The enormous sophistication and hypercritical spirit that Wittgenstein displayed in his philosophical work disappeared when his thoughts turned to politics. In that context, to use his famous simile, he was like a fly that could not find a way out of the fly bottle.
In a letter to Norman Malcolm in 1944, Wittgenstein lamented that the clear thinking nurtured in philosophy is often abandoned when philosophers address practical issues of great importance: “What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?”
Wittgenstein was obviously unaware that his lament about the uselessness of philosophy for everyday thinking also applied to his own case, and with a vengeance.
(Neven Sesardić, When Reason Goes on Holiday: Philosophers in Politics [New York: Encounter Books, 2016], 106 [parenthetical reference omitted])
