While we were reading Derrida’s Spurs (where, incidentally, Derrida briefly seems to take Wittgenstein’s private language argument as obviously correct), Chris pointed out a sort of theme that comes up in both Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Is there something to make of this? Some connection that could help us make sense of the world? Some deep rift between the analytic and continental traditions finally, and here, smoothed over? Probably not. But maybe, some German Sprichwort about old women who misplace or hide objects and then doubt their reality?
Nietzsche (quoted from Spurs):
I fear that women who have grown old are more sceptical in the secret recesses of their hearts than any of the men; they believe in the superficiality of existence as in its essence, and all virtue and profundity is to them only the disguising of this ‘truth’, the very desirable disguising of a pudendum – an affair, therefore, of decency and modesty, and nothing more!
Wittgenstein (from On Certainty):
I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys.
But then again, how does Wittgenstein do philosophy? Does he believe in “the superficiality of existence as in its essence”? That “truth” is “an affair … of decency and modesty, and nothing more”? My first stab is no, he doesn’t even commit to that. But if we step away from ‘truth’ and toward ‘essence’, then maybe Wittgenstein does have something in common with Nietzsche’s old lady.
The beginning of Wittgenstein’s critique of essences, from Philosophical Investigations:
‘The essence is hidden from us’: this is the form our problem now assumes. We ask: ‘What is language?’, ‘What is a proposition?’ And the answer to these questions is to be given once and for all, and independently of any future experience.
Finally, while surely this is one step too far, here’s Kharms again:
One old woman, due to her immoderate curiosity, tumbled out of a window and fell, killed in the collision.
So the pieces are: old ladies are skeptics, Wittgenstein does philosophy like an old lady, and curiosity killed the old lady.
