Contextualizing the 'Inner' Pretense and Aspect in Wittgenstein, Lohenstein, and Goethe

Wittgenstein;Lohenstein;pretense;inner;outer;affect;not listed

Nguyen, AnhWilliams, Meredith ;

Johns Hopkins University

关键词: Wittgenstein;    Lohenstein;    pretense;    inner;    outer;    affect;    not listed;   

Others  :  https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/60303/NGUYEN-DISSERTATION-2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: JOHNS HOPKINS DSpace Repository

【 摘 要 】

Pretense, or the opposite of sincerity, is the mismatch between the ;;inner’ and the ;;outer.’ This assertion is among the most effective and far-reaching conceptual shifts with which the Enlightenment marked its discontinuity with the cultural givens of early modernity. My dissertation project argues that this discontinuity can be more accurately described as a recasting. Where psychological states, affects, and emotions are at issue, this recasting insists upon the primacy of the ;;inner’ realm, and upon the necessity of understanding the ;;outer’ as an expression of an individual’s ;;inner’ nature. In other areas of thought, however, the more complex early modern conceptualizations of the relation of the ;;inner’ and the ;;outer’ are allowed to remain intact (Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften). By juxtaposing Wittgenstein’s late writings on the ;;inner’ and the ;;outer’ with key texts of early modern (Lohenstein’s Agrippina and Sophonisbe) and Enlightenment literature and thought, my project exposes the historical (dis)continuities that characterize the development of the ;;inner’/;;outer’ paradigm from the seventeenth through the first half of the twentieth century. More particularly, I show that Wittgenstein’s ;;final’ refutation of pretense as the grounds for skepticism of other minds points beyond the grammatical responses to it offered in his own writings to a cultural framework in which the ;;outer’ is not necessarily and primarily conceived in relation to the ;;inner’ nor in which the relation between the two ;;realms’ is thought of as being either authentic or simulated. I argue, moreover, that Wittgenstein’s refutation can have the full force of a refutation only against the background of an analysis of the early modern cultural framework and of the changes that the concept of pretense subsequently undergoes in Enlightenment literature and thought. In this way, my research not only analyzes the dislocation of the ;;inner’ realm from its primacy as well as the triangulation of the formerly binary opposition between pretense and sincerity as the fundamental aim of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, it also contributes to a more culturally situated understanding of the ;;inner’/;;outer’ paradigm.