Begging the Question, the Properly Wittgensteinian Way

I'm reviewing The Literary Wittgenstein for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, just in case you were wondering why I'm reading "Wittgenstein and Faulkner's Benjy", by Rupert Read. It opens:

I want this paper to conjoin Wittgenstein's (and Wittgensteinian) thinking to a particular piece of prose by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century: William Faulkner. I am interested in Wittgenstein's possible utility as a virtual literary critic. And especially, in using properly Wittgensteinian thinking in order to understand the philosophical lessons that I think great literature can yield for us.

This might beg the following question: How ought we to think of the impact of Wittgenstein's philosophizing upon literature? I suggest that one responds with considerable indirection to such a question, a question probably close to the mind of anyone reading the essays in this volume; for, as Wittgenstein so often maintained and practiced, one ought not to be too quick to assume that a question which 'intuitively' suggests itself is in fact the right question to ask.

Following up earlier, heated debate: which of the feuding senses of 'beg the question' is our author's? Is he saying the first paragraph illicitly presupposes something which the second paragraph makes explicit? Or is he saying the end of the first paragraph raises the question he asks in the second? Neither reading makes complete sense to me. Discuss.

Let me add that one essay in the volume is just excellent, another is quite strong, maybe three more are OK. Yet a couple more are worth reading if you have odd taste or narrow interests, whose wheels can be turned by pretty slight stuff. A couple might seem good if you don't understand Wittgenstein. A number are mediocre, shading off into bad. I'll talk about it later.

UPDATE: It's actually a pretty good volume after all. Much more good than bad. I was just in a bad mood.

Comments

[Jeremy Osner]

You are right to say that neither reading makes very much sense; the construction "this might beg..." is inelegant. I initially tried to read it as saying "this might presuppose the answer to the following question" but the passage makes no sense whatsoever then; if you read it as "this might raise the following question" (and why oh why "might"? This is a really unnecessary bit of hedging), the passage is only a little bit nonsensical. So I am going to go with the latter.

[Jeremy Osner]

to clarify -- hedging "beg the question" with "might" is only coherent if you are using the phrase "beg the qusetion" to denote its actual meaning. But the incoherency that results from reading "beg the question" as "raise the question" here is of a lesser degree than the incoherency that results from the other reading.

[Hogan]

I think he means "raise." But I may have another think coming.

[dsquared]

Raise, and the "might" is important. The idea is that going into the general business of Wittgenstein and literature, your first instinct is that the question "what impact did Wittgenstein have on literature" is a useful one to ask. But it isn't; if you go down this road you're going to waste your time. So the project "might beg [in the sense of raise]" this question, but it in fact doesn't, and if you think that it does, you're going wrong.