Wittgenstein’s later philosophical approach is rather unconventional. The remarks that state his conception of philosophical problems and method belong to the most striking sections of the Philosophical Investigations: even a cursory reading of his remarks on the nature of philosophy suffices to make the reader realize that Wittgenstein’s thoughts on this matter are strikingly at odds with traditional conceptions of what philosophy is about. Remarkably enough, these remarks also belong to the most neglected–and this even though, as various scholars have emphasized, they highlight the most revolutionary aspects of his later work and clearly hold the key to its proper understanding. While a vast amount of literature deals with Wittgenstein’s contributions to the discussion of various philosophical topics, comparatively little attention was explicitly devoted to the, in some ways, prior question of what kind of contribution he sought to make, and how he wanted to make it. This is the guiding question of the present book: which specific aims does Wittgenstein pursue in the Investigations? What is their rationale? And which methods does he employ to attain them? In brief: what is Wittgenstein trying to achieve in the Investigations? Why? And how? In this introduction, we shall develop these questions, explain this book’s approach to them, and present the papers that put it to work.
Wittgenstein himself provides quite explicit answers to all three parts of our guiding question. But his remarks on this topic have added to rather than reduced perplexity. Thus, for instance, Wittgenstein is notorious for making the claim that in philosophy ‘we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place’ (109). Or consider PI 126–8:
Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.–Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For what is perhaps hidden is of no interest to us…
The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.
If one tried to advance theses in philosophy, it would never be possible to debate them, because everyone would agree to them.
Quite obviously, Wittgenstein’s view of how philosophy ought to be practised, and is being practised by himself, diverges radically from how philosophers traditionally conceived of their own work. For, whether or not they actually managed to explain anything, philosophers through the ages certainly thought there was something for them to explain, and frequently tried to meet this felt need. In doing so, they were regularly most interested in what is not ‘open to view’ and hardly ever contented themselves with ‘simply putting everything before us’ or ‘assembling reminders’. Rather, they saw themselves as advancing, if not establishing, theses that gave rise to the liveliest debates.
But if Wittgenstein was not trying to advance any non-trivial claim of the sort philosophers traditionally have been seeking to argue for, if he did not want to explain any fact or formulate any theory, what was his aim, instead? What did he seek to achieve by ‘putting everything before us’ and ‘assem-bling reminders’? At a very abstract level, the aim sounds perfectly familiar: ‘problems are solved (difficulties eliminated)’ (133). But what Wittgenstein understands by a ‘solution’ to a philosophical problem seems to be rather less familiar: ‘Philosophical problems’, he tells us, ‘should completely disap-pear’ (133). And this appears to be a predominantly negative or critical aim: so far from consisting in the discovery of new or the explanation of familiar facts, ‘the results of’ such ‘philosophy are the uncovering of one or the other piece of plain nonsense’ (119). Apparently by attaining such results, ‘prob-lems are solved (difficulties eliminated)’ (133).
