So he returned in January of 1929. His friend, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes, announced to his wife: “God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train” (DG, p. 255). Wittgenstein would talk regularly with Ramsey, and he was soon jotting down his new ideas in notebooks, as he had done during the war.
Wittgenstein had never completed a degree from his work at Cambridge before the war. Now the Tractatus was allowed to count as a dissertation. The viva—the examination on his dissertation—was conducted by Russell and Moore in June of that year. Before the war, Moore had acted almost like a secretary to Wittgenstein, recording his ideas for him in Norway. As Moore confessed: “I…came to feel that he was much cleverer at philosophy than I was, and not only cleverer, but also much more profound.” Russell had long ago felt surpassed by Wittgenstein. After an argument about a logical issue that Russell conceded, he wrote to a friend in 1913: “Well, well—it is the younger generation knocking at the door—I must make room for him.”
So as the viva commenced, Russell smiled and said, “I have never known anything so absurd in my life.” It became more a chat between old friends. Russell tried to push the problem that Wittgenstein was using evidently nonsensical propositions to draw what he considered to be “unassailable” truths. But Wittgenstein was unmoved, and brought the proceedings to a close himself, clapping the examiners on the back and reassuring them: “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.”
Moore’s examiner’s report about the thesis was succinct: “It is my personal opinion that Mr Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy.” One of his students recalled that he then, “…wanted to be called Doctor Wittgenstein. He was very sensitive about things like that.”
Yet, even though he submitted the Tractatus as his dissertation, he was already figuring out where it needed to be modified. Two points, in particular, concerned him. One was the idea that each elementary proposition was logically independent of every other. The other was the idea that generalizations could always be treated as conjunctions of elementary propositions. I already mentioned the problem about generalizations earlier. The problem with independence is this: It might seem that a simple object having a color is about the most basic fact there could be—so “This is red” would be an elementary proposition. But then “This is blue” would also be an elementary proposition, and if both propositions referred to the same object, they can’t both be true, and thus they are not logically independent of each other after all. One might reply that this only shows that the proposition “This is red” is not really elementary after all. But while one could hold that position, and propose that it could be analyzed further, Wittgenstein saw that if there were simpler propositions, they were likely to run into the same problem. Another option would be to give up the idea that elementary propositions are logically independent of one another. Or even give up the idea of elementary propositions altogether.
So, Wittgenstein had some technical challenges to meet. But on larger issues, he still seemed to accept his earlier account of language with his distinction between showing and saying, and the insulation of the realm of value from the natural world. In November of 1929, he gave a talk to an undergraduate society at Cambridge about ethics, where he took the same line as at the end of the Tractatus, though with a good deal more elaboration. He concluded his lecture on ethics as follows:
I…see clearly…not only that no description that I can think of would do to describe what I mean by absolute value, but that I would reject every significant description that anybody could possibly suggest…on the grounds of its significance. …I see now that these nonsensical descriptions were not nonsensical because I had not yet found the correct expressions, but that their nonsensicality was their very essence. For all I wanted to do with them was just to go beyond the world and that is to say beyond significant language. My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who have ever tried to talk or write Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the ultimate meaning of life, the absolute good…can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it. (PO, p. 44)
Not only did Wittgenstein maintain this understanding of language and its limits, but he also made clear his belief in the value of what cannot be put into words. This caused his mistrust of some of the members of the Vienna Circle. Nevertheless, even while he was living in Cambridge, he visited his family in Vienna regularly over academic breaks, and on those occasions, he continued to meet and discuss various topics with some of the Vienna Circle members. He recounted the essentials of the lecture on ethics to them on his next trip home (VC, pp. 92-3).
Teaching at Cambridge
In January of 1930, Wittgenstein began teaching at Cambridge. What began as lectures on Mondays and then discussions at the end of the week, eventually became a combination of the two, with a good deal of interaction. The day before the very first class meeting, Wittgenstein’s young friend Frank Ramsey died. Ramsey had worked with Wittgenstein on many of the issues raised in the Tractatus and had proposed some of his own solutions. It is likely that with Ramsey’s passing Wittgenstein was freed to move finally beyond the framework of the Tractatus altogether. Instead of fixing the Tractatus, he could now think in terms of replacing it.
The experience of teaching and interacting with students also gave Wittgenstein a perspective different from the one he took in the Tractatus. Instead of pronouncing philosophical propositions, he would raise and discuss them. He became interested in why we hold the views we do—our temptations and tendencies—and what it would take to loosen their hold. No doubt his experience of teaching elementary students several years earlier had planted these seeds in him.
