Philosophical Investigations

"This book was published posthumously, from the notes that were left to Elizabeth Anscombe, his friend. He’d been putting this book together for ages and at his death it hadn’t quite come together. She eventually edited, published and translated it. He wrote it originally in German, though Wittgenstein did speak English. He was from Vienna, a great Austrian intellectual from a hugely wealthy industrial and highly musical family. It was an unusual family. His brother was a concert pianist who lost his arm in the First World War and carried on his career very successfully, commissioning concertos for one hand from Ravel and other people. His other three brothers committed suicide. Wittgenstein came to Cambridge just before the First World War after initially starting off as an aeronautical engineer studying in Manchester. He switched to philosophy and became interested in mathematics and the foundations of logic. He persuaded Bertrand Russell to take him on as a student and then, having had these very intense discussions with Russell and other Cambridge philosophers, he fought on the other side in the First World War, and wrote his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus , while in a prisoner of war camp. He thought he’d solved all the problems in philosophy and then went off and worked as a gardener and subsequently as a schoolteacher for a while. Then, eventually, he realized that maybe he hadn’t solved all the problems in philosophy and came back and became a professor of philosophy in Cambridge. He was extremely eccentric and lived in a room with no books and just some deck chairs and an army bed. It was very plain, very bare. He didn’t give normal lectures; he would just wait for somebody to come up with a problem or an issue and then he would discuss it. Then, halfway through the discussion, he would tear his hair out and say, ‘No, no, I’m a fool. I’ve said that wrong’ and start off again in another direction. Gradually his ideas coalesced, and his students wrote them down in notebooks and these got circulated. He had very radical ideas about the nature of the mind and its relation to language and how we think and what philosophy is. These ideas then reach their most popular version in the Philosophical Investigations , this posthumously published book. It’s a series of fragments, really, a series of numbered propositions, not completely coherent, jumping from topic to topic, almost aphoristic some of them. Ideas that come out of it include an attack on what’s come to be known as the Cartesian picture of our relationship to reality, that we have an inner picture of what the world is like and that we describe it to ourselves in a private language. Wittgenstein was in a more behaviorist tradition in the philosophy of mind, arguing that language is a public medium, that we don’t have private meanings in our heads, that we learn things and communicate in certain sorts of ways that are shaped by our ‘forms of life’—the complex social webs in which we live. Our minds are much more legible than philosophers had previously thought. We have to recognize that we’re in a community of social beings communicating with each other and there aren’t these private meanings in our heads. Another idea that is very important in the Philosophical Investigations is the idea that philosophy arises, as he puts it, ‘when language goes on holiday’. That’s a typical Wittgensteinian phrase, and what he means by it is that most traditional philosophical problems arise because people are using words that have a perfectly reasonable use in one context but they’re using those words in another context, and then wondering why they get into paradoxes. And so, by analyzing language and how we use it, we might be able to dissolve a lot of philosophical problems. He thought that by his method of revealing to people where their confusions lay he would, as he put it, let the fly out of the fly bottle. A fly bottle is a device for trapping flies with a small neck. And these flies are buzzing around in there. And what the philosopher does, if he’s a good philosopher like Wittgenstein, is let the fly out, and then there’s no more buzzing. It’s a kind of philosophy as therapy. Once you’ve done it, you needn’t do it again. He spent some of his life telling people who were studying philosophy to go off and work in factories rather than have careers as philosophers because he thought a lot of philosophy was simply a waste of time. Once you’ve solved these problems, you can just get on with something else. He was a very charismatic figure. The thing about the Philosophical Investigations is that it’s very rich as a stimulus to other people’s thought, there are a huge number of interpretations of exactly what he meant.It’s not some kind of wild poetry as some people take it to be. There are patterns within what he’s saying. “He thought he’d solved all the problems in philosophy” Another important idea of his is about how we suddenly see things differently. He’s got the example of the duck-rabbit, the famous illusion, where you have this line drawing that you can see either as a duck or as a rabbit. But you can’t see both at once. And he talks about ‘the dawning of an aspect’, of aspect seeing. The retinal image doesn’t change when you see a duck and then you see a rabbit: it’s exactly the same pattern