Philosophical Investigations

It's more than a little presumptuous to attempt a short review of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. After all, it's one of the few most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. This edition is sorely awaited by some, after years of close examination and criticism of the Anscombe translation. First, the geeky stuff on the translation and editing. Like the Anscombe translation, this one with Hacker and Schulte joining their efforts to Anscombe's, presents the original German and the English translation on facing pages. As a reader with a spotty knowledge of German, this gives me the opportunity to refer to the original where the English seems obscure, ambiguous, or just plain impenetrable. If you're a student of Wittgenstein, Hacker and Schulte have helpfully addressed numerous, controversial aspects of Anscombe's translation -- many of these, such as the difficulty with the German "Satz" (translated relative to context by "sentence" or "proposition", two very different English words) and "Seele" ("soul" sometimes but "mind" others by context in English), are discussed in their Preface. If you are a quasi-casual reader, many of these points of translation are probably less important than overall readability. And I think Hacker and Schulte have improved readability, updating the feel of Wittgenstein's writing, which is often colloquial, to something more modern. They've also added over 20 pages of sometimes helpful footnotes, where additional information about the translation or about Wittgenstein's thoughts are enlightening. And they've recast "Part II" of the Investigations itself as "Philosophy of Psychology -- A Fragment" -- their reasoning for that is given in their Preface. Like most great philosophical texts, no matter how many times I read the Investigations, it's different each time, and I feel foolish for having understood so little the previous time. The new translation offers a great excuse to give it another read. There are many themes to pick up, including the great variety of linguistic behavior (as contrasted with naive views of language as representing or naming, or with Wittgenstein's own view in the Tractatus), the illusions of distinctive mental activities (such as "meaning" a word while uttering it, or translating the inner to the outer or public), and the general theme of philosophical problems arising when "language goes on holiday". It's the last that continues to grab my attention, persistently through readings, with different remarks jumping out of the text each time. The simple view is that Wittgenstein thinks ordinary language (what we all say and do in practical contexts every day) is fine as it is, but that it's when we detach ordinary language from those practical contexts that we get in trouble. We fall into perplexing philosophical quandaries, supposing ourselves to really wonder whether the external world or other minds exist, or whether objects are material or ideal. But philosophical exercises of language are exercises of language, after all. It's not as though we can simply say, "Don't do that" when philosophers speak, and point out that they've left the "ordinary" behind. It's not a simple mistake, and the line between the "ordinary" and the "philosophical" is crossed sometimes without special notice. And it's not even the exclusive province of professional philosophers (amateurs seem even more impressed than the professionals sometimes by their own metaphysical musings). Certainly, there is more to say about the mistake that philosophers, amateur and professional, make. In particular, there is Wittgenstein's distinction between empirical remarks (remarks about facts in the world) and grammatical remarks (by contrast, remarks about how we speak or are to speak about those facts in the world). The philosopher mistakes the one for the other, thinking that, for example, by adopting what we call an idealist grammatical position (when we talk of objects in the world, we are really talking of mental or ideal objects) we have really discovered something about the objects and not just made a statement about how we should speak of them. Much more to say on this, of course -- which is why a short review is so presumptuous. In fact, it's Wittgenstein's thoughts on why we fall victim to such a misunderstanding that I puzzle most about.

