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Sobre Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein was hostile to modern philosophy as he found it. He thought it the product of a culture that had come to model everything that matters about our lives on scientific explanation. In its ever-extending observance of the idea that knowledge, not wisdom, is our goal, that what matters is information rather than insight, and that we best address the problems that beset us, not with changes in our heart and spirit but with more data and better theories, our culture is pretty much exactly as Wittgenstein feared it would become. He sought to uncover the deep undercurrents of thought that had produced this attitude. He feared it would lead not to a better world but the demise of our civilization. That perhaps explains his deep unpopularity today. It is for the same reason that Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most important philosopher of modern times. — The relentless honesty of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ian Ground

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Um dos motivos para escrever, sobretudo ficção, e uma das dimensões políticas da escrita. 

"But most of the writers I talk to desire not to escape the world but to enlarge it, by extending the possibilities of language. I think Amy Tan put it best: “The feeling I’m talking about stems from the sense that we can never fully share the truth of who we are,” she told me. “When I was six or seven, I used to read a thesaurus searching for the words that meant exactly what I felt. And I could never find them … When I had a feeling like sadness, I couldn’t find a word that meant everything that I felt inside of me. I always felt that words were inadequate, that I’d never been able to express myself—ever. Even now, it’s so hard to express what I think and feel, the totality of what I’ve seen. But this loneliness is the impetus for writing.”

In other words: articulating these universal experiences is a way of combatting existential loneliness, for both the writer and the reader. Anyone who’s truly loved a book knows how it can shrink the numbing distance between us. But it’s more than that. The attempt to speak where there’d been silence, or name a thing that had no name, is inherently political—is revolutionary—because, in very real ways, it expands boundaries: first of what can be said, and then of what can be done, and finally of what is possible." — Why Write Fiction in 2017?, Joe Fassler