Wittgenstein, therapy and decolonial school education

Abstract

Founded on the conviction that Wittgenstein’s oeuvre – which has as initial emblematic de-colonial landmark the therapeutic-grammatical criticism that he addresses to the monumental work of Scottish anthropologist James George Frazer, entitled The golden bough – can be seen not exactly as a philosophy or a new philosophy, but as a (self) therapeutic philosophizing about a set of problems that the scholar tradition called ‘philosophical’ – among which, the basic problem of language that, to him, does not constitute a problem among others, but the condition for philosophizing and, by extension, for the philosophical or verbalist deconstruction of the other problems –, the purpose of this article is to characterize and describe therapeutically what we see as the decolonial aspect of this philosophizing. To this end, we will take to the divan, constituting it as a disease that can be treated by a therapeutic-grammatical attitude, the very problem of coloniality that has been guiding global school education since the constitution of national schooling systems, since the 19th century. From this perspective, we have assumed and practiced the belief that a (self) therapeutic writing must also be a (self) decolonial writing. Thus, we chose to write this article according to a polyphonic dialogic genre, which is also one of the characteristics of the therapeutic manner of philosophizing of LW. We specify the authorship of the voices participating in the dialogue by the initials of the first and last names of their authors, so Ludwig Wittgenstein will appear as LW. Our voices, in turn, will be referenced using HW and WH, which, intentionally, do not distinguish them.