The Book of the World as I Found It: Langland and Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

Abstract

This article argues that Piers Plowman is readable through Wittgenstein's early philosophy because Langland's poem primarily concerns the logical constitution of the subject. One of Langland's foci in the poem is the paradox of subject/object, which he pursues through the device of personifi cation, showing how proliferating aspects of the subject are objectifi ed for interrogation by the transcendental subject (I), which itself resists capture in representation. Langland, using both a first-person avatar of the subject (I) and a third-person avatar (Will), produces a model of the split subject that is cognitively verisimilar, logically reproducing the ways in which the consciousness encounters reality: as an-object-for-the-subject. His purpose in exploring the fluid boundary between subject and object is ethical: the more the subject is admitted to be a worldly object interposed among other objects without privilege, the more the proprietary boundaries drawn around the self break down. Langland, like Wittgenstein, uses logic to arrive at the point of selfl essness. Likewise, in insisting on the ineffability of the transcendental subject through repeated trials—I/Will seeks endlessly to know himself as knower—Langland gestures towards the unsayable "feeling of the self as a limited whole" that Wittgenstein identifi ed as "the mystical feeling."