‘Now I can go on:’ Wittgenstein and our embodied embeddedness in the ‘Hurly-Burly’ of life

Abstract

Wittgenstein is not primarily concerned with anything mysterious going on inside people's heads, but with us simply ‘going on’ with each other; that is, with us being able to inter-relate our everyday, bodily activities in unproblematic ways in with those of others, in practice. Learning to communicate with clear and unequivocal meanings; to send messages; to fully understand each other; to be able to reach out, so to speak, from within language-game entwined forms of life, and to talk in theoretical terms of the contacts one has made., as an individual, with what is out there; and so on — all these abilities are, or can be, later developments. Wittgenstein's investigations into our pre-individual, pre-theoretical, embodied, compulsive activities are utterly revolutionary. They open up a vast new realm for empirical study to do with the detailed and subtle nature of the bodily activities in the ‘background’ to everything that we do. The relational character of such pre-theoretical, Ur-linguistic, spontaneous bodily activities—and the way in which they display us as ‘seeing connections’ from within a ‘synopsis of trivialities’ — is explored through the paradigm of currently fashionable 3–13 random dot autostereograms.