From Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein:
[b]A recurrent theme of Wittgenstein’s lectures…was a concern to uphold against philosophers, our ordinary perception of the world. When a philosopher raises doubts, about time or about mental states, that do not occur to the ordinary man, this is not because the philosopher has more insight than the ordinary man, but because, in a way, he has less; he is subject to temptations to misunderstand that do not occur to the non-philosopher:
[i]We have the feeling that the ordinary man, if he talks of “good”, of “number” etc., does not really understand what he is talking about. I see something queer about perception and he talks about it as if it were not queer at all. Should we say he knows what he is talking about or not?
You can say both. Suppose people are playing chess. I see queer problems when I look into the rules and scrutinize them. But Smith and Brown play chess with no difficulty. Do they understand the game? Well, they play it.[/i][/b]
In my view, many philosophers [still today] wish to conflate 1] how the world works 2] a set of personal values and 3] the meaning of life as though philosophically we can actually comprise a rule book from which we can then learn to envelop these relationships rationally, logically, epistemologically—and then dispense these lessons to others didactically in venues like this.
More Monk:
[b]Wittgenstein began one lecture by reading a passage from Street and Smith’s Detective Story Magazine in which the narrator, a detective, is alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the night, with no sound except the ticking of the ship’s clock. The detective muses to himself, ‘A clock is a bewildering instrument at best: measuring a fragment of infinity: measuring something which does not exist perhaps.’ Wittgenstein told his class that it is much more revealing and important when you find this sort of confusion in something said in a sillly detective story, than it is when you find it said by a silly philosopher:
[i]The clock becomes a bewildering instrument here because he says about it, “it measures a fragment of infinity, measuring something which does not exist perhaps”. What makes the clock bewildering is that he introduces a sort of entity which he then can’t see, it seems like a ghost.
The connection between this and what we were saying about sense data: What is bewildering is the introduction of something we might call “intangible”. It seems as though there is nothing intangible about the chair or the table, but there is about the fleeting personal experience.[/i][/b]
For literally tens of thousands of years men and women [our pre-historic ancestors] interacted socially and while they may have thought in a rudimentary sense about “the way the world works” or about accummulating a set of “personal values” or about encompassing a “meaning of life”, few would have proposed a philosophical rule book to encompass these largely analytic, linguistic, conceptual and theoretical insights. Philosophy as we know it today did not exist at all because it never occured to these folks that it would, in any essential sense, need to. Human life revolved then around subsistence and procreation and defense by and large. And it still does today when push comes to shove. Only now we have whole departments of university scholars intent on formalizing a set of, say, “critical rational” rules about it. But not really about human behavior; instead, the rules revolve around the language and concepts we use to talk about human behavior. What I try to do, however, is to suggest those conceptual and theoretical contraptions must be plugged into actual human social and political and economic interaction if they are going to be relevant to human interaction… And I propose further that when we do this the carefully calibrated conceptual contraptions often fall apart at the seams as the words become entangled in the thorns of contingency, chance and change. But that, in and of itself, ironically, may well be a very important philosophical insight. Ludwig thought it was certainly.
Which means that, in my own way, I am attempting to make philosophy a more serious endeavor because I am asking philosophers to talk about very tangible things like clocks and the very tangible reasons they were invented; and how, in turn, clocks used in, for example, the context of a contemporary modern metropolis frame time in a way that might be unintelligble to our ancient acestors. Or for contemporary aboriginal tribes in Australia.
But, like time itself, these things are far more intangable then some minds would like to admit. They cannot be understood logically or epistemologically. In fact, most of what constitutes human interaction can hardly be ensnared at all by appealing to “enduring values”. Not when the interactions revolve around that which is most crucial to human relationships—differentiating how we do think and feel and act around others and how we, perhaps, ought to instead. What are the limitations of philosophy here?