Wittgenstein After His Nachlass Edited by
Nuno Venturinha
History of Analytic Philosophy Series Editor: Michael Beaney Titles include: Stewart Candlish THE RUSSELL/BRADLEY DISPUTE AND ITS SIGNIFICANCE FOR TWENTIETH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY Omar W. Nasim BERTRAND RUSSELL AND THE EDWARDIAN PHILOSOPHERS Constructing the World Nuno Venturinha (editor) WITTGENSTEIN AFTER HIS NACHLASS Pierre Wagner (editor) CARNAP’S LOGICAL SYNTAX OF LANGUAGE Forthcoming: Andrew Arana and Carlos Alvarez (editors) ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS Rosalind Carey RUSSELL ON MEANING The Emergence of Scientific Philosophy from the 1920s to the 1940s Annalisa Coliva MOORE AND WITTGENSTEIN Scepticism, Certainty and Common Sense Giusseppina D’Oro REASONS AND CAUSES Causalism and Non-Causalism in the Philosophy of Action Sébastien Gandon RUSSELL’S UNKNOWN LOGICISM A Study in the History and Philosophy of Mathematics Anssi Korhonen LOGIC AS UNIVERSAL SCIENCE Russell’s Early Logicism and its Philosophical Context Sandra Lapointe BERNARD BOLZANO’S THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY An Introduction Douglas Patterson ALFRED TARSKI Philosophy of Language and Logic
Erich Reck (editor) THE HISTORIC TURN IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY Graham Stevens THE THEORY OF DESCRIPTIONS
History of Analytic Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–55409–2 (hardcover) Series Standing Order ISBN 978–0–230–55410–8 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Wittgenstein After His Nachlass Edited by
Nuno Venturinha New University of Lisbon, Portugal
Selection and editorial matter © Nuno Venturinha 2010 Chapters © their individual authors 2010 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–23266–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wittgenstein after his Nachlass / edited by Nuno Venturinha. p. cm. — (History of analytic philosophy) Summary: “In this book, leading philosophers in the field explore the rich and variable tangles that characterise Wittgensteins Nachlass, as well as their relations to his conception of philosophy”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978–0–230–23266–2 (hardback) 1. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889–1951. I. Venturinha, Nuno. B3376.W564W55357 2010 192—dc22 2009047549 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne
Contents
List of Table
vii
Series Editor’s Foreword
viii
Acknowledgements
xi
Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Texts
xii
Notes on Contributors
xv
Introduction: The Wonders of the Jungle Nuno Venturinha 1 The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections Luciano Bazzocchi
1
11
2 Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks in the Context of His Philosophizing Ilse Somavilla
30
3 Wittgenstein at Work: Creation, Selection and Composition of ‘Remarks’ Josef G. F. Rothhaupt
51
4 The Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner Arthur Gibson
64
5 The Whewell’s Court Lectures: A Sketch of a Project Volker A. Munz
78
6 Robinson Crusoe Sails Again: The Interpretative Relevance of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass P. M. S. Hacker 7 Tracing the Development of Wittgenstein’s Writing on Private Language David G. Stern 8 Concepts and Concept-Formation Joachim Schulte v
91
110
128
vi
Contents
9 A Re-Evaluation of the Philosophical Investigations Nuno Venturinha
143
10 Towards the New Bergen Electronic Edition Alois Pichler
157
Appendix I The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics Edited by Nuno Venturinha, with an English Translation by James M. Thompson
173
Appendix II Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface Edited by Nuno Venturinha
182
References
189
Index
197
List of Table
1 Wittgenstein’s Nachlass between 1933 and 1936
vii
74
Series Editor’s Foreword During the first half of the twentieth century analytic philosophy gradually established itself as the dominant tradition in the Englishspeaking world, and over the last few decades it has taken firm root in many other parts of the world. There has been increasing debate over just what ‘analytic philosophy’ means, as the movement has ramified into the complex tradition that we know today, but the influence of the concerns, ideas and methods of early analytic philosophy on contemporary thought is indisputable. All this has led to greater self-consciousness among analytic philosophers about the nature and origins of their tradition, and scholarly interest in its historical development and philosophical foundations has blossomed in recent years, with the result that history of analytic philosophy is now recognized as a major field of philosophy in its own right. The main aim of the series in which the present book appears, the first series of its kind, is to create a venue for work on the history of analytic philosophy, consolidating the area as a major field of philosophy and promoting further research and debate. The ‘history of analytic philosophy’ is understood broadly, as covering the period from the last three decades of the nineteenth century to the start of the twenty-first century, beginning with the work of Frege, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, who are generally regarded as its main founders, and the influences upon them, and going right up to the most recent developments. In allowing the ‘history’ to extend to the present, the aim is to encourage engagement with contemporary debates in philosophy, for example, in showing how the concerns of early analytic philosophy relate to current concerns. In focusing on analytic philosophy, the aim is not to exclude comparisons with other – earlier or contemporary – traditions, or consideration of figures or themes that some might regard as marginal to the analytic tradition but which also throw light on analytic philosophy. Indeed, a further aim of the series is to deepen our understanding of the broader context in which analytic philosophy developed, by looking, for example, at the roots of analytic philosophy in neo-Kantianism or British idealism, or the connections between analytic philosophy and phenomenology, or discussing the work of philosophers who were important in the development of analytic philosophy but who are now often forgotten. viii
Series Editor’s Foreword ix
This book focuses on the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), and in particular, on his Nachlass – the material that was left unpublished on his death. Wittgenstein is a central figure in the history of analytic philosophy, and (in the view of many) the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, but his work has provoked enormous debate and controversy. He published only one book in his lifetime, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which appeared in German in 1921 and in its first English translation in 1922. Influenced by Frege and Russell, in particular, he offered a critique of their philosophy and articulated some characteristic ideas of his own. Those ideas in turn influenced the further development of Russell’s views and a whole generation of other British philosophers as well as members of the Vienna Circle. Wittgenstein claimed in the preface to the Tractatus to have solved, ‘on all essential points’, the problems of philosophy, and gave up philosophy for a while as a result. Partly stimulated by his contact with members of the Vienna Circle, however, he returned to philosophy at the end of the 1920s, and began to question some of the assumptions of the Tractatus and to criticize and rethink his ideas. From then on, until his death in 1951, Wittgenstein wrote on numerous topics in the philosophy of language, logic, mathematics and mind, as well as on personal and wider social and cultural matters. He made several attempts to organize his philosophical remarks into a book; but what we now know as the Philosophical Investigations was only published posthumously in 1953, edited by two of his students, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees, and translated by Anscombe. Since then, a whole host of further material has appeared: edited selections of his remarks and letters (including from his early period), and notes taken at his lectures and in conversations. Questions have inevitably been asked about their reliability, however, and about the editorial decisions that have been made. Wittgenstein revised his remarks over and over again as he continually rethought and developed his ideas, so a single remark or passage can never be taken out of context and assumed to represent his view. He also saw connections between the various issues on which he worked – most notably, in the areas of philosophy of mind and philosophy of mathematics. What became the Philosophical Investigations, for example, was originally envisaged as including material on the foundations of mathematics, but this was not included in the book that Anscombe and Rhees edited, so little sense of the connections Wittgenstein saw can be gained. All this has made it difficult to interpret and assess his philosophy.
x
Series Editor’s Foreword
In 2000 an electronic edition of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass was completed, the result of a major project at the University of Bergen, which made available to scholars the full range of his writings (as known then), with indications of the various changes to the texts and their compositional history. In 2004 the Innsbruck electronic edition of Wittgenstein’s correspondence was also published. Since then further material has come to light, and is currently being edited, including extensive notes made by Wittgenstein’s friends Francis Skinner and Yorick Smythies. There are also plans for a new Bergen electronic edition, to include ‘interactive dynamic editing’. These events, and their implications for our understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and his method of writing, are the subject of this book. Several of the papers describe the editorial projects themselves (Chapters 4, 5 and 10), others are concerned with Wittgenstein’s method of composition, including his use of coded remarks (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), while the remainder illustrate the light that is thrown on his ideas by detailed knowledge of his Nachlass. Also included, as appendices, are two short texts by Wittgenstein which appear here for the first time in English translation: some notes dictated to Frank Ramsey in 1929 and a preface to the Philosophical Investigations drafted in 1938. Although only a handful of scholars have so far made proper use of his Nachlass in working on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, this volume demonstrates just what a rich and valuable resource it is, when used with sensitivity to the compositional history of his remarks and the complex style of his writing. Michael Beaney November 2009
Acknowledgements
This book has its origins in a conference of the same title that took place at the New University of Lisbon, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, in May 2008. The conference was made possible by generous funding, for which I am very grateful, from the Institute of Philosophy of Language and the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. I began to discuss the idea of a conference on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass with Alois Pichler some time ago, and I am indebted to him for his comments and suggestions as well as to António Marques and João Sàágua for overall support. Most of the chapters in the book were presented, in earlier versions, at the conference, with the remainder being solicited shortly thereafter. When putting together this collection, I included two texts by Wittgenstein which had not been published in English before. The first is among the Frank Ramsey Papers housed at the University of Pittsburgh, Archives of Scientific Philosophy. I thank Brigitta Arden and the Head of Special Collections as well as Brigitte Parakenings from the Philosophical Archive of the University of Konstanz for all their kindness and help. The document is published by permission of the University of Pittsburgh (all rights reserved). The second text comes from the Wittgenstein Papers housed at the Austrian National Library, Vienna. I thank Brigitte Mersich and the Director of the Collection of Manuscripts and Old Printings for kindly allowing me to consult and reproduce the document. I am also deeply indebted to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, holders of the Wittgenstein copyright in general, for permission to publish both documents. In particular, I wish to thank David McKitterick and Jonathan Smith (Trinity College Library), Peter Hacker (St John’s College, Oxford) and Joachim Schulte (University of Zurich). Finally, I would like to thank Vanessa Boutefeu and Priya Venkat for their devoted editorial assistance. Nuno Venturinha October 2009
xi
Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Texts
AWL
BBB
BEE
BT CV
DB
EPB
GB
GTB LC
Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge, 1932–1935, from the notes of A. Ambrose and M. Macdonald, ed. A. Ambrose (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). The Blue and Brown Books: Preliminary Studies for the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, 2nd edn, ed. R. Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition, ed. Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). (Numbers of manuscripts (MSS) and typescripts (TSS) are according to G. H. von Wright’s catalogue.) The Big Typescript: TS 213, ed. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005). Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains, rev. 2nd edn (by A. Pichler), ed. G. H. von Wright in collaboration with H. Nyman, trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). Denkbewegungen: Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937 (MS 183), vol. 1, ed. I. Somavilla (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1997); English translation, Movements of Thought: Diaries 1930–1932, 1936–1937, in PPO, 3–255. ‘Eine Philosophische Betrachtung’, ed. R. Rhees, in Werkausgabe, vol. 5 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 117–237. Gesamtbriefwechsel: Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe, ed. M. Seekircher, B. McGuinness and A. Unterkircher (Charlottesville: InteLex Corporation, 2004). Geheime Tagebücher 1914–1916, 3rd edn, ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1992). Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, compiled from the notes taken by Y. Smithies, R. Rhees and J. Taylor, ed. C. Barrett (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966). xii
Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Texts
LE
LFM
LPP
LW I
LW II
NB
OC
PB PG PI
PO PPO PR PT
xiii
Lecture on Ethics: Introduction, Interpretation and Complete Text, ed. E. Zamuner, E. V. Di Lascio and D. Levy (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2007). Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics: Cambridge 1939, from the notes of R. G. Bosanquet, N. Malcolm, R. Rhees and Y. Smythies, ed. C. Diamond (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976). Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–47, notes by P. T. Geach, K. J. Shah and A. C. Jackson, ed. P. T. Geach (New York: Harvester Press, 1988). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: Preliminary Studies for Part II of Philosophical Investigations, vol. I, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology: The Inner and the Outer 1949–1951, vol. II, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). Notebooks 1914–1916, 2nd edn, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). On Certainty, rev. edn, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). Philosophische Bemerkungen, ed. R. Rhees, in Werkausgabe, vol. 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984). Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974). Philosophical Investigations, rev. 2nd edn, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997). Philosophical Occasions 1912–1951, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993). Public and Private Occasions, ed. J. C. Klagge and A. Nordmann (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). Philosophical Remarks, ed. R. Rhees, trans. R. Hargreaves and R. White (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975). Prototractatus: An early version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, rev. edn, ed. B. F. McGuinness, T. Nyberg and G. H. von Wright, trans. D. F. Pears and B. F. McGuinness (London: Routledge, 1996).
xiv
Abbreviations of Wittgenstein’s Texts
PU 1979
PU 1979a
PU 2001
PU 2003 RC RFM
RPP I
RPP II
TLP VW
WC WVC
Z
Philosophische Untersuchungen: Frühversion 1937–1938, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, in Helsinki-Ausgabe (unpublished). Philosophische Untersuchungen: ‘Mittelversion’ (1945), ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, in Helsinki-Ausgabe (unpublished). Philosophische Untersuchungen: Kritisch-genetische Edition, ed. J. Schulte in collaboration with H. Nyman, E. von Savigny and G. H. von Wright (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001). Philosophische Untersuchungen, ed. J. Schulte (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003). Remarks on Colour, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. L. L. McAlister and M. Schättle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977). Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 3rd edn, ed. G. H. von Wright, R. Rhees and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. I, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II, ed. G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman, trans. C. G. Luckhardt and M. A. E. Aue (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, rev. edn, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1933). The Voices of Wittgenstein: The Vienna Circle, by L. Wittgenstein and F. Waismann, ed. G. Baker, trans. G. Baker, M. Mackert, J. Connolly and V. Politis (London: Routledge, 2003). Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951, ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, conversations recorded by F. Waismann, ed. B. McGuinness, trans. J. Schulte and B. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). Zettel, 2nd edn, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
Notes on Contributors
Luciano Bazzocchi worked for 20 years on knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence after taking a degree in Philosophy of Science at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. He built and applied several expert systems for medical and legal diagnosis, and published scientific reports and a series of ‘Notes on Artificial Intelligence’ in technical journals. Afterwards he returned to philosophy and received a PhD from Pisa University, analysing the formal structure of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. His current interests include the genesis and development of Wittgenstein’s works and manuscripts. Arthur Gibson has been Director of Studies in Philosophy for several Cambridge University Colleges, as well as its Proctor, guest philosopher variously at Columbia, Helsinki, NYU and the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and Chair of Philosophy at Roehampton University. He has now moved back to Cambridge, where he is editing the manuscripts that comprise the Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner in Trinity College for the publication of a book, and also doing his own research. Professor Gibson’s books include What is Literature? (2007), Metaphysics and Transcendence (2003), Text and Tablet (2000) and God and the Universe (2000). P. M. S. Hacker is one of the leading Wittgenstein scholars. He is the author of the four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, the first two volumes co-authored with G. P. Baker (1980–96), of Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (1996) and of Wittgenstein: Connections and Controversies (2001). He has written extensively on philosophy and the neurosciences, most recently Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (2003) and History of Cognitive Neuroscience (2008) co-authored with M. R. Bennett. He is currently working on a three-volume work on human nature, the first volume of which Human Nature: the Categorial Framework was published in 2007. The projected sequel is entitled Human Nature: the Cognitive and Cogitative Powers. Volker A. Munz is a lecturer at the Institute of Philosophy and the Institute of History at the University of Graz. He is Director xv
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Notes on Contributors
of the project ‘Friend or Fiend. A Comparison between AustriaHungary and Russia around 1900’. His publications include: Satz und Sinn: Bemerkungen zur Sprachphilosophie Wittgensteins (2005), Sprache – Denken – Nation: Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte von Locke bis zur Moderne, with Katalin Neumer (2005), and Kulturtransfer und kulturelle Identität – Budapest und Wien zwischen Historismus und Avantgarde, with Károly Csúri and Zoltán Fónagy (2009). His main research interests are Analytic Philosophy, Metaphysics, Wittgenstein and Viennese Modernity. Alois Pichler is a researcher at the Uni Research Department Uni Digital and director of the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen. His research interests include Wittgenstein, Editorial Philology and Text Encoding. With the Wittgenstein Archives, he has edited Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (2000), and with G. H. von Wright, Wittgenstein’s Vermischte Bemerkungen/Culture and Value (1994; 1998). He has published mainly in the field of Wittgenstein scholarship, with such works as Wittgensteins Philosophische Untersuchungen: Vom Buch zum Album (2004) and, with Simo Säätelä, Wittgenstein: The Philosopher and His Works (2006), and Digital Humanities, where he relates his work on Wittgenstein to the digital turn. Josef G. F. Rothhaupt is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University, Munich. He studied Philosophy, Art History, Ethnology and Theology in Mainz, Munich, Dublin, Bergen and Cambridge. His PhD thesis in Philosophy was on the theme of colour in Wittgenstein’s papers. His Habilitation is also on Wittgenstein’s work, more specifically the creation, selection and composition of his philosophical remarks. As one of the founders of the International Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, he is co-editor of the Wittgenstein-Jahrbuch and the Wittgenstein-Studien. His books include Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlass (1996) and Kreation und Komposition. Studien zu Wittgensteins Nachlass – 1929–1933 (forthcoming). His current research focuses primarily on a detailed reconstruction of the genesis of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. Joachim Schulte teaches at the University of Zürich. He has published a number of articles and four books on the philosophy of Wittgenstein: Experience and Expression (1993), Wittgenstein: An Introduction (1992), Chor und Gesetz: Wittgenstein im Kontext (1990) and Wittgenstein: Leben Werk Wirkung (2005). He is co-editor of critical
Notes on Contributors xvii
editions of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1989) and Philosophical Investigations (2001). In recent years, he has chiefly worked on Wittgenstein’s middle period. Ilse Somavilla has been a researcher at the Brenner Archives Research Institute at the University of Innsbruck since 1990. Prior to that, she received a doctorate for her dissertation on Wittgenstein, following studies in English, philosophy and psychology. Her research, published in several articles, has focused on Wittgenstein, especially on the ethical and religious aspects of his work. At the Archives, she has compiled and edited several critical editions of his letters and writings, including Denkbewegungen: Tagebücher 1930–1932, 1936–1937 (1997), Wittgenstein: Licht und Schatten (2004) and, with Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein-Engelmann: Briefe, Begegnungen, Erinnerungen (2006). David G. Stern is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations: An Introduction (2004) and Wittgenstein on Mind and Language (1995), and co-editor of Wittgenstein Reads Weininger, with Béla Szabados (2004) and The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, with Hans Sluga (1996). James M. Thompson has been lecturing at the Institute for Ethnology and Philosophy at the Martin Luther University, Halle-Wittenberg, since 2004, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Graduate School: Society and Culture in Motion (MLU). He is the author of Wittgenstein on Phenomenology and Experience: An Investigation of Wittgenstein’s ‘Middle Period’ (2008) as well as several articles on Wittgenstein. His research interests include the Philosophy of Language, Phenomenology, American Pragmatism and Ethical Theory (especially human rights). Nuno Venturinha studied in Lisbon, Tübingen and Vienna. He received his PhD from the New University of Lisbon with a thesis on Wittgenstein. He has been a research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of Language at the New University of Lisbon since 2002 and a Visiting Researcher at the universities of Bergen, Innsbruck, Oxford, Cambridge and Helsinki. He has been awarded a number of academic distinctions as well as grants from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, the Austrian Exchange Service, the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology and the European Commission. He has published widely, primarily on the Philosophy of Language and Wittgenstein.
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Introduction The Wonders of the Jungle Nuno Venturinha
A philosophical book might be entitled ‘the wonders of the jungle’. MS 149, pp. 5–6 (PO, p. 229) When Wittgenstein died in 1951, he had published only one philosophical book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. However, he left behind a voluminous collection of papers, generally known as the Nachlass. According to his will, Rush Rhees, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright were given ‘the copyright in all [these] unpublished writings and also the manuscripts and typescripts thereof to dispose of as they [could] think best’ (quoted in Nedo, 1993, p. 52). Edited by Anscombe and Rhees, the first posthumous work came to light in 1953, bearing the title Philosophical Investigations. It was followed in 1956 by Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, edited by the three literary executors.1 These two books were responsible for the introduction of what came to be known as the ‘later Wittgenstein’, whose philosophical views had been made public only in lectures and discussions such as those that originated The Blue and Brown Books, published by Rhees in 1958.2 However, the Nachlassverwalter also aimed to clarify Wittgenstein’s earlier thought. Thus in 1960 the ‘philosophical content’ of the surviving First World War notebooks, as well as a reprint of the 1913 ‘Notes on Logic’ published by H. T. Costello in 1957, appeared under the editorship of Anscombe and von Wright.3 Rhees in turn would publish in 1964 the first collection of cuttings and pastings that Wittgenstein prepared after returning to philosophy in 1929, the Philosophische Bemerkungen, translated into English in 1975 as Philosophical Remarks.4 The 1929 ‘Lecture on Ethics’ and extracts from Wittgenstein’s notes on James George Frazer’s The Golden 1
2
Introduction
Bough would also be published by Rhees in 1965 and 1967, respectively.5 In a different direction, Anscombe and von Wright offered the Wittgenstein community in 1967 the first edition of Zettel, another collection of cuttings, whose pastings, however, were not Wittgenstein’s but P. T. Geach’s – Anscombe’s husband.6 This peculiar editorial methodology immediately reveals that there was no real concern among the Wittgenstein editors to be faithful to the sources. After editing Wittgenstein’s ‘Notes for Lectures on “Private Experience” and “Sense Data” ’ in 1968,7 Rhees would in fact be severely criticized for his edition of the Philosophical Grammar, published in German in 1969. Anthony Kenny, who translated the text into English in 1974, claimed that the ‘Big Typescript’ (TS 213), on which it is based, should have been published in toto and not as a reconstruction.8 What Rhees attempted to do was to follow Wittgenstein’s puzzling revisions of the work, more specifically of its first part. These revisions began in the typescript itself, both on its recto and verso pages, continuing in the second half of MS 114, in the first half of MS 115, via MSS 156a, 156b and 145–7, in MS 140 – the Grosses Format – and in a manuscript that has not survived, referred to at the end of the Grosses Format as Kleines Format.9 The discovery of the so-called ‘Mulder V’, a typescript Wittgenstein apparently dictated for Moritz Schlick which constitutes a very close version of §§1–42 of the Grammar,10 has shown that Rhees’ editorial initiative could have been meritorious if he had not excluded, with no justification, 3 of the 19 chapters of the work (those entitled ‘Philosophy’, ‘Phenomenology’ and ‘Idealism, etc.’). Kenny, however, was not the only scholar who in the 1970s demanded an appropriate edition of the Wittgenstein papers. Shortly before the publication of his article ‘From the Big Typescript to the Philosophical Grammar’, a Wittgenstein Archive had been established at the University of Tübingen. Under the coordination of Michael Nedo and H. J. Heringer, its goal was to prepare a transcription and edition of the entire Nachlass, with a number of volumes being envisaged for publication by the mid-1980s. Although a good deal of material had already been transcribed into a computer database, accompanied by a search programme, the German project came to an end around 1980–81 allegedly as a result of quarrels between the team members. In 1981, supported by the three literary executors, Nedo applied for Austrian funds proposing to proceed independently in Cambridge with the work he had begun in Tübingen. The funding was granted in 1982 but, even after various renewals, he failed to present any substantial output. von Wright began to dissociate himself from collaboration with Nedo in 1987 even
Nuno Venturinha
3
though Anscombe continued to support him. After Rhees’ death in 1989, and the nomination of Kenny and Peter Winch as trustees, Nedo was removed from the leadership of Wittgenstein’s Gesamtausgabe in 1991, having been given permission to publish only manuscripts and typescripts from the period 1929–33, i.e. the ‘Big Typescript’ corpus, and exclusively in hard copy. This gave rise to the Vienna Edition, of which an introductory volume came out in 1993, followed, surprisingly, by only six-and-a-half volumes so far.11 Fortunately for Wittgenstein scholarship, another editorial initiative was underway. Having started in 1980, the Norwegian Wittgenstein Project, based in Bergen, aimed at producing a machine-readable version of the Nachlass. Though the collapse of the Tübingen Archive had made about 4000 pages of previous transcriptions available to the Norwegian team in 1984 and another 3250 were presented at the end of 1987, the project was brought to a stand-still since it did not have permission from the trustees for the electronic dissemination of its results. However, the principal mentor of the project, Claus Huitfeldt, then proposed to establish in Bergen a Wittgenstein Archive. The programmatic line would be similar but this time permission to publish the Nachlass on CD-ROM would be assured by the Wittgenstein Trust, which now included Kenny and Winch. Huitfeldt was authorized to proceed with his work, with the University of Bergen granting financial support from 1990 on. The official agreement between the trustees and the University of Bergen was celebrated in 1992, and one year later a contract with Oxford University Press was signed. After the publication of two initial disks in 1998 and 1999, the Bergen Electronic Edition was concluded in 2000, making about 20,000 pages available in both normalized and diplomatic transcriptions, as well as in facsimile.12 This was an outstanding and extremely valuable contribution to Wittgenstein research. Designed to accommodate an œuvre without parallel in the history of philosophy, the Bergen edition constitutes much more than a Gesamtausgabe: it allows scholars to access the multiple levels of Wittgenstein’s textual composition. Indeed, the publication of the Nachlass, the great majority of which was from the post-1929 period, did not lead to the emergence of unknown ‘works’. What was made public though was Wittgenstein’s peculiar œuvre, in all its multidimensionality. The biggest challenge the editors of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass faced was in fact, as Huitfeldt (1992) put it, to gather ‘multidimensional texts in a one-dimensional medium’. That required an electronic support, by means of which it becomes possible to keep up with Wittgenstein’s extremely complicated reformulations and revisions of his thoughts.
4
Introduction
The Bergen edition has thus conveyed for the first time an accurate picture of what Wittgenstein was trying to do in philosophy after his return to Cambridge in 1929, a picture that had been obscured by the classical editions13 and that the Vienna Edition was only tenuously able to project. Ten years after the publication of the Bergen edition, this distorted picture unfortunately prevails. David Stern has rightly pointed out that ‘[w]ith a few notable exceptions – principally editorial work on Wittgenstein’s writing, and the study of the composition of his work – writing on Wittgenstein in a possible world where the Bergen edition was never published would be almost indistinguishable from our own’ (2008, p. 350). The current availability of almost the entire Nachlass is in fact neglected by the vast majority of Wittgenstein scholars, who normally regard it as something that can only be of interest to philologists. This book challenges this view offering new ways of looking at Wittgenstein’s papers as well as clear, comprehensive and original philosophical interpretations of them. Consisting of ten chapters, it explores the rich and tangled threads that characterize the Nachlass and examines their relation to Wittgenstein’s conception of philosophy. In addition, the collection supplies important information on texts that have come to light in the meantime and which justify closer study. Two of these texts are printed as appendices. The book begins with a chapter by Luciano Bazzocchi, which tackles the difficult and largely ignored question about the genesis of the Tractatus. Even if Wittgenstein’s pre-war ‘large’ notebook,14 from which derive the ‘Notes on Logic’ and apparently the ‘Notes dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway’, is lost, we are still left with an important manuscript containing virtual earlier versions of the Tractatus. This is the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript (MS 104), which, as Bazzocchi shows, sheds an important light on Wittgenstein’s peculiar working method during the First World War. Bazzocchi’s claim is that the Tractatus was composed in a quasi hypertextual way, and this implies that the organic procedure sought in Wittgenstein’s later writings was one already practised to a certain extent in his early philosophical period. Discussing Brian McGuinness’ and Andreas Geschkowski’s theses in detail, Bazzocchi draws attention to previously unnoticed aspects of the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook and stresses Wittgenstein’s extraordinary care with style and what can be said. In Chapter 2, Ilse Somavilla engages with Wittgenstein’s repeated use of coded entries in his notebooks from 1914 on. As Øystein Hide insightfully remarked, ‘[t]here is reason to believe that this code was inspired by Leonardo Da Vinci’s “reversed alphabet” ’, since among the books
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5
Wittgenstein had before the First World War – which are now kept at the Bertrand Russell Archives at McMaster University – was ‘an edition of Da Vinci’s collected writings’ (2004, p. 69). This, Hide informs us, consists of ‘6 large volumes containing facsimiles of all Da Vinci’s manuscripts (recto pages), together with explanations and transcriptions (verso pages)’, as well as ‘an account of Da Vinci’s private alphabet’ (2004, p. 82). Analysing the status Wittgenstein apportions to his reflections in code, Somavilla argues that they can be read as representing more than a scattered (auto)biography;15 their various levels of philosophical consideration, namely aesthetical, ethical and religious, take the form of a parallel book – which goes much beyond Culture and Value16 – that can be composed out of the Nachlass. If it is possible to construct a Wittgenstein book consisting of his coded remarks, Josef Rothhaupt, in Chapter 3, examines concrete cases where a textual reconstruction is needed. He starts by offering a diagnosis of Rhees’ edition of the Philosophical Remarks and discusses Wittgenstein’s actual motivation to prepare TSS 208 and 209 – much of the former existing only in the form of cuttings pasted into MSS 112 and 114 as well as in TSS 212 and what is now 233. Another reconstruction Rothhaupt takes issue with is of what he denominated the ‘Kringel-Buch’. Following the remarks marked with a squiggle like an imperfectly drawn circle in MSS 107–12, one is able to find a complete book, with motto and preface, perhaps the ‘book on anthropology’ Wittgenstein refers to in a remark dated 22 June 1931, itself marked with a Kringel.17 Rothhaupt concludes by providing a different vision of the genesis of the ‘Big Typescript’. He outlines the way Wittgenstein composed TS 212, the ‘Proto-Big Typescript’, ‘initially ordered in groups of themes, which were marked with a “Stichwort” (headword)’, with these being ‘arranged in alphabetical order’. According to Rothhaupt, this illuminates Wittgenstein’s puzzling remark, penned before April 1932, that his book should consist of ‘[h]eadwords arranged in alphabetical order’ (MS 154, p. 1r). The insight Rothhaupt extracts from this is that the ‘Big Typescript’ was not intended as a book for publication but constituted instead ‘a huge archive, a tremendous reservoir of philosophical remarks’, which could then be used as the basis of a book. Wittgenstein’s difficulty in finding the right mode of presentation for his thoughts led him to consider dictation as a useful working method. Chapters 4 and 5 – those by Arthur Gibson and Volker Munz – deal with the legacies of two of Wittgenstein’s most loyal students and friends: Francis Skinner and Yorick Smythies. Both decided not to pursue academic careers, but devoted a great part of their lives to the
6
Introduction
understanding of Wittgenstein’s thought. It is no surprise that they singled out their philosophical activity as amanuenses, each of them leaving a Nachlass that complements and illuminates Wittgenstein’s own Nachlass. In these two chapters, Gibson and Munz focus on Skinner’s and Smythies’ ability to take down Wittgenstein’s words and then meticulously organize the results of such dictations. More than a mere description of the collections, Gibson and Munz situate the items in relation to Wittgenstein’s philosophical development from 1933 to 1947, examining their relevance for research on various topics, among them language-games, perception of visual phenomena, necessary propositions, number theory and volition. Chapters 6 and 7, by Peter Hacker and David Stern, follow in the collection. They offer two different ways of dealing with the discussion of private language in the Philosophical Investigations. Making full use of the Nachlass to clarify the text, Hacker reconsiders his criticism of Kripke’s and Malcolm’s views of Wittgenstein’s writing on following rules and on a solitary Robinson Crusoe. Although Hacker maintains that ‘the question of Crusoe and solitary rule-followers or languageusers’ is itself ‘trivial and unimportant’, he engages with communitarians in an innovative way, interpreting Wittgenstein’s concepts of Praxis, Gepflogenheiten and Institutionen. His conclusion is that Wittgenstein’s use of such terms does not ‘commit him to the view that any rulefollowing activity must be a communal one’. A nice way of putting the matter is, according to Hacker, as follows: ‘A language need not be shared, but it must be shareable. It may be private, but it must be possible for it to be public.’ In contrast, Stern places Wittgenstein’s discussion of private language in the Investigations in a Pyrrhonian setting. While comparing Wittgenstein’s view in the pre-1936 texts with that of his post-1936 writings and the one we find in the Investigations, Stern raises relevant questions on how to interpret an author’s unpublished papers. In this specific case, he says, ‘[t]he mere fact that a particular passage, whether it is in a first draft manuscript or one of Wittgenstein’s most polished works, sets out or argues for an idea gives us no more than a prima facie reason to attribute that idea to Wittgenstein’. Stern thus examines the various contexts in which Wittgenstein discusses a solitary language use and claims that an individualist reading of the Investigations cannot in the last analysis be maintained. Wittgenstein’s remarks about concept-formation in the 1940s have been investigated mainly on the basis of Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics and the four classical volumes on the philosophy of
Nuno Venturinha
7
psychology. In Chapter 8, Joachim Schulte analyses the whole manuscript corpus of this period, tracing the development of Wittgenstein’s work on the notion of a concept in its original mutual dependence, namely mathematical and psychological. However, as Schulte stresses, ‘it must be remembered that all these analogies and images do not clearly figure as coordinated parts of one and the same project Wittgenstein had in mind’. In my own contribution to this book, Chapter 9, I continue this discussion. Taking as my point of departure Avrum Stroll’s and Danièle Moyal-Sharrock’s thesis of a ‘third Wittgenstein’, the supposed author of the ‘post-Investigations works’, I suggest that we should re-evaluate Wittgenstein’s second book project. One crucial role for such a reevaluation will be to give a full account of the origin of the Investigations. Both hitherto neglected and recently discovered texts demonstrate not only that Wittgenstein was occupied until his death with only one philosophical book, but also that this book should consist of a psychological part and a mathematical one. More than merely criticizing the grounds for the ‘third Wittgenstein’, I attempt to show that a full understanding of what Wittgenstein was trying to achieve in his later philosophy depends on looking at the right place. This means that we must carry out an enquiry anchored to a solid textual basis and eschew most of the classical Wittgenstein ‘works’. The last chapter in this book, by Alois Pichler, debates the new Bergen Electronic Edition, what it needs to correct and what it should look like. It is a lucid presentation of what digital editorship and hermeneutics can currently offer but at the same time require from the user. The publication of the Innsbruck Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein’s complete correspondence,18 incorporating biographical and historicalcultural commentaries, seems to be a good model for the Nachlass itself. But if the new Bergen edition wants to become a real electronic edition and not only a traditional edition in electronic form, the interactive dynamic editing that many today think it should contemplate must be carefully taken into account, so as not to lose sight of the physical unity that characterizes each Nachlass item. The book concludes with two appendices containing editions prepared by myself. Appendix I reproduces a German manuscript in Frank Ramsey’s hand, supposedly dictated by Wittgenstein, which appears with an en face English translation by James Thompson. Appendix II contains an English translation by Wittgenstein of his 1938 preface to the pre-war version of the Investigations.
8
Introduction
Notes 1. I argue that these texts should not have been published this way in Chapter 9. 2. Additional material related to these projects has recently been found among Francis Skinner’s papers. See Chapter 4. 3. The expression ‘philosophical content’ is taken from von Wright (1982a, p. 67). It is used to differentiate the parts written in normal script from those written in code, which correspond to the, so to speak, ‘private content’ of the notebooks, omitted by Anscombe and von Wright. This editorial decision gave rise to a controversy in the 1980s, with Wilhelm Baum editing the coded passages in 1985 without permission from the Wittgenstein trustees. For further discussion, see Chapter 2. In the 2nd edition of the Notebooks 1914–1916, besides the inclusion of the 1914 ‘Notes dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway’, the Costello version of the ‘Notes on Logic’ (TS 201b) was replaced by the Russell version (TS 201a). There are two versions of the latter indeed, TSS 201a1 and a2, as well as a copy made by David Shwayder (TS 201a3), and although only the former seems to correspond to Wittgenstein’s intentions, the three versions were used for the 2nd edition of the Notebooks. I discuss this issue in Venturinha, forthcoming, §2. In a recent book, Potter (2009, pp. 263–75) suggests a new organization of the material. 4. Some problems connected with Rhees’ edition are discussed in Chapter 3. 5. With regard to the ‘Lecture on Ethics’, it is worth mentioning that there is a new edition of both the manuscript versions (MSS 139a and b) and the typescript version (TS 207), prepared by Edoardo Zamuner, E. Valentina Di Lascio and David Levy, with important historical notes by Ilse Somavilla (see LE, pp. 243–5). As to the remarks on Frazer, it is of interest to note that, as Josef Rothhaupt explains in Chapter 3, Wittgenstein himself made a selection which does not coincide with Rhees’ compilation. 6. It was also in 1967 that, under the coordination of von Wright and Norman Malcolm, a microfilm of the Nachlass was prepared for Cornell University, from which resulted a bound paper edition of about 100 volumes. Copies of these versions have been purchased by several institutions, allowing researchers to access almost all of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. However, besides the fact that all passages in code have been covered and some pages are missing, the readability is of course limited since the texts are neither transcribed nor edited and the photographic quality is poor. For that reason the Cornell edition did not arouse any great enthusiasm among Wittgenstein scholars, who were naturally more interested in studying the Nachlass than in transcribing and editing it. 7. Apropos of this work, Hintikka (1996, p. 4) writes: ‘[. . .] Rhees’s 1968 edition of Wittgenstein’s highly important “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’ ” [. . .] omits without any indications about 30 percent of Wittgenstein’s actual text, including what I consider some of the most important passages Wittgenstein ever wrote. The only warning Rush Rhees issues is to say that “(f)or special reasons, I have not included the sections on mathematics”. This is entirely misleading, because most of the omitted material has nothing to do with mathematics. Rhees’s omissions frequently take place in the midst of Wittgenstein’s text, thus destroying any hope of
Nuno Venturinha
8. 9. 10.
11.
12. 13.
14.
9
grasping the continuity of Wittgenstein’s thought on the basis of his “edition”.’ A revised and expanded edition of the non-mathematical material was published by David Stern in PO, 200–88. See Kenny, 1976, and in the same vein Baker and Hacker, 1986, especially pp. 323–4 and 347–9. Cf. MS 140, p. 38. On this lost manuscript, see Paul, 2007, pp. 164–6. This text has been catalogued by von Wright as D 308 but has not been included in the BEE. A clean copy is housed at the Vienna Circle Archive (founded by Henk Mulder) which now forms part of the North Holland Archive of Haarlem. It belongs to Schlick’s ‘Wittgensteiniana’ bearing the reference 184/D.5. For a complete description of this collection, see Fabian, 2007, pp. 52–3. But the best part of the story is that an annotated copy, which seems not to have been alluded to elsewhere, is preserved among the Rhees material at Trinity College Library, Cambridge. Von Wright (1993, p. 500) actually mentions that ‘[e]ight typescripts are known of dictations by Wittgenstein to Schlick’ but ‘[o}ne of them, however, is essentially a typescript version of 140’ and ‘[t]his typescript [he has] not listed in the catalogue’. As Alois Pichler suggests in Chapter 10 (note 7), this seems to be the result of a confusion in the updating of the catalogue, since in its first publication (1969) the item was in fact absent from the dictations. Be that as it may, even the clean copy is far from representing ‘a typescript version of 140’. It follows Wittgenstein’s complicated editorial instructions, incorporating a lot of material from other sources. Gordon Baker’s observation that ‘[t]his item [. . .] exists among Schlick’s papers in the form of shorthand notes’ seems to be the result of another confusion, since he also refers to it as a ‘long typescript’ (VW, p. xxvii, n. 3). These are MSS 105–14(I), corresponding to Volumes 1–5 (1994–96), the first half of TS 211, which constitutes Volume 8,1 (2000), and TS 213, a clean copy, which is to be found in Volume 11 (2000). A Konkordanz zu den Bänden 1–5 and the Register zu den Bänden 1–5 have also been published, in 1997 and 1998. It is worth mentioning that C. G. Luckhardt’s and M. A. E. Aue’s edition of the Big Typescript (2005) incorporates in a single volume all the corrections made by Wittgenstein in the top copy of TS 213. My account of the publication history of the Nachlass draws on Huitfeldt and Rossvær, 1989, ch. 1; Hintikka, 1996; Stern, 1996; and Kenny, 2006. These also include, among others, On Certainty, from 1969, edited by Anscombe and von Wright; Remarks on Colour, from 1977, edited by Anscombe; Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, from 1980, the first volume edited by Anscombe and von Wright and the second by von Wright and Heikki Nyman; and Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, from 1982 and 1992, also edited by von Wright and Nyman. I take issue with all these publications in Chapter 9. Cf. Wittgenstein’s reference to ‘the volume of [his] journal with the whole story in it’ in a letter to Russell from November or December 1913 (WC, 30), the very first entry of MS 101, p. 1r (GTB, 9.8.14), and a list of Wittgenstein’s papers dated January 1917 written out by his sister Hermine in a letter of 7 June 1917 (GB). In all probability, the ‘journal-notebooks and manuscripts’ Wittgenstein asked Russell to destroy in a letter of 1 November 1919 (WC, 69), as well as in one from 1922 (WC, 94), included the ‘notebook entries’
10
15.
16.
17. 18.
Introduction (Tagebuchaufzeichnungen) he began to sketch in Berlin, alluded to in MS 107, p. 74 (in code). Wittgenstein mentions in fact the writing of a ‘biography’ in a letter to Ludwig Hänsel from the beginning of August 1924 (cf. GB), and the idea of an ‘(auto)biography’ will reappear in MS 108, pp. 46–7, and MS 110, pp. 252–3, in two remarks written in code, dated 28 December 1929 and 1 July 1931 respectively. Contrary to the former editions of the text by von Wright, the revised edition prepared by Alois Pichler in 1994, translated into English in 1998, reproduces the whole remarks as they appear in the original manuscripts. However, the fact remains that Culture and Value is only a selection of remarks, several of which were in fact written in normal script. Cf. MS 110, p. 198. Wittgenstein’s Gesamtbriefwechsel: Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe was published in 2004 under the editorship of Monika Seekircher, Brian McGuinness and Anton Unterkircher. It contains more that 2000 pieces of correspondence, but it is already in need of an updating. It does not include, for instance, Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Rose Rand (see Iven, 2004), almost the entirety of Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Piero Sraffa, first published by Matthias Unterhuber (see Unterhuber, 2007) and later, but only in part, by McGuinness (see WC), as well as other correspondence, the majority of which is now available, thanks to the work of McGuinness (in WC), with the rest awaiting publication, as is the case of the correspondence between Wittgenstein and Ben Richards.
1 The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections Luciano Bazzocchi
The triple structure of the ‘Prototractatus’ kaleidoscope Both the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the so-called ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript1 contain numbered propositions. The 726 propositions of the Tractatus are printed in numerical order starting with statements 1, 1.1, 1.11, 1.12, 1.13, 1.2 and ending with 6.522, 6.53, 6.54, 7, while in the ‘Prototractatus’ the same or similar propositions appear in disarray, without any obvious criteria of arrangement or possible reading. More careful consideration of the numbering system, which is substantially the same in the two texts, reveals alternative virtual arrangements. In fact, there are at least two ways of reading Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: (1) a physical and sequential one, in strictly numerical order, as in the original edition; and (2) a logical-hierarchical one by means of the top-down structure of the decimal numbers (the tree-like arrangement, see Bazzocchi, 2008). But there are at least three ways of reading the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook: (1) a physical one, following the compositional order of the notebook pages; (2) a sequential one, reordering propositions in strictly numerical order; (3) a logical-hierarchical one, by means of the top-down structure of the decimal numbers (the tree-like arrangement). Information about the chronological order of composition is, of course, the real contribution of the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook, and it is a pity that in the printed editions rearrangement of the propositions in numerical order, in strict accordance with the second point of view, has hidden the order of composition from most critics.2 If we look at the manuscript, the most distinctive characteristic of Wittgenstein’s method of composition is the implementation of a top-down process: first he wrote down the main propositions, then ‘comments’ on them, followed by more specific comments on the 11
12
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
comments, and so on in a cascade. In doing so, he did not adopt a deep-first technique (the consecutive ‘explosion’ of all nested comments, just as in a decimal-ordered arrangement), but a breadth-first technique: every line of thought is driven for as long as he can, on the same level, before adding any more specific comment. This procedure is not immediately evident because often the series of coherent lines of thinking overlap each other, but it all becomes clear if we reconstruct the process according to the third structure of the work – the logical-hierarchical one. Despite the apparent chaos of the decimals, in every stage of the work the numerical structure is preserved both dense and coherent.3 This is not surprising because coherence is the main logical, aesthetic and ethical principle of Wittgenstein’s thought; thus, at every stage his work can be considered consistent and, in some way, complete. This feature was much appreciated by Wittgenstein, who could have died in the war at any moment, since at any point a completed version of his book would have reached Russell for printing. But what is most interesting from our point of view is that the notebook does not represent only ‘an early version of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’, as the subtitle of the printed edition claims, but includes infinite versions, nested one inside another like Russian ‘matrioskas’. In other words, we can depict the growth of the text as a coherent level-by-level adding of propositions, each one added into its specific point in the hierarchy. Thus, with the sole problem being the not infrequent corrections of the decimals (that may hide previous structural stages), we can rebuild any phase whatsoever of the work, observing it in its three alternative structures. In this way, the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript reveals that the work is a continuous evolution from the extreme synthesis of its first page until what is effectively the whole Tractatus by the last page. By the end, the manuscript contains all the material of the final typescript (title, dedication, motto and Preface included), with the exception of only five propositions.4 Indeed, the story of the ‘Prototractatus’ is the account of the Tractatus itself. We can simulate the process on the virtual tree of the decimal relations and see the unbroken evolution from its general scheme – the first page looks surprisingly like a hypertext home page – up to the final complete book without any relevant correction of previous propositions.5 Wittgenstein’s strategy, therefore, appears firmly related to a hierarchical representation, and it is likely that he used some special way to represent this, for instance schemas and propositional arrangements on loose sheets of paper.6 A technological version on database offers the opportunity to examine every intermediate stage of development with relevant
Luciano Bazzocchi 13
opportunities for new hermeneutical remarks, some of which I wish to illustrate below.
A deleted proposition on ethics and ‘the 1916 Abhandlung’ As Brian McGuinness observed, a very interesting stage of composition was reached corresponding to the separation line drawn by Wittgenstein himself on page 70 of the notebook. The initial project of a logic-based Abhandlung seems to have been completed here. It included six sections, the last of which (focused on ‘the general form of truth-function’) had only one exhaustive subsection about logical propositions, summarized by remark 6.1: ‘The propositions of logic are the tautologies.’ When reordering the book by decimal numbers, the conclusive reflection was ‘6.13 Logic is not a theory but a mirror-image of the world’, with a last definitive comment: ‘6.131 Logic is transcendental.’ This was the end of the treatise. McGuinness suggests that this stage was reached in March 1916 and that only in the autumn of 1916 did Wittgenstein decide to append another short layer of text, adding two new final propositions as well:7 6.3 All propositions are of equal value. 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Thus Wittgenstein’s conviction that he had finished his work appears to be both reinforced and ‘definitive’. As we can see, there is a surprising numerical jump here: number 6.2 is missing. It will appear only later with a new section on epistemology after the separating line following proposition 7. In 1989, McGuinness assumed that one of the previous 6.1s was originally a 6.2, because he considered the idea of such an evident numerical incongruence unacceptable. Then in 1996 McGuinness read a further deleted proposition on the blank line preceding statement 6.3 (which was also numbered 6.3)8 and had it inserted in the Bergen-Oxford transcription of the Nachlass. But later on, he formulated a new hypothesis: the deleted number could be none other than the missing 6.2. This was the real end of the book:9 6.2 Ethics does not consist of propositions. 6.3 All propositions are of equal value. 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
14
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
Evidently, McGuinness concluded, proposition 6.2 on ethics was deleted when Wittgenstein, some time later, decided to continue the work and added the new 6.2 section on epistemology. In the meantime, Andreas Geschkowski examined the notebook with care and stated that none of the previous 6.1s, nor the deleted remark, was 6.2. In his opinion, the situation of the notebook was at that point confused and uncertain. Wittgenstein had already decided to continue with comments on ethics and with epistemological assertions, and only with this section would the numerical series become correct. In this case, McGuinness’ idea of a possibly ‘definitive’ stage culminating in proposition 7, and eventually reinforced by an accurately revised and re-arranged typescript edition, would turn out to be unacceptable.10 As a matter of fact, I do not take Geschkowski’s hypothesis seriously. It is self-contradictory and explains nothing. He assumes that Wittgenstein wrote proposition 6.3 because he had already decided to continue with 6.2 (after remark 7 and the subsequent break-line), but that he at once rubbed out this 6.3 to replace it with another (evidently unforeseen) proposition 6.3 – but without occupying the space of the deleted remark.11 Besides, the idea that Wittgenstein had conceived such a controversial proposition on ethics with the explicit purpose of commenting on it later is hard to believe. And furthermore, why did he make an intentional numerical jump such as we never find in the layers divided by horizontal strokes?12 What was the thinking process that could justify the unusual incoherence of the page? It is more productive to start from McGuinness’ framework: with proposition 7, Wittgenstein thought that his work could be considered complete so all the sections and the numbers had to be coherent and concluded. Possible objections to McGuinness’ proposal show this to be different. The first question is: why would Wittgenstein later delete the statement on ethics exactly when he decided to add a new section about contingency and science? Secondly, after one long section 6.1 on logic, composed of 42 propositions, would he add two final sections 6.2 and 6.3 on the same argument, each of them composed of only one proposition? The care Wittgenstein took with his numbering was more conscientious than one could imagine. To answer these questions and to reply to the empirical datum that the supposed 6.2 at the moment of its deletion was a 6.3, we must look at the whole process.
