Abstract

Though Plato, famously, had Socrates ban the poets from his republic while Wittgenstein seems to aspire to a style of philosophical writing that approaches the literary, there is a troubling similarity between them in their elision of the self as a self. Saying what he means in the mode of the philosopher or meaning what he says in the mode of the poet, how can the self both be and say itself? The misprision of Abraham's binding of Isaac in the thinking of Kierkegaard, who with Plato was one of Wittgenstein's favourite philosophers, is a telling opening into the question of the self in its responsibilities and its discontents.