Language matters to us in philosophy because reality matters to us. If, as it is said in the Philosophical Researches, we must beware in philosophy against the constant temptation to preach about the thing that resides in the mode of representation, it is because what interests us is reality itself. itself, not what language apparently forces us to suppose or believe about it. By "realism" I mean here the conviction that between thought or language, on the one hand, and reality, on the other, there is no more fundamental and worrying distance than that which consists in the possibility of thoughts and propositions being false. What Wittgenstein says on this point is completely opposed to the Bergsonian idea that thought itself has already introduced in essence a distance between reality and us, and that only direct intuition would be able to deliver facts to us. |