"as I see it. It is more that there isn't anything to understand, or to
misunderstand."

Wittgensteins argument seems to me to be self refuting. If there isn't anything to understand, how does he arrive at his understanding. How does he know about his understanding? Does he think his claim or idea is true?

Hi willhelm,
In your comment you ask the question about whether Wittgenstein can really understand his own argument since his argument basically says there is nothing to understand in philosophy. I would say that is a really good question, and it is very insightful to point that out. I was putting my mind in circles before I just said hell with it. If you imagine that his idea is true, then his own argument is false, and that wouldn't make sense. So obviously it needs to be more specific than that. I would probably just say that he means philosophy has nothing to understand, but other things such as logic and information are understandable.

I don't know a lot about Wittgenstein. I am pretty sure he was in the line of materialist thinking. What he is talking about is cognitive relativism. The purpose is to deride the possibility of absolute truth and says all truth is subjectively relative. That truth has no meaning except in one's subjective mind. It denies the possibility of absolute truth, thereby steeping into self-refutation land. There is the absolute truth that nothing can bring itself into existence, to do so it would have to already exist.

I didn't know if you were right about that or not, about the materialist thing, so I had some help from a friend and she said on Wikipedia it says about him not being a materialist. I don't even know what a materialist is, but he apparently didn't want that to be his description.

I think he was just saying that a lot of stuff is word salad and doesn't solve anything.

Perhaps, he wasn't a materialist. The materialist line I was speaking of consists of Kant, Marx, Hegel, kierkegard, and Nietzche. I was just speculating. But his concept is still cognitive relativism.

Oh ok. I am probably a cognitive relativist then. I have a similar clip somewhere that talks about moral relativism. I think I may be a moral relativist. I would probably agree that things can't be created by themselves, which is probably an absolute truth, but seems to be the only absolute truth that I know of. The only reason I say that is because I don't know what it means for something to bring itself into existence or to bring itself out of existence. Therefore, I don't know what it means to believe in cognitive absolutes since I wouldn't believe in being absolutely one way or the other, but somewhere in between.

Keep at it. You seem like a very inquisitive and smart person. I am sure you will eventually see the fallacies of any relitivist thought. But be patient, it only took me about 15 years.