Wittgenstein and hermeneutics

Abstract EN

This paper attempts to explore Wittegenstein’s later perspective of language and its relation to hermeneutics.

Obviously, it is the "ordinary language discourse" in the latter philosophy of Wittgenstein which seems to bring his concept of language into close relation to hermeneutics.

In criticizing his early work and his own return to ordinary language, Wittgenstein is criticizing the very same thing which Gadamer's hermeneutic theory places in question: language as precise designation.

However, converging around the issue of everyday language, Gadamer and Wittgenstein radically disagree vis-à-vis fundamental characteristics of language itself.

What should we say of the literary and historic dimensions to language, themselves significant dimensions to “living” language ? The ability of the language games to change, the capacity of language to transform itself and work in new uncharted regions-about these Wittgenstein is largely silent.

Gadamer's concern with the essential historicality, that forms of linguistic agreement presuppose, shows how many of these questions might be addressed from within another philosophical tradition.

The investigation proceeds as follows.

Firstly, the analysis of Wittgenstein's language theory : language games, forms of life.

Secondly, Wittgenstein's relation to hermeneutics.

It is argued as a conclusion, that the practical contexts of language, the lifeblood of language games and the cultural space within which they are enacted, are part of a wider historical picture.

Wittgenstein’s service to contemporary thought is to make us aware of the embedded ness of language.

However, only by situating language- games within the broader ambit of tradition is it possible to uncover the richness of language’s interpretive dimensions, its ability to embrace the old and the new.

Gadamer’s hermeneutical vision of language as essentially historical and continuous runs against the idea of the language-games as both fragmented and discontinuous.