Wittgenstein’s rationale for seeking such apparently negative ‘results’ is provided by the conception of the nature and genesis of–at any rate some–philosophical problems that emerges from the same remarks: thus, e.g. ‘log-ical investigation’ is said to take its rise ‘not from an interest in the facts of nature, nor from a need to grasp causal connections: but from an urge to understand the basis, or essence, of everything empirical’. And it is ‘of the essence of [such] investigation that we do not seek to learn anything new by it. We want to understand something that is already in plain view. For this is what we seem in some sense not to understand’ (89). The failure to understand that thus motivates this investigation consists in ‘misunderstandings concerning the use of words, caused, among other things, by certain analogies between the forms of expression in different regions of language’ (90). Whether we realize it or not, ‘our investigation’, namely, of questions about essence, like Augustine’s question, ‘What is time?’ (89–90), ‘is … a grammatical one’ (90). The ‘misinterpretation of our forms of language’ (111) that has philosophers raise such problems is facilitated by an ‘urge to misunderstand the workings of our language’ (109). Yielding to their urge to misunderstand, they are left with ‘deep disquietudes’; indeed, the problems arising through such misinterpretation are such disquietudes (111). They have the character of depth, but what that means is that they are deep disquietudes; and they are deep disquietudes, since ‘their roots are as deep in us as the forms of language’ (ibid.). What ‘makes us see the value of the discovery’ of nonsense, then, are the ‘bumps that the intellect has got by running its head up against the limits of language’ (119)–and, presumably, the deep disquietudes driving these futile efforts. In other words, philosophers’ problems are entirely of their own making, articulate their failure to understand (123) and result from ‘confusions’ that ‘arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing any work’ (132). Those problems arise when people held captive (115), and disquieted (112), by similes and pictures lying in our language, absorbed into its forms, avert their attention from specific goals and concerns and yield to their urges to misunderstand (109). In response, nothing is to be done except to ‘battle against the bewitchment of our intellect by means of language’ (109): to uncover nonsense and ease urges to misunderstand, so as to allay the disquiet that is constitutive of philosophical problems. When a philosopher tries to do this, Wittgenstein remarked more than a decade later, his treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness (254–5).
There is no doubt that these remarks on the nature and genesis of (some) philosophical problems call for a radical transformation of our familiar view of what philosophy is about and how it ought to be practised. There is also no doubt that the majority of philosophers have not been persuaded by Wittgenstein that any such transformation is necessary. Indeed, many scholars manifestly felt puzzled why Wittgenstein himself should have thought it necessary, as they tended to feel more perplexed than enlightened by his pertinent remarks. Two reasons are obvious: these remarks go completely against the grain of philosophical tradition. And even though there would seem to be much in need of detailed explanation, Wittgenstein, on the whole, offers rather little help in the way of clarification and defence of his manifestly novel aims and their rationale, to enable the reader to critically engage with them. As a consequence, it has not been uncommon to ignore these remarks and assume from the start that, whatever Wittgenstein himself might say, he must have been trying to advance and establish substantive philosophical claims.
From this perspective, however, Wittgenstein’s text looks–and ought to have felt–downright puzzling. Indeed, the puzzling features presently indicated are most evident in precisely the most polished and most carefully arranged part of the text, its first 315 sections (up to the end of the private language discussion). For a start, the text contains remarkably few sentences grammatically suited to express a claim of any kind, premise or conclusion: on a rough estimate, a little less than half of the sentences in the first part of the Investigations are in the indicative mood at all. The others are questions or commands or enclosed in quotes. Second, most of the sentences in the indicative mood are used to set up examples for discussion, to spell out ‘what one thinks of’ in saying this-or-that about them, to draw comparisons, to comment on the proceeding, or to make some fairly trivial observations, in brief: to make many things other than stating a substantive philosophical claim. Third, many of the rather few candidates that remain seem to fall short of their point when read as expressions of such claims. Consider, e.g. a sentence frequently read as advancing a ‘use theory of meaning’, the claim that an expression’s meaning consists in its use: ‘For a large class of cases of the use of the word “meaning”–though not for all cases of its use–one can explain the word thus: the meaning of a word is its use in language’ (43, our translation). This formulation is not only remarkably cautious (the italics are Wittgenstein’s), but also stops noticeably short of advancing any claim about ‘what the meaning of a word is’. It is not ‘about word meaning’ but about one of the different actual uses of the word ‘meaning’: it contents itself with the claim that in many (though not all) cases in which we speak of a word’s ‘meaning’, one can explain what we are saying by paraphrasing it as a statement about the word’s use in language. When the idea that ‘the meaning of a word is its use’ does crop up, it does so not as an assertion but in the antecedent of a conditional employed in setting up an objection Wittgenstein proceeds to attack (in 138, taken up again in 197). If that idea was one that Wittgenstein wished to advance as a philosophical claim, then it would seem rather puzzling why he should have done this in so offhand a manner. Indeed, as the general philosophical claim would certainly be far from uncontroversial (even if anyone thought it should be), it would seem downright startling that Wittgenstein did not bother to explicitly defend it.
