Some useful quotations from WITTGENSTEIN

John Shotter, KCC

“I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzman, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffra have influenced me” (CV, 1980a, p.19).

“Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses” (PI, 1953, no.18).

“People sometimes say they cannot make any judgement about this or that because they have not studied philosophy. This is irritating nonsense, because the assumption is that philosophy is some sort of science. And it is talked about almost as if it were the study of medicine. — But what one can say is that people who have never undertaken an investigation of a philosophical kind, as have, for example, most mathematicians, are not equipped with the right visual organs for this type of investigation or scrutiny” (CV 1980a, p.29).

“In the city, the streets are nicely laid out. And you drive on the right and you have traffic lights, etc. There are rules. When you leave the city, there are still roads, but no traffic lights. And when you get far off there are no roads, no lights, no rules, nothing to guide you. It’s all woods. And when you return to the city you may feel that the rules are wrong, that there should be no rules, etc.” (in Bouwsma, 1986, p.35).

“Life’s infinite variations are essential to our life. And so too even to the habitual character of life. What we regard as expression consists in incalculability. If I knew exactly how he would grimace, move, there would be no facial expression, no gesture. – Is that true though? ...” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.73).

“The way to solve the problem you see in life, is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear. The fact that life is problematic shows that the shape of your life does not fit into life’s mold. So you must change the way you live and, once your life does fit into the mold, what is problematic will disappear” (1980a, p.27).

“People say again and again that philosophy doesn’t really progress, that we are still occupied with the same philosophical problems as were the Greeks. But the people who say this don’t understand why this has to be so. It is because our language has remained the same and keeps seducing us into asking questions. As long as there continues to be a verb ‘to be’ that looks as if it functions in the same way as ‘to eat’ and ‘to drink’, as long as we still have the adjectives ‘identical’, ‘false’, ‘possible’, as long as we continue to talk of a river of time, of an expanse of space, etc. etc., people will still keep stumbling over the same puzzling difficulties and find themselves staring at something which no explanation seems capable of clearing up.

              And what’s more, this satisfies a longing for the transcendent, because in so far as people think they can see the “limits of human understanding,” they believe of course that they can see beyond these” (CV, 1980a, p.15).

“There are so many means of extirpating and eradicating, and nevertheless so little evil has been extirpated... that one clearly sees that people invent a lot of things but not the right one. And yet we live in an era of progress, don’t we? I s’pose progress is like a newly discovered land; a flourishing colonial system on the coast, the interior still wilderness, steppe, and prairie. It is in the nature of all progress that looks much greater than it really is” (From Johann Nestroy’s Der Schutzling (The Protege), act 4, scene 10. Wittgenstein uses the last italicized line as the motto for PI).

Wittgenstein’s (1953) remarks about his own efforts to order the results of his investigations into an ordered whole:

“After several unsuccessful efforts to weld my results 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 were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. - And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide filed of thought criss-cross in very direction. - 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 involved journeyings” (p.v).

Where, he wanted to put “a number of tolerable ones” into an arrangement such, “that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album” (p.v).

The view of language he is attacking

“These words [of Augustine’s], it seems to me, give us a particular picture of the essence of human language. It is this: individual words in a language name objects - sentences are combinations of such names. - In this picture of language we find the roots of the following idea: Every word has a meaning. This meaning is correlated with the word. It is the object for which the word stands” (1953, no.1).

“And now, I think, we can say: Augustine describes the learning of human language as if the child came into a strange country and did not understand the language of the country; that is, as if it already had a language, only not this one. Or again: as if the child could already think, only not yet speak. And ‘think’ would here mean something like ‘talk to itself” (no.32).

His more ‘practical’ stance toward language

“(If I had to say what is the main mistake made by philosophers, including Moore, I would say that it is when language is looked at, what is looked at is a form of words and not the use made of the form of words)” (1966, p.2, emphasis js).

“Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning,” (1981, no.173).

“Words have meaning only in the stream of life” (1990, no.913).

“Our talk gets its meaning from the rest of our proceedings” (1969, no.229).

“For a large class of cases - though not for all - in which we employ the word ‘meaning’ it can be defined thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language” (1953, no.43).

“Think of words as instruments characterized by their use” (1965, p.67).

What are its uses?

