Wittgenstein, von Wright and the Myth of Progress

The Viennese satirist Karl Kraus called progress a 'standpoint that looks like movement' and a 'mobile decoration': a politically useful slogan devoid of content. Despite his tendency to think in the revolutionary mode of the tabula rasa, Ludwig Wittgenstein was a cultural conservative, sceptical of progress. He shares this pessimistic scepticism with some, but not all, of the early twentieth-century Viennese writers he read enthusiastically (strong sceptics include Kraus but not Robert Musil). It would, however, be too simple to claim that Wittgenstein did not believe in the possibility of progress. Rather, he thought it mistaken to confuse progress with continued movement in one direction. Georg Henrik von Wright, Wittgenstein's student and successor at Cambridge, has discussed the 'myth of progress' in Wittgenstinian terms; the relevance of these analyses of progress in contemporary political discourse is examined

Aesthetics · Art · Art history · Epistemology · Literature · Mythology · Pessimism · Political science · Politics · Skepticism · Slogan · Theology · Wright · Classics · History · Law · Philosophy · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications

• Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein

  Open Access•Talal Asad•Critical Times•2020

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