What is the task of philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the bottle.

The image that the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) uses to talk about the usefulness or, if you will, the uselessness (in the Aristotelian sense) of philosophy allows us to focus on the essence of this noble human activity.

When reading, for example, the pages of Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s Metaphysics, or Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, the first question concerns the very meaning of these reflections, their “usefulness.”

In a social context like the present one – where the primary interest is immediate practical results – the space for philosophy is truly reduced to a minimum, and the question of the role of this activity becomes even more important. In this regard, the image proposed by Wittgenstein is extremely suggestive.

Sometimes man resembles a fly buzzing around in a bottle.

This happens when theoretical constructs diverge from common sense perceptions (as in the case of materialism or individualism), leading to a futile exercise and a closure to real being, which remains – as classical philosophical tradition teaches – the starting and ending point of any reflection or – to use Wittgenstein’s words – the “way out” for the fly.

Giovanni Covino