“But how many kinds of sentence are there? Say assertion, question, and command? - There are countless kinds: countless different kinds of use of what we call ‘symbols’, ‘words’, sentences’. And this multiplicity is not something fixed, given once for all; but new types of language, new language-games, as we may say, come into existence, and others become obsolete and get forgotten” (1953, no.23).

The importance of our embedding in our surroundings

“We are concentrating... on the occasions on which [words] are said - on the enormously complicated situation in which [an expression] has a place, in which the expression itself has an almost negligible place” (Wittgenstein, 1966, p.2).

“What does behavior include here? Only the play of facial expression and the gestures? Or also the surrounding, so to speak, the occasion of this expression?...” “... the word 'behavior' as I am using it, is altogether misleading, for it includes in its meaning the external circumstances” (1980c, I, no.314).

“Doesn’t the [musical] theme point to anything outside itself? Yes, it does! But that means: - it makes an impression on me which is connected with things in its surroundings - e.g., with our language and its intonations; and hence with the whole field of our language-games” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.175).

The background, acknowledgments, forms of life, ‘at homeness’, and hate

“Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing” (PI, no.25).

“The relations between these concepts form a landscape which language presents us with in countless fragments; piecing them together to too hard for me. I can make only a very imperfect job of it” (CV, 1980a, p.78).

“What happens is not that this symbol cannot be further interpreted, but: I do no interpreting. I do not interpret, because I feel at home in the present picture. When I interpret, I step from one level of thought to another” (1981, no.234).

“Perhaps what is inexpressible (what I find mysterious and am not able to express) is the background against which whatever I could express has its meaning” (C&V, p.16).

“I am showing my pupils details of an immense landscape which they cannot possibly know their way around” (CV, 1980, p.56).

“When you are philosophizing you have to descend into primeval chaos and feel at home there” (CV, 1980a, p.65).

“My life consists in my being content to accept many things” (1969, no.344).

“Knowledge in the end is based on acknowledgment” (1969, no.378).

“You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our life” (1969, no.559).

“How could human behavior be described? Surely only by sketching the actions of a variety of humans, as they are all mixed up together. What determines our judgment, our concepts and reactions, is not what one man is doing now, an individual action, but the whole hurly-burly of human actions, the background against which we see an action” (Z. no.567)... (cf also 1980c, II, no.629).

“Seeing life as a weave, this pattern (pretense, say) is not always complete and is varied in a multiplicity of ways. But we, in our conceptual world, keep on seeing the same, recurring with variations. That is how our concepts take it. For concepts are not for use on a single occasion” (Z, no. 568).

“And one pattern in a weave is interwoven with many others” (Z, no.569).

“Can one learn this knowledge? Yes, some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through ‘experience’. - Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip.- This is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here.- What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgements. There are also rules, but they do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them right. Unlike calculating rules. What is most difficult here is to put this indefiniteness, correctly and unfalsified, into words” (Wittgenstein, PI, p.227).

“We could say: Hate between men comes from our cutting ourselves off from each other” (CV, p.46).

“Instead of the unanalysable, specific, indefinable: the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g., punish certain actions, establish the state of affair thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colors, take an interest in others’ feelings. What has to be accepted, the given - it might be said - are facts of living” (RPP, I, no.630).

How can we be so ‘bewitched’ by language? Why was it so hard for Wittgenstein to bring himself to this new - more practical, everyday, less academic view of language?

“One thinks one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing around the frame through which we look at it” (1953, no.114).

“That way of speaking is what prevents us from seeing the facts without prejudice ... That is how it can come about that the means of representation produces something imaginary. So let us not think we must find a specific mental process, because the verb ‘to understand’ is there and because one says: Understanding is an activity of the mind.” (1981, no.446).

“The problems arising through a misinterpretation of our forms of language have the character of depth. They are deep disquietudes; their roots go as deep in us as the forms of our language. - Let us ask ourselves: why do we feel a grammatical joke to be deep? [e.g.: “Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them?” “I see nobody on the road,” said Alice. “I only wish I had such eyes,” the King remarked in a fretful tone. “To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance too! Why, its as much as I can do to see real people by this light.”] (1953, no.111).

“How does the philosophical problem about mental processes and states and about behaviorism arise? - the first step is the one that altogether escapes notice. We talk of processes and states and leave their nature undecided. Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them - we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter... (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent)” (no.308).

