Language Games About Language Games: Wittgensteinian Hermeneutics Between Imaginative Participation and Analysis

ABSTRACT Drawing on Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough and Philosophical Grammar , it is shown that, from a hermeneutic perspective, the Middle Wittgenstein, develops a fluid model of understanding which supposes a fixable meaning of any given text. In this context, to understand a text (intransitively) means to (imaginatively) play the language games that are textually constituted; it thus amounts to a hermeneutics of imaginative participation . The stronger emphasis on representation, interpretation, and aspect also shifts what can be reconstructed from Wittgenstein's later writings from a hermeneutic perspective. In particular, §§ 60–63, 90, and 130 suggest a model of textual understanding that can be understood as an analytic hermeneutics . This analytic hermeneutics will belong to those language games that have other language games as their content; hence, it will be a second‐order language game.