Rupert Read

This text offers major re-evaluation of Wittgenstein's thinking. It is a collection of essays that presents a significantly different portrait of Wittgenstein. The essays clarify Wittgenstein's modes of philosophical criticism and shed light on the relation between his thought and different philosophical traditions and areas of human concern. With essays by Stanley Cavell, James Conant, Cora Diamond, Peter Winch and Hilary Putnam, we see the emergence of a new way of understanding Wittgenstein's thought. This is a controversial collection, with essays by highly regarded Wittgenstein scholars that may change the way we look at Wittgenstein's body of work.

James Klagge aims to shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy by situating it in its biographical–cultural context. While Klagge is not alone in pursuing this aim, his claim to originality lies in his thematic focus on Wittgenstein’s relationship to his time and culture as one of “alienation” (3), expressed by the metaphor of being “in exile” (61). A central concern of Klagge’s is how we, as modern readers living in a “civilized” culture not dissimilar to the one from which Wittgenstein felt himself estranged, can hope to understand the philosophical writings of such a radically distant “other.” Klagge’s suggestion is that through acknowledging and engaging with just how different Wittgenstein was, we can ..

I argue that the language of some schizophrenic persons is akin to the language of Benjy in Williams Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, in one crucial respect: Faulkner displays to us language that, ironically, cannot be translated or interpreted into sense... without irreducible 'loss' or 'garbling.' The same is true of famous schizophrenic writers, such as Renee and Schreber. Such 'garbling' is of an odd kind, admittedly: it is a garbling that inadvisably turns nonsense into sense.... Faulkner's language is a language of paradox, of nonsense masquerading beautifully as sense. When this language works, it generates the powerful illusion that we can make sense of the 'life-world' of a young child or an 'idiot'—or a sufferer from chronic schizophrenia. But this remains, contrary to Louis Sass's claims, an illusion. Thus, drawing on the thinking of Wittgenstein (his On Certainty, especially, with its incisive critique of the very idea of being able to make claims or statements from within a sufficiently altered [non]state of mind) and of the Wittgensteinian literary critic James Guetti (who critiques the very idea of 'deranged language' being paraphrased into sense), I argue that the most impenetrable cases of schizophrenia may be cases not of a sense being made that we cannot grasp, nor of a different form of life, but, despite appearances, of no sense, no form of life, at all. This is an option that has not really been considered in the literature of/on psychopathology to date. And it can be tentatively established, not through a dubious scientism, but through a careful attention to the literature of the insane and the literature of Modernism.

A Wittgensteinian Way with Paradoxes examines how some of the classic philosophical paradoxes that have so puzzled philosophers over the centuries can be dissolved. Read argues that paradoxes such as the Sorites, Russell’s Paradox and the paradoxes of time travel do not, in fact, need to be solved. Rather, using a resolute Wittgensteinian ‘therapeutic’ method, the book explores how virtually all apparent philosophical paradoxes can be diagnosed and dissolved through examining their conditions of arising; to loosen their grip and therapeutically liberate those philosophers suffering from them (including oneself). The book contrasts such paradoxes with real, ‘lived paradoxes’: paradoxes that are genuinely experienced outside of the philosopher’s study, in everyday life. Thus Read explores instances of lived paradox (such as paradoxes of self-hatred and of denial of other humans’ humanity) and the harm they can cause, psychically, morally or politically. These lived paradoxes, he argues, sometimes cannot be dissolved using a Wittgensteinian treatment. Moreover, in some cases they do not need to be: for some, such as the paradoxical practices of Zen Buddhism (and indeed of Wittgenstein himself), can in fact be beneficial. The book shows how, once philosophers’ paradoxes have been exorcized, real lived paradoxes can be given their due.

If one is impressed with Wittgenstein's philosophizing, then it is a deep mistake to think that the terms that he made famous-philosophical terms like 'form of life', 'language-game', 'everyday', 'bedrock'-are the key to his philosophy. On the contrary, they are in the end an obstacle to be overcome. The last temptation of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is to treat these terms as providing a kind of ersatz foundation. They are rather a ladder that takes one... to where one already is, only now undeluded. Provided, that is, that one throws them away, at the first sign that one feels oneself to be securely grounded by-or holding onto-them