The controversial development of section 6 On careful examination, the whole of section 6 shows a particular development, unusual even by Wittgenstein’s standards. Proposition 6
Luciano Bazzocchi 15
appears on the first page of the text, but it is not commented upon in the following pages, unlike all the other 14 propositions on the same sheet: its first ‘elucidation’ (remark 6.1) comes at least one year later, on page 64. It is tempting to suppose that only later was proposition 6 added to the first page; in fact when this did happen and its formalism was stated, some of the previously inserted propositions were radically modified (see propositions 5.0016 and 5.003 on page 11, or 5.3001 and 5.3002 on page 13). Besides, the 42 propositions of frame 6.1 do not reveal any direct reference to the very technical form of proposition 6, that is to the much sought after the ‘general form of the proposition’.13 The first real consequences are the definitions of the general form of the operation and of the integer number (remarks 6.01 and 6.02 on page 70). During the general rebuilding of the notebook’s structure, corresponding to the remarks on pages 103–18, the formula given in proposition 6 must have changed and assumed the definitive symbolism we can find in the Tractatus; its necessary justification and explanation are on pages 114 (proposition 5.501) and 116 (proposition 5.502). As already noted, the second recorded section of this sixth part, that is the section on ethics, was or became section 6.3, because section 6.2 (on science) was added later. However, the definitive section 6.2 (on mathematics) arrived only on page 101, forcing a new renumbering of the previous parts. In contrast to the other five segments, clearly stated and partitioned in a definitive way on the first page of the text (or on the immediately following sheets), section 6 shows that a great deal of effort had been put into its continuous reworking. For a better reconstruction of the chronological process, the first idea is that number 6 was originally not foreseen and that proposition 6 was inserted on the first page only just before appending, on page 64, section 6.1. However, in that case, the chronology suggested by McGuinness (who considers that section 6.1, up to page 70, was finished in March 1916) would need to be reformulated. In fact, as Jinho Kang recently observed, Wittgenstein was involved in researching ‘the general form of proposition’, without success, until the end of the year. Although he seemed sure that such a definition was possible, he had in fact not yet grasped it, as we can infer from MS 103.14 Thus he was not yet able to write proposition 6, as we now read it on the first page.15 Thus, a suspicion when observing the decimal numbers of section 6.1 has to be allowed for. Some have been corrected and their written form is often ‘unnatural’. In particular, the two digits of the proposition now numbered as ‘6.1’ seem to have been written with different pencils; moreover, in the direct comments 6.1001, 6.1002, 6.1003 and 6.1004, the digit ‘1’ is clearly a later insertion. Something of a similar nature can
16
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
be detected in the numbers of comments 6.101, 6.102 and so on. The most immediate explanation is that this was originally the real section 6, and only later was it transformed into section 6.1. At the time, there was no proposition 6 on the first page of the book. It is simple to reconstruct the section in a way that is compatible with this hypothesis by assuming a dozen modifications to numbers (their deletions and corrections clearly noticeable in the manuscript) and maintaining, of course, the coherence of the collated texts. Simulations on the database show that this hypothesis looks very plausible. In this manner, it is possible to preserve the chronology proposed by McGuinness. According to my hypothesis, the Abhandlung had at the time a very different conclusive section 6 when compared to the current one. Proposition 6 was ‘The propositions of logic are the tautologies’, and the content of its subsections was programmatically of a logical nature. In no way could such a section 6, entirely concerned with formal logic, contain something like the Tractatus’ sections 6.3 (on epistemology), 6.4 (on ethics) or 6.5 (on philosophical questions and methods), which at the time were completely outside the plan. Then when Wittgenstein decided – as we shall see – to change the framework, he could simply add new main sections 7, 8, 9 and so on. Instead, though, he preferred to put these new sections on the same level as logic, positioning all under the definition of ‘the general form of proposition’. On the other hand, proposition 7 (‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’) has another structural level and another overall relevance, with no relation to the propositions that now seem to precede it. Most Tractatus commentators are accustomed to considering the decimal numbers essentially as an expedient for propositional ordering and insertion, without giving great consideration to the dependence relations. But it is clear from the effort made to regenerate the frame in order to add new, unplanned arguments that the relationship among them, between them and logic, and, overall, between all of them and ‘the general form of proposition’ is substantial and revealing. Up to page 70 of his work, his long fight16 to pursue the definition of ‘general form’ was close to solution, but on the other hand the situation was very frustrating. Wittgenstein was sure that an answer was possible, and he could even draw some conclusions from a possible solution, but in fact he was not able to fix it on the page. For instance, he stated from the beginning that ‘the general form of these propositions can be presented only by the form of a variable’ (remark 5.00535, p. 21). What then was a way of representing this idea, without yet having the capability to
Luciano Bazzocchi 17
formulate the formula? And how was it possible to manage as though the definition was fixed, without fixing it on the paper? One way, in my opinion, is to write the proposition without inserting the formula, leaving something like a free variable or an empty space. For instance: ‘This is the general form of proposition: . . .’ or ‘The general form of the operation is: . . .’. Wittgenstein had already expressed a similar idea on page 46: ‘4.4303 The general form of proposition is: Such and such is the case. This form must be contained in all propositions in some way or other.’ If we look at the manuscript, the propositions about ‘the general form’ have the exact form of an open clause. Now, on the page, the ‘variable’, so to speak, has the value ‘[formula]’; but in a first version the ‘variable’ could have been left free, that is empty. Propositions 6.01 and 6.02 (p. 70) are written with one pencil, but their ending part (the formula) is written with another pencil and another stroke as if it had been added later. Similarly, proposition 6 is split into two parts. ‘The general form of truth-function is:’ is accurately fitted into the line, and below, more clearly marked, but coming off the line into the middle of the remaining free space of the page, there is the formula. So, if necessary, we could imagine that Wittgenstein first wrote the schema of these propositions, and only later added their effective formulae (formulae, I stress, that were further changed in the Korrektur). Returning to the historical perspective, none of this was visible in the 1916 Abhandlung at least until the autumn. It is relevant that three such pregnant factors – considerations on ethics, proposition 7 and ‘the general form of proposition’ – came in at the same moment, in a very puzzling interaction, and together with a fourth factor hidden in the last remark of the working page.
An unexpected, linguistic trigger The month of June was very difficult for Wittgenstein’s division at the front.17 In his personal diary (6.7.16), all the events are summarized with the words: ‘Colossal exertions in the last month.’ Then he continues: ‘I reflected at length on every possible thing, but oddly enough I cannot establish the connection with my mathematical modes of thought.’ The following day, a first way out can be observed: ‘But the connection will be established! What cannot be said, can not be said!’ (7.7.1916) There is here a first suggestion of proposition 7: the connection seems to be essentially negative. The ‘not said’ can become in a certain way a strong characterization. A full solution can only be reached with the contribution of ‘the general form of proposition’. Because of his military
18
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
duties, this can begin only18 two days later: the 9.7.16 entry of the philosophical diary is entirely dedicated to it. In conclusion, if one can indicate the general form of proposition, with this is indicated all that can be said; and all that does not correspond to it (including questions about the sense of life, moral duty and so on) cannot be said. The problem was how to express this in his book. I think that the trigger was of a linguistic nature, by chance represented by the last proposition on the manuscript’s page. As McGuinness noted, at the stage reached on page 70, the final statement (reordering the material by decimal numbers) was: ‘6.131 Logic is transcendental.’ But in the manuscript, the physical order is completely different. The last inserted proposition was 6.11343, a remark taken from the 24.4.15 diary entry: ‘In logic process and result are of equal value (Therefore no surprises.)’ Here, in the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript, the proposition reads differently. Its first part is written with a normal, light stroke; then the stroke is heavier and the text changes. From what I can see, it is not clear whether there was a later deletion using a rubber and a correction, or if Wittgenstein simply suspended his writing during the act of copying ‘of equal value’. Gleichwertig, of equal value. When he recorded this proposition in his diary more than one year earlier, he was thinking of logical equivalence. He had always used the word Wert, value, in the mathematical and formal sense: the value of a function, to give a value to a variable. But now his sensibility changed. Starting in July, in the philosophical pages of his diaries he began to speak about the sense of the world, about good and evil; the word Ethik, which had never appeared before in his manuscripts, occurred twice on 21 July 1916, three times on 24 July, three times on 30 July and three times on 2 August. By then the word Wert had new implications. To be of equal value may also signify to have the same importance for us, to be of value in an identical way. Logic or science do not lie at the level of ‘the values’, of the sense of the world; for them, to be of equal value in a value sense can only signify to be of no value. In fact, the same locution, incontestable from the logical-mathematical point of view, can be understood to have a second, different meaning. Thus, Wittgenstein could now carry out the upgrading of his project.
A solution of genius First he sterilized proposition 6.11343, replacing gleichwertig with äquivalent. It is not relevant if proposition 6.11343 was already on
Luciano Bazzocchi 19
the page (starting in March, in McGuinness’ hypothesis) and then Wittgenstein corrected it, or if he was just copying the phrase when he reflected on the question and decided to continue in the new way. In both cases, the different use of the word gleichwertig activated the revolutionary process bubbling in his mind. Then he put at the highest level the ‘general form of proposition’ (expressed as ‘the general form of truth-function’), or rather its schema, to be completed later. It was the result of his previous work (propositions 1–5) and it had to include, as its main product, considerations on logical statements. There was only one way to do this: to give number 6 to the new remark and to change the section on logic (previously numbered as 6) to 6.1. But where to place the new proposition 6 in the manuscript? There were two main criteria for compiling the notebook: the chronological order of composition and the top-down logical analysis from high-level propositions to low-level comments. Putting proposition 6 on ‘general form’ sequentially onto page 70, after section 6.1, would respect chronological order of composition, but would not respect logical development. There was no space immediately before the section (that was to become) 6.1. Fortunately, there was still space on the first page in perfect sequence with the first five main propositions, as if it had been reserved by chance: this solution fits the logical structure completely. Consequently, Wittgenstein put proposition 6 at the bottom of the first page. After that, he transformed the old section 6 into 6.1. He modified some numbers on page 64 and the following pages by inserting a digit ‘1’ or reconsidering some dependences. Then, he drew a separating line on page 70 to mark the end of a phase of copying and reworking and the beginning of a new stage of composition. Here, he wrote down two particular (still open) consequences deriving from the new proposition 6: 6.01 The general form of an operation is: 6.02 The general form of a number is:19 At the end, he set up the closing remarks: 6.2 Ethics does not consist of propositions. All propositions are of equal value. 7 Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
20
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
The two paragraphs on ethics form a single proposition and one single section: ethics cannot consist of propositions because all propositions are of equal value. Its number is of course 6.2, in equilibrium with 6.1 on logic, of which it represents the negative complement. So, proposition 7 can conclude this phase and the whole book. Since all that is not covered by definition 6 is nonsense and is not part of any senseful language, it is not necessary to add anything else to what can be sensefully said. Even if he could think that his Abhandlung had reached its conclusion, the influence of his new friends and the intellectual environment found at Olmütz in autumn 1916, as McGuinness argues, drove Wittgenstein to reconsider the question and to continue the work. Therefore, some weeks later, he drew a separating line after proposition 7 and began a new phase of collecting material from his previous notebooks, this time considering propositions on contingency and natural science. Statements on science are formulated following definition 6. Thus this new section is another of its subsections and it is numbered 6.2; the old 6.2 on ethics changes into 6.3, and so number 6.2 on the first line of page 71 was corrected to 6.3. Propositions 6.001–6.004 on page 74 demonstrate that he returned to proposition 6 (and consequently to definitions 6.01 and 6.02), perhaps inserting the required formulae. Page 75 shows a final change of strategy. Wittgenstein resolves to comment also on the proposition on ethics, now numbered as 6.3. But then it is not necessary to compress its sense (ethics cannot consist of propositions because all propositions are of equal value) in only one composite proposition. The most elegant solution is to put the real fulcrum in evidence, the semantic shift of the word gleichwertig, and to work out the reasoning through ‘comments’ on it. Therefore, Wittgenstein rubs out the first paragraph of proposition 6.3, also cancelling its number and rewriting it next to the second paragraph, which is the real main statement of the section. The result is exactly what we can now detect on the page: 6.3 Ethics does not consist of propositions. [rubbed out] 6.3 All propositions are of equal value. Then, on page 75, he displaces as comment 6.32 the content of the deleted paragraph: ‘Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.’ In this way, the controversial word ‘ethics’ and the value problem are moved to the third level of the Tractatus tree, leaving on the second level the equipollence of all senseful propositions.
Luciano Bazzocchi 21
Appendix: about ‘Hermine’s list’ The above notes presuppose both a dating and a reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s modus operandi which is slightly different from McGuinness’ widely accepted thesis. Here I wish to summarize some points of agreement and some points of divergence. Starting in 1989, McGuinness based his dating of the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript upon the recovery of a list of documents found among Hermine Wittgenstein’s correspondence. It is his sister’s copy of a list given to her by Wittgenstein himself in January 1917, together with instructions for the management of his notebooks in the event of his death. There are five items on the list, the last of which can be identified with the ‘Prototractatus’ (at the time not yet completed of course). This fifth text is defined as containing ‘the revision of 1) and 2) for publication’. Item 1 is a notebook acknowledged as Wittgenstein’s pre-war diary; item 2 comprises two notebooks, most probably the diaries MS 101 and MS 102. This can be assumed with a fair degree of confidence.20 Items 1 and 2 are joined in a brace bracket with the note: ‘handwritten; they exist also corrected in typescript in Olmütz’.21 Since at the end there is the instruction ‘Typescript in Trenkler’s hand to be destroyed’, one can suppose that this last was a non-corrected carbon-copy (or a previous version) of the ‘corrected typescript in Olmütz’. From these few clues, McGuinness infers that at the time there was a typescript version of the ‘Prototractatus’ itself, possibly in decimal number order. In fact, it would have been impossible to manage the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook without some other well-organized version. McGuinness thinks that Wittgenstein produced recurring ordered versions, preferably in typescript,22 and one important copy was the one at the end of 1916. But indeed, it is very unusual that somebody, in order to say that a notebook, which is extracted from three other notebooks, is also ‘typewritten’, says that these other source notebooks are ‘also in typescript’. The fact that manuscripts 1 and 2 are said to be also in typescript does not permit us to assert anything, I believe, about the status of the derived manuscript 5. In fact, Hermine asks her brother: ‘Is 5) handwritten or typewritten?’ The delivery instructions are equally clear: ‘Russell receives 3) 4) and 5), and 1) and 2) in typescript’. The typescript corresponds to the main content of the first diaries, and, if we keep to the list, it cannot be interpreted as an ordered copy of the ‘Prototractatus’ itself.23 That McGuinness’ interpretation is forced becomes more evident if we consider item 4, a notebook about which it is specified: ‘literally every
22
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
proposition in order without any corrections’. McGuinness explains: ‘Item 4 was probably a transcript made in order to facilitate the production of the typescripts’ (1989, p. 40). In other words, it was an ordered transcript of the propositions of the ‘Prototractatus’, from which the typescript(s) might have been obtained. As a result, in McGuinness’ reading, the only manuscript ‘also typewritten’ was item 4, which was produced by reordering item 5, which was extracted from items 1 and 2 (that, says the list, are also typewritten). This is not only unlikely but unfeasible because against item 4 there is a clear note: ‘only handwritten’. Hence we must conclude that from ‘Hermine’s list’ we cannot infer that there was some ordered typescript of the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook (item 5); rather, we can presume that there was not because if there had been, it would probably have been explicitly cited, or item 5 would have to have been directly marked as ‘also typewritten’ (and item 4 would not have been marked: ‘only handwritten’). If the typescripts are what the list says, that is extracts from the diaries, what was their aim? Geschkowski supposes that their purpose was to assist the insertion of propositions into the ‘Prototractatus’, simplifying their localization, without needing to put the notebooks at risk (Geschkowski, 2001, p. 32). It seems reasonable but I do not think this supports Geschkowski’s conclusions, that is that typescripts from the diaries and the subsequent ‘Prototractatus’ were compiled at the end of 1916. In my opinion, the extracts could have been made during 1915,24 after Wittgenstein finished the ‘core-Prototractatus’ (its first 28 pages) and decided to adopt the method of inserting ‘in between these sentences [. . .] all good propositions of [his] other manuscripts’.25 The ‘typescript in Olmütz’ is said to be ‘corrected’ because, during the long process of insertion, there were numerous corrections of content, as we can infer from the differences between the diaries and the ‘Prototractatus’ and from the corrections in the ‘Prototractatus’ itself. One can understand the phrase as being ‘the corrected typescript [which is] in Olmütz’ rather than ‘the typescript [that was] corrected in Olmütz’26 as Geschkowski does. For Geschkowski, however, the typescripts were made, corrected and fully exploited, that is converted into ‘Prototractatus’ pages 28–70, during the period in Olmütz (September– December 1916). This is a very questionable hypothesis for practical reasons too. Evidently Geschkowski does not realize the extremely complex architecture of the book. If this is more or less true, and the typescript mentioned in Hermine’s list is not an ordered copy of the ‘Prototractatus’ but an earlier selection from diaries, how was it possible for Wittgenstein to manage its
Luciano Bazzocchi 23
integration into the absolute numerical chaos of his notebook? This was the real reason for McGuinness’ thesis about the existence of ordered versions, which seem absolutely necessary at least from page 28 onwards. Geschkowski passes over the question in silence but how could Wittgenstein maintain a coherent global vision of the whole without making a mistake in the chaotic decimals of the book? I think that he did use a structured version of the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript, but that it was neither a typescript nor a sequential version. It can only be ‘the last summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper’ that Russell would have found – Wittgenstein assures him in a letter of 22 October 1915 – among his manuscripts in the event of his death. Such an evolving system, like the twin notebook, is always up to date and coherent because in all probability it is structured according to levels of comment (in general, one sheet for every commented proposition, i.e. for every node of the tree) and it is always possible to insert a new comment at the end of a sheet or at the beginning of a new one. Otherwise, why was it so important to specify ‘on loose sheets’, and why did Wittgenstein choose a loose sheets format as ‘the last summary’ to compile and possibly send to Russell? McGuinness says that the copy on loose sheets ‘we do not have preserved, nor does Wittgenstein refer to it in January 1917’ because, perhaps, ‘the material in it was absorbed into one of the typescripts made later, and it itself discarded’ (1989, p. 39). But, if the loose sheets had the right structure, there was no advantage to be gained by destroying the logical tree and reducing it into a linear typescript. However, neither of these supposed typescripts have been preserved nor does Wittgenstein refer to them (as we saw) in the list. I believe that the loose sheets experiment was the same (growing) ‘manuscript which was written in pencil on loose sheets with numbered propositions’ that Groag remembered having had on loan precisely – following McGuinness – in the winter of 1916–17.27 As far as this last question is concerned, McGuinness interprets the text mentioned by Groag as being the typescript in the list. He summarizes the fact with the words: ‘Groag recollected the loan of an Abhandlung numbered as the Tractatus is but remembered it as handwritten’; that is very different to saying: ‘Groag remembers a manuscript [. . .] written in pencil on loose sheets with numbered propositions’ (as in the original testimony cited by von Wright). Moreover, McGuinness adds that ‘handwritten’ can signify ‘a typescript with handwritten parts’ (1989, p. 45). I prefer to think that when they say ‘manuscript’, we can quite happily read ‘manuscript’. Therefore, the problem we have is: why
24
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
does the list not mention this manuscript on loose sheets that was used from at least October 1915, that was probably still in use at the end of 1916 and that was lent to Groag? I believe we have to accept as a matter of fact that the instructions to Hermine do not mention all Wittgenstein’s writings. So we come to item 3 of the list, a notebook ‘only handwritten’ like item 4, but about which is added, for more precision: ‘one part of it exists already in the fascicule of typescript’. The first idea is that it was the notebook that supposedly came immediately after MS 102, a diary covering the June 1915–March 1916 period. But McGuinness argues that at the time the last diary we have (MS 103, from April 1916 to January 1917) surely existed. In this hypothesis, it must be on the list and, therefore, it needs to correspond to item 3 – what else? The supposed intermediate diary too (if it exists) ought to be on the list; but on the list there is only one place for it (the same item 3). Since we are sure that MS 103 existed while we are not sure of the other, ergo an intermediate diary did not exist. The corresponding period, June 1915–March 1916, McGuinness conjectures, was spent compiling the first 70 pages of the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook instead of a diary. It is clear, in McGuinness’ reasoning, that the point is that whichever manuscript or relevant document existed at the time, it must be on the list. But what really was the purpose of these instructions? The following instruction was included in the letter to Russell (22 October 1915): ‘If I do not survive’, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘get my people to send you all my manuscripts: among them you’ll find the last summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper’. It was a typical provision concerning a work-in-progress: all the existent material at the time of his death is to be sent, together with an indication of the most advanced document, the most relevant for publication.28 But now, in January 1917, Wittgenstein thinks his Abhandlung is finished. He had used all the relevant propositions from his previous pertinent manuscripts (items 1, 2 and 3); item 5 (the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript) was at a ‘closing point’. In the list there was no need to refer to any working material such as the loose sheets – which therefore became obsolete and could be lent to Groag.29 The last diary, MS 103, is not quoted in the 1916 Abhandlung,30 nor was it conceived to be inserted in the Abhandlung. Perhaps Wittgenstein believed – not without reason – that Russell was not in consonance with his latest reflections, especially in the form in which they appear in the diary. So, if we admit that ‘Hermine’s list’ was not a fully comprehensive inventory of all existent manuscripts but an organized plan for a
Luciano Bazzocchi 25
(possible) definitive ‘release’ of the Abhandlung, it is admissible that the last non-pertinent diary was omitted. I do not agree either with Geschkowski’s symmetrical efforts to convince us that since item 3 is in fact the lost diary, item 4 has to be the last diary. According to the list, item 4 contains ‘literally every proposition in order without any corrections’. Geschkowski interprets this tautologically: every document, indeed, ‘contains literally all its propositions in order [as they are] without any corrections [not already done]’. So, it can be MS 103 or whatever else we want. But, since MS 101 and MS 102 (and presumably the intermediate diary) have the same structure as MS 103, why specify ‘literally every proposition in order’ only for the last one? Items 2 or 3 in themselves are neither more ‘corrected’ nor less ’literally in order’ due to the fact that there is a typescript made from them. In any case, it would be a very odd manner of identifying any document whatsoever! Geschkowski feels his reasons are very weak, and so proposes a last trick: if we read jeden Satz and not jeder Satz, the accusative may signify not a description, but a prescription for the editor: ‘[to print] literally every proposition in order without any corrections’.31 It is not clear why Wittgenstein would be so concerned that the editor might make corrections or print MS 103’s propositions in any other order. And how can he be sure that his sister (or the editor, or whoever) would read jeder/n correctly? After all, the list was meant to be a clarification, not a riddle. In the end, it is even possible (although not confirmed by the list) that Wittgenstein wanted to send MS 103 also to Russell.32 It is highly improbable, on the other hand, that he considered his diaries to be printable. As Russell says in his memoirs, before 1914 Wittgenstein did not intend to publish anything ‘less than perfect’. Thus it is out of the question that he was anxious to print MS 103 ‘literally’. What about the coded parts? What about the double series of records on the left- and on the right-hand pages?33 Item 4 really cannot be MS 103. ‘Every single proposition’, ‘ordering’, ‘corrections’ are concepts relating to Wittgenstein’s very unusual way of composing. Following McGuinness, it is difficult to believe that here the sense is not what it seems to be – that item 4 is an ordered copy of the (first layers of) the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook. Perhaps, I conjecture, it was the first he made as he did not use sequential copies like this for managing or inserting propositions but, I suppose, a different, much more effective instrument. In fact, this copy remains unused, ‘without any correction’. New insertions and a general fine-tuning of the work, which were impractical to do using the ‘Prototractatus’ manuscript and which he
26
The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
had not done in item 4 – a fortiori impossible in a non-existent typewritten summary – were entrusted to the loose sheets version. As to exactly how this was done, it is not opportune to discuss further in this chapter.
Notes 1. The notebook, found in Vienna in 1965, was reordered and partially published as Prototractatus, 1971. 2. A rough indication of place of composition is given by the page numbers of the various propositions. 3. In certain cases, subsequent corrections of the decimals altered the previous numbering and the original coherence. Moreover, the propositions from pages 79 to 86 were obtained by systematically copying entries from the second part of the (lost) June 1915–March 1916 diary and from the following MS 103. The decimal numbers were added later, so here the physical order on the page may not correspond automatically to the chronological process of inclusion in the hierarchical structure. 4. They are remarks 3.251 (derived from a note of 19 June 1915), 4.0311 (4 November 1914) and the second paragraph of 4.01 (27 October 1914). These were perhaps already in a parallel, final version of the MS 104 notebook, the so-called Korrektur. Propositions 3.22 (from 29 December 1914) and 3.221 (from 26 and 27 May 1915) were added directly during the process of dictation. In fact, their insertion requires a renumbering of propositions already arranged on page 104. The typescript (in two carbon copies, now catalogued as TS 202 and TS 204) was dictated in August 1918. TS 202 was used for the 1921–22 Tractatus editions. It contains 12 other propositions added by hand on supplementary sheets. However, one of these 12 later insertions, proposition 5.2523, had already appeared (without a number) as the last entry of MS 104. 5. The only significant restructuring that happens starts on page 103 when Wittgenstein resorts to a progressive overall correction undertaken on a twin version of his Abhandlung, which we can rebuild on the basis of the records in the notebook. Together with registering the most important reworkings of previous arrangements, the adding process continues in the same way as before throughout the final 20 pages of the notebook (not printed in the 1971 and 1996 editions of the Prototractatus). In fact, I think that the Korrektur Wittgenstein refers to in the footnote on page 103 was carried out by restructuring and modifying a twin version of the ‘Prototractatus’ notebook, while he annotated pages 103–18. The final typewritten version of this Korrektur is nothing else than TS 202. 6. It is remarkable that the only direct reference to any other version of work on the Tractatus material, besides the ‘Prototractatus’ itself, is ‘the last summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper’ mentioned in Wittgenstein’s letter to Russell of 22 October 1915. Von Wright notes that Heinrich Groag also ‘remembers a manuscript lent to him in the winter of 1917–18 which was written in pencil on loose sheets with numbered propositions’ (PT, p. 6). McGuinness thinks this is a mistake and it should be 1916–17; by the next winter Groag too was at the front.
Luciano Bazzocchi 27 7. McGuinness, 1989, p. 42. In relation to numbering, I prescind here from modifying all the 6.3s to 6.4s (and all the 6.2s to 6.3s) when on page 101 the definitive 6.2 section on mathematics occurs. 8. See PT, p. x, n. 3. 9. McGuinness explains: ‘The Bergen transcriber, and indeed I myself at an earlier stage, thought that the first proposition (which has been rubbed out) must have had the number 6.3, to fit with the 6.4 of the following proposition, but in fact the latter was a correction of an original 6.3’ (McGuinness, 2002b, p. 280). But if one looks at the deleted line with a lens, indeed one sees a 6.3. (I owe this conviction to my friend, Nuno Venturinha, who assures me that he too saw a 6.3 in the original Bodleian notebook; but even in the facsimile of the printed edition, the 3 is quite plausible.) For an analysis of McGuinness’ articles on this point, see Venturinha, 2006, pp. 122–3 and, in particular, n. 34. 10. Geschkowski, 2001, pp. 70–1. In McGuinness and Geschkowski we find two opposite attitudes represented: a theoretical one that wants to understand and that assumes sense and coherence (at the cost of amending data), and a philological one that wants to observe and that assumes that there is only data (despite sense and coherence). I propose a hermeneutical solution, which seeks to be both theoretical and philological. 11. In the entire notebook, there are only two other blank lines, which Geschkowski himself recognized as being exceptional. 12. Following McGuinness, I give the name ‘layer’ to a portion of text in the notebook, delimited by horizontal lines like those on pages 28, 52, 64, 70, 71 and so on. These layers correspond to a phase of work in connection, I believe, with changes in the sources or method of composition. The coherence in the numbering, which is always accurate, is particularly assured at the end of each stage. 13. As Wittgenstein’s alter ego says in §65 of the Philosophical Investigations, this is ‘that part of your research which at the time gave you most headache: i.e. the part about the general form of the proposition and of the language’. See also Kang, 2005, p. 15. 14. In its first pages (15-23.4.1916), the definition is only vaguely and doubtfully intuited – 17.4.16: ‘But can such a rule exist? A definition is possible only if it is not itself a proposition.’ Kang (2005, pp. 16–17) observes that these hesitations are incompatible with the idea that at that time proposition 6 had already been stated. On 24 November 1916, the situation is still fluid: ‘When the general countersign of the operation is known, it will also be clear which constitutive elementary parts an operation always consists of.’ 15. Strangely, Kang fails to notice that proposition 6 and the consequent formalism of some propositions on pages 11 and 13 are later insertions. Consequently, he supposes that the entire first layer of the notebook (the part up to page 28, which he calls ‘core-Prototractatus’) was composed after the following parts. Without going as far as this extreme, ad hoc solution (not compatible with the complex homogeneity of the notebook), it is still necessary, however, to formulate an answer because the formulae of proposition 6 on the first page and of propositions 6.01 and 6.02 on page 70 could hardly have been written before December 1916.
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The ‘Prototractatus’ Manuscript and Its Corrections
16. As can be seen from his letters to Russell, he had been facing this problem since 1913. 17. For his actions in this period, Wittgenstein was awarded the Bronze Medal for Valour and the Silver Medal for Valour 2nd Class, both conferred on him in October. See McGuinness, 2005, p. 242. 18. Secret diary, 8.7.16: ‘What a pity, what a pity! I have no time to work!’ 19. Later on, when the effective formula was found, the last remark was modified with the insertion of ‘integer’: ‘The general form of an integer number is: | 0, α, α + 1|.’ The change was made with the same heavy pencil stroke as the formula added on the right. 20. See also Geschkowski, 2001, p. 29, and Venturinha, 2006, p. 116. 21. ‘Handschriftlich; existiert auch Machin. in Olmütz corrig.’ (see McGuinness, 1989, p. 35). 22. ‘Breaking points are indicated by lines in the manuscript indicating that propositions up to that point have been inserted either in a typescript or in a manuscript of loose sheets, such as we know Wittgenstein produced at various stages in the production of the work’ (McGuinness, 2002b, p. 273). 23. See also Geschkowski, 2001, p. 33. 24. For instance, Wittgenstein had three weeks leave in August. 25. See the prefatory note to the ‘Prototractatus’. 26. The former reading has meaning for Hermine whereas the latter is of no use to her – she cannot have known where and when Wittgenstein made his corrections. All interpretations of these lines would be easier if one thinks of their possible aim and not of our perspective. 27. See above, note 6. 28. This set of documents corresponded at the time exactly to ‘Hermine’s list’, that is to its items 1, 2, 3 (the intermediate diary, only in part compiled) and 5 (‘Prototractatus’ notebook, compiled up to page 28 or little more). Finally, it included the loose sheets, an organized version of the ‘Prototractatus’, that in some way corresponds to item 4 of the list. 29. On the other hand, it is not likely that Wittgenstein was able to lend Groag, given all the risks of the war, some of the documents mentioned in the clauses like one of the notebooks or a supposed final typescript with handwritten insertions. However, when Wittgenstein started composing his Abhandlung again in spring, he asked for the document with insistence. 30. To sustain his thesis that it corresponds to item 3, McGuinness tries to find the ‘part of’ MS 103 possibly included in the ‘typescript’ (as requested by Hermine’s list), that is, in his hypothesis, in ‘Prototractatus’ pages 3–78. Nevertheless, of the supposed ‘five or so quotations from MS103’ (1989, p. 44) he can cite only three of them (2002b, p. 280), one of which is out of the range (diary record 12.10.16 is quoted on page 85), another (28.11.16) not detectable in the ‘Prototractatus’ and the last one (19.9.16) not interpretable as a proper quotation. In fact, in its supposed correspondent PT 5.30225 (‘Men have always thought that there must be a sphere of questions whose answers – a priori – are symmetrical and united into a closed regular structure. A sphere in which the proposition, simplex sigillum veri, is valid’) the first sentence comes literally from 5.3.15, and the second has only the quotation of three Latin words: ‘Simplex sigillum veri’ in common with 19.9.16. Indeed, it is not simplex to sustain this thesis . . . In short, the point is whether
Luciano Bazzocchi 29 Wittgenstein could think (and write) that ‘a part’ of MS 103 had been quoted before page 79 of his Abhandlung. It is evident that all the good propositions from MS 103 (in order of date from 15.4.16 to 7.1.17) are systematically copied into the ‘Prototractatus’ on pages 81–6 consecutively (plus another three on page 94). 31. Geschkowski, 2001, pp. 34–5. Venturinha (2006, pp. 117–18 and n. 16) summarizes it very well. 32. To reinforce his interpretation, Geschkowski writes: ‘All three preserved diaries however contained in the original the reference that they are to be sent to Russell in case of Wittgenstein’s death’ (2001, p. 33). This is true for MS 101 and MS 102, but in fact there is no reference of this kind in MS 103. 33. We could consider this idea to be prophetic. In fact, a ‘literal’ edition of his diaries, without the absurd separation between ‘notebooks’ and ‘secret diaries’, would be a great idea today.
2 Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks in the Context of His Philosophizing Ilse Somavilla
There is a great difference between the effects of a script that one read easily & fluently & one which one can write but not easily decipher. One locks one’s thoughts in it as though in a casket. (MS 157a, p. 59v, 9.2.1937) Why did Wittgenstein choose the device of a special form of writing for certain thoughts? Did he want to disguise them or give them a special setting within the context of his philosophical thoughts written in normal script? In the following I do not intend to provide answers to this truly complicated subject – the riddle behind Wittgenstein’s coded remarks – but primarily raise questions relevant to this problematic issue. Nevertheless, in the course of my examination, I will try to give some preliminary interpretations by presenting examples of coded entries in juxtaposition with those in normal script.
General remarks In Wittgenstein’s Nachlass one often finds remarks which are partly diary-like notes, partly aphorisms and fragments. Although they are frequently scattered throughout his philosophical manuscripts, they do not really belong to his philosophical work. At first glance, these entries seem to be of a personal, autobiographical nature; many of them touch on or treat ethical, religious and sometimes even philosophical questions. Furthermore, Wittgenstein makes comments on the process of his philosophizing – as if viewed and judged from a meta-level. 30
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Given that most of these remarks – be they autobiographical, religious or cultural – are written in code, the question arises whether these (and some other) aspects are related to one another and whether Wittgenstein intended them to be viewed and treated on a specific level. It seems as if they could be ordered according to a common cultural perspective and thus be described as elements of a unique form of expression. Generally speaking, Wittgenstein’s code consists of an inversion of the alphabet (‘a’ = ‘z’, ‘b’ = ‘y’, etc.), or to be more precise: a=z b=y c=x d=w e=v f=u f=ü
g=t h=s hh = ss/ß i=r k=q l=p m=o
m=ö n=n o=m p=l q=k r = i/j s=h
t=g u=f v=e w=d x=c y=b z=a
z=ä
To the best of our knowledge, Wittgenstein’s coded remarks first appeared during the First World War.1 Searching through the Nachlass, one finds in the diplomatic version of the Bergen Electronic Edition 447 different occurrences – sometimes as one or several sentences, sometimes consisting of longer passages, and occasionally even extending over a few pages.
State of research In 1977 G. H. von Wright chose a selection of remarks from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass which deviate from the strictly philosophical discourse and published them under the title Vermischte Bemerkungen. In 1980 the volume was translated into English by Peter Winch and published under the title Culture and Value. In 1994 Alois Pichler published a revision of the first edition by G. H. von Wright. In the editorial note Pichler mentions that a considerable number of the remarks are partly or wholly written in code. However, in addition to the coded remarks published in the Vermischte Bemerkungen, there are a great number of further coded remarks in the Nachlass. In part, these are isolated remarks sporadically occurring in the midst of philosophical entries written in a normal fashion. They do not appear to have anything in common with the philosophical context, but rather strike one as being something completely different and out of place.
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Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks
Moreover, there are coded entries in Wittgenstein’s diaries, for example the one from the 1930s, published under the title Denkbewegungen (Movements of Thought), which occasionally stretch over longer passages. According to G. H. von Wright, in the 1930s Wittgenstein gave a diary written in code entitled Abrechnung (Reckoning) to his friend Arvid Sjögren. Later Sjögren gave the diary to Margaret Stonborough, but it has since been lost. It is also possible, according to Brian McGuinness, that the manuscripts Wittgenstein left in England in 1913 and which he explicitly demanded be destroyed, contained personal notes. Further, it is possible that such entries were also to be found in ‘the large book’, in which Wittgenstein – according to the reports of his students and neighbours – used to write at night in the 1920s (McGuinness, 1988, p. 212). The most comprehensive known set of coded remarks are the personal entries of his wartime notebooks that have been published as Notebooks 1914–1916. There are three manuscripts – MSS 101–3 – according to the catalogue numbers provided by G. H. von Wright. However, von Wright and McGuinness assume that there were at least three more notebooks written during the First World War, which have since been lost.2 The extant manuscripts consist of Wittgenstein’s philosophical notes in normal script (on the right-hand pages of the manuscripts), beginning on 22 August 1914 and ending on 10 January 1917, and of his personal notes in code, beginning on 9 August 1914 and ending on 19 August 1916. These personal encoded entries were withheld from the public and thus from researchers for many years. Whilst the philosophical notes on the right-hand pages were published by G. H. von Wright and Elizabeth Anscombe in 1960, the editors omitted the coded parts written on the left-hand sides. In the microfilm versions of the Nachlass, the left-hand sides were also covered over. In the course of his research, Wilhelm Baum went to the Wittgenstein Archive in Tübingen and illegally made copies of the unknown parts of the wartime notebooks in the so-called ‘Gmundener Notizbücher’.3 In the autumn of 1981 Ulrike Baum transcribed the coded parts of these manuscripts and her husband, Wilhelm Baum, published passages from them in the Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie. The philosopher Andrés Sánchez Pascual from Barcelona finally started a German-SpanishCatalan edition of the entire text, which appeared in 1985 in the philosophical magazine Saber (‘Diarios secretos de Ludwig Wittgenstein’, 5, pp. 24–52, and 6, pp. 30–59). In 1991 the first German edition was published by Turia & Kant under the title Geheime Tagebücher.
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The publication of the so-called ‘Secret Diaries’ evoked a great deal of discussion in the field of Wittgenstein research; it led to a ‘scandal’, and finally to litigation. The image of Wittgenstein as a dry and sober philosopher known for his cool and distant mode of philosophizing was shattered. On the other hand, the insight into his personal problems led to a gradual understanding of the connection between his life and his work. Unfortunately, it also led to an increase in the number of myths surrounding Wittgenstein, sometimes even to a distorted presentation of his personality.
Evaluation of the coded texts Since Wittgenstein’s coded remarks have become widely accessible via the publication of the Vermischte Bemerkungen, Geheime Tagebücher and Denkbewegungen – not to mention the Bergen Electronic Edition – they are now frequently referred to as important sources amongst scholars, especially with regard to Wittgenstein’s attitude towards ethics and religion. Nevertheless, opinions differ on the possibilities of ordering the remarks systematically according to certain criteria. In other words, there is no unanimous opinion as to whether these entries are to be seen from a purely personal, in other words autobiographical point of view, from a cultural or ethical and religious perspective, or even to what extent these aspects are related to one another. Moreover, there is no consensus among Wittgenstein scholars as to why these particular thoughts are written in code. Whether this was done intentionally and deliberately – for reasons unbeknown to us – or without any underlying purpose (for example, as the result of toying with different sorts of scripts) remains an open question. The usual characteristic of ‘personal entry’ versus ‘philosophical entry’ cannot be applied indiscriminately to his coded entries for Wittgenstein occasionally wrote philosophical reflections in code and quite banal remarks, such as on the weather or on his physical condition, in normal script. Additionally, he encoded remarks on the nature of his philosophizing as well as his instructions for the publication of his philosophical work. This suggests that he was conscious of how easy his code was to decipher. In this sense, it would appear inappropriate to associate his code with secrecy. The majority of his coded remarks, however, concern personal, ethical and religious matters, usually related to one another. These entries, as mentioned before, are gaining more and more attention within the
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Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks
field of Wittgenstein scholarship. Often, these remarks are referred to in order to emphasize the connection between his life and his philosophy. Wittgenstein himself hints at this connection between his philosophical thought and his personal situation with his notion of moral concepts: The movement of thought in my philosophizing ought to be discerned in the history of my mind, its moral concepts & the understanding of my situation. (DB, p. 125, 7.11.1931) In the following sections, I will briefly turn to the significance of diaries and ethical and religious matters in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and then analyse his coded remarks in the wartime notebooks, in the diaries of the 1930s and those scattered throughout the philosophical manuscripts of the Nachlass.
Diaries According to a note Wittgenstein penned in 1929, he began to write diaries in 1912 when he was in Berlin. ‘It was an important step for me’, he remarked. Among the reasons for writing a diary he mentioned that it was partly the desire for imitation (Gottfried Keller), partly the wish to write down something of his own – an endeavour he condemned as ‘vanity’ – and partly as a substitute for a human being with whom he could speak in confidence. In the course of his reflections on the nature of writing diaries, he remarked: ‘What cannot be written, cannot be written’ (MS 107, p. 75) – an indication of his awareness of the limits of language in writing on personal matters as well as on philosophical ones. In the same year as he was thinking about writing a diary, he also considered writing an autobiography with the aim of creating ‘clarity and truth in all events’ (MS 108, p. 46) – for himself as well as for others. Thus, his search for clarity and truthfulness as characteristics of his philosophy can also be discerned in his coded entries dealing with personal, mostly moral problems. Yet this also applies to his search for truthfulness in his preoccupation with aesthetic questions. Art, as a means to express the inexpressible, was highly esteemed by Wittgenstein. Consequently, in the hope of finding in it the true expression of life, he sometimes put art on the same level as religion. Thus he once wrote about Beethoven’s music: Beethoven is a realist through & through; I mean his music is totally true, I want to say: he sees life totally as it is & then he elevates it.
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It is totally religion & not at all religious poetry. That’s why he can console in real pain while the others fail & make one say to oneself: but it is not how it is. He doesn’t lull one into a beautiful dream but redeems the world by viewing it like a hero, as it is. (DB, p. 72, 1.3.1931) For Wittgenstein, Beethoven seemed to represent the right ‘tone’ – the tone of truthfulness he required of a man of genius, a ‘tone’ or ‘style’ that embodies both ethics and aesthetics as it is rooted in a view sub specie æternitatis – a view that results from the preoccupation with and acceptance of reality; in other words, an acceptance of the ‘world as it is’ with its dark and gloomy side, with its opposing poles of life and death, hope and despair, with the limits experienced in philosophizing or creating works of art. This entry about Beethoven is not in code, nor are a few other remarks about music in this diary from the 1930s mentioned above. Despite the fact that there are more uncoded than coded entries in this diary, it can still clearly be characterized as a ‘diary’. There are philosophical passages as well, but – in contrast to the wartime notebooks – philosophical and personal entries are not strictly separated by the categories of coded and uncoded writing. Instead, the two different types of script alternate again and again throughout the text. I will come back to this point a little later.
Ethical and religious matters Wittgenstein’s distant attitude towards these topics, that is his refusal to speak about them in philosophy, cannot be observed throughout all of his writings. However, the way he sometimes tries to approach this problematic topic is never that of an attempt at explanation or even at establishing a theory. On the contrary, he renounces any form of rationalization. In his diaries we can observe an intense preoccupation with ethical and religious matters, arising from his personal experience – a preoccupation that does not strive for theoretical explanation, as he also mentions in his Lecture on Ethics. As he said to members of the Vienna Circle, regarding the concept of ‘value’: ‘[. . .] I would reply that whatever I was told, I would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation’ (WVC, p. 116). And he continued: ‘What is ethical cannot be taught. If I could explain the sense of the ethical only by means of a theory, then what is ethical would be of no value whatsoever’ (WVC, p. 117). In addition, at the end of his Lecture on Ethics, he emphasized the importance of speaking in the first person.
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Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks
This ‘stepping forth as an individual’ instead of giving a theory could also be seen as characteristic of his personal approach towards ethics in his coded entries. Wittgenstein’s frequent involvement with ethics and religion expressed in code seems to suggest that he did not want to treat this topic within philosophy, but on a different level – the level of what can be shown, not said and explicated. Therefore, the method of encoding particular remarks, according to this line of interpretation, would have been a way to differentiate ethical and religious matters from those of philosophy. In connection with this point I would like to draw attention to the fact that the remark ‘What is good is also divine. Strange as it sounds, that sums up my ethics. Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural’ (MS 107, p. 192, 10.11.1929; CV, p. 5) he wrote in code, whereas the remark written only four days later, ‘You cannot lead people to what is good; you can only lead them to some place or other. The good is outside the space of facts’ (MS 107, p. 196; CV, p. 5), is written in normal script. The reason for writing the first remark in code is obviously connected to the fact that it reveals a valuation or notion of ethics in a way that almost amounts to a theory. Therefore he concealed it, so to speak, by means of his code. The later remark, however, does not contain a theoretical tone or evaluation, but simply the resigned acknowledgement of the impossibility of giving ethical rules within the world of facts. And, as we know from the Tractatus, values like ‘the good’ lie outside the world of facts, that is they are outside the sphere of rational analysis. The frequency of Wittgenstein’s coded entries involving his ethical and religious reflections suggest that he wanted to create a special type of text for these matters, a type clearly distinguishable from his philosophical discourse, and which by the very method of concealment should hint at the aspect of the hidden or invisible. The questions he deemed essential should be touched on, but not made the subject of philosophical dispute. Instead, they should be relegated to a separate part of his work – the aspect he decided not to explicitly address in the written part of his philosophical work. Coded propositions of ethical and religious content could therefore be seen as symbolic of the ineffable that should be concealed. For, if such matters were expressed in everyday language, then it would prove their nonsensicality. Their encoding is thus a means to emphasize the distinction between meaningful and nonsensical propositions, that is between the sayable and the unsayable, accentuated by a specific kind of script.
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The Notebooks 1914–1916 The separation between personal and philosophical entries by different types of text is particularly obvious in Wittgenstein’s wartime notebooks. However, this separation cannot be applied to all of his entries, for there are a few exceptions. In the first manuscript, Wittgenstein begins to report on personal matters in normal writing, starting on 9 August 1914; however, on 15 August, in the middle of a sentence written in normal script, he continues to write but in code. It is not until 22 August 1914 that he begins to write his philosophical entries (in a normal fashion) on the right-hand side of his manuscripts whilst he now puts his coded remarks on the left-hand side. According to Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein started writing in code when he entered enemy territory. While this may be true of his very personal, predominantly moral problems, I contend that his writing in code has to do above all with the sphere of the ineffable which he was gradually approaching at that time. However, as with the problematic topic of ethical and religious matters, a gradual mingling can be observed in some passages. That is to say, we can also find philosophical reflections in the personal, coded part of the notebooks – even essential thoughts that are then further developed in the philosophical part before they attain their final, concentrated and precise form in the Tractatus. Thus Wittgenstein first writes the sentence ‘What cannot be said, cannot be said!’ (MS 103, 7.7.16) in its determinate tone in code.4 On the same day we find the following entry in the philosophical part of the notebooks: ‘Isn’t this the reason why men to whom the meaning of life had become clear after long doubting could not say what this meaning consisted in?’ (NB, 7.7.16; cf. also TLP, 6.521) This seems to be somehow analogous to the course of his philosophical movements of thought as documented in the Tractatus when, after having long searched for definite answers in philosophy, he comes to see that the essential questions cannot be answered – even though he might have come close to them. Thus, on the same day as he reflects on the meaning of life which he sees outside the world of facts – in the sphere of the ineffable – he, in effect, in recognition of the problems not to be grasped in words, formulates this sentence about the impossibility of saying what cannot be said. One day later, on 8 July, he writes: To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.
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Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks
To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. In the preceding passages, we find further reflections on the meaning of life, on God, the will, on conscience, fate, death, on time and eternity. These entries reveal Wittgenstein’s gradual approach towards a personal God: one he had already often addressed in the coded remarks, presumably shaped by his wartime experiences, above all by the nearness of death, as well as by Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. Still, there are also pantheistic and panentheistic tendencies which can apparently be related to the philosophies of Spinoza and Schopenhauer. But while these tendencies characterize the philosophical part of the notebooks, the coded parts reveal a religious attitude towards a personal God in a Christian sense. Further possible influences of Tolstoy that primarily touch on Wittgenstein’s personal feelings, thus on his life in existential aspects, but which gradually also become part of his philosophical thoughts, are those of a life in the present – that is not in time – and those reflecting on the justification of a happy life – understood as the ‘purpose of existence’, despite the ‘misery of the world’. Put differently, a ‘life of knowledge’ (Leben der Erkenntnis) as well as a renunciation of the ‘amenities of the world’ that are merely ‘so many graces of fate’ (13.8.16). The impression that Wittgenstein’s philosophical movements of thought were rooted in his personal experience is particularly relevant for the idea of a life in the present. On 8 July he noted in his philosophical notebook: ‘Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy. For life in the present there is no death.’ This ‘eternal life’ can be attained by a life totally devoted to the present; it does not mean eternity in the sense of infinite temporal duration, but non-temporality. It is the good and ethical life which is the end of Being. It is attained by a contemplative attitude in which the subject forgets about himself and his sorrows by totally devoting himself to the present and his immediate surroundings, for example, to an object he contemplates and absorbs, as described by Schopenhauer as aesthetic contemplation. Reading Wittgenstein’s coded diaries from the same time, one finds very similar thoughts that obviously originated in the extreme situation of war when he was confronted daily with death: on 4 May, that is two months before his philosophical preoccupation with life in the present, he notes: ‘[. . .] then war will finally begin for me. And – maybe – life, as well! Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life!’ And a
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few days later he notes that life gets its meaning through death (9.5.16). He continues to emphasize the importance of a happy life which, in an idealistic sense, he sees in living ‘in the good and in the beautiful until life ends itself’ (7.10.14). As a consequence, we can observe a tendency towards a kind of stoic attitude regarding the trappings and externalities of life which Wittgenstein hoped to reach by an increasing inclination towards the spiritual – a ‘life in the spirit’, not unlike the Spinozian surrendering to one’s fate as being God’s plan. All these aspects characterize both the coded diary entries and the philosophical notes, which he regards as the ‘work’ that prepared the way for the Tractatus. It has to be mentioned that these thoughts first occur in the coded part of the Notebooks and only later – in MS 103 (1916) – are introduced into the philosophical part. Thus it becomes obvious what kind of philosophy Wittgenstein himself seemed to need for his life – in borderline situations such as those of war – and how these thoughts eventually influenced his philosophical work. While in earlier years he was primarily preoccupied with the problems of language and its correct logical analysis (distinguishing between meaningful and meaningless propositions), his reflections on linguistic problems gradually turn to a level that lies beyond the issues to be treated in the world. Put in Wittgenstein’s terms, a level which lies outside the world of facts and where the philosophical urge centres on the problem of life. However, since this sphere belongs to the metaphysical, it cannot be verbalized and thus cannot be explained rationally: ‘That something about it [the world] is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it’ (cf. TLP, 6.41). Immediately following this passage, Wittgenstein writes about his total dependency on the world and exhorts himself to surrender without trying to make himself independent; in other words, to surrender and thus obtain freedom in the sense of Spinoza’s philosophy of determinism that can only be escaped by the recognition and acceptance of it as the necessity of God’s eternal nature – to ‘master it by renouncing any influence on happenings’, as Wittgenstein put it. For, by being dependent on the outer world, Wittgenstein lacks the inner poise and serenity he would need in order to work – ‘work’ meaning here his philosophical reflections on which he regularly reports in the coded part. There are entries like ‘no work’, ‘little work’ and so on, documenting phases of progress or failure in his work. Since he sometimes notes ‘a lot of work’, even when nothing is written in the philosophical part, one can assume that ‘work’ also includes strenuous thought.
