Wittgenstein and the Question of Masculinity

Wittgenstein is not the most obvious writer to choose for a discussion of masculinity. He is so silent about it that it might seem impossible to argue that a work like the Philosophical Investigations is engaged with issues of masculinity at all. Even his homosexuality seems to offer little scope for such a discussion. In this paper I shall not address that homosexuality, but I will question the silence, although not on the grounds that the silence itself is culpable. Instead I hope to show that the silence is only apparent, and that it is only a silence about the names and sources of conflict. I will argue that the Investigations both defends and criticises models of the self in terms that recapitulate many familiar representations of masculinity. I was drawn to Wittgenstein because his work is both influential and yet not so well established that analysis would have to take on a whole body of surrounding argument that tries to control modes of approach to the founding work. I found that Wittgenstein is surprisingly astute about the consequences of assumptions derived from representations of masculinity that he inherits unconsciously. His engagement with the consequences makes his work fascinating. To echo the words of the epigraph, I hope to show why there is an unreadable darkness in the Philosophical Investigations, while remaining wary of the conviction that this is 'what the whole picture represented

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis · Conviction · Epistemology · Homosexuality · Masculinity · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Silence · Sociology · Law · Philosophy · Psychology · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications