This is curious.

If language is our primary tool for understanding the world, why would he place such value on activities that seem to operate mostly beyond language?

The usual answers are familiar. We are told that he disliked academia, admired craftsmen, valued simplicity, distrusted intellectual pretension, or sought moral discipline. None of these explanations seems completely wrong, but none seems sufficient either.

Many dislike academia. Few leave Cambridge for a workshop.

Scholars have proposed moral, religious, psychological, educational and philosophical reasons. Yet I have never found a text in which Wittgenstein simply explains why manual work mattered to him.

For someone who considered emigrating to the Soviet Union as a labourer, that silence is rather remarkable.

He argues that our own hands are, in a sense, strangers to ourselves. Much of what they do never reaches conscious awareness. Consider something as simple as picking up a cup. The movement involves position, force, balance, anticipation and continuous adjustment. Yet we simply pick up the cup. The conscious mind sees only the result.

I have never met a plasterer who could adequately explain what he was doing or how he was doing it. Yet some of these men could produce walls and ceilings of astonishing quality.

Ask a cabinet maker how he knows a particular joint will work. Ask a stonemason how he reads a block of stone. Ask a tiler why one layout feels balanced while another does not. The answers are often shockingly inadequate.

This is not because craftsmen are ignorant. On the contrary, their work would be impossible without knowledge. The difficulty is that part of this knowledge appears to exist in a form that resists articulation.

It does not teach this lesson through arguments. No one explains it. It simply becomes increasingly difficult to avoid. Certain realities – responsibility, patience, beauty, trust, even failure itself – do not stand opposite us as objects to be analysed. We already live inside them.

Discursive thought remains indispensable, but the workshop has a way of reminding us that thought itself exists within a larger reality that must first be lived.

There is a remarkable consistency in linking integrity and meaning with simplicity and practical work. Plotinus, monastic traditions, William Morris, Schumacher, the Amish and Wittgenstein himself differ enormously in their beliefs.

Yet they seem to share a suspicion of lives that become too dispersed.

Doctors speak about treating the patient in front of them. Christians speak about the duty immediately before them. Craftsmen concern themselves with the work on the bench.

The horizon becomes smaller, not because reality has become smaller, but because meaning has moved closer.

An idea becomes an action. The action produces a result. The result corrects the idea. Thought, action and responsibility remain connected.

Yet perhaps the silence itself is revealing.

If philosophy is a way of being, and not a collection of explanations, then perhaps Wittgenstein regarded an explicit theory as the wrong kind of answer.

Instead of explaining the importance of manual work, he repeatedly returned to it. The answer, if there was one, was not written down. It was lived.