Wittgenstein’s Liberatory Philosophy (original) (raw)

Overcoming Over-Reliance on ' The Bedrock'?: On PI 217 279 Contents x Contents 10 The Anti-' Private-Language' Considerations as a Fraternal and Freeing Ethic: Towards a Re-Reading of PI 284-309 11 Conclusion: (A) Liberating Philosophy 327 Bibliography Index A human being is imprisoned in a room, if the door is unlocked but opens inwards; he, however, never gets the idea of pulling instead of pushing against it. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value (C&V) If there is a book that I have in me that really ' captures' what I have to say about and to offer from Wittgenstein, it is this book. This book is, if you will, my life's work on his work. This book has been the hardest to write of anything I've yet written. Close-reading Wittgenstein's work imposes on one a great discipline. But it's also been the most joyful because, I think, of the great freedom I have found in the vision of Wittgenstein's way of working that has come to me in the long course of writing this book. This book is inspired and informed above all by the later Gordon Baker's method, including as taken up by Katherine Morris. In a way, its inspiration goes back to listening to Baker's joint lectures with Hacker at Oxford from 1986 onward-and realising with shock and interest that they no longer agreed so much, because Baker was moving away from the ' Baker-and-Hacker' vision. This book is also deeply inspired by my teachers Cora Diamond and James Conant, 1 and more generally by the project of reading Wittgenstein's oeuvre resolutely, a project that I sought to help focus, by putting together The New Wittgenstein (TNW) (2000) collection, two decades ago now, for, while I am closer to Baker than to anyone else in terms of my thinking on the later Wittgenstein (as can be seen from the amount I quote and reference his book in this book, second only to the amount I use Philosophical Investigations (PI) (1958) itself), and while I find deeply encouraging the extent to which his vision of Wittgenstein's method overlaps or coincides with the project of reading resolutely Wittgenstein's later work, I believe, following Wittgenstein himself, that the later Wittgenstein can only be understood properly against the background of the early Wittgenstein, properly and sympathetically understood: and making the latter available in this way is probably the greatest achievement of Diamond, Conant et al. 2 Preface and Acknowledgements xii Preface and Acknowledgements More briefly, the late Stanley Cavell was also my teacher, and I owe a signal debt to him too, I hope. His name is found less in these pages than those of Conant and Diamond, let alone Baker, but this is perhaps because of how very close I am to him in certain key respects; it is as if his attitude to Wittgenstein almost saturates some of my thinking. I'll highlight one example here which is important methodologically in what follows: Cavell's emphasis on Wittgenstein seeing ' proof' is as much a ' literary' as a logical category. The task of convincing others of something is intrinsically aesthetic; this is not an inessentiality or something to be regretted. I have also been influenced more recently by the fascinating work of Hannes Nykanen and Joel Backstrom. As I was creating the orientation to Wittgenstein's work to be found herein, it was a joy to discover that they were creating a somewhat similar orientation. In particular, there is a profound point of connection between my conception and theirs, in the emphasis throughout this book on the 2nd person as an alternative to the clapped-out debate between ' subjective' and ' objective' approaches to philosophy, and in the cognate emphasis that develops increasingly through the text below on (liberatory) philosophy as ethics, an ethics of relationality. This book has been profoundly influenced by the work that Phil Hutchinson and I have co-published together over the past 15 or so years. Much of this is referred to, and on occasion quoted, throughout the book. The book also reflects much work that we undertook together and had hoped to publish together, but in the end did not. This applies primarily to parts of Chapters 1-3 and also to the portion of Chapter 4 on 122 (a small portion of which is reworked from our published paper " Towards a perspicuous presentation of ' perspicuous presentation'" (Hutchinson & Read 2008)). My debt to Phil Hutchinson is immense, the most immense of all; it is not calculable by me. Deep gratitude also to those who read my manuscript in full, and provided wonderful, at times transformative commentary on it: especially Katherine Morris, Andrew Norris, Duncan Richter, Ryan Dawson, and three anonymous referees. 3 Deep gratitude also to my PhD students across the years who have worked with me on this material, especially Joshua Smith and Anton Leodolter, with whom I have walked a soteriological and ethical-aesthetic path of reading Wittgenstein. This book includes a reworking of some previously published material that I sole-authored: Early in Chapter 4, the treatment of ordinary use is based loosely on a small part of my chapter " Ordinary/ everyday language" (Read 2010a), which is here heavily revised. Within Chapter 5, the treatment of 133 is based loosely on part of my paper " The real philosophical discovery" (Read 1995), which is here heavily revised.