Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein approached, and circled, the question of the language within which we do philosophy, but did not address it directly. He didn’t see what conclusions should be drawn from such an examination.

 

I think about this often. I’m not a W scholar, but have read a good deal of him, and about him. I don’t know whether he made a mistake, or whether I have. It is possible that, despite his therapeutic recommendations, he was simply unable to face what an enquiry in this direction might produce. Academics, and particularly academic philosophers, are deeply committed to a certain view of the generality of their disciplines and their methods.

 

He spoke a good deal about mysticism, and mentioned ‘that of which we cannot speak’, but avoided the boundary between this and what we actually say. And yet it is exactly the exploration of this hinterland, the discovery and rediscovery of its rules and conflicts, that lends meaning to the rest – that shows us, by discovery and demonstration, that we cannot give a syntactical or a ‘correspondence’ account of truth and meaning. We can only discover these things in the course of our conversational experiments.

 

The central limitation that philosophers find hard to accept is that there cannot be a theory about how to do philosophy properly. Their core activity cannot be rendered intelligible by explicating its validity rules.

 

And yet the desire for intelligibility – in ourselves, in our interlocutors, and in the world – seems like the whole ground of rationality. If this is not an intelligible desire, then what is?

 

We have to attribute minimal intelligibility to any potential interlocutor, of course. And it is obvious that to be an interlocutor one must be intelligible. But there does not seem to be a categorical imperative to be an interlocutor? Maybe its easier to think ‘whereof we cannot speak’ than ‘to whomsoever we cannot speak’. This is the picket fence that bounds the jurisdiction of argument, beyond which the dragons roam.