05-08-2003, 09:42 PM
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#1
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Banned
Join Date: Apr 2002
Location: Canada
Posts: 1,234
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Marx and Wittgenstein
Quote:
For Marx, very famously, the point was to change the world, not merely to describe it, as philosophers do / had done. For Wittgenstein, perhaps likewise, philosophy can, famously, only describe, and leaves the world 'as it is' -- though what exactly that means, I will discuss later.
But then, we are immediately inclined to ask, of these unusual ('limited') visions of the nature and power of philosophy: what is the status of Marx's (or Wittgenstein's) own discourse? Are Wittgenstein and Marx describing, when they say these things; or what?
Here is Harry Redner:
"Marx was the first major thinker to have explicitly undertaken the destruction of metaphysics on the basis of a new conception of language... . The destruction of metaphysics and the creation of a new concept of language went hand in hand in Marx's philosophy and that of the other Faustians [Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Wittgenstein]. Language was discovered as its metaphysical cover was dissolved. Marx begins by noting that metaphysics is language concealed:
"The philosophers would only have to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world, and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life."
In this passage there are already all the terms and turns that will play such a prominent part in subsequent Faustian destructions of metaphysics."1
Indeed; what fascinates here, in the present context, is the strikingly Wittgensteinian tenor of the nested remark, especially of its first half. For Marx is not simply saying that philosophical language becomes propagandistic ideological language in its propositions and in its effects; he is saying that the language itself -- not only what is said in it -- is a 'distortion'. (He is saying, we might say, that philosophical language is...alienated.)
When we recognize in this remark of Marx's an anticipation of Wittgenstein and/or of so-called Ordinary Language Philosophy -- which is to say, in part, that we recognize this remark because of our familiarity with a view we know of as fully developed elsewhere, i.e. that we have already tacitly re-framed Marx in the light of our knowledge of Wittgenstein & co. -- we can begin to appreciate the depth of the problem of the status of philosophical discourse itself, especially that of Marxians or Wittgensteinians. For, as Redner continues:
"Marx characteristically overreaches himself and speaks too sharply of a general 'dissolution of philosophy', not distinguishing too sharply between 'philosophy' and 'metaphysics', and he was unknowingly followed in this by the other Faustian thinkers, who frequently presented their critiques as attacks on philosophy itself."
I have argued elsewhere (in my "The real philosophical discovery", Philosophical Investigations, 1995, on which I draw here) that the problem Redner identifies can be solved, at least in Wittgenstein’s case. But the solution is radical.
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http://www.humboldt.edu/~essays/read
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Only 80 footnotes