Finally, there is something odd even about some of the few sentences that do read like straightforward expressions of exemplary philosophical claims. As an example, take (154d): ‘In the sense in which there are processes (including mental processes) which are characteristic of understanding, understanding is not a mental process’. Not unnaturally, this might be taken to state the conclusion of the preceding discussion, the claim this discussion was meant to establish. But then it seems strange that this sentence was included neither in the original manuscript nor in the first or second typescript version of this discussion, but was only later inserted in handwriting into the latter typescript (TS 239). Or, consider a remark whose phrasing itself suggests that it expresses a conclusion to be established by the previous discussion: ‘And hence [!] also “obeying a rule” is a practice’ (202). Curiously enough, it was not included in the first version that contained the preceding discussion (the so-called ‘Intermediary Version’). These and related observations on the genesis of the text do not establish that Wittgenstein did not want to advance the pertinent claims, or that he did not regard them as supported by discussion that precedes them. But those observations do strongly suggest that, even in some of the rather few cases in which it would seem straightforward to interpret Wittgenstein as establishing a substantive philosophical truth, this was not one of his foremost aims.
The moment we turn from familiar positive to familiar negative aims, from the pursuit of truth to philosophical criticism, the text presents us with no less difficulty. Such criticism clearly is an important aim in the Investigations. But it seems to be criticism of a rather unfamiliar kind, which does not focus on claims or arguments explicitly advanced, to prove them false or invalid. Thus, for instance, already the starting-point of the whole work is the critical examination of a ‘picture of language’ Wittgenstein finds in the work of another philosopher, namely, Augustine. But such a philosophical ‘picture’ is not an explicit theory or set of claims. Thus, the ‘picture of the essence of human language’ Augustine’s account of language learning conveys ‘is this: the individual words in language name objects–sentences are combinations of such names’ (1). And these are not claims explicitly advanced by Augustine, who says nothing of the sort in the passage Wittgenstein quoted, and never claimed that, say, prepositions name objects.
Rather, those assumptions are implicit in inadvertent leaps of thought and the thoughtless concentration on certain paradigms. Thus, Wittgenstein finds in Augustine’s picture the ‘root’ of this drift of thought: ‘Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands’ (1). Neither Augustine nor any other philosopher alluded to by Wittgenstein ever explicitly rehearsed this line of thought. Rather, it exemplifies the sort of biased interpretation that many philosophers thoughtlessly mete out to truisms (‘Every meaningful word has a meaning’) without noticing the leap from triviality into nonsense. (Here, a tendentious interpretation is placed on the phrase ‘has a meaning’: it is to ‘have’ some thing that is to be ‘correlated with the word’. What is this thing? The Augustinian picture suggests an answer: ‘The object for which the word stands.’) Second, adherence to the picture manifests itself in concentration on a remarkably small range of examples. Thus, philosophers in its grip are ‘thinking primarily of nouns like “table”, “chair”, “bread”, and of people’s names, and only secondarily of the names of certain actions and properties; and of the remaining kinds of word [a truly vast group] as something that will take care of itself’ (1). Augustine’s ‘picture’, thus, is a set not of explicit claims but of implicit assumptions, assumptions that bias philosophical reflection in various ways that philosophers hardly, if ever, notice. The first critical effort in the Investigations is, thus, directed against a rather unfamiliar kind of target.
Also, in the remainder of the book, Wittgenstein does not seem to be much concerned with the critical examination of claims and arguments explicitly advanced by other philosophers. At any rate, if such examination had been his aim, his proceeding would have been remarkably cavalier in manner: apart from rather summary references to ‘Nominalists’ (383), ‘Idealists, Solipsists, and Realists’(402), and an acknowledgement of F.P. Ramsey (81), only twenty-one sections (of 693) contain references to other philosophers. Of these, only eleven contain a text reference. Of these, three (342, 413, 436) contain brief quotes without any indication of their source, five (23, 46, 48, 89, 518) refer to nothing more specific than an entire philosophical work (Wittgenstein’s own Tractatus, Plato’s Theaetetus, and Augustine’s Confessions), while only three (1, 97, 114) contain a precise reference (to specific passages of Augustine’s and sentences of the Tractatus, respectively).
