Abstract
Pace Wittgenstein's saying that he sees differences where Hegel sees identities, I start this chapter by claiming that Hegel's and Wittgenstein's philosophies are, in some important sense, identical or similar to each other. And I suggest that this identity consists in the way Hegel and Wittgenstein develop their concepts of knowledge from more primitive forms of consciousness and bring them to a cautiously optimistic closure based on the sociality of reason, particularly as mirrored in Hegel's master-slave parable and Wittgenstein's private language argument.
The basic idea behind my line of thought is to read Hegel's master-slave parable not as a loose reference to the problem of mastering a rule but as a complex epistemological argument concerning the struggle between mere "private" opinions, resulting in the emergence of intersubjective knowledge. According to Wittgenstein's examples, the mastering of a rule arises from the mutual conditioning of the pupil and his teacher in the process of following a rule.
What is risked here, I claim, is the certainty of one's private opinion, which, in its aiming at objective knowledge, necessarily becomes fallible.