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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Philosophy and the Vision of Language (routledge Studies in Twentieth-century Philosophy) Wittgenstein, Kant, and the Critique of Totality =================================================== One of the most central and familiar elements of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is his call to replace the traditional inquiries of philosophy with investigation into the “use” [ Gebrauch ] of words in their various practical connections and surroundings, linguistic and non-linguistic.[^290] Again and again, Wittgenstein counsels his readers to abandon the search for “deep” or esoteric inquiries into the nature of things, in favor of reminders of the ways we actually employ language in the vast variety of contexts and situations that comprise a human life.

But despite the familiarity and widespread influence of Wittgenstein’s appeal to use, I argue in this chapter, this appeal has a critical significance that commentators have often missed. What has been missed in projects that construe Wittgenstein as offering a theory of meaning as grounded in social practice, in fact, is a far-ranging critique of totality that runs through Wittgenstein’s work, early and late.

For although he constantly directs his readers to recall the “use” of a word, Wittgenstein nevertheless just as constantly resists the natural temptation to think of this use as an object, a unity, or a whole, accessible to a comprehensive, theoretical understanding of practice or enclosable within a set of determinate rules.

In this way, his practice of linguistic criticism works to undermine the totalizing assumptions behind not only what can be called a “metaphysical” picture of the nature and force of rules but also the concrete technological and material practices that this kind of picture tends to support.

Wittgenstein’s philosophical method, in fact, challenges just those features of thought that Adorno, in Negative Dialectics, characterized as “identity thinking,” and joins the tradition of critical theory in its criticism of the totalizing assumptions that underlie it.

Seeing this connection - a connection ultimately rooted in the common Kantian heritage that Wittgenstein’s project shares with the project of critical theory - can help us to understand the political significance of Wittgenstein’s investigations of language in a new way, and suggests farther-ranging implications for the kind of philosophical reflection they embody.