Cora Diamond : Philosophy as therapy

Cora Diamond : Philosophy as therapy

Professor Robert Solomon is a scholar on Continental Philosophy. His comment on Wittgenstein is different from the analytic tradition. I was astonished by his comment
on the relationship between Wittgenstein and Frege and Russell.

excerpted from Robert Solomon

<< Continental Philosophy since 1750 : The Rise and Fall of the Self >>
page 147-151.

1. Kraus, not Frege, was Wittgenstein's model, and it was Kierkegaard, not Russell, whom he most closely resembled.

2. Freud saw the symptoms of repression, Wittgenstein the pathology of language abused. In one sense his efforts were neo-Kantian, to provide a thoroughgoing ' critique of language ', but in a more profound sense his ambitions were Kierkegaardian, to draw the limits of ethics " from the inside as it were', to separate ethics from the realm of rational discourse.

3....he turns increasingly to a notion of 'therapy', viewing philosophy a kind of disease, as " language going on holiday ", and as a series of traps. In a way reminiscent of Kraus's view of psychoanalysis, Wittgenstein saw philosophy as a disease for which it presented itself as the cure.

4. He always looked for the closure in philosophy, and more than any other philosopher in history he was tormented by uncertainties and self-doubts.

5. Life, he impatiently concluded, is in the living of it, in daily chores and useful work, not in the abstract speculations of the philosophers.

In youtube:
Existentialism - Waking Life excerpt

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=82EV4KBIsNk&hl=zh-TW