ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out briefly the intellectual background to the project. Wittgensteinian ‘therapeutics’ and liberations are work on the self as ethical work (as was clear to the Hellenistic philosophers): an ethical work that centres upon us overcoming our deep tendency to manifest heteronomy. The chapter strives, that is, to help midwife autonomy, but absolutely not in the sense of “as opposed to dependence on others”. It aims to take such dependence as ubiquitous, enabling and desirable. The ‘New Wittgensteinian’ work of Diamond and Conant, of Stanley Cavell and (the later work of) Gordon Baker, all of them our teachers at University/ies and our intellectual mentors, are our direct inspiration. The resistance to therapy as a mode of understanding Wittgenstein has for reasons proved formidable. Wittgenstein’s search for liberatory terms – for words, phrases, sentences, passages that will conduce to liberation – is typically read, wrongly, as his proposing technical terms.