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Wittgenstein’s Coded Remarks
Related to this, it is noteworthy that, for example on 8 July 1916, Wittgenstein reports on his reflections about God and the sense of life, on time and eternity, on conscience and on agreement with the world in the philosophical part, but in the coded part he remarks: ‘What a pity! I don’t have time to work!’ The question arises whether he did not consider these reflections touching upon metaphysical questions as belonging to his philosophical work – as he emphasized in the Tractatus and other passages of his work. However, this assumption seems to contradict the fact that he did take up these reflections on metaphysical problems in the Tractatus, and thus into his philosophical work. In fact, there are several thoughts written in the last few pages of the wartime notebooks (penned in 1916) that I contend have their beginnings or roots in the earlier coded diaries. For example, thoughts about the dependency upon the world and that of a life in the present – aspects upon which Wittgenstein first reflected in his personal diaries and which later became the subject of his philosophizing – also occur in the Tractatus. To my mind, he brought these reflections – often labelled as Wittgenstein’s mystical thoughts – into his philosophical work in order to emphasize their different nature in contrast to his purely philosophical entries, all the while hinting at their significance within philosophy. While in this instance these remarks are written in normal script – thus to be viewed as part of the whole – they nevertheless differ with regard to content and style. And, as is well-known, Wittgenstein hinted both in his foreword and on other occasions, for example in his letter to Ludwig von Ficker, at the importance of these thoughts.5 In 1916, when Wittgenstein had to go to fight, and was constantly surrounded by danger, his fears began to intensify and, with them, his willingness to surrender to God’s will. Yet his will to live remained, and as such he accused himself of ‘a wrong view of life’ (29.7.16). On the same day his thoughts in the philosophical part are focused on ethical questions of willing and not willing, on the world of the happy in contrast to the world of the unhappy. Personal reflections are clearly transferred to philosophical thoughts: For it is a fact of logic that wanting does not stand in any logical connexion with its own fulfilment. And it is also clear that the world of the happy is a different world from the world of the unhappy. (NB, 29.7.16; cf. also TLP, 6.43) In his preoccupation with the question of willing and not willing, of wanting and not wanting, he thinks – just as indicated in the coded
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part – that not wanting is the only good thing in a certain sense. On another occasion, when Wittgenstein was again confronted with the fear of death, the tone of his writing amidst a logical analysis of complicated operations of propositions is suddenly interrupted by the following remark: ‘Man cannot make himself happy without more ado. Whoever lives in the present lives without fear and hope’ (NB, 14.7.16). Thus it becomes evident how the philosophical topic of ‘living in the spirit’, devotion to the present as well as the stoic submission to fate, are all rooted in his wartime experience. The significance of his attempts to overcome the sensual drives – in order to survive in a spiritual and intellectual sense – by taking refuge in the spirit are further intensified by his reading of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. Wittgenstein often describes the painful process of his philosophical work with metaphorical expressions, referring to the context of the outer surroundings of wartime conflict. Thus he regards a philosophical problem that he is trying to solve as a ‘siege’ to be won (12.11.14) or a ‘fort’ (31.10.14) which he is out to conquer. The term ‘redeeming word’ (erlösendes Wort) occurs several times – first in the coded part and later in the philosophical part. This term has been the subject of discussion among Wittgenstein scholars: it is seen not only in connection with Wittgenstein’s obsessive search for the right word or formulation in his philosophical writings,6 but also in relation to his search for an answer to his personal moral problems. The term first occurs on 21 November 1914: ‘Worked a lot. But still I cannot express the one redeeming word. I encircle it and come very close, but I can’t yet grasp it itself!!’ On the following day, Wittgenstein writes in the philosophical part that he is again trying to express something ‘which cannot be expressed’. On the same day we can read in the coded part: ‘Not spoken the redeeming word. Yesterday it once lay totally on my tongue. But then it slipped back again . . .’. In the philosophical part of the notebooks, the concept of the ‘redeeming word’ does not occur until 20 January 1915 and takes the form of a question after a series of logical reflections: ‘The redeeming word -?!’ On 3 June 1915, when he is intensely preoccupied with the tautology of propositions, he notes: ‘The redeeming word has not yet been spoken’7 and puts this remark in brackets. The term also appears in later years as characterizing the aim of the philosopher to find peace in his thoughts as it were: ‘The task of philosophy is to find the redeeming word’ (MS 105, p. 46; cf. also MS 107, p. 44). Even though the term ‘redeeming word’ can be seen in connection to Wittgenstein’s philosophical work – symbolizing the ‘redemption’
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(Erlösung) character of his endeavours to solve philosophical problems8 as well as the painful search for the right or proper expression – one must not neglect its religious connotation in relation to his personal and moral situation, documented in his coded entries during the First World War. Wittgenstein’s gradual preoccupation with existential problems of life, thus universal questions of philosophy, is clearly observable starting on 23 May 1915 – a time when his future role in the war was uncertain and his fears began to mount. His remarks now reflect Weininger’s notion of the genius as being distinguished by an acute awareness not only of the self (microcosm) but also of the outer world (macrocosm). It is worth noting that in the dramatic situation of the war Wittgenstein became acutely aware of a sense of self within his surroundings and that the entries about his existential position written in code gradually turn into reflections on the problem of life in general and of the philosophical ‘I’ in relation to the world. He now reflects on solipsism, on microcosm in macrocosm and formulates sentences like the following (a few of which are well-known from the Tractatus): The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious! (NB, 5.8.16) The I makes its appearance in philosophy through the world’s being my world. (NB, 12.8.16; see also TLP, 5.641) It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world.’ (NB, 12.10.16; see also TLP, 5.63) Thus he also recognizes that the limits of his language mean the limits of his world (cf. TLP, 5.6). On 25 May he writes that the ‘urge towards the mystical comes from the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science’, and he adds the following sentence, which he later slightly altered in the Tractatus: We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all. Of course in that case there are no questions any more; and that is the answer. (NB, 25.5.15; cf. TLP, 6.52) Even though within Wittgenstein scholarship most scholars refer to the Tractatus assuming that he has selected what he considered the essence of his thoughts, one must not neglect the importance of the Notebooks
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as preliminary steps to this work. According to Joachim Schulte, the spirit of the Tractatus is closer to the Notebooks than to the later writings (Schulte, 2001, p. 211). Similarly, I daresay that the spirit of Wittgenstein’s thoughts as found in the Notebooks contains several aspects that have been developed from remarks encoded in the personal diaries of that time. Insofar as these remarks illuminate his very personal view on various matters, predominantly on existential questions with respect to both the individual and mankind in general in his social and cultural environment, they reflect the importance of the ‘uniqueness’ of the individual’s consciousness and apprehension of the world, which Wittgenstein himself emphasized: ‘Only from the consciousness of the uniqueness of my life arises religion – science – and art’ (NB, 1.8.16). Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflections – stretching from pantheism to idealism and solipsism as well as the overcoming of them – seem to correspond somehow to the course of his personal and religious development that leads from mysticism to a dialogic relationship with a personal God. Yet he did not take the last step, as this would have meant transgressing the sphere of philosophy in the sense of the Tractatus.
The Movements of Thought Apart from the wartime notebooks and the coded remarks scattered throughout the philosophical manuscripts, there are also coded passages in a diary of Wittgenstein’s that was found in 1993. These entries are predominantly very personal reflections on moral and religious questions, whereas other autobiographical entries, for example, about his relation to Marguerite Respinger, are not in code. Remarks on cultural topics that in other parts of the Nachlass are often encoded are here in normal script. Additionally, there are a few philosophical entries on the ‘idea’ (Idee) or ‘archetype/prototype’ (Urbild), the ‘sign’ (Zeichen) and so on – entries that occur in a similar form in the Philosophical Investigations. However, since these questions relate to the metaphysical sphere, and thus belong to the sphere of the ineffable, Wittgenstein uses terms such as ‘unsayable’, ‘gesture’ and the like. Therefore, as far as this diary is concerned, I would say that Wittgenstein also handled metaphysical questions – questions transcending the phenomenal world – in his diaries, but not coded and in a more general tone. However, when it came to his intensely personal struggles with ethics and religion, he made use of the code. Quite possibly he considered these problems to be too precious and sublime for the superficial reader to be able to easily
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gain access to and so should be hidden. The metaphor of the casket mentioned in the beginning would support this reading. There are further entries on ethical and religious matters, on the lack of seriousness and love for truth in his philosophical work, on his doubts in his search for God, his wavering between religious devotion and scepticism, sometimes even rebellion. These entries have a striking resemblance to those of the coded diaries of the First World War – in several cases the content and wording are almost identical. These involve his prayers written in utmost desperation: ‘May God help!’ (DB, p. 144, 20.11.1936); ‘May God have mercy on me’ (DB, p. 157, 28.1.1937) and so on. Similarly, there are coded entries on his fear of losing his mind and ending in a form of madness. Torn between philosophical knowledge and failure in achieving certainty, thus often finding himself on the borderline between sanity and madness, he tries to endure his spiritual tortures by means of his prayers for spiritual enlightenment. I would like to quote a passage where Wittgenstein, confronted with the difficulties of providing a rational explanation, contemplates the alternative of describing. In the middle of writing normally, as soon as he begins to report his personal feelings of spiritual struggles, he immediately shifts to code: ‘Don’t explain! – DESCRIBE ! [in code] Submit your heart & don’t be cross for you must suffer such a lot! This is the piece of advice that I should give myself. If you are ill, find yourself in this illness; don’t be cross that you are ill.’(DB, pp. 183 ff., 19.2.1937) These entries written in code deal with thoughts and emotions apparently of deep concern to Wittgenstein, whereas the greater part of the diary is written in a normal fashion – obviously because it was from the start intended as a diary so that he did not find it necessary to use the code which he normally would have used in his philosophical manuscripts in order to mark the distinction between the two different types of text. Wittgenstein himself emphasized the difference between personal reflections on religion and those meant for other people in more general terms, closer to theories: ‘It is one thing to speak to God & another thing to speak of God to other persons’ (DB, p. 174, 16.2.1937). His personal, encoded entries written in a passionate tone in contrast to the sober tone of argument in his philosophical manuscripts seem to be evidence of this difference.
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Coded remarks scattered throughout the Nachlass Although a great number of these remarks are published in the Vermischte Bemerkungen, they have been chosen according to other criteria, that is predominantly according to their treatment of cultural questions. Thus, the Vermischte Bemerkungen also contains many remarks that are not coded. The volume does contain coded remarks on ethical and religious matters but not on autobiographical ones. The question arises whether the coded remarks interspersed within the philosophical texts have some special value or significance, and whether there might be a connection between them and the philosophical entries. It is reasonable to ask whether these remarks, as mentioned above, might be seen as an example of Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language – insofar as he regarded them as having a specific kind of function within language which could not be attained by normal usage nor by scholarly dispute. Perhaps they should serve as a special way of demonstrating different language games, and, as mentioned previously, as a means to separate what can be shown from what can be said: for example, the use of, say, lyrical sentences as a counterpart to strict philosophical discourse. To give a concrete example: what significance do coded entries like the following have in connection to Wittgenstein’s nature of philosophizing? O why do I feel as if I wrote a poem when I write philosophy? It is here as if there was something small that has a wonderful meaning. Like a leaf, or a flower. (MS 133, p. 13r, 31.10.1946) Wittgenstein wrote this passage amidst his preoccupation with the meaning of names within language games written in normal script. This and other remarks on the nature of his philosophizing suggest that he sometimes seemed to pause in the middle of strenuous movements of thought on philosophy in order to catch his breath, so to speak. Then, as a result of the difficulty involved in solving the problems analytically, he became aware of other forms of treating language and philosophy – forms that are closer to showing than explaining. Apparently, he wanted to hint at such alternatives while at the same time reminding himself of them. However, as these remarks interrupt his philosophical discourse, in the same sense as his reflections on cultural topics or his personal entries spread here and there throughout his manuscripts do, Wittgenstein clearly separates them
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from the strictly philosophical discourse by means of a special kind of script. Yet it is not only the different type of writing but also the tone and style that help distinguish these entries from the more sober tone of his philosophical discourse. These apparently disruptive inserted reflections appear to be like comments from a meta-level concerning the nature of his philosophizing – they examine its value and its truthfulness; they reflect on and question the necessity of his philosophical investigations. Personal entries such as on the state of his internal anxiety or reports on the weather could perhaps serve as a kind of contextual frame for his work in order to give a vivid picture of his overall situation. The relatively strict distinction between philosophical and personal, ethical and religious entries in normal writing on the one hand and coded on the other is, as previously mentioned, particularly relevant to Wittgenstein’s wartime notebooks. In later years, that is in the various entries spread throughout his philosophical works, we find an intermingling of the two different types of text: there are numerous reflections on cultural, ethical and religious matters, sometimes written in code, sometimes not. This is especially true for the years 1931, 1936 and 1937 – the years when Wittgenstein tended more towards writing diaries and was even thinking of writing an autobiography. Interestingly, the majority of his reflections on Jewishness are not coded.9 This was also the time when he considered making a confession (according to a diary entry as well as a report by Drury), which he in fact (according to written sources) did not do until the end of 1936. That his writing at this time on personal matters is not coded seems to confirm my assumption that, with regard to autobiographical remarks such as a confessional report, he no longer wanted to hide these notes via a code. In accordance with his self-imposed standard of utmost honesty, he left personal notes which included all the negative and ugly sides of his character out in the open for general inspection, thus not coded. The only encoded entries involved very personal remarks concerning God, for example prayers written in a passionate and at the same time devout tone, often with the formulation ‘may’ (möge) as is also found in his wartime diaries: May God forbid! (MS 108, p. 38, 25.12.1929) May God send me purity & truth. (MS 108, p. 47, 28.12.1929) May God hold my ideal up! (MS 107, p. 161, 11.10.1929)
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It thus seems that the code was a means to express his awe and distant approach towards God – a relationship too deep and precious to be laid bare for others to see. Therefore, even if many of his reflections on religious belief are written in normal script, Wittgenstein switches to code when the matter is more personal and thus his tone more passionate and obviously rooted in his personal despair. During his long stay in Norway when he spent a great deal of time in solitude, he wrote longer passages in code. These passages were predominantly about his personal situation, and as such substantiate one of the reasons he gave for writing diaries, that is as a kind of substitute for a confidant. He reports on his fears of madness, illness or death – on his sufferings that reveal his deepest despair. As a consequence, he tends to abandon himself to the hands of fate or God and writes in a devout and resigned tone: God, in your hands I give myself! (MS 118, p. 10, 25.8.1937) I am in the hand of fate & have to find myself in it somehow. (MS 118, p. 37, 29.8.1937) But if it is so, you have to accept it. (MS 118, p. 37, 29.8.37) Often he accuses himself of lacking in a love of truth and of cowardliness, and above all of vanity and ‘indecency’, that is a lack of Anständigkeit, a term he uses again and again. When his reflections on God and religion move from his personal situation to the problem of life in general, his tone changes and he switches from a passionate tone to the more sober tone commonly associated with the normal philosophical writing style. This is reminiscent of his entries in the philosophical Notebooks 1914–1916: a turning away from a monological towards a more dialogical tone: The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mould. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mould, what is problematic will disappear. (MS 118, p. 17r, 27.8.1937) Then he continues to write in his usual analytic and sober style about a box of apples. In this case, the code is used to emphasize the difference
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in content, that is as a sign or signal of his straying from the context of philosophical discourse. Not unlike what he did during the First World War, Wittgenstein often reports on his philosophical work in code, although now in much greater detail. Most of what he has written he does not consider mature enough for a book and thus wants to rework it. Thus we can see how his coded entries provide us with a vivid picture of the reasons and methods used for the numerous alterations, deletions and so on in his philosophical manuscripts. In the 1940s, Wittgenstein frequently writes about concepts such as character, genius, truth and love – this in relation to himself and his situation as a result of his personal experience and critical reflections on his own nature and his way of writing philosophy. He often complains about his growing inability to think clearly as well as his fears of a gradual but complete loss of mind (1.10.1940). The feeling of dwindling intellectual powers leads to a general sense of unhappiness, hopelessness and resignation. In describing his state of philosophical decline, he uses metaphors like ‘barrenness’, ‘waste land’, ‘winter’ and the like. The main reason for his despair though, he sees in his increasing isolation. He feels as if there were nothing ahead of him but a long period of death in life (MS 125, p. 26, 1.4.1942). There are fewer entries in code on religious matters, but whenever there are, Wittgenstein’s tone is intense and devout and he uses the ‘may’ form again. We find passages like: ‘O! May God give me contentment with my fate!’ (MS 130, p. 154, 8.8.1946). On 27 July 1947, Wittgenstein notes: May God give insight to philosophers for what is lying in front of all our eyes. (MS 135, p. 103) This entry follows a remark about philosophical books he has read but does not consider at all valuable. His at first quite condescending tone regarding the quality of philosophical works turns into a serious and modest tone as soon as he mentions God in his prayer – along with the shift from normal to encoded script. In 1946–47, he seems to anticipate his illness and death. He suffers from extreme bouts of tiredness, weakness and, at the same time, severe loneliness and depression. There are notes on the nature of love which he esteems as the most important thing in life, a ‘rare precious stone’ (MS 132, p. 77, 29.9.1946), ‘the pearl of great value’ (MS 133, p. 8v, 26.10.1946), ‘a fortune. Perhaps a fortune with pain, but a fortune’
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(MS 133, p. 8r, 26.10.1946). Once he remarks: ‘Is it an unfulfilled longing that drives a man to madness?’ (MS 165, p. 200, c. 1941–44)
Conclusion When reading Wittgenstein’s coded remarks in the context of his philosophizing, it seems obvious that he used a code (even if not always consistently) in order to draw a line between strict philosophical questions and questions concerning his personal life as well as the sphere of ethics and religion. Evidence for this reading is not only to be found in distinctions in the content and style of his writing, but also in the fact that before transferring his notebooks to volumes, starting in Cambridge in 1929, he wrote the coded remarks in normal script but in brackets (Pichler, 1997, pp. 68 ff.). This suggests that he used his code as a special kind of script for the problems that were not meant to be treated within philosophy, but rather in other forms of expression. Wittgenstein’s code marks out problems that transcend the limits of language – the sphere lying outside the world of facts. Since these topics cannot be grasped by normal language, but only shown by different means, the mere attempt to express them in words would prove their nonsensicality. Thus, Wittgenstein utilized the code as a means to conceal or disguise these special topics which he nevertheless longed to speak and write about: It is strange what relief it is for me to write about some things in a secret script which I would not like to have written in an easily legible way. (MS 106, p. 4, 1929) As this analysis has shown, the use of normal and encoded writing as criteria for distinguishing philosophical from personal matters, as well as the sayable from the unsayable, can be observed in most, but not all, of the Nachlass passages. Whether the reasons for this inconsistency are the result of carelessness or negligence – due to the flow of writing or a temporary weakening of resolve in pursuing his purpose – is still unclear. Even though the findings of a comprehensive and extended special research project on this matter would probably bring about a significant contribution to our understanding of Wittgenstein’s way of writing, it is still possible that his coded remarks would remain a riddle – more difficult to solve than the code itself.10
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Notes 1. McGuinness (1988, p. 212) mentions that the comparative facility in using the code suggests that Wittgenstein had practised it earlier, that is before his wartime diaries. 2. McGuinness, 1988, p. 212. On 23 April 1953, Paul Engelmann reported to Friedrich Hayek that the Tractatus was the result of notebooks and that there were seven volumes from which the Tractatus was the final extract (quoted in von Wright, 1982a, p. 68). 3. These were found in 1952 by John J. Stonborough, one of the sons of Margaret Stonborough, in the ‘Villa Toscana’ in Gmunden. John Stonborough gave the manuscripts to Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright. 4. Even though Wittgenstein had previously made entries in the philosophical part concerning the difficulty of adequate expression, this was primarily with respect to his analysis of propositions. Cf. NB, 22.11.14: ‘At this point I am again trying to express something that cannot be expressed.’ Cf. also 27.5.15: ‘What cannot be expressed we do not express –.’ 5. In a letter to Ludwig von Ficker, written presumably in November of 1919, Wittgenstein states that his work actually consists of two parts – the one he has written and the one he has not written but which is the essential part (GB). 6. Cf. Pichler, 1993. 7. G. E. M. Anscombe translates ‘erlösendes Wort’ as ‘key word’ – which unfortunately does not adequately capture the meaning of this expression. 8. Cf. ‘The task of philosophy is to find the redeeming word. The redeeming word is the solution to a philosophical problem.’ 9. There are a few encoded remarks on Jewishness in 1929. 10. I wish to thank James Thompson for his great help with the English version of this paper.
3 Wittgenstein at Work: Creation, Selection and Composition of ‘Remarks’ Josef G. F. Rothhaupt
Wittgenstein wrote nearly the whole of his philosophy as ‘Remarks’ – thousands and thousands of them. G. E. M. Anscombe, one of Wittgenstein’s trustees, states: ‘A Bemerkung might be a single short sentence, or might be over a page long; it might itself be divided into several paragraphs [subsections: J. G. F. R.]. It is the form in which Wittgenstein composed most of what he himself wrote’ (1969, p. 373). An adequate understanding of the creation, the selection and the composition of Wittgenstein’s remarks is extremely important for an adequate understanding of his philosophy. During the last three decades only a few experts have focused on this fundamental, basic issue. Stephen Hilmy wrote in his study, The Later Wittgenstein: The Emergence of a New Philosophical Method: ‘[O]ne must be clear what Wittgenstein is doing before one can adequately assess his results [. . .], it is precisely his approach to philosophy, and not so much his specific philosophical conclusions or doctrines, that Wittgenstein wished to convey in the first place’ (1987, p. 6). Merrill and Jaakko Hintikka wrote in their book Investigating Wittgenstein: ‘We hope that in the future philosophers will no longer try to support their interpretations of Wittgenstein by haphazard quotes out of their historical, developmental, and argumentative context, as still is the case to far too great an extent. In particular, Wittgenstein‘s aperçus cannot be fully understood without knowing where they belong in the development of Wittgenstein‘s ideas and questions, or without knowing the problems he is wrestling with on a particular occasion’ (1986, p. x). And Isaiah Berlin wrote in a letter dated 2 July 1987 to Denis Paul, one of the experts on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass since the 1950s: ‘Looking at the actual manuscripts, at diaries, at fragments, at notes, gives a far more intimate understanding of 51
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the philosophical process – I don‘t know what else to call it – than the finished article – there is something direct and inescapable about such jottings, which can literally produce a kind of precipitate in one which is about as near to the truth of particularly such a philosopher as Wittgenstein, who did not believe in finished articles but in the painful process itself, than anything else could do’ (quoted in Paul, 2007, p. 14). To get a clear understanding of the texts Wittgenstein has produced and handled in philosophy, the following question has to be addressed: Are Wittgenstein’s ‘remarks’ (Bemerkungen) meant as aphorisms, as fragments, as sequences, as aperçus, or as maxims? In his papers we can find, for example, the following remark on his ‘remarks’: ‘I am thinking of Kraus and his aphorisms, but of myself too and my philosophical remarks.’1 ; ‘The concept “fragment”. It isn‘t even casually easy to describe the use of this word.’2 He was aware of the long tradition of writing aphorisms as well as writing fragments in literature and philosophy. Furthermore, in creating, selecting and composing small texts as ‘philosophische Bemerkungen’ (philosophical remarks) he practised a new style and a new method of doing philosophy, of philosophizing.3 The creation of remarks is Wittgenstein’s ‘way of thinking’ while the selection and composition of remarks is his ‘arrangement of thoughts’. This paper will focus on four concrete subjects in the study of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass:4 A) The posthumous and very problematical publication of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks and the base typescript 209. B) Wittgenstein’s newly discovered ‘Kringel-Book’ project, which is preserved in MSS 107–12. C) The selection of remarks from MSS 105–14i for TSS 208, 210 and 211. D) The selection of remarks for the ‘Proto-Big Typescript’ (TS 212) and the ‘Big Typescript’ (TS 213) and their arrangements. All these will demonstrate that further and new research on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass can and should be done. To get an adequate ‘Überblick’ (overview) and a comprehensive ‘Übersicht’ (overall view) on this philosophical Nachlass is not only an important desideratum but also one of the urgent tasks to be carried out in research on Wittgenstein’s œuvre.
The posthumous Philosophische Bemerkungen and the base typescript 209 One of Wittgenstein’s trustees, Rush Rhees, posthumously edited and published Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Bemerkungen in 1964 for the first
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time. This book appeared simultaneously in Germany, published by Suhrkamp Verlag, and in England, published by Blackwell Publishers. Both editions were in German with no English translation. In addition, the ‘Anmerkung des Herausgebers’ (Editor’s Note) by Rhees was only in German. A translation into English was first published in 1975 in Oxford by Blackwell under the title Philosophical Remarks. In 1984 the second edition of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Bemerkungen appeared in Frankfurt, published by Suhrkamp. The English translation and the German second edition also have an ‘Editor’s Note’ or ‘Anmerkung des Herausgebers’. But – and this is the astonishing and confusing issue – for the translation, Rhees had written another ‘Editor’s Note’ without mentioning the first one. This new ‘Editor’s Note’ was then translated into German and published in the second edition, but again with no hint that it had been rewritten. The first ‘Anmerkung des Herausgebers’ was therefore never translated into English. It can be shown that this problematic editorial praxis, however, has led to some confusion because Rhees’ new ‘Editor’s Note’ introduced an error about Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks. This was in relation to the origin of the base typescript 209 for this posthumous publication. In his second ‘Editor’s Note’ Rhees states: ‘Our text is a typescript that G. E. Moore gave us soon after Wittgenstein’s death: evidently the one which Wittgenstein left with Bertrand Russell in May, 1930, and which Russell sent to the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, with his report in favour of a renewal of Wittgenstein’s research grant’ (PR, p. 347). However, it can be shown that it is very unlikely that Wittgenstein gave TS 209 (posthumously published as Philosophical Remarks) to Russell. It was the previous TS 208 that Wittgenstein gave to Russell. TS 208 is a selection of remarks from MSS 105–8i which Wittgenstein dictated in April 1930 whereas TS 209 is a selection and reordering of many remarks from TS 208, which are pasted as ‘Zettel’ (cuttings) into a blank manuscript volume. This typescript is by no means a finished book by Wittgenstein and he never planned to publish it. Rush Rhees’ posthumous edition under the title Philosophical Remarks created a great deal of confusion because TS 209 itself contains the remarks not in the order in which they were originally written in MSS 105–8i nor in the chronologically selected order in TS 208. Therefore, TS 209 presents neither the genesis of Wittgenstein’s philosophy nor the important changes in his thought during the period February 1929–April 1930. Denis Paul writes thus in the first chapter of his book Wittgenstein’s Progress 1929–1951: What would be a disastrous starting point for any student is a volume which appeared in 1964 as Philosophische Bemerkungen and later
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in English as Philosophical Remarks. This was edited from a text which Wittgenstein derived from the first three and a half large manuscript books [. . .]. Now selecting and reordering was Wittgenstein’s normal treatment of his material, in manuscript or typed. What makes Philosophische Bemerkungen so difficult to study is that its new order disguises a profound change in his philosophical views which he made about half way through the three and a half manuscript books. For on its very first page there are references to an abandoned viewpoint, giving the impression that the change was made before the book was begun. This change was first recorded in October 1929, though it may have been brewing somewhat earlier than that. It concerns an attempt to justify a ‘primary’ or ‘phenomenological’ language for the description of sense data without any reference to objects that might have caused them. Many paragraphs from this ‘phenomenological’ episode are included in the final version without any indication that they were written before the attempt was given up. In fact, to read Philosophische Bemerkungen without its manuscript sources is to cripple any possibility of understanding it. Nor is there any evidence that Wittgenstein ever regarded it as a book for publication. After serving its purpose of providing him with a fellowship he gave it to Moore, in gratitude for his help in gaining it, and it thus ceased to be part of his working material. The uncut top copy, however, remained with him, and some of its paragraphs were pasted into later manuscript books from which they contributed to an important typescript which was a kind of retrospective of his development up to its being made; and in this, known as the Big Typescript, he did not disguise – well, hardly ever disguised – the stages of that development. It is an extremely useful source for Wittgenstein studies [. . .]. (2007, pp. 17–18)5 Unfortunately, in the Philosophical Remarks publication, Rhees also introduced as Wittgenstein’s ‘Foreword’ for this book a selection of remarks Wittgenstein had drafted under the heading ‘Zu einem Vorwort’ (To a preface) from 6 to 8 November 1930 in MS 109 (pp. 204–13). It is easy to show that none of these remarks were ever written for TS 209 and that in this incorrect context content such as Wittgenstein’s powerful statement that ‘[t]his book is written for such men as are in sympathy with its spirit’ and that ‘[t]his spirit is different from the one which informs the vast stream of European and American civilization in which all of us stand’6 is reduced, distorted or even destroyed. It is
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also easy to show through an important letter that has not been taken into consideration until now that in 1930 Wittgenstein was thinking of writing a philosophical book. On 8 May 1930, shortly after Wittgenstein finished dictating TS 208, Moritz Schlick wrote to Ludwig Wittgenstein: What I have heard from Mr Waismann about your manuscript, has delighted me. I am grateful to you with all my heart, that later you will give us the detailed version of your work for publication, as Mr Waismann has assured me. With that you are doing a really good deed.7 It is important to recognize that in the second half of 1930 Wittgenstein planned to write a book for publication in the context of the ‘Wiener Kreis’ (Vienna Circle).8 Under no circumstances was, or is, this book TS 209. But what then was the purpose of TS 209? The reason for dictating TS 208 as a synopsis of remarks from the manuscripts was so that Wittgenstein might get a ‘Research Fellowship’ (under title B). Bertrand Russell was asked to converse with Wittgenstein and to write a report for the Council of Trinity College. Subsequently, Russell forced Wittgenstein to produce a summary of his new philosophical thoughts. As a result, Wittgenstein dictated TS 208 in March/April 1930 and gave a copy of it to Russell. Then on 8 May 1930, Russell wrote his ‘Report to the Trinity Council on Wittgenstein’s work’ in which the last paragraph reads as follows: The theories contained in this new work of Wittgenstein’s are novel, very original, and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should wish to think that they are not, but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since when completed they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy. (Russell, 1968, p. 200) But Russell’s report was in a certain way counterproductive because his pronouncement regarding Wittgenstein’s thoughts ‘Whether they are true, I do not know’ forced the Council of Trinity to seek further, more positive information about Wittgenstein’s new philosophy. John Edensor Littlewood was consulted and also asked to write a report on this matter. In Littlewood’s Miscellany, there is the following description of ‘Wittgenstein’s Fellowship Election’:
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In the late twenties the question of making Ludwig Wittgenstein a title B Fellow was raised at the Council. A report from Russell seemed to make reservations, e.g. he said he was not convinced that Wittgenstein’s theories were true. And any reservation is apt to be fatal to a Fellowship. Wittgenstein had not yet acquired his later status, and the Council were sceptical. They decided that I should have a series of talks with Wittgenstein and report, and they would act accordingly. The whole thing seems to me incredible – I was a personal friend of Wittgenstein; suppose the answer was ‘no’. I said the Council were asking no light thing, but we went through with it. Wittgenstein never finished a sentence, except to say ‘It is impossible’, and there was an obligato of ‘I am a miss’. In order to understand A you had to hear B, C for B, . . ., X for A. I was favourably convinced after half a dozen interviews, reported, and Wittgenstein was given a B Fellowship. A fee seemed hardly relevant to the fantastic picture. The Council suggested £5. C. D. Broad, saying that I had been seen staggering exhausted into Hall, got it raised to £10. (Littlewood, 1986, p. 138) Thus, not only did Russell submit a report to the Council of Trinity but also Littlewood. This report has recently been found in the archives of Trinity College, Cambridge. It is a very interesting document and has therefore been fully transcribed and reproduced below: Trinity College Cambridge 1.6.30 Wittgenstein has explained some of his ideas to me verbally in some 6 or 8 sessions of an hour to an hour and a half. This has been inadequate for a full understanding, but enough to give me the impression that his work is of the highest importance. Revolutionary as his ideas are, some of them seem to me clearly destined to become eventually part of logical thought. There are cases of abso new absolutely first class work where even an amateur can feel confident, & justifiably, in its importance. This seems to me to be such a case, & as the Council has asked for my opinion, here it is. But I am only an amateur in logic, even in mathematical logic.
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I began, for some or no reason, with the idea that W.[ittgenstein] might be living on old capital, or unable to communicate his ideas. I was agreeably surprised, & it is true to say that I always became interested when once the session started, I enjoyed it. His illustrations struck me as highly illuminating, he often guessed what was at the back of my hesitations & so on. In fact, whatever his idiosyncracies [sic!] in other matters may be, on his own ground he is simply the first rate mind. The idea about old capital is entirely groundless. W.[ittgenstein] wrote a book once before, & I mean it literally when I say that I see no reason whatever why he should not write another, & perhaps a more important one. J. E. Littlewood9 It is most likely that Wittgenstein constructed and used TS 209 for his own rethinking of themes in preparation for the meetings and conversations with Littlewood, for conversations with members of the Vienna Circle and as preliminary studies for the book he planned to write for publication in the context of and through the Vienna Circle. TS 209 was not composed as a ‘Fellowship dissertation’ because to be awarded a ‘Research Fellowship’ (under title B) it was not necessary to submit a dissertation.
Wittgenstein’s ‘Kringel-Book’ in MSS 107–12 In Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, it is possible to find a very special and unique project for creating a book. However, no name for this book has come down to us from Wittgenstein himself. It can be called the ‘KringelBook’10 because all the sections selected for this collection are marked with a Kringel (a squiggle like an imperfectly drawn circle). This selection comprises a total of 223 remarks which are located in MSS 107–11 (to be exact, MS 107, p. 159/1, to MS 111, p. 196/1) and were written between 11 October 1929 and 13 September 1931. One single remark dated 1 November 1931 is found, like a late arrival, in MS 112 (p. 70v/4). The ‘Kringel-Book’ selection contains (and this is unique in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass) remarks on very different subjects: philosophical remarks on various themes, remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, cultural remarks on music, literature and so on, personal remarks, autobiographical remarks, coded remarks. With special reference to the selected remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough, it can be stated that they are
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more extensive and complete than the posthumous remarks in Rush Rhees’ 1967 edition Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’.11 In this context Wittgenstein has not only chosen his remarks on James George Frazer’s The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, but also his remarks on Ernest Renan’s Histoire du Peuple d’Israel.12 Peter Hacker has pointed out the similarity between the remarks on Frazer and on Renan in his article ‘Developmental Hypotheses and Perspicuous Representations: Wittgenstein on Frazer’s Golden Bough’: ‘Frazer, like Renan, whose work inspired The Golden Bough, thought that primitive man was impressed by the forces of nature because he could not explain them’ (2001, p. 93).13 Therefore it should be borne in mind that the selection of remarks on Frazer was made by Wittgenstein himself while the excerpt Remarks on Frazer’s ‘Golden Bough’ was posthumously compiled by Rhees. The same can be claimed for the cultural, personal and autobiographical remarks in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. The selection in the ‘Kringel-Book’ was created by Wittgenstein whereas the excerpt in Culture and Value was compiled by George Henrik von Wright. Wittgenstein’s creation of the ‘Kringel-Book’ was not merely a trivial exercise; on the contrary, it can be shown that it is an outstanding project in Wittgenstein’s life and œuvre. For this ‘Kringel-Book’, Wittgenstein not only chose an extra motto but also drafted a preface. During the years 1929–32, he wrote down in his manuscripts two ideas for a motto for a book. The first motto can be found in MS 109 (p. 288/2) as an entry on 31 January 1931 and reads as follows: ‘I could choose as a motto for my book: A fool can ask more than ten wise man can answer. It should be named “ten clever men”.’14 Only this motto was selected with a Kringel as a section mark and Wittgenstein planned to use it as the motto for the ‘Kringel-Book’. There is another idea for a motto in MS 110 (p. 180/2) in an entry on 19 June 1931 which goes: ‘|A motto for this book: “Do you see the moon there?/Only half of it is visible/Yet it is round and beautiful.”|’15 Wittgenstein has extracted this motto from the poem ‘Abendlied’ (Evening Song) by Matthias Claudius. While the text of the first motto is accompanied by a squiggle as a section mark (‘◦’), the second one has Wittgenstein’s sign ‘∫’, his section mark for ‘schlecht’ (bad) or ‘schwach’ (weak). Thus it is clear that Wittgenstein did not choose this motto for the ‘KringelBook’. However, he selected the remark immediately following it for this book-project. For his ‘Kringel-Book’ Wittgenstein also created a special excerpt with remarks for a preface. As mentioned above, there exists a series of remarks under the heading ‘To a preface’ in MS 109 (pp. 204–13). From this series of drafts for a preface for a book, Wittgenstein chose a few
Josef G. F. Rothhaupt 59
remarks and indicated them with the Kringel. This can be seen as further proof that these remarks for a preface were definitely not written for TS 209 – the posthumous publication, Philosophical Remarks, edited by Rush Rhees. The content of the sections ‘To a preface’ in MS 109 on one hand does not fit the themes and subjects treated in TS 209 and on the other reduces or even destroys the power of Wittgenstein’s critic of ‘the vast stream of European and American civilization’.16 But the sections in ‘To a preface’ fit perfectly as powerful remarks into the preface to the ‘Kringel-Book’ because in this selection of philosophical, cultural, personal and autobiographical remarks, Wittgenstein’s critic of ‘the vast stream of European and American civilization’ is omnipresent. Discussion and evaluation of the ‘Kringel-Book’ is a desideratum for research on the life and work of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the near future. In addition, publication of a top-quality edition of the ‘Kringel-Book’ with detailed commentaries is desirable.
Selection of remarks from MSS 105–14i into TSS 208, 210 and 211 During the period from 2 February 1929 to 5 June 1932 Wittgenstein wrote thousands and thousands of remarks. Together these form a series of manuscripts, namely MS 105 to MS 114i . Wittgenstein then dictated a selection of remarks from the manuscripts into three typescripts: TS 208, TS 210 and TS 211. Each of these three typescripts existed in at least two copies, namely the top copy and at least one carbon copy. From one copy of TS 210 and TS 211 Wittgenstein made cuttings which he transferred into TS 212. The second copy of TS 210 and TS 211 is preserved in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass. From one copy of TS 208 he produced TS 209. Later Wittgenstein treated the other copy of TS 208 in a very special way. Thus the second copy of TS 208 has a double genesis. First he reworked pages 1–118 into MSS 111–14i and the so-called ‘Wiederaufnahme’ (readaptation, reversion) took place; secondly, he transferred nearly all of pages 119–68 as cuttings into TS 212, the so-called ‘Proto-Big Typescript’. A complete copy of TS 208 in its original form is not available in the Nachlass. One copy was used to produce TS 209 and has been destroyed insofar as its original ordering is concerned. The other copy was used for reworking the manuscripts (the first series of TS 208) or for transfer into TS 212 (the second series of TS 208). Then from TS 212 the so-called ‘Big Typescript’ (TS 213) was created. But it is possible, although very time-consuming, to nearly completely reconstruct the original form of TS 208.17
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Wittgenstein at Work
Number of Pages
TS-Spacing MSS-Scope in TS
MSS-Period in TS
Date of TS-Dictation
TS 208
168
1
MS 105, p. 1 to MS 108i , p. 133
2 February 1929 to 24 March 1930
April 1930
TS 210
87
1½
MS 108ii , p. 133 to MS 108ii , p. 300
25 March 1930 to 9 August 1930
between August 1930 and June 1932
TS 211
773
1½
MS 109, p. 1 to MS 114i , p. 31r
11 August 1930 to 5 June 1932
September 1931 to at least June 1932
Wittgenstein’s ‘Proto-Big Typescript’ (TS 212) and ‘Big Typescript’ (TS 213) A detailed study of the so-called ‘Proto-Big Typescript’ is extremely important for an understanding of Wittgenstein’s attempt to compose remarks as a book. In this respect, the ‘Proto-Big Typescript’ contains much more information than its successor, the ‘Big Typescript’. It can be shown that, for Wittgenstein, TS 213 is primarily a huge archive, a tremendous reservoir of philosophical remarks. For him it is a storehouse which contains thousands of sections arranged in groups with special themes and ordered in chapters. But TS 213 presents only one system of ordering in TS 212. TS 213 was dictated or typed basically in order to provide the material for writing and composing a philosophical book. TS 213 was not produced for publication as a book by Wittgenstein, and the so-called ‘table of contents’ in TS 213 is mainly a list of the ordered groups of themes in this great archive of remarks. A deep and comprehensive understanding of the complex composition of TS 213’s predecessor, TS 212, provides the foundation not only for an adequate reconstruction of the genesis of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass from 1932–33 onwards but it also shows the technique with which Wittgenstein selected, arranged and composed his remarks in order to create a philosophical book.18 The ‘Proto-Big Typescript’ contains a huge number of remarks as cuttings which come from the earlier TSS 208, 210 and 211. And nearly all these thousands and thousands of cuttings of philosophical remarks have one or more so-called ‘group numbers’, that is numbers for a
Josef G. F. Rothhaupt 61
special theme. The group numbers go from 1 to 99, but there are also subordinated numbers (e.g. 4a and 4b or 4.1). In TS 212 there are 90 subgroup numbers which together with the 99 main group numbers make a total of 189 group numbers in the ‘Proto-Big Typescript’. The original list of these group numbers is not retained in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass but it can be reconstructed. It is possible, although very time-consuming, to reconstruct this system by ordering all the remarks, all the sections and all the cuttings into their original numbered groups.19 The astonishing outcome of this reconstruction is that TS 212 was initially ordered in groups of themes, which were marked with a ‘Stichwort’ (headword). And then all the headwords (in German) were arranged in alphabetical order. The alphabetical ordering starts with the headwords ‘Absicht’ (intention), ‘Allgemeinheit’ (generality), ‘Arithmethik’ (arithmetic) and ends with the headwords ‘Zahlen’ (numbers), ‘Zeichen’ (sign/symbol), ‘Zeit’ (time). Following this alphabetical ordering in TS 212, a second order – an arrangement by themes and the grouping of themes as found in TS 212 and also present in TS 213 – was introduced. And this second system rests mainly on the earlier alphabetical order of headwords. Until now, until reaching the astonishing conclusion that Wittgenstein really did organize his tremendous pool of philosophical sections – the huge TS 212 – according to the structure of the alphabet, the remark below could not really be understood; it could only be read as an interesting but unusual, strange and speculative idea for the introduction of a system to order the contents of a book. Wittgenstein wrote this remark shortly before April 1932 in his pocket notebook MS 154 (p. 1r/2): ‘The title of my book: “Philosophical Considerations”. Headwords arranged in alphabetical order.’20 Now we can see that Wittgenstein carried out this project in the ‘Proto-Big Typescript’, TS 212. The four specific subjects (A) to (D) which are addressed in this article serve to demonstrate how important and how necessary it is to undertake further detailed research on the œuvre of this philosopher. We are still only at the beginning.
Notes 1. MS 136, p. 91v (1 January 1948); MS 168, p. 7 (CV, p. 76): ‘Ich denke an Kraus und seine Aphorismen, aber auch an mich selbst und meine philosophischen Bemerkungen.’ 2. MS 134, p. 148 (21 April 1947); TS 229, §1610; TS 245, §1610: ‘Der Begriff des “Fragments”. Es ist nicht leicht die Verwendung dieses Wortes auch nur beiläufig zu beschreiben.’ Further remarks on the fragment are: MS 108, p. 152 (8 May 1930): TS 210, p. 12: ‘Was ich auch immer schreibe, es sind
62
3. 4. 5. 6.
7.
8.
9. 10.
11. 12. 13. 14.
15. 16.
Wittgenstein at Work Fragmente, aber der Verstehende wird daraus ein geschlossenes Weltbild entnehmen <ersehen?>.’ And: MS 134, p. 2 (1 March 1947): ‘Wir fassen das, was wie ein Fragment ausschaut als Ganzes auf. [. . .]’. See Rothhaupt, 2009. Detailed studies on these four subjects can be found in Rothhaupt, 2008. In all probability TS 209 did not serve Wittgenstein’s purpose ‘of providing him with a fellowship’. MS 109, p. 211 (8 November 1930): ‘Dieses Buch ist für solche geschrieben die seinem Geist freundlich gegenüberstehen. Dieser Geist ist ein anderer grossen:::::::: Stromes der europäischen & amerikanischen Kultur als der g des ::::::
in dem wir alle stehen.’ The original text in MS 109, pp. 204–13, contains not only important alternative formulations but also meaningful corrections, for example the deletion of ‘Kultur’ (culture) and the replacing with ‘Zivilisation’ (civilization), which are not reproduced in the posthumous publication Philosophical Remarks. ‘[W]as ich von Herrn Waismann über Ihr Manuskript hörte, hat mich sehr gefreut. Und von ganzem Herzen bin ich Ihnen dankbar, dass Sie uns später die ausführliche Fassung Ihrer Arbeit zur Publikation übergeben wollen, wie Herr Waismann mir versicherte. Sie tun damit wirklich ein gutes Werk’ (GB). This book is not identical with the publication Logik, Sprache, Philosophie which Friedrich Waismann started to write in 1929 on Wittgenstein’s philosophy. See the announcement of Waismann’s book in Hahn, Neurath and Carnap, 1929, p. 47. First reproduced in Rothhaupt, 2008. This document is also included in WC, 133. Extensive documentation, an introductory commentary and (as an Appendix) the transcription and edition of the ‘Kringel-Book’ project can be found in Rothhaupt, 2008. Reprinted in PO, pp. 115–55. These three remarks on Renan from MS 109, p. 200/2 to MS 109, p. 202/1 were written on 5 November 1930. See also Ricken, 2003, p. 53. ‘[Ich könnte als Motto meines Buches wählen: Ein Narr kann mehr fragen, als zehn Weise beantworten können. Eigentlich müsste es hier heissen “zehn Gescheite”.]’ ‘|Ein Motto für dieses Buch: “Seht ihr den Mond dort stehn?/Er ist nur halb zu sehn/und ist doch rund und schön.”|’ On this matter, see the correct, but in part also misleading and wrong, statement in the new and very important publication by DeAngelis (2007). DeAngelis (2007, p. 32) points out that the preface does not go with the content of TS 209, but he is not aware of the philological fact that this preface definitely does not belong originally to TS 209 and that TS 209 is not even a book by Wittgenstein when he states: ‘Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks is a work from what is sometimes called his “transitional” or “middle” period [. . .]. It concerns itself explicitly with the problems that Wittgenstein always took seriously: the meaning of words and sentences, the relationship between language and the world and between language and thought. There are also remarks on the foundations of mathematics. Against its content, the preface to the Remarks comes as a surprise. It announces
Josef G. F. Rothhaupt 63
17. 18.
19. 20.
intentions that, on the surface, would appear to have nothing to do with the content of the work. Indeed judging from the evidence of the preface alone, one would have virtually no indication that a work in philosophy was to follow. He does not mention propositions, meanings, words, thoughts, verification, pictures, metaphysics, behaviourism, solipsism, dualism, or even philosophy itself. What little he does say concerns the “European and American civilization in which all of us stand” – a civilization whose spirit, he explicitly states, is opposed to that of the work.’ The whole reconstruction is done in Rothhaupt, 2008. It can, for example, be shown that TS 228, one of the base typescripts Wittgenstein dictated and used for the composition of the so-called ‘Spätfassung’ (late version) of the Philosophical Investigations (TS 227), also has a very similar system of numbers. And from further research on Wittgenstein’s Nachlass it can be stated and proven that the origin of this late version entailed two clearly distinguished steps, namely the composition of an ‘early late version’ (1945–46) and a ‘late late version’ (1949). See Rothhaupt, 1999 and 2006. The whole reconstruction is done in Rothhaupt, 2008. ‘Der Titel meines Buches: “Philosophische Betrachtungen. Alphabetisch nach ihren Gegenständen geordnet .” [nach Stichwörtern angeordnet.]’ A very similar remark can be found in his pocket notebook MS 154, p. 9v/2, namely: ‘Weniger versprechen als man halten will ist oft schön, aber es kann auch aus einer Anmassung entspringen; dann, wenn man sich auch etwas darauf einbildet weniger zu versprechen als man halten wird. – Ist es richtig oder unrichtig mein Buch nicht “Philosophische Betrachtungen etc.” zu nennen, sondern “Philosophische Bemerkungen, nach ihren Gegenständen alphabetisch geordnet”? [nach Stichwörtern alphabetisch geordnet] <[alphabetisch nach Stichwörtern angeordnet]>”.’
4 The Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner Arthur Gibson
Introduction On 3 and 4 October 1941, bombers attacked Oakington RAF Wellington base; victims were rushed to Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge. The admission of an osteomyelitis case, left in a corridor, was no priority. When attended to, he was dying: Wittgenstein’s principal amanuensis and closest friend – Francis Skinner – died on 11 October 1941. Wittgenstein was traumatized by Skinner’s death, made worse by his 1939 ironic quip: better if Skinner were to die. He tried to resign his Professorship, turning to implement the spirit of ‘their’ plan to do medical work, as if atoning for his recent neglect of Skinner. So on 14 October – the day of Skinner’s funeral – Wittgenstein wrote to the Cambridge Vice-Chancellor: he was taking up work as a ‘dispensary porter’ at Guys Hospital London.1 Skinner’s life’s work and a considerable portion of years of Wittgenstein’s lay united together in an archive: Wittgenstein thrust the archive into the post to Reading, sending it to Reuben Goodstein. Arriving on 22 October 1941, it disappeared until the twenty-first century. None of Wittgenstein’s literary heirs and scholars seemed to have known of its existence. A book2 publishing this Wittgenstein archive of Francis Skinner (hereafter, the archive) is under preparation. This chapter briefly introduces the manuscripts and airs only a few pertinent matters.
Skinner the mathematician and Goodstein’s secret Goodstein was born into London’s late-nineteenth-century Jewish Russian émigré stock. He and Francis studied at St Paul’s London. Both 64
Arthur Gibson 65
came up to Cambridge to read mathematics and graduated in the same year, achieving identical impressive first-class Honours3 in the Final Exams List; in the Cambridge argot they were both Wranglers. As an undergraduate and research student, Goodstein was subject to dire tragic domestic as well as external emotional pressures, was in penury, suffering from scurvy; Wittgenstein assisted him when he realized this. Goodstein was at one time Mathematical Association president, librarian, editor of the Mathematical Gazette, and mastermind of the relocation of the Mathematical Association headquarters and library to Leicester from Reading, and his office there was host to all these functions. He suffered a stroke in 1976, and ceased to attend his office. This was a time of transition for the university: the contents of the office were subject to somewhat peremptory removal. Goodstein did not leave an expression of intention or note on the archive’s identity. At home he had a wife with a long history of extreme jealousy concerning Skinner and Wittgenstein. A ‘close’ colleague of his for over 20 years in his office was unaware of the archive’s presence. ‘He played his cards close to his chest’,4 being ‘an intensely private person’, and one of ‘quiet courtesy’, with ‘traditional views’.5 Two of his colleagues6 recall that the then-unrecognized archive lay among office remains provisionally assigned for disposal, though by their good instinct this end was averted. Maybe this near-fateful terminus for the archive mirrored Goodstein’s attitude to it: the archive and his relation to it were a closed book to himself, fixed when Skinner died, yet spawned in undergraduate days – with Goodstein on outside of the circle constituted by Wittgenstein and Skinner. The archive languished in Leicester until 2002 when the Mathematical Association’s Librarian’s and the Council’s protracted enquiries led to contact with Trinity College Cambridge to ask if it would identify, assess and handle the archive. Eventually this was deposited with Trinity Library for that purpose. I was invited by Trinity7 to examine the archive, prepare a report, and subsequently to edit it for its (forthcoming) publication. In the same week as Skinner’s death in 1941, Wittgenstein had written more than one letter to R. L. Goodstein about sending the archive to Goodstein in Reading. When Goodstein received the archive by post from Wittgenstein, he replied:8 Dear Dr Wittgenstein, Very many thanks for your letters. Three parcels of Francis’ papers reached me on the 22nd. I am very grateful to you for sending them
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to me, as I very much wanted to have them. I have so far sorted out two of the parcels. These consist of (1) Work done at School (2) University lecture notes and worked examples (3) One volume of rough notes on your lectures taken by Skinner himself and a fair copy of these notes, dated Michaelmas 1934. I need not tell you how beautifully neat, careful and thorough all the work is – a true piece of Francis himself. I suppose the dictated notes to which you refer are in the third parcel. If I find anything of Francis’s work sufficiently complete for publication, I shall get in touch with you about it. What Francis’s family perhaps don’t realise is that his chief work was his life and now that we have lost him the most precious thing that we have left is the memory of that life, not something that can be dressed in words for a philosophical article. You say that they don’t seem to realise what they have lost, but perhaps it is that they lost him already some years ago. If I do hear from his family, which I think very unlikely, though of course I wrote to them, shall try to explain to them that what they are attempting is the very last thing Francis would have wished. I shall let you know the next time I am going to London in the hope that we shall be able to meet. Ever yours Louis Goodstein There are puzzles here, which cannot be given attention in the space available, not least since this is an extraordinary projection of Goodstein’s own lack of relation to his own parents.