It is hard for me to imagine anything more presumptuous than my doing a review of LW’s Philosophical Investigations. As a general reader who lacks the background in Russell/Frege/Moore, et al. to contextualize LW’s thought, I can hopefully speak for the interested amateurs out there who are considering buying the book. First, this is a scholarly edition. It presents the German text and the English translation on facing pages. The copy text, if you will, for the translation is that of G.E.M. Anscombe, but it is revised by P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Wittgensteinians study LW’s writings word by word, and some of the translation choices have been disputed. The book also contains endnotes and a substantial index. Considering the accumulated elements of apparatus and the density of the text, the price is a bargain. This is, after all, one of the most important books of 20thc philosophy. It is, of course, quite skeptical of the philosophic enterprise. LW believed that the ‘problems’ of philosophy were essentially self-created and result from the constraints posed by language. That which we cannot speak of, LW argued, was what was truly important. The rest was a series of muddles. The book consists of two parts, the second renamed “Philosophy of Psychology – A Fragment.” The first consists (crudely speaking) of an extensive set of observations on language and communication, the second on perception and behavior. These observations are stated with great lucidity though we can feel the weight of reflection that stands behind them. We can also feel the weight of previous philosophic opinion, though LW is very sparing in his mention of other philosophers. His immediate predecessors are mentioned and he cites both Plato and Augustine (quoting the latter in Latin). He mentions William James, but on his predecessors he tends to remain silent. When he reflects on causality, e.g., he does not engage directly with Hume, though it is clear that Hume is in his thoughts. He anticipates much contemporary neuroscience, in, e.g., his discussion of the problems of ‘consciousness’, but he does not provide extensive references. At a number of points (a very small number of points) he states his aims and his conclusions with great specificity: “Philosophy is a struggle against the bewitchment of our understanding by the resources of our language” (#109). “What I want to teach is: to pass from unobvious nonsense to obvious nonsense” (#464). “A whole cloud of philosophy condenses into a drop of grammar” (#315). And quintessentially: “What is your aim in philosophy? – To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (#309). He is (expectedly) hard on psychology: “The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by its being a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings . . . . For in psychology, there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion. . . . The existence of the experimental method makes us think that we have the means of getting rid of the problems which trouble us; but problem and method pass one another by” (II, #371). There are other memorable passages which I will allow the reader to discover for him- or herself. I would describe this book as a necessary read for anyone interested in the history of philosophy and the course of modern thought. Even if one is not prepared to dissect it in detail, it is a pleasure to watch a brilliant mind at work, tracing an outline of thought that has been immensely influential.

It was time for a complete re-think of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and an opportunity to incorporate the fruit of a lot of scholarly discussion on the text that has accumulated since its original collation, which was not Wittgenstein's own doing. It is important to point out that philosophy in the Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein lineage, has moved on since Wittgenstein, and largely because of his thinking, particularly his manner of doing philosophy, starting from, and remaining in contact with palpable experience as the reference of any possible reality explanation. Since it is fairly certain Wittgenstein would have found it sad if his work were to have become uniquely a chalk-lined pitch for territorial calculatons of measurable status-honors and award citations in professional circles, it is incumbant upon us to see his work as the product of a man debating the events of his time with himself, and to take his hint that the point of doing what he was doing was to "show" us what we might well choose to do in our own time and circumstance. Is being a conscious creature post-Enlightenment-- "modern" if you must --necessarily anti-historical or science-paradigm processed in infinite circular limbo? Wittgenstein's writings and intellectual development suggests a way to wonder such matters is to develop critical apptitudes for responding responsibily to desires to find a sense of permanence (historical) while also responding to desires to take subjective first-person responsibility for believing what is rigorously factual (science). In this sense, Philosophical Investigations, is a trail of evidence left of one persons work-in-progress. Wittgenstein, it is fair to say, believed whatever sort of thought-work philosophy supposes itself to be doing, it ought to be doing it where the work demand for work leads. His life was practically bookended by the two World Wars, a surface phenomenon that had long been brewing. The spectacular failure of social authority that "was" the two World Wars announced the end of governance by genetics-selected social elites and recognition of the political importance of public opinion in the consensus building process. Wittgenstein was famously uncomfortable talking philosophy in academia, for him the mental finishing schools of moribund authority structures, but he found minds there ready and able to demand a lot of themselves in the ways his thinking would require. He was even more allergic to group-think, especially operating in the so-called 'social sciences,' under the guise of science. Wittgenstein saw well before most-- and there's his genius --that a reality deprived by historical events of a crushing nature opposed to human purposes, hopes and desires, a collective world organized sufficiently to insulate itself against the imposing necessities of material scarcity, could no longer be ordered collectively from outside the individual; if any collective order can be possible under such a changed condition, it must come as an organizing principle inside conscious thinking, from an individuals taking within his own conceptual powers the responsibility to justify whatever he might accept to believe as fact, or what is the case. Wittgenstein's brand of self-questioning, for readers prepared to go mentally active as 'authors' of their own authority, is presently continued in spirit in the work of John R. Searle, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, P.F. Strawson and G.E.M Anscombe. Philosophical Investigations is not any easy text to read because its compilation of remarks on loosely associated themes reads like reports of Wittgenstein ruminating to himself, like raw epiphanies of a moment's inspiration without the subject's mapping assumptions. Like Socrates, Wittgenstein believed he could assist at the birth of active consciousness, but could not force a passive mind into the world, or mystify it into existence with mind-candy-- or, even less, to 'sell it.' Books that disturb our complacency, that change us because we are aware of something at point B we weren't aware of at point A, are perhaps not for everyone, but they are about all that some of us may want to bother to read.

