Abstract
Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language may be read as a dialogic-agonal exchange with his precursor Nietzsche in their endeavors to demystify language-use. Wittgenstein’s contradictory relationship to Nietzsche has its origins in his borrowings from Fritz Mauthner. Nietzsche’s and Wittgenstein’s transvaluations of language occur most vividly via the metaphor of vision, semiological relationality, rules and the will.
Zusammenfassung
Wittgensteins Sprachphilosophie läßt sich als dialogisch-agonaler Austausch mit seinem Vorläufer Nietzsche verstehen, insofern als beide an der Entmystifizierung der Sprache arbeiteten. Wittgensteins widerspruchsvolle Beziehung zu Nietzsche resultiert aus seinen von Fritz Mauthner übernommenen Gedanken. Die Umwertung der Sprache bei Nietzsche und bei Wittgenstein vollzieht sich vornehmlich über die Metaphorik des Sehens, in semiologischer Relationalität sowie in der Rolle der Regeln und des Willens.
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References
Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally & Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin, New York 1959.
Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington & Brian Massumi, Minneapolis 1984.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence. A Theory of Poetry, New York 1973.
An exception to this is Tracy B. Strong’s discussion of the anti-prejudicial move by Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, in Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, 2nd ed., Berkeley 1988, 78–86.
There is also Erich Heller’s 1965 study of the existential rapport between Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, in which he states that although it would be “absurd to represent Wittgenstein as a latter-day Nietzsche”, the two philosophers share the “creative mistrust of all those categorical certainties that, as if they were an inherited anatomy, have been allowed to determine the body of traditional thought” (The Importance of Nietzsche, Chicago 1988, 150). References are also made by Joseph Peter Stern (Nietzsche, Sussex 1978, 147), and Elrud Kunne-Ibsch’s Die Stellung Nietzsches in der Entwicklung der modernen Literaturwissenschaft, Tübingen 1972, 13–14.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden, New York 1988, 26.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. Georg Henrik von Wright, trans. Peter Winch, Chicago 1980, 9.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden, ed. Giorgio Colli, Mazzino Montinari, Munich 1980, II, 146–147. All references to Nietzsche’s works are documented in the text with volume and page number. Translations of Nietzsche are my own, unless indicated.
For discussions of Schopenhauer’s influence on Nietzsche, see Claudia Crawford’s The Beginnings of Nietzsche’s Theory of Language, Berlin, New York 1988, 22–36, 95–104,179–192.
Cf. David Weiner for an analysis of Wittgenstein ’s reception of Schopenhauer, in Genius and Talent: Schopenhauer’s Influence on Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy, Rutherford, 1992.
Fritz Mauthner, Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 3 vols., Leipzig 1923, and Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Neue Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache, 2 vols., Munich, Leipzig 1910.
Although Mauthner in his Beiträge distinguishes his own approach from that of Nietzsche (cf. I, 364–372), his metaphoric base of language is most Nietzschean: “Jedes einzelne Wort ist geschwängert von seiner eigenen Geschichte, jedes einzelne Wort trägt in sich eine endlose Entwicklung von Metapher zu Metapher” (1,115). In the introduction to his Wörterbuch, Mauthner states: “… die skeptische Resignation, die Einsicht in die Unerkennbarkeit der Wirklichkeit, ist keine bloße Negation, ist unser bestes Wissen; die Philosophie ist eine Erkenntnistheorie, Erkenntnistheorie ist Sprachkritik; Sprachkritik aber ist die Arbeit an dem befreienden Gedanken, daß die Menschen mit den Wörtern ihrer Sprachen und mit den Worten ihrer Philosophien niemals über eine bildliche Darstellung der Welt hinaus gelangen können” (xi). Cf. Elizabeth Bredeck’s article, “Fritz Mauthners Nachlese zu Nietzsche’s Sprachkritik”, Nietzsche-Studien 13 (1984), 587–599
and also the discussion of Mauthner in Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna, New York 1973, 120–133.
Aristotle, Poetics, Basic Works, ed. Richard Mckeon, New York 1941, 1455–1487, here: 1457
Stanley Cavell has remarked of the necessity for this corrective enterprise: “For Wittgenstein, philosophy comes to grief not in denying what we all know to be true, but in its effort to escape those human forms of life which alone provide the coherence of our expression” (Must We Mean What We Say?, New York 1976, 61).
As a possibility of the es denkt recommended by Nietzsche, see Lorna Martens’ discussion of the non-self-objectifying “expressive” mode of language in Wittgenstein, in The Diary Novel, New York 1985, 44.
Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, New York 1960, 67.
Plato, Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton, Huntingdon Cairns, New Jersey 1973, 748.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, I, Stuttgart 1987, III, §36.
Jacques Derrida, “White Mythology,” Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago 1982, 228, 251.
Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton 1979, 13.
Edmund Husserls phenomenological theory of “intuition” may be seen as the last Platonist attempt to intimate pure consciousness of meaning directly through the use of a prelinguistic, transparent imagination; see Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay, London 1970, I, § 8, 278–280. Derrida undermines this approach in Speech and Phenomena, trans. David B. Allison, Chicago 1973, 32–47.
