The Scales and the Compass of Philosophy: Wittgenstein in the Mirror of Plato

Abstract

The scales of justice in ethics and the compass of ‘perspicuous representation’ in linguistic analysis are, in this essay, the tools for sketching a physiognomy of Wittgenstein reflected in the mirror of the Socratic method. The comparison I draw between Wittgenstein and Plato centres on the figure of Socrates and on the method of the dialogue, and is designed to reflect on the meaning of philosophical therapy in its original sense of ‘observation of anomaly’. In order to grasp the anomaly one must know the code of reference, capturing the emergent or dissonant aspect. This is the character of the teras — a borderline case of the casus datae legis — that requires a ‘therapy’ in an observation made more acute by the examples of the norm. The Latin term monstrum, which translates the Greek term teras, captures the contra naturam character of that which goes beyond the limits of a natural form. There is a semantic duplicity in the term — a positive sense, which goes together with its negative: namely, the emergence of an ‘extraordinary’ character confirms the rule, from which error draws away, and indicates not simply the place of an impossibility but the occasion of a recognition. In section 90 of the ‘Philosophy’ chapter of the Big Typescript we read: ‘Just as laws only become interesting when they are transgressed, // when there is an inclination to transgress them //, certain grammatical rules only get interesting when philosophers want to transgress them’.¹

His quaint opinions to inspect,

His knowledge to unfold

On what concerns our mutual mind,

The literature of old;

What interested scholars most,

What competitions ran

When Plato was a certainty,

And Sophocles a man

Emily Dickinson