Our task is not to explain anything, but to leave everything as it is - for we want to know ‘what’ we are talking of when we are talking of language. Our task is simply to notice what has not been noticed before - for:

“Nothing is hidden” (1953, no.435)

“We must do away with all explanation, and description alone must take its place. [For] these are, of course, not empirical problems; they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognize those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them” (1953, no.109).

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known” (1953, no.109). “Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is” (1953, no.124).

“It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of the state of mathematics that troubles us: the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved... The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules.

    This entanglement in our own rules is what we what to understand (i.e.. Get a clear view of).

    It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: “I didn’t mean it like that.”

    The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem” (PI, no.125).

“Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden, for example, is of no interest to us” (no.126).

 “The great difficulty here is not to represent the matter as if there is something one couldn't do. As if there really were an object [a mental state or process, a social structure or set of rules or norms, an oppressive State apparatus], from which I derive its description, but I were unable to show it to anyone. – And the best that I can propose is that we should yield to the temptation to use this picture, but then investigate how the application of the picture goes” (PI, no.374, my additions).

“Disquiet in philosophy might be said to arise from looking at philosophy wrongly, seeing it wrong, namely as if it were divided into (infinite) longitudinal strips instead of into (finite) cross strips. This inversion of our conception produces the greatest difficulty. So we try as it were to grasp the unlimited strips and complain that it cannot be done piecemeal. To be sure it cannot, if by a piece one means an infinite longitudinal strip. But it may well be done, if one means a cross-strip. - But in that case we never get to the end of our work! - Of course not, for it has no end. (We want to replace wild conjectures and explanations by the quiet weighing of linguistic facts) (1981, no.447).

“... it is, rather, of the essence of our 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” (1953, no.89).

When philosophers use a word - 'knowledge', 'being', 'object', 'I', 'proposition', 'name' - and try to grasp the essence of the thing,” he comments, “one must ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? - What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use” (1953, no.116).

So, what can we do? We can give reminders - for they can draw our attention to something that would otherwise pass us by unnoticed.

“... we shall constantly be giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (1953, no.132).

“Something that we know when no one asks us, but no longer know when we are supposed to give an account of it [cf. Augustine - on ‘time’], is something we need to remind ourselves of” (1953, no.89).

“I wanted to put that picture before him, and his acceptance of the picture consists in his now being inclined to regard a given case differently: that is, to compare it with this rather than that set of pictures. I have changed his way of looking at things” (1953, no.144).

“We feel as if we had to penetrate phenomena: our investigation, however, is not directed towards phenomena, but, as one might say, towards the ‘possibilities’ of phenomena. We remind ourselves, that is to say, of the kind of statement that we make about phenomena” (1953, no.90, my italics).

“But ‘knowing’ it only means being able to describe it” (1953, p.185)

His use of language-games

“And to imagine a language means to imagine a form of life” (1953, no.19).

“Here the term ‘language-game’ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity, or a form of life” (1953, no.23).

“Our clear and simple language-games are not preparatory studies for a future regularization of language - as it were first approximations, ignoring friction and air resistance. The language-games are rather set up as objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities, but also of dissimilarities” (no.130).

The beginnings of new ‘language-games’ in reactions, in responses

“The child understands the gestures you use in teaching him. If he did not, he could understand nothing” (1966, np2).

“I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination” (1969, no.475).

“The origin and primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language - I want to say - is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed’[Goethe]” (1980a, p.31).

“The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word (1953, pp.217-218).

“Our attitude to what is alive and to what is dead, is not the same. All our reactions are different” (no.284).

“... it is not that before you can understand it you need to be specially trained in abstruse matters, but the contrast between understanding the subject and what most people want to see. Because of this the very things which are most obvious may become the hardest of all to understand. What has to be overcome is a difficulty having to do with the will, rather than with the intellect” (CV, 1980a, p.17)... the will to avoid ‘theories’ and to seek ‘descriptions’, the will to ‘heroize’ the present (Foucault)

“Animals come when their name is called. Just like human beings (CV, 1980a, p.67)

“The primitive reaction may have been a glance or a gesture, but it may also have been a word,” he suggested (1953, p.218).

