Wittgenstein face au platonisme de la signification: le tournant anthropologique vers une philosophie de la praxis

Abstract

This paper is intended to elicit Wittgenstein’s position regarding platonism reformulated into 1 – the analytical investigation of the conditions for a meaningful language, and 2 – the deepening of a problem generated by the illusory conception that it is possible to capture the ultimate atomic elements of the meaning of a linguistic complex. That’s the way one can indeed understand that Wittgenstein has presented a critique of the tradition of ontology. The fact that he endorsed a “quasi-realism” approach to “objects” (Br. McGuinness) contrasts with the future Vienna Circle at a time the latter was still under the spell of the Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, close to a Russellian kind of logical atomism. It is not surprising that later on, Wittgenstein’s own “platonism” in its Fregean version became a target in the anthropological framework of a broader self-criticism for the belief in referential entities, or “objectual fetichism” (in A. Gargani’s terms). This anthropological turn nonetheless did not conquer the harder epistemological public of readers looking for logical truth. Yet, it presents some interesting features articulated to a “philosophy of praxis” that make “forms of life” the core of a possible critical grammar adjusted to a political engagement. Such an articulation that has been so much put into question among a number of theoreticians of social theory in Frankfurt and even later in France (e.g. Alain Badiou’s critique of Wittgenstein), seems to be on the contrary the opening of a new and fruitful way to consider contradictions between Frankfurt and Vienna in connection with social praxis.