Untangle your thinking

Some thinking goes nowhere. The same question, the same circle, the same tired conclusion at two in the morning. Wittgenstein had a name for one version of this: philosophical confusion, the kind that comes not from missing facts but from being misled by our own ways of speaking. His later philosophy is an attempt to treat it, and he described that attempt in medical terms. You can borrow some of his methods for everyday overthinking, as long as you remember they were made for something else.

Was ist dein Ziel in der Philosophie? Der Fliege den Ausweg aus dem Fliegenglas zeigen.

What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.

Philosophical Investigations §309

Philosophy as therapy

A fly in a bottle keeps buzzing against the glass, though the opening is right there. In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein calls philosophy “a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by means of our language” (§109). He says the philosopher treats a question “like an illness” (§255), and that there is not one method in philosophy but methods, “like different therapies” (§133). A philosophical problem, he writes, has the form “I don’t know my way about” (§123). The concept page on philosophy as therapy gives more background.

How literally to take the word therapy is debated. Some readers, including the “New Wittgensteinians”, make it the key to all his work; others, like P.M.S. Hacker, stress that he also does careful conceptual description. The Stanford Encyclopedia and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy give overviews.

Held captive by a picture

Ein Bild hielt uns gefangen. Und heraus konnten wir nicht, denn es lag in unsrer Sprache, und sie schien es uns nur unerbittlich zu wiederholen.

A picture held us captive. And we could not get out, for it lay in our language, and language seemed only to repeat it to us relentlessly.

Philosophical Investigations §115

Wittgenstein was thinking of pictures like “meaning is an object the word stands for”. But the mechanism is familiar from daily life. A lot of overthinking runs on a picture that hides inside a phrase:

• “The right decision is out there; I just have to think hard enough to find it.”
• “If I really loved my work, I would never doubt it.”
• “A good parent never loses their temper.”
• “Everyone online who disagrees with me must have missed an argument.”

None of these is a fact you discovered. Each is a way of looking that keeps repeating itself every time you use the words. As long as it stays invisible, more thinking only produces more of the same.

Assembling reminders

Wittgenstein’s remedy is not a new theory but a different kind of work.

Die Arbeit des Philosophen ist ein Zusammentragen von Erinnerungen zu einem bestimmten Zweck.

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

Philosophical Investigations §127

Reminders of what? Of how we actually use our words, of cases we already know but overlook because they are too familiar (§129). He also warns against “a one-sided diet”: nourishing your thinking with only one kind of example (§593). That gives a practical method.

Exercises

1. Name the picture. Write down the sentence that keeps coming back. Underline the big words: always, never, real, should, failure. Then write, in one line, the picture behind it. Just seeing it written as a picture rather than a fact often loosens it.
2. Bring the word home. Wittgenstein asks whether a word is ever actually used in the way the philosopher uses it, “in the language in which it has its home” (§116). Do the same. Where does “failure” normally live? In an exam, a project, a bridge. Does “I am a failure” use it the same way?
3. Vary the diet. Collect three concrete cases that do not fit the picture: times you decided without certainty and it went fine, a day you lost your temper and the relationship survived. Write them down. These are your reminders, assembled for one purpose.
4. Ask what the answer would change. If you found the final answer, what would you do differently tomorrow? If nothing, the question may be a buzzing against glass rather than a real problem.
5. Give yourself permission to stop. Set a time limit for the question, and stop when it ends.

Die eigentliche Entdeckung ist die, die mich fähig macht, das Philosophieren abzubrechen, wann ich will.

The real discovery is the one that makes me able to break off philosophising when I want to.

Philosophical Investigations §133

Three everyday examples

At work, a message from your manager says “Can we talk tomorrow?” and the evening fills with scenarios. The picture: a short message hides a bad verdict. Reminder: how often have such messages been about scheduling? In a relationship, “we always fight about the same thing” may be literally false; listing the last five arguments often shows different things. In an online discussion, noticing that you and the other person mean different things by “freedom” can end a quarrel that no amount of extra arguments would settle, a theme taken further in dissolving disagreements.

What this is not

Wittgenstein’s therapy aims at conceptual confusions, not at grief, trauma or anxiety, and the medical words are a metaphor. These exercises can help you think more clearly. If worrying or overthinking is persistent and starts to affect your sleep, work or relationships, it deserves real help from a doctor or psychologist; that is not a failure of philosophy but a different kind of care.