“But what is the word ‘primitive’ meant to say here? Presumably that this sort of behavior is pre-linguistic: that a language-game is based on it, that it is the prototype of a way of thinking and not the result of thought” (Z, no.541).

“A new word is like a fresh seed sown on the ground of discussion” (CV, p.2).

No inner mental processes:

1) About thinking: “No supposition seems to me more natural than that there is no process in the brain correlated with associating or with thinking... [W]hy should the system continue further in the direction of the centre? Why should this order not proceed, so to speak, out of chaos?...” (1981, no.608).

Or 2) about remembering:”Why must something or other, whatever it may be, be stored up [in one's nervous system] in any form? Why must a trace have been left behind? Why should there not be a psychological regularity to which no physiological regularity corresponds? If this upsets our concepts of causality then it is high time they were upset” (1981, no.610).

Rules in practice

“The proposition seems set over against us as a judge and we feel answerable to it. - It seems to demand that reality be compared with it” (Wittgenstein, 1978, p.132).

“... obeying a rule is a practice. And to think one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule... otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it” (1953, no.202).

“‘But how can a rule show me what I have to do at this point? Whatever I do is, on some interpretation, in accord with the rule’ - That is not what we ought to say, but rather: any interpretation still hangs in the air along with what it interprets, and cannot give it any support. Interpretations by themselves do not determine meaning” (1953, no.198).

“What this shows is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call ‘obeying the rule’ and ‘going against it’ in actual cases” (no.201).

“Don’t always think that you read of what you say from facts; that you portray these in words according to rules. For even so you would have to apply the rule in the particular case without guidance” (no.292).

“...just where one says ‘But don’t you see...?’ the rule is no use, it is what is explained, not what does the explaining” (1981, no.302).

“I obey the rule blindly” (1953, no.219).

“Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself” (1969, no.139).

Rules only emerge from where we stand ‘now’, they do not draw on prior ‘agreements’ – we learn them in the course of using them!

“A language-game, in which someone calculates according to a rule and places the blocks of a building according to the results of the calculation. He has learnt to operate with written signs according to rules. — Once you have described the procedure of this teaching and learning, you have said everything that can be said about acting correctly according to a rule. We can go no further. It is no use, for example, to go back to the concept of agreement, because it is no more certain that one proceeding is in agreement with another, than that it has happened in accordance with a rule. To repeat, what the correct following of a rule consists in cannot be described more closely than by describing the learning of ‘proceeding.; according to the rule.’ And this description is an everyday one, like that of cooking and sewing, for example. It presupposes as much these. It distinguishes one thing from another, and so it informs human being who is ignorant of something particular” (RFM, VII 26, p.392, my emphasis in third sentence).

“The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize that the ground that lies before us is the ground” (RFM, VI 31, p.333).

The ‘practical’ nature of our problems

“A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I don’t know my way about’” (1953, no.123).

“Actually I should like to say that... the words you utter or what you think as you utter them are not what matters, so much as the difference they make at various points in your life... Practice gives words their significance” (Wittgenstein, 1980a, p.85).

“My life shows that I know or am certain that there is a chair over there, or a door, and so on - I tell a friend e.g. ‘Take that chair over there’, ‘Shut the door’, etc. etc.” (1969, no.7).

“If there is anything ‘behind the utterance of the formula’ it is particular circumstances, which justify me in saying I can go on - when the formula occurs to me... Try not to think of understanding as a ‘mental process’ at all. But ask yourself: in what sort of case, in what kind of circumstances, do we say, ‘Now I can go on’, when, that is, the formula has occurred to me?” (1953, no.154).

“We now have a theory, a ‘dynamic theory’ of the proposition; of language, but it does not present itself to us a s a theory. For it is the characteristic thing about such a theory that it looks at a specual clearly intuitive case and says: ‘That shows how things are in every case; this case is the exemplar of all cases.’ - ‘Of course! It has to be like that’ we say, and are satisfied. We have arrived at a form of expression that strikes us as obvious. But it is as if we had now seen something lying beneath the surface.

              The tendency to generalize the case seems to have a strict justification in logic: here one seems completely justified in inferring: ‘If one proposition is a picture, then any proposition must be a picture, for they must all be of the same nature’. For we are under the illusion that what is sublime, what is essential, about our investigation consists in its grasping one comprehensive essence” (Z, no.444).

