<\/p>
Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on The Literary Wittgenstein <\/i> (edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) in the April 29 issue of the TLS. There are a number of highlights: <\/p>\n
1) Eagleton sets Wittgenstein firmly in the glitzy, kitchy world of Vienna. \u201cThe place,\u201d he writes, \u201cwas a cockpit of magnificent art and appalling kitsch, glutted with waltzes, whipped cream, chocolate cake and high culture.\u201d In reaction, Wittgenstein pursued a \u201cmonkish austerity,\u201d eschewing material possessions and, especially in the Tractatus <\/i> , reaching for purity, a philosoph that was \u201cchaste, lean, disciplined and translucent\u201d (Eagleton\u2019s description of logical positivism). <\/p>\n
2) Eagleton interestingly contrasts Wittgenstein to the Russian Formalists. For the latter, the purpose of art was to \u201cdefamiliarize,\u201d to make the familiar seem strange or to capture the genuine strangeness lurking beneath the surface of the normal. Wittgenstein saw strangeness as the problem from which philosophy was designed to deliver us: \u201cIt is a sense of estrangement \u2013 of vertigo, bewitchment, out-of-placeness [one is almost tempted to say \u2018thrownness\u2019 -PJL] \u2013 which the therapy known as philosophy seeks to overcome, revealing to us what was always in place and which . . . we somehow knew without knowing it, all along. For Wittgenstein, as for Sartre, philosophy begins in a kind of existential angst.\u201d Hence, Wittgenstein, \u201cthis religious devotee of the commonplace,\u201d inspires novelists and artists because he is searching with them for \u201cspiritual secrets, auras of mystery and hidden depths.\u201d <\/p>\n
3) The comparison to Sartre raises the suggestion that Wittgenstein is more Germanic than his \u201cvery Oxbridge aversion to grand narratives and abstract theories\u201d would suggest. Eagleton suggests that beneath the surface is a strain in Wittgenstein\u2019s thought \u201ccloser to Heidegger than to J. L. Austin.\u201d While his style aims at clarity, his thought does not follow in lockstep, and particularly after The Philosophical Investigations <\/i> he turned his attention to \u201cthe rough ground of our ambiguous, fuzzy-edged practices.\u201d <\/p>\n
4) In this respect, Eagleton suggests also another affinity between Wittgenstein and artists: \u201cIt is [his] nose for the density and irregularity of things, their distinctive, untotalizable tones and textures, that links Wittgenstein\u2019s thought to the great European tradition of realist fiction.\u201d Eagleton places Wittgenstein among philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Benjamin and Adorno, all of whom \u201cwere skeptical of the whole genre of philosophizing as they found it, and like avant-garde artists could say what they meant only by inventing a different sort of discourse altogether.\u201d This places Wittgenstein in the midst of another tradition, that of literary modernism, in that he \u201cliked his thoughts to jump around rather than being forced into a linear pattern. In this respect, he was closer to Molly Bloom or Mrs Dalloway than to A. J. Ayer.\u201d For Wittgenstein, like a poet, form and content were inseparably connected. <\/p>\n
5) Wittgenstein is attractive to artists and writers because he shares their wariness of \u201cphilosophy\u2019s anaemic abstractions.\u201d Eagleton\u2019s summary is stimulating: \u201cArt is nothing if not fleshly, embodying ideas rather than denoting them; and Wittgenstein\u2019s effort to persuade us out of the dualistic view that the soul lurks within the body, that I can know my own experiences directly but only infer yours, or that meaning is a ghostly process in our heads, represents a singularly incarnational project . . . . Literature, one might claim, is that anti-Cartesian phenomenon, public experience. Like writers, too, Wittgenstein understands that language is not a mirror but a social practice in its own right, with its own material thickness.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Terry Eagleton reviews a new book on The Literary Wittgenstein (edited by John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer) in the April 29 issue of the TLS. There are a number of highlights: 1) Eagleton sets Wittgenstein firmly in the glitzy, kitchy world of Vienna. \u201cThe place,\u201d he writes, \u201cwas a cockpit of magnificent art and appalling […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3021,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"yoast_head":"\n