The New Wittgenstein (review)

Judging by its title and date, The New Wittgenstein hopes to become a pole for Wittgenstein debate in the new millennium. Its emphasis on the concept of "nonsense" even distantly echoes anxieties about Y2K computer babble. The essays, many of them written for this volume, are united around revisionist ideas in Wittgenstein scholarship. Crary sees their central theme as a view of Wittgenstein's philosophy, early and late, as "therapeutic." More apparent, though, is that they find Wittgenstein opposing a neo-Kantian project of drawing limits to sense or logic in order to make room for other kinds of thoughts. There are only meaningful propositions and humble nonsense, he allegedly holds; there is nothing illogical or ineffable to be thought or said. (I'll call this view "resolutism," after Warren Goldfarb.)

Part I focuses on Wittgenstein's later work. Here resolutism is manifested in the idea that by situating meaning within "forms of life" Wittgenstein shows that Kripkian skepticism about rule-following is incoherent. As David Finkelstein writes in "Wittgenstein on rules and platonism" (a response to Crispin Wright): "According to Wittgenstein, it is only when we conceive of words as cut off from the applications that living beings make of them that there even appears to be a question concerning how . . . rule-informed judgments . . . can be true" (69). John McDowell also expresses this in "Non-cognitivism and rule-following": we cannot view language-world relations "from sideways on," for "we cannot occupy the independent perspective platonism envisages; and it is only because we confusedly think we can that we think we can make any sense of it" (44). This rejection of the longing for a metaphysical arbiter of meaning outside of our social practices also characterizes Martin Stone's "Wittgenstein on deconstruction," a particularly rich entry in the field of Wittgenstein-Derrida comparisons. In "Wittgenstein's philosophy in relation to political thought," Crary uses similar ideas to argue that "meaning as use" neither denies nor affirms the possibility of criticizing cultural norms.

The novelty in these interpretations is mainly their commitment to a connection between Wittgenstein's later communitarian views about meaning and his earlier conception of nonsense. But one could imagine Wittgenstein objecting to the emphasis on the "incoherence" of skeptical paradoxes. What makes them tempting is their having the coherence of a persuasive if misleading analogy. Perhaps this avoids the semantic abyss that is urged on us here.

Part II centers on the writings of Cora Diamond and James Conant, whose resolutism hinges on a literal reading of Tractatus 6.54 ("my propositions . . . [are] nonsense"); a rejection of the idea that it expresses ineffable ethical or metalinguistic truths; and a strict adherence to Frege's "context principle." In "Ethics, imagination and the method of Wittgenstein's Tractatus" Diamond suggests that the Tractatus solicits imaginative identification with the author's "nonsense," which then produces insights about why the author's sentences are mistaken for meaningful ones. Conant, in "Elucidation and nonsense in Frege and early Wittgenstein," and David Cerbone, in "How to do things with wood," argue that Wittgenstein found Frege vacillating between denying the possibility of illogical thought and hinting at something unsayable, and resolved this tension in the Tractatus.

Resolutists write with a certain zeal against the idea that nonsensical sentences can express thoughts, or that Wittgenstein suggests that they can. But it is quite counterintuitive to hold, as they do, that we can't say or think what a nonsensical utterance tries vainly to express, or what features make it nonsensical. Moreover, in my view the notion that utterances have sense within language games is directly opposed to Frege's contextualism; "Slab!" refutes Fregean semantics, by my lights. Resolutists also need to account for later writings in which Wittgenstein appears to hold that the Tractatus expresses false doctrines, not mere nonsense, as P. M. S. Hacker argues in his dissenting contribution, "Was he trying...