To arrive at the place where you are already

“I might say: if the place I want to get to could be reached by way of a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is the place I must be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me” (CV, 1980a, p.7).

“If you want to go down deep you need not travel far; indeed, you don’t have to leave your most immediate surroundings” (CV, 1980a, p.50).

“Where others go on ahead, I stay in one place” (CV, 1980a, p.66).

“Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is...” (1953, no.124).

“... the difficulty – I might say – is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it. ‘We have already said everything. – Not anything that follows from this, no, this itself is the solution!’ This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it. The difficulty here is: to stop” (1981, no.314).... for you are already ‘at’ where you need to be; there is no necessity to ‘go beyond’ your present circumstances – the way to ‘go on’ can be found ‘there’.

The ‘saying’/’showing’ distinction: the way in which the ‘grammar’ of the situation ‘shapes’ our conduct

“Grammar is not accountable to any reality. It is grammatical rules that determine meaning (constitute it) and so they are not answerable to any meaning and to that extent are arbitrary” (1978, no.133, p.184).

“There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They show themselves...” (1922, 6.522).

“Grammar tells us what kind of object anything is” (no.373).

“(meaning is a physiognomy)” (Wittgenstein, 1953, no.568).

“Let the use of words teach you their meaning. (Similarly one can often say in mathematics: let the proof teach you what was being proved.) (1953, p.220).

“We talk, we utter words, and only later get a picture of their life” (1953, p.209).

His project in ‘philosophy’

“It is only by thinking even more crazily than philosophers do that you can solve their problems” (CV, 1980a, p.75).

“Working in philosophy - like work in architecture in many respects - is really more a working on oneself... On one’s way of seeing things. (And what one expects of them.) (CV, 1980a, p.16).

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself” (CV, 1980a, p.34)

“How hard I find it to see what is right in front of my eyes” (CV, 1980a, p.39)

“The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something – because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all. Unless that fact has at some time struck him. - And this means; we fail to be struck by what, once seen, is most striking and most powerful” (1953, no.129).

“Once the new way of thinking has been established, the old problems vanish; indeed they become hard to recapture. For they go with our way of expressing ourselves and, if we clothe ourselves in a new form of expression, the old problems are discarded along with the old garment” (CV, 1980a, p. 48e).

A ‘social poetics’: the ‘methods’, the ‘therapies’

“I think I summed up my attitude to philosophy when I said: Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetic composition. It must, as it seems to me, be possible to gather from this how far my thinking belongs to the present, future or past. For I was thereby revealing myself as someone who cannot do what he would like to be able to do” (1980a, p.24).

“It is not our aim to refine or complete the system of rules for the use of our words in unheard-of ways. For the clarity that we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completely disappear. The real discovery is the one that makes me capable of stopping doing philosophy when I want to. - The one that gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself in question. - Instead, we now demonstrate a method, by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. - Problems are solved (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem” (no.133),

“There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies” (1953, no.133).

METHODS:

‒            i) noticing in practice: “giving prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (no. 132): ‘stop’ ‘look’, ‘listen to this’, ‘look at that’ (breaking routine ways of responding by pointing out features of the flow from within the flow) (no. 144). The point here is to arrest or interrupt (or ‘deconstruct’) the spontaneous, unself-conscious flow of our ongoing activity, and to give “prominence to distinctions which our ordinary forms of language easily make us overlook” (1953, no.132).

‒            ii) new connections and relations: “a picture held us captive” (no. 115): the use new metaphors to reveal new possible connections and relations between events hidden by the dead metaphors in routine forms of talk. By the careful use of selected images, similes, analogies, metaphors, or ‘pictures’, he also suggests new ways of talking that not only orient us toward sensing otherwise unnoticed distinctions and relations for the first time, but which also suggest new connections and relations with the rest of our proceedings.

‒            iii) continue to gather examples: “don’t think, but look!”... “and the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing” (no. 66);

‒            iv) bring some order to our experiences by making comparisons using (sometimes invented) “objects of comparison which are meant to throw light on the facts of our language by way not only of similarities but dissimilarities “ (no. 130);

‒            v) this will help us “to establish an order in our knowledge of the use of language: an order with a particular end in view [so that we can all participate in discussions toward that end]; one out of many possible orders, not the order” (no. 132). Other possible ways of talking, other “language games” both actual and invented, suggest other relational dimensions.

