Wittgenstein and Diamond on meaning and experience: from groundlessness to creativity

The chapter deals with what is here called ‘an experience of limitation’. I introduce this term as a combination of what Wittgenstein describes, in ‘A Lecture on Ethics’, as the ‘running-up-against paradox’, on the one hand, and, on the other, what Cora Diamond describes as the ‘difficulty of reality’ when she speaks of experiences which are painful and difficult or awesome and astonishing in their inexplicability (Diamond, 2008, pp.45–6). I argue that what Wittgenstein’s and Diamond’s kinds of experience have in common (and what the above-introduced term designates) is that they appear to have an absolute value, which looks as if it cannot be expressed in words, at least not without leading to our dissatisfaction with meaning.1