Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Philosophy As A Guide To Life?
Saurabh Sanatani
Introduction
Whether philosophy is "quite simply the supreme guide to life"(Billington 1990) is
debatable.. Should a philosopher not be the best person to tell us what was right,
what was wrong, how we should behave, what was ultimate reality, and, above all ,
to tell us how to solve our immediate personal problems ? If a philosopher could not
guide us, to whom should we turn?
The answer to these questions , of course, depends on what one takes philosophy
to be. Those who see philosophy as a guide to human life come mainly from adherents
of what is called continental or existential philosophy or from lovers of Oriental
philosophies such as Vedanta, Buddhism, Taoism. Current western philosophy, on the
contrary, is dominated by what is called analytical philosophy which can be
characterised by a rationally critical thinking about the general nature of the world
(metaphysics), justification of belief (epistemology) and ethics (theory of value). On the
other hand, what is understood as eastern philosophy is somewhat different in scope.
The aim of Indian philosophy, for instance, roughly stated , is the attainment of liberation
(moksha) or transcendence of sorrow (duhkha) by dispelling cosmic ignorance
(avidya). Indian philosophy (darsana) is a subject-centred, intensely personal affective
attitude arising from an feeling of despair and disquiet. For both darshana and
philosophy the aim is to dispel ignorance by knowledge, but the significance of the word
knowledge is radically different in the two cases.(Sarkar 1979). Nevertheless it has been
pointed out by scholars that large parts of Indian philosophy are as rigorously logical
and rational as western philosophy and the there is a lot of overlap in the problems
studied in both.
Briefly, mainstream western philosophy (mainly analytical) does not support the
idea of philosophy as a cure for spiritual disquiet, sorrow, meaninglessness in our mind
nor does it say how we should live (except perhaps in normative ethics , a branch being
pushed out by meta-ethics in academic philosophy).
In this paper we examine the views of Wittgenstein, one of the most significant
philosophers of our time, on the question at hand, and see what advice, if any, he has
for the common man . We will see that there may not be much. advice, applicable to our
daily life, to be found in Wittgenstein's later philosophy which is basically a profound and
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