Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, and metaphysical wit

Philosophy and Literature

Volumn 36, Issue 1, 2012, Pages 238-248

  Pugh, Jonathan ^a  

^a NEWCASTLE UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 84865675074     PISSN: 01900013     EISSN: 1086329X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/phl.2012.0013     Document Type: Letter

References (11)

1. Peter B. Lewis, "Wittgenstein, Tolstoy, and Shakespeare," Philosophy and Literature 29 (2005): 241-55; hereafter abbreviated WTS.
2. These are all contained in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman, trans. Peter Winch, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998); hereafter abbreviated CV. Wittgenstein's italics.
3. Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). It would be interesting to examine the relationship between Cavell's analysis of "forms of life," invoking "the spiritual" struggle within Wittgenstein's philosophy, and the struggle of metaphysical wit outlined in my essay. Such an examination could add another dimension to the spiritual struggle at the heart of Wittgenstein's later philosophy.
4. Albert J. Smith, Metaphysical Wit (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 107; hereafter abbreviated MW.
5. William Shakespeare, The Winter's Tale, ed. S. L. Bethell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), p. 50.
6. Ralph W. Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: The Modern Library, 2000), p. 27.
7. Samuel Johnson, "Preface to Shakespeare"(1768), in The Works of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., vol. 10 (London: F. C. and J. Rivington [etc.], 1823), pp. 132-94; hereafter abbreviated PS.
8. William Shakespeare, "Epilogue," in The Tempest, ed. David Lindley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 217-18.
9. Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The Nature of Philosophy," in The Wittgenstein Reader, ed. Anthony Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1994), p. 263.
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1953).
11. In the summer of 1938, during a lecture at Cambridge, Wittgenstein is reported to have said, "Freud does something which seems to me immensely wrong. He gives what he calls an interpretation of dreams. . A patient, after saying that she had had a beautiful dream, described a dream in which she descended from a height, saw flowers and shrubs, broke off the branch of a tree, etc. Freud shows what he calls the 'meaning' of the dream. The coarsest sexual stuff, bawdy of the worst kind. . He shows relations between the dream images and certain objects of a sexual nature. . Freud [then] calls the dream 'beautiful,' putting 'beautiful' in inverted commas. But wasn't the dream beautiful? I would say to the patient: 'Do these associations make the dream not beautiful? It was beautiful. Why shouldn't it be?' I would say Freud has cheated the patient." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1966), pp. 23-24; hereafter abbreviated LCAPR.