See the axis · The point of philosophy

ObjectionAttacks the position

Do not throw out the real questions

By treating the great problems as confusions of language, one risks dismissing the very questions that give philosophy its worth.

Objects to

Heidegger · What Is Metaphysics? · 1929

  1. Clarification holds many philosophical problems to be knots of language, to be dissolved rather than solved: 'whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent' .
  2. But the questions thus consigned to silence, the meaning of life, death, the just, the free, are not mere grammatical mistakes: they are the ones that press upon every existence.
  3. Making language clear does not yet teach how to live or what is: in wanting to dissolve too much, one risks keeping only a technique without an object, a logical tidiness that has given up on what mattered.

Therefore So clarifying cannot be the whole task: one can tidy up language without having answered anything, and the 'pseudo-problems' one sets aside are often the real questions one does not know how to handle.

Possible resolutions of the objection

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