David Egan Philosophy

Apart from a short visit between terms in February 2025, this is my first visit home since I left Vancouver for Istanbul two years ago. Coming home is always a curious experiment, assaying my present self by testing it against deeply embedded memories from the past. What about this place will seem strange? What will seem comfortingly familiar? Am I the same person who left two years ago? Will this place still feel like home after a couple of years away?

This isn’t a personal diary but a philosophy newsletter, though, so I’ll transpose these reflections into a different key. In his Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein makes a reference to home that’s had a profound effect on the way I think about philosophy. He writes: “When philosophers use a word – ‘knowledge,’ ‘being,’ ‘object,’ ‘I,’ ‘sentence,’ ‘name’ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at home?”

What does it mean to talk about language being “at home”? We get a hint in the remark that follows this question: “What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” Language is at home, Wittgenstein suggests, in its “everyday use,” which contrasts with a “metaphysical use” that philosophers are prone to put words to.

Animating this contrast is a particular understanding of where philosophy begins, as well as an understanding of where, whether, and how it ends. Unlike the natural sciences, philosophy has no specialized subject matter. Physics starts in the lab or the observatory and usually involves highly sophisticated equipment that allows practitioners to see things that are too small or fast or far away for ordinary perception. They coin new names for the things they observe—names like “quark,” “quasar,” or “dark matter”—because these things are foreign to our everyday experience.

The objects of study in philosophy, by contrast—the sorts of things Wittgenstein mentions in the passage above, like knowledge, being, and objects—make their way into ordinary talk all the time. You might not know what a quark is but every competent speaker of English knows the word “know.”

A common self-conception among philosophers is that they aim to achieve a more precise understanding of these everyday concepts. Just as physicists have their armamentarium of microscopes, telescopes, and particle colliders, philosophers have the tools of logical analysis, conceptual distinctions, and methods of argument that enable them to zero in on their targets with a precision that lies beyond the means of the layperson. This picture makes phenomena like knowledge, being, and objects analogous to the quarks, quasars, and dark matter of the physicists: features of the world that exist independently of us that we can misapprehend unless we proceed carefully.

Wittgenstein wants us to think of these phenomena not as independent features of the world but as tools. Before anything else, “knowledge,” “object,” “being,” and the like are words, and they’re words in our language because they have a use. If we want to get a good understanding of knowledge, Wittgenstein says, look at how the word “know” is used. Knowledge is more like a hammer than a quark: to understand what it is, you have to understand what people do with it.

And not simply what people do with it: you also have to understand why. It’s all well and good to know that hammers are used to pound nails into wood but that doesn’t tell you much unless you also know why people might want to pound nails into wood. You also need some understanding of the aims of carpentry. Implicit in this understanding is an understanding of the uses of things like housing and furniture. Why hammer nails into wood unless people want chairs to sit on, tables to sit at, houses to live in? Implicit in our understanding of a hammer is an understanding of various forms of human life.

You could tell a similar story about knowledge. Knowledge isn’t a thing out in the world for us to discover. The word “knowledge” is a tool: it’s useful in various contexts of communication. Understanding what knowledge is means understanding both how people use the word and why it’s useful.

Wittgenstein often explores that latter question—why a given concept is useful—by imagining peculiar scenarios where the concept loses its point. If lumps of cheese spontaneously grew or shrank for no apparent reason, he observes, we wouldn’t find it useful to sell them by weight. More generally, our concept of weight has a use because most things maintain a fairly steady weight across time. If everything behaved like the growing and shrinking lumps of cheese, we would have no use for the concept of weight—and the word “weight” simply wouldn’t exist in our vocabulary.

So here’s a preliminary explanation of what Wittgenstein means by the “everyday use” in which language is “at home.” Wittgenstein thinks that an appropriate analysis of our concepts requires a broad understanding of their use—not just an understanding of the conditions of their use but an understanding of the conditions of our lives that make them useable and useful.

But this explanation doesn’t on its own explain why Wittgenstein thinks philosophers so often get it wrong—why, that is, they have a tendency to stray into what Wittgenstein calls a “metaphysical use.” This tendency isn’t simply a mistake, Wittgenstein thinks. It lies deep in philosophy’s self-conception.

