The original post:
Should we view Wittgenstein as enhancing British Philosophy, or British Philosophy as enhancing Wittgenstein?I support the former, though I should stipulate (specify or "spell out") that in addition to Locke and Bacon, I'd argue the "thrust" of "British Philosophy", as it were, is construed most clearly along a literary line, beginning with the Greek satirists, and from there to Robert Burton, Milton, Swift, Fielding, Peacock, Irving (Washington Irving), Poe, Hawthorne, Samuel Clemons (Mark Twain), Melville, Huxley, Orwell, Nabokov, Kubrick, and so on. "British" because it is convenient, and has some historiographic validity; though if you look at the historians and the historians of literature past fifty years, they are rather smug and reductive concerning "Whig" (or "Whiggish") historiography, as they style it.As for Whiggish historiography being overly-optimistic in the face of the reality of the Human Condition? Well, considering "Whiggish" historiography emerged from Calvinism, and small-c Calvinists like Milton, Locke, and so on, I can't for the life of me imagine much optimism or upbeat anticipation being advanced through that view of human nature. But mark this. Is it possible that what the new historicism actually finds insufferable about Whiggish positions, is the unwelcome Whiggish--or Calvinist, both large-C and small c--habit of shining a bright light on fraud?Which brings us back to Wittgenstein. He is a force to be reckoned with when it comes to turning on that spotlight.
The back-channel response:
The question seems fatuous to me, but also remarkably un-Wittgensteinian... W stands at a very peculiar (meant positively) juncture between German and British philosophy if (and only if) they are distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all. Two of the most enthusiastic borrowers of his ideas I know were Japanese...
My initial remarks:
Hmm. Do you mean "fatuous qua fatuous", "fatuous, as such", or "fatuous, as it were"?On a more serious note, is it not appropriate to review possible interdisciplinary perspectives, and uncover what might be useful--in terms of philosophic and cultural understanding--as such intersections are explored, or are you suggesting that the field of Philosophy and Literature is, erm, "Fatuous"?Meanwhile, if you review what in the past fifty years the historians and literary historians have been doing in respect to the "dismissal" or "mitigation" of "whiggish" historiography (that is, a potted description of "whiggish" historiography), well, things begin to get interesting. I don't think it is at all fatuous to suggest there are ample exemplars in literature (construed along the lines of the list of authors above, as a beginning of a broader survey) that some significant and challenging questions might be raised.
My additional remarks:
"...juncture between German and British philosophy if (and only if) they are distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all."Compare: "Are German and English literature distinctive enough to deserve those labels at all?"From another direction, something might be made writing up the "German Wittgenstein" and (vs.) the "English Wittgenstein." Another, related project could be surveying the history of philosophy for antecedents, cognates and correlatives to W's thought.Millionaires and billionaires are not privy to the important thoughts we are examining and, importantly, recirculating, in the university, and as I might hazard to suggest, that is precisely why they have rounded us up and placed us in the university, where we won't do much harm. cf. Swift in the Preface to A Tale of a Tub.Traditionally, though it might not be popular today--and, as one could argue, it is merely a specimen of the English penchant toward eccentricity and enthusiasm--maybe it's the soft nature of the English aristocrat, or some foible of some faulty culture logic under-girding a nation of shopkeepers--but the phenomenon is rooted in fact: English intellectuals have traditionally enjoyed the privilege of talking "like" Swift or otherwise their aristocratic "betters", which has not been traditionally indulged in the more scientific and thus "correct" nations of Europe, where monarchs enlightened by scientific truths (moreover carefully-vetted "scientific truths" advanced by important professors) have so wonderfully kept a lid on people speaking their mind. Thankfully, these days Britain is catching up, ahem.Anyway, more (perhaps) persuasive (and less corrosive) than Swift's arguments are found in Sir Philip Sidney's Defense of Posey, where the academic magisteria are described, well-ordered and fitted, or one might argue, and I am of the mind Sidney's advice is germane to the question of a "British" (or anyway English) philosophical "type". And while we're in that century, something might be made in a review of Elizabeth's Speech to the Troops at Tilbury, and the Golden Speech. At that time, was anyone in Europe taking like this?A few remarks from an historian of literature:British Philosophy"It is often maintained by historians of philosophy that England has had only one school of philosophy, or rather, that it has had none at all, for its philosophy is a perpetual protest against Scholasticism. A faith in experimental science, based upon empirical evidence of the senses, and a complementary distrust of scholastic and rationalistic a priori speculation, may be said to form the cornerstone of the English philosophical tradition. Although Swift developed no systematic philosophy--this absence, too, seems to be characteristic of the tentative and experimental English mind--a peculiarly English and to some degree Lockeian nexus of assumptions underlies one major area of his satiric technique."Rejection of Mechanism in Nature"[Jonathan Swift strikes] at the affectation of those who, by formula and artifice, impose some rigid subjective perception upon the world and then pay honor to this graven image as truth and to themselves as its discoverers. The folly of man's refusal to see things as they really are is thus consistently translated by Swift into symbolic representations of man as a mechanism. Inflexible, blinded to external truth by his own conceit, contentious in his assumption of the infallibility of his subjective responses, man becomes a puppet in life's Punch-and-Judy show of artifice, system and self-delusion."Source: Bullitt, John M. Jonathan Swift and the Anatomy of Satire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1953. (124).
Finally, in response to the original post, another scholar writes: "Interesting! Two names I would be excited to see mentioned in relation to your text are Oswald Spengler and Quentin Skinner.
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