Jungian Archetypal Creation Symbolism in Wittgenstein’s Earlier and Later Philosophies

Abstract

Wittgenstein suggests in Culture and Value that he puts a certain kind of lock on his works to “keep certain people” out because they will not understand the “spirit” of his work and do not have the “key”. Mainstream philosophers who focus on propositions and arguments tend to regard the imagery and symbolism in philosophical works as tangential to the core philosophical project. In fact, Wittgenstein’s works, both early and late, are filled with much of the same archetypal symbolism emphasized by Carl Jung, symbolism also found in Augustine, who influenced them both. The paper surveys Wittgenstein’s Jungian archetypal symbolism generally but focuses on the ancient archetypal cosmological creation symbolism in Zettel (para. 608) which suggests that language and thought might emerge from chaos or even nothingness at the centre. The paper also discusses Wittgenstein’s interpretation of his own “second dream” as involving alchemical, rather than Christian, symbolism because alchemy employs the same ancient cosmological creation symbolism. On this basis, the paper argues that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, on analogy with Jung’s psychology of transformation, is fundamentally a philosophy of transformation, of mere matter into language and thought or of a base human life into a “cosmic life.”