Wittgenstein taught some four dozen courses over the next 17 years, missing an occasional year to retreat again to Norway, or for medical work during the Second World War. During all of this time, he was hard at work on a new book, eventually entitled Philosophical Investigations. The processes by which he reached the views of this later book were by no means short, direct, or easily summarized.
At one stage, in 1943, when Wittgenstein felt that perhaps he was ready to have the new work published, he insisted that it be printed in a volume together with the Tractatus. This indicates the importance that he put on his earlier views: Even though he had left them behind, they still functioned as a sort of ladder. A colleague and friend asked Wittgenstein in 1941 whether he still held the views expressed in the Tractatus. He used a different metaphor this time: “No. It’s like this. If you find your way out of a wood you may think that it is the only way out. Then you find another way out. But you might never have found it unless you had gone along the other way first. I should not be where I am now if I had not passed through what is expressed in the Tractatus” (PPO, p. 387).
Wittgenstein retired from teaching at Cambridge in 1947, at least partly so that he could focus on his writing. He never did complete a version that he was fully satisfied with. And when he died in 1951, he left it to some friends to see to the final form and publication of the book. His will reads, in part: “I intend and desire that Mr. Rhees, Miss Anscombe and Professor von Wright shall publish as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit….”
The Philosophical Investigations appeared in print posthumously in 1953.
The Philosophical Investigations
The only visual similarity between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations (PI) is that both begin with the number 1. After that, the differences accumulate.
The Investigations is much longer, with numbered sections sometimes extending over a page or more. Concerning the b
revity of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein remarked to a friend in 1949: “Every sentence of the Tractatus should be seen as the heading of a chapter, needing further exposition. My present style is quite different; I am trying to avoid that error” (CW, p. 159).
Although the Investigations consists of numbered sections, there are no decimals and no clear sense of organization. Wittgenstein addressed this in the Preface: “…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.” In one of his course lectures, he explained this by comparing himself and his job to that of a tour guide:
In teaching you philosophy I’m like a tour guide showing you how to find your way round London. I have to take you through the city from north to south, from east to west, from Euston to the embankment and from Piccadilly to the Marble Arch. After I have taken you [on] many journeys through the city, in all sorts of directions, we shall have passed through any given street a number of times—each time traversing the street as part of a different journey. At the end of this you will know London; you will be able to find your way about like a born Londoner. (GJ, p. 143)
Even if, after reading the Investigations, you don’t find your way about language like a native, at least you know what Wittgenstein was trying to accomplish and how he had gone about it. Familiarizing someone with a city is a very different project from laying out the steps of a proof.
For a few years in the early 1930s, Wittgenstein worked with a member of the Vienna Circle, Friedrich Waismann, to write a book on his new ideas. Waismann tried to lay out Wittgenstein’s views in a well-organized fashion, explaining everything carefully as he went along. But Wittgenstein was never satisfied with the outcome—partly because his views were changing, but also because Waismann’s expository format was simply not how Wittgenstein thought his views were best conveyed. This book you are reading now tries to do what Waismann failed to do, so reader beware!
The Tractatus consists of assertions. The Investigations, on the other hand, contains not just assertions but also 784 questions of which only 110 are answered, and 70 of those answers are intentionally wrong (AW, p. 235). It is not immediately obvious that many of the answers are meant to be wrong—and this is often confusing to readers.
In fact, the Philosophical Investigations is really a sort of dialogue. In certain ways, it is like a Socratic dialogue by Plato. Different points of view are expressed, and a final resolution of them is not always reached. The dialogue format is clear in Plato from the fact that contributions to the discussion are always ascribed to a particular character, as in a play. In Wittgenstein’s work, however, there are no named “characters.” Sometimes he prefaced a statement with “Suppose someone said” (PI §14), sometimes he simply included a sentence in quotation marks (PI §27) or surrounded by dashes, and sometimes he asserted a sentence without quotation marks around it, yet didn’t mean to endorse it, such as: Thinking is surrounded by a nimbus (PI §97). So it is much less clear that it is a dialogue.
It is crucial for the reader to see that the Investigations is a tentative discussion of ideas. Wittgenstein did endorse some of these ideas, but it takes some practice to see when he did and when he did not. I think you can see the discussion as similar to what happens in a classroom, with points being made, questions being asked, and answers being commented on. But some scholars see the discussion as more of an internal conversation in which we hear different voices inside Wittgenstein’s head: a voice of “temptation,” a voice of “reason,” and even perhaps a voice of “ironic commentary” (AL, p. 71; WP, p. 22). In any case, it is not helpful to see the Investigations as a presentation of Wittgenstein’s beliefs at that time. Instead, imagine that he is showing us ways to think through these issues—in other words, how to do philosophy. While working on the Investigations Wittgenstein wrote: “One could call this book a textbook. But not a textbook in that it imparts knowledge, but in that it stimulates thought.”
