Resolution’s Realism: Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard on the Remembrance of Meaning

• Author / Creator

  McNulty, Luke Blanchet

• The ‘resolute’ reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s work is often taken to involve a kind of anti-realism about what the philosopher calls ‘logic,’ or ‘grammar’ – the order of meaning that structures our understanding of the world and which is expressed in our uses of language. Conversely, I argue that the resolute interpretation permits us to find, in both Wittgenstein’s early and later work, a compelling new account of realism about this structure of significance. This realism comes into view if we take to heart his claim that philosophy is a practice of remembering the meaning/logic of our words and if we construe his concept of remembrance as a matter of what Søren Kierkegaard calls ‘repetition.’ Once regarded in this light, three often underemphasized features of the Wittgensteinian picture come to the fore.
  The first feature is the method of ‘indirect communication.’ Like Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein felt that he could only remind us of what we had forgotten if he employed an unconventional philosophical method. Where traditional philosophers offer linear arguments for explicitly stated conclusions, Wittgenstein, like Kierkegaard, heightens our awareness of certain tensions in our life with language, withdraws, and allows the lesson that dissolves those tensions to dawn upon us spontaneously through its appeal to our natural and historical linguistic sense.
  The second feature is the phenomenon of ‘revelation,’ which involves an encounter with logically unforeseeable meanings. Revealed meanings are neither the creations nor the discoveries of the autonomous human self. They are, instead, meanings provided to us by a source outside the self. On a resolute account of realism, revelation functions as the mechanism by which a remembrance of meaning dawns spontaneously upon our natural and historically conditioned linguistic intuitions. However, a crucial problem stands in the way of any such realism: it is not clear how we should understand our intentional relationship to a meaning that is yet to be revealed. A way of resolving this problem emerges when we take stock of the third oft-overlooked feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophy that comes into view from the Kierkegaardian perspective: ‘embodiment,’ or ‘incarnation.’
  The body plays a crucial role in Kierkegaard’s Christian account of the self, of the ethical truth to which the self relates, and of that relation. Just as the self is a synthesis of the eternal soul and the temporal human body, Christ is a synthesis of the eternal God and the embodied life of Jesus. Further, the self’s commitment to Christ is a practical, bodily, capacity to follow His example and ‘go on’ according to the rules that comprise Christian ethical life. This tripartite significance of the body provides us with the conceptual resources we need to understand the possibility of revelation as it enters into Kierkegaard’s account of repetition. Similarly, for the resolute Wittgenstein, the self is the incarnation of a non-temporal soul in a temporal human body, and language is the incarnation of non-temporal meaning in a temporal linguistic sign – paradigmatically, the written or spoken word and its use in linguistic practice. Finally, our understanding of meaning is, most fundamentally, manifest as our practical ability to ‘go on’ according to logic’s rules for the use of such signs. As is the case in Kierkegaard, this three-fold function of embodiment helps us to understand our relationship to possibilities of revelation in Wittgenstein.
  The phenomena of indirect communication, revelation, and embodiment enable us to account for Wittgensteinian meaning-remembrance as a matter of Kierkegaardian repetition. This account helps us to defend the resolute reader from the charge of anti-realism and to provide a positive picture of what a resolute realism involves. The practical significance of such realism is three-part. It calls for, 1) a renewed respect for the autonomy of the individual to whom the work of philosophy is addressed, 2) a turn away from top-down and revolutionary views of how ‘progress’ can be achieved in philosophy, and 3) a renewed deference to our organic, historical, pre-philosophical sense of what we do and do not mean by our words.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Wittgenstein
  • Realism
  • Remembrance
  • Kierkegaard
  • Resolute reading

• Graduation date

  Fall 2020

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-s2cg-ah70

• License

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