Description of the archive All the manuscripts and book-manuscripts appear to be dictations by Wittgenstein to the amanuensis Skinner. That there is regular and sometimes extensive emendation, correction and additions by Wittgenstein in his own handwriting goes some way to supporting the view that Wittgenstein regarded them as his dictations. Skinner performs as Wittgenstein’s personifying writing hand. There is evidence that much
Arthur Gibson 67
of this editing was done as they lived together. In view of the archive, and of Skinner’s working relationship with Wittgenstein, concepts of ‘fair copy’, ‘dictation’ and ‘notes’ and so on are given fresh attention and extension in the forthcoming edition of the archive. None of the manuscripts’ contents has been published before, except for a typed version in many respects different from the last manuscript – MS VIII: Wittgenstein’s Brown Book. Even so, there are sufficient revisions to this manuscript in Wittgenstein’s own hand to warrant a new edition of the Brown Book. Furthermore, there is the prospect to consider that the previously unpublished additional last 12,654 words within the six manuscript volumes could be considered to be part of the Brown Book.9 The manuscripts are all written in Francis Skinner’s pencil or pen handwriting, with substantial emendations and additions by Wittgenstein. The archive’s manuscripts are as follows:
MS I: The Pink Book The manuscript is over 14,000 words long, plus illustrations. This contains two full-lined exercise books (one without outer binding) marked ‘I’ and ‘II’ inside them. They are in Skinner’s ink handwriting, and there are some additional paragraphs or corrections, and extensive refinements in Wittgenstein’s English handwriting (and one in German). The cover of the Pink Book is pink, with maroon tape.10 This has the same binding as the large notebooks, used for notes in lectures, in the Nachlass’ manuscripts 145–51, the so-called ‘C-Series’. It would be rather too easy to conclude that this is the missing Yellow Book. There are some small partial parallels between MS I and what Ambrose published of the Yellow Book, yet with very extensive differences. In view of the disparities and entirely different parts of the Pink Book it is worth using this latter title. It nods in the direction of Yorick Smythies’ use of the title (there are references to it in his unpublished archive11 ). Alice Ambrose12 in effect agrees that the Yellow Book is not dictation, whereas with MS I we have Wittgenstein’s own additions and revisions to authenticate it. There is no evidence that Wittgenstein had read and made revision to the Yellow Book, in contrast with his handwriting revisions and additions in MS I, which seems to be one of the fair copies alluded to in Goodstein’s above cited letter.13 There is an unpublished copy of a 14-page typed manuscript held in Trinity College in the Rhees Papers,14 which seems not to have been referred to elsewhere. Von Wright has a note and classification attached to it that
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The Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner
states: ‘undictated notes’. Its contents match neither the Pink Book nor precisely the published pieces of the Yellow Book. Certainly there are such comparable references as those to Schopenhauer in her Yellow Book fragments and the Pink Book in the archive; yet the use of each is thematically different. Detailed analysis of both supports the conclusion that the Pink Book is a fair copy of formal dictation by Wittgenstein to Skinner, which is itself consequent on and a synthesis of a number of previous developing dictation contexts of which the Yellow Book is one indirect ancestor. Although the Pink Book addresses language game issues, it sometimes relates these to formal matters. For example Part I: The laws of geometry talk about the cube in the sense of giving rules. [An objection was made] I said geometry fixed the meaning of the word cube. If one alters the geometry, one alters the meaning. Another example follows the above case: An objection was ‘is it true all the geometry constitutes the meaning, or does some constitute the meaning and is the rest the propositions which follow from the rules?’ I can neglect this question . . . There are also some – technical quite abbreviated, yet evident – outlines sketching mathematical research debates concerning graph theory, relations to ratios in number theory that pertain to other Nachlass manuscripts.15 Typically these C-volume mathematical contents have not been published, even where portions of the narrative have. It is clear that it is at this level of specific attention that Wittgenstein has attended to the role of such illustration. This is a research topic for further attention. MS II: Communication of Personal Experience The manuscript is over 12,000 words long, plus illustrations. The manuscript comprises two bound canvas spined and lined large notebooks. Although it appears at the end of the Brown Book manuscript, it is placed here because it has not been published; also it is thematically
Arthur Gibson 69
and temporarily close to the Pink Book. MS II consists of Book V, mentioned below in MS VIII, from page 19 to the end, and all of Book VI of the Brown Book. Volume V, page 1816 concludes with the published ending of the Brown Book: ‘the ray of light reaches the mirror.’ Below this is the pencilled inscription: ‘ended of printed version’ (sic). After the standard ending of the Brown Book over the page a separate manuscript commences with the above heading, in Skinner’s hand, yet with substantial changes and additions in Wittgenstein’s handwriting. There are also additional remarks in Wittgenstein’s hand in German or English in the blank facing pages. Some features of the manuscript bear some fragmentary and incomplete comparison to certain sketchy statements in the C-Series volumes in similarly bound exercise books; yet the overall content and form are that of a fair copy worked over by Wittgenstein, which contrasts with the C-Series volumes. Since these C-Series lecture notebooks have a similar structural relation to the Blue and Brown Books as they have to the contents of MS II, this supports a strong claim to the importance of the Pink Book. MS III: Philosophy The manuscript is over 20,000 words long, plus illustrations. There is a large card wallet, with the sentence in Skinner’s handwriting ‘Unedited Notes of Lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein in Trinity College Cambridge 1934. The notes were taken by Sidney George Francis Skinner and are in his handwriting.’ This cover description must have been made early because there is some emendation and correction of MS III in Skinner’s and in Wittgenstein’s handwriting. A card wallet contained two batches of lecture notes, one in the envelope that was posted from Letchworth to Cambridge in February 1934. One batch is MS III, which comprises 19 sets of lecture notes, varying from 2–19 pages in each set, totalling 93 pages. The dates commence at ‘Wedn. Jan. 17th’ and end on ‘Friday, Feb. 23rd’. The manuscript paper comprises unlined buffcoloured sheets, whose paper mark is less well crafted and is worded as ‘FINE IVORY’. MS IV: Visual Image in his Brain The manuscript is well over 3000 words long, plus illustrations. This manuscript comprises 16 unlined sheets. The pages are numbered into sequences of: 1–8; 1–3; 1–5, respectively. The watermark on the paper has a crown over the words in capitals ‘KINGS COLLEGE’.
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The text starts with a discussion of Goldbach’s theorem. It appears to fulfil the allegedly unfulfilled promise in the Blue Book, p. 11.17 The last page concludes with: ‘I want to talk about the thought reading from the Monday Lecture. Meet at eleven Friday morning.’ This seems to refer to the Monday lecture represented in the Pink Book Part I; the section is dated ‘November 27th’ (second page of entry; see above), which is a Monday in 1933. This would make the note indicate Friday 1 December, which would be between the end of the Pink Book I and Pink Book II. Since these 18 sheets are grouped in three numbered batches, it is plausible to conclude that they are records of meetings Wittgenstein had with Skinner, of three meetings held in between the lectures. Since they are not bound or clipped together in the present order, it may be that the current last one, which ends with the above note, was the first, and led to the other two, since they do not contain references to other meetings. MS V: The Norwegian Notebook The manuscript is over 18,000 words long, plus illustrations. This is a small exercise book containing continuous discussion. The book, as the above title supposes, is a Norwegian Notebook.18 The handwriting is Skinner’s, in pencil. This is a buff/light brown A5 exercise book, originally with a staple binding, now missing.19 The text investigates perception of visual phenomena, their quality ordering and interpretation. It has a dialogue-like quality, with questions to Wittgenstein from Gasking, Redpath, Rhees, Wisdom and Paul (not Denis, but George Andrew Paul, of Trinity – Affiliated Student, 1934, Exhibitioner 1935, Senior Scholar, 1936, Fellow, from 1939). MS VI: Self-evidence and Logic The manuscript is over 20,000 words long, plus illustrations. An empty paper bag20 in one of the boxes which seems originally to have contained some of MS VI has the following inscription on it in Skinner’s hand: ‘Notes taken by myself of Dr Wittgenstein’s lectures Lent Term 1935’, which complements the above evidence. These are depicted as lecture sets of notes for lectures VII–XVI, each set of which comprises between 7 and 17 pages. There are 120 pages. The first eight of these are in pencil, with the remaining two pages in ink. The manuscript paper is watermarked: ‘Vanity Vellum BRITISH MADE’ with the image of a fine quill pen diagonally through the words. Some of Wittgenstein’s own handwritten emendations and his own note identifying it as Skinner’s notes of his lectures appear.
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The series starts with the denial that the truths of logic are selfevident, and in this vein addresses central areas of logic and some mathematical questions. It also articulates an original discussion of some of his doctrine that derives from the Tractatus, as well as a fresh perspective on identity; it tackles Russell’s logic, Hardy, the theory of number and other topics. It employs such terms as ‘experiential’ some years before many supposed he did.21 However, Wittgenstein is also especially concerned with what it is to be a proposition, and about Russell’s definition of two sets being ‘the same size’ – if there is a bijection (alias one-to-one matching, alias oneto-one correspondence) between them.22
MS VII: A Mathematical Investigation There are over 7000 mathematical expressions that comprise this manuscript’s calculations. The manuscript physically consists in a series of unlined long paper sheets, consisting of four loose and separate folia (each just over A3 size), four loose and separate folia (each just over A4 size), and one octavo sheet. All these are written on one side, except the last that has a calculation unconnected with the reviewed calculations, and will be dealt with in the forthcoming edition of the archive. The manuscript is entirely mathematical – calculations attending to matters concerning number theory. Since it is in Skinner’s hand, there is a question as to whether this is Skinner’s or Wittgenstein’s own work. As the manuscript is part of this archive, was sent by Wittgenstein to Goodstein and it has an expressly Wittgenstein-like character that is in contrast with standard mathematical procedure, it is included here and in the forthcoming edition. The manuscript is here presented as a somewhat unusual duty of care to Francis Skinner’s right of recognition in view of his devotion to the emergence of Wittgenstein’s philosophy and compositions. The calculations cannot be dismissed as the standard work of a mathematics undergraduate, but are more advanced for the 1930s. I have been encouraged by Professors Bela Bollobás and Imre Leader to publish these calculations. It appears that there is nothing in existence like them from the 1930s Cambridge mathematics. The mathematical contents below are original and unprecedented, if not also a little bizarre. The mechanically driven calculations seem to have the job of exposing the contrast between a carefully composed elegant mathematical route and one that is driven by no order other than random exploration of possibility within a series of numbers and relations.
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The calculations have an almost obsessive feel to them – no elegant short cuts. Rather, they are brute-force calculations. The writer has said to himself: ‘I know what these results are, but I want to see them for myself, by switching my brain off, just doing the calculations, and see what happens.’ Unlike Turing’s later behaviourism, yet acting like a primal ancestor of Turing’s coding machine before it existed, it utilizes the unexpected. The following is only a small sample of the type of calculations in the manuscript. Calculations in this manuscript are mainly concerned with some calculations in the integers mod 257. The significance of the number 257 is not explained; perhaps it is that it is a Fermat prime, being 223 + 1. It starts with a calculation of the powers of 3 mod 257. There is no explanation of what is going on, but it is clear from the numbers that this really is a calculation mod 257 – right through to 3256 , which is 1. This is a confirmation of Fermat’s Little Theorem (that ap−1 is always 1 mod p, for any prime p and any a that is not a multiple of p). Since no earlier power of 3 is 1, this also shows that 3 is a primitive root mod 257. Next we have some sums of powers of 3. For example, the sum 32 + 4 3 + 36 + . . . + 3256 of all the even powers of 3 is calculated, as is the sum 31 + 33 + 35 . . . + 3255 of all the odd powers of 3. There are also the four sums 3a + 3a+4 + 3a+8 + . . . , for a = 1, 2, 3, 4. The expressions are not evaluated, even though each must be zero. There are many more types of calculations. This manuscript and MS VI obliquely back on to an area for research, which concerns the technical significance of Wittgenstein’s frequent research discussions with the Trinity mathematician Littlewood, and the latter’s teaching of Skinner.23
MS VIII: Wittgenstein’s New Brown Book The length of this manuscript is that of the published version, with additions to this standard text, as well as over 12,000 words if we classify MS II above as part of the Brown Book. This manuscript is the first known – and only – handwritten copy of the Brown Book in the archive. Note that there is an extension to it, which consists as MS III above – listed separately and first since it has not been published before. This Brown Book is replete with Wittgenstein’s own handwritten revisions and sentence-long additions to it, which frequently differ from the published and other typed or printed versions. It is noteworthy that it is not divided into Parts I and II, as with the published version, rather into five volumes.
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Listing the archive’s contents Let us use the catalogue designation ‘Add.ms.a.407/’ for this, and Roman numerals by which to index and cite the manuscripts in the archive. It is composed of manuscripts I–VIII as follows: 407/I: ‘PINK BOOK’ 407/II: ‘COMMUNICATION OF PERSONAL EXPERIENCE’ 407/III: ‘PHILOSOPHY – A COURSE OF LECTURES’ 407/IV: ‘VISUAL IMAGE IN HIS BRAIN’ 407/V: ‘THE NORWEGIAN NOTEBOOK’ 407VI: ‘SELF-EVIDENCE AND LOGIC’ 407/VII: ‘MATHEMATICAL INVESTIGATION’ 407/VIII: ‘THE NEW BROWN BOOK’
The archive’s place in the Nachlass The retrieval of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass requires explicit retrieval of his own archival identities, which he deployed to craft and organize his philosophy as expressed in his manuscripts. ‘Archival identities’ here indexes attention to Wittgenstein’s organization, evolution and distillation of his physical manuscripts and their contents in his pursuit and degree of success to express his philosophy in writing.24 It is helpful to this perspective to place the archive’s manuscripts in the overall picture we can formulate of his Nachlass. Insofar as this picture can be hinted at in a catalogue plan, Table 1 briefly summarizes the contents of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass between 1933 and 1936, and shows a chronological comparison between the C-Series lecture notes and the archive inserted in the final column.
Conclusion The majority of the archive is made up of material dictated by Wittgenstein to Skinner and notes taken by Skinner at Wittgenstein’s lectures. That the former are comparable to the dictations included in von Wright’s catalogue raises them to the level of Nachlass material. It could be argued that since they are in (written) manuscript with quite substantial correction and revision by Wittgenstein, this elevates them above the typescript Blue and Brown Books in giving us an insight not only into his thought but also into his methodology. That
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Table 1 Wittgenstein’s Nachlass between 1933 and 1936 Volumes
C-volumes
114 (1932–) 115 (1933–34, 36)
145 (=C1) (1933) 146 (=C2) (1933–34) 147 (=C3) (1934)
148 (=C4) (1934–35)
149 (=C5) (1935–36) 150 (=C6) (1935–36)
151 (=C7) (1936) 152 (=C8) (1936)
Pocket books
156a (c. 1933) 156b (c. 1933)
TSS
Dictations
211 (1932) 212 (1932–33) 213 (1933)
309 (1933–34)
157a (1934, 37)
Other MSS
140 (1934)
310 (1934–35)
Add.ms.a.407/
407/I: ‘Pink Book’ 407/II: ‘Communication of Personal Experience’ 407/III: ‘Philosophy – A Course of Lectures’ 407/IV: ‘Visual Image in his Brain’ 407/V: ‘The Norwegian Notebook’ 407VI: ‘Self-evidence and Logic’
141 (1935–36) 407/VII: ‘Mathematical Investigation’ 407/VIII: ‘The New Brown Book’
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the ‘notes’ are meticulously drafted, by Francis Skinner, and include revision by Wittgenstein himself make these a most reliable record of Wittgenstein’s lectures of the period. In the light of the archive’s illuminating new material, new insights into Wittgenstein’s philosophical dictation thought-processes and his approaches to mathematics, the Skinner archive25 must rank as one of the most exciting discoveries in Wittgenstein studies since von Wright first published his catalogue of the Nachlass in 1969.26
Notes 1. See WC, 294 and footnotes. 2. L. Wittgenstein, Dictating Philosophy: the Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner (ed. A. Gibson). I acknowledge Trinity College Cambridge, the family of Francis Skinner and the Mathematical Association for their permission to publish this material and for their assistance to this end. Professors Brian McGuinness, David McKitterick, Joachim Schulte, Imre Leader, Alois Pichler and Sophie Singer (nee Margaret Goodstein) have been especially helpful in this research. 3. See The Historical Register of the University of Cambridge Supplements, 1942, p. 83: Tripos List for Mathematical Tripos, Part I, 1931. Note that one of the Examiners was A. S. Besicovitch – Fellow of Trinity, advisor to Sraffa – Wittgenstein sparring partner; cf. p. 90. Part II, 1933. One of the Moderators was G. H. Hardy of Trinity, and one of the Examiners was N. F. Mott. 4. Brian McGuinness used this depiction of Goodstein in discussion with me. 5. These three expressions are quoted from his obituary by H. E. Rose, and to the last he adds ‘for instance, he was not keen on student participation in university committees’ (1988, p. 160). 6. Dr Mike Price and Margaret Walmsley. 7. The Trinity Library’s archivist, Jonathan Smith, has been instrumental to, and his expertise is of great importance in, this process. 8. Brian McGuinness kindly supplied me with a copy of this prior to publication (now in WC, 295). 9. At junctures where there is comparison and contrast with Ambrose’s Wittgenstein’s Lectures, they turn out to involve vast differences in matters of quantity and quality, as well as allowance for the different years in which material was composed, as one might expect from the residential and personal proximity of Skinner to Wittgenstein. See AWL. 10. Notice that these two volumes relate to the Brown Book manuscript in the same archive. That is to say, volumes I–IV and the first half of V constitute the first known handwritten manuscript of the Brown Book, which was published from a typescript, which differs in some respects from the contents of the present archive. 11. I thank Volker Munz and Gabriel Citron for pointing out some of these references. 12. Ambrose, 1972, p. 16 and n. 3. The reports of a privately held or sold 164–page carbon copy by Ambrose of the Yellow Book are accompanied by an
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13. 14.
15.
16. 17. 18.
19.
20. 21. 22.
23.
The Wittgenstein Archive of Francis Skinner archivist’s description that notes where this carbon copy corresponds to the Yellow Book she changed the copy’s use of ‘Wittgenstein’ to his first-person pronoun that gives it an air of a dictated script, which does not concur either with accuracy or with the previous bibliographical reference in this footnote. Even so, ‘fair copy’ does not appear to have a precise single definition in archival research. In Box II, item 12. The title and attribution are: ‘Some notes on “Personal Experience” taken from the “Yellow Book” (companion to the Blue Book) of undictated notes taken from Wittgenstein’s lectures 1933–34 by A. Ambrose and M. Masterman’. Compare the Pink Book with, for example, Nachlass MS C148, pp. 36, 38–40 – note especially the employment forms of the term and notions of calculation; cp. C148, p. 44. Page numbers refer to the archive’s manuscripts (not as folio recto/verso). I.e. Rhees’s footnote in the Blue Book stated that Wittgenstein did not fulfil his promise to come back to the point, which he did. Perhaps this was obtained from the postmaster’s shop in Skjolden, where he had previously stayed, and during the time he met Francis Skinner in Bergen and they spent seven days together (see MS 118, 18.9.37, and 119, 6 and 7.11.37). So the earlier dating in the chart is provisional as a starting point, though it may be later. It has harbour marine pictures, with three buildings, printed over the outer cover. The printer’s designation on the lower outer back cover is: ‘Norsk Papir. Norsk Omslag. Norsk Trykk. Mønsterbeskyttet’. Dimensions of the bag are: length 277mm; width 220mm. Cp. Steiner, 2009. On MS page 44 Wittgenstein states that we try to put each cup on a saucer, and if there are cups left over then the sets are not of the same size. But this is not correct. It is correct if the sets are finite, of course, and maybe this is what Wittgenstein was thinking of without saying so – or, more likely, he takes it as obvious that a set of actual real-world cups is always finite (and he is right in that). If the sets are infinite, here is an example of what can go wrong. Let A be the set of all positive integers and B the set of all squares: so A is 1,2,3, . . . and B is 1,4,9,16, . . . and so on. These two sets do have the same size, because here is a bijection: for each n, pair up n in A with nˆ2 in B (so we pair 3 with 9, etc.). However, suppose instead we said: take each point m of B (of course, m is a square number), and pair it up with m in A. So we pair 9 in B with 9 in A, and so on. This pairing does use up all points of B, but there are some points of A left over (i.e. left unpaired). It seems evident, however, that with the degree of technical insight Wittgenstein is showing here and elsewhere that he was aware of this problem. An extension of this concerns Ambrose’s decision not to continue her attendance of Littlewood’s lectures on functions (cf. Ambrose, 1972, p. 15; cp. Littlewood’s Lectures on the Theory of Functions (1944); note that part of these were given as early as 1931 – see its Preface), which relates to Wittgenstein pressing her to – and her resistance to his view that she should – ‘learn’ more, and how this affected her capacity to act as an amanuensis in such arenas, in contrast with Skinner’s competence, where one can compare relevant examples, which has consequences for assessing the role of amanuensis where
Arthur Gibson 77 there is a disinterested advanced research requirement to perform that role. (Cf. WC, 181; cp. 188. Separately, consider Part II of Ambrose’s Cambridge PhD thesis.) 24. If in handling and interpreting them we adopt a methodology that is not his, this will generate an outcome that is not a component of the internal identity of his manuscripts (cp. Williams, 2008, p. 62). 25. Contra R. L. Goodstein, in the year of Wittgenstein’s death, in the Preface of his Constructive Formalism (1951, p. 10): ‘My last word is for my dear friend Francis Skinner, who died at Cambridge in 1941, and left no other record of his work and of his great good gifts of heart and mind than lies in the recollections of those who had the good fortune to know him’; a paradox to be explored in the forthcoming edition of the archive. 26. I would like to acknowledge the insights I have gained from engaging in dialogue with Jonathan Smith, due to his approach to the subject, and benefited from his significant archival expertise, scholarly insights, as well from his reading of this chapter.
5 The Whewell’s Court Lectures: A Sketch of a Project Volker A. Munz
Introductory remarks The following text is not really a philosophical contribution but rather a short outline of a research project that has been concerned with the edition of hitherto unpublished notes of lectures given by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The notes were taken down by Yorick Smythies, a student and very close friend of Wittgenstein, and cover the period between 1938 and 1947. Most of them were written between the second part of the academic year 1937–38 and 1939–40. Some notes refer to sessions held in 1936–37. No other notes from that period are known to exist except the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (LC), A Lecture on Freedom of the Will (PO, 427–44), and Wittgenstein’s Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (LFM). All these publications contain Smythies’ notes. The material exists in various stages: First, the original notes Smythies took during the lectures. These are written in the very difficult and barely legible shorthand that Smythies used in order to record as faithfully as possible what Wittgenstein said during the lectures. From these notes, Smythies compiled various handwritten fair copies. Finally, a secretary prepared a collection of typescripts from 21 tapes Smythies dictated, mostly on the basis of his rewritten notes. The final aim of my research is to create a publishable version that contains all remarks included in the first versions. In addition, I plan to produce a series of audio recordings based on Smythies’ dictations. The collection will be accompanied by a facsimile of the handwritten manuscripts on Digital Video Disc. As a matter of course, the correct philological move would be to totally ignore Smythies’ prepared rewritten manuscripts and typescripts and to 78
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try to solely reconstruct the first drafts he took during the lectures. However, serious considerations regarding the huge amount of material to be edited with respect to the time available and the fact that without a parallel reading of the original notes and the rewritten manuscripts the first drafts are almost indecipherable led to the decision to produce first a single typescript and subsequently correct it on the basis of the originals. Furthermore, a sole transcription of the first drafts without supportive parallel reading of the more legible material would overshadow the fact that we are not dealing with a primary Wittgenstein text. This philological flaw will be met by the production of an electronic facsimile version so that any researcher can compare the printed edition with the first drafts.
The manuscripts Research on the manuscripts has brought to light various obstacles, which are basically caused by the fact that Smythies was obviously trying to reproduce as closely and as completely as possible what Wittgenstein did actually say in his lectures. To this end, Smythies applied a peculiar shorthand variant which makes almost all of the first drafts indecipherable. Only sometimes do we find a key in the page margin. Furthermore, as Smythies points out in his introduction to the notes: These notes were taken down at my maximum speed of writing, making the words Wittgenstein was uttering and the notes being taken down, nearly simultaneous with one another. It results from this that the notes contain numerous grammatical errors, German constructions, uncompleted beginnings of sentences, etc. Additionally, many notebooks contain different notes from different lectures, some lecture series are spread over several books, and in various cases Smythies only wrote on one side of a page and then started to use the verso sides when a notebook was finished. Nevertheless, since those first versions are the notes that come closest to Wittgenstein’s lecturing, it is essential to take them as the basis for a final edition. A comparison with hitherto published lecture notes either from Smythies or Rhees has shown that all those publications are based on typescripts that were provided by Smythies and Rhees (cf., e.g., LFM, LC, Rhees’ notes in Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness, Appendix A, B, and C (PO, 406–26), or The Language of Sense Data and Private Experience
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(PO, 289–367)). A comparison of the typescripts with the handwritten notes does, however, show that both Smythies and Rhees had already applied some editorial steps, basically because the first versions contain gaps, unclear sentences, illegible parts, and so on. In his textual remarks, Smythies writes: In some cases, long gaps of no-note-taking occurred during a lecture. Except occasionally, such gaps have not been indicated; partly because I do not remember, now, where and when these gaps occurred. For instance, in those instances in which I, myself, was engaged in dialogue with Wittgenstein during a lecture, there was not either time or energy to make any records. Also, there were cases in which I left a particular Wittgenstein lecture before it had become completed. These omissions (which would occur at the ends of a single lecture), have not, in any instances, been indicated in the present transcriptions. In his introduction to the notes, Smythies points out that Wittgenstein mentioned to him on various occasions that he wanted Smythies to publish these notes, which is rather remarkable if we consider the fact that Wittgenstein disliked any of his students taking down notes during his lectures. This fact makes it quite probable that Smythies constructed the clean versions of his first drafts sometime during the late 1930s and 1940s. It is, however, also obvious that the typescripts which Smythies provided for a future publication were produced some 40 years later, the latest shortly before his death in 1980. Since these typescripts contain numerous spelling mistakes, incomplete sentences, obviously wrong names of Wittgenstein’s students, and so on, it becomes clear that Smythies did not produce the typescripts himself. This fact also explains the existence of tape recordings. A close study of the rewritten copies of the first drafts and their comparison with the recordings shows that Smythies took the clean copy of the notes as the basis for his dictation on audio cassette tapes. These tapes he handed over to a secretary to prepare a typescript of the various series of notes. The secretary was, however, not familiar with any of the subjects or persons mentioned in the text. For example, she always typed ‘Wiggenstein’ or ‘Louis’ instead of ‘Lewy’. Without the underlying shorthand and rewritten notes these typescripts are, however, more difficult to handle since they contain numerous unclear passages, gaps, syntactical errors, and so on, where it is not clear at first sight whether they result from the typist or from the lectures themselves. This also explains the various corrected versions
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by Peg Smythies, Rush Rhees, and D. Z. Phillips. Peg Smythies’ corrections are almost all based on the handwritten clean versions. Phillips and Rhees tried to produce a readable text. During my work on the notes, it has also turned out that Smythies did not prepare typescripts of all the notes that are available in manuscript form. In his introduction he writes: These lecture-notes do not contain all the notes I made between 1938–1949. I have, for instance, omitted all notes relating to Logic and Mathematics, and notes from isolated lectures of kinds that cannot become consistently fitted into any of those series here published. In some cases, he also rearranged the order and affiliation of particular lectures, but it is not clear at first why or according to what criteria he did so. He turned, for instance, the final lecture of Lectures on Similarity from the typescript version into one lecture on Understanding (of which no manuscript equivalent exists). He also separated lectures A–J into two parts, one containing four lectures, the other six, interrupted by a single lecture on necessary propositions, although lectures A–J are all contained in two successive notebooks whereas the notes on Necessary Propositions are in a notebook with four lectures on Gödel and two on the Existence of Trinity College. In the textual remarks in his introduction Smythies writes: The differing, consecutive series, which these notes contain, are not arranged in any chronological order of series. Others, who attended these lectures, may be able to specify the year, term, etc., at which such and such a series of lectures was delivered. But:- (a) I do not trust my own memory sufficiently to do this myself, (b) I think that an arrangement of the lectures in a logical, rather than a chronological order, helps to make evident the continuities and divisions characteristic of Wittgenstein’s thinking. A chronological allocation will therefore only be possible on the basis of the first drafts. The fact mentioned above that Smythies sometimes used the verso pages of a notebook for a different series of lectures also helps to identify the approximate dates when Wittgenstein gave them. Some of the handwritten notes are, however, missing in Smythies’ Nachlass such as the first drafts of the first four lectures on Similarity, or the rewritten first one-and-a-half lectures on Description. Furthermore,
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there is no first draft of the Reply to a paper by Yorick Smythies on ‘Understanding’ and Smythies’ paper is also missing. We can, however, assume that Wittgenstein’s reply may have resulted from one of the numerous discussions he had with Smythies during the late 1930s and 1940s. Some of the rewritten manuscripts Smythies prepared contain more text than the first drafts he took during the lectures. Presumably, he had other versions of lecture notes. At least this is the case with six lectures contained in his Nachlass. In the introduction Smythies writes: Notes from lectures (belonging to the present series) which I did not, myself, attend, were, in many cases, taken down by other people at these classes. Because nearly all these notes appear to contain paraphrasing, I have not, except in a few instances, indicated either the presence or the absence of such notes. Also, in cases in which I and one or more other attenders at these lectures, possess notes taken at the same time from the same lecture, I have avoided constructing composities [sic], potential emendations, etc. For instance, Taylor and Rush Rhees possessed notes taken from Lecture (1) on ‘Knowledge’, and notes on the final section of the lecture entitled ‘Necessary propositions’, but I have not put into the text any indication of these potentially available additions to the notes taken by myself. The inventory of the handwritten material has led to the following table of contents: i) Introduction and textual notes. Five pages, written by Yorick Smythies. ii) Lectures on Similarity. 13 lectures. (a) Notes taken during the lectures (first draft): The first draft of lectures 1–4 is missing, lectures 5–9 cover 49 pages, and lectures 10–13 cover 62 pages. (b) Rewritten version of Lectures 1–8, containing 47 pages. In sum: 158 pages. iii) Belief. Lectures A–J. (a) Lectures A–D, four lectures. Smythies later titled these lectures States of Mind (Belief; Feelings; etc.). (b) Lectures E–J, second series, six lectures. Smythies later named these lectures Lectures on Categories and Objects.
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All notes were taken during the lectures and consist of two notebooks. The second notebook starts with Lecture J and furthermore comprises a fragment from the first lecture on Religious Belief, and, starting from the other end of the notebook, the beginning of the same lecture. This lecture was published in LC. We can therefore assume that the lectures on States of Mind and Categories and Objects were given in 1938. In sum: 154 pages. iv) Lectures on Description. Ten lectures. (a) Two notebooks, containing notes that were taken during the lectures. The first notebook comprises lectures 1–5 on 87 pages. The second notebook comprises lectures 6–10 on 140 pages. (b) Three notebooks, containing a rewritten version of the Lectures on Description. The first notebook starts from lecture 2 until the middle of lecture 5, comprising 69 pages. The second covers the rest of lecture 5 until the beginning of lecture 7 on 51 pages, and the third contains lecture 7 and lecture 8 on 51 pages. Part 2 of lecture 4 has been published in LC (pp. 37–40). Therefore the Lectures on Description were probably also given in 1938. In sum: 398 pages. v) Lecture on Necessary Propositions and other issues. (a) This notebook consists of 55 pages and contains the Single Lecture on Necessary Propositions (22 pages) and a lecture on Puzzle of Trinity College (seven pages). Both lectures are rewritten based on the original notes. The notebook also contains four pages entitled Are There an Infinite Number of Shades of Colour? in a rewritten version. (b) The rest of the notebook consists of a series of papers Smythies entitled Taylor from Wittgenstein. These papers only exist in manuscript form. They comprise the following subjects: ‘All there’. Logical Necessity (seven pages); Achilles and the Tortoise (three pages); Absolutely Determinate (three pages); Continuous Band of Colours (two pages); Infinitesimal Calculus and Freewill (four pages). In sum: 52 pages. vi) Lectures on Gödel. Four lectures.
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This notebook contains a first draft of four lectures on Gödel comprising 19 pages and dated ‘Michaelmas Term, 1937’. Since it is quite certain that Wittgenstein did not teach in 1937, we can assume that these lectures were held in early 1938 probably at the end of January. Wittgenstein’s pocket diary mentions three or four ‘discussions’ in January and February 1938 (cf. PPO, p. 348). It is therefore quite likely that this entry refers to the discussions on Gödel. The rest of the notebook contains first notes on Puzzle of Trinity College (later renamed Existence of Trinity College) on 16 pages and the Single Lecture on Necessary Propositions on 30 pages (cf. v). The versos of that notebook contain lectures 2, 7, and 10 of the Lectures on Knowledge (see viii), also first versions, consisting of 37 pages. Since this series started in Easter Term 1938, the lectures on Existence of Trinity College and on Necessary Propositions were quite likely also given during that period. The rest of the notebook consists of four pages headed G. E. Moore. In sum: 65 pages. vii) Reply to a paper written by Yorick Smythies on ‘Understanding’. The notebook consists of 51 pages and solely comprises Wittgenstein’s remarks written down by Smythies. The paper itself is missing. Although Smythies included it in the series of lectures, I assume that Wittgenstein did not teach on this particular subject. And since Smythies writes in his introduction that the series consists of notes taken from lectures and private conversations with Wittgenstein, it is quite likely that he took these notes during a discussion with Wittgenstein. In sum: 51 pages. viii) Lectures on Knowledge. Ten lectures. (a) Two notebooks contain the first drafts of the series on Knowledge which were given in May and June 1938. We find lectures 2, 7, and 10 in the same notebook that contains the lectures on Gödel, Trinity College and necessary propositions (see vi). Lectures 3–6, 8, and 9 are in a separate notebook (viii) consisting of 53 pages. Smythies obviously missed the first lecture of this series. This notebook also includes four pages belonging to a series called Shades of Colours, and some remarks from the lectures on Description (see iv). At the top of the cover of this notebook Rhees commented: ‘This is of lectures in Lent and
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Summer Terms, 1938’. The mixing of various series, which we find in several notebooks that are written on both sides (recto and verso), helps to date the academic year during which they were held. (b) One notebook comprises all ten lectures in a rewritten version. Lecture 1 is referred to as ‘Taylor’s notes’. It contains a total of 78 pages. In sum: 168 pages. ix) Lectures on Volition. Six lectures. (a) One notebook comprises 39 pages which Smythies headed Emotions. In the later typescript version he named them Lectures on Volition. The series consists of six lectures. The typescript Notes from Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Volition is not included in the manuscript version on Volition. (b) Notes to W. numbered 1–4. This notebook contains 20 pages of remarks Smythies took from Wittgenstein. The last part of the notes includes various page references starting with 91A until 195c and then again 13d–89d. Smythies compiled some of these notes into a typescript which he named Miscellaneous Remarks related to Volition from other Lectures given by Wittgenstein. The final typescript version of these remarks is far shorter than this handwritten collection. Since Moore, Lewy, and Hijab are mentioned, we can assume that the period these remarks cover lasts from 1938–40 until 1945–47. In sum: 59 pages. x) Colours. (a) One notebook containing 25 pages, headed Colours. No typescript version of these notes is available. They probably belong to a series of lectures on Colours. Since there are parallels to the Lectures on Similarity, we can assume that they were probably given at about the same time (1938). (b) A second notebook consisting of 38 pages contains another ten pages on colours. Here, too, no typed version is available. In sum: 35 pages. xi) Wittgenstein.
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This notebook is headed ‘Wittgenstein’ and contains 69 leaves. This set is a rewritten version of notes not yet identified. Thirteen pages of the notebook are entitled Notes taken in the course of Wittgenstein’s lectures (not too accurately) by D. A. T. Gasking. We can also find similar remarks in the Lectures on Similarity. It is therefore highly probable that they were held in Lent and (or) Easter Terms 1938. In sum: 69 pages. xii) Wittgenstein. Blue Book. This notebook comprises 24 pages containing remarks by Smythies on Wittgenstein’s Blue Book. The whole manuscript corpus provides a total sum of 1238 pages. It does not include the following notebooks: (1) Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (six notebooks); (2) Aesthetics (two notebooks); (3) Other philosophical notes (Wisdom lectures); (4) Notes from G. E. Moore lectures; (5) Notes on Russell’s ‘Knowledge by Acquaintance’ and ‘Knowledge by Description’; (6) Remarks on C. D. Broad; (7) Translation of PI; (8) Notes on Experience, Colour, and Language; (9) Miscellaneous papers. A comparative study of the originals with the rewritten manuscripts has made it quite obvious that Smythies made decisions not to include all the parts contained in the original first drafts. There seem to have been various reasons for these decisions. In some cases it is difficult to see the context of particular remarks contained in the first drafts. Sometimes paragraphs come to an abrupt end because Smythies was probably engaged in discussion, or for example he had to leave earlier, as already mentioned. In some cases the revised versions are shorter and basically rectified formulations of the original texts.
The typescripts The typescript corpus contains various alternative versions including notes by Smythies, Rhees, and Wisdom. The typescripts are full of handwritten corrections, comments, diagrams, and so on made by different people such as Smythies himself, Peg Smythies, Rhees, or D. Z. Phillips. An inventory of the typescripts resulted in the following list: 1) Lectures on Similarity. Thirteen Lectures, 82 pages, four different versions. 2) Lectures on States of Mind (Belief; Feelings; etc.). Four Lectures, 65 pages, three different versions.
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3) Lectures on Categories and Objects. Six lectures, 92 pages, three different versions. 4) Lectures on Description. Ten lectures, 130 pages, three different versions. 5) Lecture on Necessary Propositions. Single lecture, 23 pages, three different versions. 6) Lectures on Knowledge. (a) Ten Lectures, 93 pages, one version. (b) Five lectures (4, 5, 7, 8, and 10), 22 pages. The notes were taken down by Rush Rhees. Lectures 5, 7, and 9 are published in Philosophia, Vol 6, Sep.–Dec. 1976 (pp. 430–4, 438–40, 442–5), and reprinted in PO. The typescripts of the five lectures show slight variations to the published versions. The typescript for lecture 9 is missing. Smythies’ notes are obviously more complete. 7) Lectures on Understanding. (a) Existence of Trinity College. Two lectures, 15 pages, three different versions. (b) Reply to a paper by Yorick Smythies on ‘Understanding’. 22 pages, one version. (c) Understanding. Seven pages, three different versions. 8) Lectures on Volition. Six lectures, 34 pages, one version. 9) Notes from Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Volition. Two lectures, 17 pages, three different versions. 10) Lectures on Free Will (published). 19 pages, two lectures (9 and 10), four different versions. 11) Miscellaneous Remarks relating to Volition by Wittgenstein in various other Lectures which he gave. Six pages, one version. 12) Lectures on Gödel. Four lectures, eight pages, two different versions. 13) The King of the Dark Chamber, by Rabindradath Tagor [sic], translated from the English of Rabindradath Tagor into the English used by L. Wittgenstein and Yorick Smythies. Seven pages, one version. 14) Comments prompted by the Notes taken from Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Volition and Freewill. 23 pages, three different versions. The typescript is based purely on Smythies’ own thoughts. 15) Wittgenstein, April 15, 1945. Volition (No lecture notes, some remarks by R. Rhees), three pages, one version. 16) Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics. Notes taken down by Rush Rhees, 135 pages, one version.
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17) Lectures on Private Experience and Sense Data (starting in the middle of lecture 3). The notes were taken down by John Wisdom, 135 pages, one version. 18) Lectures on the Philosophy of Psychology. Incomplete (pp. 9–39, 225–8), one version. 19) Introduction and textual notes by Smythies. Five pages, ten different versions. As already mentioned Smythies did not provide typescripts of all the manuscripts and he regrouped some of the manuscript series.
Final remarks The great value of Smythies’ notes is due to the fact that we find subjects Wittgenstein discusses during the lectures in a more systematic and focused way than in his own written work. Although it is impossible to go into details, I would just like to mention a few points to highlight the importance of the notes. For instance, in the ten lectures on Knowledge, Wittgenstein discusses various subjects related to Russell, particularly to his Limits of Empiricism and Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy. Russell’s remark that the ultimate furniture of the world consists of images and sensations (cf. Russell, 1993, p. 182) leads Wittgenstein to question about the relation between knowledge and causality. Furthermore he discusses ‘knowing sense data’ versus ‘knowing physical facts’, the relation between the concepts ‘to know’, ‘to believe’, ‘to have something in my mind’ and expressions such as ‘I only thought I believe’ as opposed to ‘I only thought I knew’. Most of the notes are closely connected to the already published remarks in Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness. Another set of lectures deals with questions related to volition where we find a stringent argument related to Wittgenstein’s understanding of voluntary and involuntary actions, the role and function of ‘bodily sensations’ and ‘feelings of the mind’ as well as the role of ‘wishing’ and ‘longing to do’ in such contexts. We find remarks connected to these lectures in, for example, Eine philosophische Betrachtung, Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, and Philosophical Investigations, but these published remarks occur in a more inconsistent way. Wittgenstein’s discussion of necessary propositions helps us to understand the role such propositions play in the context of our everyday usage of them in scientific investigations and with respect to Wittgenstein’s understanding of a grammatical rule and empirical
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propositions. This point also plays a crucial role in the Lectures on Knowledge, where Wittgenstein discusses at length his idea of an ‘internal relation’, expressions such as ‘it is in the nature of’ or ‘we ask for the essence of’, and the role of paradigms as opposed to empirical propositions. All these topics are crucial for understanding central topics in the Philosophical Investigations. The series on Similarity and Description help us to get a clearer picture of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the possibility of a private language and his understanding of the role of mental processes as possible candidates for justifying our particular use of psychic expressions. They also do away with the persistent assumption to read him in a behaviouristic way. Wittgenstein himself often mentions the danger of sounding like a behaviourist but clearly points out where this interpretation may be rooted and where he fundamentally differs from such an approach (cf., e.g., Munz, 2005, ch. V and VI). The list of subjects that dominated Wittgenstein’s later writings and run through all the various sets of lectures could be extended continuously. What is, generally speaking, most important is the fact that the unpublished corpus offers us a different kind of approach towards the questions Wittgenstein discusses since the series of lectures contain a kind of continuity which is not found in his published writings in any similar way. Furthermore, lecturing is different to writing, especially in the case of Wittgenstein, who made constant changes in his manuscripts and typescripts in order to create something like a ‘final version’. This also explains why he did not allow any student to take notes during his lectures – in the case of Smythies, he fortunately made an exception – for he obviously lectured without any written notes and often elaborated many ideas right in the middle of the lessons. Norman Malcolm remembers that Wittgenstein always regarded his lectures ‘as a form of publication’ (Malcolm, 1984, p. 48). Casimir Lewy points out that Wittgenstein once mentioned to him that ‘ “to publish” means “to make public” and that therefore lecturing is a form of publication’ (Lewy, 1976, p. 11), and Wasfi Hijab, who joined Wittgenstein’s lectures between 1945 and 1947, recalls that for Wittgenstein teaching was the only way he could convey his thoughts in an adequate way (cf. PPO, p. 331). This does of course also affect the editorial process and this becomes particularly clear in Smythies’ introduction to the lectures when he, for example, remarks: Editorial corrections would have resulted in blotting the impression that, in these lectures, Wittgenstein was not engaged in developing
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trains of thought (previously worked out, less completely, by himself), but was engaged in thinking out, spontaneously and impromptu, the utterances he was producing. Another important point that illustrates the value of the material is the fact that Wittgenstein uses numerous examples during his lectures that we also find in many of his published works. They are mostly identical, or at least similar, and often located in different contexts. The distribution of examples, especially, shows the connections and interrelations between various subjects Wittgenstein discusses which are in no way obvious at first sight. A comparison of the contexts will help the reader to see the different questions Wittgenstein addresses to the same kind of problem. Therefore, a study of the notes is an ideal complement to Wittgenstein’s work already published at that time. Or, as Smythies puts it: Re-reading them [the notes], now, after thirty years, I find them more natural, fluent, simple, continuous, expressive, than the remarks, contained in Wittgenstein’s so far published writings. I think that there are other people, especially amongst those unlinked with professional philosophy, who will, like myself, obtain more pleasure from these notes, than from those more compressed, more deeply worked upon, more tacit remarks, written and selected by Wittgenstein himself, for possible publication. While he was lecturing, he was not able to delete what had been said, or to give to trains of thought more tightness than they were showing themselves to have. Also, tones which give personal expressiveness to his lectures became omitted from his writings. The expletives, interjectory phrases, slangy asides, etc., which were essentially constituent in what he was saying to his classes, would have shown affectation if they had been addressed to the general, reading, public.
6 Robinson Crusoe Sails Again: The Interpretative Relevance of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass P. M. S. Hacker
Communitarians and individualists Immediately after the publication of the Investigations there was a lively debate between Rush Rhees and Freddie Ayer over the intelligibility of someone, abandoned in infancy on a desert island, inventing a language for his own use and following the rules of this private language. Ayer thought this to be intelligible, Rhees denied it to be so.1 Such a person, Ayer remonstrated, could surely invent words for the flora and fauna around him, so why should he not also invent words for his own subjective sensations and experiences? Rhees insisted that a person solitary from infancy could not follow a rule and could not invent or use a language – no matter whether it is a language containing names of flora and fauna, or a language containing sensation-words. Over the next decade, it became clear that what Wittgenstein had meant by a ‘private language’ was not simply a language containing sensation-words that one might use to refer to one’s sensations, but rather a language containing sensation-words the meaning of which was severed from behavioural expressions of sensations. The issue of Robinson Crusoes of various shades of solitude dropped out of sight. Twenty years later, however, the debate was revived in the aftermath of Kripke’s 1976 lecture on following rules. Kripke claimed, among other things, that Wittgenstein, or at least Wittgenstein ‘as he struck Kripke’, had argued that a language is essentially a social institution, that ‘if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content’.2 Norman Malcolm, who disagreed with Kripke’s sceptical interpretation 91
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of Wittgenstein’s remarks on following rules, nevertheless agreed that ‘for Wittgenstein the concept of a rule presupposes a community within which a common agreement in actions fixes the meaning of a rule’ and that ‘the idea of a rule is embedded in an environment of teaching, testing, correcting – within a community where there is agreement in acting in a way that is called following the rule’.3 Quite independently of Kripke and his involvement with new forms of scepticism, Eike von Savigny, in his impressive and helpful German commentary on the Investigations also argued for a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenstein’s arguments.4 Christopher Peacocke likewise argued that Wittgenstein’s claim is that ‘what it is for a person to be following a rule, even individually, cannot ultimately be explained without reference to some community’.5 A decade later, in 1991, Anthony O’Hear wrote that it is ‘hard to deny that Wittgenstein is claiming that rule-following for an individual always requires a background of a rule-following community to which that individual belongs’.6 More recently, in 2006, Martin Kusch has defended Kripke’s interpretation and argued at length that ‘whatever a born Crusoe does, he is too different from us for us to be able to regard him as a rule-follower. [. . .] If Crusoe is not part of our community, then all hypotheses concerning his behaviour – that his behaviour constitutes a correction of earlier actions, an introduction or modification of a (new) rule – are fatally underdetermined.’7 Gordon Baker and I joined in this debate in the mid-1980s. In a little book Scepticism, Rules and Language (1984), we confronted Kripke’s interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on following rules in general, and on solitary Crusoes in particular. Independently of Kripke’s problems, we examined Wittgenstein’s views on the matter again in the second volume of our Commentary Wittgenstein: Rules, Grammar, and Necessity (1985), and in response to Norman Malcolm’s criticisms,8 we defended our views in a paper entitled ‘Malcolm on Language and Rules’ (1990). In these writings, we had full access to the Wittgenstein Nachlass, but, of course, not to the Bergen transcription. Recently, in the course of writing a much revised edition of Volume 2 of the Commentary, I have had occasion to reconsider our old arguments and interpretations. For this purpose, I have been able to make full use of the Bergen edition and its search-engine. This has enabled me to assemble all the materials in the Nachlass that bear on this question, and to reconsider the issue. It has not changed my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s views. I continue to believe that he thought the question of Crusoe and solitary rule-followers or language-users trivial and unimportant. But the
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communitarians hold the question to be of the greatest significance. That itself is a matter of interest. The following paper makes full use of the Nachlass to shed light on Wittgenstein’s conception of following rules, on private languages of Crusoes, cavemen and monologuists, and on whether Wittgenstein thought that a language is necessarily a social artefact. This will raise some delicate questions about the interpretative use of the Nachlass. How is one to decide on the relevance of passages from the Nachlass that were not incorporated in the Investigations? In some cases, we may wonder, did Wittgenstein not perhaps change his mind? But there surely must be some evidence for a change of mind. If doubts arose, presumably such doubts must have grounds? What then are they? Is it not incumbent upon interpreters to reconcile their interpretations of the Investigations with relevant discussions from the Nachlass? And what are the criteria of relevance? I hope we may discuss some of these methodological questions.
Wittgenstein’s usage: Praxis, Gepflogenheiten, Institutionen Communitarians rightly draw attention to Wittgenstein’s remark at Investigations §199: ‘To follow a rule, to make a report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (usages, institutions).’ von Savigny and Kusch argue that Gepflogenheiten, Gebräuche, Institutionen are, in current German usage, applied primarily to shared social practices. The grouporiented use of Gepflogenheiten, Kusch informs us, is to be found in 99 per cent of the occurrences of the word on the internet. Gebräuche, he avers, are always customs of a group, and Institutionen (like ‘institutions’ in English) involve many people.9 Similarly, he suggests, Wittgenstein’s use of Praxis and Praxis der Sprache always involves reference to a social practice. In particular, the remark in Investigations §202 ‘Hence “following a rule” is a practice’ is an explicit commitment to the idea that following a rule, speaking a language, is essentially a social practice. In order to set aside some of the linguistic qualms, I shall examine Wittgenstein’s use of the key terms Praxis, Gepflogenheiten and Institutionen.10 For, as far as I can discern, Wittgenstein had no qualms about using the former two expressions to refer to an individual’s practice and customs, and his use of the term ‘Institutionen’ did not commit him to the view that an ‘institution’ is uniformly a matter of a social organization or practice involving a multiplicity of people. What did Wittgenstein mean by ‘a practice (Praxis)’ and what precisely was he asserting when he wrote that following a rule is a practice? The
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noun ‘practice’, in English (cf. OED), has a variety of related meanings. Among those relevant to our concerns are the following: (i) The actual application or use of an idea, belief or method, as opposed to the theory or principles of it. (ii) The habitual doing or carrying on of something; usual, customary or constant action, performance or conduct. (iii) A habitual action or pattern of behaviour, an established procedure or system. Associated with these are the familiar phrases: ‘in practice’, i.e. in reality, in practical terms, actually, as a matter of fact; ‘to put into practice’, i.e. to put into effect, execute, carry out in action; ‘to make it one’s practice’, i.e. to determine to do something habitually or as a rule; ‘to make a practice of . . .’, i.e. to do, or carry out something habitually or customarily; ‘practice makes perfect’, i.e. regular exercise of a skill or activity. The German equivalent ‘Praxis’ is similar. Wittgenstein’s use of the German word (102 occurrences in his Nachlass, 73 in the MSS), as well as his use of the English noun ‘practice’ (in his English dictations) is in no way out of the ordinary. He writes of ‘the practice of a language’, ‘the practice of communication’, ‘the practice of a game’ and of ‘the practice of the use of a word’. Sometimes ‘Praxis’ is more or less equated with ‘Anwendung’ (‘application’ (MS 121, p. 42r)), sometimes with ‘Anwendungsart’ (‘way of applying’ (MS 120, p. 78r)) and sometimes with ‘Ausübung’ (exercise, performance, execution (MS 152, p. 59)). He uses the phrase ‘in practice’ in its perfectly ordinary sense, as when he says that ‘propositions of logic have no application as information in practice’ (RFM, p. 123), of a sign’s being ‘unusable in practice’ (RFM, p. 204), or as when he queries how a doubt would ‘come out in practice’ (OC, §120). It is obvious, and to be expected, that the practices Wittgenstein discusses are social practices, shared by human beings in the stream of human life. He speaks of languages, of games, of communication, of arithmetic, of narrating past events and of using words as practices. These are patently social practices in human communities. The moot question,
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however, is whether he used the word ‘Praxis’ to mean social practice, i.e. whether his use of the word makes the phrase ‘social practice’ pleonastic. Numerous passages in his writings suggest that he didn’t and that it doesn’t. When he observes that the meaning of a sign is not to be found in a mental accompaniment, but rather in the complicated but familiar practice of its use (MS 121, p. 78r), he is emphasizing the regular employment of the sign. When he claims that interpretations and explanations are, in the end, in the service of practice (‘Die Deutungen und Erklärungen dienen am Schluss nur der Praxis’ (MS 165, p. 33)), he patently means ‘regular performance’, not ‘social practice’. His observation that the words ‘to follow a rule’ relate to a practice that cannot be replaced by the appearance of a practice (‘auf eine Praxis die nicht durch den Schein einer Praxis ersetzt werden kann’ (MS 180a, p. 36v)) does not mean that to follow a rule is a social practice that cannot be replaced by the appearance of a social practice. For he is speaking there of a transition made in the mind from seeing something red to saying that it is red – and a transition in the mind does not even appear to be a social practice. He claims that a rule that can be applied in practice is always in order (PG, p. 282), that the use of a word in practice is its meaning (BBB, p. 69), that a word can have a meaning only in the practice of a language (RFM, p. 344) – and in all these cases, he is emphasizing that words are deeds (PI, §546, PG, p. 182, CV, p. 53). In his observation that ‘In order to describe the phenomenon of language, one must describe a practice, not something that happens once, no matter of what kind’ (RFM, p. 335), the emphasis is on recurrent behaviour, not on shared behaviour. He had no qualms about speaking of a single person’s practice (as we all speak of making something one’s practice, and of a person making a practice of doing something): What is so repulsive in the idea that we study the use of a word, point to mistakes in the description of this use, and so on? First and foremost, one asks oneself: How could that be so important to us? It depends on whether what one calls ‘a wrong description’ is a description that does not accord with established usage [sanktionierten Sprachgebrauch] – or one which does not accord with the practice of the person giving the description [der Praxis des Beschreibenden]. Only in the second case does a philosophical conflict arise. (RPP I, §548, second emphasis added) It is clear that being a practice is not tantamount to being a social practice.
