Robert Vinten

The prominent literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, is one of a limited number of Marxist theorists to have taken Wittgenstein’s ideas seriously. He wrote the script for Derek Jarman’s film about Wittgenstein and his work in cultural theory is clearly indebted, to some extent, to Wittgenstein. His Ideology: an Introduction employs the Wittgensteinian notions of ‘family resemblance’ and ‘forms of life’ and he also leans on Wittgenstein’s remarks about epistemological matters in it. Among the novels inspired by Wittgenstein there is one by Eagleton—Saints and Scholars—that has a semi-fictionalised version of Wittgenstein meeting in Dublin with James Connolly, Nikolai Bakhtin and Leopold Bloom. Eagleton has clearly both endeavoured to understand Wittgenstein as a person and engaged with Wittgenstein’s philosophical work. In this paper I will argue that Eagleton’s interpretation of Wittgenstein, in his paper ‘Wittgenstein’s Friends’, is defective in various respects, but I will conclude that the project of uniting the insights of Wittgenstein and Marx is nonetheless a sound one.

I start by arguing that Mackie’s claim that there are no objective values is a nonsensical one. I do this by ‘assembling reminders’ of the correct use of the term ‘values’ and by examining the grammar of moral propositions à la Wittgenstein. I also examine Hare’s thought experiment which is used to demonstrate “that no real issue can be built around the objectivity or otherwise of moral values” before briefly looking at Mackie’s ‘argument from queerness’. In the final section I propose that Robert Arrington’s ‘conceptual relativism’, inspired by Wittgenstein, helps to make our use of moral language more perspicuous and avoids the problems faced by Mackie

ABSTRACT The question of whether Wittgenstein was a liberal philosopher has received less attention than the question of whether he was a conservative philosopher but, as Robert Greenleaf Brice has recently argued, there are hints of liberalism in some of his remarks, and some philosophers, like Richard Eldridge, have argued that a kind of liberalism follows from Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. Richard Rorty has also drawn liberal conclusions from a philosophical viewpoint which draws on Wittgenstein’s work and Alice Crary has suggested that the lessons learned from her own interpretation of Wittgenstein are “reflected in forms of social life that embody the ideals of liberal democracy”. Here I will argue both that Wittgenstein was not a liberal and that his philosophy does not imply a liberal viewpoint. The authors discussed here do not demonstrate that any broad ideological conclusions fol-low from Wittgenstein’s philosophical remarks. RESUMEN La pregunta si Wittgenstein fue un filósofo liberal ha recibido menos atención que la de si fue un filósofo conservador, pero, como Robert Greenleaf Brice ha defendido recientemente, hay muchos indicios de liberalismo en algunas de sus observaciones, y algunos filó-sofos, como Richard Eldridge, han sostenido que hay un cierto tipo de liberalismo que se sigue de la filosofía de su última etapa. Richard Rorty ha sacado también conclusiones libera-les a partir de la perspectiva filosófica que se basa en la obra de Wittgenstein y Alice Crary ha sugerido que las lecciones aprendidas de su propia interpretación de Wittgenstein se “reflejan en formas de vida social que incorporan los ideales de la democracia liberal”. En este artículo, voy a defender tanto que Wittgenstein no era un liberal como que su filosofía no implica una perspectiva liberal. Los autores de que se discuten aquí no prueban que de las observaciones filosóficas de Wittgenstein se desprendan amplias conclusiones ideológicas de ningún tipo.