ABSTRACT
“If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” Wittgenstein famously wrote. But who are “we” for Wittgenstein? Most commentators assume that he is here referring to all human beings and that, by way of symmetry, the lion represents all animals. In this talk I argue that this is not so. Across his writings Wittgenstein uses the word “we” to include and exclude various kinds of groups, including philosophers, language-users, and Europeans. I explore these uses alongside the more general question of the relation of “I” to “we”, as it appears in the work of Wittgenstein and his near-contemporaries (most notably Arthur Koestler, George Orwell, & Roman Jakobson). In conclusion, I maintain that we would do best to understand Wittgenstein’s “we” as here meaning something like “the average person”, in a sense that excludes ethologists, lion tamers, and “jungle men” such as Mowgli and Tarzan. This puts a whole new perspective on what Wittgenstein’s remark is actually about, if not human-animal communication. It also invites us to re-consider the precise modality of “could not” in the same remark.
