Goethe, Spengler and the morphology of language in Wittgenstein

Abstract

This article presents the importance of Goethe's and Spengler's morphology for the development of a morphology of language in Wittgenstein's work, after his return to Cambridge and philosophy in 1929. In fact, according to Norman Malcolm's testimony, present in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A memoir, Wittgenstein says, in the course of his lectures about philosophical psychology, which took place between 1946 and 1947, that what his philosophy try to give is the morphology of the use of an expression. The development of a morphology of the use of an expression in Wittgenstein would become the result of the application to the domain of language of the concept of morphology applied by Goethe, in his scientific writings, to the domain of nature and by Oswald Spengler to the field of the universal history, as one sees in the work The Decline of the West - Sketch of a Morphology of the History of the World, which constitutes for Wittgenstein one of the sources to access fundamental aspects of Goethe's morphology. Throughout Wittgenstein's writings one finds several references to the thoughts of Goethe and Spengler which enable us to understand in what extent the works of these two thinkers constitute the basis for the construction of a wittgensteinian morphology of language. Thus, taking all these elements into consideration, we'll try to elucidate to what extent Wittgenstein's morphological-philosophical method after 1929 is the re-elaboration of fundamental aspects of the morphological tradition present in the works of Goethe and Spengler.