File spoon-archives/aut-op-sy.archive/aut-op-sy_2001/aut-op-sy.0107, message 191


Date: Sun, 8 Jul 2001 23:35:31 +0100 (BST)
From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Scott=20Hamilton?= <s_h_hamilton-AT-yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: AUT: Wittgenstein follow-up


 


> > One of the modernist "Europe is sick" thinkers who
> receives special  attention from Hardt and Negri is
a bit of a  surprise: Ludwig  Wittgenstein.

I guess that here they would be talking about his
early work, which differs markedly from the later
stuff, even if it springs from the same basic
worldview. In particular, on the ethical remarks in
the Tractatus, which are heavily influenced by the
gloom merchant Schopenhauer.

> And that effort does indeed have an appearance of
> plausibility,
> if we focus only a few aspects of his thoughts.

One philosopher said 'citing Wittgenstein is the
philosophical equivalent of getting a character
reference from your Mum.' Because of the episodic and
aphoristic style his works take, it is pretty
difficult to pin Wittgenstien down to any one
position. However, a few broad generalisations can
probably be made confidently. I don't believe that the
later work, which is what the postmodernists seem to
pick up on, can be reconciled with the epistemological
nihilism of Derrida et al. In his very late work 'On
Certainty', for instance, Wittgenstein argues against
GE Moore that there are no statements which are true
by themselves, claiming that the apparent self-evident
truth of some statements is created by a network of
statements that reinforce each other, and beyond that
by a culture, a 'form of life' which confers meaning.
Wittgenstein certainly seems here to be a cultural
relativist, but there is a big difference between
cultural relativism and nihilism. A nihilist says
there is no truth, a relativist says there is a lot of
truths. Of course, cultural relativism can be as bad
in its own way as nihilism.

> > Andrews notes that according to someone who knew
> Wittgenstein well  in the  1930s, "he was opposed to
[Marxism] in theory, but supported it in  practice;"
and he is reported to have said: "I am  a communist,
at  heart"

I think Wittgenstein's interest in the Soviet Union
was based in a romantic nostalgia for a stable,
pre-industrial society, not na enthusiasm for Stalin's
society, nor any sort of socialism. Wittgenstein's
views are rooted in the late Austro-Hungarian milieu,
with its mysticism, distaste for science and
technology, and individualism. Wittgenstien never
dropped his hostility to science, nor did he show much
enthusiasm for the redistribution of income - when he
gave away his fortune, he chose to give it to artists
and the already-rich, because he didn't want to
'corrupt' the poor! You get a good characterisation of
the 'modernist' milieu Wittgenstein's attitudes came
out of in a book called '1910: the Emancipation of
Dissonance' by Thomas Harrison. This book also
includes discussions of the early, pre-Marxist work of
Lukacs.


> > The impact of the theory of Marxism on
Wittgensteins philosophy is  also  mixed. 

I think it is possible to get the foundations of a
materialist methodolgy for the study of society out of
late Wittgenstein. This is what a group of social
scientists known often as the 'Edinburgh School' or
the 'Strong Programme in the Sociology of Knowledge'
have done - in books like David Bloor's 'Knowledge and
Social Imagery' Wittgenstein has been cast as the
half-conscious inventor of a new, positivistic model
for the social sciences. Marx - or a reading of Marx -
is also a key influence on these people. A book which
makes an even more explicit link between late
Wittgenstein and Marx is David Rubenstein's 'Marx and
Wittgenstein', which I think came out in the early
80s. It's a long time since I read it, so I won't
comment on this book, except to say that it is worth
reading (again?).

Cheers
Scott

 
--- 

====For "a ruthless criticism of every existing idea":
THR-AT-LL, NZ's class struggle anarchist paper http://www.freespeech.org/thrall/
THIRD EYE, a Kiwi lib left project, at http://www.geocities.com/the_third_eye_website/
and 'REVOLUTION' magazine, a Frankfurt-Christchurch production, http://cantua.canterbury.ac.nz/%7Ejho32/

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