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With respect to his use of Gepflogenheiten Wittgenstein has no qualms about speaking of emergent regularities in a child’s pain-behaviour as ‘the beginnings of a custom’, which must be patent before one can speak of the child’s pain-behaviour as pretence (MS 137, p. 59a). In an early draft of PI §199 (MS 180a, p. 1av) an alternative to ‘Gepflogenheiten’ is ‘Übungen’ – regularities, practices. And in MS 180a, p. 1bv the obtaining of ‘a custom’ is immediately glossed as ‘a technique’. MS 164, p. 57 remarks that ‘the application of the concept of following a rule presupposes a custom (‘Gepflogenheit’), and that is why it is nonsense to say: once in the history of mankind // the world // someone followed a rule or a signpost, played a game, carried out a calculation, uttered or understood a sentence.’ Here too the emphasis is upon the normative regularity, not upon its social character. As we have seen, it has been suggested that Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘Institution’ in Investigations §199 plainly commits him to the view that following a rule is essentially a group activity, since an ‘institution’ is always ‘of a group’. Institutions, Kusch claimed, ‘involve many people’. But if we examine Wittgenstein’s usage, this is clearly not uniformly so. He speaks of an unlimited technique in mathematics as ‘lacking the institution of an end’ (MS 121, pp. 63r–v; RFM, p. 138); of proof as a part of an institution (RFM, p. 168) – but that does not mean that a proof is a part of a social institution. In MS 164, p. 95 he notes that a language, a game, a rule, are institutions – and immediately goes on to ask ‘But how often must a rule actually have been applied before one can have the right to say that there is a rule?’ – and does not raise the question – but how many people must actually apply a rule before one can have the right to say that there is a rule? MS 123, p. 56r observes that the concept of applying a rule is not constructed according to what goes on in a one-off application, but according to the institution of the rule and its constant application. MS 124, pp. 188–9 notes that a language is an institution – it is impossible that only once in the history of mankind a sentence should be spoken and understood. Wittgenstein speaks of ‘the institution of applying a rule’ (MS 129, p. 183); and of a rule being an institution – and queries how many times must it be applied before one is warranted in speaking of a rule (RFM, p. 334). In MS 180a, pp. 35v–36r, he remarks, apropos the transition from seeing that something is this to seeing that it is red, that the rules leave one in the lurch here, because there is no technique, no institution, of going by the rule. In these cases, he is evidently concerned not with social institutions, but with established regularities, apprehended as uniformities, that function in practice as standards of correctness and that guide conduct.
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Making a report, giving an order, playing chess are all rule-following practices shared by participants. They are acts and activities performed in complex diachronic social contexts. But given Wittgenstein’s recurrent emphasis on the requirement of a multiplicity of occasions, and the total absence of any emphasis or queries about the requirement of a multiplicity of agents, it would surely be premature to conclude without more ado that he was arguing that following a rule as such is essentially, logically, a social custom, or that one cannot imagine language-using creatures that play language-games only by themselves, give orders to themselves and so forth.
Innate knowledge of a language Human beings are born with a unique second-order ability – the ability to acquire the ability to speak a language. All normal human beings are innately able to learn a language. This ability is, as far as we know, unique in the animal kingdom (perhaps with the marginal exception of chimpanzees). It is striking that this second-order ability, if not realized prior to the age of about ten, fades. But no human being, and no other animal, is born with the first-order ability to speak a language. These are empirical facts, discovered by empirical investigation. Is it conceivable that a being be born with the ability to speak a language? It is evident that Wittgenstein did not find anything amiss about the idea. In the Grammar (cf. BT, pp. 191 ff.), in the context of a discussion of the causal conception of linguistic meaning, he noted ‘it may be all one to us whether someone has learnt the language, or was perhaps from birth constituted to react to sentences in English like a normal person who has learnt it’ (PG, p. 188), a remark he repeated in Investigations §495. So too, in the Blue Book he remarked: Insofar as the teaching brings about the association, feeling of recognition, etc. etc., it is the cause of the phenomena of understanding, obeying, etc.; and it is a hypothesis that the process of teaching should be needed in order to bring about these effects. It is conceivable, in this sense, that all the processes of understanding, obeying, etc., should have happened without the person ever having been taught the language. (BBB, p. 12) Subsequently, in the Brown Book, he considered a case in which members of an imaginary tribe were born with the propensity to follow a rule
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of a game correlating letters a, b, c, d with moving pieces up, down, left and right on a chess board. He wrote: This case at first sight looks puzzling. We seem to be assuming a most unusual working of the mind. Or we may ask, ‘How on earth is he to know which way to move if the letter a is shown him?’ But isn’t B’s reaction in this case the very reaction described [previously, in cases in which a learner, after due training, follows the letters without consulting the correlating chart], and in fact our usual reaction when for instance we hear and obey an order? For the fact that the training [in the previous cases] preceded the carrying out of the order does not change the process of carrying out. In other words, the ‘curious mental mechanism’ assumed [here] is no other than that which we assumed to be created by training in [the previous cases]. ‘But could such a mechanism be born with you?’ But did you find any difficulty in assuming that that mechanism was born with B, which enabled him to respond to the training in the way he did? (BBB, p. 97; cf. EPB, pp. 141 ff.) Or, to go merely one step further, is being born with a second-order ability to speak a language (i.e. the ability to acquire the ability to speak) so much less amazing (less miraculous) than being born with a first-order ability to speak a language? In MS 179, written as late as 1944 or 1945, Wittgenstein observed that one was taught to follow orders in the course of learning to speak. But this is merely to specify the causes of one’s later ways of acting. But when an adult orders or obeys, he doesn’t remember the time of this previous training. Perhaps he never was trained, but somehow suddenly at some past time was able to speak – to use language (MS 179, p. 2r). It is clear that this supposition did not strike Wittgenstein as incoherent or as excluded from what is logically possible. This drift of thought may seem startling to someone who conceives of language as essentially, logically, a social artefact of mankind, transmitted through training and teaching, and sustainable only through the availability of an objective standard of correct use consisting of shared reactions and behaviour of others. For on that conception, it is a feature of the grammar of the term ‘language’ that a language is learnt in a social group of speakers of a shared language. To be sure, it would not have occurred to Wittgenstein (or to any other sensible person) that human languages are innate. So why did he so nonchalantly insist that this is a (rather uninteresting) logical possibility?
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The reason is surely that the genesis of an ability is irrelevant to the possession of an ability. What shows that someone is able to speak a language is his current behaviour – his exercise of his ability to speak and understand. How he acquired his ability to speak is irrelevant to whether he has that ability. For the origin of an ability is no part of the criteria for the possession of the ability: ‘Teaching, as the hypothetical history of our subsequent actions [. . .] drops out of our considerations’ (BBB, p. 14). Were we to discover a strange desert islander (human or Martian), who appeared to be using a language, we might, were he patient and friendly, interact with him. And were we to suspect that the sounds he emitted and the gestures he employed were indeed the signs and symbols of a language, we might, with his cooperation, learn his language. And we would establish that his utterances were indeed speech and establish what the words of his language meant long before discovering where he came from, and from whom he had learnt his language. And if our Martian friend averred that he, like all Martians, had never learnt his language from others, but was born with the ability to speak, would we insist that this is logically impossible? It is evident that the genesis of the ability is irrelevant to, and does not enter into, the criteria for its possession.
Robinson Crusoe sails again Wittgenstein not only tolerated the idea of innate knowledge of a language, he also discussed at some length the idea of a language of a solitary human being – for example, Robinson Crusoe. His ruminations on Defoe’s adventurer begin in the mid-1930s. In MS 116 (Vol. XII), Wittgenstein reflected on the difference between objective and subjective understanding, and raised the question of whether an unshared language can still be called ‘a language’ and whether its sounds and signs can still be deemed a ‘toolbox’ for private use. To which he replied: yes, as long as the speaker plays language games by himself – which, to be sure, he can do.11 Just think of a Robinson Crusoe who employs signs for his own private use. Imagine that you watch him doing so (without him seeing you). So you see how, in various circumstances, he carves lines on wood, utters sounds and so forth. This is indeed a case of using signs, but only if one can detect a certain regularity (MS 116, p. 117). This passage was written in 1936. But Crusoe crops up again and again in 1944, just prior to the composition of the Intermediate Draft (ZF). Wittgenstein distinguishes between a private language which someone
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speaks only to himself and an essentially private language. The former ‘is like the one Robinson had on his desert island in which he was able to talk to himself. Had someone heard him and observed him, he would have been able to learn Robinson’s language. For the meanings of the words are apparent in Robinson’s behaviour’ (MS 124, pp. 221 ff.). A desert islander speaks only to himself. How does he signify his sensations (or experiences)? If as we do – that is, if his sensation-words are bound up with his natural expressions of sensation – then, of course, his language is not essentially private (MS 124, pp. 225 ff.). Elsewhere Wittgenstein noted that an essentially ‘private language’ seems a kind of a language, although it isn’t really one. But In another sense, there can of course be a private language. Say the language of a Crusoe who talks to himself. First, the following remark: to talk to oneself doesn’t mean to be by oneself and talk. One can imagine a man who encourages himself to act by means of words, who asks himself questions and answers them, and reproaches himself. Now, we’d only call such a phenomenon a language if the man’s ways of acting were to resemble those of mankind in general, and in particular if we had already understood his gestures and his facial expressions of sadness, unwillingness, joy. One could call this a language or a language-like phenomenon. One can imagine a man who lives alone and who draws pictures of objects around him (perhaps on the walls of his cave), and his picture-language is easily understood. But someone who encourages himself has not yet mastered the language-game of encouraging another. Someone who can talk to himself cannot thereby yet speak to another. If someone can play patience, he cannot thereby yet play card-games with others. Language: that is above all the languages spoken by the peoples of the earth. And then we call ‘language’ phenomena that bear a similarity to those languages. Ordering is a technique of our language. Someone who comes into a foreign land the language of which he doesn’t understand will in general not find it difficult to detect when an order has been given.
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One can indeed also give oneself an order. But if we observed a Robinson giving himself an order in a language we didn’t know, then it would be much more difficult to recognize. (MS 165, pp. 103–9) It is evident from these ruminations that Wittgenstein did not think that Crusoe’s isolation debarred him from speaking a language to himself and employing his language for his own private use. There is no hint here that the absence of other speakers would mean that Crusoe himself could no longer distinguish between using a word correctly and merely thinking that he was using a word correctly. Nor did Wittgenstein suggest that, being isolated from a community of speakers of a common language, Crusoe cannot distinguish between its merely seeming to him that an act accords with a rule and the act’s really according with the rule. What is true is that no one can distinguish between what he thinks to be correct and what is actually correct by identifying something that he mistakenly takes to be correct or that he wrongly takes to be incorrect. There is little use for the phrase ‘I think this is correct, but it is actually incorrect’ (by contrast with the utterances ‘I thought that this was correct, but it is actually incorrect’ or ‘This seems to him to be correct, but is actually incorrect’). This singularity in our grammar has many parallels: in particular, no one can pinpoint a proposition as something that he now mistakenly believes to be true. In other words, if English had a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely’, it would lack a first-person singular present-tense declarative form (PI, p. 190). But these grammatical truisms do not expunge the distinction between appearance and reality in respect of first-person judgements of the correctness or truth of one’s own beliefs. Rather, the distinction must be drawn in a different way. And of course, it is. For there is no barrier to Crusoe’s saying, ‘this seemed to me (yesterday) to be correct, but it is not’ and there is no conceptual puzzle about supposing him to establish its truth. He might have played out a game of patience before going to sleep, thinking he had won and leaving the cards arranged on the table in the final ‘winning’ position. In the morning he might look over the cards and find to his disappointment that he had confused the two red knaves; so he would now conclude that he had made a mistake in applying the rules of the game, although the previous night he had thought that he had really won. We could imagine similar sequences of events in connection with his counting or measuring objects, with his keeping records of his stores or of the date and so on. In all these cases, Crusoe could actually find out that what he had thought to be correct was in fact incorrect,
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and he could often rectify earlier errors. Moreover, he needs no community aid, and comparisons of his actions with the responses of others play no role whatever in his deliberations. All this might be granted, but only on the understanding that the Crusoe we are envisaging was born in Britain, learnt English at his parents’ knee and carried on speaking English. After all, he would merely be doing for a very long time what we all do when we are alone for much shorter times. However, the manner in which Crusoe acquired his language played no role in Wittgenstein’s reflections, and it is clear that this line of thought would not find favour with him. For, to repeat, the mode of acquisition of an ability is not part of the criteria for the current possession of that ability. Strikingly, there are further reflections in Wittgenstein’s writings that concern imaginary people who do not speak, and have never spoken, a language shared with others. It is to these that I now turn.
Solitary cavemen and monologuists It is evident that as far as Wittgenstein’s reflections are concerned, nothing in principle depends on the assumption that the desert islander speaks some established language to himself (as Crusoe did). One can of course imagine someone who lives by himself and draws pictures of the objects around him (say on the walls of his cave), and such a picture language could be readily understood. (MS 165, p. 105) There is no intimation that such a picture language must be shared. We might envisage the caveman using other symbols. Provided that his symbolism resembles paradigmatic languages closely enough (MS 165, pp. 106 ff.), and provided he satisfies the conditions for speaking to himself (which is not to say that he lives by himself and speaks (MS 165, p. 103)), then we can discover that he is master of a language. Parallel possibilities hold for determining whether he follows other rules and applies various techniques. No genuine technique of rule-application is in principle impenetrable. Later, in the manuscript, Wittgenstein raised the question: ‘How if a person (say, a caveman) always spoke only to himself. Think of a case in which we could say: “Now he is considering whether he should act thus or thus. Now he has made a decision. Now he is ordering himself to act.” It is possible to imagine such a thing if he makes use of simple signs which we can interpret’ (MS 165, p. 117).
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Wittgenstein did not reflect only on cavemen. In an early draft of Investigations §243, written sometime after 19 April 1944, he discussed the strange idea of a group of monologuists. Is it not imaginable that each human being should think only for himself, speak only to himself. (In this case, each person could even have his own language.) There are cases in which we say someone has admonished himself, ordered, obeyed, punished, blamed, asked and answered himself. So there can be human beings who are acquainted only with languagegames which one plays by oneself. Indeed, it is imaginable that these human beings should have a rich vocabulary. We could imagine that an explorer came to this country and observed how each one of them accompanied his activities with articulate sounds, but did not address others. Somehow, the explorer gets the idea that these people are talking to themselves, listens to them in the course of their activities, and succeeds in producing a probable translation of their talk into our language. By learning their language, he reaches the position in which he can predict actions which people subsequently perform, for some of their utterances are expressions of decisions or plans. (How these people were able to learn their language is here irrelevant.) (MS 124, pp. 213 ff.) This is, to be sure, a wild fantasy. But the only thing that matters about it for present purposes, is that Wittgenstein had no qualms about envisaging people who, although living together rather than in the solitude of a Crusoe, nevertheless did not speak a common language. Here each person speaks his own language, and uses it exclusively to speak to himself. The significance of the fantasy is to emphasize the logico-grammatical requirements that need to be satisfied for one to say of a being that he is using a language, following rules, speaking to himself. Manifestly it is a monologuist’s behaviour that settles for us whether he is speaking to himself. He must engage in some such activities as giving himself orders, making predictions, arriving at decisions, posing questions and so forth. We must be able to say of him that now he is deliberating what he ought to do, now he is reaching a decision, now he is ordering himself to do something (MS 165, p. 116). Each of these is a technique of human life and of our language (MS 165, p. 109), and the criteria for mastery of these techniques and for engaging in them lie in behaviour. There must be public criteria for a person’s playing
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a language-game. If somebody, whether living in isolation or in society, satisfies the criteria for giving orders to himself, framing rules for himself and applying them, asking himself questions and answering them and so forth, then he is correctly said to play these language-games no matter how he acquired the requisite skills. Consequently, on Wittgenstein’s view as here expressed, it does make sense to say that an isolated individual follows a rule, uses signs and symbols, speaks a language. That person may be a Crusoe, who learnt his language from others, but is now accidentally removed from those with whom he shares his language. Presumably, he may be the last speaker of a previously shared language – like Chingachgook after the death of Uncas. Clearly, according to Wittgenstein, it may be a solitary caveman, who has never shared his language with anyone. And it may be one of Wittgenstein’s imaginary monologuists, who lives with others, but shares no language with them and speaks only his own language, only to himself. In general, it makes sense for one to say of another that he is following a certain rule only if one can understand the rule (MS 165, p. 72). For only then will one know the criteria for following the rule in question. If we imagine watching a person without interacting with him, it will, on the whole be much more difficult for us to determine whether the sounds he occasionally emits or signs he inscribes amount to the words of a language (MS 165, pp. 108 ff.). Unless we were very patient observers and the subject under observation were very voluble, it might not in practice be feasible to learn his language and penetrate his practices, whereas, if we could lift the veil of invisibility and interact with him, our task would become far more tractable. But it is important not to confuse the epistemological question of how we could know whether this being is speaking a language with the logico-grammatical question of whether it makes sense to ascribe mastery of a language to one kind or another of solitary being.
Private languages and ‘private languages’ Wittgenstein’s verdict in the Nachlass is clear: a solitary individual (a Crusoe, a caveman, a monologuist) can follow a rule. (Here ‘can’ is the hallmark of a grammatical proposition.) Consequently, unless there was a radical change of mind, calling following a rule ‘a practice’ (PI, §202) cannot be meant to differentiate an essentially social from an individual practice. Rather it must be intended to distinguish genuine cases of
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following rules from illusory ones. Framing rules and following them is a technique of human life and of our language: [. . .] that technique can be private, but this only means that nobody but I knows about it, in the sense in which I can have a private sewing machine. But in order to be a private sewing machine it must be an object which deserves the name sewing machine not in virtue of its privacy but in virtue of its similarity to sewing machines, private or otherwise. (MS 166, p. 7, in English) The idea of a private language – a language that only one person speaks (no matter how he acquired the requisite verbal skills) – is unobjectionable. Such a language would, to be sure, involve private (unshared) techniques, practices, customs and usages. But, of course, none of these are in principle private. There are public criteria for someone’s following a rule, applying a technique, using signs and symbols – and whether someone is following a rule must be capable, in appropriate circumstances, of being exhibited in behaviour. For rulefollowing is a form of activity (RFM, p. 331), a regularity perceived as a uniformity and conceived as a norm. The internal relation between a rule and its extension is forged in the practice of acting on the rule, in taking such-and-such behaviour as being in accord with the rule, in calling that behaviour ‘following this rule’, in one’s readiness to explain one’s behaviour as accord with the rule, and in one’s preparedness to teach another what counts as following the rule by reference to this behavioural regularity, to these examples. Someone who describes the language of a people describes a uniformity of their behaviour. And someone who describes a language that someone speaks only to himself describes a uniformity of his behaviour, and not something that can occur only once. But I shall call behaviour ‘speaking a language’ only if it is analogous to ours when we speak our language. (MS 165, pp. 124 ff.) The lengthy discussion of following rules in Investigations §§143–242, that allegedly culminates in the remark of §202 that ‘it is not possible to follow a rule “privately” ’ is not concerned with the conception of a private language that is introduced in §§243 ff. There Wittgenstein focuses upon the idea of a language of the kind explicitly or tacitly presupposed by linguistic idealists from Descartes and Locke to the Vienna Circle and
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beyond.12 According to such a conception, the (descriptive) words of a language stand for ideas in the mind of the speaker, for ‘mental representations’, that are conceived to be epistemically private as well as privately and inalienably owned. This is far removed from the idea of an unshared, but shareable, language of solitary desert islanders, cavemen or imaginary soliloquists. In MS 124, where, as we have seen, Crusoe is discussed at some length, Wittgenstein introduces the idea of a language that is not a means of communication, but rather a ‘toolbox’ for a person’s private use. This, he writes, is perfectly conceivable – as is patent in the case of a Crusoe. For the meanings of the words in this private language are manifest in Crusoe’s behaviour (MS 124, pp. 221 ff.). But, Wittgenstein continues, can one not conceive of a language in which someone speaks or writes of his own private sensations, his inner experiences, for his own use? Such a language would, of course, be intelligible only to him, for no one else could know what the words of his language refer to (MS 124, p. 222). This sets the stage for the private language arguments proper, which are designed to show that although it may seem as if we were here dealing with a language – that is an illusion. It is an illusion to which most philosophers of the modern era succumbed, for they thought that our public languages are the confluence of all speakers’ private languages, the words of which refer to private ideas or mental representations. The task that Wittgenstein set himself, not yet executed in §§143–242, was to show that this is merely an illusion – that thus conceived there can be no such thing as a ‘private language’ lacking any public criteria for correct use.
Overview Let us take stock. Wittgenstein’s use of Praxis, Gepflogenheiten, Institutionen does not commit him to the view that any rule-following activity must be a communal one. His conception of the relationship between an ability, its genesis, and the criteria for possession of that ability exclude the manner of acquisition of an ability from the criteria for its possession. Wittgenstein discussed solitary people who follow unshared rules in many different manuscripts in his Nachlass between 1936–37 and 1944. In none of these numerous remarks, did he express any qualms about the conceivability of speakers with an innate knowledge of a language, or about speakers who speak a contingently private language. Throughout these discussions, his focus is unquestionably on the requirement of regularity seen as uniformity and conceived as a norm,
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not upon the requirement of multiplicity of agents. That should not be surprising, since it was his view that the internal relation between a rule and what accords with it is forged in the agent’s practice. However, there is little trace of these discussions in the Investigations. It might be suggested that this is because he changed his mind, and came to think that following a rule is essentially a social practice. But this is improbable. It is not as if these reflections so long predate the Final Draft (SF) as to have been forgotten. They are more or less contemporaneous with the Intermediate Draft (ZF), in which the bulk of the arguments concerning following rules and a private language are already in place. Had Wittgenstein changed his mind on this matter, it is wildly implausible to suppose that he would have left no trace of such a shift of position in his manuscripts. Had his arguments in support of his ‘individualist’ conception suddenly struck him as mistaken, it is more than just improbable that he would not have written the new objections down – at least in the manuscript notebook. But a question remains to be answered – namely: why is the discussion of Crusoe and of solitary soliloquists largely excluded from the Investigations? I suggest that the matter appears only fleetingly because on reflection it seemed to Wittgenstein that there was little to discuss. Language, as he wrote, ‘is above all the languages spoken by the peoples of the earth. And then we call “language” phenomena that bear a similarity to those languages’ (MS 165, pp. 106 ff.). If a solitary being uses signs in ways that warranted ascribing self-reflexive speech acts to him, then he is performing self-reflexive speech acts – no matter how these skills were acquired and no matter whether they are shared by some absent community or not. That the issue of whether solitary beings or monologuists can be conceived to be language-users is of very minor significance to Wittgenstein is patent in the three remarks that allude to the matter in the Investigations. In §243, the monologuists are mentioned without elaboration as something perfectly conceivable. A human being can encourage himself, give himself orders, obey, blame and punish himself; he can ask himself a question and answer it. So one could imagine human beings who spoke only in monologue; who accompanied their activities by talking to themselves. – An explorer, who watched them and listened to their talk, might succeed in translating their language into ours. (This would enable him to predict these people’s actions correctly, for he also hears them making resolutions and decisions.)
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This passage is a slimmed down version of MS 124, pp. 213 ff. and MS 129, pp. 36 ff. (cf. MS 180a, pp. 13 ff. and 20 ff.), and there is no sign whatsoever of any change of mind relative to the MSS versions written a few months earlier. In Investigations §257, the question of how the child might learn the use of the word ‘toothache’ if there were no outward signs of pain is brushed aside as irrelevant with the casual remark ‘let’s assume the child is a genius and invents a name for the sensation by himself’. Evidently the question of how a child might be taught the use of sensation-names is not the central concern here, but rather whether the child can be said to understand such a name without being able to explain its meaning to anyone. In §495, the old claim that ‘it may be all one to us whether someone has learned the language, or was perhaps from birth constituted to react to sentences in English like a normal person who has learned English’ is repeated without any qualms. The context is the same as before: namely the contrast between a causal and a normative conception of a language. But nevertheless, even in this rather special context, it would make no sense to say ‘it may be all one to us whether . . .’, if what followed were logically incoherent. What may be all one to us here must, on pain of talking nonsense, make sense. In short, if Wittgenstein’s arguments concerning the family-resemblance concept of a language are understood, and if his arguments concerning following rules, practices and techniques are grasped, then there is nothing further to discuss, and the issue of solitary rule-followers and private linguists (as opposed to ‘private linguists’) is of no significance. Of course, all human languages are social artefacts, created by the interaction of human beings living together in social groups and sharing a common form of life. A language relates to a way of living, and all natural human languages relate to human ways of living, to the form of life and culture of human communities. All human speakers learn their mother tongue from others in the course of their childhood. Human beings are born with innate second-order linguistic abilities, not with first-order ones. So there is in fact no innate knowledge of a language. And there are no known cases of wolf-children inventing languages of their own. These are important truths. But they are not grammatical truths. It is not part of the grammar of the word ‘language’ that the phrase ‘innately known language’ is nonsense, or that the form of words ‘a language of a solitary asocial being’ is excluded from our language. What are ‘grammatical truths’ are that following a rule is a practice, that there is no such thing as following a rule without there being public criteria for so doing, that all languages must in principle be capable of being understood by others who possess the appropriate abilities. A language
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need not be shared, but it must be shareable. It may be private, but it must be possible for it to be public.
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Ayer and Rhees, 1954. Kripke, 1982, p. 89. Malcolm, 1986, pp. 175 and 178. von Savigny, 1994; see also his 1991. Peacocke, 1981, p. 73. O’Hear, 1991, p. 45. Kusch, 2006, p. 194. Malcolm, 1989. Kusch, 2006, pp. 248–50. I have no comments to make on the use of Gebräuche. This plural form occurs rarely in Wittgenstein, usually indeed in the context of discussions of rites of primitive peoples. In PI §199, however, it means much the same as ‘usage’. 11. As early as MS 149, p. 22, written in 1935–36, Wittgenstein noted: ‘We can indeed imagine a Robinson using a language for himself but then he must behave in a certain way or we shouldn’t say that he plays language games with himself.’ 12. Wittgenstein was quite explicit about this in his notebook. In MS 165, p. 102, he wrote: ‘And here we are on the brink of a discussion about the language in which someone speaks about his experiences, and which is intelligible only to himself. In this place I shall not enter into this discussion, which belongs to the problems of idealism and solipsism. I wish to say only this much: that here no language is being described at all, even though it appears to be.’
7 Tracing the Development of Wittgenstein’s Writing on Private Language David G. Stern
The discussion of private language in the Philosophical Investigations is one of the last pieces of Part I of that book to have been drafted. Most of it was written between 1937 and 1945, after the first 190 remarks of Part I of the book had almost reached their final state. The post-1936 writing on private language that leads up to the final version of section 243 ff. represents a fresh start, both in wording and in conception, on the pre-1936 drafts. Almost none of the post-1936 writing is a direct reworking of the previous material, and while it discusses many of the same topics, it approaches them differently. The paper examines Wittgenstein’s post-1936 manuscripts on private language and their relationship to both his earlier writing on private language and to the discussion of private language in the Philosophical Investigations. In addition to early drafts of sections 243 ff., this post1936 material contains a great deal of writing on the same topic that Wittgenstein ultimately discarded.
§1 Almost all of the remarks on private language in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations are among the last parts of that book to be written. Our first record of the vast majority of §§243–315 is in manuscript material written during the second half of 1944. The first 190 remarks of Part I, on the other hand, were composed during the early and mid-1930s, and had almost reached their final state of revision and organization in the pre-war drafts of the ‘Early Investigations’, which Wittgenstein worked on from 1936–38 (PU 2001, p. 32). 110
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The full story of Wittgenstein’s earlier work on this topic is a long and complex one.1 However, Wittgenstein’s writing on private language in 1944 clearly develops out of the discussion of questions about the possibility of a language for inner experience that had preoccupied him in 1929 and throughout the 1930s. Thus, its pre-history includes his work on the idea of a ‘phenomenological language’ in the early months of 1929, his change of heart on that matter in October 1929, and his subsequent criticism of that work on a language for inner experience in the Big Typescript and the Blue Book. However, only four remarks in §§243 ff. can be traced back to writing from the very end of this period. These are §§251–2, on what it means to say ‘I can’t imagine the opposite’ (MS 116, pp. 75–8; 1934); §257, on whether one could invent a name for a pain if there were no outward signs of pain (MS 115, p. 91; 1933–34) and §264, an expression of the interlocutor’s conviction that once you know what a word stands for, you know its whole use (MS 116, p. 118; 1934). The earliest extended discussion of the topic of a private language along lines that clearly anticipate the discussion in the Philosophical Investigations takes place in the ‘Notes for Lectures on Sense Data and Private Experience’ (PO, pp. 200–88). As the source manuscripts were written in preparation for lectures given in Cambridge in 1935–36, they were composed in English, with occasional asides in German. The ‘Notes for Lectures’ are, for the most part, fragmentary first drafts, and notes of points to be developed in class discussion. Thanks to Rush Rhees’ lecture notes for 1935–36, we also have a record of how Wittgenstein presented those ideas in his classes (PO, 289–367). In these two sets of notes we can see the first detailed development of the distinctive themes and concerns that are addressed, in much more polished form, in Philosophical Investigations §§243–315. In late 1937 and early 1938 Wittgenstein wrote at length on private language in German for the first time; some of this work continued over the next year or so (MSS 119, 120, 121, 158, 160 and 162b). However, only ten remarks from this material were ultimately used in the Philosophical Investigations, namely §§248, 263, 265, 267–8, 294, 297, 305–6 and 309. Apparently, Wittgenstein put this work to one side, for like the remarks in the Philosophical Investigations on private language from the early 1930s, they were only incorporated into the text when he assembled the final draft in late 1945 or early 1946. Wittgenstein next returned to the topic in 1941 when he composed the ‘Notes for the Philosophical Lecture’ (PO, pp. 445–58). This material was also written in English, presumably occasioned by the invitation, in April 1941, to give a lecture to the British Academy the following year.
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The exposition there is often much blunter and more straightforward than the nuanced and elusive treatment one finds in the Philosophical Investigations. Presumably because the piece was written 6 years after the more wide ranging and exploratory ‘Notes for Lectures’, and was designed with a general audience in mind, it provides a much more clearly focused treatment of the privacy of experience. In my judgement, ‘the more subtle and nuanced approach in the Investigations, where Wittgenstein engages in dialogue with opposing voices rather than elaborating a positive view, is essentially an elaboration and development of the critique he set out in these lecture notes’ (Stern, 1994, p. 554; see also 1995, 6.3). However, perhaps because they were written in English, none of Wittgenstein’s lecture notes were used as source material in Wittgenstein’s later work on private language. Wittgenstein did also write on private language in German in the early 1940s, further exploring these ideas.2 If we follow Peter Hacker’s approach in the third volume of his Analytical Commentary, and take the emergence of Wittgenstein’s ideas about private language as our guiding theme, there is a clear continuity and steady development in Wittgenstein’s writing on the topic from 1932 to 1945: ‘What we see in the condensed sixteen pages of the Investigations §§243–315 is the precipitate (cf. PI, Preface) from many hundreds of pages of notes’ (Hacker, 1993, p. 4). On the other hand, if we look back from the finished work to its source material, and track when it was first composed, what is most striking is the discontinuity between the vast bulk of the earlier writing and the final stages of composition. In view of the fact that Wittgenstein wrote at such length on private language from the mid-1930s to the early 1940s, and that the writing covers the same terrain, along broadly similar lines, to the Philosophical Investigations, it is remarkable that so little of the material in question was included in that book. Indeed, in view of all this prior work, it is striking that the earliest manuscript drafts of the vast majority of the material in Philosophical Investigations §§240–315, together with many of the remarks in §§316–421, can be dated to the second half of 1944. In other words, the great majority of the 110 remarks that were added to the early version of the Philosophical Investigations around the end of 1944, yielding the 300 remark intermediate version, were composed only months before. Most of these remarks derive from MS 129, where the first entry is dated 17 August 1944. However, a small group can be traced back to a slightly earlier manuscript, the last third of MS 124, which was begun only a few weeks earlier, on 3 July 1944. These comprise not only the first formulation of the opening of the private language discussion and its immediate
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sequel (§§241, 243–4, 246) but also a dozen or so later remarks from the second half of §§243–315. These include a number of key passages: the opening of the discussion of privacy of colour experience (§§272–3, 275), a central part of the exploration of the idea that one might turn into a stone yet still feel pain (§§288–9b), and later methodological reflections on the role of philosophical pictures (§295) and exhibiting and expressing pain (§§310–13). Wittgenstein must have rapidly realized that he had found the right opening for his discussion of private language, for he continued to work on §§241, 243–4, 246 in another manuscript notebook (MS 180a, pp. 8v–12r), adding drafts of what we now know as §256 and §258, usually regarded as the crucial reformulation of the challenge of making sense of ‘language which describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand’ (§256) and a key argument against the possibility of a private language (§258). In the ‘Intermediate Investigations’, they form a single long remark, but were later broken up into two in order to insert §257 as a separate remark. In drafting these remarks, Wittgenstein had not only found the right words for many of the key passages in the Investigations’ discussion of private language, but a way of approaching the problems in question that provided a narrative structure that he could further develop. It looks as if Wittgenstein had to put his prior work on the topic aside and make a fresh start in order to find the right point of departure, and the right tone and style, and that once he had done so, he was able to make rapid progress. While the material written in the summer of 1944 could easily be regarded as just a more polished formulation of issues and arguments that are familiar from earlier drafts, they are less didactic, and more dialogical, and mark a shift from lecturing the mistaken student to telling a story about how we are misled by a ‘dream of our language’ (MS 165, p. 5). One could describe Wittgenstein’s writing on private language in the 1930s as aspiring to construct a latter-day refutation of idealism. The discussion in the Investigations, on the other hand, moves back and forth between giving voice to the ‘fantasy of uncovering a phenomenal realm of fully transparent, fully authoritative concept application’ (Eldridge, 1997, p. 269), recognizing that the words with which we struggle to express that fantasy are nonsense, and a return to acceptance of our everyday life. Indeed, it is crucial that the very material in the Philosophical Investigations which has traditionally been read as Wittgenstein’s refutation of a private language can also be construed as carrying out the very different task of trying, and failing, to give meaning to the interlocutor’s proposals.3
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The intermediate draft of the Philosophical Investigations, assembled just a few months after this burst of productivity, includes the first 200 remarks of the final version in their final order, followed by a little less than half of what we now know as §§201–421. After the opening sections that had fallen into place in MS 120 (pp. 243–4, 246), he added only two further sections (§§253–4, on talk of privacy of ownership and its dangers) before moving directly to §256 and then §§258–61, which are immediately followed by §§270–91 in full. In other words, if we look back from the final version, and consider what had not yet been incorporated in this version, the most striking gaps occur towards the beginning, in the vicinity of §256 and §258, and towards the end. The final version also incorporates another eight remarks (§§261–9) that develop additional lines of attack on the idea of inner ostensive definition of sensations. The other remarks added in the final version are §§292, 294, 297, 299–301 and 305–9. The material that was added in the final stage towards the beginning and end of this swatch of text serves as a frame. It provides a methodological opening that forces us to think at some length about the issues raised by the very idea of a private language, and a memorable conclusion in which Wittgenstein most directly addresses the accusation that he is ‘really a behaviourist in disguise’ (§307), leading up to the memorable exchange, ‘What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle’ (§309). However, the majority of the material worked into the Intermediate draft of this swatch of text also dates from the second half of 1944.
§2 Research on an author’s unpublished papers raises a number of questions about the methods and presuppositions that inform one’s research. What is the relationship between the material that the author published during his or her lifetime, posthumously published material and the unpublished writing? How should one identify the author’s ‘works’ – perhaps those writings that reached a certain, further specifiable, level of final revision, or that the author regarded, at least for a while, as ready for publication?4 Should one divide the remainder of the author’s writing into a number of textual categories, distinguishing, say, manuscripts, typescripts and dictations, as in the von Wright catalogue (1993) of the Wittgenstein papers? Alternatively, if one is more concerned with stages of revision, one might prefer to start with a finer-grained set of categories, distinguishing, say, between first draft manuscripts, revised manuscripts, typescripts of material selected from
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manuscripts, typescripts in which material is rearranged in a planned order and manuscript revision of typescripts. Adopting a finer-grained approach, one might take as one’s basic unit the smaller units that the author repeatedly revised and rearranged. In Wittgenstein’s case, that unit is the remark, which may be as short as a single sentence or as long as several paragraphs stretching over a number of pages. They are usually indicated in the manuscripts by a blank line or two at the beginning and end, and by a series of numbers in many of the typescripts. Delving even further into the microstructure of the author’s writing, one might also want to distinguish between a number of different representations of any given paragraph in a particular manuscript. In the current Bergen edition of the Wittgenstein papers (2000), the reader has access to three such representations: (1) a colour photograph of each page; (2) a normalized transcription that provides the text as finally revised, without any of the earlier stages, or alternate choices that the author might have left undecided; (3) and a diplomatic transcription, that provides as much information as possible about every stage of revision. An experimental online edition of part of the Nachlass offers a fourth, user-customizable view in which one can choose how much editing information one would like to see (see Stern, 2008). However, as the vast majority of remarks in the most polished typescripts also exist in a number of earlier versions, some very similar, some quite different, one has to acknowledge that different drafts of a remark in different manuscripts are often as intimately connected as a first draft and the revisions of that draft written on that sheet of paper. In view of the extent to which a trail of revised and rearranged remarks rhizomatically connects every stage of Wittgenstein’s writing, one might well conclude that the Nachlass as a whole should really be regarded as a single work. In that case, one would treat the various distinctions proposed above as a heuristic device to enable the reader to navigate between the various interlinked textual strata (cf. Stern, 1996). In other words, while the current Bergen edition takes the von Wright catalogue and each page of those manuscripts and typescripts as its point of departure, one can envisage a future digital edition that would take the totality of possible links between remarks as its organizing principle (cf. Hrachovec, 2006). Furthermore, the questions we have considered so far, and the different approaches to the text described above are primarily philological, editorial strategies best suited for organizing textual material in a catalogue, edition or research archive. One might well think that if one’s research is primarily concerned with the content of the writing, rather than philology or textual history, one should give a guiding role to the
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author’s intentions, especially insofar as there is evidence for them in the texts in question. At a relatively fine-grained level of evidence of authorial intention, this might lead us to exclude from consideration words, sentences and paragraphs that are crossed out. At first sight, this can seem an unproblematic principle, but on closer consideration, it can prove hard to distinguish cases where material was rejected because the author no longer endorsed it, as apart from being poorly drafted, unhappily worded or simply better said elsewhere. In some cases, it is clear that the rejected passage states a view that the author later rejects – for instance, in cases where there is later quotation and criticism of those words.5 In other cases, even an explicit rejection, such as Wittgenstein’s writing, three quarters of the way through a revised German translation of the Brown Book, that ‘this entire “attempt at a revision” from page 118 up to here is NOT WORTH ANYTHING’ (MS 115, p. 292; translation from von Wright, 1993, p. 493), cannot be taken at face value. For much of that material is used, without further revision, in the Philosophical Investigations. Or we may discover that all of the material that is crossed out in a manuscript was used, unchanged, in a subsequent typescript, and infer that the mark was intended as a way of indicating material that had already been used. Thus, even in the case of what might initially seem to be the most straightforward evidence of a negative judgement, careful interpretation that draws on the broader context is required. Similarly, in the case of any passage on a given topic that is not used in later writing on that topic, the significance of that authorial decision is far from clear. In his book on Wittgenstein’s post-Investigations philosophy of psychology, Joachim Schulte calls these ‘suppressed remarks’. He does say that in calling certain passages ‘suppressed’ he does not wish to imply that these passages do not represent Wittgenstein’s views. In many cases Wittgenstein’s motives for not selecting such remarks may have been purely stylistic ones. For us as readers they may be of great importance if they are our only or our best evidence for attributing a certain idea to Wittgenstein. (Schulte, 1993, p. 10, n. 12) Even so, this is not an entirely happy turn of phrase; it might have be better to call them ‘omitted remarks’, as ‘suppressed’ is a more appropriate term for remarks that were not merely left out, but actually marked for deletion. Nevertheless, while such passages may be our best evidence for attributing certain ideas to Wittgenstein, they are not always
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strong evidence. The mere fact that a particular passage, whether it is in a first draft manuscript or one of Wittgenstein’s most polished works, sets out or argues for an idea gives us no more than a prima facie reason to attribute that idea to Wittgenstein. In certain cases, such as claims uttered by an interlocutory voice, sometimes indicated by quotation marks, or a double dash, or passages containing ideas that are later subjected to criticism, or remarks that set out views that contradict other commitments, the very fact that those passages set out the ideas that they do is our best evidence that we should not attribute them to Wittgenstein. A closely related issue concerns the question of which parts of Wittgenstein’s writings set out his own considered views, and which parts explore views that he was merely entertaining, or set out views that were to be the target of criticism. Broadening one’s focus, but still giving a guiding role to authorial intention one might give greater weight to the author’s planned reorganization or rearrangement of material, or his own remarks about the value of that stage of work. One such case is the question of the relationship between the posthumously published Philosophical Grammar, as compared with the Big Typescript, on which it is based. Some interpreters, from Rush Rhees to Michael Nedo, have regarded the Grammar as an important work of Wittgenstein’s from the 1930s, while the earlier typescript is of secondary importance. However, one might well argue, with Anthony Kenny (1976), that the earlier typescript provides clear evidence of Wittgenstein’s views at the time the material was arranged and typed up, while the later revisions occurred at a number of different stages, never reached the same level of coherence, and leave it unclear what the author’s final intentions were. It is striking that Wittgenstein, who reflected at length on the potential difficulties in interpreting signs, the role of the community and established practice in our use of language, and the ways in which a solitary language user might come up with a code for his own use, made use of a wide variety of marginal marks, or sigla, in his writing, and never provided a key. There is a consensus about the overall interpretation of a few of the most common signs. Examples include ‘S’ for ‘Schlecht’, a ‘/’ for manuscript remarks to be transcribed in a typescript of selections from that manuscript, and wavy lines in the margin as a way of indicating his dissatisfaction with the wording (the latter is also used under particular words for the same reason). However, such construals are at best reasonably well-established hypotheses. It is also striking that there has been very little explicit discussion of Wittgenstein’s use of sigla and other related editorial techniques in his manuscripts. Some rare
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exceptions to this rule are the brief but helpful remarks by Schulte in the preface to Experience and Expression (1993, pp. 6–7) and by Luckhardt and Aue in the preface to the Big Typescript (BT, p. x). The only extended discussion of this issue in print is in Rothhaupt’s Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlass (1996, pp. 327–39). Nedo observes that ‘Wittgenstein’s marginal marks, which in general relate to the relevant remark in toto, present both a form of commentary and indications for further use in revision’ (1993, p. 100), but to the best of my knowledge does not provide further guidance in construing those remarks. Indeed, Rothhaupt observes that even in the cases that seem most straightforward, the evidence for the usual reading is not unequivocal. For instance, there is an ‘S’ in front of the first manuscript record of the Nestroy passage that became the motto to the Philosophical Investigations. Rothhaupt proposes that its function here may have been to indicate that this remark should be ‘separated’ (separiert) from the material on other topics before and after it (1996, p. 329). While this is a particularly striking case, there are a number of other remarks marked with an ‘S’ that are not ‘suppressed’ in subsequent work. One example is the first draft of the following striking simile for the difficulties the philosopher faces in ‘striving to find the liberating word’, ‘the word that finally permits us to grasp what until then had constantly and intangibly weighed on our consciousness’: (It’s like having a hair on one’s tongue; one feels it, but can’t get hold of it, and therefore can’t get rid of it.) (MS 110, p. 18) That passage occurs in the source typescripts for the Big Typescript, TSS 211 and 212, on p. 409 of the Big Typescript, and on four subsequent occasions in early drafts of the Philosophical Investigations. Other sigla are also clearly ambiguous: usually a question mark functions as a metasign, indicating uncertainty about the siglum or sigla that immediately follow, but on some occasions it indicates doubts about the remark itself (Schulte, 1993, p. 7). We cannot rule out the possibility that Wittgenstein used the same marks for different purposes in different manuscripts, or at different stages of revision. Indeed, in the case of some of the more elaborate sigla, it is far from clear whether the differences between certain inscriptions are merely orthographic, or should be taken as distinguishing different sigla, let alone how the various sigla interact when several are written on top of one another. Lacking a good grasp of the semantics of Wittgenstein’s sigla, the question of how to reidentify a siglum – which marks count as the same siglum – becomes pressing. Recently,
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Rothhaupt (2008) has proposed that a circular siglum, or round squiggle ‘Kringel’, indicates Wittgenstein’s selection of remarks for a book, complete with motto and preface, drawing from manuscripts written between October 1929 and September 1931. Rothhaupt calls this the ‘Kringel-Buch’ text corpus. Taking up a still wider angle, one might argue that the crucial question, which must be answered before one considers the fine details of the author’s intentions about particular remarks, concerns the number of different periods, or overall approaches, that one should attribute to the author, and the point(s) at which the author makes those transitions. The question is, of course, one of the most hotly disputed questions in Wittgenstein interpretation. Recently, the debate has focused on the disagreement between those who draw a clear distinction between the early and the later Wittgenstein, and New Wittgensteinians who maintain that the continuities between the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations are much more important than the discontinuities. In ‘How Many Wittgensteins?’ (Stern, 2006), I propose that this has obscured the fact that there are deep differences among those who stress the differences between an earlier and a later Wittgenstein, and that even those who insist on the unity of Wittgenstein’s philosophy may disagree about the point in his work on the Tractatus where he first arrived at his mature views. Consequently, the appearance of a pitched battle between two diametrically opposed camps can be misleading; a great deal depends on where, and for what reason, one draws ‘the Dividing Line between Early and Late Wittgenstein’ (Kienzler, 2001; cf. 1997). For instance, the prototypical New Wittgensteinian maintains that in every case where Wittgenstein might seem, at first sight, to be endorsing a positive philosophical position, his ultimate aim is always to get his reader to see that the position is nonsensical. A modest variant would be to hold that Wittgenstein had not yet achieved this clarity in some of his pre-Tractatus manuscripts, but that he did consistently maintain it in the final draft of that book. On such a reading, the ‘dividing line’ between an early, Russellian Wittgenstein, and a later resolute Wittgenstein, would be placed in the final years of the First World War. If one draws a dividing line in the early 1930s, like Baker and Hacker, Glock and Kienzler, then one will presume that, other things being equal, material written after that point states the views of the ‘later Wittgenstein’. On this approach, the Big Typescript, Philosophical Grammar and the Blue and Brown Books can all be mined for statements of the later Wittgenstein’s philosophical methods and his views about the
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nature of grammar and rules of language. This will lend substantial support to a reading of the Philosophical Investigations on which the identification of grammatical truths, and their use, in Hacker’s Strawsonian turn of phrase, to police the bounds of sense, plays a central role. On the other hand, one may, like Schulte, Pichler and myself, construe this material as evidence about Wittgenstein’s outlook at the time, rather than a settled conviction that he maintained in later years. On this alternative reading, Wittgenstein was attracted, during the first half of the 1930s, to a conception of philosophy on which its aim is to clarify, in a systematic way, the rules of our language in a philosophical grammar. However, he gave up this overarching approach in favour of piecemeal criticism of specific philosophical problems by the time he composed the first draft of the Philosophical Investigations in 1936–37.6 If we follow Hacker’s reading, we will construe Wittgenstein, not only in the early 1930s, but also throughout the rest of his career, as a philosophical grammarian, using the rules of our ordinary language to make clear the bounds of sense and so rule out certain philosophical claims and theories as mistaken. In that case, we will be inclined to draw a sharp line between scenarios that are logically possible, and thus conceivable, on the one hand, and those that are logically impossible, ruled out by the grammar of our language on the other. Traditional philosophy makes claims that may appear attractive, but on closer examination they prove to be nonsense, for they break grammatical rules. The task of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is, accordingly, to provide arguments that make these errors clear. If, however, we give up the idea that the rules of our ordinary language enable us to demarcate sense and nonsense, we also have to give up the correlative notion that there is a clear boundary between sense and nonsense. Whether or not a particular form of words makes sense does not simply depend on the rules of our language, but on the particular circumstances in which we are drawn to utter them, and the reasons we have for finding them attractive. Our attention turns from the question of whether the words under examination are grammatically well formed to the fantasies, or illusions, that motivate us to say such things, and lead us to offer another form of words when it turns out that our first formulation misfires. My own view is that Wittgenstein was continually moving back and forth between proto-philosophical theorizing and Pyrrhonian criticism of such theories, and that we can find evidence for and against a ‘resolute’ reading of his work at every stage of his career. Given that no one has yet provided a fully worked out resolute reading of the Tractatus as a whole, it is perhaps better to regard the New Wittgensteinian reading
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as a research program, rather than an established result. However, even if such a reading can be produced, it will be much more difficult to account for such matters as Wittgenstein’s earnest explanation of the show/say distinction in his letters to Russell, or his collaborating with Waismann in the early 1930s on a systematic exposition of his philosophy. Rather than looking for a decisive dividing line that clearly separates an earlier Wittgenstein who proposed various philosophical theories, and a later Pyrrhonian Wittgenstein who resolutely criticized such theories, we need to recognize that Wittgenstein felt the pull of both these impulses – the attractions of philosophical theorizing, and the critical attack on those theories – throughout his life. We can see the dialectic between these impulses at work in every stage of his career. However, it takes on a particularly central role in the transitional period that begins with his return to Cambridge in 1929 and ends with the composition of the ‘Early Investigations’ in Norway in 1936–37. I will explore what would be involved in applying this view in the case of §§243–315 and its antecedents in §3.
