IJ study archive

Solipsism at essay length — the Wittgensteinian frame

echoes

From: The Empty Plenum: David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

  • Early text: WM as "a kind of philosophical sci-fi" — "an imaginative portrait of what it would be like actually to live in the sort of world the logic and metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus posit"; "This sort of world started out, for Wittgenstein, to be logical heaven. It ends up being (I opine) a metaphysical hell"; and the Investigations' turn, that "the existence, nay the very idea of language depends on some sort of communicative community". [the Tractatus/PI exposition] [e-text]
  • IJ echo: The Wittgensteinian substrate the archive tracks in Wallace — Broom of the System's overt Wittgenstein structure and, in IJ, the solipsism/communication problematic and the map-vs-territory concerns (Eschaton; the samizdat). This essay is the fullest statement of the frame; it is the essay-length companion to the wittgenstein-frame sighting promoted in hf-raizman-call-it-something-i-ate.
  • Weight: shared-preoccupation (philosophical substrate)