Indeed, when we look at the rather few cases in which Wittgenstein did deal with specific claims he takes up from other philosophers, we see that he does not try to show them to be false. Consider, for example, his response to the Socratic statement quoted from the Theaetetus in PI 46, which he refers to for the purpose of clarifying ‘the idea that names really signify simples’ (46). He does not attempt to refute what Socrates reports other philosophers as saying about the ‘primary elements’, i.e. about the alleged ‘simple parts of which reality is composed’ that supposedly provide names with referents, in which Wittgenstein recognizes the ‘objects’ of the Tractatus. Rather, what he does is to observe that it ‘makes no sense at all to speak absolutely’ of ‘the simple parts of which reality is composed’; to show that the question of whether something is composite or simple, cannot be meaningfully answered ‘outside a particular language-game’ which determines what we mean by, how we use, the word ‘composite’ or ‘simple’ (46). It thus seems that the refutation of philosophical claims was no more Wittgenstein’s aim than the demonstration of their truth.
To sum up, Wittgenstein’s explicit statements of his aims and their rationale have been found perplexing. The pursuit of non-trivial truth imputed to him in disregard of his own statements render his actual proceeding in the text positively puzzling. So, far from reducing this puzzle, examination of the genesis of the text, otherwise frequently helpful, merely exacerbates it. And as an exercise in philosophical criticism, Wittgenstein’s work clearly has unfamiliar kinds of target, addressed with uncommon aims in mind. All of which suggests that his own remarks on his aims and their rationale should not be brushed aside in favour of more familiar notions, but taken perfectly seriously–even if they go completely against the grain of philosophical tradition and are in much need of further explanation. Whence the first two parts of our tripartite question: what are Wittgenstein’s manifestly unfamiliar aims, and what is their rationale?
This bipartite question can be approached in two ways: by trying to become more clear on the nature of the problems Wittgenstein manifestly addressed, and by trying to clarify the methods he employed to cope with these problems, to attain those aims. By and large, the chapters assembled in this volume pursue the latter strategy; expecting the results to shed light also on the first, they focus on the final part of our guiding question: what methods does Wittgenstein employ?
At first sight, this does not really seem to improve things. For Wittgenstein’s explicit answers to this question are not significantly clearer than those remarks in which he states his aims and their rationale. To remove philosophical ‘prejudices’, he writes, we need to ‘turn our whole investigation around’, namely, about the ‘pivot’ of ‘our real need’ (108). In line with this reorientation, we should refrain from all explanation and content ourselves with description alone (109), namely, with descriptions that merely arrange what we have always known (ibid.), that state only what lies open to view (126) and merely add up to assemblies of reminders (127). Such descriptions serve the purpose of the ‘perspicuous representation’ of ‘the use of our words’, which is of ‘fundamental significance’ for Wittgenstein, since on his view ‘[a] main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of the use of our words’ (122). They are to be employed in a number of philosophically pertinent activities. Among other things, ‘we … bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’ (116), and lay bare the foundations of language on which philosophers built their houses of cards (118). This activity is facilitated by the construction of ‘clear and simple language-games’ (130) and the finding and invention of ‘intermediary links’ (122). Thus, we are to liberate ourselves from ‘pictures’ holding us captive (115) and to uncover nonsense (119). More generally, we thus are to acquire that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’ (122) and such insight into the workings of our language as solves the problems of philosophy (109), to dry up the sources of that failure to understand (122) whose articulation takes the form of a philosophical problem (123), and to attain such clarity as makes philosophical problems disappear completely (133). The different methods employed for these purposes are like different therapies (ibid.).