This is Wittgenstein's posthumous book. The original German is given side by side with the English translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, which has undergone many corrections for this edition. Philosophical Investigations, like the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus of 1918, is unconventionally organized. There are no chapters and no subheadings. Each numbered paragraph tells its own story. Large blocks of paragraphs deal with a single topic. For instance, the first thirty-eight paragraphs of Part I deal with the question of meaning. A given theme is treated at some length, dropped and is picked up again later on and in connection with another problem. This, plus Wittegnstein's unorthodox views may make the book difficult reading. Wittgenstein's chief philosophical principle is that there are no philosophical problems. There are only philosophical muddles engendered by inattention to the proper uses of linguistic expressions. All of his main discussions in the book are general questions about language; not that language is the subject matter of philosophy but rather that an important, but not the only, function of philosophy is to clear away philosophical puzzles by tracing them to their source in linguistic muddles. Beyond the therapy lies the possibility of proposing different ways of talking, each of which, insofar as it is free of linguistic puzzles, may be a profitable way of looking at things analogous to "a new way of painting..." (p. 128, paragraph 401). Wittgenstein's therapeutic method is best understood by seeing it in use. However, an inadequate idea of it may be conveyed by means of a general characterization. In the space allotted, I can do no more. To understand a linguistic expression in a given context describe the way(s) in which that expression functions in that context. Context is, in the last analysis, social context because languages that communicate, i.e., languages that are languages, cannot be private. This is not an empirical hypothesis but a statement of logical necessity. In the philosophy of psychology, this thesis is usually called logical behaviorism. Another way of putting Wittgenstein's general therapeutic prescription is this. To learn the "proper" meaning of a linguistic expression, investigate the ways in which we would learn or teach the use of the expression in specific contexts. We must pay particular attention to the ways in which the learner could get the wrong ideas about how to use the expression. We must also remember that the same utterance may function in many different kinds of contexts. Wittgenstein takes great pains to show the rich variety of usages. Clarifying meanings can be done only within an already existing language. This principle relates not to the ways in which language comes into existence but rather to the ways in which it functions as a means of communication. The question of meaning in a way underlies every other question in the book. Here is a partial list of the many philosophical problems discussed: meaning, use and understanding; logical behaviorism and its consequences for the conception of philosophical analysis; thoughts, things and words; states of mind and conduct (as against involuntary action); sameness and difference of meaning, induction, deduction, memory. One would have to write such an extensive article even to begin exploring the method and cogency of Wittgenstein's philosophizing on these questions. When one mentions philosophical analysis nowadays, Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein come to mind as the three fountainheads of three important 20th-Century styles of philosophical analysis. Wittgenstein's influence on Oxford philosophers and through them, and also directly, his influence on some 20th-Century American philosophers is enormous. These philosophers have used, though by no means slavishly, the Wittgenstein way of doing philosophy and their work is very suggestive. One need not agree with one's philosophical colleagues in order to admire the quality of their work. Suggestive philosophical processes and products, even if alien to our own ways of doing philosophy are, unless prima facie absurd, oftentimes more stimulating than agreement. For this reason, if for no other, Wittgenstein and the Wittgensteineans deserve serious attention.

It would be the height of hubris to write a book review of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Instead, I’ll merely try to summarize some key points in the hopes that this encourages prospective readers. To understand the Philosophical Investigations you have to begin with his earlier Tractatus. In that work, Wittgenstein thought he had solved all the problems of philosophy by explaining them as misuses of language. He proposed a theory of how languages work and thus showed why questions of metaphysics did not reach concord. Metaphysical questions are perpetual conundrums not because of their difficulty but because they stretch language to cases where it shouldn’t wander. Never forgoing his fundamental intuition that language provides the key to all philosophical problems, Wittgenstein revised the comparatively simple explanations of the Tractatus to a more complex theory in the Philosophical Investigations. He now held, or recognized, that language was used in many different contexts or, to use his term, various games. Philosophical problems arise, not from the misuse of language, but from the complexities of using the same words and concepts in different language games. Philosophical questions then become puzzles; which is what most of the text of the Philosophical Investigations consists in. When we use these words or this expression, what is the underlying context that explains the confusion we have when trying to understand them? In a sense, the Philosophical Investigations is something of a relief compared to most classics in philosophy. There is no deep meaning to be sussed out from pithy remarks. A helpful analogy might be to think of Aristotle’s Metaphysics as akin to a Da Vinci while the Philosophical Investigations is an Andy Warhol. You can meditate, ponder and debate endlessly about the meaning of one while the other is simply what it is. There’s no ulterior or deeper meaning. I don’t believe I’ve really captured the text as fully as possible, but I hope I’ve encouraged even non-philosophers to read this seminal text. It deserves its reputation as a classic.