§3 In construing any particular passage, whether the remark in question is omitted, deleted or reused unchanged in later material, the interpreter faces the task of working out the author’s considered view of the ideas in question. Similarly, one has to consider whether a passage that occurs in a number of different contexts has the same meaning in each case. To what extent, or under what circumstances, can one make use of the significance of the passage in its original context to shed light on its meaning in a later rearrangement? (Hilmy, 1987; Stern, 2004, 5.2.) Indeed, the material ultimately included in the Philosophical Investigations calls for just as much interpretive caution as the deleted and omitted writing. For the book is a dialogue between a number of voices, which are usually not clearly identified. Much of what is said there consists of attempts to express ‘what we are “tempted to say” ’ about philosophical problems, which is ‘of course, not philosophy; but is its raw material’ (§254). In the case of a full-voiced statement of such a temptation, enclosed in quotation marks, with an immediate response in the text, the interlocutory character of the words is unmistakable. Such cases include the following examples: ‘But I can (inwardly) undertake to call THIS “pain” in the future.’ (§263)
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‘Once you know what the word stands for, you understand it, you know its whole use.’ (§264) However, in many other cases, it is not so easy to tell Wittgenstein’s provocations from his ‘philosophical treatment’ (§245) of them. A great deal of stage-setting is presupposed in Wittgenstein’s presentation of his ideas, and must be taken into careful consideration if we are to make sense of his words. For instance, in §495, we read that ‘it may be all one to us whether someone has learned the language, or was perhaps from birth constituted to react to sentences in German like a normal person who has learned German’. At first blush, we might take this as evidence that the author of the Philosophical Investigations regards the fact that speakers of a language have learned that language as philosophically irrelevant and maintains that it is entirely conceivable that we might have been born with innate knowledge of our language (as Hacker does; see Chapter 6). However, there is reason to be cautious here. For the quote in question is part of a passage where we are being asked to look at learning the language as ‘adjusting a mechanism to respond to a certain kind of influence’ (§495). A few remarks earlier, Wittgenstein explicitly contrast two ways of conceiving of the invention of a language. The first, namely, ‘invent[ing] an instrument for a particular purpose on the basis of the laws of nature’ (§492) is clearly the one under discussion in §495; the other, a familiar and central theme in the Philosophical Investigations, is ‘analogous to that in which we speak of the invention of a game’ (ibid). Consider also the following example of a passage in the Philosophical Investigations which one might take as evidence that Wittgenstein held that it is conceivable that a solitary individual could invent a language. At the beginning of §257, at a crucial stage in the discussion of a private language, Wittgenstein is exploring the imaginary scenario, proposed at the very end of §256, in which I don’t have ‘any natural expression of my sensation, but only had the sensation. And now I simply associate names with sensations and use these names in descriptions.’ §257 opens with a question and reply, all enclosed in quotation marks, making the point that ‘if human beings showed no outward signs of pain’, ‘it would be impossible to teach a child the use of the word “tooth-ache” ’. It is not entirely clear who speaks each of the next six sentences, mostly interspersed with single dashes, that make up the middle of this remark; they are more like a series of reflections on the issues raised by the opening material,
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than a clear back and forth dialogue. They begin with the following exclamation: – Well, let’s assume the child is a genius and invents a name for the sensation by himself! It is possible to construe them as the narrator’s way of moving the discussion along, or as the interlocutor’s impatient reply or as part of an indecisive soliloquy. But regardless of who speaks here, the very fact that the view in question is expressed at this point does nothing to settle the question what Wittgenstein would have had to say about it. However, that question is not left hanging for long, for the rest of the remark goes on to raise a number of pointed questions about the imagined act of inventing a name for a sensation that cannot be named in a public language. – But what does it mean to say that he has ‘named his pain’? – How has he done this naming of pain?! And whatever he did, what was its purpose? The answer that follows is not a direct answer to those questions, but rather a reminder of what we overlook when we imagine that a superchild could invent a super-private word for a pain all by himself, or when we say that such a thing is logically possible, and thus conceivable, albeit not practically possible: – When one says ‘He gave a name to his sensation’ one forgets that a great deal of stage-setting in the language is presupposed if the mere act of naming is to make sense. And when we speak of someone’s having given a name to pain, what is presupposed is the existence of the grammar of the word ‘pain’; it shows the post where the new word is stationed. This is not a grammatical claim about the meaning of the words in question, but rather a reminder about the ‘natural history of human beings’ (§415), about how language and practice are intimately interwoven. To be more specific, it is a point about what must already be in place before we can give any ostensive definition that Wittgenstein has already insisted on in the discussion of that topic in §§28–38. Looking back at the history of this remark’s composition, we can see how Wittgenstein’s reflections on the stage-setting that an act of ostension
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presupposes antedate his first explicit discussion of a ‘private language’. However, for present purposes, it also provides an excellent example of why one cannot take an idea presented in the course of Wittgenstein’s polished discussion of a topic, such as the idea of the language-inventing child genius, at face value as an example of something the author regards as a possible scenario. Because Wittgenstein discusses any number of scenarios that he ultimately aims to convince us are nonsensical, we cannot infer from the fact that he discusses a given scenario that he regards it as philosophically unobjectionable. Likewise, in the case of a ‘suppressed’ or, to be more cautious, omitted passage, judgement is called for as to whether the author ultimately endorsed what was said in that passage. He may have seen no need to make use of it, either because he regarded it as obvious, or perhaps because it came to seem to lie at a tangent to the main course of discussion. On the other hand, the author may have given up the ideas set out in that passage altogether, or may have arrived at some more equivocal view about the value of that material. Thus, great caution is needed in handling Hacker’s claim that ‘Wittgenstein’s numerous discussions of Robinson Crusoe, solitary cavemen, etc. demonstrate [that] there is no conceptual incoherence in imagining a person following a rule in an asocial context’ (1993, p. 4). Hacker contends that the fact that ‘Wittgenstein discussed solitary people who follow unshared rules in many different manuscripts in his Nachlass’ including manuscripts ‘more or less contemporaneous with the Intermediate Draft (ZF), in which the bulk of the arguments concerning following rules and a private language are already in place’ shows that he cannot have held that ‘following a rule is essentially a social practice’, for if he had, he would not have seriously entertained such scenarios (all quotes are from Hacker’s chapter in this book). Furthermore, given that there is no explicit evidence that Wittgenstein subsequently changed his mind, Hacker holds we should attribute that position to the author of the Investigations, even though he concedes there is very little evidence, if any, within that book in support of the view that solitary language use is possible. In assessing this attribution of individualism to the Philosophical Investigations, we need to start by distinguishing a number of subtly different monological scenarios. These can be placed on a spectrum from the entirely conceivable – such as Defoe’s shipwrecked Crusoe soliloquizing – to the most provocatively nonsensical – such as the case of a child genius in a world where there are no outward signs of pain, knows no language at all, yet invents a name for a sensation by himself. Rather
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than beginning by drawing a sharp line between scenarios that are ruled out by grammar, and scenarios that are logically possible – some of which may be actual and some of which may be ruled out by facts of nature – we need to explore these various scenarios one by one, and see whether they are indeed as coherent as they seem to be at first sight. However, we can narrow the field of relevant scenarios substantially once we observe that many of the cases Wittgenstein discusses in his manuscripts are not the cases of completely socially isolated language users that would be needed to lend support to individualism, but merely cases of people who are not currently part of a speech community, such as Defoe’s shipwrecked mariner. As Claudine Verheggen has suggested, the relevant notion we need here is that of a solitary language: one that an individual has acquired and uses in complete social isolation but whose words are connected to things that are publicly accessible, such as the individual’s behaviour or objects and events in her environment. So a solitary language could in principle be understood by other people and is in that sense a public language. (Verheggen, 1995, p. 329) As Verheggen observes, the monologists of §243 do ‘not warrant the claim that Wittgenstein did suggest that a solitary language is possible’ (ibid). For Wittgenstein does not say anything there about whether they developed and maintained their monological languages without any background of interpersonal communication. Even if they never spoke to each other, watching and listening to each other, which is not ruled out, would be enough to make their use of language non-solitary. It is the possibility of a solitary language, not just a monological one, that is the crucial issue for the individualist reading of the Philosophical Investigations, and there is no evidence within the Philosophical Investigations that Wittgenstein is convinced that such a language is possible. Indeed, consider his discussion of the case of William James’ deafmute Mr Ballard, ‘who wrote that in his early youth, even before he could speak, he had had thoughts about God and the world’ (§342). Wittgenstein regarded this supposed case of the recollection of an autonomous, but non-solitary, invention of an inner language of thought as so ‘queer’ that he did ‘not know what conclusions one can draw from them about the past of the man who recounts them’ (ibid). He does not categorically assert, as a card-carrying communitarian would, that such a case is impossible, nor does he insist, as a full-blooded individualist would, that it is entirely possible. Instead,
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his treatment of the story is remarkably cautious and restrained. In the sequel, the interlocutor defends the possibility of people who only speak to themselves, arguing that we can conceive of a community of deafmutes who ‘have learned only a gesture-language, but each of them talks to himself inwardly in a vocal language’ (§348). Note that this is not a strictly solitary language, for the deaf-mutes share a gesture language. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein’s narrator responds that there is something fishy here; just like the Ballard case, it is one where he does not know whether he is to say he understands or doesn’t. The proposed scenario ‘has a connexion with other sentences which makes it difficult for us to say that nobody really knows what it tells us; but everyone who has not become calloused by doing philosophy notices that there is something wrong here’ (§348). In reply, the interlocutor insists that the scenario is conceivable: ‘But this supposition surely makes good sense!’ (§349) The narrator’s reply here is one that could equally well be applied to the case of a solitary language speaker: ‘Yes; in ordinary circumstances these words and this picture have an application with which we are familiar. – But if we suppose a case in which this application falls away we become as it were conscious for the first time of the nakedness of the words and the picture.’ (§349) A defender of the individualistic reading can respond that it is surely significant that Wittgenstein did not actually say this about solitary language use, and that he surely would have done so if he had given up the idea that it is a possibility. As David Pears observes, Wittgenstein repeatedly sidesteps the question whether ‘Super-Crusoe’s solitary vocalizations necessarily fail to count as a language’ (2006, p. 62). Instead Wittgenstein gives an unqualified negative answer to the question whether it is ‘possible that there should have been only one occasion on which someone obeyed a rule’ (§200; cf. RFM, III, §67). But ‘These are evasions. What they parry is the demand for crisp, sharp-edged definitions of calculating or speaking a language. The reason for not meeting the demand is that these concepts do not have structures that can be cut out and pinned in the classical way’ (Pears, 2006, p. 62; cf. 1988, pp. 371–88). In much the same way as we know what a game is, yet are unable to provide a watertight definition (§75; see also §§66 ff.), we know what it is to speak a language, yet are unable to provide necessary and sufficient conditions. In §494, Wittgenstein writes: ‘I want to say: It is primarily the apparatus of our ordinary language, of our word-language, that we call language; and then other things by analogy or comparability with this.’ Because there are significant analogies and comparisons that can be drawn in cases such as Mr Ballard and
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Super-Crusoe, we cannot simply say that grammar rules them out; however, when we try to fill in those stories, we may find that they fall apart, and we are left wondering why they mattered so much to us.
Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
For further discussion, see Stern, 1995 and forthcoming A. See MS 165, p. 5 and pp. 88–124, discussed by Hacker, 1993a, pp. 18–21. See Cavell, 1979; Mulhall, 2007; Stern, 2004 and forthcoming B. See Stern, 1996; Schulte, 2006. See Stern, 1995, on Philosophical Remarks §48 and Big Typescript, pp. 496–7; Kienzler, 1997 and 2001, on the ‘Wiederaufnahme’. 6. For further defence of this approach to Wittgenstein’s method, see Schulte, 2002; Stern, 2004, ch. 5.
8 Concepts and Concept-Formation Joachim Schulte
One feature of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts of the 1940s that will strike the reader is the fact that the notion of a concept is nowhere in his writings examined with more intensity and frequency than in his later manuscripts on the philosophy of mathematics and in those on the philosophy of psychology. I use these labels with a good deal of hesitation, but they serve the purpose of identifying the manuscripts I mean. The same manuscripts show an unusual frequency of certain compound expressions like Begriffsverwirrung (conceptual confusion), Begriffswelt (conceptual world) and, in particular, Begriffsbildung (formation of concepts). A notorious remark is Wittgenstein’s observation that conceptformation is the limit of the empirical.1 Taken out of context, this brief statement is far from clear. But even if one takes its context into account, it is more a concise way of expressing a number of questions than an explanation of difficulties that have bothered us for a long time. One point that seems clear is that the formation of concepts is something that we, as a collective body or sub-group of human beings, achieve. Another point that is obvious in Wittgenstein’s eyes is that concepts are a matter of our use of language. In a lecture he says that ‘a concept is a technique of using a word’, and similar formulations can be found in his manuscripts.2 An image that is used repeatedly is that of concepts channelling our experience. We get the impression, Wittgenstein says, that concept-formation conducts our experience into particular channels, so that one experience is now seen together with the new one in a hitherto unfamiliar way. What corresponds to this is that a change in concepts – a transition from one concept-formation to another – will involve that the abandoned concept remains present in the background.3 A typical consequence of the introduction of a concept is that now we feel justified in 128
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using the word ‘must’ where, without conceptual connections, we used to say ‘This is the case’ or ‘That will happen’. To speak of conceptual necessity – to use the word ‘must’ in this way to express inexorability (die Unerbittlichkeit des logischen Muss) – seems to signify that we cannot depart from a certain concept: that we cannot leave the path it traces out for us. But in characteristic fashion Wittgenstein adds the question whether it would not be better to say that we do not want to depart from this concept.4 Of course, this is the sort of remark Wittgenstein typically makes in the context of examining our notion of a proof and what we expect proofs to be able to accomplish. This is not my topic, but it will be helpful to remember his remarks to the effect that in mathematics a new proof will affect our concepts and eventually change them. Such a proof will play a particular role, the role of a paradigmatic procedure, and as such it will be stored in the archives of our language, as Wittgenstein says.5 Accordingly, one expects that proofs and the concepts shaped by them can serve as standards of conceptual clarification and thus help to remedy conceptual confusion. In Wittgenstein’s view, the clearing up of conceptual confusions is a central task of the philosopher. But the nature of concepts is not a matter that was systematically discussed by the champion of familyresemblance concepts and the idea that many of our concepts have blurred edges. Still, as I pointed out, Wittgenstein’s remarks on the philosophy of psychology, just as his writings on the foundations of mathematics, are generously sprinkled with observations on concepts and concept-formation. Perhaps the most striking passage is a wellknown remark, namely section xii of Part II of the Investigations. I shall now quote a slightly modified translation of this section and then proceed to highlight a few points that seem particularly noteworthy. If concept-formation can be explained by facts of nature, shouldn’t we be interested not in grammar, but rather in that which is its basis in nature? – We are, indeed, also interested in the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest is not reflected back into these possible causes of concept-formation; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history – since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different, people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). Rather: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the
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correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. Compare a concept with a style of painting. Is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian, for instance.) Or is it just a matter of pretty and ugly? This section emphasizes the idea that philosophical reflections are very remote from scientific ones. This idea is a constant in Wittgenstein’s thought and can be found in his earliest manuscripts as well as in his last writings. Wittgenstein says that even if we are interested in the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature, this will not require us to take an interest in the causes, or possible causes, of the formation of our concepts. As philosophers we have no need to know anything about such causes – ‘since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes’ or, as he puts it in a much earlier remark to a similar effect: ‘In this respect we are quite prepared to believe anything.’6 The three paragraphs making up the quoted section xii do not come from the very same period of Wittgenstein’s thought. The first two go back to MS 130, and hence to the summer of 1946, whereas the third paragraph, which mentions the Egyptian style of painting, comes from MS 137, and was written in February 1948. All these remarks went through at least one or two further stages of revision before they arrived at their last formulations. A look at the original manuscript context shows more clearly than the printed version that Wittgenstein is aware of a certain degree of legitimacy of asking whether his way of doing philosophy involved, or ought to involve, scientific procedures. What he does not make explicit is the fact that his use of the word Begriffsbildung (‘concept-formation’) can make this question appear particularly urgent. He wonders if describing our concept-formations does not in reality amount to a kind of closet science (verkappte Naturwissenschaft). Here I take it that in one sense ‘describing our concept-formations’ means a description of the result of the process of concept-formation. What is to be described is the use of the concepts we have, not the process of forming them. It is only when we consider this process that a scientific attitude seems more natural: only if we want to learn how it has come about that we have those concepts that we happen to have do we want to be told a causal story. So, in a way it is the very word Begriffsbildung with its ambiguity between
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process and result that can mislead us into thinking that a description of our use of concepts ought to be based on a scientific account of how we have come to have these concepts. It is clear that Wittgenstein rejects the idea of bringing in scientific methods and findings. His reason is simple: it is a matter of interest. We (as philosophers) are, as he says in his manuscript, not interested in making predictions; accordingly, we are not interested in finding out about possible and real causes of concept-formation. In an instructive but crossed-out passage he writes that all he wants to do is to state and arrange things: Wir konstatieren und ordnen nur (MS 130, p. 72). And then he goes on to say that what he is interested in is natural history, not natural science, and even in natural history he is interested only to the extent it serves to illuminate things. At this point of the manuscript remark, Wittgenstein reconsiders the matter and crosses out what he has written. Now he puts it differently and writes that as philosophers we do not even do natural history: if we need any natural history for our purposes, we are free to invent it. Wittgenstein’s hesitation over the word ‘natural history’ is very revealing.7 It indicates that he is inclined to make a clear distinction between natural science and natural history: he does not tend to see the two as shading into one another. This agrees with the tone of well-known remarks like §§25 and 415 of the Investigations, where he says that ‘giving orders, asking questions, telling stories, having a chat, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing’, and that ‘What we [that is, Wittgenstein] are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings’. Still, even natural history of the philosophically useful kind does not deal with fictional stories; it makes ‘observations that no one has doubted’ and ‘which have escaped notice only because they are always before our eyes’. Philosophy, however, is not limited to facts when it strives to give an account of our concepts, even if it does, and ought to, remember that these concepts are products of an historical development – of a process of concept-formation. For philosophy it is not only legitimate to invent fictitious natural history; doing so can even be positively useful. As Wittgenstein points out in the second paragraph of section xii and its manuscript sources, thinking about the possibility of deviant or invented kinds of facts of nature can help us to arrive at two insights. First, we may notice that having different concepts from our usual ones does not mean that one is bound to overlook something that is simply there to be seen. Second, imagining the natural world different from the way it actually is will help to render unfamiliar kinds of
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concept-formation intelligible. Or, as he puts it in an earlier version of this remark: ‘If you imagine certain general facts of nature to be different from the way they are, concept-formations different from ours will seem natural to you’ (RPP I, §48). This point is connected with another idea of Wittgenstein which constitutes a typical feature of his style of philosophizing. Why should one, as he often does, invent anomalies or divergent ways of thinking? His answer is that this is a useful test for the simple reason that if you cannot perform this feat, this will show that you do not know your way around the relevant conceptual terrain (RPP II, §605). These observations require a certain amount of explanation, and again a look at the manuscript sources can be helpful. What is striking is not only the fact that Wittgenstein declines to show any interest in hypotheses linking natural developments with certain features of our concepts but also the perspective from which he discusses the possibility of different kinds of concepts. In his manuscript notes he writes: All I say is: If you believe that these concepts are the only correct ones, the only ones that are worthy of highly developed human beings, then you should imagine nature different from the way it is, and quite different concept-formations will no longer seem unnatural to you. (MS 137, p. 76) What Wittgenstein emphasizes here is that our concepts need not be the only respectable ones. Not content with making it clear that we might have had quite different sorts of concepts, he also wants to underline that we should beware of conceptual chauvinism. This, I think, adds another facet to what he himself called his ‘ethnological’8 method: an almost ethical dimension closely connected with his objections to what he judged to be philistine, or imperialist, ways of imposing our own categories on other people whom we tend to regard as less advanced than ourselves. While section xii as printed only mentions the possibility of rendering unfamiliar concept-formations intelligible, the manuscripts speak of impressions of naturalness or unnaturalness. At first glance this may look like a minor stylistic difference, but the manuscript context shows that originally Wittgenstein had certain contrasts in mind that are not explicit in the later version. In his manuscript, Wittgenstein proceeds to emphasize his choice of the word ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘necessary’, and the word ‘necessary’ is then glossed as ‘functional’, ‘practical’ or ‘expedient’ (the German word is zweckmässig) (MS 130, p. 78).
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But Wittgenstein continues to mention another sense of ‘necessary’, which I find particularly illuminating. By way of giving various examples he introduces what one might call a ‘physiognomic’ sense of the word ‘necessary’. He mentions arrangements of multi-coloured flowers that can easily be memorized and acquire a kind of ‘face’ or ‘physiognomy’ or ‘character’. Of these, Wittgenstein says that each has its own ‘necessity’ (MS 130, p. 79). And he goes on to assert that such faces are accepted into one’s ‘gallery of models or paradigms’ – a phrase which is of course strongly reminiscent of what he says about placing a demonstration in our archives of mathematical rules. The necessity appertaining to such Beweisbilder (‘proof-pictures’), as he calls them, is of course not of the kind normally attributed to analytic or mathematical or logical truths. It is all of a piece with the necessity which, according to Wittgenstein, characterizes the way in which the second idea in the overture to Figaro follows from the first.9 We know what gestures to make if we want to clarify what we mean by speaking of ‘necessity’ here, but no proper explanation is forthcoming. The real paradigm behind it remains ‘obscure’, as Wittgenstein observes. We can adduce parallels, comparisons and other examples, but then we cannot say more than ‘That is how this piece fits into the world of our thoughts and feelings’ (MS 134, p. 78, 30.3.1947; CV, p. 65). In other words, tradition, habit, familiarity, training, a whole culture are invoked to elucidate what is meant by ‘necessity’ here. But if we understand the word ‘necessary’ in the sense alluded to just now, what follows from that for the contrast between naturalness and necessity emphasized in Wittgenstein’s original manuscript version of our remark? However we reply to this question, our answer will contain an element of speculation. But I think that considerations along the following lines may be helpful. A contrast that Wittgenstein may have had in mind is that between man as an animal and man as a member of his culture. In that sense, what seems natural (or unnatural) to man as an animal belongs to a different category from that to which we may assign things that can display the sort of ‘physiognomic’ necessity to which I have alluded. One may even want to say that the second, more sophisticated, category presupposes the category of what seems ‘natural’ to us in the sense of being instinctive or primitive. This would fit a number of things Wittgenstein says in his later writings, for example his remark that We have an idea of which forms of life are primitive, and which could only have developed out of these. We believe that the simplest
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plough existed before the complicated one. (PO, p. 397 (trans. modified), 21.10.1937) If this is the sense of the word ‘natural’ that Wittgenstein had in mind when writing down the manuscript version of the first two paragraphs of section xii, then this would fit the original observation that he was interested in natural history – an observation that he crossed out when he noticed that he wanted to include fictitious natural history, and that fictitious natural history is not natural history. One reason why I have told this complicated story is that I wish to point out a potential tension or conflict in Wittgenstein’s thought. This is a tension or conflict between the idea of naturalness, instinct and primitiveness as features of man’s natural history, on the one hand, and the notion of necessity as a feature attributed to certain products of man’s culture, on the other – be they works of music, mathematical proofs or concepts. A conflict can arise because what is natural may easily seem necessary and what possesses physiognomic necessity may easily seem natural. The conflict is one between the paradigmatic members of these classes which form centres of gravity pulling in opposite directions. And the conflict is exacerbated if we confuse these different levels and ascribe to elements of one class what should only be said of elements of the other class. In the first two paragraphs of the printed section xii the potential conflict I have spoken of does not arise for the simple reason that Wittgenstein crossed out or dropped those words or remarks that could have led his readers to notice a tension in his thought. The third paragraph, however, which was written much later, seems to tip the scales in the opposite direction: whereas the earlier remarks, in their original context, overemphasized the dependence of concept-formation on natural history, the third paragraph accentuates the cultural element. To quote it again: Compare a concept with a style of painting. For is even our style of painting arbitrary? Can we choose one at pleasure? (The Egyptian, for instance.) Or is it just a matter of pretty and ugly? As a matter of fact, comparisons with styles of painting occur in several parts of Wittgenstein’s writings. In one particularly instructive, selfcritical passage he compares himself to someone who tries to employ the impressionist style of painting but nonetheless continues to paint what one does not see; that is, he compares himself to a painter who
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remains stuck with a traditional and admittedly misleading way of representing things (MS 135, p. 186, 16.12.1947). Another instance is §401 of Philosophical Investigations, which contains the following splendid description of what it means to make a grammatical move or arriving at a new conception of something. This, Wittgenstein writes, is ‘as if you had invented a new style of painting; or again, a new metre, or a new kind of song’. In our remark, however, the analogy with a new style of painting is meant to bring out that we are by no means free to choose or devise our concepts as we please. It is not a matter of prettiness or ugliness. It is a matter of getting something across, and that is conditional on agreement in language and judgements, as Wittgenstein says in a well-known passage of the Investigations.10 For a style of painting to be recognizable as a style, more contextual conditions have to be satisfied than we would ever care or be able to enumerate. Wittgenstein often tries to refer to such conditions – which are relevant to concepts just as much as to styles of painting – in a summary way by expressions like ‘language game’, ‘technique’ or, occasionally, ‘form of life’. Talking about concepts in this general way is not without its own risks and pitfalls. Wittgenstein is aware of this and accordingly notes on the manuscript page after the comparison with styles of painting (MS 137, pp. 8b–9a) that it would be hazardous to say that our concepts show the way in which we look at the world. But still, he adds, there is some truth in this way of putting it; only that it is not so much a matter of how we look at things but of how we deal with them. To understand the role of concepts we have to take into account not only what we perceive and think but all kinds of practical aspects. And here again Wittgenstein wonders whether our concepts might be different if our life and our environment were of a different kind. If this is not meant as a scientific hypothesis, he continues, then he would indeed say that having different concepts means playing different language games and living a different kind of life.11 And here he adds an extremely important qualification: A ‘different kind of life’ means one which is similar to ours, for otherwise it would not be regarded as a kind of life and would hence fail to be of interest to us. Using Wittgenstein’s own way of talking we may summarize his view by saying that in order to play an instructive role in our considerations unfamiliar concepts must be recognizable as variations on our own concepts; and a different type of life must be recognizable as a variation on our own life. It is this sort of reasoning which lies behind the great number of ‘life’ metaphors Wittgenstein employs in his manuscripts of the
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time between 1946 and 1949. Thus, he speaks not only of ‘forms’ of life but also of ‘patterns’ and ‘the stencil’ of life. Perhaps the most impressive and at the same time puzzling one among these metaphors is that of the tapestry (or, literally, the carpet) of life when he says that certain psychological concepts describe patterns which recur, with different variations, in the carpet of life.12 Let us go back to the paragraph where Wittgenstein asks us to compare a concept with a style of painting. I think his phrasing makes it clear that not even our style of painting is arbitrary, and that we are not free to choose a style as we please. But if this is really what Wittgenstein wants to suggest, then his remark is truly difficult to understand. For imagine that we are, technically speaking, good enough at painting pictures and fairly knowledgeable about the history of art. What could it mean then to say that I cannot simply choose to paint in the Egyptian style? Obviously, this is not only possible but it is done every day. Many people are interested in the culture of ancient Egypt, and many try to understand it by way of learning its script as well as copying or painting pictures in the Egyptian style. So, why on earth does Wittgenstein suggest that doing so is out of the question? The only answer I can think of is complicated and speculative, and it is connected with what I said about physiognomic necessity (as opposed to instinctive naturalness) and about ways of looking at or dealing with the world. To notice something like a physiognomic necessity you will have to know a lot about the culture in which this necessity is expressed. In cases like the overture to Figaro this is obvious: musically uneducated members of our own civilization or members of other cultures will not know what we are talking about when we use the kind of phrase employed by Wittgenstein in speaking of the necessity of one musical idea following another. But in this as in many comparable cases knowledge in a fairly theoretical sense of the word will not suffice to grasp this sort of remark. Theoretical knowledge, practice, skill and a lot of time will sometimes not be enough to understand certain ways of talking even if you know the meanings of the words and the grammar – and here my speaking of ‘words’ and ‘grammar’ is of course meant in a way that is not restricted to strictly linguistic utterances. If you were born and raised at the wrong time and in the wrong place, the likelihood of your picking up the cultural ways of the Egyptians is nil. As regards the Egyptians, we were all born at the wrong time and in the wrong place: the only thing we can do is copy or imitate what they did. One may even paint new pictures in the Egyptian manner, but these will be paintings by a person who has seen works by Rembrandt and Cézanne. We other
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latecomers may be quite unable to distinguish these pictures from genuine Egyptian paintings, but for all that they are not additions to the canon of old Egyptian artworks, just as computer-generated music in the style of Mozart does not belong in the Köchel catalogue of Mozart’s works. In suggesting that you cannot choose to paint in the Egyptian style Wittgenstein probably means this in a particular sense. He obviously does not mean it in the sense that you cannot paint something that looks vaguely Egyptian to yourself and other members of your culture. He means it in the sense in which you cannot even try to paint such a picture for the simple reason that you were not born and raised in ancient Egypt. This is where ways of seeing and dealing with things come in: the claim is that these form part of certain periods and places, just as paintings and overtures do. Again, in a certain sense I may know more about Renaissance Florence and about those Florentines’ ways of looking at and dealing with things than anybody who was alive and active at that time and in that place, but I shall never acquire their ways of looking at and dealing with things – and the impossibility I am alluding to is not a physical one; historical distance is, as it were, built into concepts like ‘Renaissance’, ‘Egyptian style’, ‘Louis XIV’ and, even though less obviously so, into many other concepts as well.13 I want to explain what I am driving at by employing an image used by Wittgenstein himself. In a manuscript passage written in 1947 he says that terminology (the words we use) is visible, whereas the technique (of applying these terms) is invisible (RPP I, §911). In my view, this can be regarded as implying that invisible techniques of application cannot be recovered once their context is past. They may leave traces or sediment, but the techniques themselves are gone as soon as their practitioners have passed away. The ‘visible’ signs, the terminology, can be preserved, copied, reconstructed, imitated and so on; the ‘invisible’ technique of applying those terms is lost, simply because the cultural air we breathe is different from that which made those terms come alive. Of course, we are meant to apply all this to concepts. It is clear that we can learn a good deal about the use of words, and hence about concepts, even if the culture whose concepts they are or were is very remote. What Wittgenstein means and what we are discussing here has nothing to do with that ‘conceptual relativism’ which seems to be the pet bugbear of much recent philosophy. But what we can learn about is only part of the use of these words: it is the as it were visible part, while the invisible technique is irretrievably lost. It was never there to be retrieved, as it existed only in virtue of the people whose technique it was. The
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Egyptian style of painting was not merely a way of putting the right kind of paint on the right kind of surface; it also required the eyes and the hands of people who lived in the same atmosphere in which paintings in that style were created. I have indicated that occasionally in Wittgenstein’s writings a certain tension can be felt between what belongs to man as an animal and what belongs to man as a more or less sophisticated member of a culture. In part this tension is due to the fact that, on the one hand, many of our concepts rest squarely on instinctive behaviour and animal needs while, on the other, there are many fine shades of meaning and nuances of phrasing that go with cultural developments and refinements of man’s conceptual resources. One form in which this second tendency can find expression is the idea of ‘physiognomic’ necessity alluded to before. Very roughly speaking, one can regard it as permissible to associate the nature-based tendency with what is or can easily be rendered visible, whereas our culture-based techniques remain invisible.14 It may well be possible to connect this admittedly vague opposition with other contrasts that can be found in Wittgenstein’s writings, and in particular in his manuscripts from the 1940s. Here, I shall content myself with mentioning the ideas of ‘fine shades of behaviour’ (as opposed to obvious and easily classifiable behaviour) and of imponderable (as opposed to ponderable) evidence.15 Both ideas are discussed in the manuscripts of the late 1940s, and the notion of imponderable evidence is explicitly linked with that of connoisseurship. It is, as Wittgenstein says, an ‘important fact [. . .] that we learn certain things only through long experience and not from a course in school’ (LW I, §925). He emphasizes that often it is the case that connoisseurs cannot justify their verdicts; and even if we believe what they say, it is not their reasons that we find convincing. Justification and convincing reasons, I take it, are at home in those parts of our conceptual terrain that can be seen to rest squarely on our animal nature. Informed hunches and the verdicts of connoisseurs belong to the slippery parts of that terrain. There may be good reasons to think that the point about fictitious history doing as well as factual history for certain philosophical purposes will hold for cultural history just as much as it will hold for natural history. What Wittgenstein wants to underline seems to be a certain non-arbitrariness of concept-formation that can be understood by considering fictitious history as well as by considering factual history. But perhaps this is a question that deserves further examination. What I want to emphasize here is that the various analogies, comparisons and images drawn upon come, not from a finished work of Wittgenstein’s,
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but from his manuscripts or first revisions of these. True, I have nearly exclusively relied on manuscript notes written during one fairly short and well-circumscribed period, but still, it must be remembered that all these analogies and images do not clearly figure as coordinated parts of one and the same project Wittgenstein had in mind. Often, I think, they are tentative ways of indicating possible approaches to possible projects. For this reason, it will not always be feasible or advisable to make Wittgenstein’s images and analogies coexist in harmony. Thus, while talking, as he does, about conceptual ‘geography’16 or conceptual ‘worlds’ may suggest a considerable degree of stability or even immutability of our concepts and their relations, a number of perhaps even more powerful images points the other way and can be seen to accentuate flexibility and transitoriness. In conclusion, I want to connect some of the things I have said with two images Wittgenstein uses in his writings from the 1940s. Both images were devised to throw some light on the notions of a concept and concept-formation. In one place Wittgenstein worries that what he means by a concept is still very obscure to him. He underlines the word ‘concept’ (Begriff ) and goes on to say that when he speaks of a concept he thinks of ‘the technique of our use of an expression: as it were, the railway network that we have built for it’ (MS 163, p. 57r). This is an idea that he returns to several times in these pages. He speaks of ‘concepts and conceptual paths’ (or, perhaps, ‘rails’ or ‘conduits’) and mentions ‘conceptual connections’. In particular, he talks about new conceptual paths and says that ‘[the expression] “You prepare new conceptual paths” means: you create new means of representation’ (MS 163, p. 60v). So, this is one image intended to capture part of what is involved in concept-formation. What we should remember is the emphasis on our creating the means for moving between different parts of the conceptual terrain and on the importance of the fact that concepts are instruments or vehicles for getting from one part of that terrain to another. Wittgenstein himself connects these ideas with a second image when he speaks of conceptual slopes or inclines.17 The German words are Böschungen and Abhänge, and in at least two places the image is explained by using it as a paraphrase of the idea of a transition. At one point he writes that for us (i.e. for Wittgenstein) the steeper and the more gentle slopes of our concepts are especially interesting (MS 163, p. 57v). He also speaks of the gradual inclination or steep drop of our concepts. And then he goes on to say that it is this conceptual inclination or drop which justifies our use of certain expressions as opposed to other ones. I think one has to reflect a bit on this image of the sloping
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or dropping away of our concepts to see its force. Still, it may not be altogether clear what its force really amounts to. I am inclined to think that Wittgenstein’s claim that the sloping of a concept justifies our using this expression rather than that expression is connected with the idea of getting from one concept to another. It is not so much a matter of moving across disputable or yielding territory, but a matter of being helped or hindered in the attempt to get from concept A to concept B. But I may well be wrong about this. What I am fairly sure about, though, is that finding one’s way across these slopes is a task for sophisticated people: it requires a lot of experience and skills that cannot be learned ‘from a course in school’. If these skills can be taught at all, instruction will proceed by way of hints or giving clues. And what can become visible to one learner may forever remain invisible to another.
Notes 1. MS 125, pp. 41v ff., cf. RFM, p. 237. What Wittgenstein seems to have in mind when, in his remarks from the early 1940s, he discusses the limits of the empirical is a kind of approach that would result in assimilating mathematical sentences to empirical ones. This kind of approach would construe mathematical concepts along the same lines as empirical ones. According to Wittgenstein, Ramsey had a tendency to ignore or overlook differences between mathematical and empirical (scientific) ways of talking. The wellknown remark ‘Nicht Empirie und doch Realismus in der Philosophie, das ist das schwerste. (Gegen Ramsey.)’ (RFM, p. 325) is one expression of Wittgenstein’s objections to Ramsey’s views on this matter. Here the English translation (‘Not empiricism and yet realism’) seems rather unfortunate. It is clear that Wittgenstein does not specifically or primarily mean the tradition exemplified by Locke, Hume, Mill and Russell. What he objects to are applications or transpositions of empirical (scientific) methods and ways of thinking to mathematics and our understanding of mathematics. What Wittgenstein means by ‘realism’ is far from obvious, but this is surely not the place to hazard a guess. 2. LPP, p. 50. Cf. the passage from MS 163, p. 57r, quoted below. 3. MS 125, pp. 44r–44v. Cf. RFM, p. 238. 4. MS 125, p. 44r. Cf. RFM, p. 238. 5. MS 122, pp. 55v and 72r (21 and 31 December 1939). Cf. RFM, p. 165. 6. MS 110, p. 284 (4 July 1931). The whole passage is interesting, also because its use of the term ‘grammar’ is not clearly reconcilable with the sort of view Wittgenstein puts forward in his later writings. The passage runs as follows: ‘All we can do is give descriptions, since causal connections, i.e. the actual succession of events, do not interest us (for in this respect we are quite prepared to believe anything). And the connections that will then remain are formal ones, which cannot be described but express themselves in grammar.’ – All translations of manuscript passages are my own. 7. For Wittgenstein’s use of the term ‘natural history’, see my 2004.
Joachim Schulte 141 8. See MS 123, p. 11r; MS 124, p. 253; MS 162b, p. 67v. 9. Cf. RFM, p. 370, where Wittgenstein compares Brahms’s variations on a theme by Haydn to ways of solving mathematical problems. 10. PI, §§241–2. It is interesting to note that in MS 129 an early version of PI §242 can be found on the same page as a slightly modified version of the Empirie vs. Realismus remark (which in its turn follows a draft of PI §240). Cf. note 1, above. 11. It is advisable to distinguish between two central meanings of the term ‘language game’. In one sense, language games function as ‘objects of comparison’: they are (like) calculi which can be employed to highlight certain features of our uses of linguistic expressions. In a second sense, language games are contextually specifiable ways of using our expressions. It is in this second sense that playing different language games involves leading a different kind of life. For the notion of a language game, see my 2004a. 12. See LW I, §§402, 862; PI, II, i, p. 174. Cf. LW II, p. 42. Wittgenstein’s unusual expression Lebensteppich is reminiscent of the title of one of Stefan George’s cycles of poems (Der Teppich des Lebens, 1899). There is a reference to George in the manuscript draft of RPP I, §1087 (MS 135, p. 53v, 28.7.1947). It has been pointed out to me by Severin Schroeder that there are earlier occurrences of this expression, for instance in Schiller (e.g., see Maria Stuart, I. vi. 15). 13. For the identifiability of what falls under the concept ‘Louis XIV’, see LW I, §§751 and 753. §752 mentions the idea of ‘conceptual slopes’ briefly discussed below. Cf. §765. 14. It has been pointed out to me by Almut von Wedelstaedt that this idea is not as clear as I thought, or hoped, it was. What I had in mind is, roughly, the following. What may be associated with man’s nature is visible in the sense that typical situations involving certain kinds of human behaviour can be used to exemplify the concepts in question. Thus, standard situations of pain behaviour can usefully be referred to if one wishes to explain what we mean by ‘pain’ and kindred expressions. It should be remembered, however, that, taken in this sense, visibility does not mean obviousness. Explaining and illustrating the use of our expressions by means of typical situations of the relevant kinds of behaviour may require a good deal of thinking and stage-setting. But if these natural ways of behaving can in most cases be ‘seen’ to fall under the concept in question, the whole pattern of use will become visible. These sorts of concept are generally accessible and available to speakers of a human language, and we do not normally have occasion to say that speaker A is much more proficient at using the concepts of, say, pain or pleasure or hunger than speaker B, nor do we connect the use of such concepts with varying degrees of sophistication in the employment of culture-based techniques. Correspondingly, the invisibility of culture-based (and culture-bound) techniques of appreciation and production in areas like the arts or fashion consists in this: that explanations and illustrations relying on standard situations of concept use are of practically no avail. What is important here are fine shades and nuances, and to gain some understanding of these you need not only talent but also a kind of training that cannot be obtained ‘in school’ (see the passage from Last Writings, volume I, quoted in the next paragraph of my text). It may be confusing that there is a somewhat
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different visibility–invisibility distinction that can be brought to bear in this context: there is a peculiar way in which certain culture-based techniques are invisible to the members of the culture concerned. Of such techniques one may want to say that they form part of the ‘second nature’ of (some) members of that culture. In my opinion this second nature and its more or less sophisticated techniques are not only invisible to members of the culture concerned – they cannot be uncovered and picked up at all (as opposed to guessed at and reconstructed) by members of other cultures. Here, it might be less confusing to speak (as Arthur Danto does) of ‘transparency’ rather than ‘invisibility’. The products of culture-bound techniques, however, can be seen as manifestations of those (invisible or transparent) techniques, but in their role of manifestations of that kind they can become visible only to members of other cultures. While inhabitants of ancient Egypt would have had no idea of what might be involved in producing or identifying a typically Egyptian work of art, many of us can spot Egyptian works when confronted by them, whereas the way of seeing of Egyptian artists cannot be recovered by us. Cf. Danto, 1981, p. 42 (‘[. . .] ways of seeing are perhaps transparent to those whose ways of seeing they are, and these may turn, so to speak, opaque when they no longer are their ways of seeing’), and his remark on Giotto’s way of seeing, ibid., pp. 42–3. Accordingly, one might say that our invisible or transparent culture-based techniques and ways of seeing become indirectly visible through the medium of their products in the shape of artefacts from the period concerned. This idea is related to the insight that in the course of time objects from earlier periods lose much of their individuality and come to appear more and more alike – a point which is elaborated and repeatedly emphasized by Proust in passages like the one from which I take the following words (I hope readers of the entire passage will be reminded of a number of things Wittgenstein says in various places): ‘[. . .] I have the feeling of leaving some one I know for another quite different person when, going back in memory, I pass from the Swann whom I knew later and more intimately to this early Swann – this early Swann [. . .] who, incidentally, is less like his successor than he is like the other people I knew at that time, as though one’s life were a series of galleries in which all the portraits of any one period had a marked family likeness, the same (so to speak) tonality [. . .]’ (Swann’s Way, trans. C. K. Scott-Moncrieff). 15. Cf. some of the remarks on pp. 227–8 of PI. 16. See, for example, MS 137, p. 63a. 17. See MS 123, p. 11r; MS 127, p. 199; MS 138, pp. 7a and 8b; MS 163, p. 57v.
9 A Re-Evaluation of the Philosophical Investigations Nuno Venturinha
Introduction In The Third Wittgenstein: The Post-Investigations Works, Danièle Moyal-Sharrock writes that the book ‘stems from the conviction that there is a third Wittgenstein, a Wittgenstein who went beyond what he had achieved in the Investigations’ (2004, p. 1). As stated in her introduction, the aim of the anthology is to ‘supersede the traditional bipartite division of Wittgenstein’s philosophy crowned by the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations, and indicate not only a new phase in Wittgenstein’s thinking, but also that Wittgenstein was the author of three, not two, philosophical masterpieces’ (2004, p. 1). This alleged third philosophical masterpiece is On Certainty, something which, as Moyal-Sharrock stresses, was first recognized by Avrum Stroll.1 But she goes further taking ‘the third Wittgenstein corpus as essentially consisting of all of his writings from approximately 1946’, and ‘[t]his includes On Certainty, Remarks on Colour, Zettel, and all the writings on philosophical psychology, including Part II of Philosophical Investigations’ (2004, p. 2).2 Moyal-Sharrock is here following a view that has been put forward by G. H. von Wright, namely ‘that Part I of the Investigations is a complete work and that Wittgenstein’s writings from 1946 onwards represent in certain ways departures in new directions’ (1982b, p. 136). Von Wright, whose name erroneously appears in various editions of the Investigations as one of the editors, was actually the first to raise doubts about the publication of the two parts together.3 For Peter Hacker, who concurs with von Wright’s view, ‘[w]hether or not Wittgenstein would have incorporated Part II into the text of Part I at some stage, the fact is that he did not’ and therefore ‘Part II is not part of the same book’ (1996, p. xvii). 143
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Indeed, as Joachim Schulte put it, ‘[i]n view of Wittgenstein’s original intention to include material on logic and the foundations of mathematics one may wonder if Part I of the Investigations really is to be regarded as “a complete work” ’, but his opinion is that ‘as regards form, style and argument [. . .] Part I of the Investigations is an accomplished and rounded-off work’ (1993, p. 10). Schulte’s criticism is for that reason different from that of David Stern, who goes as far as to claim that the material edited as Part II of the book was to be used by Wittgenstein for the purpose of ‘revising Part I’ (1996a, p. 304).4 I shall thus begin by considering the bipartition of the Investigations.
I The typescript from which Part I of the Investigations was printed is lost but two copies have survived, corresponding to items 227a and 227b in von Wright’s catalogue of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass.5 The typescript of Part II, numbered 234, is also lost and, in this case, no copy has been preserved, only its manuscript version, item 144. We know that Wittgenstein worked intensively on the Investigations, even submitting early versions of the book to Cambridge University Press in 1938 and in 1943–44 – the latter also including the Tractatus.6 The so-called ‘Early Version’ was apparently based, like the printed Investigations, on two typescripts, 220 and 221,7 to which Wittgenstein attached a preface (TS 225), where he speaks of distinct parts of the work. Moreover, in a letter to von Wright, dated 13 September 1939, Wittgenstein refers to ‘what would be the first volume of [his] book’ (WC, 263), a reference already made in two other letters, to J. M. Keynes, of 1 February 1939, and to Moore, of the next day.8 A few years ago, an English version of TS 225 was discovered and is now housed at the Austrian National Library in Vienna.9 This version differs from the German original in two important aspects. First, whereas the German text opens with ‘In dem Folgenden will ich eine Auswahl der philosophischen Bemerkungen veröffentlichen, die ich im Laufe der letzten neun Jahre niedergeschrieben habe’, the English text reads ‘In this and the following volumes I wish to publish a selection of the philosophical remarks which I have written down in the course of the last nine years’ (emphasis added). Second, whereas the German text says further ahead ‘Ich beginne diese Veröffentlichung mit dem Fragment meines letzten Versuchs, meine philosophischen Gedanken in eine Reihe zu ordnen’ (p. II), the English text says ‘I begin these publications with the fragment of my last attempt to arrange my philosophical thoughts in an ordered sequence’ (p. 2,
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emphasis added). There is thus in the English an intriguing reference to a number of ‘volumes’ and ‘publications’. This cannot be simply the result of a bad translation for in Volume XIII, among three drafts for a preface begun on 27 June 1938, we find ‘Ich beginne diese Veröffentlichungen . . .’.10 Wittgenstein therefore had in mind more than one publication and the fact is that by the time of the submission to Cambridge University Press in August 1938, which is the date of the later preface in MS 117 and of TS 225, only a part of the text had been completed. Indeed, Wittgenstein writes in the preface that ‘[he intends] to follow up this fragment with a mass of remarks more or less loosely arranged’ (p. 2). And he goes on to say: [. . .] I shall explain the connection between my remarks, where the arrangement does not itself make them apparent, by a system of cross-references thus: each remark shall have a current number and besides this the number of those remarks which stand to it in important relations. In one of his introductions to the Vienna Edition, Michael Nedo observes that ‘[b]esides the confusion about [. . .] which “fragment” was to be the core of this book, it is as yet not at all clear what Wittgenstein meant in the 1938 preface by the “host of remarks” he was thinking of linking with the “fragment” by means of a “numbering system” ’, pointing out that ‘[t]he answer to this question may cast a completely new light on the function of the numbering in Part I of the Philosophical Investigations’ (1998, pp. xvi–xvii). A cognate reading is offered by Schulte. In his view, ‘it remains unclear whether Wittgenstein, by using the word “fragment”, wants to stress the piecemeal character of the entire first part – perhaps even of the entire typescript to which the preface was attached – or whether he wishes to refer to a shorter segment of it’, and he concludes that ‘[w]e shall never know the answer to this question’ (2002, p. 400). Schulte is surely right, but in the opinion of Alois Pichler the ‘fragment’ referred to in the preface corresponds to ‘MS142, or TS220 respectively, into which MS142 was dictated’ and ‘[w]ith the “mass of remarks” [. . .], Wittgenstein meant [. . .] TS221, which was to follow the “fragment” ’ (2007, p. 138).11 This is a sound interpretation since the two typescripts, 220 and 221, are consecutively paginated – the reason why they have always been regarded as forming the ‘Early Version’ of Wittgenstein’s masterpiece. Moreover, if TS 220 may have been dictated in 1937, TS 221 contains remarks which can be found in MSS 121 and 162a, written only at the end of 1938 or beginning of 1939. On
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the basis of this thesis, Pichler has developed a groundbreaking reading of Wittgenstein’s second book project as an ‘album’,12 arguing that the fragmentary nature of the text is actually crucial for an understanding of his struggle against dogmatism in philosophy. However, the ‘system of cross-references’ Wittgenstein alludes to in the preface poses a problem: it is not found in TS 221. Commenting on these issues, Schulte explicitly avoids discussing this particular point, considering that it ‘renders the entire matter even more puzzling’ (2002, p. 400). But in the exegetical part of his extensively revised edition of Volume 1 of An Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations, Hacker, holding a view coincident with Pichler’s, emphasizes that in a draft for a preface dated 16 September 1937 Wittgenstein already envisages ‘a network of numbers’ and thus, Hacker notes, ‘[i]t would, after all, be quite natural to leave that task until the writing was absolutely finished’ (Baker and Hacker, 2005, p. 41).13 Hacker’s alternative hypothesis, that ‘it is possible that W. executed such a numbering on separate sheets of paper (since only the final numbering would be entered in the TS), and that he later destroyed these, since once the idea was abandoned, such lists of interconnections would have little value’ (Baker and Hacker, 2005, p. 41), is also quite reasonable. This perspective, though, has been challenged by Rothhaupt, who argues that the first two parts of MS 116, which, dating from 1937–38, include a peculiar numbering, should be taken into consideration as a possible part of the Investigations project.14 Be that as it may, given the reworking carried out in TS 222, composed of cuttings from a copy of TS 221,15 it is not likely that Wittgenstein’s second submission to Cambridge University Press included only TS 239, a revised version of TS 220, but consisted, rather, of more than one part. As a matter of fact, in MS 124, an item dating from 1944, we still find additions to TS 222.16 In Schulte’s 2001 Kritisch-genetische Edition of the text, only TS 239 appears as belonging to this version, but TS 222 should clearly be included there.17 Yet the typescript consisting of cuttings available in the Bergen Electronic Edition was in all probability composed later than 1944 when Wittgenstein inserted a numbering in the original copy of TS 221 to reorder the material. As the editors of the Helsinki-Ausgabe had pointed out,18 the numerical version of the document is completely different from the version we have. As a matter of fact, it seems to result in a unified ‘Revised Early Version’, with the section numbers following those of TS 239. Now, if TSS 220 and 239 correspond to §§1–189a of the Investigations published in 1953, the same does not apply to Part II of the book since
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TS 234 has nothing to do with TSS 221–2, which deal with the philosophy of mathematics and not with the philosophy of psychology. In fact, the package that contains TS 227a is itself labelled by Wittgenstein Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie, the reason why Brian McGuinness maintains that ‘[t]he title “Philosophical Investigations” was always meant to cover the mathematical material as well’ (2002a, p. 286).19 Wittgenstein himself makes this clear in the published preface to the Investigations. He writes: The thoughts which I publish in what follows are the precipitate of philosophical investigations which have occupied me for the last sixteen years. They concern many subjects: the concepts of meaning, of understanding, of a proposition, of logic, the foundations of mathematics, states of consciousness, and other things. (PI, n.p., emphasis added)20 Nevertheless, Anscombe and Rhees, the editors of the Investigations, did not understand the matter that way, editing three years later – this time together with von Wright – TSS 222 and 223 as well as a wide selection from later manuscripts (sc. 117, 121–2 and 124–7) under the title Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.21 This then opened the door to many other publications, including the so-called ‘post-Investigations works’. I shall now turn to them.
