I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein

I absolutely hated reading "On Certainty" but in a sort of good way I suppose. It is a frustrating experience that I wouldn't recommend to anyone. Wittgenstein spends a bulk of his effort on two questions, roughly, how can he say that the statement "I know my name is Ludwig Wittegenstein" is true, and how can he validate the truth of the statement "I know that is a tree" while looking at a tree. Both of those starting points end up in tail-chasing experiments. It is very stream of consciousness as it was actually compiled from his journals after his death and wasn't a book he was attempting to write. If feels like he is trying to grasp some deep meanings but I could sense his frustration when he realized his logic was at a dead end or when it was coming back on itself in a circle. Often he just abandons a line of thought mid sentence and you soon realize it is because he has once again stumbled upon one of a few consistently encountered dead ends. I've heard it described that "On Certainty" was some kind of proof that certainty is illusive. However, the book never proves anything. It's basically an insight into the mind of an extremely intelligent and well practiced philosopher banging his head against a problem that proves intractable.