Wittgenstein and the Novel: Notes from Diamond's Recent Lecture

Cora Diamond's recent lecture on Wittgenstein and the novel drew a packed audience at the University of Melbourne's philosophy seminar room, with scholars spilling out into the corridor and clustering on the steps afterwards. The event, hosted jointly by the School of Culture and Communication and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, brought together researchers from across the Faculty of Arts to consider what Wittgenstein's later remarks on rules, grammar, and forms of life might tell us about reading fiction. As someone who has spent decades working at the intersection of philosophy and literature, Diamond offered a way of thinking about the novel that resists the usual dichotomies between analysis and appreciation.

For those familiar with the ordinary language tradition, the appeal of Diamond's approach is its refusal to treat literature as either a source of illustrations for philosophical claims or as a mere object of stylistic admiration. She returns repeatedly to the textures of specific texts, to what it is to read a particular novel with attention to the words on the page. Her lecture wove together remarks from Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty with sustained attention to writers such as Henry James, Elizabeth Bowen, and J.M. Coetzee, asking what philosophical work the novel form actually performs.

The speaker and the occasion

Cora Diamond's reputation in ordinary language philosophy has been built over five decades of teaching and writing, much of it in conversation with the later Wittgenstein. Her work on The Realistic Spirit and the collection Wittgenstein, Work and Ideology established her as a leading interpreter of Wittgenstein's philosophy of mind and mathematics, while her essays on Henry James and Iris Murdoch have become touchstones for anyone interested in philosophy and literature. The Melbourne lecture built on themes she has developed in essays and at previous conferences, including a much-discussed paper on the difficulty of reality.

The occasion was introduced by a member of the philosophy department who noted the timeliness of bringing Diamond's work to an Australian audience, where Cavell reception has grown steadily since the publication of the Cambridge Companion to Cavell. Attendees included postgraduate students from Sydney, Brisbane, and Hobart, several of whom had travelled specifically for the event, along with members of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. The questions at the end ran for nearly an hour, and the discussion continued in the corridor long after the scheduled close.

Rules, grammar, and reading

Diamond opened by reflecting on Wittgenstein's scattered remarks about rule-following, drawing a careful line between the abstract philosophical puzzles and the concrete practices they emerge from. She argued that the novel offers a privileged site for thinking about grammar in Wittgenstein's sense, because novels lay out the contexts in which words come to have their lives. A character who lies, a narrator who hedges, a description that almost persuades: these are not merely themes but grammatical investigations in their own right.

She turned at one point to the opening of Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, reading the famous lecture on the lives of animals alongside Wittgenstein's remarks about seeing an aspect. The point was not to extract a philosophical thesis from the novel but to notice how the novel stages the kind of attention that philosophy often demands of its readers. Diamond suggested that this staging is itself a form of philosophical work, and one that the essay cannot easily replicate without losing its grip on the particular.

Ethics, attention, and the difficulty of reality

Much of the lecture turned on the relation between ethical attention and the form of the novel. Drawing on her essay on the difficulty of reality, Diamond argued that our capacity to respond to the reality of other lives is bound up with the specific textures of literary attention. The novel, she suggested, trains a kind of looking that resists abstraction, and in doing so it puts pressure on philosophical accounts of moral knowledge.

She was careful to distinguish her view from the popular idea that novels simply teach us empathy. Such claims usually rest on a thin account of what both novels and moral responses actually are. The interesting question is rather how certain novels hold their readers in a state of attention, refusing easy resolution, and whether that holding is related to what philosophers have called the difficulty of reality. She pointed to the late style of Bowen and the compressed scenes of Coetzee as examples of this difficulty at work in Australian and international fiction.

Conversation with Cavell

It was inevitable that Stanley Cavell would enter the discussion, given the long friendship and intellectual partnership between Diamond and the late Harvard philosopher. Diamond spoke about Cavell's reading of The Claim of Reason and Must We Mean What We Say?, noting his insistence that ordinary language philosophy and the criticism of literature are not parallel activities but deeply entangled ones. For Cavell, the reading of Emerson and Wordsworth was philosophy, and philosophy without that reading was incomplete.

Diamond suggested that her own work on the novel extends a Cavellian project, though with different emphases. Where Cavell often begins from the conditions of skepticism and the ordinary, Diamond finds in Wittgenstein a vocabulary for describing what she called the patient work of reading. The two approaches, she argued, converge in their attention to the particular, and both resist the philosophical habit of generalising away the textures of language.

Reception and implications for Australian scholarship

The response from the Melbourne audience was warm and probing, with several questions about how Diamond's approach might inform teaching in Australian universities, where the Australian Curriculum has emphasised critical literacy and ethical understanding across the humanities. One postgraduate from the University of Queensland asked whether the approach risked collapsing the distinction between philosophy and literary criticism, a question Diamond handled with characteristic care, suggesting that the distinction is less stable than it appears once one starts reading with attention.

For scholars in ordinary language philosophy and literary studies, the lecture offered a reminder of the breadth of work still to be done in this area. The Higher Education Standards Framework in Australia continues to encourage interdisciplinary research, and Diamond's lecture provided a model of how philosophy and literature might speak to one another without one being reduced to the other. A recording of the talk is expected to be made available through the OLP & Literary Studies Online archive in the coming months, alongside the site's existing resources on Cavell and Wittgenstein.

Readers interested in the bibliography on Cavell and Wittgenstein, including Diamond's work, can find curated resources on the website, along with notices of forthcoming lectures and symposia. The site welcomes short reports from events held across the country, whether at the University of Sydney, Monash, or the smaller regional campuses that keep the conversation going through the long southern winter.