Continuing this series, today’s quote is from Bertrand Russell, a colleague of Wittgenstein (who was featured in Part 1).
This is from his forward to Ernest Gellner’s Words and Things
When I was a boy, I had a clock with a pendulum that could be lifted off. I found that the clock went very much faster without the pendulum. If the main purpose of a clock is to go, the clock was the better for losing its pendulum. True, it could no longer tell the time, but that did not matter if one could teach oneself to be indifferent to the passage of time. The linguistic philosophy which cares only about language and not about the world, is like the boy who preferred the clock without the pendulum because, although it no longer told the time, it went more easily than before and at a more exhilarating pace.
I feel this isn’t just true of the philosophy of language — but of all art, fiction, imagined worlds, and abstract reasoning. These are symbolic tools, but without any connection to the real world, here and now, they’re just tools — tools with no function.
I don’t mean to reduce art to its functionality, but I also want to resist some of the temptation I personally feel toward escapism, and for getting lost in abstractions that will ultimately fail to make my life any richer or more meaningful.