system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Does philosophy arise due to the limitations in our language?

It occurs to me that most philosophical enquiries revolve around the question “what is XXX?”. For example, in Republic, Plato discusses what Justice is; in Being and Time, Heidegger explores what “being” is. The branch Aesthetics ask questions about what beauty is.Hence i would like to ask to what extent is philosophy about defining words that we use in an everyday sense that we are not conscious of the real meaning most of the time? And this leads to the second question, does philosophy arise due to a limitation in our own language?
gpt
Wittgenstein would say it’s not limitations in our language, but it’s a temptation growing out of language itself. In *Philosophical Investigations*, he says this:

>Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language [paragraph 109].

For him, a lot of philosophy is driven by our tendency to suspend our everyday use of words and to try find some pure, abstract meaning of them that would lurk behind all their uses. Wittgenstein urges against doing philosophy in this way. He sees the job of philosophy not as the search for new fundamental explanations about the world, but rather as describing what we in some sense already know but distort in our effort to get past the ordinary:

>Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. [paragraph 126]

But again, he denies any notion that we are constrained or limited by our language, as though there could be some beyond language we could access that would somehow satisfy a craving for the abstract.