Steven Affeldt

The number and variety of images of reading in the Investigations suggest that, for Wittgenstein, reading is an essential part of our natural history and of the human form of life. Further, his treatments of reading show that different forms of reading express and sustain different forms of life. This essay explores what the Investigations reveals as the existential stakes of different modes of reading. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s opening engagement with Augustine, it argues that in the Investigations, as in the Confessions, different modes of reading both bespeak, and open us to, blessed or cursed forms of life. It then develops extended interpretations of individual passages in order to detail some specific shapes of, and conditions governing, modes of reading tied to these blessed or cursed forms of life. Finally, given these existential stakes of reading, it examines how the Investigations itself asks to be read and outlines specific ways in which its notorious difficulty and obscurity are essential to achieving its philosophical aims and, in particular, to promoting an ongoing practice of reading through which we are able to awaken to the wonder of our lives in language.

In Philosophical Myths of the Fall, Stephen Mulhall argues that Wittgenstein’s Investigations harbors genuinely redemptive ambitions, but necessarily fails to achieve them. For him, Wittgenstein’s correct identification of the condition from which redemption is required—a structural flaw in human nature akin to the Christian idea of Original Sin—itself militates against the success of any redemptive efforts that, like Wittgenstein’s, do not rely on a divine source. Mulhall’s argument is a tour de force that seeks to read Wittgenstein through both Christian and Cavellian interpretive frames. However, there are deep tensions between these frames, and Cavell’s work provides good reasons to resist the view of Wittgenstein that Mulhall develops. In this essay, I draw on Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein to contest Mulhall’s argument and to suggest that his Christian interpretive frame is ultimately more distorting than illuminating. However, while my focus is largely critical, my overall aim is positive; it is to use the examination of Mulhall’s argument to open more hopeful paths for thinking of the work of the Investigations as redemptive.

This work will be of interest to, and should be studied by, a wider audience than its title may initially suggest. The bulk of the work is devoted to Nietzsche’s early philological writings, primarily his unpublished essays, notes, and sketches from the late 1860s to early 1870s and The Birth of Tragedy. Each of the five chapters following its substantial Introduction explores some single aspect of these writings, and they center respectively on Nietzsche’s “Homer and Classical Philology,” his never completed study of Democritus, his studies on ancient rhythm and meter, his “Encyclopedia of Classical Philology,” and The Birth of Tragedy —although this final chapter ranges over a wider array of materials than do the others. Porter’s provocative readings of these texts convincingly demonstrate the need for more attention to this largely neglected area of Nietzsche’s writing.

How might we think about relationships between philosophy as a way of life and the domain of the political? Or, since there are clearly, and importantly, multiple understandings of philosophy as a way of life and multiple aspects of the domain of the political, let me put my question somewhat more narrowly as: How might we think about relationships between the kind of ongoing work of self-cultivation and self-transformation which has been at least one continuing dimension of philosophy in the West from its beginning and the existence, realities, and responsibilities of social life?

The dissertation consists of three essays titled respectively: "The Citizen as The Legislator: The Conversation of Constitution in Rousseau's The Social Contract," "On Speaking and Sharing Language: The Grounds of Intelligibility in Stephen Mulhall's Stanley Cavell," "Paths to the Other: Reading as Philosophy and as Therapy in Freud's "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva"." ;Beyond an overarching concern with the conditions of mutual intelligibility, with developing accounts of different kinds of efforts which are required in order to arrive at mutual intelligibility, and with understanding the nature of various impediments to mutual intelligibility, central themes and concepts developed within the dissertation include: the nature and origin of society; Rousseau's general will; law and the introduction of law into human existence; the loss of the humanity of the human; attaining humanity and freedom; aspirations for human transformation and producing this aspiration in others; moral education; relationships between moral philosophy, political philosophy, and aesthetics; conformity: human enchainment and fixation; pessimism; citizenship and universal legislation; the self; self-expression, autobiography, and their significance for political and moral life; the self as representative; the self as beyond and unknown to itself; making the self intelligible to itself; intelligibility and genius; Wittgensteinian criteria; judgment and the intelligibility of judgment; the ways in which efforts to insure intelligibility undermine intelligibility; agreement in language and agreement in judgement; overcoming a desire for mastery; transformative reading and writing; philosophy and analytic therapy.

All students of Nietzsche know of his profound admiration for Emerson’s writing. However, as Stanley Cavell has observed, this knowledge has mostly been repressed or ineffective; which is to say that the extent, depth, and specificity of Emerson’s influence upon Nietzsche has remained largely unacknowledged and unassessed. In the course of the past decade or so, owing in large part to the influence of Cavell’s own work on Emerson (and Nietzsche), this situation has begun to change. Emerson’s work has increasingly been taken up philosophically, and students of both Emerson and of Nietzsche have begun to explore systematically the relations between them. While the present study devotes considerably more attention to Nietzsche than to Emerson, it constitutes a provocative and important contribution to this work and enriches our understanding of each of these thinkers.

Including the substantial Introduction by Richard Eldridge, this volume consists of nine previously unpublished essays each of which focuses upon a single region of Cavell’s work. While the scope of the issues considered in the volume can be only incompletely indicated by listing the regions addressed, they include: ethics, philosophy of action, the normativity of language, aesthetics and modernism, American philosophy, Shakespeare, film, television, and opera, and the relation of Cavell’s work to German philosophy and Romanticism. The volume also contains a useful index, and a brief annotated bibliography of works by and about Cavell.