The symposium was organized by Denis Perrin and Jean-Jacques Rosat.
Wittgenstein: experience and subjectivity
From the manuscripts of the 1930s to the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology
How can language, which is necessarily public and common (and possibly scientific), relate to lived experience, which is deemed "private", interior and subjective? What is the status of the statements with which we describe our sensations or our visual space, our pain or our emotions? What role does the word "I" play? What is its grammar, and who is saying "I"?
These questions, which run throughout Wittgenstein's work, were particularly central to him at two stages in his career: between 1929 and 1933, when he sought to elaborate a phenomenology of lived experience in various ways; and between 1946 and 1949, when he attempted to acquire an overview of the concepts of psychology. As a result of the classic periodization of Wittgenstein's thought into two phases - one centered around the Tractatus, the other around the Philosophical Investigations - the singularity and fruitfulness of these two moments have often been underestimated by Wittgenstein studies. But what has been overlooked even more is the close and complex links between them.
One of the clearest readings from the Nachlass (which has only been fully accessible for a few years) is that Wittgenstein's writing activity involved successive repetitions of the same sequences of remarks, subjecting them to constant reworking: in this way, his philosophical work of therapeutic reworking progressed. Yet, among the strata that mark out this process of resumption, the reintegration at the end of the 1940s, within the framework of reflections on the philosophy of psychology, of concepts and images that seemed to have been definitively discarded after the criticism to which they had been subjected following the rejection of the phenomenological project of 1929 is exemplary. What sense can we make of this particular return to Wittgenstein's path? That is to say, how should we think about the relationship between the critique of phenomenology and that of psychology, with particular reference to the two questions of experience and subjectivity? And what does this tell us about Wittgenstein's evolution from his "return" to philosophy in 1929 to his last thoughts?
