Professor Andrew Norris: "Johannes de Silentio's Private Language"

Abstract:
Although Wittgenstein’s so-called “private language argument” has been shown to comment in important ways upon numerous epistemological and metaphysical positions, including those of Russell’s logical atomism, none of those positions are announced by their authors to entertain the possibility of a private Sprache or private language. However, an author absent from most discussions of this aspect of Wittgenstein’s work does use such language to characterize one of his central philosophical claims: Søren Kierkegaard, whom Wittgenstein once described as “by far the most profound thinker of the last century.” In Kierkegaard’s most widely read text, Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author Johannes de Silentio characterizes “knights of faith” such as Abraham as figures who experience a religious demand that defies linguistic expression but that is nonetheless intelligible to them in their own “strange tongue.” In this essay I explore what it might mean to take seriously the idea that Kierkegaard was among the sources or targets of Wittgenstein’s “argument.”

Professor Andrew Norris is the author of Becoming Who We Are: Politics and Practical Philosophy in the Work of Stanley Cavell (Oxford University Press, 2017) and about fifty articles. 

In 2023/2024 he is Senior Fellow at the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy at Potsdam Universität; in the spring of 2024 he will also be Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.