Finally, while the Tractatus is a finished work, the Philosophical Investigations is not. Wittgenstein was never completely satisfied with what he wrote in the Investigations, which is why he never published it himself; but it is not even exactly clear what material he saw as constituting the Investigations. What Wittgenstein thought of as the book he was working on is closest to what was published in 1953 as Part I of the Philosophical Investigations. The editors at that time also included additional material that they labeled “Part II,” which comprised later on-going reflections on related material. (In the 2009 edition of the Philosophical Investigations, this material was labeled “Philosophy of Psychology—A Fragment.”) But it is not obvious how much of “Part I” should be included. For example, Wittgenstein worked on and revised the material up through §421 more extensively than the material that follows.
Nevertheless, despite major differences between the form of these two books, and, as we will see, also in Wittgenstein’s positions, there are continuities in the topics he considered to be significant. It is important to know where he began, in the Tractatus, to appreciate where he travels to, in the Investigations.
Language
Once Wittgenstein began thinking about philosophy again in 1929, it did not take long for him to realize that tinkering with the Tractatus would not suffice. Soon he saw the need for bigger shifts in his viewpoint. It was in thinking about language that these changes were clearest.
In November of 1929, Wittgenstein ended his lecture on ethics, by talking about “the tendency of all men who have ever tried to talk or write Ethics or Religion … to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless.” Yet, a year later, when he was meeting once again with members of the Vienna Circle and discussing religion, he said: “Running against the limits of language? Language is, after all, not a cage” (VC, p. 117).
This was a big change. What accounted for this transformation in his view of language? Here is part of the story, as told by one of Wittgenstein’s friends:
Wittgenstein and [Piero] Sraffa, a lecturer in economics at Cambridge, argued together a great deal over the ideas of the Tractatus. One day (they were riding, I think, on a train) when Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’, … Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ Sraffa’s example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the insistence that a proposition and what it describes must have the same ‘form’. This broke the hold on him of the conception that a proposition must literally be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.” (MM, pp. 57-8)
The gesture Sraffa used was akin to giving someone the finger. Sraffa’s point was that a gesture could convey meaning in the way language does, and yet it does not do so by representing a state of affairs. It does not get meaning by sharing a logical form. Language does not have to be representational. Another friend said Wittgenstein’s “discussions with Sraffa made him feel like a tree from which all branches had been cut” (MM, p. 15). And Wittgenstein himself testified to Sraffa’s impact on his thinking in the Preface to the Investigations.
Even if ethical judgments, say, do not describe reality, the language in which they are expressed may serve other functions. Wasn’t the account in the Tractatus of how language has sense correct? “Yes,” he says, “but only for [a] narrowly circumscribed area, not for the whole of what” we call language (PI §3).
When Wittgenstein set out to write about his new views he began by contrasting them with a picture of language he found in St. Augustine’s Confessions (PI §1). He told a friend that he chose to begin the Investigations with this passage from S
t. Augustine “not because he could not find the conception expressed in that quotation stated as well by other philosophers, but because the conception must be important if so great a mind held it” (MM, pp. 59-60). In fact, the passage has important things in common with his own view in the Tractatus: “The words in language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names…. Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (PI §1).
During the war, Wittgenstein’s understanding of language had been shaped by the use of a model in a legal court to represent a traffic accident. But now he was prompted by a different comparison: “One day when Wittgenstein was passing a field where a football [in the US: soccer] game was in progress the thought first struck him that in language we play games with words” (MM, p. 55). This seems to be the origin of Wittgenstein’s notion of “language games.”
Language Games
In the Tractatus, Wittgenstein offered a picture theory of language, which accounted for the saying (or describing) and the showing uses of language. In the Investigations, he imagined a number of different uses of language, to begin with through scenarios where people are shopping (§1) or building (§2). Then he went on to mention the great variety of language games in this brain-stormed list:
Giving orders, and acting on them—Describing an object by its appearance, or by its measurements—Constructing an object from a description (or drawing)—Reporting an event—Speculating about the event—Forming and testing a hypothesis—Presenting the results of an experiment in tables and diagrams—Making up a story, and reading one—Acting in a play—Singing rounds—Guessing riddles—Cracking a joke, telling one—Solving a problem in applied arithmetic—Translating from one language into another—Requesting, thanking, cursing, greeting, praying. (PI §23)
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