Wittgenstein in 1929 photograph in public domain Wikipedia
My appreciation of this philosopher was enhanced even more by the recent publication of his Private Notebooks: 1914-1916. These both precede and anticipate the Tractatus, showing its origins to lie in the author’s moral and religious struggles within his immediate family, as well as the upheavals in Central European culture preceding the First World War.
Of course it would be foolish to propose the entirety of Wittgenstein’s later writings are utterly informed -or even worse- defined by these notes. Nevertheless it is true to say that these early notes definitely owe more to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief than to any amount of post-Hegelian philosophy.
There were interpretations of Wittgenstein directly inspired by his musings about, and reverence for, Das Mystisch. D Z Phillips, for instance, was a noted philosopher of religion who supposed prayer to be a sort of contemplative language game. Nevertheless Philips did not suppose that religion, religious experience, or faith were keys to unlock the complexities of Wittgenstein’s philosophical musings.
As far as I can understand, since the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's philosophical stance was radically pluralist. Investigations is a plural word, like the word “games" as in language games. To this extent he reminds me of William James’ radical empiricism in A Pluralistic Universe of 1909 or the Essays in Radical Empiricism published a few years later. If there are indeed a plurality of universes how will human thought embrace this multiplicity without reducing it to some all embracing cognitive or imaginary principle? James partially addressed this dilemma by making his God finite. There could be no absolutes for James; but rather series of pluralities -which might better be termed "infinite provinces of meaning".
I write this because much contemporary philosophical activity displays a tendency to colonise disparate provinces of thought and reality. Even if there are “known unknowns” -like the unconscious theorised in various psychoanalytic theories- it is so tempting to suppose that my version of the “unknown” is far superior to, and explanatory of, the unknown of Others.
Intellectual systems that aspire to colonise concepts belonging to Others easily become repetitive, boring and dated -as well as annoying and dishonest. For Wittgenstein the remnants of world philosophical systems amounted to little more than “scraps” or leftovers. Importance lay elsewhere.
L Wittgenstein: Private Notebooks 1914-16. Translated by Perloff . Norton 2025.
D Z Phillips : The Concept of Prayer Routledge Revivals 2013
Alfred Schutz: On Phenomenology and Social Relations. University of Chicago Press 1999
No comments:
Post a Comment