What Is the Value of a Silly Movie?
An Answer from Austria's Most Famous Philosopher
Ludwig Wittgenstein/Wikimedia Commons
A typical American film, naive and silly, can—for all its silliness and even by means of it—be instructive. A fatuous, self-conscious English film can teach one nothing. I have often learned a lesson from a silly American film.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, who dissected the relationship between philosophy and language most precisely.
