The Paideia Archive: Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy

Volume 32, 1998

Philosophy of Language

Victor J. Krebs
Pages 48-53

Mind, Soul, Language in Wittgenstein

I show that the latter Wittgenstein's treatment of language and the mind results in a conception of the human subject that goes against the exclusive emphasis on the cognitive that characterizes our modern conception of knowledge and the self. For Wittgenstein, our identification with the cognitive ego is tantamount to a blindness to our own nature — blindness that is entrenched in our present culture. The task of philosophy is thus transformed into a form of cultural therapy that seeks to awaken in us a sensitivity to different modes of awareness than the merely intellectual. Its substance of reflection becomes not only the field of conscious rational thought, but the tension in our nature between reason and vital feeling, that is, between culture and life.