Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism

✍ Scribed by Anat Matar (editor)

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 287
• Series: Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In the last half-century Ludwig Wittgenstein’s relevance beyond analytic philosophy, to continental philosophy, to cultural studies, and to the arts has been widely acknowledged.
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was published in 1922 — the annus mirabilis of modernism — alongside Joyce’s Ulysses, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. Bertolt Brecht’s first play to be produced, Drums in the Night, was first staged in 1922, as was Jean Cocteau’s Antigone, with settings by Pablo Picasso and music by Arthur Honegger. In different ways, all these modernist landmarks dealt with the crisis of representation and the demise of eternal metaphysical and ethical truths. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus can be read as defining, expressing and reacting to this crisis. In his later philosophy, Wittgenstein adopted a novel philosophical attitude, sensitive to the ordinary uses of language as well as to the unnoticed dogmas they may betray. If the gist of modernism is self-reflection and attention to the way form expresses content, then Wittgenstein’s later ideas — in their fragmented form as well as their “ear-opening” contents — deliver it most precisely.
Understanding Wittgenstein, Understanding Modernism shows Wittgenstein’s work, both early and late, to be closely linked to the modernist Geist that prevailed during his lifetime. Yet it would be wrong to argue that Wittgenstein was a modernist tout court. For Wittgenstein, as well as for modernist art, understanding is not gained by such straightforward statements. It needs time, hesitation, a variety of articulations, the refusal of tempting solutions, and perhaps even a sense of defeat. It is such a vision of the linkage between Wittgenstein and modernism that guides the present volume.

✦ Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Contributors
Abbreviations
Series Preface
Introduction: Giving the Viewer an Idea of the Landscape
Part 1 - Conceptualizing Wittgenstein
Chapter 1 Language, Expressibility and the Mystical
1 Mysticism: Philosophical and anti-philosophical
2 What can and cannot be said
3 Existence, safety and guilt
4 The ascetic ideal
5 Culture and civilization
6 Wittgenstein and modernism
Chapter 2 Modernism and Philosophical Language: Phenomenology, Wittgenstein and the Everyday
1 Phenomenology as modernism
2 The early Wittgenstein’s reconfiguration of philosophical language
3 The later Wittgenstein: Completing the departure
Chapter 3 Wittgenstein and ‘Ordinary Language Philosophy’
1 The early Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn
2 The turn towards actual linguistic practice
3 ‘Ordinary language philosophy’
4 Philosophy and ordinary language
5 Philosophy, logical analysis and formal logic
6 Philosophy and metaphysics
7 The nature of philosophy
8 Conclusion
Chapter 4 Wittgenstein’s Modernist Political Philosophy
1 Wittgenstein’s philosophy of meaning as the foundation of conservatism, socialism and liberalism
2 Wittgenstein’s anti-political absolute ethics
3 Particularism, therapeutic Wittgenstein and politics
4 Wittgenstein’s modernist transformation of the progressive project of enlightenment
Chapter 5 Too Cavellian a Wittgenstein: Wittgenstein’s Certainty, Cavell’s Scepticism
1 Tractarian language and silence
2 The estrangement of the ordinary
3 Language is in order as it is
4 The disappointment with criteria
5 Certainty versus sceptical acknowledgement
Part 2 - Wittgenstein and Aesthetics
Chapter 6 Wittgenstein, Musil and the Austrian Modernism
1 Wittgenstein and Austrian modernism
2 Historicism and avant-garde in Musil’s novel
3 Feeling alienated from modernism and modernity
4 The problem of culture
Chapter 7 ‘We Should be Seeing Life Itself’: Back to the Rough Ground of the Stage
1 The everyday on stage – Michael Fried’s interpretation
2 Dramatics of the language-game: The uses of the theatrical stage
Chapter 8 A Confluence of Modernisms: Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation and Henry James’s Literary Language
1
2
3
4
5
Chapter 9 Modernism with Spirit: Wittgenstein and the Sense of the Whole
1 Wittgenstein’s double orientation in music
2 ‘What is modern?’ – An architectural question in Vienna between the two wars
3 Formalism and modernism: Eduard Hanslick’s ‘sound-forms in movement’
4 From sentimental feeling towards expressivity of meaning: A modern step
5 Wittgenstein’s ‘anti-modernist’ tone in 1930: The lack of ‘the sense of the whole’
6 Spirit in what sense? Life and language
7 ‘Musikalische Gedanke’: Wittgenstein and Schoenberg, a methodological affinity
8 A musical case of tension between outmoded style and modernism: Schoenberg’s Von Heute zu Morgen
9 Life versus Geist
Chapter 10 Wittgenstein and the Art of Defamiliarization
1 Sketches and journeyings
2 ‘An ancient city’
3 Defamiliarization: Russian Formalism
4 ‘Grammar tells what kind of object anything is’ (PI, §373)
Part 3 - Glossary
Logic
1 ‘Logic’ and ‘grammar’
2 Devices to avoid misunderstanding
3 Logical writing in the Tractatus and in the Investigations
Picture
Grammar
A last word
Use
Psychological Concepts
1 Wittgenstein confronts the origins of modern philosophy of mind
2 Conceptual duality as two uses of language
3 Psychopraxis
4 Psychopraxis as a shared psychological form of life
Ethics
1 Ethics and the early Wittgenstein
2 The Tractatus, ethics and modernism: Wittgenstein with Adorno
Art
1 The autonomy of the artwork
2 Form contra Ornament
3 The art of philosophy
Index