‒            vi) our task is not to see something behind or underlying appearances, but to see “something that lies open to view and that becomes surveyable by a rearrangement” (no. 92).

Indeed, the aim of all these moves is to achieve a “perspicuous representation” {Ger: übersichlichte Darstellung}, an ‘inner’ way of surveying a sequence of experiences (as if they were moments of fixation in one’s visual scanning over a landscape) with the aim of producing “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’” (no. 122).

“A main source of our failure to understand is that we do not command a clear view of our use of words. - Our grammar is lacking in this sort of perspicuity. A perspicuous representation [portrayal] produces just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connections’. Hence the importance of finding and inventing intermediate cases.” (1953, no.122).

Such an understanding need not lead to any new theories, but to the kind of practical understanding which enables us to be more ‘at home’ within our own cultural creations, to know our “way about” (no. 123) within them, and thus to avoid becoming “as it were, entangled in our own rules” ( no. 125), i.e., to avoid being at cross-purposes with each other. Wittgenstein calls these “reminders” (no. 89) because they direct attention to “what we have always known” (no. 109): about our relations to our circumstances; about how we intertwine our activities in with those of others; about how we make sense of our surroundings, and create living relationships.

The ‘setting’ for the use of the above methods

“... the difficulty - I might say- is not that of finding the solution but rather that of recognizing as the solution something that looks as if it were only a preliminary to it... This is connected, I believe, with our wrongly expecting an explanation, whereas the solution to the difficulty is a description, if we give it the right place in our considerations. If we dwell upon it, and do not try to get beyond it” (1981, no.314).

“Giving grounds, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; - but the end is not in certain propositions striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game” (1969, no.204). Where, “you must bear in mind,” he continues, “that the language-game is... not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there - like our life” (1969, no.559).

“What is it that is repulsive in the idea that we study the use of a word, point to mistakes in the description of this use and so on? First and foremost one asks onself: How could that be of important to us? It depends on whether what one calls a 'wrong description' is a description which does not accord with established usage - or one which does not accord with the practice of the person giving the description. Only in the second case does a philosophical conflict arise,” (RPP, I, no.548).

The ‘aim’ and ‘style’ of his writing

“The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging [putting into dialogue with each other] what we have always known” (1953, no.109).

“Our thought here marches with certain views of Goethe's which he expressed in the Metamorphosis of Plants... [Goethe's] conception of the original plant [Ürpflanze] implies no hypothesis about the temporal development of the vegetable kingdom such as that of Darwin. What then is the problem solved by this idea? It is the problem of synoptic presentation. Goethe's aphorism 'All the organs of plants are leaves transformed' offers us a plan in which we may group the organs of plants according to their similarities as if around some natural center... We follow this sensuous transformation of type by linking up the leaf though intermediate forms with the other organs of the plant.

              That is precisely what we are doing here. We are collating one form of language with its environment, or transforming it in imagination so as to gain a view of the whole space in which the structure of our language has its being” (Waismann, 1965, pp.80- 81).

“‘Don’t look for anything behind the phenomena; they themselves are the theory’ (Goethe)” (1980c, I, no.889).

“... philosophy ought really to be written only as a poetic composition” (1980a, p.24).

“The way music speaks. Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information” (Wittgenstein, 1981, no.160).

“Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one might think” (1953, no.527).

“What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities” (1980b, p.26).

References:

Bouwsma,O.K. (1986) Wittgenstein: Conversations 1949-1951. Indianapolis, IA: Hackett Publishing Company.

Waismann, F. (1965) The Principles of Linguistic Philosophy, edited by R. Harré. London: Macmillan.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1965) The Blue and the Brown Books. New York: Harper Torch Books.

Wittgenstein, L. (1966) Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief. Edited by Cyril Barrett. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1969) On Certainty. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1978) Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (revised edition), trans. G.E.M. Anscombe. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980a) Culture and Value, introduction by G. Von Wright, and translated by P. Winch. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980b) Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, vols. 1 and 2. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980c) Wittgenstein’s Lectures: Cambridge 1930-1932. D. Lee (ed.) Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1988 [1922]) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.