November 18, 2021
THE ANGLOSPHERIC INSIGHT:
The Way Out of the Fly-Bottle: Wittgenstein's "Tractatus" at 100 (Jared Marcel Pollen, 11/07/21, Los Angeles Review of Books)
The terminal question of Wittgenstein's philosophy is whether our understanding of the world can ever step outside of language. If language is a kind of container for human experience, can that experience exceed it? The conclusion seems to be that it cannot. Language as the limit of the world is a constant, but whereas the Tractatus ends with a call for silence, the Investigations ends with an invitation to play. This is our "obligation to express," even if it proves futile. If Wittgenstein had truly believed that philosophy ended with the Tractatus, then the book's legacy is the challenge of discovering what you're left with after you've reached the end.
Many find this unbearable, so clutch Reason to their breasts, even though it has been disproven on its own terms. Others embrace fatalism/nihilism, determined that when we reach this point anything goes. The English-Speaking world, on the other hand, flips Reason the bird and gets on with life, recognizing that it never mattered much to begin with.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 18, 2021 7:16 AM