These remarks are far from self-explanatory. What is the ‘metaphysical use’ from which Wittgenstein wants to ‘bring words back’ (and how)? What kinds of ‘houses of cards’ are built on what sort of ‘foundations’? What sort of things does he have in mind when speaking of ‘simple language-games’, asking for ‘perspicuous representations’, and setting out to ‘find and invent intermediary links’? From what kind of ‘picture’ does he want to liberate himself, what sorts of ‘nonsense’ does he want to uncover, what kind of ‘understanding’ and ‘clarity’ does he seek to achieve? And what does any of this have to do with ‘therapy’? To these questions, however, there is an obviously helpful approach: we can relate the methodological remarks in question to Wittgenstein’s actual proceeding in his various specific investigations, and vice versa: to identify, e.g. potential ‘perspicuous representations’ and to examine how, and to what ends, they are being employed. This is the approach pursued in this volume.
Though it may seem quite obvious, this approach is anything but well-worn. This is, perhaps, ultimately due to a second puzzling feature of the Philosophical Investigations, which, together with its approach, gives the book its unique character: the form in which it is written. In his preface, Wittgenstein compares his book to an ‘album’ arranging ‘sketches of land-scapes’ in which ‘[t]he same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions’. What makes this comparison apt is the ‘criss-cross’ character in which Wittgenstein often jumps from one topic to another, in quick succession. Some of the topics he leaps to have never been thought worth discussing by any other philosopher and, on the face of it, look like philosophically irrelevant digressions. And many topics keep recurring, again and again. The criss-cross and repetitive character of his Investigations Wittgenstein puts down, at least in part, to ‘the nature of the investigation itself’. But in the light of familiar expectations of how a philosophical work ought to be structured to clearly present its argument, this may well be taken as an excuse for failing to impose a lucid structure on the material. And, in fact, many readers of the Philosophical Investigations have been led to despair of discerning any system or method at all in the text, thus making it seem advisable to examine and appreciate its undoubtedly profound insights outside the labyrinth of the surrounding text. Confronted by the unfamiliar and less than perspicuous form of the book, other readers resorted to the familiar, and tried to make sense of Wittgenstein’s proceeding by relating it to familiar models of philosophical activity–rather than to his own explanations.
The first response is a possibly premature act of desperation. The second has led to only limited success. Thus, e.g. Wittgenstein has sometimes been supposed to engage in forms of conceptual analysis familiar from the works of J.L. Austin or P.F. Strawson, respectively. However, the conceptual analyses identified in the Investigations clearly do not aim for the generality characteristic of the latter and fall far short of the standards of rigour set by the former. Consider, e.g. how Wittgenstein proceeds from the–highly specific–claim that for us it is the circumstances under which someone has an experience (such as that a formula suddenly occurs to him) that justify him in saying he knows how to continue a number-series (155). Instead of enumerating various pertinent circumstances, he names only one (in 179); and this he does after a long digression into reading. This discussion, in turn, concerns not our established concept of reading but rather an unorthodox notion of Wittgenstein’s own definition (which is liberal enough to cover such activities as writing upon dictation and writing out something printed). If this is, or involves, conceptual analysis, it is a rather unfamiliar form of it, one that is presumably best understood on its own terms, by relating it to similar moves Wittgenstein makes elsewhere, and to his explicit remarks on method. Which holds all the more for the host of moves that fit even less well into any philosophically familiar mould. Just like his aims, Wittgenstein’s methods, also, are best understood not by invoking familiar models but by relating his actual proceeding in the text to his own explanations, and vice versa.
The present volume employs this approach in two ways: Part 1 assembles contributions that start out from Wittgenstein’s actual proceeding in a specific philosophical investigation, and interpret it in the light of pertinent methodological remarks, to reconstruct (some of) the methods employed and the aims pursued in it. Part 2 of the volume assembles contributions that proceed the other way around: that start out from a specific methodological remark or notion, and clarify it by relating it to relevant applications.
