Thoughts on Reading Wittgenstein

Most of what I’ve been writing about Wittgenstein has been focused on very specific passages or points that he makes, so I’d like to step back a bit and comment on the general experience of reading and studying Wittgenstein’s writing.

The strange thing about reading Wittgenstein is that most of what one reads is not something that he considered publishable (with the obvious exception of the Tractatus). Some sections appear to be pieces of drafts that Wittgenstein might have at least considered publishing, but much of his writing seems to be his notes to and debates with himself. These sections can be extremely difficult to read because Wittgenstein often seems to be simply jotting down fragments as they occur to him, or writing himself reminders for things that he wants to think about later; many of the thoughts that he expresses are incomplete. I sometimes feel like I am having to do his philosophy for him when I am reading because I am the one who has to draw all of the connections; he never makes the connections for me. Interestingly, even Wittgenstein’s one published work, the Tractatus, has a certain air of incompleteness about it. In many ways it strikes the reader as an outline for a philosophic work rather than as the work itself. Yet, despite his tendency not to fully develop his thoughts, Wittgenstein is startlingly consistent throughout his notes on various subjects, and he seems always to connect back to and develop past claims that the reader thought he had forgotten.

One of the benefits to reading a philosopher’s unpublished writings is that there is a striking honesty and lack of ornamentation that can be quite refreshing. Sometimes when I am reading philosophers like Hegel or Sartre, I begin to feel like they are intentionally trying to make themselves confusing in order to appear profound or using ostentatious language when much simpler words would have done nicely. Wittgenstein’s honest struggle with philosophic issues is often quite endearing, and I never feel like he is “muddying the waters to make them appear deep”, as Nietzsche (rightly, in my opinion) accused Kant of doing.

I also think that the complete privacy of these unpublished writings has interesting implications. In his writings on private languages, Wittgenstein emphasizes again and again that no private language is possible; language is a public activity. Of course, Wittgenstein is not using a private language in his writings, but he is expressing thoughts that were meant only for his own private reflection. It is interesting to think about the fact that Wittgenstein so often feels driven to introduce an imaginary interlocutor in order to write down his ideas in the way that he wants to: language use seems, to him, to be a game best played with others.

Reading a philosopher’s private notes also provides a unique perspective of his method of doing philosophy. Wittgenstein’s tendency to write down thoughts and work them out gradually over time is very different from my own method. Usually, I do not write anything down at all until I feel that I have a complete thought; it is almost as though I do not give my thoughts the “privilege” of being recorded until they have earned it by completing themselves. Of course, the consequence of this practice is that I often forget my thoughts before they are complete, and then I never write them down at all. Perhaps reading Wittgenstein’s sometimes incomplete thoughts, as difficult as it may be at times, will expand and improve my own methods of doing philosophy.

Rule-Following

I am more than a little puzzled by Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following in the Philosophical Investigations. What puzzles me most is his worry that we can never know what rule we meant when we gave someone a direction.

Wittgenstein’s argument about what rule is meant starts with a scenario in which I tell someone to write “a series (say +2) beyond 1000 – and he writes 1000, 1004, 1008, 1012” (WR 105). I might object that what he wrote is not in accordance with what I meant when I told him to write a series of +2 starting at 1000, but Wittgenstein asserts that I could not have meant each addition of 2 because I was not thinking of each member of the series when I gave the order: “So when you gave the order +2 you meant that he was to write 1002 after 1000 – and did you also mean that he should write 1868 after 1866, and 100036 after 100034, and so on – an infinite number of such propositions?” (WR 106). Since I was not thinking of that infinite set of propositions, I cannot claim to have “meant” any of the steps that I wanted the person to take.

What I do not understand here is why it is not enough that each one of those propositions follows logically from the order that I gave: the order entails each of the infinite set of propositions that Wittgenstein mentioned. It is the very nature of language that it allows us to speak in terms of general concepts that entail an infinite number of specific propositions. Our memories are limited, so we cannot think of an infinite number of things at once, but we can think of one general concept that applies to an infinite number of things. For instance, I can think of or mention my childhood without thinking of my third birthday, the week that I spent in Disney World when I was eight, and the day my sister was born. But certainly when I say “my childhood” I mean each of these events and all of the others that occurred when I was young because they all fit under the concept of my childhood. Without the ability to organize particulars into concepts, Wittgenstein would not have been able even to express his worry about rule-following because he would not be able to use the concept “rule”; he would have begun by simply listing as many rules as he could think of and never gotten past that point. Of course, even stating those rules would rely on concepts as well. Without concepts, we would not be able to use language in a way at all similar to how we use it now.

A rule is just another kind of concept, except (as in the case that Wittgenstein mentioned) we are asking someone to list some of the particulars that fall under that concept. So, when I ask someone to write the series +2, I am asking her to list the particulars that fall under the “concept” of +2 after 1000. It does not matter whether I was thinking of those particulars or not because the concept of +2 entails each of them, just as mentioning my childhood entails each of the events that occurred when I was young.

I realize that this problematic position is simply one that Wittgenstein considers and ultimately rejects. However, I think that the fact that he thought it was a legitimate problem worthy of consideration is very telling. As is so often the case with philosophers who are uninterested in doing epistemology, Wittgenstein seems to be in desperate need of it, despite his assertions to the contrary.