Wittgenstein and Cavell on initiation into the (philosophical) community

By Chantal Bax 

Teaching or training forms a recurring topic in Wittgenstein’s later work - from his 

comments on Augustine’s account of language learning in the first paragraph of the 

Investigations to the entries about the inheritance of world pictures in his swan song On 

Certainty. It could even be argued that Wittgenstein takes it to belong to the very 

essence of human language that it is taught, or that he more generally takes it to belong 

to the very essence of being human that we come into this world as children rather than 

fully formed adults.1 According to Wittgenstein, selfhood or subjectivity is acquired 

rather than given, and is more precisely acquired in the course of one’s upbringing 

within a particular socio-cultural context. On his view, in other words, we are what the 

senior members of our community have taught us.2