Major critical studies on Wittgenstein’s demythologizing of the image are: Mary Warnock’s Imagination, London 1976
W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Wittgenstein’s Imagery and What It Tell Us”, New Literary History 19/2 (1988), 361–370, and “What Is An Image?”, New Literary History 15/3 (1984), 503–537
Alan Thiher’s Words in Reflection: Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction, Chicago 1984
and Alan White’s The Language of the Imagination, Cambridge 1990.
Cf. Michael Morton’s The Critical Turn: Studies in Kant, Herder, Wittgenstein, and Contemporary Theory, Detroit 1993, for a discussion of how Wittgenstein always adheres to the context of a speech-act or activity. Morton warns against losing the “distinctive features of the particular context in which a given activity… may be occurring” (53), and supports Wittgenstein’s “theme of contextual determination” for definable sets of meaning in language (200).
Cf. Wittgenstein ’s posthumous, Goethe-inspired Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, Berkeley 1977, as a text which is less a visual study than a discussion distinguishing imaginable from non-imaginable colors as the verbally conceivable and the verbally inconceivable. The non-imaginable in color is renamed as an unknown “Wortgebrauch” (III, § 123).
There would appear to be, as a result, at least two “Wittgensteins” as far as the American academic field is concerned, one conceptual and the other metaphorical. Influential in the former camp are: Stanley Cavells The Claim of Reason. Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality, and Tragedy, New York 1979
Saul Kripke’s Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language, Cambridge, Ma. 1982
and Charles Altieri’s anti-Derridean “Wittgenstein on Consciousness and Language: A Challenge to Derridean Literary Theory”, MLN 91/6 (1976), 1397–1423.
Pro-Derridean readings have been enacted by Christopher Norris in The Deconstructive Turn: Essays in the Rhetoric of Philosophy, New York 1983
and Henry Staten in Wittgenstein and Derrida, Lincoln 1984.
There is a tendency to imitate Wittgenstein’s style in the former group, and to import Derrida’s style onto Wittgenstein in the latter. See also the exchange over Wittgenstein and deconstruction that has arisen between Staten and John M. Ellis in New Literary History 19 (1988). Marcus Bullock’s insightful article assesses this debate and adds an interesting Benjaminian angle: “Receiving Ludwig Wittgenstein”, boundary 2 17/3 (1990), 69–94. However, the real disciplinary divide over Wittgenstein in American academe is so acute that there is an unfortunate lack of communication between the actual institutional “sides”. Michael Morton, in The Critical Turn, refreshingly attempts to bridge this gap.
Victor Shklovsky, in his 1917 essay, “Art as Technique”, explains the device of ostraneye as a technique of anti-representational art that makes familiar objects “unfamiliar”, and promotes the process of perception as an aesthetic end in itself; in: David H. Richter (ed.), The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, New York 1989, 738–748, here: 741f.
Cf. Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play”, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago 1978, 292.
Cf. Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis 1984, 41. But see Terry Eagleton’s critique of Lyotard, in The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Cambridge 1990, for having misappropriated the later Wittgenstein in an effort toward absolute anti-prescriptivism - which Eagleton finds unrealistic and full of Sophistry: “Lyotard claims that each language game must be conducted in its autonomous singularity, its purity scrupulously preserved. Injustice comes about when one such lan guage game imposes itself upon another. There is no recollection here of Wittgenstein’s insistence on those complex ‘family resemblances’ which, like the overlapping fibres of a rope, interweave our various language games in real but non-essentialistic ways” (397).
Wittgenstein ’s Lectures on Aesthetics (1939) are on aesthetic taste and reception, not on active creativity, and so are not extendable to language innovation.
Cf. Elizabeth Bredeck on Mauthner’s tendency to contradict himself with respect to the notion of power in the social language-game: Metaphors of Knowledge: Language and Thought in Mauthner’s Critique, Detroit 1992, 64–75.
Such self-reflexivity dissolves the subject-object duality present in Schopenhauer ’s theory of inspiration: cf. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, Stuttgart 1987, I, 300.
Cf. Adrian Del Caro’s analysis of Nietzsche’s preference for the struggles of homo natura over the theorizing idealist: “The Hermeneutics of Idealism: Nietzsche versus the French Revolution”, Nietzsche-Studien 22 (1993), 158–64, here: 162f.
Friedrich Kittler relates Nietzsche’s physiological understanding of language to his nineteenth-century contemporaries in cultural physiology: see his “Nietzsche (1844–1900)”, in: Horst Turk (ed.), Klassiker der Literaturtheorie, Munich 1979, 191–205: “Distinktion aber ist die notwendige und hinreichende Bestimmung einer Zeichenmenge, wenn Zeichen nicht mehr nur repräsentieren. Zur selben Epoche, da die Physiologen (Helmholtz, Fechner) Schwellwerte der Sinnenrezeption ermitteln, beschreibt Nietzsche eine Sinnenproduktion von Differenzen und Intensitäten” (203).
Here one could posit Walter Benjamin on Nietzsche’s side when it comes to the art of criticism: “Wer nicht Partei ergreifen kann, der hat zu schweigen” (Einbahnstraße, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a.M. 1972, IV. 1, 108).
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I would like to thank the following scholars for their helpful observations on this paper: Walter H. Sokel, Lorna Martens, Allan Megill and Benjamin Bennett.
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Lungstrum, J. Wittgenstein and Nietzsche Agonal Relations in Language. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 69, 300–323 (1995). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374568
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03374568