II Edited by Anscombe and von Wright, the Zettel was the first ‘postInvestigations work’ that came to light. Both the original edition of 1967 and the revised (English) one of 1981 are based on an arrangement made by Geach from a large quantity of cuttings found in a box, some of them clipped together, but others lying loose in it, which resulted in two collections of cuttings, TSS 233a and 233b. The problem of deciding in several cases where the material should be assigned and the need to complete it in others – with Geach making use of copies of the cut-up typescripts (mainly 228–9 and 232) or, in certain cases, his own inspiration – gave rise to a work which may be at odds with Wittgenstein’s intentions.22 Two years after the publication of Zettel, Anscombe and von Wright would take, nonetheless, a further step in the editing of Wittgenstein. Selecting remarks from MSS 172 and 174–7, they published On Certainty, of which a revised edition appeared in 1974. In the editors’ ‘Preface’ it
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is argued that ‘[i]t seemed appropriate to publish this work by itself’ because ‘[i]t is not a selection’, insofar as ‘Wittgenstein marked it off in his notebooks as a separate topic, which he apparently took up at four separate periods during [the last] eighteen months [of his life]’; in their view, ‘[i]t constitutes a single sustained treatment of the topic’ (OC, n.p.). That Wittgenstein had taken up such a topic only at that point is negated, as Kim van Gennip rightly pointed out, by a number of related remarks in the undated MSS 169–71, which were published by von Wright and Nyman in 1992 as chapters 1–3 of Volume II of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology.23 But additional evidence is found in the – according to van Gennip – preceding MSS 137(II)-8 (the sources for more than a half of MS 144, from which TS 234 was dictated), published by von Wright and Nyman in 1982 as Volume I of Last Writings. As a matter of fact, Wittgenstein had explicitly dealt with the topic of certainty already in MS 119, which dates from 1937, an item partly published, with lecture notes, by Rhees as ‘Cause and Effect: Intuitive Awareness’, in 1976.24 And if this clearly indicates that On Certainty is far from representing a ‘single sustained treatment of the topic’, any remaining doubts concerning its status of ‘masterpiece’ will be completely removed when one verifies, as van Gennip nicely put it, that ‘not only are Wittgenstein’s “marks” ambiguous, but the editors applied their own demarcations [. . .] as well’ (2003, p. 129; 2008, p. 52). The same holds obviously for the 1977 Remarks on Colour, edited solely by Anscombe from MS 173 and, once again, from MSS 172 and 176.25 And it immediately follows that Volume II of Last Writings, whose chapters 4–6 derive, once again, from MSS 173–4 and 176, is problematic too. Yet these arguments do not seem powerful enough to meet MoyalSharrock’s more general claim that ‘the third Wittgenstein corpus [. . .] essentially [consists] of all of his writings from approximately 1946’, and this brings me back to the Investigations. There are plenty of reasons to suppose that, contrary to what is commonly assumed, Wittgenstein was still working on (Part I of) the Investigations in the final years of his life. A letter to Theodore Redpath, written as late as 22 July 1948, is particularly suggestive, saying that the book ‘isn’t finished’ (WC, 391). In their ‘Editors’ Note’, Anscombe and Rhees point to this very fact for, after having written that ‘[w]hat appears as Part I [. . .] was complete by 1945’, they concede that ‘[i]f Wittgenstein had published his work himself, he would have suppressed a good deal of what is in the last thirty pages or so of Part I and worked what is in Part II, with further material, into its place’ (PI, n.p.). A much
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similar but somewhat contradictory view is held by Geach in his preface to Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946–47. He says, on the one hand, that ‘Part I of the Investigations was complete when Wittgenstein died, and [that he and Anscombe] had already seen the MS of what is now printed as Part II’, but, on the other, that ‘Wittgenstein intended to have revised the final pages of Part I to incorporate the new material, but he died before he could do this’ (LPP, p. xiii). Another hint is given by Ray Monk. Apropos of Wittgenstein’s dictation of TS 234, Monk notes that ‘as he had told [. . .] Anscombe in [December 1948], he regarded this new selection as material to use in the revision of Philosophical Investigations, Part I’ (1990, p. 544). He goes on to say: As he never carried out this work of revision himself, the book as we now have it has the rather unsatisfying two-part structure whereby the second ‘part’ is no more than material to be used in the revision of the first. Moreover, the work that was originally conceived of as the ‘second part’ – Wittgenstein’s analysis of mathematical concepts – does not appear in the book at all. In this way, Schulte’s 2003 edition of the Investigations, prepared on the basis of his Kritisch-genetische Edition, may be seen as a significant step towards an elimination of a huge confusion. Indeed, whereas the latter still includes MS 144, the former leaves out Part II entirely.26 The problem is that Part I continues to be regarded as ‘a complete work’ and although its typescript certainly merits an outstanding place in the corpus, the fact remains that it belongs to a work in progress. In this essay, I shall not discuss all the pieces of evidence I can find for the truly unfinished nature of the Investigations27 but I shall look at some textual facts which are particularly illustrative. In a parenthetical remark, written down on 9 November 1948 in MS 137 (p. 92b), edited as §150 of Volume I of Last Writings, Wittgenstein observes that ‘[i]t’s no accident that [he’s] using so many interrogative sentences in this book’. What does he mean with ‘this book’? It must be the Investigations. This becomes clear in a remark written down just a few days later, more specifically on 28 November, in the same notebook (p. 112a), edited as §340 of Volume I of Last Writings, where it is said, with no further reference, that ‘[i]f the language-game, the activity, for instance, building a house (as in No 2), fixes the use of a word, then the concept of use is flexible, and varies along with the concept of activity’, something that, Wittgenstein adds, ‘is in the essence of language’. That
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‘No 2’ refers undoubtedly – and the editors of Last Writings were the first to recognize it – to §2 of the Investigations. In fact, there are various allusions to that same section in previous items28 and two more exist in MSS 175 and 176, the first in a remark of 18 March 1951 (p. 67v) and the second in one of 19 April (p. 62v). Both made their way into On Certainty and read as follows: In the language-game (2), can he [Moore] say that he knows that those are building stones? – ‘No, but he does know it.’ (§396) Nor does a child who learns my language-game (No. 2) learn to say ‘I know that this is called “a slab” ’. Now of course there is a language-game in which the child uses that sentence. This presupposes that the child is already capable of using the name as soon as he is given it. (As if someone were to tell me ‘this colour is called . . .’.) – Thus, if the child has learnt a language-game with building stones, one can say something like ‘and this stone is called “. . .” ’, and in this way the original language-game has been expanded. (§566) If one then adds another allusion, again with no further reference, to §8 of the Investigations, which is found in a remark written down on 7 February 1949 in MS 138 (p. 16a),29 it becomes manifest that Wittgenstein was occupied until his death with Part I of the Investigations, the psychological one,30 which was to be linked with his work on the philosophy of mathematics. The 1950 ‘Wittgenstein’ entry in the Chambers Encyclopedia, prepared by Wittgenstein himself as his recently published correspondence with John Wisdom makes plain, is in this regard illuminating. We are told that ‘[h]is researches since 1929 (unpublished) bear chiefly on the philosophy of psychology and mathematics’ (WC, 364, n.).This, I am convinced, not only shows the inaccuracy of a ‘third’ Wittgenstein, but also, and fundamentally, that if we want to make sense of the Investigations, we have to read them in all their extent.
Conclusion In his posthumous book on the later Wittgenstein, Denis Paul claims that ‘the entire 1929–1951 corpus was a composite work of art’ (2007, p. 23). I shall not go here into Paul’s reading of Wittgenstein, but I concur with this opinion. Indeed, if it was only on 6 November 1930 that Wittgenstein began to write a preface to his new book,31 a
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book that would soon receive some possible mottoes and titles,32 the discovery made by Rothhaupt of what he called the ‘Kringel-Buch’,33 which includes remarks from MS 107, dating from 1929, reveals that Wittgenstein’s second book project can only be criss-crossed in all its multiplicity in the entire post-1929 Nachlass. A nice description of why that book never became more than a collection of notebooks, handwritten or typewritten, is given by Wittgenstein himself in a rather problematic remark, dated 24 January 1948. It is preceded by an intriguing ‘C’, a mark that actually precedes quite a lot of remarks in MSS 136–8 as well as in MSS 167 and 169,34 eventually forming a virtual arrangement like the ‘Kringel-Buch’. He says: I do not have any right to publish a book which simply expresses and repeats over and over again the difficulties I feel. For these difficulties are in effect interesting for me, who am caught up in them, but not necessarily for mankind /other people /. For they are difficulties of my thinking, due to my development. They belong, so to speak, in a notebook, not in a book. And even if this notebook might be once interesting for someone, I cannot publish it anyway. My stomachaches are not interesting, but the remedies – if any – that I have found against them are. (MS 136, p. 144a, my translation)35 That is certainly the reason why the puzzling table of contents that can be found in TS 235, presumably prepared in 1946 to judge from its outline in MS 130, which embraces remarks from the early post-1929 manuscripts to Part I of the Investigations itself, was never completed. It is interesting that with the clean copy of item 235 kept in Trinity36 we find a note saying that originally the typescript was in a case also containing – one of the three versions of – TS 230, the second half of the pre-war version of the Investigations, two other copies of this typescript with some remarks cut out, and finally a number of cuttings and handwritten annotations focusing on the same mathematical issues dealt with in the previous items.37 We are therefore in need of a complete map of Wittgenstein’s later work. Besides the effective relationship between the work on the philosophy of psychology and the work on the philosophy of mathematics, we need to know, for instance, the role played by the different parts of MS 116 in the development of Wittgenstein’s book. We also need to know the purpose of a text like TS 230, the ‘Remarks II’, when there exists in TS 231 a list of the corresponding remarks in TSS 228 and 230. And our understanding of what Wittgenstein had in mind will remain incomplete until we find out why TS 232 begins on page
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600 – with TS 229 ending on page 457 – and how the original project of Zettel fits into the planned book.38
Notes 1. See Stroll, 1994, p. 5. See in addition Moyal-Sharrock’s inaugural paper on the subject, where she claims that ‘[i]t is time that On Certainty be recognised as one of Wittgenstein’s three great works’ (2002, p. 294). 2. In an attempt to justify ‘the propriety of calling On Certainty and other compilations of Wittgenstein’s notes (by Wittgenstein himself or by others) “works” ’, Moyal-Sharrock argues that ‘what can and cannot rightly be called a work in Wittgenstein’s corpus is debatable, and the discussion would have to include the status of all Wittgenstein’s posthumous publications, including of course Philosophical Investigations’ (2004, p. 10, n. 7). See in the same vein Moyal-Sharrock, 2002, p. 294, n. 3 (where only ‘the status of Philosophical Investigations, Part II’ is referred to), Moyal-Sharrock, 2004a, pp. 2–3, and Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner, 2005, pp. 1 and 14, n. 1. It is precisely such a ‘discussion’, which the ‘third Wittgenstein’ thesis obviously avoids, that this chapter aims at. 3. See von Wright, 1982b, pp. 135–6, as well as 1992, especially pp. 186–8. It is worth mentioning, however, that the correspondence between von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe preserved at the National Library of Finland (Coll. 714.11) shows that the former was involved in the project, having proofread both parts. 4. For further discussion on the status of Part II, see Scholz, 1995, and Keicher, 2008, pp. 219–20. 5. Until the last printing of the catalogue, only one copy was listed (cf. von Wright, 1993, p. 491), but both copies are referred to in von Wright’s 1997 unpublished catalogue of the Wittgenstein materials kept with the Department of Philosophy at the University of Helsinki, which now form part of the von Wright Archives. The second copy, which, like the first one, is housed at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, was found by P. T. Geach in 1993. It contains extensive corrections, in different hands, and these corrections differ from those of the first copy and from the printed version. For a discussion of this issue, see Stern, 1996a. There also exists in Trinity an unnoticed page numbered 103 from a third copy of TS 227, accompanied by another handwritten version (apparently by Rush Rhees) of the appendix to that page in TS 227b, which appears typed in two fragments in TS 227a. It is likely that, as von Wright (1997, p. 18) conjectures, Part I had been printed from this TS 227c. I am grateful to Jonathan Smith from Trinity College Library for detailed information regarding these pages. 6. On this topic, see von Wright, 1982b, pp. 120–22. A letter from Norman Malcolm to G. E. Moore of 13 October 1944 is also instructive in this regard. It says: ‘The Press has agreed to publish the book as he wants it. It is to be in German, with no English translation, & the Tractatus is to be reprinted as part of it, in order that people may be able to see the difference. He says he thinks it will have to be two volumes’ (Moore and Malcom, 2003, p. 257).
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7. In addition to item 221 listed in von Wright’s catalogue, there exists another complete typescript in Trinity containing handwritten insertions on the opening page that are absent from the version available in the BEE. Also catalogued by Trinity is a page numbered 248 from a third copy of 221. This seems to be the same source of an uncatalogued set of pages (numbered 237–9 and 244–5) and cuttings (from pp. 236, 240 and 243), which include corrections by Wittgenstein that are neither in 221(i) nor in 221(ii) – the latter being the published version. They may have been discarded by Wittgenstein when he produced TS 222, which I discuss below. 8. Cf. WC, 239–40. In a letter to Rhees of 13 June 1945 Wittgenstein still refers to his ‘first volume’: ‘I am now dictating some stuff, remarks, some of which I want to embody in my first volume (if there’ll ever be one)’ (WC, 328). See also a letter to Malcolm of 26 June 1945, in which Wittgenstein expresses the wish of getting ‘a volume ready for publishing by next autumn’ (WC, 330), and three letters from the summer of 1947 to Yorick Smythies, of 27 July, and to von Wright and Malcolm, both of 27 August, all of them showing a Wittgenstein struggling to publish ‘part of [his] book’ (WC, 369 and 371, GB). 9. The text is published in this book as Appendix II. 10. Cf. MS 117, pp. 112 and 117. I must thank Josef Rothhaupt for having brought these passages to my attention. 11. See in addition Pichler, 2004, p. 14. Pichler (2007, p. 138) takes ‘the “last attempt” ’ to mean ‘the Brown Book together with the “Fragment” ’, but a passage in the earlier of the drafts for TS 225 reveals that the ‘last attempt’ is, as Baker and Hacker (2005, p. 40) also claim, the ‘fragment’ itself, namely ‘TS 220 (and MS 142)’. Wittgenstein writes there: ‘The last attempt of summary is that with which I begin this publication of my thoughts here. It is a fragment and has perhaps the advantage that it gives comparatively easily an idea of my method’ (MS 159, pp. 36v–37r, my translation). The German original reads: ‘Der letzte Versuch der Zusammenfassung ist derjenige mit welchem ich diese Veröffentlichung meiner Gedanken hier beginne. Er ist ein Fragment und hat vielleicht der Vorzug dass er verhältnismässig leicht einen Begriff von meiner Methode vermittelt.’ This argument also goes for Nedo, who says: ‘Exactly which manuscript Wittgenstein meant by his “last attempt to order [his] philosophical thoughts in sequence”, it has not as yet been possible to establish’ (1998, p. xvi, my emphasis). 12. This is an expression added to the final preface presumably in 1946, if we take into account the draft for the passage in which it occurs, written down in MS 130, p. 22. On the Investigations as an album, see Pichler, 2004. 13. This preface appears in MS 118, pp. 95r–95v. The relevant passage, in Hacker’s translation, runs as follows: ‘The only presentation of which I am still capable is to connect these remarks by a network of numbers which will make evident their extremely complicated connections’ (Baker and Hacker, 2005, p. 38). On 14 October 1937, in the opening of a draft for an English Preface, Wittgenstein writes: ‘This book is a collection of wisecracks. But the point is: they are connected, they form a system’ (MS 119, p. 108). 14. Rothhaupt (2006, p. 279) identifies the ‘fragment’, as do Pichler and Hacker, with MS 142, or TS 220, but takes the ‘mass of remarks’ as corresponding
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15. 16. 17.
18. 19.
20.
21.
22. 23. 24.
25.
26.
A Re-Evaluation of the Philosophical Investigations to pages 1–264 of MS 116. However, against this conjecture speak two facts: (i) the continuous pagination of TSS 220 and 221; and (ii) the non-systematic numbering of MS 116. See note 7 above. Cf. MS 124, pp. 150–1 (18.3.1944) and TS 222, pp. 87–8. In the so-called Helsinki-Ausgabe of the Investigations, on which the Kritischgenetische Edition is based, von Wright and Heikki Nyman themselves lean towards this opinion (see PU 1979, p. 6, and PU 1979a, p. 1; also von Wright, 1982b, p. 122), and Schulte himself affirms that this bearbeitete Frühfassung consisted of two parts (see PU 2001, p. 22). See PU 1979, p. 4. Rewriting his and Gordon Baker’s commentary on the Investigations, Hacker interprets Wittgenstein’s handwritten words in the folder containing TS 227a as follows: ‘It is conceivable that typescripts of his later writings on the philosophy of psychology had been kept in this folder. One may speculate whether a third book of that title was contemplated’ (2005, p. 28). Hacker refers here to a ‘a third book’ because, in his opinion, Wittgenstein ‘intended a [second] book, entitled “Beginning Mathematics”, as a sequel to the Philosophical Investigations’ (2005, p. 5, n. 14; cf. also p. 28). However, the remark in which Wittgenstein alludes to that title can be seen instead as a clear indication that, as late as 1949, he was still contemplating a second part of the Investigations dealing with the philosophy of mathematics. He says: ‘I want to call the consideration on mathematics that belongs to these /my / Philosophical Investigations “infantile mathematics”. /“Beginnings of Mathematics”/’ (MS 169, p. 36v, my translation). Here are Wittgenstein’s words: ‘Ich will die Betrachtung über Mathematik die diesen /meinen / Philosophischen Untersuchungen angehören “infantile Mathematik” nennen. /“Anfänge der Mathematik” nennen./’ For Hacker, Wittgenstein’s mentioning of such a topic in this preface constitutes ‘an oversight’ (Baker and Hacker, 2005, p. 5, n. 13), but, as he himself recognizes, it already appears in TS 243, the preface written for the ‘Intermediate Version’ of the Investigations, which is also dated ‘January 1945’. I cannot thus agree with him that ‘[i]t is possible that with this draft we see the abandonment of the idea of including the mathematical materials in the book’ (Baker and Hacker, 2005, pp. 4–5). A new English edition of this text appeared in 1978, incorporating, apart from other selections from the same manuscripts, TS 224 and material from MS 164. It is of some interest to note that TS 224, like TS 223, originally formed part of TS 222. I direct the reader here to Oku, 2004. See van Gennip, 2003 and 2008, pp. 54 ff. I say that Wittgenstein had explicitly dealt with the topic of certainty in MS 119 because, as James Conant (1998, pp. 238 ff.) convincingly argued, such a topic (or what it involves) is nothing but what underlies Part I of the Investigations. Astonishingly, the ‘Editor’s Preface’ mentions that ‘[m]uch of what was not selected is of great interest, and this method of publication involves the least possible editorial intervention’ (RC, n.p.). See Schulte’s reasons in PU 2003, pp. 292–4.
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27. That would notably imply an analysis (and dating) of MS 182, a list of the remarks from TS 228, the ‘Remarks I’, which were included in TS 227, and of TSS 227, 228, 230 and 231, with a particular focus on why TS 228 and TS 229 bear consecutive pagination and section numbering. Note that TSS 229 and 232, from 1947 and 1948, were the sources for Volumes I and II of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, the former edited by Anscombe and von Wright and the latter edited by von Wright and Nyman, both published in 1980. 28. Cf. MS 165, pp. 94–5 (c. 1941–44), MS 124, p. 192 (13.4.1944), MS 132, p. 203 (21.10.1946), MS 136, p. 53a (3.1.1948), as well as TS 233a, pp. 20–1. The latter remark, published in Zettel, runs as follows: ‘Do we say that anyone who is speaking significantly is thinking? For example the builder in languagegame no. 2? Couldn’t we imagine him building and calling out the words in surroundings in which we should not connect this even remotely with thinking?’ (Z, §98) 29. It reads as follows: ‘But what is the meaning of “ascertain something”? To understand this you have to run through some simple language-games with this word. – How does someone ascertain in language-game 8 that there are a certain number of tiles over there? How does one ascertain that 6 + 6 = 12? Etc.’ (LW I, §833). 30. We would do well to remember that already in the Tractatus, at 4.1121(2), Wittgenstein says that ‘[t]he theory of knowledge is the philosophy of psychology’. 31. Cf. the drafts in MS 109, pp. 204 ff. 32. Cf. MS 109, p. 288 (31.1.1931), and MS 110, p. 180 (19.6.1931), as well as MS 110, pp. 214 and 254 (24.6 and 1.7.1931), and MS 154, pp. 1r and 9v–10r (c. 1931). Cf. also MS 114, p. iv (c. 27.5.1932). 33. See Rothhaupt, 2008, as well as Chapter 3. 34. For a discussion of the meaning of Wittgenstein’s marginal marks, see Schulte, 1993, pp. 5–6, Rothhaupt, 1996, pp. 327–39, as well as Stern’s chapter in this book. 35. The German original reads: ‘Ich habe kein Recht, der Öffentlichkeit ein Buch zu geben, worin einfach die Schwierigkeiten, die ich empfinde ausgedrückt & durchgekaut sind. Denn diese Schwierigkeiten sind zwar für mich interessant, der in ihnen steckt, aber nicht notwendigerweise für die Menschheit /Andern. /. Denn sie sind Eigentümlichkeiten meines Denkens, bedingt durch meinen Werdegang. Sie gehören, sozusagen, in ein Tagebuch, nicht in ein Buch. Und wenn dies Tagebuch auch einmal für jemand interessant sein könnte, so kann ich’s doch nicht veröffentlichen. Nicht meine Magenbeschwerden sind interessant, sondern die Mittel – if any – die ich gegen sie gefunden habe.’ It is interesting to compare this remark with the opening of a preface sketched some days before, more specifically on 8 January, in the same manuscript. Here Wittgenstein writes: ‘I publish the book not without /with / dislike’ (MS 136, p. 81a, my translation). Wittgenstein’s own words are: ‘Nicht ohne /Mit / Widerstreben übergebe ich das Buch der Öffentlichkeit.’ The last prefatory remark of Wittgenstein’s is found in MS 175, p. 59v, dating from 16 March 1951. 36. Another copy of TS 235 has survived and this contains a large number of corrections by Wittgenstein. It remains in private hands but it has been
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transcribed for the BEE on the basis of a photocopy housed at the von Wright Archives in Helsinki. The facsimile however is from the Trinity copy. 37. The note ends with the information that all the mathematical material was taken by von Wright on 21 October 1951. This separation is probably the reason for the neglect of both TS 230 and TSS 221–2 in the reconstruction of the Investigations project. 38. Earlier versions of this paper were read in conferences in Bristol, Kirchberg am Wechsel, Lisbon and Skjolden in 2007 and 2008. I would like to thank those audiences and also Peter Hacker and Alois Pichler for their constructive criticism.
10 Towards the New Bergen Electronic Edition Alois Pichler
Introduction The 1998 publication of Volume 1 of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass: The Bergen Electronic Edition (BEE) by Oxford University Press made around 4000 pages of the Wittgenstein Nachlass from the so-called middle period available in diplomatic, normalized and facsimile versions. A second volume followed in 1999 and the complete edition, consisting of five CD-ROMs, appeared in 2000. Thus the Wittgenstein Nachlass, as classified by G. H. von Wright in his Nachlass catalogue, was made available to the public. BEE was prepared at the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen (WAB) during the second half of the 1990s although work producing the ‘machine-readable version’ of the Nachlass – which formed the basis of BEE – had already begun at WAB in 1990.1 Despite some scholarly and technical deficiencies, BEE is still much appreciated by the academic community; it is, after all, the only existing scholarly edition which gives full access to the Wittgenstein Nachlass in both facsimile and edited text versions. The full impact of this edition can only be assessed in the long term since most new results from BEE-based Wittgenstein research are still in the making or just about to be published. In addition, BEE remains too closely attached to the rapidly developing field of digital editorial philology to allow an adequate view of it within this context. It is, however, a fact that an increasing number of theses, articles and books have appeared that would not have been written without BEE although this is not to say that they would not have been possible without BEE.2 It is simply that the production and publication of BEE has created a climate in which conditions are much more conducive to Wittgenstein research with an eye on his Nachlass than was earlier the case. 157
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Currently, WAB is making plans for the preparation of a new edition in conjunction with OUP and InteLex Corporation. While I will not present details of what the next BEE will look like in this chapter, I will present some central points relating to change and improvement. I should, at the same time, point out that the possibilities, perspectives and challenges facing the conception of the new BEE are much greater than can be presented here. One example is the implementation of semantic enrichment, semantic Web technology and ontologies (see Pichler and Lanestedt, 2007). Although I personally am much in favour of these, in this chapter I will primarily concentrate on the intended changes and additions that would seem to be uncontested and generally welcomed by the Wittgenstein research community. Semantic enrichment which includes metadata about the themes and topics of the text (see Hrachovec, 2000, ‘toothache’) is not part of such general agreement and seems to be a bit too much at the ‘cutting edge’ for many, or to unjustly blur the distinction between edition and interpretation. One exception I will make regards the issue of what at WAB is called ‘interactive dynamic editing’ which, although it is considered by many Wittgenstein researchers as ‘too postmodern’, I will discuss and defend. It would be a mistake to work on the preparation of the new BEE in such a way that a possible later inclusion of additional or alternative elements would be hindered; in fact, it is implicit to the character of preparing electronic resources to provide for and anticipate the possibility of later changes and add-ons. For the production of the new BEE, WAB will make renewed use of its ‘machine-readable version’ of the Nachlass in order to keep the process as open to revision as possible. Such an editing and working philosophy presupposes the implementation of text encoding techniques and standards, and therewith a methodological and technical separation of the marked-up machine-readable version (or electronic text archive, as we could say today) from editorial outputs thereof, of which BEE is one example. BEE is not a project being developed at WAB in isolation. On the contrary, it is substantially embedded in close international cooperation networks, and would indeed not be possible without such cooperation. This holds true for scholarly, technical and financial aspects. Therefore, a further aim of this chapter is simply to acknowledge the significant role which international collaborative projects such as the EU projects ‘COST Action A32’3 and ‘DISCOVERY’4 and the Austrian FWF project ‘C&V Revisited’5 have played in endeavouring to continue to make the Wittgenstein Nachlass more widely available in constantly improved versions since its first publication in BEE.
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Rectifying deficiencies and mistakes When discussing what a new, revised BEE should look like, a good starting point is naturally the question: What is wrong, or no longer good enough, with the current BEE? Let us start with the simplest of all questions: What is wrong with BEE on its own premises? What are the mistakes and deficiencies which we would or should have wanted to avoid back then in 2000? Deficiencies and mistakes falling into this category can be grouped as follows: (1) Mistakes in the transcription of the Nachlass items (e.g. reading mistakes) and in the enrichment with metadata (e.g. dating and identification of references). (2) Deficiencies in the editorial decisions made, including editorial markup and apparatus. (3) Deficiencies in the facsimile rendering of the Nachlass, e.g. inadequate resolution, fragmentary capture and uneven quality. (4) Deficiencies which arose in the process of producing BEE from the machine-readable version due to technical faults and incorrect parameters. (5) Deficiencies in the BEE software and output format: FolioViews.6 (6) Missing facsimiles or missing transcriptions of items.7 While the advantages and benefits of using BEE by far outweigh its deficiencies, there is no question that these flaws should be corrected to the degree to which it is possible. Group (4) mistakes will be removed when the machine-readable version is re-processed correctly and the outputs produced anew. One example of group (4) flaws is the diplomatic version’s rendering of the blank lines with which Wittgenstein separates his Bemerkungen from each other. In BEE, one blank line appears where in the original there are two blank lines (which to most people will still be acceptable) yet, incorrectly, no blank line where in the original there is only one blank line. Consequently, Wittgenstein’s division of the text (and thought) into units becomes less visible. This was of course not intended when conceiving the diplomatic version, but was due to a small deficiency in the process of filtering BEE out of the machinereadable version which had important consequences. One example of group (5) deficiencies concerns the free text search functions where ‘and’, ‘or’ and ‘not’, and any combinations that involve these, are not searchable in the same way as other words since these words are also
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used as operators for combined searches. (However, one can find them by putting them into quotation marks.) Similarly, this kind of deficiency will simply disappear by choosing a new output format which is correct on these points. With regard to (6), the missing transcriptions and facsimiles are easily added provided that the required funds are available, these items and their whereabouts are identified, and the permission to publish them is in place. The greatest attention by far should be given to groups (1)–(3). To cure group (3) deficiencies may require significant financial input: a considerable number of pages may need to be re-photographed or scanned in order to achieve Wittgenstein facsimiles which meet the demands of Wittgenstein scholarship throughout, both then and now. But while group (3) deficiencies have been pointed out by only a few scholars, it is predominantly group (1) flaws which are felt to be the most disturbing. At the same time, this is also the field where the Wittgenstein research community is most able to contribute with corrections, and, in fact, has already done so. Since 2002, a list of ‘Mistakes in BEE’ has been available on WAB’s website. This is the result of careful users’ spotting of transcription mistakes, which are then collected and posted on this site.8 The ‘Mistakes in BEE’ site is a good example of collaborative work, where WAB external scholars feed valuable input into WAB and its BEE project from which in the end the entire community benefits. While WAB itself does not have the resources to undertake a second proofreading of all its transcriptions, user participation and involvement in this field have contributed, and continue to contribute, a large number of important corrections. Instances of group (2) flaws, or at least candidates for such instances, include some features of the normalized version such as the treatment of ‘erroneous text blocks’ (which are suppressed) and the rendering of Wittgenstein’s own text alternatives (where BEE is seen by some to blend different writing stages when it combines the base text with the latest alternative rather than the earliest). Other issues belonging to this group are the rendering of editorial interventions (where editorial omissions go unmarked), the rendering of graphics in the normalized version (which are rendered as facsimiles while one might argue that they should be normalized too and thus redrawn), and much of the rendering of notation in general. Editorial decisions concerning these and other cases will be carefully reconsidered when designing the filters for the new BEE. Additional deficiencies may be said to be caused simply by the passage of time since the original publication in 1998–2000. These relate to technical platforms and software which are continuously changing
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and forging ahead. BEE was designed for Windows 98 and utilizes a version of FolioViews which is no longer supported. While the BEE FolioViews infobases which contain the edited text versions still run under Windows XP, the BEE facsimile file viewer, InfoView, does not. However, a Windows XP compatible picture viewer can be affiliated with BEE through a simple change in the local settings for the edition. Many users of BEE have pointed out that they would like online Web access rather than a CD or DVD edition on a local or network drive. While we should not forget that local carriers still have certain advantages over Web access, use of the latter must surely be provided for. This is easily possible with the machine-readable version being encoded in TEI(P5) guided XML format and a range of XSL stylesheets being created for its further processing and filtering for presentation on the Web.9
Docking on to other Wittgenstein primary resources While BEE contained only items from the Nachlass as catalogued by G. H. von Wright, much material which is important for understanding Wittgenstein’s philosophy is also found in other sources such as his correspondence (GB). It would definitely, therefore, be of great benefit to Wittgenstein research to have the Nachlass and the correspondence interlinked. Such interlinking can happen on several levels, for example the chronological where texts from the same time are referred to each other, or through the inclusion of a shared biographical and historical-cultural commentary. The first steps towards connecting the Nachlass with the correspondence were undertaken in 2001–04 with the ‘Wittgenstein MS 101 from September 1914’ project.10 The explicit goal of this project was to bring together complementary resources and competences in order to produce, with a small sample from the Wittgenstein Nachlass (Ms-101, recto pages 12r–30r) as its test-bed, a resource on the Web which would demonstrate the advantages of such cooperation and which would be freely available for the benefit of Wittgenstein research. WAB provided the primary source texts and the editorial standards, methods and tools for their publication; the Brenner Archives and Brian McGuinness provided relevant correspondence; Michael Biggs supervised the rendering of graphics material, provided additional correspondence, including postcards in image format, and coordinated the project together with WAB. InteLex Corporation, the distributor of the BEE normalized version on the Web, functioned as the evaluation partner and assessed the results from the perspective of a professional publisher of humanities
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databases on the Web. The Web resource that the project resulted in is still up and running today and gives insight into several technical and scholarly aspects of making Wittgenstein Nachlass material available on the Web whilst also enriching and interlinking it with Wittgenstein correspondence. In addition to interlinking BEE with the correspondence, it makes good sense to interlink it also with other primary sources. Among these are (what is often still called) the ‘published’ or ‘collected works’, but also publications of smaller items like memoirs, lecture notes or recollections and notes of conversations. To have the Nachlass interlinked with such Nachlass external Wittgenstein publications could be of special value for those who approach the Nachlass from the perspective of exactly these previously published and well-established works, and often through translations of them. While such researchers may find it difficult to use the Nachlass otherwise, they would thus be enabled to use the map of the ‘published works’ to enter and explore the Nachlass in familiar and proven ways. I should point out that what I am talking about here is not the preparation of one resource which includes the Nachlass, the correspondence, other primary sources and other complementary secondary sources such as a biographical and historical-cultural commentary, but rather the preparation for interlinking them. This means that each resource is marked-up in such a way that it permits docking on to the other complementary resources, either directly or via a translation tool. Users may want to have one resource only, for example the Nachlass, and should still be able to make sensible and functional use of it as an independent resource. However, with adding more resources to one’s research platform, the interlinking function which was already present in the Nachlass resource (though only producing ‘broken links’) can now be put to work. A structuring of the research platform along these lines has many advantages, including the advantage that each provider of the single resources can continue to improve their own products without interfering with the work of the others. Naturally, success with the overall result presupposes thorough communication and cooperation between the providers of both the resources and the platform. Such cooperation was partly undertaken in the ‘C&V Revisited’ project (2006–08), where a new electronic edition of Vermischte Bemerkungen/Culture and Value was interlinked with a biographical and historical-cultural commentary. Here work on the text edition and work on the commentary ran in parallel and independent of each other, and their actual interlinking took place only through a Web site.
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Preparing the inclusion of biographical and historical-cultural commentary In addition to the Nachlass, correspondence and other primary sources, a third type of resource belongs in the basic kit of the well-outfitted Wittgenstein researcher: a biographical and historical-cultural commentary. BEE is not interlinked with either the Wittgenstein correspondence or other primary sources or such a commentary. Yet such a commentary is of great benefit not only for the study of the correspondence (for which it is already written thanks to the Brenner Archives in Innsbruck), but also for Nachlass research which contains a great number of explicit and implicit references not only to writers, artists, scientists and other persons but also to places and events. If the Nachlass is going to be interlinked with the correspondence, which already is accompanied by a biographical and historical-cultural commentary, then the completion of this commentary for the entire Nachlass would only be natural. And even if it should not be possible to interlink the Nachlass with the correspondence, it would be thoroughly appropriate to provide such a commentary. Firstly, a biographical and historical-cultural commentary must identify and make explicit all relevant references. Here WAB has already developed a function in BEE for searching and focusing on persons or works mentioned or referred to in the Nachlass. Complementary to this work and developing it further, Hans Biesenbach has produced a monograph which lists Nachlass remarks where Wittgenstein quotes or refers to other works, be they philosophy, literature, other scholarly works, including science, or art, and in addition quotes the actual passages referred to (Biesenbach, 2008). Secondly, the references must be commented upon according to the standards of biographical and historical-cultural commentary. The work of the Brenner Archives – identifying and commenting all references to names, places, events, persons, literature, music, art and so on for the correspondence – is paradigmatic for this. By extending this work to the entire Wittgenstein œuvre, Wittgenstein research will be provided with a uniquely helpful resource to relate Wittgenstein’s life and work to the wider biographical and historical-cultural context, and thereby to draw new and, even if not new, now at least more empirically grounded conclusions. To enrich part of the Nachlass with such a commentary, and to thereby test conditions and possibilities for such enrichment of the entire Nachlass, was an important task of the above-mentioned ‘C&V Revisited’ project, a cooperation between WAB and the Brenner Archives. Though
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the primary aim of this project was to create a new electronic edition of the text known as Culture and Value, this alone would have left the project incomplete (and the possibilities for cooperation between the two institutions underexploited). Since several book editions of Culture and Value had been produced before, it was now not only time to produce an edition that was planned as an electronic edition from scratch (which is different from putting an existing book edition into electronic form) but also to enlighten the text with a biographical and historicalcultural commentary. The resulting resource provides an important guide to a text which otherwise could remain little understood and underexplored.
Improving the reference system An edition which goes online, docks to complementary resources and is enriched with a biographical and historical-cultural commentary demands a stable reference system with unique identifiers for each text unit of reference. The more telling and intuitive the names of the units are, the better. At the Nachlass item level (manuscripts and typescripts), BEE used the von Wright catalogue numbers. For reference at page level, Wittgenstein’s own pagination or the librarian’s was used; but when this was lacking, pagination was created. However, no system was established for reference at the Bemerkungen level; but such a reference system is important to Wittgenstein research.11 Since then, under the DISCOVERY project, a new system has been employed to furnish each Bemerkung with a unique and unambiguous identifier or siglum. The Bemerkung siglum is composed of a sequence of ‘subidentifiers’: the identifier of the overarching Nachlass item in which the Bemerkung is found, the identifier of the page(s) on which it is found; and the identifier(s) of the segments of which the Bemerkung consists. The Nachlass item is identified through a prefix ‘Ms-’ (for manuscripts) or ‘Ts-’ (for typescripts), respectively, followed by the von Wright Nachlass catalogue number. ‘Ms-115’, for example, refers to the Nachlass item which in the catalogue has the number 115 and belongs to the class of manuscripts. Page identifiers are given through following either Wittgenstein’s or the librarian’s pagination, or introducing a new pagination. In the siglum, the page identifier follows after the identifier of the Nachlass item, separated from it by a comma, For example, ‘Ms-115,20’ is the page in Ms-115 which has the identifier ‘20’. But as I have said, the reference system does not stop here; it continues down to Bemerkungen-level. ‘Ms-115,20[2]’ is then the siglum for a specific single Bemerkung and
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refers to the second block of text on page 20 in Ms-115, thus to the remark ‘Wie, wenn man . . .’. A Bemerkung can go across page breaks and sometimes goes over several pages; this will also be mirrored in the siglum. In the end, each of the more than 50,000 Bemerkungen in the Wittgenstein Nachlass is identified through such a unique siglum. The same system of reference is also applied to the facsimiles. One clear improvement is, therefore, that every Nachlass page can have the same identifier in the facsimile and in the text editions. Ms-115,20.jpg is thus a JPG file with a facsimile of Ms-115,20 – page 20 of Ms-115. Moreover, if Bemerkungen are also demarcated in the facsimiles, they can then receive the same identifier as the corresponding Bemerkung in the text edition. In the current BEE, the identification of the facsimile files is not as informative since the facsimile files for an item are simply identified 1 to n – starting with 1 for the first page, usually the Front Cover, and continuing from there until n, which in most cases leads to the fact that facsimile file identifiers and identifiers of pages in the text edition are not easy to correlate. In my own experience, it contributes significantly to user-friendliness and the quality of research when facsimile and text edition share the same system of reference. The Bemerkung had already been made a unit of reference and the centre of research and philology in the ‘Tracing Wittgenstein’ project which ran from 2001 to 2004.12 In the ‘Wittgenstein MS115 in APE’ resource, one of the project’s outcomes, one finds for each Bemerkung of the first part of Ms-115 an interlinked philosophical commentary and, without losing contact with either the commentary window, the Bemerkungen text or the navigation structure window, one can easily move around between the three or between the units in the navigation window, the latter allowing quick access to other manuscript pages or remarks. With each single Bemerkung receiving a unique siglum identifier, the Nachlass component of Wittgenstein research becomes easier to refer to, more easily traceable and tractable and, most of all, communication about it becomes more straightforward and less vulnerable to misunderstandings. Both Wittgenstein’s and one’s own arrangements and rearrangements of the text, both virtual and actual, can be described exactly.
Adding further metadata Since the Bemerkungen in Wittgenstein’s Nachlass can now be taken as one’s basic unit, attaching helpful metadata to each Bemerkung such as dating, information about where it is published, whether it is written in secret code, where it came from and where it goes to (text genesis),
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where it was previously published in the so-called published works and so on and so forth becomes easy to implement. In fact, it often makes more sense to attach such metadata to Wittgenstein’s work at Bemerkungen level than at higher levels. For it is primarily in the single Bemerkungen rather than higher units or even the entire item where changes in these respects take place. One kind of metadata which is especially important for Wittgenstein research concerns text genetic relations in the Nachlass. Drawing genetic paths between the texts can to some extent be done on the level of entire Nachlass items or, at least, of some substantial parts of them (like Ms-115, second part); but in order to get the full picture, it should also be done on Bemerkungen level.13 Information about text genetic paths tells us more when related to the single Bemerkung than to larger or smaller units while at the same time, by extracting information on the migration of single Bemerkungen, it will also be possible to obtain information about the movement of groups of Bemerkungen, and thus larger units. Moreover, with the possibility of focusing on the single Bemerkung and of working with it as one’s basic unit, it becomes much easier to explore and discuss the alternative arrangements which Wittgenstein produced or envisaged for his Bemerkungen, thus also being able to focus on his composition activity. I do not of course want to say that there should not also be metadata which directly relate to groups of Bemerkungen and higher levels such as the entire item, for example information about the manuscript’s status, the number of pages, or writing materials. Equally, some other metadata will need to be included at lower levels such as sentences. These extensions into higher and lower levels should not, however, hinder the Wittgensteinian Bemerkung being tractable and traceable as a unit on its own. Some of the metadata which I am referring to already exist. Biggs and Pichler (1993) and Keicher (2002) include exact information about where a specific Nachlass part is published in the ‘published’ or ‘collected works’, and have thus already created bridges to interlink the two. Maury (1981 and 1994), Pichler (1997a), Rothhaupt (2008) and PU 2001 are examples of works which contain exact information about specific areas of Wittgensteinian text genesis. These metadata can be beneficially implemented in the new BEE. Again, this will particularly suit those who want to take the ‘published works’ as their entrance key to Nachlass research. But such metadata will be a great asset to any Nachlass search, and the preparation of a single Bemerkungen reference will prove particularly helpful when one is interested in queries such as
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‘Give me all Geheimschrift-Bemerkungen’, ‘Find all Bemerkungen which are published in Philosophical Grammar’, ‘Show me all Bemerkungen which form part of the genetic path of PI §1’ and so on.14
Strengthening dynamic editing BEE can be considered a combined edition (see Pichler and Haugen, 2005) which consists of several interlinked sub-editions: a facsimile, a normalized and a diplomatic version. It is exactly this triple structure which permits it to serve several purposes at the same time. With regard to the diplomatic and the normalized versions, we can say that, roughly speaking, the latter primarily focuses on Wittgenstein’s ‘text acts’, while the former records his ‘writing acts’ and attends to the text-carrier rather than the text itself. To try to do both in one and the same editorial presentation can lead to undesirable confusions and mis-presentations (which goes for any scholarly editing). It is, however, important to keep in mind that the diplomatic and normalized versions are produced through filtering and conversion from one and the same source – WAB’s machine-readable version of the Nachlass. The philosophy and practice of editing the Nachlass in three (or more) versions and of allowing for renewed and revised production of these versions from its basis (the machine-readable version) we call ‘dynamic editing’. Its constitution is dynamic and revisable, and the edited text itself, presented in different versions, is conceived dynamically rather than statically. It surely makes sense to supplement BEE’s diplomatic and normalized versions with an additional output version which we can call the ‘typescript version’, which is a rendering of typescripts which removes all handwritten revision in them. In fact, the desire to focus on a typescript’s typewritten part alone was recorded decades ago, for instance, when Kenny remarked to Rhees that the ‘Big Typescript’ would have been better edited ‘as it stood’ (Kenny, 1984, p. 37; as a response see Rhees, 1996). Such a rendering is possible in addition to a diplomatic version which can distinguish the typewritten layer from the handwritten revisions through, for example, the use of different colours, and a normalized version which can fuse both into a ‘final’ rendering. Again, one has to bear in mind that this does not involve producing a different source transcription, but involves just marking in the one and only ‘master’ transcription everything that is handwritten and every hand-produced writing act in such a way that the typewritten parts can be filtered and processed independently from everything which is the result of handwritten revision.
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Most users have responded positively to WAB’s dynamic editing and have had no problems switching between working with book editions, which usually present only one text version, and working with BEE. However, some users have reacted negatively to an extension of the dynamic aspect into what at WAB is called interactive dynamic editing; they fear, with regard to its possibilities, a ‘postmodern’ direction in development (with which I disagree). While dynamic editing provides the user with a number of pre-produced and interlinked text presentations such as the diplomatic and normalized versions, interactive dynamic editing also permits the user to filter and prepare, through a Web interface, differing supplementary versions from the machinereadable version, and thus to take on aspects of the editorial role themselves. I would like to give some examples of the application of interactive dynamic editing which should also be acceptable (at least in terms of their practical value) to those who otherwise are sceptical about interactivity in the area of scholarly editing. Interactive dynamic editing can be used to filter or rearrange the Nachlass texts according to the marks and numbers which Wittgenstein often assigns to his Bemerkungen. Being able to do so can be of tremendous benefit for research on Wittgenstein’s principles for the composition, that is arrangement, of his works and thus also on the status of specific items. This is even more valid since we do not yet know enough about the function of certain marks (like, for example, the asterisk sign in the ‘Bände’ from the early 1930s), and such a filtering tool can then permit easy extraction of all Bemerkungen and only the Bemerkungen which are marked by Wittgenstein with a slash, or an asterisk, or a backslash, and so on, or a specific combination of these, which in turn can help us to see what the marks are about. Alternatively, interactive dynamic editing can be used to organize the entire Nachlass text chronologically since each Bemerkung will be tagged with a date, and this information can be used to filter and sort the data of the machine-readable version according to chronology rather than, for example, adherence to Nachlass item. Another text element which is easily manageable through interactive dynamic editing is the soft line-break. While such line-breaks were not as a rule recorded for manuscripts at WAB in the 1990s but only for typescripts, today at WAB work on this is in progress. Edited text outputs which follow the original line order have many advantages, one of them being that they easily permit comparison of edited text version and facsimile. At the same time, the positions of soft line-breaks are often non-essential to one’s research interests, and therefore it is
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desirable to be able to suppress them; this is best done through direct user-controlled interactive editing and filtering.15 In addition to the diplomatic, normalized and typescript output versions, one could think of still others; for example, a version somewhere between diplomatic and normalized, which, unlike the first, omits those deletions which ‘disturb’ the reading (where the parts deleted do not fit syntactically into the context) but, unlike the second, still retains deleted parts, the inclusion of which helps understand the resulting text16 (but not without indicating that they were deleted by Wittgenstein). Such an ‘in-between’ version could also remove some burden from the normalized version by allowing it to only mark editorial interventions on word-level, while in this sort of version every editorial intervention could be indicated (and in the diplomatic version no editorial intervention is included). Moreover, one could imagine the ‘typescript version’ itself performing in both a diplomatic and a normalized form, the latter allowing searches across unified orthography and grammar while the former renders the typescript ‘as it stood’. But, in fact, such add-ons lead us exactly to the point where interactive dynamic editing already is: all of this can be made available to userdefined filtering, and it may just be that as soon as there is sufficient agreement on the legitimacy of one’s filtering and conversion parameters (as there surely already is for the ‘give me the typewritten text only’ interest), the interactive dynamic editing scenario loses much of that ‘risky’ dimension which the sceptics are suspicious of. The issue is then no different from other issues in text philology and interpretation, where scholarship demands that both editors and users describe and justify their methods along with the results they produce.
Perspective Today, a decade after publication of the BEE, we can confidently say that we have continued to make progress towards and can look forward to a new and improved edition of BEE. WAB’s machine-readable version of the Nachlass is transferred from MECS-WIT to TEI guided XML markup, both being internationally recognized standards, and XML a primary standard for publication on the Web. Having the machinereadable version in XML keeps the necessary flexibility when converting it to editorial outputs, and brings more sustainability with regard to maintaining it than has been the case before. Where in BEE we had a less informative reference system and nomenclature, now not only each page but also each single Bemerkung can receive its distinct identifier
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and figure as an independent holder of a Web page. Dynamic editing is extended to include, at the very least, a ‘typescript version’ as well, and the profile of the diplomatic and normalized versions is being improved. While the possibility to work with entire items as research objects is retained, an additional option to have the single Bemerkung as a research unit is being added. While semantic and ontology enrichment was little used for BEE then, they may now be increasingly utilized when preparing search and query functions. BEE was a closed resource, but now its interlinking with other primary resources and its enrichment with further metadata are on the agenda. BEE was once a fixed resource; now having it on the Web will make it more easily extendable and updateable. In this chapter, except for the short discussion of interactive dynamic editing, I have barely touched upon the possible topics of revision and change which are most contested, such as semantic enrichment en large, the inclusion of philosophical commentary and ontologies, or the implementation of collaborative workspaces. Nor have I discussed technical details of, for example, updates or possible personal workspaces. Issues like these pose not only technical challenges but also more ‘societal’ ones. They can demand coordination of individual use and expectations with collaborative working environments. They also confront traditional understandings of what an edition is, what it is supposed to deliver, and what it is not, with something much more than and different from an edition: a digital workdesk, shareable with others, where what we adhere to when we think of typical scholarly editions may be only a part. I do not think that the next, second BEE will be like this, but the third one could be. Many of the things which are on the agenda today were far on the horizon when BEE was conceived, and some of them may even now only make scant appearances in the next version. But while they may fully enter the third BEE, also by then new perspectives and technologies will be available for which we must first develop a culture and methodology before we can implement them.17
Notes 1. On Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and WAB’s work find more in Huitfeldt, 1994 and 2004; Cripps and Ore, 1997; Krüger, 1999; Pichler, 2002 and 2005. Reviews of BEE include Jantschek, 1999; Hrachovec, 2000 and 2006; Roser, 2001; Schulte, 2002a; Binder and Haller, 2002; McGuinness, 2002c; Soulez, 2003; Raatzsch, 2003; Bremer, 2003. Specifically on digital Wittgenstein scholarship see Hrachovec and Köhler, 2002; McEwen, 2006; Stern, 2008; De Mul, 2008.
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2. Though they might have been difficult to achieve, since full access to the Nachlass would have then only been available to those researchers who had the Cornell or other (black and white) facsimile available or even access to the originals. This highlights another benefit of BEE – it has reduced the number of people who must handle the original manuscripts. 3. ‘Open Scholarly Communities on the Web’, see http://wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_ cost-a32.page and http://www.cost-a32.eu/. 4. ‘Digital Semantic Corpora for Virtual Research in Philosophy’, see http:// wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_discovery.page and http://www.discovery-project.eu/; see also Bartscherer and D’Iorio, 2008. 5. ‘Culture and Value Revisited’, see http://wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_fwf-cv.page and http://www.uibk.ac.at/brenner-archiv/projekte/wittg_vermischtes/index. html; see also Mayr and Wang, 2007. 6. Folio Bound Views. Version 3.11.3, Folio Corp. 1992–96. 7. This includes items 307 and 308 for which neither facsimiles nor edited text versions could be published, and item 203, for which only edited text versions could be published. With regard to facsimiles, for items 105, 106, 107, 112 and 113 only facsimiles in black and white could be included. Sporadic facsimile lacunae occur in a number of other items; for a detailed (though not entirely complete) list, see BEE, ‘Introduction’. It was not possible to include items 307 and 308 because their location and identity seemed a puzzle. At least for ‘Mulder V’/Ts-308, the puzzle may be solved. Ts-308 is, I think, the typescript which von Wright (confusingly) says in his catalogue that he had not included in the catalogue, namely a typescript of 57 pages, kept in the Schlick Nachlass (Inv.-Nr. 184/D.5, see Fabian, 2007, p. 52, and Iven, 2009, p. 79) which is essentially a typewritten Reinschrift of Ms-140: ‘Eight typescripts are known of dictations by Wittgenstein to Schlick. One of them, however, is essentially a typescript version of 140 (the manuscript to which Wittgenstein referred by the name “Grosses Format”). This typescript I have not listed in the catalogue’ (von Wright, 1993, p. 500). Indeed, in the catalogue’s first version of 1969, Mulder V was not included, and what were called items ‘307’ and ‘308’ then, were in fact the Blue and Brown Books (which later received the numbers 309 and 310). My conjecture is that von Wright, when changing his mind and eventually (for reasons which we do not know) including Mulder II and Mulder V as today’s items 307 and 308, consequently renamed the earlier 307 and 308 as 309 and 310, but forgot to correct the above quoted comment. Since the production of BEE, new Nachlass items have also been discovered; on this see Appendices I and II to this book. 8. http://wab.aksis.uib.no/bee-errors.htm. 9. The machine-readable version consists of marked-up source transcriptions in platform independent file formats. An example shall serve to illustrate what is meant by markup: when representing text features of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, for example the underlining of a word, we can do this by using the underline function of a word processor such as Microsoft Office Word. When doing markup in the sense used here, however, we attach an explicit marker to the word specifying that it is underlined in the original transcribed, for example ‘word’. This explicit way of recording a document/text and its properties permits processing the information
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15. 16. 17.
Towards the New Bergen Electronic Edition attributed to the document/text in multiple ways (including disregarding it), which leads to much greater flexibility, control and sustainability than when doing it in the ‘Word’ way. Markup should follow standards with regard to both its syntax and its nomenclature and rules; regarding the first, WAB today follows XML, and regarding the second the TEI proposal P5. For an introduction to both, see http://www.tei-c.org/Guidelines/P5/. The project of conversion from the original MECS-WIT markup, which involved a major effort, was begun in 2001 and received a significant financial boost through the DISCOVERY project. Samples of Nachlass transcriptions in the current TEI(P5) guided XML format are available from WAB’s HyperWittgenstein site http://wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_hw.page/. See http://wab.aksis.uib.no/sept1914/home.html and http://wab.aksis.uib. no/wab_sept1914.page. Here I pass over the possibility of using a technical system of reference provided by FolioViews, that is referring to BEE’s ‘records’, which – for the normalized version – correspond to Wittgenstein’s Bemerkungen (while, in the diplomatic version, the records correspond to the Nachlass pages). I should mention that WAB’s machine-readable version (but not BEE) contained a system for reference on Bemerkungen level. See http://wittgenstein.philo.at/ and http://wab.aksis.uib.no/wab_115ape. page. Project members included Herbert Hrachovec (Vienna), Dieter Köhler (Karlsruhe) and Alois Pichler (WAB). I have tried to give an example of this in Pichler, 1997a. As said in the ‘Introduction’, here I consciously pass over a type of metadata which addresses semantic rather than structural features. Examples include enrichment with metadata about the philosophical subject treated in a certain remark which can be exploited to, for example, ‘Show me all Bemerkungen which speak about private language’, or enrichment which allows to ‘Show me all personal remarks’, ‘Show me all remarks belonging to philosophy of mathematics’ and so on. While I personally see more advantages than disadvantages with enriching the edition in such a way, the value of semantic enrichment is rather controversially regarded among Wittgenstein researchers. Such semantic enrichment is implemented in the DISCOVERY project, and BEE already has parts of such enrichment when, for example, it offers classifications of Nachlass graphics or mathematical notation. For an experimental site of interactive dynamic editing, visit http://wab.aksis. uib.no/transform/wab.php. Cases in question include entire sentences or remarks deleted by Wittgenstein and text alternatives. Parts of this chapter have, in addition to the Lisbon conference in 2008, been presented at other conferences and meetings, including the ALWS annual Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg in 2006 and the Nordic network for Wittgenstein research conference in Norwich in 2008. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of these meetings for valuable discussions. I would also like to thank Hans Walter Gabler, Claus Huitfeldt, Allan Janik, Christine Madsen, Cameron McEwen, Brian Rogers, Deirdre Smith and Jonathan Smith who have all made valuable comments on drafts of this chapter.
