Citizenship and culture

Wittgenstein's warning against our stubborn propensity to mistake our own concepts for the facts of the world which they purport to describe should probably Sit, inscribed on a bright yellow Post-it® note, atop the glimmering LCD monitor of every self-aware intellectual historian. It is, after all, the nub of the problem of intellectual history that we want to trace currents of thought across the oceans of time and space (and through the shoals and eddies which we like to term 'contexts'), using concepts as our guide. And yet we must always remain uneasily aware that the concepts through which we are tracing are not things-in-themselves, or essences of 'crystalline purity, appearing as shadowy epiphenomena in different times and places. Instead they are tokens of our incorrigible 'craving for generality,' our frantic need to impose a singular order upon a loose and variegated network of meanings and usages: and to find a single guiding thread linking each and every instance. Although, as Wittgenstein also pointed out, it is more respectful (if also perhaps more arduous) to think of the various uses of a term across cultures and circumstances as a loose system of 'fam1ly resemblances' a network of overlapping and criss-crossing similarities -where some family members share the same nose, others the same eyebrows and others again the same gait (Wittgenstein, 1963: 31-32; 1958: 17-18). At best these resemblances may be genuinely familial - as in the case of 'traditions' which recognise themselves as such and hence retain some broad commonality of usage over time (like family traits that recur over generations). At worst they may be nothing more than 'the frame through which we look' at the specific thoughts of particular authors - a frame of reference which we compose by ourselves, for our own benefit, and then 'observe, like a wraith, at every historical juncture upon which our eager examining eye rests.