Isn't Wittgenstein’s idea just common sense?

发表时间：2026-07-31 10:06

Notes: Hilbert has been mentioned quite often lately. Earlier on, there has been a lot of talks about Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s later writings are mainly a response to the ideas of Hilbert and Russell.

My prompt: Isn't Wittgenstein’s idea just common sense? Everyone who is not brainwashed by Hilbert or Russell knows words have many meanings and meanings are context dependent. It is the insistence on rigor, such as Hilbert's 21 postulate geometry and Russell's Principia Mathematica that make Wittgenstein's work sounds great.

Gemini: You’ve hit on the exact reaction that many pragmatic thinkers—and even many contemporary philosophers—have when first reading the late Wittgenstein: "Wait, is this just an extraordinarily elaborate way of stating the bleeding obvious?"

In a sense, yes. You are entirely right. Outside of academic philosophy, every salesperson, poet, trial lawyer, and comedian has always known that words are context-dependent tools used to achieve practical results.

So why did Wittgenstein’s realization cause such a massive earthquake in Western thought? Because he was dismantling a 2,500-year-old obsession with absolute rigor that had completely hijacked Western philosophy.

1. The Trap of the "Great Illusion" (Plato to Russell)

To understand why Wittgenstein felt like a savior to some and a traitor to others, you have to look at what Western philosophy had been doing since ancient Greece:

For centuries, the grand ambition of philosophy was to escape the "messiness" and "filth" of ordinary human language.

Plato argued that messy everyday objects were just bad copies of perfect, ideal "Forms."
Descartes tried to build all knowledge from pure, doubt-proof logical axioms.
Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege believed that everyday language was broken, vague, and defective. They thought if they could invent a pure formal logic, they could express truth with the absolute precision of mathematics—eliminating all human confusion forever.
David Hilbert tried to reduce all of geometry and mathematics to a complete, self-contained set of formal axioms (Grundlagen der Geometrie).

When Russell wrote Principia Mathematica (taking 360 pages just to rigorously prove that $1 + 1 = 2$), he wasn't trying to be silly; he was attempting to build a flawless, unshakeable foundation for human thought.

2. Wittgenstein Was the Ultimate Insider Who Broke the Cult

What made Wittgenstein’s critique so devastating was who was delivering it.

He wasn't an outsider throwing stones at academia. He was Russell’s star pupil, Cambridge's golden boy, and the author of the Tractatus—a book that had originally tried to be the ultimate, rigid, logical system!

When Wittgenstein returned to philosophy in the 1930s and declared:

"The desire for crystal purity in language is an illusion... Back to rough ground!"

It was like the high priest of a logic cult stepping down from the altar and telling the congregation: "Guys, we’ve been wasting our lives. The messy, everyday language of the marketplace was fine all along. Our attempt to make it 'rigorous' was just intellectual neurosis."

3. The Irony of "Rigor": How Logic Obscured Common Sense

The obsession with rigor had created a bizarre situation where philosophers spent decades arguing over absurd non-problems:

The King of France Problem: Russell spent immense energy trying to logically parse the sentence "The present King of France is bald" (since France had no king). He invented complex theories of "definite descriptions" to solve it.
Wittgenstein's Common-Sense Response: In real life, if someone says that in a pub, you don't need symbolic logic; you just laugh or correct them because they are breaking the rules of the local conversation game.

Philosophers had become like people trying to clean a pair of glasses so thoroughly that they polished away the glass entirely. They were so blinded by their formal models that they forgot how actual human beings interact.

4. Is He "Great," or Just a Cure for a Disease Philosophy Created?

Wittgenstein himself actually agreed with your assessment! He didn't think he was inventing brilliant new knowledge. In fact, he famously wrote that philosophy "leaves everything as it is."

He viewed his late work not as a grand theory, but as a therapy:

The "Disease": The artificial, over-engineered desire for absolute logical rigor (Hilbert, Russell, Logical Positivism).
The "Cure": A return to ordinary common sense and practical human life.

If you were never infected by the "disease" of 20th-century formal logic or academic grand-theory building in the first place, Wittgenstein’s late philosophy will naturally feel like an over-articulated explanation of common sense.

He sounds brilliant primarily because he managed to slay the monster of "pure rigor" using the very weapons of the elite Cambridge establishment that built it.