On Being with Others by Glendinning Simon;

Author:Glendinning, Simon; [SIMON GLENDINNING]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

Closing philosophy

There are many fascinating continuities between Wittgenstein’s early and late philosophies.12 However, in my view Wittgenstein’s later approach involves a special kind of break from both his early work and ‘metaphysics’ in general. It is on the nature of this break that we can see a clear and deep correspondence between the thought of the later Wittgenstein and Derrida.

The most salient contrast to previous philosophy lies in their common refusal to accept that their work marks the ‘apocalyptic’ end of philosophy in the sense of a final completion or ‘once and for all’ achievement of a state of complete clarity that stands in need of no further (essential) supplementation (PI, §§91–2, §§132–3; Z, §447; cp. TLP, p. 4; Derrida, 1993, pp. 144–6). Moreover, both name the attempt to achieve such complete clarity ‘philosophy’. Of course, it is not in the least peculiar to either Wittgenstein or Derrida to write of, and hence in some sense to write beyond, a tradition they are willing to call simply ‘philosophy’. Indeed, no philosophy can really do otherwise. However, it is a recurrent feature of the history of philosophy that ‘new’ modes of thought (new ‘signatures’: Aristotelian, Cartesian, Humean, Kantian, Hegelian, Fregean, etc.) have always positioned themselves in some way in a relation of final mastery over those discourses they claim to supersede.13 With each new stage in the history of philosophy a new claim is made to have found a way of achieving complete clarity which brings philosophy to an end.

It is precisely in this respect that the kind of approach pursued by both Wittgenstein and Derrida constitutes a new ‘kink’ in the history of philosophy which separates their writing from previous Western thought.14 In contrast to the classical ‘discourses of the end’, the writings of Derrida and Wittgenstein effect what might be called a ‘closure’ of a tradition. Closure does not aim to bring a tradition or ‘historical totality’ to an end by fulfilling its aims. Indeed, it resists the assumption that it can ever ‘end’ in that sense. Rather, it aims to identify the basic structural figure which characterises the tradition as such.15 In the sketch of Derrida’s reading of the ‘history of (the only) metaphysics’ outlined above, this figure was identified with the ideal of exactness. In what follows I aim to show that Wittgenstein’s later work has precisely the same basic target in view. It is this ideal which sustains the assumption that ‘the world’ has a unitary essence about which we might become completely clear, and hence sustains ‘philosophy’as a discourse of the end.

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