Christopher Moore

early greek philosophy

0

Friendship and the novel

L. Wittgenstein and F. Skinner

L. Wittgenstein and F. Skinner

Thomas Bernhard‘s 1982 book, Wittgensteins Neffe (“Wittgenstein’s Nephew“), has as its genre-designation Eine Freundschaft (“A Friendship”). This project, with Sam Frederick, seeks to understand in what respect this book — a novel, a memoir, a eulogy — is a friendship; and by doing so, it aims to understand what friendship is. The question about the text has adjunct to it several other questions, especially about its title, which at once emphasizes Ludwig Wittgenstein (a philosopher, a writer of questionable publication record, and a man whose psychic health was not renownedly good) and an homage to Diderot’s Rameau’s Nephew (which dialogue crystallized a certain understanding of the European Enlightenment, via Goethe, Hegel, and latterly in Trilling and Williams). Thus friendship is set at the heart of the problems of modernity, philosophy, and madness. Friendship is also set, given the generic ambiguities of the text — mostly memoiristic, somewhat fictional, a single monumental paragraph-long reflection — in the question of autobiography, writing, and time.

Curricular relevance

“The friend is another self.” Our reading of Bernhard’s book contributes to an understanding simultaneously of friendship and of self-constitution. The formal oddities of this work provide a seductive and oblique way into deep philosophical questions about friendship and our capacities — or aversions — to growing closer to, or with, other people. Thus this book fits into a generically-diverse syllabus of books on friendship: Plato’s Lysis, Aristotle’s Ethics, Montaigne’s and Emerson’s essays, and so forth.

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