Reading Wittgenstein
Part 1 of 694, hopefully
Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.
The trouble about progress is that it always looks much greater than it really is.
—Nestroy
This is the first post in an intended series going section-by-section through Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Reasons for doing this:
I would like to get my own thoughts about this book down somewhere that I can easily reference them, and making a public promise to grind through the whole thing seems like it might help me overcome my fundamental laziness through imagined social disappointment.
Philosophical Investigations is unfortunately misused and neglected by the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, which is nevertheless the only tradition (of which I am aware) that has really taken it up (small pockets of German Wittgensteinians aside).
This book has the potential to help people (not just philosophers) in their thinking about communication, language, the mind, and social life. Wittgenstein often talks as if what he says is useful only for academic philosophers and their problems, and many of his readers have accepted that he was correct in so assessing his work. I disagree. In my view, Wittgenstein most likely thought of his own project in those terms, but even so produced considerations applicable to, at the very least, many modern Euro-Americans.1
A corollary of (2) and (3) is that I hope to discuss things in a way that is productive for both those trained in the canon, methods, rhetoric, tropes etc. of academic philosophy and those without any such background. One likely consequence of this approach is that I’ll end up disappointing both parties at turns. In order to explain why Wittgenstein makes some moves that he does, I imagine I’ll have to resort to explaining some of his influences, who he is responding to, what he wrote earlier about the same subjects in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, etc. This explanation is liable both to bore or obstruct those without prior familiarity and to frustrate or dissatisfy those who already have thoughts on the material I introduce. Sorry! If you’ve got a better way to do things, let me know. I think most of the other prefatory material I’d want to include should fall naturally out of discussing Wittgenstein’s preface, so enough from me. Let’s hear from Ludwig!
Preface
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. I have written down all these thoughts as remarks, short paragraphs, sometimes in longer chains about the same subject, sometimes jumping, in a sudden change, from one area to another.—Originally it was my intention to bring all this together in a book whose form I thought of differently at different times. But it seemed to me essential that in the book the thoughts should proceed from one subject to another in a natural, smooth sequence.2 [italics mine]
The first thing to note here is the example topics which he offers. Keep these in mind, because it will often seem as though he is discussing something which has nothing at all to do with these topics, which are rather formal and seem quite specific to “epistemology” or “the philosophy of mind.” It will be useful to ask yourself, at various points, how he takes himself to be commenting on these sorts of topics by writing the things he does.
Notice that Wittgenstein, in the very first paragraph of the preface, is already telling us that his book is a failure—and he doesn’t get more optimistic in the rest of it! I think people rarely want to take philosophers (or writers in general, really) seriously when they say this sort of thing: wahh wahh, we get it, you’re very dissatisfied, etc. I don’t begrudge anyone this impulse, but I would cautiously suggest that you should take sentiments like that pretty seriously coming from W. The biographical evidence suggests to me that, at the very least, he genuinely took himself to have failed; if the book seems at points to be succeeding, we will need to ask ourselves why this is.
The failure, moreover, is linked directly to the form of the book, with all of its disjointed paragraphs and jumping around between topics. Yet Wittgenstein doesn’t think this form is entirely due to a failure of imagination or effort:
After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts soon grew feeble if I tried to force them along a single track against their natural inclination. — And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For it compels us to travel criss-cross in every direction over a wide field of thought. — The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and meandering journeys. [italics mine]
This is the paragraph sometimes cited (or implicitly rested upon) as evidence that the form of PI is the only form which the thoughts contained therein could have taken; on this view, the “nonlinear” feeling that we get from the structure of PI is supposed to caution us against the kind of straightforward sense of impregnable truth that we might get from a mathematical proof. I think Wittgenstein’s claim here is a bit weaker: the lines of thought which he is exploring cut against the grain of the Western philosophical tradition, and this makes demonstrating them in a straightforward book difficult, but that doesn’t mean that doing so would be impossible! I say this to ward off a temptation to which many readers (myself included) succumb: treating the actually-existing structure of PI with a kind of mystical reverence, as if attempting to say what he is saying in other words, or attempting to reach his conclusions by other paths, would be already missing the point. If we give in to that temptation, we can’t do much beyond reverential contemplation. Instead, let’s just take him at face value: the arrangement of the remarks tells us something about the subject-matter, but it doesn’t tell us everything. Everyone, even Ludwig Wittgenstein, can sometimes run out of editing steam.
