Jacques Bouveresse

Jacques Bouveresse (1940-2021) was the philosopher who made Wittgenstein a serious presence in France. Born in Épenoy in the Doubs, he studied at the École normale supérieure and held the chair of philosophy of language and knowledge at the Collège de France from 1995 to 2010, remaining professor emeritus there until his death in 2021. At a time when Paris was dominated by structuralism, phenomenology and their successors, he read Frege, the Vienna Circle and Wittgenstein closely, and paid for it with years of relative isolation.

What he took from Wittgenstein

Bouveresse's early books are still among the best studies of Wittgenstein in any language. Wittgenstein: la rime et la raison (1973) explored science, ethics and aesthetics in his thought. Le Mythe de l'intériorité (1976), based on his doctoral thesis, examined the remarks on inner experience, meaning and private language. Its target is a picture most of us carry around without noticing: that the mind is an inner theatre, and that words get their meaning from private scenes only the speaker can see. Wittgenstein, as Bouveresse reads him, shows that this picture explains nothing.

From Wittgenstein he also took a style of thinking: patient, exact, suspicious of big words, and convinced that many philosophical problems come from misunderstanding how our language works. In La Force de la règle (1987) he returned to the question of rule-following.

What he did with it

Bouveresse turned Wittgenstein's critical temper on his own intellectual culture. In Philosophie, mythologie et pseudo-science (1991), translated as Wittgenstein Reads Freud, he followed Wittgenstein's mixed admiration and distrust for psychoanalysis. In Prodiges et vertiges de l'analogie (1999) he criticised the loose use of scientific results, such as Gödel's incompleteness theorems, in literary and political essays. He also wrote at length on two other Viennese writers close to Wittgenstein's world, the novelist Robert Musil and the satirist Karl Kraus, and became a sharp critic of the media and of intellectual fashions.

Where he differs

Bouveresse was never a mere disciple. He shared Wittgenstein's suspicion of scientism, but he was more openly attached to scientific rationality, to logic and to the ideals of the Enlightenment than Wittgenstein, who wrote that he felt out of sympathy with the spirit of modern European civilisation (see Culture and Value). He resisted readings that turn Wittgenstein into a relativist or an enemy of reason, and he kept up a respectful dialogue with philosophers Wittgenstein had little time for, such as Carnap. For Bouveresse, taking Wittgenstein seriously meant arguing with him, not repeating him.