Metaphor and Irony
Metaphor that can intended to be taken ironically is usually pretty easy to spot. This is far less certain in philosophical texts, however, because philosophy is all about perception. Add in the extra twist of the philosophical text being about perception and one just simply can’t be entirely sure. Irony or not:
“A certain professor once said: ‘For me to be moral is to behave like a professor.’”
That Eureka Moment
The author explains the motivations behind the analysis and insight into the works of philosophers using a common metaphor. When one starts to think about it closely, however, and examine with closer scrutiny, the metaphor itself seems philosophically unsound: wouldn’t a blinding flash of light make it more difficult to see connections?
“I have been moved…by the wish to understand better some particular concept or range of concepts, or the views of some particular philosophers; or by the rare exciting occurrence of one of those moments of what at least at the time seems like a blinding flash of insight into connections.”
Metaphorical Philosophizing
Eventually, every philosophical text gets to the point where the metaphorical imagery depends upon understanding of philosophical terms to make sense. It is a simple fact of the genre. Unless one has at least a basic grasp of the meaning of terms like empiricism and utilitarianism, the following will be difficult to fully grasp. But that’s just the nature of the beast and why it is always best to start studying philosophy from the bottom up:
“The optimist’s style of over-intellectualizing the facts is that of a characteristically incomplete empiricism, a one-eyed utilitarianism. He seeks to find an adequate basis for certain social practices in calculated consequences, and loses sight (perhaps wishes to lose sight) of the human attitudes of which these practices are, in part, the expression.”
“The Echo of a Thought in Sight”
This metaphor is about as simple as Wittgenstein gets and even its description leaves much to be desired. The idea being expressed here—at its most basic level—is the concept of one thing sparking the imagination about something else that need not be directly related on sensory basis. In other words, the imagination is sparked by seeing or hearing something but not in a way that one can necessarily drawn a direct and tangible line between.
What’s the Difference?
A lot of people have trouble reading philosophy because inevitably they reach a point of asking, what’s the difference? This book examines in minute detail various concepts of perception that consist of a series of increasingly narrower divergences. Many will grow frustrated by this point, throw up their hands and ask, what, really, is the difference when you get right down to it:
“it might be the case that a subject’s sensible experience was most aptly described by saying that it sensibly seemed to him just as if he was perceiving a deep black shadow when he was in fact perceiving a piece of black cloth which looked like a shadow.”