reflected within your eyes, but it’s a kind of gestalt shift where you suddenly see it as one or the other. This is how human beings engage with the world when we see things under descriptions. We can flip between different ways of seeing things without the things themselves changing. He then applies that in various ways. Another important thought of his is about how philosophers generalize. They’re looking for abstract generalizations about the world, they’re not just talking about one rock, they’re talking about matter; they’re not talking about one person’s thoughts, they’re talking about mind, or consciousness. Wittgenstein has an anti- essentialist thread running through the Philosophical Investigations . Take his example of a game. What is a game? Do all games have something in common? Don’t just assume they do, he says, look and see. Then he runs through all the different sorts of games—throwing a ball against the wall, playing cricket, athletics. All kinds of things are called games. We tend to assume as Socrates did (according to Plato), that if they’re all called ‘game’, there must be some essence of the thing that makes them games. Maybe they have a winner and loser. Well, what about solitaire? Maybe they’re all activities, but you can play chess in your head (that’s probably not a very good example for him, because he wouldn’t say ‘in your head’). But his thought is that there are these things which he calls ‘family resemblance’ terms. ‘Game’ is a family resemblance term. You can see the resemblance between people in a genetically related family, but they might not all share one common feature. They don’t all have the same-colored eyes, they don’t have same shape cheeks, but there is a pattern of overlapping similarities between them. Analogously, games don’t all share some key feature. He thought that we assume with language, when we use one word in different contexts, there is some essence that carries across all those different things. But he says there’s a cluster of different things there, patterns of overlapping resemblance. Using another metaphor, if you have a piece of rope, lots of fibers are overlapping, but there is probably no single strand that runs the whole length of the rope, there is no essence of the thing that makes it what it is. And, once we recognize that, a lot of problems in philosophy will dissolve. When you start looking for the one thing that all freedom has in common, or one thing that all consciousness has in common, that kind of essentialism, it can be a flawed assumption in your reasoning. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter There are many different aspects of Wittgenstein, a huge number of things that are brought up by this very original thinker. He’s somebody who deliberately tries to provoke you to thought, rather than doing the thinking for you. There are big gaps between what he says which you’re supposed to fill in by your own reasoning and either move along with him or disagree with him. It’s a really interesting, important book in the history of philosophy. It can be irritating too, because it’s far from obvious some of the time what he is getting at. And sometimes his style of writing can be a little too indirect. I think, though, that he would have been glad to know that people are still discussing it and arguing about what he meant nearly seventy years after it was published. He’s had a massive influence on 20th century philosophy, that’s why. I’m not entirely a fan of his. I certainly wouldn’t be a fan of his personality; he would be a horrible person to have to deal with, often a jerk—more worried about his own honesty to himself than hurting others around him. But he’s an incredibly important thinker because he’s introducing new ways of seeing the subject. Whether you agree with him or not, he’s had a huge influence. I don’t think anybody understands all of it, in the sense of being able to say definitively what he meant by everything in it. There are numerous commentaries, and their authors disagree with each other about key points. But I think people can get something out of a lot of it. I think the way to do it is to read bits of it, be confused by it. Take on what you can, and then possibly go to some commentaries—of which there are many—and read it again and think about it again and see whether it makes sense to you. The section on what a game is might be a good place to start. I don’t think the ideas are impossibly difficult to grasp. It’s a lot easier than the theory of relativity , the things he’s dealing with, though he does it in an indirect way, often, by getting you to think about scenarios rather than telling you straight out what he thinks and it is not always obvious whether he is endorsing a view or merely entertaining it in order to refute it. That’s the last line of his earlier book, the Tractatus . That was about the limits of what can meaningfully be said. He was kind of mystic in that book: religion, ethics, everything important about humanity, you might say, is beyond the pale and you can’t talk meaningfully about it. There’s an early and a late Wittgenstein. The Tractatus is the early, extremely difficult book, but with some lucid aphorisms within it. The Philosophical Investigations is more approachable, more psychological in places. It also has its difficulties, but you can get more out of dipping into it."