In Praise of Socks: The “Poetic” in Wittgenstein

Abstract: How can I trust in the existence of other minds when thoughts and sensations show up only to me? Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein addressed this worry—known as “the problem of solipsism”—through a form of writing widely celebrated as poetic. But Wittgenstein himself insisted that his writing was not accomplished by literary standards. In contrast, two little-known lyric poems about the same pair of socks composed by Wittgenstein between the writing of the Tractatus (1921) and The Philosophical Investigations (1953) display poetic sensitivity. Written in the style of Georg Trakl, the poems represent the rare and possibly the only moment in Wittgenstein’s corpus where he enters an existing language game—Austrian expressionism—without trying to change its rules. The result, I argue, is an even more effective response to solipsism than Wittgenstein offers in his prose.