It always
seemed intriguing to me that Wittgenstein, one of the twentieth century’s most
well-known, admired and quoted philosophers, is so barely understood. What I
mean is how is it possible to know exactly or even approximately what kind of
philosophical activity he developed through his texts, when we have so many
interpretations around: conceptual therapy, anti-philosophy, skepticism,
communitarianism, mathematical naturalism, moderate intuitionism, full-blooded
conventionalism, quietism, grammatical mapping of philosophical concepts? How
is it possible that experts arrived to such amount of divergent philosophical
views? But difficulty to fully understand his philosophy becomes really fascinating
if we noticed that many people do not even realize that they did not understand
him or his texts. Examples abound in this direction: Russell, Moore, Frege,
Ayer, Waismann, Marcuse, Dummett, etc., just to mention some philosophers from
the past.
Contrary to the first appearances,
Wittgenstein’s later texts are not properly obscure, in the plain sense of the
word, or even forged in a philosophical idiom of its own. And perhaps we can
also include the Tractatus, his first book, in that category.
Wittgenstein’s texts are composed in a fairly normal or colloquial language,
intersected with several dialogical situations where two or three voices
sometimes interact. But his compositions are rather condensed and come to any conclusion. The fact is that as long as such writing style may
present some challenges, it surely was not the first time in the world that
such thing happened in the literature. So what is exactly the problem, and from
where does it arise?
Difficulty to understand Wittgenstein is not
only a widespread and popular joke (cf. Felix Bennett in the Philosophers'
Magazine cover, 2006, issue 33), it was also a concern expressed a long time
ago by Maurice Drury (in Rhees, Rush (ed.). Recollections of
Wittgenstein, pp. 76-85), one of his former pupils and personal friend, and
something that Wittgenstein himself once acknowledged too (idem, p. 78). It is a
theme from a recently published book by James Klagge (Wittgenstein in Exile,
The MIT Press, 2011), and from an article published by Paul Horwich in The New
York Times (“Was Wittgenstein Right?”, The New York Times, 03/03/2013).
In this very sense, David Stern once
asked a strange question: “How many Wittgensteins?” (in A. Pichler, S. Säätelä
(eds.), Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and his Works, 2006, pp.
205–229). There are not only early and later Wittgensteins, apparently two
quite different persons, but also a skeptical and a theoretical irreconcilables
Wittgensteins, according to him.
I’m trying to work on this intriguing
problem that might be called, in the lack of a better name, philosophical
unawareness. It is possible that texts and their author are internally
related, so that the best way of reading is to understand them performatively, as someone trying to fulfill two hard conditions: a condition of authenticity, fighting philosophical illusions as a care of the self, and a condition of recognition, writing about his battles for an ideal and qualified reader.
All the texts, at least those written from 1929 to 1951, could also be
considered as a huge package of failed attempts to publish a book. Maybe one
single book, idealized in several different forms at different times, and ultimately
never published. Behind and connected to that large collection of unfinished
manuscripts and typescripts there is an author, someone whose stomach aches are
irrelevant to the reader except by the means that he envisioned to fight them (cf.
MS 136, p. 144a). Texts for the care of himself, so to say. The kind of
philosophical practice remembered by Pierre Hadot in regard to Ancient
Philosophy.1
I’m publishing now (February, 2016) a
book on those problems, entitled The
Singularity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Physiognomy of the
Text (in Portuguese, by Editora da Unicamp). Wittgenstein’s thinking is
presented there as expression of a kind of philosophical activity that has virtually
no place nowadays.
___________
1. Such similarity with Ancient Philosophy was
suggested to me by Yuri Zacra in personal conversation, but it is also
mentioned by James Conant in “Philosophy and Biography” in: Klagge, J. (ed.). Wittgenstein: Biography & Philosophy.
Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press, 2001, p. 20.
