Leading a Human Life: Wittgenstein, Intentionality, and Romanticism - Tapa dura

This study presents an account of Wittgenstein's "Philosophical Investigations", interpreting the text as displaying the human need to pursue an ideal of expressive freedom within the limits set by culture. The author sees Wittgenstein as a Romantic protagonist pondering on the nature of intentional consciousness, and ranging over ethics, aesthetics and philosophy of mind. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and scepticism. Eldridge aims to provide a careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work.

Beginning from the Kantian and post-Kantian efforts to maintain a connection between intentionality and conscience, but without assuming any dogmatic metaphysical system, Richard Eldridge argues in Leading a Human Life that human persons are caught up in a continuing effort to bring their intentionality and powers of practical reason to full and fit expression. Contrary to the claims of both dogmatism and naturalism, human life remains haunted by the question, "How might I, in interaction with those around me, effectively form and choose a life of expressive freedom?" Eldridge reads Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations as a sustained, self-interrogative internal monologue that is concerned continuously with this question, embracing both ethics and philosophy of mind. Its protagonist struggles to bring his powers of spontaneity into coherent expression in human life. By following this effort, we can find grounds for resisting underdescriptions of human life that rest on overly simple accounts of either thinking or right action. Leading a human life becomes a creative act, akin to writing a poem, of continuously seeking to overcome both complacency and skepticism. Eldridge's careful reconstruction of the central motive of Wittgenstein's work will influence all subsequent scholarship on it.