Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- Part II Wittgenstein
- 10 The loneliness of the long-distance empiricist
- 11 The poem to solitude, or: confessions of a transcendental ego who is also a Viennese Jew
- 12 Ego and language
- 13 The world as solitary vice
- 14 The mystical
- 15 The central proposition of the Tractatus: world without culture
- 16 Wittgenstein mark 2
- 17 Tertium non datur
- 18 Joint escape
- 19 Janik and Toulmin: a critique
- 20 The case of the disappearing self
- 21 Pariah communalism
- 22 Iron cage Kafka-style
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
19 - Janik and Toulmin: a critique
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Foreword
- Part I The Habsburg dilemma
- Part II Wittgenstein
- 10 The loneliness of the long-distance empiricist
- 11 The poem to solitude, or: confessions of a transcendental ego who is also a Viennese Jew
- 12 Ego and language
- 13 The world as solitary vice
- 14 The mystical
- 15 The central proposition of the Tractatus: world without culture
- 16 Wittgenstein mark 2
- 17 Tertium non datur
- 18 Joint escape
- 19 Janik and Toulmin: a critique
- 20 The case of the disappearing self
- 21 Pariah communalism
- 22 Iron cage Kafka-style
- Part III Malinowski
- Part IV Influences
- Part V Conclusions
- General bibliography
- Bibliographies of Ernest Gellner's writings on Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and nationalism
- Index
Summary
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin's Wittgenstein's Vienna (1973) contains an intricate, sustained, and elaborate attempt to account for Wittgenstein's thought and development in terms of his Viennese and Habsburg background. This idea is excellent; and it is an aspiration which the present work shares, though there are great disagreements concerning the execution of this aim. My argument is, above all, very much simpler.
The really crucial explanatory fact is the deep polarisation of Habsburg society and sensibility. It is the confrontation of an abstract, universalistic individualism on the one hand and a romantic communalism on the other. At a conscious level Wittgenstein was barely interested in socio-political issues and certainly gave them no sustained or sophisticated attention. None the less, or all the more, he simply could not but have been impregnated with an awareness of this opposition. He could not but have absorbed, assimilated and internalised the central intuitions of these two great competing visions. They impinged on his life and his feelings. Everything in his own background made him a natural adherent of the first of these two visions, and his first work was an almost perfect specimen of it – so perfect as to be in effect a parody of it. It was somewhat eccentric and unusual in its details, but it exemplified that outlook precisely in what it took for granted, what seemed so obvious that it wasn't even stressed, let alone argued. This assumption pervaded his early thought and is treated as utterly obvious: its implications are explored, but its premises are left unexamined. They are too obvious to warrant examination.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Language and SolitudeWittgenstein, Malinowski and the Habsburg Dilemma, pp. 85 - 95Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998