Philosophy aspires to get to the bottom of things, to the truth about things. It’s interested in the general principle rather than the particular case, in what’s necessarily the case rather than what simply happens to be the case. That can make the contingent facts about how people behave—what tools, linguistic or otherwise, that they happen to find useful—seem irrelevant to philosophy. If you want to know how a particular group of people conceives of this or that, consult an anthropologist. Philosophers are in the business of seeking universal truths.

If you’re looking for the ideal, pure, universal essence of a concept like knowledge, you’ll be disinclined to look for it in the particular forms of life in which we happen to find the concept useful. But philosophers who turn away from the particularities of our practices effectively disown the concept: in order to elevate it into something universal, they neglect the way that this concept is theirs. They refuse to see it as a tool that has a particular relevance to the particular lives that they have.

Wittgenstein contrasts this philosophical pursuit of universal truths with his preferred focus on everyday use in a striking image. “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction,” he writes, characterizing the metaphysical position. “And so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal; but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

The ”rough ground” Wittgenstein describes here is the “home” of “everyday use.” When doing philosophy, we’re tempted by a desire to step out of our own skins, to see the world as God might see it, free from our all-too-human perspective. Wittgenstein conceives of his later philosophy as an attempt to cure us of this temptation, to bring us back to the home in which our language lives.

The solution here isn’t simply to stop doing philosophy. As Wittgenstein conceives it, we’re all doing philosophy all of the time. You don’t need to be sitting in a seminar to confuse the tools of language for features of the world. To link together two words Wittgenstein mentions in that initial quotation, “being” and “I,” consider how fixated any of us can become in talking about the person that “I” “am”—the way we can start to think of selves as fixed spiritual essences such that “I” denotes a thing of a very special kind.

Wittgenstein’s vision of philosophy is a tragic one. We’re at home in our language but constantly tempted to disown that home in an aspiration to rise above our limited existence. It takes constant vigilance and rigorous attention to recognize that home as home and to inhabit it fully, in a spirit of belonging. Being at home is an achievement, not a given.

In a less metaphorical vein, it’s something I’ve spent a great deal of my adult life struggling with as well: how to find myself at home where I am, clear-sightedly and without illusion. 

1. In the early 1960s, abortion in Romania was legal, affordable, and safe but there was very little access to contraceptives. It’s estimated that, every year, about 20% of Romanian women of reproductive age had an abortion. (source)
2. Until recently, Argentina had a law decreeing that the seventh sons or daughters of a family are to be adopted as godchildren by the president to protect them from turning into werewolves. (Javier Milei recently scrapped the law. No doubt the anti-lycanthropy lobby is up in arms.) (source)
3. When people are walking, they almost always veer left when they encounter another person and will move in a generally counterclockwise direction when instructed to wander randomly. This same pattern applies regardless of whether a person is right-handed or left-handed or what side of the road cars in their country drive on. (source)
4. Capsaicin, the compound that makes chili peppers hot, is an evolutionary filter designed to punish mammals and reward birds. Mammal digestive systems destroy the pepper seeds whereas bird digestive systems don’t. Birds will eat peppers, fly some distance, and then excrete the seeds allowing the plant to propagate. Mammals experience capsaicin as painful but birds don’t: it’s the pepper’s way of getting itself eaten by birds rather than mammals. (source)
5. In North America, more young men than young women claim they want to have children. (source)
6. Green traffic lights aren’t green. They’re actually a brilliant turquoise that we’re so used to seeing as green because they’re called “green.” They aren’t pure green so as to avoid confusing people who are green–red colourblind. (source)
7. Europe has more heat-related deaths per capita than any other continent. (source)
8. Early in his career, the behavioural psychologist B. F. Skinner devised a project to use pigeons in guiding bombs. It wasn’t ultimately adopted but the method, which involved training pigeons to peck at a screen that displayed the bomb’s target, eventually influenced the development of touchscreen display technology. (source)