blue and brown books

[this is from a bit of a letter i wrote to a philosophy pal of mine, we’re considering doing a directed reading together for our theses. this letter is a kind of case being made for wittgenstein being so important to me.]

Justin,
Facebook chess has been absolutely amazing by the way, I know I’m shit at it, but it’s still a lot of fun. Otherwise, I hope you’re keeping well.

I’m pretty excited about potentially working on something with/along side you next year. It’s been a bit difficult being away from school, and it’s upsetting that even more of the people I know and enjoy will be gone next year! In regards to Wittgenstein, I have no issues with telling you that it’s probably just a bit of a philosophy crush. For whatever reason, Wittgenstein just sticks with me. Although his outlook is somewhat original, and his methods of presentation, and the overall lore surrounding him is novel and interesting (both in terms of his ‘cult’ following, and otherwise) the ultimate ideas he presents and put forward are not very new at all. I think Wittgenstein is instead important because of the way in which he comes across these ideas, the context in which he is looking at them, and why he remains so difficult to read given the countless veins of thought that call him their originator. To me, he’s a bit like an Abraham, if I can put it so dramatically (and almost comically).

The central idea, and criticism that Wittgenstein has is that the external/internal divide is a misguided one. When speaking, when thinking, in terms of morality or metaphysics, everything we ‘get’ comes from the same ‘place’. This, supplemented with some interesting insight into the sceptical nature of consciousness and a nice articulation of ‘meaning as use’ is why, I think, he’s so interesting.

…

There isn’t any one decent way in to Wittgenstein. I took Dharamsi’s Analytic course, and for an entire term (when I would attend) I was EXTREMELY confused. It wasn’t until the second term when reading people like Robert Brandom [Articulating Reasons], or in Keenan’s Social and Political reading Charles Taylor [Malaise of Modernity] and Michael Sandel [Liberalism and the Limits of Justice], or Dharamsi’s Idealism class reading Hegel [Phenomenology of Spirit, Philosophy of Right] that things started finally adding up. I was able to pursue how this central idea of ‘Public Personhood’ (as I am only somewhat calling it right now) operates in the world, and how and why there is so much tension between the ideological camps of ‘right and left’.I’m sure that someone more meticulous than I am would be able to pick this through in a much more clear and concise way, and far too often I try to see how as a whole these ideas operate (furthermore, that meticulous person might very well find that this whole project is horseshit.)

My further reading has been T.H. Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics, Tom Rockmore’s Marx after Marxism, Collingwood’s Idea of History and the collection of papers ‘The New Wittgenstein’ ed. Alice Crary and Rupert Read. (above all else, I recommend reading along side of Wittgenstein after sinking your teeth in to Philosophical Investigations Book I, and the a bit of the Tractatus)

For me, Wittgenstein is like an idealist. In the same camp as Hegel and T.H. Green. But he is an idealist in such a way that he only opens up the world of ‘idealism’ to the analytic tradition at large, and doesn’t necessarily advance it. A way in which he is a peer of the analytic community, criticizing his own tradition for ‘getting it wrong’.

Sometimes I like to think that Frege sent Wittgenstein to England as a kind of anti-analytic plant, a malicious anti-representationalist trojan horse that would spring and corrupt all of Cambridge and thus, the analytic heart. But that’s just me wanting philosophy to be more dramatic than it is… wow i just realized that makes me look like a complete philosophy geek.

Okay! Hope your holidays went well, and I hope that this gives you some insight in to why I’m so interested in Wittgenstein. Either that, or you’re going to be entirely confused and scared off. Cheers!
/Aaron