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Wittgenstein, Kierkegaard And The Unspeakable, Joseph C. Mohrfeld

Journal of Undergraduate Research at Minnesota State University, Mankato

Soren Kierkegaard and Ludwig Wittgenstein have long been thought of as philosophers with little, if anything in common. There are but a handful of contemporary philosophers who have provided links between works by Kierkegaard and works by Wittgenstein; however no one has, at least explicitly, provided the following link I intend to show in this paper. I will show Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus have a remarkably common theme. The theme is the ability of one to communicate, or understand the unspeakable, that which remains beyond the limits of language. Both have a unique approach to …