"I believe Mr. Wittgenstein's Tractatus to be one of the great works of contemporary philosophy; that being said, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge Phd." (Apocryphal statement by G.E. Moore on being asked to review the TLP for Cambridge so as to grant Wittgenstein the degree). To which the PI is certainly its equal or superior. It is hard to think of anyone else with as much courage as Wittgenstein, to essentially destroy his entire previous philosophy -- so beautiful, so completely crystalline -- in favour of a new one (or, if you like, supercede it). Mostly, in life, it is someone else who comes along to beat up on you: to do it to yourself so thoroughly is the mark of a true genius. Whatever you think of either philosophy, it is admirable. This edition is a fine updated translation. My only tiny quibble is that they should have had an appendix with the earlier and changed page numbers, especially for the now renamed "Part II". It's a bit of a pain (the earlier numbers are actually inserted in the text, but still.....)

Even though Wittgenstein's German is nothing like Kant's, providing a good translation of his work is a challenge given all that one must bring into consideration. Anscombe's original translation had its merits, but it also had a number of frustrating flaws. One of the many problems with Anscombe's translation of PI is her translation of both "hinweisende Erklärung" and "hinweisende Definition" as "ostensive definition," where the former is more literally read as "ostensive explanation" and the latter as "ostensive definition." See, e.g., §§27 and 28 of an earlier edition. And as one can see from Wittgenstein's discussion, there are times when he uses "hinweisende Erklärung" to mean "ostensive explanation" as opposed to actually ostensively defining a word, e.g., §31. And sometimes he uses them together almost interchangeably, e.g., the last two lines of §28. One of the most glaring cases of Anscombe ignoring the distinction is in §6 where the German reads, "Dies will ich nicht `hinweisende Erklärung', oder `Definition', nennen...." and the English translation reads simply "I do not want to call this `ostensive definition'...." One way this difference, and Anscombe's failure to track it, is important is that giving an explanation is a much more open ended activity than giving a definition in a somewhat similar way as the German word for "game," "das Spiel," is more open than the English word, since "das Spiel" can also mean the more open concept of play. One small "problem" presented by the updated translation is that the changes make past expressions no longer so apt, e.g., talk of a "no stage-setting" interpretation of the failure of the private ostensive definition in §258, based on the remarks about stage-setting in §257, is now problematic, since the new translation does not make use of the expression "stage-setting." This is a small problem, however. While I respect Hacker's work, I do not agree with how easily he attributes substantive views to Wittgenstein; so I worry about how Hacker's methodological assumptions about Wittgenstein influence his input on the revisions. Nevertheless, I do not have a similar worry about Schulte, and I know that both Hacker and Schulte took into consideration the suggestions of other Wittgenstein scholars when making the revisions. It is too soon to tell now, but I am excited to see what kind of an effect this new edition has on Wittgenstein studies.

This new edition of the classic posthumous work of Wittgenstein is worth it even for those who have known and worked with the book for years in its earlier incarnations. For non-German speakers, it presents a very carefully and responsibly rethought translation, addressing everything from minor bits of orthography (the archaic anglicism 'shew' in the older editions, for instance) to fairly serious conceptual rethinking ('ostensive definition' becomes now, and correctly, 'ostensive explanation'). The index has been revamped, and a series of helpful notes added connecting the pieces here to elements of LW's mss. and other works. Already famously, part II has been integrated into the text, quite genially and reasonably in my estimation. This is editorial practice at a very high and commendable level, and will prove invaluable to students of this work old and new. Enthusiastically endorsed! MW Morse