looks like "the river flows", so we start asking where time flows to and how fast. Philosophical problems arise, he writes, when language goes on holiday (PI §38): when a word is taken out of its everyday work and left idling.

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.

Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the means of our language.

PI §109

Often the source is a single picture that we cannot get out of our heads. "A picture held us captive", he says, and we could not get outside it, because it lay in our language, which seemed to repeat it to us relentlessly (PI §115). The picture of meaning as an object that a word stands for is his main example, and much of the Philosophical Investigations is spent loosening its grip.

What does the therapy look like?

Not one method, but many:

Es gibt nicht eine Methode der Philosophie, wohl aber gibt es Methoden, gleichsam verschiedene Therapien.

There is not one method in philosophy, but there are methods, different therapies, as it were.

PI §133

In practice, the therapies include:

• Bringing words home. We lead words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (PI §116). Instead of asking what knowledge "really" is, look at when people actually say "I know", and when they would hesitate.
• Assembling reminders. The philosopher collects familiar facts about language, for a particular purpose (PI §127). Nothing new is discovered; what was always in plain view is arranged so that we can see it.
• Inventing examples. Imagined language games, strange tribes and odd cases help us see our own concepts from the outside. This is why Wittgenstein said that meaning lies in use: use is where you look.
• Treating the question, not answering it. "The philosopher treats a question; like an illness" (PI §255, in his own punctuation).

A philosophical problem, he writes, has the form: "I don't know my way about" (PI §123). The cure is not a new doctrine but an overview, so that you know your way about again. And philosophy, done this way, leaves everything as it is (PI §124): it does not reform language or correct science.

An everyday example

Saint Augustine said he knew what time was as long as nobody asked him; when someone asked, he did not know (Wittgenstein discusses this at PI §89). That is a classic fly-bottle. You use the word "time" perfectly every day: "do you have time?", "we're out of time", "that took a long time". The trouble starts only when you ask for the essence behind all these uses, as if "time" named a hidden thing. The therapeutic move is not to find that thing, but to notice that the demand for it came from a picture, and to return to the uses you already master.

The same works on a smaller scale in daily life. Two people arguing about whether a hot dog is "really" a sandwich are not disagreeing about any fact. Once you see that they are applying a word with blurred edges, the argument does not get solved. It dissolves. The page on untangling your thinking gives more exercises of this kind.

Is it really therapy?

The word "therapy" is Wittgenstein's own, and the comparison with medicine runs through his later work. He admired Freud and, according to his friend Rush Rhees, once called himself a disciple of Freud, while doubting Freud's claims to be scientific. The analogy fits in one way: the patient must recognise the cure himself. A philosopher cannot force an insight on you, just as an analyst cannot simply announce the cause of a symptom. The discovery that counts, Wittgenstein writes, is the one that lets me stop doing philosophy when I want to (PI §133).

How do scholars disagree?

Readers disagree about how far the therapeutic idea goes, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes in its section on the nature of philosophy.

• The New Wittgensteinians (the label comes from The New Wittgenstein, edited by Alice Crary and Rupert Read in 2000) read both the early and the later work as therapeutic through and through, with no hidden doctrines.
• Others, notably P.M.S. Hacker, accept the therapeutic aim but stress its positive side: a clear, surveyable picture of the grammar of our concepts (PI §122).
• Critics say the view makes philosophy too modest. Bertrand Russell complained in My Philosophical Development (1959) that the later Wittgenstein seemed to have grown tired of serious thinking.

Whatever the reading, the core idea is clear enough. Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, is hard work, but the work is on oneself: on the way one sees things, and on what one expects from an answer. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy sums it up as therapy rather than answers.