Language matters to us in philosophy because reality matters to us. If, as we say in Recherches philosophiques, in philosophy we must guard against the constant temptation to predicate of the thing what resides in the mode of representation, it is because what interests us is reality itself, and not what language apparently obliges us to suppose or believe about it.
By "realism", I mean the conviction that between thought or language, on the one hand, and reality, on the other, there is no distance more fundamental and more worrying than that which consists in the possibility of thoughts and propositions being false. What Wittgenstein says on this point is completely at odds with Bergson's idea that thought itself has already inherently introduced a distance between reality and us, and that only direct intuition would be capable of delivering facts to us.
