What Ludwig Wittgenstein Actually Said About Action

Ludwig Wittgenstein returns to action 17 times in thinkr's library — more often than to almost anything else. Austrian-born philosopher who twice changed the course of analytic philosophy — first with the Tractatus, then with the Philosophical Investigations.

What follows is every one of those passages, in full, with what each is actually claiming. The language is of its period, but the question underneath is not: what is action for, and what does it ask of you?

Every Ludwig Wittgenstein passage on action

“Logic takes care of itself; all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”

“Don't get involved in partial problems, but always take flight to where there is a free view over the whole single great problem, even if this view is still not a clear one.”

“It is one of the chief skills of the philosopher not to occupy himself with questions which do not concern him.”

“The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)”

“What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts. (2)”

“If I cannot say a priori what elementary propositions there are, then the attempt to do so must lead to obvious nonsense. (5.5571)”

“The subject does not belong to the world, but it is a limit of the world. (5.632)”

“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical. (6.522)”

“For remember that in general we don't use language according to strict rules — it hasn't been taught us by means of strict rules, either.”

“I must plunge into the water of doubt again and again.”

“Frazer's account of the magical and religious views of mankind is unsatisfactory; it makes these views look like errors.”

“A religious symbol does not rest on any opinion. And error belongs only with opinion. One would like to say: This is what took place here; laugh, if you can.”

“The ceremonial (hot or cold) as opposed to the haphazard (lukewarm) characterizes piety.”

“The problems are dissolved in the actual sense of the word — like a lump of sugar in water.”

“Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.”

“Philosophers are often like little children, who first scribble random lines on a piece of paper with their pencils, and now ask an adult What is that?”

“The meaning of a question is the method of answering it: then what is the meaning of 'Do two men really mean the same by the word white?' Tell me how you are searching, and I will tell you what you are searching for.”

What holds these together

Read in sequence rather than one at a time, the passages stop being separate aphorisms. Ludwig Wittgenstein is not offering 17 opinions about action; the lines are facets of one position, and the repetition is the argument. The shortest of them — “The world is the totality of facts, not things. (1.1)” — is the version you can carry, and the longer ones are what it unpacks into.

Ludwig Wittgenstein applied to a real decision

Quotation is the easy part. The harder test is what the position actually does when it meets a situation where every option costs something. thinkr puts one such case to Ludwig Wittgenstein.

A convenient tool wants more of your attention and data.

Argued as self-reliant restraint: You are protecting attention as a condition for thought. The risk is romanticizing refusal when adaptation would be wiser.

Who disagrees

Plato, Seneca, Mahatma Gandhi and Lao Tzu all address action too, and they do not converge. Reading Ludwig Wittgenstein alone gives you a coherent position; reading Ludwig Wittgenstein against Plato shows you what the position is actually choosing against.