jude’s Reviews > Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius > Status Update

There is nothing wrong with a science before the foundations are laid.

Just as speech is not essential in religion, so words cannot be essential to revealing what is true, or deep, in metaphysics.

He himself once wrote: 'I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: philosophy ought really to be written as a poetic composition.'

'All that philosophy can do’, he says there, ‘is to destroy idols.'

[W]hat is deep in metaphysics, as in magic, is its expression of a fundamentally religious feeling – the desire to run up against the limits of our language.

In philosophy we are not, like the scientist, building a house. Nor are we even laying the foundations of a house. We are merely ‘tidying up a room’.

“I thought: I have to live with people to whom I cannot make myself understood. – That is a thought that I actually do have often. At the same time with the feeling that it is my own fault.”