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Abstract
One of the features that makes us human is our capacity for language. We do not merely produce arbitrary sounds; we are creatures that create meaning, and language is at once our canvas, paint and brush. Our capacity for language enables us to make ourselves understood to others and, with them, to create and interact with the world. This amazing capacity for language and the creation of meaning is the enabling condition for the practices of politics. At the same time, the use of language is imbued with political significance and is the occasion for contestation as well as cooperation.
How, then, do we make sense of language as it relates to politics? This dissertation establishes a novel reading of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s post-1929 work in which he developed groundbreaking insights into these issues and the basic features of language. These later works take seriously the social and political context in which language is used. The use of language and our forms of life are intimately linked together for Wittgenstein: specifically, the nexus between language and action is where meaning and thus normativity emerges. To avoid establishing yet another fallible theory to explain meaning, however, Wittgenstein refuses the call to identify a singular, universal foundation for language. Instead, the pedagogic reading advanced here, which focuses on the role that learning and teaching play in Wittgenstein’s later writings, reveals that the process of learning happens in a condition of uncertainty. The resultant norms and habits are contingently stable, balanced between stasis and change – at times fragile, at times durable.
This dissertation brings together detailed textual interpretations of Wittgenstein’s most well-known later works with biographical episodes in order to highlight teaching as central to his thinking. Following the teaching thread reveals Wittgenstein’s philosophical method to be thoroughly pedagogic, in contrast to widely held therapeutic interpretations. It also sheds new light on Wittgenstein’s time as a teacher and the impact this experience had on both his published and unpublished writing, including a little-known dictionary that he published for his students.
These explorations in turn represent a new way of reading Wittgenstein in political theory. The pedagogic reading elaborated here invokes questions of community and mutual relations and even raises larger issues about politics conceived as the condition of living amongst and being mutually interdependent with our fellows. In turn, our capacity to judge what is similar or different – what accords with our conception of fairness or fails to do so – arises from our gradual enculturation into contingently stable forms of life. The practice of learning, then, pin-points our attention on the complicated process by which we come to be able to play language-games and engage in new forms of life. Since the processes of education happen in a condition of uncertainty, our capacity to learn and judge becomes paramount in all forms of life, but especially politics.