Appendix I The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics Edited by Nuno Venturinha, with an English Translation by James M. Thompson
In July 1929, Wittgenstein read a paper at the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association, which took place in Nottingham. As he told Bertrand Russell in a letter written some days before the meeting, the paper published in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, ‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’, would not correspond to the piece that would be delivered. The relevant part of the letter reads as follows: On Saturday the 13th I will read a paper to the Aristotelian Society in Nottingham and I would like to ask you if you could possibly manage to come there, as your presence would improve the discussion immensely and perhaps would be the only thing making it worth while at all. My paper (the one written for the meeting) is ‘Some remarks on logical form’, but I intend to read something else to them about generality and infinity in mathematics which, I believe, will be greater fun∗ . – I fear that whatever one says to them will either fall flat or arouse irrelevant troubles in their minds and questions and therefore I would be much obliged to you if you came, in order – as I said – to make the discussion worth while. ∗
though it may be all Chinese to them (WC, 125)
We do not have records of what Wittgenstein actually said in Nottingham but, as Brian McGuinness suggested, the notes ‘about generality and infinity in mathematics’ may be preserved in a peculiar document among Frank Ramsey’s papers.1 These are housed at the Archives of Scientific Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh, and the document in question, FR 004-23-01, given the title ‘Time and mathematics’ by the Archives, is published here with an en face English translation.2 It is in Ramsey’s hand but almost entirely in German, consisting of 20 numbered remarks. Interestingly enough, all the German remarks can be found in Wittgenstein’s Volume II – MS 106 in G. H. von Wright’s catalogue – which dates exactly from 1929. It is possible, as McGuinness conjectures, that Wittgenstein had dictated the notes to Ramsey with a view to preparing a translation of them for the presentation at the Joint Session. Some differences in regard to the punctuation and the text itself suggest indeed that Ramsey did not copy 173
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the German notes from MS 106. Moreover, the English sentences all look like jottings, presumably thought of by Wittgenstein for the first time while dictating. The only possible exception is the penultimate remark, which resembles a couple of remarks in MS 106 (pp. 180–2). The status of item 004-23-01 is thus completely different from that of other Wittgensteinian materials in the Ramsey collection. Item 002-30-01, for example, dated September 1929, also includes German sentences. However, it appears to be a work by Ramsey, not by Wittgenstein. At least, none of the German passages are found in the surviving manuscripts and typescripts. Here is the text in question: What is wrong with my probability is its externality. The ‘form of thought’ which makes it impossible to think illogically is a form which thought haben soll [should have]. Das Denken hat eine solche Form nicht. Die Form ist eine Idee. [Thinking does not have such a form. The form is an idea.] Logic, i.e. the laws of thought, is according to L((udwig)) W((ittgenstein)) a consequence of analytic psychology. Es liegt im Begriff des Denkens dass man p . ∼ p nicht denken kann. [It lies in the concept of thinking that one cannot think p . ∼ p.] Aber dieser Begriff des Denkens ist keiner naturwissenschaftlicher. [But this concept of thinking is not a concept of the natural sciences.] Die Psychologie von auswärts kann diesen Begriff gar nicht benutzen. [The psychology of the outer cannot use this concept.] (Ramsey, 1991, p. 277)3 My conjecture is that the German passages resulted from discussions between the two men, which we know to have occurred on a regular basis from Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge at the beginning of 1929 until Ramsey’s premature death on 18 January 1930. In another text, item 002-33-01, Ramsey discusses topics that are clearly Wittgensteinian in nature and writes that ‘[u]nderstanding a sentence is an Einheit des Zusammenwirkens [unity of cooperation]’ (1991, p. 62).4 Even if much speaks in favour of FR 004-23-01 being the German draft of the paper actually delivered in Nottingham, an intriguing letter Wittgenstein wrote to Moritz Schlick on 24 October 1929 forces us to consider an alternative hypothesis. In this letter we read: Mr Waismann has given me your Remarks on Logical Form and told me that you are preparing two other publications on the foundations of mathematics. I very much look forward to these works [. . .]. (GB)5 It is a fact that FR 004-23-01 focuses on the foundations of mathematics, but it remains unclear whether it was prepared for the 1929 Joint Session, with Wittgenstein envisaging its posterior publication, or as an outline for an article. In both cases we are left with the idea of another publication on the same topic to which no item in the Nachlass of this period corresponds. Of course Wittgenstein could already have had in mind a synopsis like TS 208, which he dictated a few months
The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics 175 later. Yet neither TS 208 nor its reworked version, TS 209, concentrates exclusively on the foundations of mathematics. In preparing the text for publication, I have tried to be as faithful as possible to the original. Ramsey’s spelling has been corrected in square brackets in the following cases: where letters or signs are missing (e.g. ‘unendl[i]ch’, ‘3[-]dimensional’); where a letter should be suppressed (e.g. ‘zeig[h]t’); and where a word needs to be amended (e.g. ‘[m|M][o|ö]glichkeit’). Ramsey’s (and Wittgenstein’s) occasional use of ‘c’ instead of ‘k’ has also been corrected (e.g. ‘[C|K]opula’). All commas inserted in square brackets are in accordance with Wittgenstein’s MS 106. Words printed above the line are representatives of a word inserted with or without a caret mark (e.g. ‘was ’). Deleted words are reproduced as such when they are readable (e.g. ‘Regel’) and as ‘xxx’ when they are unreadable. Italics are used in place of single underlines. Page numbers from the manuscript are given in double brackets.6
Notes 1. See McGuinness, 2006, p. 24, as well as his note in WC, p. 172. See also Rothhaupt, 1996, pp. 52–3. Galavotti (1991, p. 17) had already pointed out the similarities between the content of this document and, for example, §140 of Wittgenstein’s Philosophische Bemerkungen. This derives from TS 209, a reworking of TS 208, prepared by Wittgenstein in April 1930. 2. A first transcription appeared in a note (125) in Kienzler, 1997, pp. 261–3. 3. The translation of the German passages is my own. Compare the first paragraph with MS 106, p. 233. 4. The translation of the German expression is my own. Wittgenstein uses the word ‘Zusammenwirken’ in MS 105, p. 84. 5. My translation: The German original reads: ‘Herr Waismann hat mir Ihre Remarks on Logical Form gegeben und mir erzählt, dass Sie zwei weitere Publikationen über die Grundl. d. Math. vorbereiten. Ich sehe diesen Arbeiten mit freudiger Spannung entgegen [. . .].’ 6. I would like to thank Thomas Baldwin, Arthur Gibson, Peter Golla, Andrew Lugg, Erich Rast, Jonathan Smith and David Stern for helping me check some parts of the transcription against the original.
Translator’s note Translating the work of a thinker such as Wittgenstein’s is always a challenge. His fragmented style and lack of jargon lull one into a false sense of straightforwardness and simplicity. However, nothing could be further from the truth. It is often the case that how Wittgenstein says something is just as important as what he is saying. As such, I have attempted, at the expense of a more flowing and easy-toread translation, to remain as faithful to the original German as possible. I felt it was more important to preserve the author’s idiosyncratic, yet, unmistakeable style.
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Ist die primäre Zeit unendl[i]ch? D. h. ist sie eine unendliche Möglichkeit? Auch wenn sie nur so weit erfüllt ist als die Erinnerung reicht so sagt das keineswegs dass sie endlich ist. Sie ist in demselben Sinne unendlich in dem der 3[-]dimensionale Gesichtsraum es ist auch wenn ich tatsächlich nur bis zu den Wände[n] meines Zimmers sehen kann. Denn was ich sehe präsupponiert die Möglichkeit eines Sehens in grössere Entfernung. Das heisst ich könnte[,] was ich sehe korrekt nur durch eine unendlich[e] Form darstellen[.] [MS 106, pp. 29–31; TS 208, pp. 11–12; TS 209, p. 631 (PB, p. 160)] Wenn ich mir eine unendliche färbige Ebene denke2 so habe ich damit nicht unendlich viele Gegenstände[,] sondern die unendliche Ebene ist ein Gegenstand & die einfachen Farben sind Gegenstände. [MS 106, p. 47] Die richtige Ansicht muss am Ende die natürliche sein; und was wir sehen sind nie un[d]endlich viele Dinge[n] sondern immer eine Anzahl Dinge die das [c|C]hara[c|k]ter[ist]ische unendlich vieler verschiedener Möglichkeiten haben. [MS 106, p. 47] Man würde glauben dass ein Satz[,] aus dem unendlich viele S[a|ä]tze folgen, unendlich viel sagen muss. Aber die unendlich[e] Teilbarkeit drückt sich durch eine Regel aus, nicht dadurch dass das Zeichen die unendlich komplexe ist Regel xxx.3 Anderseits ist die unendlich komplexe Regel nur ein Ersatz für ein unendlich komplexes Zeichen. (Etwa ein gemaltes Bild.) [MS 106, p. 57] ϕ (2 − 5) = ϕ (2 − 3.15) . ϕ (3.15 − 4.2) [.] ϕ (4.2 − 5) = e[tc.]4 Das Symbol ist das[,] was alle solche[n] Produkte gemeinsam haben.5 Die Regel nach der alle gebildet werden. [MS 106, p. 59] Wenn diese Anschauung richtig ist, so gibt es keine Elementa[r]sätze. Die Sätze ϕ (n – m) sind zwar analysierbar[,] aber nur wieder in Sätze von derselben Form. [MS 106, p. 59] Wenn aus einem Satz unendlich viele folgen so ist jener Satz nicht aus diesen aufgebaut. D. h. Ihr6 Verständnis ist nicht nötig um ihn zu verstehen. [MS 106, p. 59] Ich möchte so sagen. Zu sagen dass unendlich viele Sätze aus einem folgen besagt die unbegrenzte Möglichkeit solcher Folgesätze nicht ihre Wirklichkeit. Ich meine damit[,] es besagt dass es keine7 Anzahl solcher Grund Sätze [Grundsätze]8 gibt. Und das ist ja klar: Es gibt dann nicht unendlich viele sondern keine Elementa[r]sätze[.] [MS 106, pp. 59–61] Daher kann der Satz nur verstanden werden[,] wenn man den zusammengesetzten Satz versteht, denn er liegt dann allem zu Grunde[.] [MS 106, p. 61] Diese Ansicht hat verschiedene Schwierigkeiten. Wenn ich sage das[s] kleine Quadrat im gross[t]en ist rot was immer das übrige für eine Farbe haben mag so kann ich mir doch das kleine Quadrat gar nicht vorstellen wenn es nicht von etwas andersfärbigem begrenzt ist[.] [MS 106, p. 61]9 [I may remember it to have been diff[erent], and say ‘but now it is the same’]10 ––––
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The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics 177 [[1]]
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Is primary time infinite? That is, is it an infinite possibility? Even if it is only fulfilled insofar as memory reaches, that in no way means that it is finite. It is infinite in the same sense as the three-dimensional visual field, even if I, in actuality, can only see till the walls of my room. For what I see presupposes the possibility of seeing into a larger space. That means I can only represent that which I see correctly by means of an infinite form.
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The correct view must, in the end, be the natural [one]; and what we see is never infinitely many things, but rather always a number of things that have the characteristic of infinitely many different possibilities. One would think that a sentence from which infinitely many sentences follow, must say infinitely much. However, the infinite divisibility is expressed by a rule, [and] not in that the sign is infinitely complex rule xxx. On the other hand, the infinitely complex rule is only a substitution for an infinitely complex sign (for instance a painted picture). ϕ (2 − 5) = ϕ (2 − 3.15) . ϕ (3.15 − 4.2) [.] ϕ (4.2 − 5) = e[tc.] The symbol is that which all such products have in common. The rule according to which all are formed. If this intuition is correct, then there are no elementary sentences. The sentences ϕ (n – m) are indeed analysable, but only in sentences of the same form. If from one sentence infinitely many follow, then that sentence is not composed of them. That is, their comprehension is not necessary in order to understand it. I would like to say it thusly. To say that infinitely many sentences follow from one states the unlimited possibility of such derived sentence – not their actuality. I mean by this, it states that there is no [definite] number of such fundamental sentences. And that is of course clear: There are not, then, infinitely many, but rather no elementary sentences. Thus the sentence can only be understood, if one understands the composite sentence; for it, then, underlies them all.
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This perspective has various difficulties. If I say the small square within the large one is red, regardless of what colour the remaining one might have, I surely cannot imagine the small square, if it is not limited by something of a different colour. [I may remember it to have been diff[erent], and say ‘but now it is the same’] ––––
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Is 5 in there are five men who love one another not the ordinary 5?11 Das Problem ist: [w|W]ie kann man Vorbereitungen zum Empfang von etwas eventuell existierendem treffen[?] [MS 106, p. 158; TS 208, p. 19r; TS 209, p. 42 (PB, p. 124)] Gibt es denn wirklich ein Stadium wo ich weiss dass ich 2 + 2 Äpfel habe noch ehe ich die Ersetzung von ‘2 + 2’ durch ‘4’ vollzogen habe?
∃3 ϕ ()
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Man könnte sagen: Ich muss nun13 nur erst ausrechnen wie viel [wieviel] 3 + 4 ist[.] [MS 106, p. 107] Die Gleichungen der Mathematik kann man, so scheint es mir, nur mit sinnvollen Sätzen vergleichen, nicht mit Tautologien. Denn die Gleichung enthält eben dieses aussagende Element – das Gleichheitszeichen – das nicht14 dazu bestimmt ist etwas zu zeigen. Denn was sich zeigt, das zeigt sich o[h]ne das Gleichheit[z|s]zeichen. Das Gleichheitszeichen entspricht nicht dem ⊃ in p · p ⊃ q : ⊃ : q15 xxx16 denn das ⊃ ist nur ein Bestandteil unter allen17 anderen die zur Bildung der Tautologie gehören. Es fällt nicht aus dem Zusammenhang heraus sondern gehört zum Satz wie das ‘.’ oder ‘⊃’. Das ‘=’ aber ist eine [C|K]opula die allein die Gleichung zu etwas Satzartigem macht. Die Tautologie zeigt etwas, die Gleichung zeig[h]t nichts, sondern weist darauf hin[,] dass ihre Glieder etwas zeigen. [MS 106, pp. 172–4; TS 208, p. 20;18 TS 209, p. 53 (PB, pp. 142–3)] Man könnte meine Auffassung so darstellen: das Wort ‘unendlich’ ist nur in der Ausdrucksweise ‘ad inf’19 richtig gebraucht[.] [MS 106, p. 174] – – – – Bedeutet ein endloses logisches Produkt etwas? Ist es nicht eo ipso unbestimmt?20 Aber ist es nicht durch eine Regel bestimmt? Nein[,] denn die Regel bestimmt nur unendlich viele endliche Produkte aber kein unendliches Produkt, es sei denn das[s] man hierunter die Regel selbst versteht, dann aber gehören endlich und unendlich verschiedenen Kategorien an. Die Regel bestimmt nur insofern ein unendliches log. Produkt als sie sich selbst bestimmt. [MS 106, p. 178] Wenn er durch kein endliches Produkt wahr gemacht wird[,] so heisst das: er wird durch kein Produkt wahr gemacht. Und darum ist er kein log. Produkt. [MS 106, p. 180; TS 208, p. 20; TS 209, p. 5621 (PB, p. 149)] goes on is (x) ϕx ever lg[.] prod[.] e[.]g[.] I have only 3 pencils [N.B[.] there is a limited rage e[.]g[.] my life ‘no acts of arguing except these’]22 Die unendliche Möglichkeit ist durch eine Variable vertreten[.] die eine unbegrenzte [m|M][o|ö]glichkeit der Besetzung hat; und auf andre Art darf das Unendliche nicht im Satz vorkommen. [MS 106, p. 184]
The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics 179 12 13 14
Is 5 in there are five men who love one another not the ordinary 5? The problem is: How can one make preparations for the reception of something that potentially exists? Is there, then, really a stage where I know that I have 2 + 2 apples even before I have performed the substitution of ‘2 + 2’ with ‘4’?
∃3 ϕ ()
∃4 ψ ()
∃3 + 4 ϕ () ∨ ψ () One could say: I have now only to calculate how much 3 + 4 is. [[4]] 15
The equations of mathematics, as I see it, can only be compared with sensical sentences, not with tautologies. For the equation contains precisely this predicative element – the equals sign – which is not designated to show something. For what it shows it shows without the equals sign. The equals sign does not correspond to the ⊃ in p · p ⊃ q : ⊃ : q xxx, for the ⊃ is only a component amongst all the others belonging to the formation of the tautology. It does not drop out of the connection, but rather belongs to the sentence as the ‘.’ or ‘⊃’. The ‘=’ however is a copula which alone makes the equation something sentence-like. The tautology shows something, the equation shows nothing, but it indicates that its parts show something.
16
One could state my position so: the word ‘infinite’ is only used correctly in the expression ‘ad inf’. – – – – Does an endless logical product mean anything? Is it not eo ipso indeterminate? But, is it not determined by a rule? No, for the rule only determines infinitely many finite products but not an infinite product, unless of course one understands by it the rule itself; then, however, finite and infinite belong to different categories. The rule determines an infinite log. product only insofar as it itself determines.
[[5]] 17
18
If it is not made true by a finite product, then it means: it is not made true by any product. And that is why it is not a log. product.
19
goes on is (x) ϕx ever lg[.] prod[.] e[.]g[.] I have only 3 pencils [N.B[.] there is a limited rage e[.]g[.] my life ‘no acts of arguing except these’] The infinite possibility is represented by a variable which has an unlimited possibility of replacement; and in another way the infinite should not appear in the sentence.
20
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The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics
Notes 1. Whereas in TS 208 the fourth sentence reads ‘Sie ist in demselben Sinne unendlich, in dem der dreidimensionale Gesichtsraum das ist, . . .’, in TS 209 the word ‘das’ was replaced by ‘es’. The words ‘Gesichts- & Bewegungsraum’ were also inserted above the line as an alternative to ‘Gesichtsraum’. 2. In MS 106, Wittgenstein first wrote ‘Fläche denke’. 3. The deleted words do not appear in MS 106, which correctly reads: ‘. . . dass das Zeichen unendlich komplex ist.’ This seems to be the result of a confusion in the dictation (or copy) since a bit further on in the text we find ‘die unendlich komplexe Regel nur . . .’. Ramsey will have inserted ‘ist’ but did not delete ‘die’, which looks like a previous insertion. He also left the last ‘e’ in ‘komplexe’. Kienzler (1997, p. 262) cites the passage in question in accordance with the wording of MS 106. 4. In citing this paragraph, Kienzler (1997, p. 262) considers the last symbol illegible, but there are good reasons to believe that it is an abbreviation for ‘etc.’. In fact, the formula in MS 106 runs as follows: ‘ϕ (2 − 5) = ϕ (2 − 3.15) . ϕ (3.15 − 4.2) . ϕ (4.2 − 5) = ϕ (2 − 2.6) . ϕ (2.6 − 5) = etc. etc.’ 5. The original formulation in MS 106 was: ‘Das Symbol ist das, was allen solchen Produkten gemeinsam ist.’ 6. The word ‘ihr’ appears underlined in MS 106. 7. The word ‘keine’ appears underlined in MS 106. 8. Wittgenstein’s first option in MS 106 was ‘Element’ (correctly ‘Elemente’), which he replaced by ‘Grund-Sätze’ (correctly ‘Grundsätze’). 9. The picture is absent from Kienzler’s citation of this remark (1997, p. 262). 10. The abbreviation for ‘different’ is not entirely clear. See the facsimile of this paragraph below. 11. The word ‘ordinary’ is not completely discernible, hence Kienzler (1997, p. 262) does not hazard a guess for it in citing this remark. See the facsimile below. 12. The scheme is only partially transcribed by Kienzler (1997, pp. 262–3) in his citation of this remark. 13. The same remark in MS 106 reads ‘mir’ instead of ‘nun’. 14. In MS 106, Wittgenstein inserted ‘nicht’ above the line. 15. Wittgenstein’s notation in MS 106 is ‘p . (p ⊃ q) . ⊃ . q’. 16. The deleted words, which are no longer readable, have no correspondence in MS 106. 17. The word ‘allen’ was not included in either TS 208 or TS 209. 18. The last sentence was crossed out in this typescript. 19. In MS 106, Wittgenstein did not abbreviate ‘ad infinitum’. 20. This remark in MS 106 begins with: ‘Haben wir hier nicht einen Fall wo die Allgemeinheit nicht auf Produkt oder Disjunktion reduziert werden kann? Was heisst es, wenn ich sage alle (unendlich vielen) Sätze einer bestimmten Form sind wahr?’ 21. The beginning of this remark in the typescripts reads: ‘Wenn der Satz durch . . .’
The Ramsey Notes on Time and Mathematics 181 22. Some words are not completely discernible. In citing this remark, Kienzler (1997, p. 263) takes ‘ever’ to be illegible. In the case of ‘rage’, one may speculate, like Kienzler, whether Ramsey intended to write ‘ra[n]ge’. In relation to the last word, Kienzler reads ‘three’ instead of ‘these’. See the facsimile below.
Page 3, §10b
Page 3, §12
Page 5, §19 (Reproduced by permission of the University of Pittsburgh. All rights reserved.)
Appendix II Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface Edited by Nuno Venturinha
This is a transcription of a previously unpublished typescript of Wittgenstein’s. It consists of an English translation of item 225 in G. H. von Wright’s catalogue and is dated, like the German original, ‘August 1938’.1 The document is housed at the Austrian National Library in Vienna and belongs to the Collection of Manuscripts and Old Printings, bearing the reference Cod. Ser. n. 39,544. Although the library catalogue describes the text as a translation by Rush Rhees, there are reasons to believe that the work was done by Wittgenstein himself with the assistance of Theodore Redpath. As a note on the covering sheet added by the services explains, this is a Preface to TS 226, which was indeed produced by Rhees. But the typescripts were clearly composed at two different times. TS 226 is a translation of part of TS 220, the so-called pre-war version of the Philosophical Investigations, containing extensive corrections in Wittgenstein’s hand. A letter from Wittgenstein to Rhees of 13 July 1938 hints at the beginning of that collaboration. He writes: [. . .] I am thinking of publishing something before long after all so as to end the constant misunderstandings and misinterpretations. I very much want to talk the business over with you. (WC, 227) Also instructive is a letter from J. M. Keynes to Wittgenstein dated 30 August 1938. The relevant passage runs as follows: Very glad to hear that you are near publishing. I should feel perfectly certain that the Press would take the book as soon as they asked any competent person’s advice about it. (WC, 229) The ‘Press’ Keynes alludes to is Cambridge University Press, whose Syndics, as von Wright reports, ‘on 30 September 1938 offered to publish the German original with a parallel English translation of a work referred to as Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Remarks’ (1982b, pp. 120–1).2 Wittgenstein actually tells Rhees in a letter sent on 6 October that ‘[t]he University Press has accepted [his] book’ (WC, 234). However, the minutes of the Syndics for 21 October record that ‘the Secretary reported that Wittgenstein was uncertain about the publication of his 182
Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface 183 Philosophical Remarks but was making arrangements with a translator’ (quoted in von Wright, 1982b, p. 121). This suggests that Rhees was not yet working on the translation. As a matter of fact, three letters from Wittgenstein to Rhees sent on 9 September and on 3 and 6 October show that the latter had been occupied with a thesis for a Fellowship (cf. WC, 230 and 233–4). It seems thus very likely that the translation was prepared between the end of October 1938 and the end of January 1939. The date of its conclusion can be inferred from a letter Wittgenstein wrote to Keynes on 1 February. It reads: I went round to King’s College last night with the M.S. but was told that you had gone to London; so I took it back again and shall keep it till Friday unless you want it before then. I want to use the two days to look a little through the translation and perhaps correct some of the worst mistakes. I haven[’]t yet had time to do this (queer as this may sound). My translator did about half of the first volume and then had to leave for America where his father died some weeks ago. I’ll also give you the German text – in case it’s any use to you. Not that I think that it’s worth your while looking at it, or at the translation; but as you wish to see it of course you’ll get it. (Moore has read most of the German text and might possibly be able to give some information about it.) I’m afraid there’s only one copy of the English in existence and only one corrected copy of the German; you’ll get these two copies. Thanks ever so much for taking all this trouble (in what I believe to be a lost cause). (WC, 239) The ‘lost cause’ Wittgenstein refers to here is his application for the Professorship of Philosophy, to which he would eventually be elected on 11 February 1939, succeeding G. E. Moore (cf. WC, 243). In a letter to Moore of 2 February, Wittgenstein confesses that ‘the translation is pretty awful’, but he adds that ‘Rhees did his very best and [that] the stuff is damn difficult to translate’ (WC, 240; cp. 241–2). We are also told in this letter that Yorick Smythies has helped with the revision and, in fact, a notebook of Smythies’ headed ‘Translation of Some Remarks of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (preliminary version)’ is preserved. However, this does not contain the Preface.3 In all probability Wittgenstein had it typed much earlier, and one may wonder if the material received by Keynes really included any Preface. Against this possibility seems to speak only a letter from James Taylor to Wittgenstein of 24 February, in which it is said: Thank you for sending a copy of the Preface to your book. It seems to me, so far as I can judge, to be the right one, to make the things clear that need to be made clear. I think it will do good to get it out and get these things clear in people’s heads. [. . .] Since you didn’t ask me to return the copy of the Preface you sent, I’m supposing I can keep it. (WC, 247) The text Wittgenstein sent was evidently the English version. But why did he send his Preface to Taylor? Writing to Rhees on 15 July 1938, Wittgenstein lets
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Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface
him know that ‘[t]here is going to be a discussion in Taylor’s room [. . .] tomorrow (Saturday) at 5 p.m.’ (GB). This is surely one of the discussions known as the ‘Lectures on Aesthetics’ which, as Cyril Barrett informs us in his Preface to the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief, ‘were delivered in private rooms in Cambridge in the summer of 1938’ (LC, p. vii). Barrett goes on to write. They were given to a small group of students, which included Rush Rhees, Yorick Smythies, James Taylor, Casimir Lewy, Theodore Redpath and Maurice Drury (whose names occur in the text). Here we have the core of Wittgenstein’s disciples at the time and a letter to W. H. Watson dated 28 July 1938 shows that Wittgenstein had great regard for Taylor: A friend of mine Mr. J. C. Taylor from Toronto may be passing through Montreal and I want to recommend him most warmly to you. He has been studying philosophy here and is an excellent man in every way. Please give him any assistance you can if he should come to you. – (WC, 228) Besides the letter of 24 February 1939 only one other piece of correspondence between the two men is known to exist from this period. It is a letter of 24 September 1938 that Taylor sent from America.4 Both letters reveal a close friendship and my conjecture is that Wittgenstein gave a copy of his Preface to Taylor as a farewell gift. Of course Taylor might have helped Wittgenstein with the translation, but a paragraph in his first letter seems to exclude that he had been involved in the project. Taylor writes. I hope the small volume you mentioned does get published. I’ll look forward to seeing it. (WC, 231) There are, however, other documents that throw light on the date and provenance of our text. The first one is an unpublished manuscript that can be found among Moore’s papers at the Cambridge University Library. It is titled ‘Wittgenstein’ and has a cover sheet in the handwriting of Moore’s wife, Dorothy Moore, saying ‘Extracts from diary 1929–39’. Under the date ‘1938’, Moore records: Aug. 24 W. comes about Preface to his book & for 2 hrs. later; again 2 hrs., 27th, when finish his Preface & talk of Rhees; 30th write to Press about W.’s book. (MS. Add. 8330–1/5, p. 8)5 It is unclear whether Moore took part in the preparation of the Preface or simply discussed it, and actually if this was the German or the English version of the text. What is certain is that he acted as an advisor to Cambridge University Press and it is likely that his report had been based on the English Preface. In regard to the role played by Rhees here, I myself lean towards the opinion that his name was brought to the discussion only as a prospective translator of the book.6 I say this
Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface 185 because there is an important memoir written by Redpath in which he mentions the following: [. . .] in the summer of 1938 Wittgenstein asked me if I would be willing to assist him in translating the Preface to a book which he was thinking of publishing. I said I should be very glad to try to help. I had not realized what an exhausting task it would be. We sat for several hours one day thinking out not only every sentence, but pretty well every word, and Wittgenstein sometimes got very worked up when he (or we) could not find words or phrases which entirely satisfied him. Time and again I found myself wishing to heaven that he would let me work on the German quite alone and present him with a version which he could then comment on and revise, but he pushed inexorably on, and though his interpositions were sometimes quite awry, as well as exasperating, one did learn something from the procedure, and it gave one an insight into Wittgenstein’s fanatical care both for accuracy and for style. In August 1938 he sent me a typescript. (1990, pp. 72–3) That this ‘typescript’ corresponds to the same Preface is confirmed by the fact that all the quotations made by Redpath (pp. 73–5) match our text. Taking into consideration that the item classified as Cod. Ser. n. 39,545 is Redpath’s copy of the Brown Book (which, interestingly enough, is not coincident with number 310 available in the Bergen Electronic Edition), I am convinced that Cod. Ser. n. 39,544 is in fact this ‘typescript’ – the Taylor ‘copy’ being a carbon copy. Wittgenstein’s only handwritten words in the text, ‘Better, though not good’, inserted at the top of the right-hand margin of the first page, also coheres perfectly with the story told by Redpath. Wittgenstein probably wrote the words in fun, even if he really did not think much of the final result. We are thus in the presence of a work by Wittgenstein. Michael Nedo’s observation that ‘[t]here is a translation by Theodore Redpath of the August 1938 preface’ (1998, p. xvi) is not entirely true. Wittgenstein must have produced the typescript alone and this is certainly the reason why the punctuation and style are so German like. Additional evidence is given by a series of jottings at the end of MS 160 (pp. 32v–iii) for a passage that occurs on page 1 of our Preface. They run as follows: My intention was that some day all this should be one book. to make a book (out) of them My intention was some day to make a book out of all this these thoughts to make a book out of them all to make out of all of them a book It can be argued that these jottings were recorded only after the end of August 1938 since the first date in MS 160, which occurs on page 19v, is 14 September 1938. Nedo dates in fact the beginning of the notebook to 14 September (cf. 1993, p. 38), in what appears to be a confusion. But the horizontal position of
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Wittgenstein’s 1938 Preface
Wittgenstein’s handwriting in these pages suggests that these were afterthoughts, which may have been inserted at any time, including in August. In editing the text, I have not interfered with the original punctuation and spelling. Words that were underlined are printed in italics, the same happening with the title Tractatus Logico-philosophicus, originally in double quotation marks. Page numbers from the typescript are indicated in double brackets.
Notes 1. I discuss some important differences between the two versions in Chapter 9. 2. These Philosophical Remarks cannot be confused with the book posthumously published under that title. There are actually in the Nachlass various manuscript volumes headed Philosophische Bemerkungen, and Wittgenstein is even reported by M. O’C. Drury to have said as late as 1949: ‘I have been wondering what title to give my book. I have thought of something like “Philosophical Remarks” ’ (1996, p. 160). My thanks to Josef Rothhaupt for his refusing to let me forget this particularly interesting remark. 3. For a description of the Smythies papers, see Volker Munz’s contribution to this book. The notebook, numbered XIII, can be consulted at Trinity College Library, Cambridge (Microfilm 00J00003C, Box 3). It covers only part of TS 239, which corresponds to the ‘Revised Early Version’ of Part I of the printed Investigations. 4. Extracts from this letter are also published in WC (231). Full versions of the letters are available in GB. There remains a third letter from Taylor but it is dated 22 January 1946. This is published in full in WC (347). 5. I am indebted to Josef Rothhaupt for bringing this passage to my attention. It is quoted by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library. 6. Also on p. 8 of his ‘Extracts’, Moore records that Rhees came twice on 10 October because of Wittgenstein’s manuscript.
Preface
In this and the following volumes I wish to publish a selection of the philosophical remarks which I have written down in the course of the last nine years. They concern many topics of philosophical speculation: the concepts of ‘meaning’, ‘understanding’, ‘proposition’, ‘logic’, the foundations of mathematics, sensedata, the conflict between realism and idealism, and others. All these thoughts were originally written down in the form of remarks (short paragraphs) sometimes forming connected series on the same subject, sometimes shifting rapidly from one subject to another. My intention was – some day to bring them all together in a book; regarding the form of this book I had various ideas at different times. It seemed essential however that the thoughts in it should pass from one subject to another in an ordered sequence. About four years ago I made the first attempt to collect my remarks in this way. The result was unsatisfactory and I made various further attempts. Until, two years later, I arrived at the conclusion that it was all in vain and I ought to give up any such attempt. It became clear to me that the best I ever could write would just be philosophical remarks; that my thoughts soon grew lame if, against their natural inclination, I forced them [[2]] along a single track.– This, however, was not unconnected with the nature of the subject itself. This subject compels us to travel through the field of thought in all directions by a host of different routes. And thus the thoughts do not naturally form a simple sequence but a complicated network. I begin these publications with the fragment of my last attempt to arrange my philosophical thoughts in an ordered sequence. This fragment has perhaps the advantage of giving comparatively easily an idea of my method. I intend to follow up this fragment with a mass of remarks more or less loosely arranged; and I shall explain the connections between my remarks, where the arrangement does not itself make them apparent, by a system of cross-references thus: each remark shall have a current number and besides this the numbers of those remarks which stand to it in important relations. I wish all these remarks were better than they are. They are – to put it shortly – lacking in force and in precision.– I am here publishing those which do not seem to me too dull. Until a short time ago I had practically given up the idea of publishing them during my lifetime. But the idea was revived in me, perhaps chiefly, by the fact that I found that the results of my work, which I had passed on in lectures and discussions, were circulating, frequently misunderstood, more or less watered down or mutilated. By this my vanity was stung and it threatened [[3]] to pester me again and again if I did not settle the matter, at least for myself, by publishing. And this seemed the most desirable thing from other points of view as well. For various reasons what I publish here will coincide with what others are writing to-day. If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine,– I will lay no further claim to them.
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Since, about ten years ago, I again started to work at philosophy I have had to recognise grave mistakes in what I once set down in by book Tractatus Logicophilosophicus. What helped me to recognise these mistakes was – in a measure which I can hardly now estimate – the forceful criticism which my ideas received from F. P. Ramsey; with whom I went over them in innumerable discussions during the last two years of his life. – Even more, however, I owe to the criticism which Mr P. Sraffa, Lecturer in Economics at this University, has incessantly offered on my views. To this stimulus I owe the most fruitful of the thoughts I here communicate. I publish them not without misgivings. I don’t dare to hope that it should fall to the lot of this inadequate work to throw light into this or that brain, in our dark age. I don’t by my writing wish to save others the trouble of thinking; but rather, if it were possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own. Cambridge, August 1938.
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Index
aesthetic contemplation, 38 principle (of Wittgenstein’s thought), 12 questions, 34 aesthetics, 35, 86 Ambrose, A., 67, 75–7 Anscombe, G. E. M., 1–3, 8–9, 32, 50–1, 147–9, 152, 155 arithmetic, 61, 94 art, 34–5, 43, 136, 142, 150, 163 Aue, M. A. E., 9, 118 Ayer, A. J., 91, 109 Baker, G. P. (and Hacker, P. M. S.), 9, 92, 119, 146, 153–4 see also Hacker, P. M. S Baldwin, T., 175 Barrett, C., 184 Bartscherer, T., 171 Baum, U., 32 Baum, W., 8, 32 Bazzocchi, L., 4, 11 Beethoven, L. van, 34–5 behaviour, 92, 94–5, 98–100, 103, 105–6, 125, 138, 141 pain-behaviour, 96 behavioural expressions of sensations, 91 regularity, 105 behaviourism, 63, 72, 89, 114 Bergen Electronic Edition, The, 3–4, 7, 9, 13, 27, 31, 33, 92, 115, 146, 153, 156–72, 185 Berlin, I., 51 Besicovitch, A. S., 75 Biesanbach, H., 163 Biggs, M. A. R., 161, 166 Binder, T., 170 Bollobás, B., 71 Brahms, J., 141 Bremer, J., 170
Brenner, W. H., 152 Broad, C. D., 56, 86 calculation(s), 71–2, 76, 96 see also infinitesimal calculus Carnap, R., 62 categories, 82–3, 87 causality, 88 Cavell, S., 127 certainty, 44, 148, 154 Cézanne, P., 136 Citron, G., 75 Claudius, M., 58 colour(s), 83–6, 113, 150, 177 communication, 94, 106, 125 of personal experience, 68, 73–4 see also experience: inner, privacy of, private, subjective Conant, J., 154 concept-formation, 6, 128–42 consciousness, 43, 118, 147 Cornell edition, 8, 171 Costello, H. T., 1, 8 Cripps, P., 170 culture, 62, 108, 133–4, 136–8, 141–2 see also Wittgenstein, L.: cultural remarks custom(s), 93, 96–7, 105 Danto, A., 142 Da Vinci, L., 4–5 DeAngelis, W. J., 62 Defoe, D., 99, 124–5 De Mul, J., 170 Descartes, R., 105 description(s), 54, 81, 83–4, 87, 89, 95, 122, 130–1, 140 determinism, 39 Di Lascio, E. V., 8 D’Iorio, P., 171 197
198
Index
dogmatism, 146 Drury, M. O’C, 46, 184, 186 dualism, 63 Eldridge, R., 113 emotions, 85 empiricism (empirical), 128, 140 Engelmann, P., 50 epistemology (epistemological), 13–14, 16, 104 eternity, 38, 40 ethics (ethical), 5, 12–17, 19–20, 30, 33–8, 40, 43–6, 49, 132 evidence, 138 self-evidence, 70, 73–4 experience, 86, 128 inner, 106, 111, 113 privacy of, 112–13 private, 88 subjective, 91 see also communication: of personal experience Fabian, R., 9, 171 facts empirical, 97 of nature, 125, 129–32 physical, 88 space of, 36 world of, 36–7, 39, 49 of the world, 38 family-resemblance, 108, 129 Fermat, P. de, 72 Ficker, L. von, 40, 50 form(s) of life, 108, 133, 135–6 Frazer, J. G., 1, 8, 57–8 free will, 83, 87 functions, 76 Gabler, H. W., 172 Galavotti, M. C., 175 game(s), 93–4, 96, 98, 100–1, 122, 126 see also language: language-game(s) Gasking, D. A. T., 70, 86 Geach, P. T., 2, 147, 149, 152
general form of a number (an integer number), 19, 28 of an (the) operation, 15, 17, 19 of (the) proposition, 15–19, 27 of truth-function, 13, 17, 19 generality, 61, 173 geometry, 68 George, S., 141 Geschkowski, A., 4, 14, 22–3, 25, 27–9 Gibson, A., 5–6, 75, 175 Giotto, 142 Glock, H.-J., 119 God, 37–40, 43–4, 46–8, 125 Gödel, K., 81, 83–4, 87 Goldbach, C., 70 Golla, P., 175 Goodstein, M., see Singer, S. Goodstein, R. L., 64–7, 71, 75, 77 grammar, 98, 101, 108, 120, 123, 125, 127, 129, 136, 140 see also logic(al): logico-grammatical; propositions: grammatical graph theory, 68 Groag, H., 23–4, 26, 28 Hacker, P. M. S., 6, 58, 112, 120, 122, 124, 127, 143, 146, 153–4, 156 see also Baker, G. P. (and Hacker, P. M. S.) Hahn, H., 62 Haller, R., 170 Hänsel, L., 10 Hardy, G. H., 71, 75 Haugen, O. E., 167 Haydn, J., 141 Hayek, F. A. von, 50 Heringer, H. J., 2 Hide, Ø., 4–5 Hijab, W., 85, 89 Hilmy, S., 51, 121 Hintikka, J., 8–9, 51 Hintikka, M. B., 51 Hrachovec, H., 115, 158, 170, 172 Huitfeldt, C., 3, 9, 170, 172 Hume, D., 140 hypertext(ual), 4, 12
Index 199 idealism, 2, 43, 109, 113, 187 identity, 71 ineffable, 36–7, 43 see also inexpressible; unsayable inexpressible, 34 see also ineffable; unsayable infinitesimal calculus, 83 see also calculation(s) infinity, 173 Innsbruck Electronic Edition (Innsbrucker elektronische Ausgabe), 7, 9–10, 50, 62, 153, 161, 163, 174, 184, 186 institution(s), 91, 93, 96 Iven, M., 10, 171 James, W., 125 Janik, A., 172 Jantschek, T., 170 Kang, J., 15, 27 Keicher, P., 152, 166 Keller, G., 34 Kenny, A., 2–3, 9, 117, 167 Keynes, J. M., 144, 182–3 Kienzler, W., 119, 127, 175, 180–1 knowledge, 38, 82, 84, 87–9 by acquaintance and by description, 86 innate, 97–9, 106, 108, 122 philosophical, 44 theoretical, 136 theory of, 155 Köhler, D., 170, 172 Kraus, K., 52, 61 Kripke, S. A., 6, 91–2, 109 Krüger, H. W., 170 Kusch, M., 92–3, 96, 109 Lanestedt, G., 158 language, 27, 45, 62, 86, 128–9, 135, 141 essence of, 149 everyday, 36 language-game(s), 6, 45, 68, 97, 103–4, 109, 135, 141, 149–50, 155 limits of, 34, 42, 49 logical analysis of, 39 ordinary, 120, 126
phenomenological, 54, 111 private, 6, 89, 91–127, 172 senseful, 20 Leader, I., 71, 75 Levy, D., 8 Lewy, C., 80, 85, 89, 184 ‘liberating word’, 118 see also ‘redeeming word’ literature, 52, 57, 163 Littlewood, J. E., 55–7, 72, 76 Locke, J., 105, 140 logic(al), 12–14, 16, 18–20, 40–1, 56, 70–1, 73–4, 81, 98, 133, 144, 147, 173–4, 179, 187 logico-grammatical, 103–4 see also language: logical analysis of; necessity: logical; propositions: logical, of logic Luckhardt, C. G., 9, 118 Lugg, A., 175 Madsen, C., 172 Malcolm, N., 6, 8, 89, 91–2, 109, 152–3 Masterman, M., 76 mathematics (mathematical), 7–9, 15, 17–18, 27, 56, 65, 68, 71, 73–5, 81, 96, 129, 133–4, 140–1, 147, 149, 151, 154, 156, 172–3, 179 foundations of, 62, 86–7, 129, 144, 147, 174–5, 187 philosophy of, 128, 147, 150–1, 154, 172 Maury, A., 166 Mayr, K., 171 McEwen, C., 170, 172 McGuinness, B., 4, 10, 13–16, 18–28, 32, 37, 50, 75, 147, 161, 170, 173, 175 McKitterick, D., 75 meaning causal conception of linguistic, 97 concept of, 147, 187 of life, 37–9 of a rule, 92 shades of, 138 of a sign, 95
200
Index
meaning – continued of words and sentences, 45, 62, 68, 95, 100, 106, 123, 136 see also sense metaphor(ical), 41, 44, 48, 135–6 metaphysics (metaphysical), 39–40, 43, 63 Mill, J. S., 140 Monk, R., 149 Moore, G. E., 53–4, 84–6, 144, 152, 183–4, 186 use of ‘I know’, 150 Moore, Mrs D., 184 moral concepts, 34 Mott, N. F., 75 Moyal-Sharrock, D., 7, 143, 148, 152 Mozart, W. A., 137 Mulder, H., 9 Mulhall, S., 127 Munz, V. A., 5–6, 75, 89, 186 music, 34–5, 57, 134, 137, 163 mysticism (mystical), 40, 42–3 natural history (of human beings), 123, 129–31, 134, 138, 140 necessity, 39 conceptual, 129 logical, 83 physiognomic, 133–4, 136, 138 see also propositions: necessary Nedo, M., 1–3, 117–18, 145, 153, 185 Nestroy, J. N., 118 Neurath, O., 62 norm, 105–6 see also rule(s) Norwegian Wittgenstein Project, 3 number theory, 6, 68, 71 Nyman, H., 9, 148, 154, 155 objects, 54, 82–3, 87, 177 O’Hear, A., 92, 109 Oku, M., 154 Ore, E. S., 170 pantheism, 43 Paul, D., 9, 51–4, 70, 150
Paul, G. A., 70 Peacocke, C., 92, 109 Pears, D., 126 perception of visual phenomena, 6, 70 see also visual field Phillips, D. Z., 81, 86 philology, 115, 157, 165, 169 Pichler, A., 7, 9–10, 31, 49–50, 75, 120, 145–6, 153, 156, 158, 166–7, 170, 172 Potter, M., 8 practice, 93–7, 104–5, 107–8, 117, 123–4, 136 Price, M., 75 probability, 174 propositions analysis of, 41, 50 elementary (sentences), 177 empirical, 88–9 ethical, 20 grammatical, 104 logical, of logic, 13, 16, 94 meaningful, 36 meaningless, 39 necessary, 6, 81–4, 87–8 nonsensical, 36 senseful, 20 sensical (sentences), 36, 179 tautology of, 41 Wittgenstein on, 63, 71, 147, 187 Proust, M., 142 psychology (psychological), 7, 136, 150 analytic, 174 philosophical, philosophy of, 6–7, 88, 116, 128–9, 143, 147, 150–1, 154–5 Pyrrhonism, 6, 120–1 Raatzsch, R., 170 Ramsey, F. P., 7, 140, 173–5, 180–1, 188 Rand, R., 10 Rast, E., 175 realism, 140, 187 ‘redeeming word’, 41, 50 see also ‘liberating word’ Redpath, T., 70, 148, 182, 184–5
Index 201 religion (religious), 5, 30–1, 33–8, 42–9, 83 Rembrandt, 136 Renan, E., 58, 62 Respinger, M., 43 Rhees, R., 1–3, 5, 8–9, 52–4, 58–9, 67, 70, 76, 79–82, 84, 86–7, 91, 109, 111, 117, 147–8, 152–3, 167, 182–4, 186 Richards, R. B. (Ben), 10 Ricken, F., 62 Rogers, B., 172 Rose, H. E., 75 Roser, A., 170 Rossvær, V., 9 Rothhaupt, J. G. F., 5, 8, 62–3, 118–19, 146, 151, 153, 155, 166, 175, 186 rule(s), 27, 68, 88, 120, 126, 177, 179 ethical, 36 mathematical, 133 rule-following, 6, 91–109, 124 see also meaning: of a rule; norm Russell, B., 5, 8–9, 12, 21, 23–6, 28–9, 53, 55–6, 71, 86, 88, 121, 140, 173 Sánchez Pascual, A., 32 Savigny, E. von, 92–3, 109 scepticism, 44, 92 Schiller, F., 141 Schlick, M., 2, 9, 55, 171, 174 Scholz, O., 152 Schopenhauer, A., 38, 68 Schroeder, S., 141 Schulte, J., 7, 43, 75, 116, 118, 120, 127, 144–6, 149, 154–5, 170 science, 14–15, 18, 20, 38, 40, 42–3, 129–31, 163, 174 Scott-Moncrieff, C. K., 142 Seekircher, M., 10 sensation(s), 88, 91, 100, 106, 108, 114, 122–4 sense bounds of, 120 data, 54, 88, 187 of the ethical, 35 of life, 18, 40 of self, 42
theoretical, 136 of the world, 18 see also meaning Shwayder, D. S., 8 similarity, 81–2, 85–6, 89 Singer, S., 75 Sjögren, A., 32 Skinner, F., 8, 64–77 Smith, D., 172 Smith, J., 75, 77, 152, 172, 175 Smythies, P., 81, 86 Smythies, Y., 5–6, 67, 78–90, 153, 183–4, 186 solipsism, 42–3, 63, 109 Somavilla, I., 4–5, 8 Soulez, A., 170 speech acts, 107 Spinoza, B. de, 38–9 Sraffa, P., 10, 75, 188 states of mind, 82–3, 86 Steiner, M., 76 Stern, D. G., 4, 6, 9, 112, 115, 119, 121, 127, 144, 152, 155, 170, 175 Stonborough, J. J., 50 Stonborough, M., 32, 50 Stroll, A., 7, 143, 152 Taylor, J. C., 82–3, 85, 183–5, 186 Thompson, J. M., 7, 50 thought, 62–3, 70, 187 inner, 125 Ramsey on, 174 Tolstoy, L., 38, 41 training, 98, 133, 141 Trenkler, A., 21 Turing, A., 72 understanding, 81–2, 84, 87, 97, 99, 147, 187 unsayable, 36, 43, 49 see also ineffable; inexpressible Unterhuber, M., 10 Unterkircher, A., 10 value, 13, 18–20, 35–6, 48 van Gennip, K., 148, 154 Venturinha, N., 8, 27–9 Verheggen, C., 125
202
Index
verification, 63 Vienna Circle, 9, 35, 55, 57, 105 Vienna Edition, 3–4, 145 visual field, 177 see also perception of visual phenomena volition, 6, 85, 87–8 von Wright, G. H., 1–2, 8–9, 23, 26, 31–2, 50, 58, 67, 73, 75, 114–16, 143–4, 147–8, 152–7, 161, 164, 171, 173, 182–3 Waismann, F., 55, 62, 121, 174–5 Walmsley, M., 75 Wang, J., 171 Watson, W. H., 184 Wedelstaedt, A. von, 141 Weininger, O., 42 Williams, C., 77 Winch, P., 3, 31 Wisdom, A. J. T., 70, 86, 88, 150 Wittgenstein, H. (sister), 9, 21–6, 28 Wittgenstein, L. (auto)biographical remarks, 5, 10, 30–1, 33–4, 43, 45–6, 57–9 coded script (Geheimschrift), 4–5, 8, 10, 25, 30–50, 57, 165 cultural remarks, 31, 33, 43, 45–6, 57–9 cuttings (and pastings), 1–2, 5, 53, 59–61, 146–7, 151, 153 lectures, conversations, etc, 1, 35, 66–70, 73–6, 78–90, 111, 140, 149, 162, 184, 187 marginal marks, 5, 57–9, 116–18, 155, 168 personal remarks, 46, 57, 172 prefaces, 5, 7, 12, 54, 58–9, 62–3, 112, 119, 144–7, 150, 153–5, 182–8 publication plans, 5, 21, 24–5, 33, 55, 80, 90, 144–7, 152–3, 155, 174, 182, 184–5, 187–8 third, 7, 143, 148, 150 works
Big Typescript, 2–3, 5, 9, 52, 54, 59–60, 97, 111, 117–19, 127, 167 Blue and Brown Books, 1, 67–70, 72–3, 75–6, 86, 95, 97–9, 111, 116, 119, 153, 171, 185 ‘Cause and Effect’, 79, 88, 134, 148 On Certainty, 9, 94, 143, 147–8, 150, 152 Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen), 5, 10, 31, 33, 36, 45, 58, 61, 95, 133, 162, 164, 171 ‘Eine Philosophische Betrachtung’, 88, 98 Geheime Tagebücher, 9, 32–3 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, 9, 138, 141, 148–50, 155 Lecture on Ethics, 1, 8, 35 Movements of Thought (Denkbewegungen), 32–5, 43–4 Notebooks, 1, 8, 29, 32, 37–43, 47, 50 ‘Notes dictated to G. E. Moore’, 4, 8 ‘Notes for Lectures’, 2, 8–9, 111–12 ‘Notes on Logic’, 1, 4, 8 ‘Notes for the Philosophical Lecture’, 111 Philosophical Grammar, 2, 95, 97, 117, 119, 167 Philosophical Investigations (Philosophische Untersuchungen), 1, 6–7, 27, 43, 63, 86, 88–9, 91–3, 95–6, 101, 103–4, 107–9, 110–14, 116, 118–22, 124–5, 129, 131, 135, 141–56, 166–7, 182–3, 186 Philosophical Remarks (Philosophische Bemerkungen), 1, 5, 52–4, 59, 62, 127, 175–6, 178, 186 Prototractatus, 4, 11–29
Index 203 Remarks on Colour, 9, 143, 148, 154 Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 1, 6, 94–6, 105, 126, 140–1, 147 ‘Remarks on Frazer’, 1–2, 8, 58, 62 Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, 9, 88, 95, 132, 137, 141, 155
‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’, 173–5 Tractatus, 1, 4, 11–12, 15–16, 20, 23, 26, 36–7, 39–40, 42–3, 50, 71, 119–20, 143–4, 152, 155, 186, 188 Zettel, 2, 143, 147, 152, 155 Zamuner, E., 8
