Introduction

Where is the disaster in Wittgenstein's writing? Where are the protracted reflections on what humans are capable of doing to one another found in contemporaries and near-contemporaries like Adorno, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Benjamin, Russell, Arendt, and even Heidegger? Where are the meditations on scenes of horror from the wars, pogroms, purges, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Did Wittgenstein think these scenes too sacred to be appropriated and profaned by philosophy? Is the level of inhumanity unique to the twentieth century that edge separating speech from silence he posited in his Tractatus?

In my reading of Wittgenstein, he is categorized best with writers like Karl Kraus, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, Primo Levi, and George Steiner who observed and argued that language was the first victim and best measure of the damage done by exposure to, and use in, totalitarianism, total war, and abject horror. Wittgenstein opposed those philosophers who believed language has an essence (religious, ontological, cognitive, and so on) impervious to damage in human time. But he also went further than those like Orwell and Arendt, who measured the harm done to language in term of decreased and profaned vocabulary, mangled grammar, hateful graffiti, and flights of political escapism in the form of euphemism and overly academic prose.