By analogizing his thoughts to “sketches of landscapes,” W makes the first of many references to what I’m going to call “visibility:” the idea that much of what he’s doing here proceeds in the manner of looking, as opposed to reading or hearing. The next paragraph elaborates on this analogy:
The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or lacking in character, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected, a number of half-way decent ones were left, which now had to be arranged and often cut down, in order to give the viewer an idea of the landscape. — So this book is really just an album. [italics mine]
An album—not a notebook, a commonplace book, or a scrapbook. Why would you call your book of sentences a book of pictures? In his first major work, the Tractatus, Wittgenstein outlines what is generally called his “picture theory of language.” There, he says things like “We make to ourselves pictures of facts (TLP 2.1),” “The picture is a model of reality (TLP 2.12),” “The picture represents a possible state of affairs in logical space (TLP 2.202),” and eventually “The proposition is a picture of reality (TLP 4.01).” You get the picture. More or less, Wittgenstein is generally taken to be saying that language and thought work as direct representations of things in the world, and the relation between the two is like that between a picture and its subject. Another common assumption in the reading of Wittgenstein3 is that PI begins by breaking with this “picture theory” and setting up a new theory in its place. I don’t want to say that this assumption is wrong (at least, I don’t want to say that yet), but we should perhaps be skeptical of this received wisdom in light of the prominence of “pictures” here.
Until recently I had really given up the idea of publishing my work in my lifetime. All the same, it was revived from time to time, mainly because I could not help noticing that the results of my work (which I had conveyed in lectures, typescripts and discussions) were in circulation, frequently misunderstood and more or less watered down or mangled. This stung my vanity, and I had difficulty in quieting it.
Four years ago, however, I had occasion to reread my first book (the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) and to explain its ideas. Then it suddenly seemed to me that I should publish those old ideas and the new ones together: that the latter could be seen in the right light only by contrast with and against the background of my older way of thinking.
This series is a gamble that the last sentence here is incorrect. I think that viewing PI alongside the Tractatus can be very helpful, and I think we will have to do it a bit here. Yet I also think that the path which he explored in his early work bears resemblance to common patterns of thought that occur to anyone trying to think about such topics as communication, expression, and language. As such, even though Wittgenstein is responding to the particular traps and dead-ends into which he takes his younger self to have fallen, the sketches which he provides for escaping from those conundrums carry force even for readers who have never touched the Tractatus.
For since I began to occupy myself with philosophy again, sixteen years ago, I could not help but recognize grave mistakes in what I set out in that first book. I was helped to realize these mistakes — to a degree which I myself am hardly able to estimate — by the criticism which my ideas encountered from Frank Ramsey, with whom I discussed them in innumerable conversations during the last two years of his life. — Even more than this — always powerful and assured — criticism, I am indebted to that which a teacher of this university, Mr P. Sraffa, for many years unceasingly applied to my thoughts. It is to this stimulus that I owe the most fruitful ideas of this book.
The impact of Ramsey and Sraffa on Wittgenstein’s later thought is a very interesting historical question that I won’t be trying to tackle here. Sraffa himself claimed to have found Wittgenstein annoying, and to have gotten very little from their conversations. This perhaps demonstrates that Wittgenstein could find significance in things that others find banal; it perhaps also demonstrates that the corrective demanded for Wittgenstein’s early thought was somebody who wasn’t impressed by his genius or willing to take his bullshit.
For more than one reason, what I publish here will have points of contact with what other people are writing today. — If my remarks do not bear a stamp which marks them as mine, then I do not wish to lay any further claim to them as my property.
I make them public with misgivings. It is not impossible that it should fall to the lot of this work, in its poverty and in the darkness of this time, to bring light into one brain or another — but, of course, it is not likely. [italics mine]
This is a preface of its time. The first remark, about what others are writing today, suggests that there is something about the historical situation from which Wittgenstein is writing that makes these considerations particularly apt. We might better understand the “darkness” he sees in his times when we learn, at the end of the preface, that it was composed in January 1945. Europe was burning. A few months earlier, the liberation of the Majdanek extermination camp, and the machinery of genocide discovered there, had headlined the New York Times. Wittgenstein is writing as an exile, as a survivor, as a veteran. The milieu that raised him, the assimilated German-Jewish bourgeoisie and intelligentsia, has been viciously eradicated. I hope to show that the Philosophical Investigations will continue to be misunderstood until we learn to see it as evidence surviving the wreck, a book written under the shadow of the destruction of a world.
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
The Philosophical Investigations contains exercises and instructions. We should take them seriously.
I should have liked to produce a good book. It has not turned out that way, but the time is past in which I could improve it.
One can’t just “stop and think,” isolate the utterance and turn it around like a specimen. Language unfolds in time. Aren’t you always running out of it?
On with the story. On with the story.
Not trying to make a strong historicity or scope claim here. Just saying that Wittgenstein (despite himself?) produced considerations on some problems that I think were common among his contemporaries. We are still his contemporaries.
This text is taken from the Fourth Edition of G. E. M. Anscombe’s translation, revised by Schulte and Hacker. For the actual propositions, I intend to present the German text along with my own translation, so I can note some things that I take to be important about the German that aren’t captured easily in English. However, the preface is a lot of text, and I’m lazy.
There is also the common position that the project in PI is continuous with the project in TLP; this generally follows out of what is called the “resolute reading” of TLP. I don’t really want to get into these endless debates here; for anyone reading who is familiar with them, I trust that my ambivalent feelings re: the resolute reading will become clear as I go on.