Myth and Certainty

Abstract

The idea that Wittgenstein’s On Certainty contains important insights for understanding Georges Sorel’s concept of social myth will surely strike a lot of people as implausible, ludicrous or absurd. So, it is necessary to begin by explaining the point of this exercise. It is certainly intended neither to put old wine into new bottles nor to open up a new branch of the burgeoning Wittgenstein industry. It is, rather, an effort to do three things. First, reading Sorel through Wittgensteinian spectacles should help to rescue his insights, perhaps in a way that he would challenge, given the opportunity, from the confusions arising out of the woefully inadequate Bergsonian conceptual framework in which they were developed. The point of departure for this is taken from H. Stuart Hughes’s classic study, Consciousness and Society, perhaps the most important presentation of Sorel in America to date. Hughes writes: “Sorel never found a proper vocabulary nor a suitable conceptual scheme into which he could fit what his critical intelligence had taught him”. ¹ Secondly, my inquiry will provide an occasion for further articulating some of the implications of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy for social thought.