The first 315 sections of the Investigations, clearly, are carefully integrated into sustained stretches of argument. At any rate at first sight, the remaining 378 sections, by contrast, appear to resemble more a structured collection of material, grouped into thematic blocks, than the sort of sustained campaign that the investigations up to, and including, the discussion of a private language represent. Therefore, the first 315 sections lend themselves most readily to the project of extracting methods and aims from a reconstruction of Wittgenstein’s proceeding. The contributions assembled in the first half of the present volume jointly cover the whole of this first part of the Investigations (with the exception of sections 65–88 that were to be covered solely by Gordon Baker whose premature death prevented the completion of the paper on sections 65–108 that he intended to contribute). Part 1 of the present volume, thus, provides a methodological commentary on the apparently most polished part of the Investigations. Part 2 then explains further core notions of Wittgenstein’s methodology. In this way, the present volume is to provide a methodological companion to his later main work.
The opening chapter introduces the issue of Wittgenstein’s reorientation of philosophical work and provides some background on the ideas from the Tractatus that are the immediate concern of at least the first 138 sections of the Investigations: Peter Hacker elucidates how Wittgenstein ‘turned his investigation around’, by showing how the metaphysical vision of the Tractatus gave way to the descriptive-therapeutic conception of the Investigations. Joachim Schulte’s contribution on their opening sections then examines the use of simple ‘language-games’. Eike von Savigny’s chapter on the discussion of ostensive definition in sections 38–64 elucidates the ‘non-explanatory’ character of both metaphysical theory and Wittgenstein’s response to it. Stephen Mulhall covers the explicitly methodological sections 89–133 and clarifies the image of the ‘pivot’ of ‘our real need’ around which ‘the whole investigation’ is to be ‘turned’. Eugen Fischer analyses the investigation of understanding in sections 138–97, so as to give proper content to the notion of philosophical ‘therapy’. Erich Ammereller examines the discussion of rule-following in sections 185–242 with a view to clarifying Wittgenstein’s technique of ‘bringing words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use’. Severin Schroeder, finally, analyses the private-language discussion of sections 243–315, so as to explain the notion of ‘perspicuous (or synoptic) representation’.
Part 2 of the volume assembles contributions that start out from particular remarks Wittgenstein made on method. Anthony Kenny’s essay opens the discussion by summing up the problem presented by Wittgenstein’s most notorious remarks, his repudiation of controversial theses. The following chapters discuss the related repudiation of theory in philosophy (Oswald Hanfling), Wittgenstein’s notions of clarity and clarification (Cora Diamond), of nonsense (Hans-Johann Glock), and of ‘pictures’ holding (not only) philosophers captive (Stuart G. Shanker). The analytical table of contents contains authors’ abstracts of all twelve essays.
Most contributions are about ten thousand words in length. We feel justified in tolerating three exceptions to this rule: Anthony Kenny magisterially sums up how the most salient problem about Wittgenstein’s methods presents itself from a widely shared and important perspective. Stuart Shanker presents a concise case-study of how a ‘picture’ held philosophers and scientists captive, which makes this Wittgensteinian notion significantly clearer. Both get by with half the average length. Eugen Fischer presents a therapeutic interpretation of Wittgenstein’s proceeding, which the editors believe to be both genuinely novel and potentially controversial, and was therefore allowed the space necessary for accessible presentation of new concepts and detailed argument, not quite double the standard length.
Finally, we wish to acknowledge our debt to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the University Society of Munich, who generously funded the conference preparing this volume. Georgios Karageorgoudis assisted us greatly in the preparation of the final manuscript. Wilhelm Vossenkuhl, as our head of section at the philosophy department of Munich University, did his successful best to ensure exceptionally good working conditions. Our greatest debt is to Gordon Baker and Peter Hacker, who taught us and continued to encourage and stimulate our work over the years. This volume, dedicated to the memory of Gordon Baker, is what tribute we are able to pay to a scholar of exceptional brilliance and integrity with that characteristically Wittgensteinian ability to always ‘see things in a new light’.