1.M. O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollections,
ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981), 93. Drury wasone of many students who found Wittgenstein’s anxiety contagious. He published a collection of essays entitled
The Danger of Words
and discontinued his memoirs of Wittgenstein because, according to Rhees, he thought“what he had written would do more harm than good” (ix).
PHILOSOPHICAL SELF-DENIAL
Wittgenstein and the Fear of Public Language
Rei Terada
“Throughout his life Wittgenstein was convinced that he could not make him-self understood”—so a friend recalls.
1
Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted, it would seem, with a dreadful expec-tation that he would himself be unintelligible. Commentators who relate Witt-genstein’s psychology or biography to his philosophy often do so by setting themin opposition: by writing his polemic against private language, it is suggested, Wittgenstein fought off a personal susceptibility to myths of romantic solitude.But the assumption of antagonism may not be apt: hard-core belief in the pub-lic nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together. The morepublic language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When onecan no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of itsreception, an ineffective utterance matters more. Without an ideal standard, weneed only to be generally, not completely, competent; but at the same time, weneed only to be generally
in
competent to become linguistic pariahs. And for the very reason that one’s intelligibility is never perfect or finally destroyed, eachexchange counts. Wittgenstein’s life and work alike show that these incremen-
Common Knowledge
8:3Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press
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