Is Life a Big Problem that Needs to be Solved? Wittgenstein’s ‘Slippery Ice’ Metaphor

When it comes to human happiness, there is a paradox: On the one hand, we want big, simple, powerful solutions — quick fixes that solve all our problems in one fell swoop, like flipping a big switch.

On the other hand, we know, from our own and others’ experience, that these kinds of solutions never really work as they promise to.

As Oliver Burkeman puts it, in a passage about the self-help industry:

“That we yearn for neat, book-sized solutions to the problem of being human is understandable, but strip away the packaging, and you’ll find that the messages of such works are frequently banal” (The Antidote 5).

We have this impulse to look at our life as a problem that needs a solution.

We therefore tend to be attracted by bright, shiny objects that promise incredible results.

Do we need to Solve Everything?

But the appeal of these objects wears off almost immediately. We are left searching for the next big idea that is ‘guaranteed’ to turn our whole world upside down (in a good way).

We are all only human, in other words. Who wouldn’t want an immediate, clear solution to a problem that appears so complex and ambiguous? I certainly do.

But maybe we should take a closer look at the impulse to ‘solve everything’ before acting on it. If we see how this impulse works — what it does to us and to our world — we might be less inclined to fall into the vicious cycle of excitement and disappointment.

This is what we want: not to get rid of the ‘solve everything’ impulse but to step away so we are not unthinkingly controlled by it. The work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein can help.

In this article, we’ll take a look at a very short passage from Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations that provides a powerful metaphor for how this impulse to solve everything works, and how we might loosen its hold over us.

On the Slippery Ice

In the passage, Wittgenstein is investigating the belief that our world is completely logical — that there is a ‘formal unity’ underneath everything, hidden in the background of all we say and understand.

When we hold this ideal, even if we aren’t aware that we’re doing it, we feel a tremendous conflict when we look at the ways we actually speak and communicate. Compared to the logical ideal, the ordinary things we say and think appear imperfect, even contaminated.

Nothing can live up to the requirement we hold for how things should be.

Then Wittgenstein introduces a helpful metaphor. When we believe in an ideal version of reality, it is like this:

“We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so, in a certain sense, the conditions are ideal…”

The ideal has taken us into a landscape free from conflict. This is what happens when we have found a ‘solution’ to the problem of life: we cling to an idea that reduces everything to one single way of looking.

Differences are smoothed over. Change is frozen, held in place by the desire to see everything as united. The ordinary, everyday aspects of life are hidden from view, smothered beneath layers of ice.

We want everything to be the same, so we, in a certain sense, have absolute control. We know what everything is. We have trapped it!

Imagine yourself on an unbroken sheet of blue ice as far as the eye can see in every direction. There is no need to go anywhere. We cannot get enough traction to move.

Even if we could walk, there would be no point — the ice is all the same, wherever we go. This is what it means to have ideal conditions, to find the ‘solution’ that solves everything.

Reality

It would be perfect, except for one little thing: Reality inevitably intrudes on our perfect world of ice. Things change. Anomalies arise. The unexpected occurs.

What happens when we have the solution to the problem of being human? We have to cling to it at all times for dear life.

If we don’t, if we get tired and start to slip, we feel the ice starting to crack beneath our feet. Our ideal forces us to cover over experience, freezing it. But we can only do that for so long.

Sooner or later, we are confronted by things that are hard to explain. We have to work hard to hold everything still, as if lowering the temperature were a matter of sheer willpower.

Back to the Rough Ground

Eventually, we won’t be able to hold it all in place. What then? We could, of course, go back to hunting for a new one-size-fits-all solution. We were so close, we say to ourselves. A bit more searching and we’ll find it. We project another ideal form over everything, hoping it will freeze once again.

But maybe the problem is in the freezing itself.

When there is no friction, Wittgenstein notes, “we are unable to walk.”

Ideal conditions mean that we too, not just our world, are unable to move. In freezing our concepts, holding them to an impossible requirement, we have frozen ourselves.

How do we thaw ourselves out? When we are done jumping from ideal to ideal, living in the barren landscape of unchanging conditions, Wittgenstein writes:

“We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!”

We want to make contact with the earth.
We want to experience things outside of ourselves, no longer forcing them to be part of a unitary structure.
We want to feel ourselves interacting with the world without holding it up against an impossible requirement.
We want to be able to see destruction and separation — to experience change, without imposing a necessary and unchanging essence over everything.
We want to give up the search for a solution to life, so we can start living.

We Need Friction

So we need friction.

To move, we have to allow the ice to melt, so we can feel the rough ground beneath our feet, lifting us, challenging us, propelling us, causing us to stumble, and on and on.

The rough ground is the world without the aura of contamination we pinned on it. To move is to allow ourselves to be moved, in all senses of the word.

Without the requirement that everything be the same, we are freed from the intolerable conflict that comes from living in our heads. We get to live in the world of others, where we see others are genuinely others.

We don’t have to look at being human as a problem. And without a problem, there’s no need for a solution.

The rough ground is rough — we will sometimes have a hard time staying upright. We will probably get lost. There might not always be a way through.

But if we don’t go back to it, we won’t know what a burden we were truly carrying. Turning everything to ice is a full time job.

Putting the world in a box ultimately puts us in one too. When we are sick of it, we have to return to the risk not knowing how everything fits together.

We have to “stick to matters of everyday thought,” Wittgenstein writes.
This is where we find ourselves able to breathe.
The outside world, paradoxically, is where we are free.

We thought we needed life to be totally within our grasp, completely reduced to one unbroken surface.

But what do we really need?

Images above are from the films Good Will Hunting (1997), Skating to New York (2014), and Old Joy (2006).

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