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/ ____________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free -AT-yahoo.co.uk address at http://mail.yahoo.co.uk or your free -AT-yahoo.ie address at http://mail.yahoo.ie --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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