“As If I Could Read the Darkness”: Some Stakes of Reading in Philosophical Investigations

The number and variety of images of reading in the Investigations suggest that, for Wittgenstein, reading is an essential part of our natural history and of the human form of life. Further, his treatments of reading show that different forms of reading express and sustain different forms of life. This essay explores what the Investigations reveals as the existential stakes of different modes of reading. Beginning with Wittgenstein’s opening engagement with Augustine, it argues that in the Investigations, as in the Confessions, different modes of reading both bespeak, and open us to, blessed or cursed forms of life. It then develops extended interpretations of individual passages in order to detail some specific shapes of, and conditions governing, modes of reading tied to these blessed or cursed forms of life. Finally, given these existential stakes of reading, it examines how the Investigations itself asks to be read and outlines specific ways in which its notorious difficulty and obscurity are essential to achieving its philosophical aims and, in particular, to promoting an ongoing practice of reading through which we are able to awaken to the wonder of our lives in language.