Philosophical Self-Denial: Wittgenstein and the Fear of Public Language

Wittgenstein’s confidence in the stability and public character of language coexisted with a dreadful expectation that he would himself be unintelligible. A hard-core belief in the pub-lic nature of language and a terror of isolation may well go together. The more public language is, the more awful failures of communication must be. When one can no longer imagine that an utterance retains a meaning independent of its reception, an ineffective utterance matters more. Without an ideal standard, one needs only to be generally, not completely, competent; but at the same time, one needs only to be generally incompetent to become linguistic pariahs. And for the very reason that one’s intelligibility is never perfect or finally destroyed, each exchange counts. Wittgenstein’s life and work alike show that these incremental shifts in the account book of one’s intelligibility are large enough to perceive with the naked eye.