PHILOSOPHICAL UNAWARENESS João José R. L. De Almeida
[email protected] The Singularity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Physiognomy of the Text. (in Portuguese: Editora da Unicamp, February 2016). 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 notice 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 their 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 no conclusion whatsoever. 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. 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. 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.
