Att Vandra i Intets Närhet : Wittgenstein, Heidegger och Vägen Bortom Filosofins Slut

Sammanfattning: What does it mean to occupy the other side of what is - to “be” the nothing that lies beyond being? Or, in other words: Where yonder the End of Philosophy? Thus reads the first and final line of inquiry that we, the philosophers of this age, are impelled to pursue. Such is the case, I contend, in light of the fact that our time quite simply is that of the eschatological aftermath, the “postmodern” era where the purportedly “greatest” thinkers of our immediate past, Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, have, each in his own way, already declared philosophical moratorium. Yet it seems to me there is curious and vital affinity to the philosophical legacy these thinkers, whose mark on history is, paradoxically, so wide and so deep as to be at once indelible and invisible. Accordingly, this thesis seeks to render Heidegger and Wittgenstein, each a formidable critic of the philosophical tradition, as mutually complementary voices, speaking not of an end-to-be, but on the way beyond the end-that-is-past. In writing on the disjunctive parallelism evident in their famed non-encounter, I hope to clarify the nature and purpose of contemporary philosophical practice. My principal argument is that, in locating philosophy, conceived as a thematic study of the being of what is, within language, Wittgenstein and Heidegger both came to view language itself as the pre-philosophical nothing, which, in its wordless non-identity or self-difference, presents a way beyond the word and world of traditional philosophical thinking. It is my hope that, in outlying the shared strains of their respective critical disclosures of the relation between language and philosophy, I will be able to say not the same, but something yet unsaid, addressing our time, the time after the end, as a period of continued, self-critical thinking and speaking about that which, as the difference between the spoken word and that which is, prepares the way towards an experience of the hitherto “impossible” meaning of non-being.