Heidegger and Wittgenstein

Abstract

The words with which Karl-Otto Apel introduced his paper “Wittgenstein und Heidegger” of 1967 – namely that the juxtaposition of these two names in a philosophical essay “still awakens some indignation”¹ – have lost nothing of their force in the succeeding decades. On the growing number of comparisons between the two philosophers which have appeared in connection with their common centennial in 1889, one could read in a prominent German weekly:

Whatever might be found or invented in the way of so-called parallels at airless heights of abstraction – an abstraction that is for this reason always “right” because it has nothing to say – a more absolute contrast of thought, of style, of total intellectual appearances can hardly be imagined than that between these two most influential philosophers of the 20th century.²

In opposition to this, however, I wish to defend a view advanced most recently by the literary theorist George Steiner. As Steiner maintains in the “Preface 1989” to his book on Heidegger, it is

the deep-seated connections between Wittgenstein and Heidegger, the two most outstanding, apparently so antithetical philosophical-linguistic thinkers of our time, which in the future will provide the most fruitful soil for research and understanding.³

In what follows I want first of all to summarize very briefly the most important parallels that have been put forward in the literature, to extend these parallels somewhat, and finally, as my main concern, to sketch a conceptual framework for their interpretation, a framework that is broader than is customary.