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Philosophical Investigations (3rd Edition)

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The two greatest works of philosophy of the 20th century are, I believe, Wittgenstein's PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS and Heidegger's BEING AND TIME. The famous distinction between Analytical or Anglo-American Philosophy on the one hand, and European or Continental Philosophy is symbolized by these two books. I have to confess that I found the Wittgenstein absolutely fascinating, and has become one of the most important books in my life and library. I have studied the Heidegger, but perhaps because of the extraordinary moral failings in his life (he was a member of the Nazi party from 1933 to 1945, though he apparently was more of a fan of Nazism than Hitler, his great break with Hitler being that he saw the Jewish problem as being an intellectual problem, and not a biological one, i.e., he felt like traditional anti-Semites that Jews need only change their beliefs to be reintegrated into society, while Hitler felt the problem was in their blood, and the only solution was isolation of the Jews or their destruction), or perhaps because of the tortured and obscure mode of writing that he felt he had to use to express his thought, I found the Heidegger to be remote, uninteresting, and inaccessible. Ultimately, not worth the effort. But BEING AND TIMES's status as a classic is incontestable.

As a grad student in philosophy at Yale and the University of Chicago, I was subject to a growing conviction that most university professors teaching Wittgenstein should, perhaps, not. The problem is that most American professors teaching Wittgenstein teach him as an extension of Russell, Tarski, and Carnap. Their background is logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science, and their philosophy of language is rooted in logical and scientific issues. Although Wittgenstein was interested in these issues, there is a definitive amount of information that indicates that while he possessed a knowledge of mathematics, logic, and philosophy of language, his own philosophical background was much, much broader. His own cultural concerns ran much more broadly than most of these professors. It is not merely that they have not read Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Lichtenberg, Karl Kraus, Goethe, or the prayers of Samuel Johnson: they have no interest in doing so, and little sympathy for these writers, whom Wittgenstein himself found congenial.

One is, therefore, in a dilemma with Wittgenstein. Unless you have taken several courses in philosophy, taking up the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS can be an almost overwhelming challenge. Most of the books on Wittgenstein are either weak or very misleading because of a lack of sympathy with his wider interests.

For an ordinary individual, perhaps well read, but not especially knowledgeable of the work of philosophers like Russell and Frege and against whom he developed much of his thought, my first recommendation would be not to read the PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, but to read instead Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein. This is a excellent biography, and does a very good job of acquainting the casual reader with the highlights of both Wittgenstein's thought and life (and his life was a very interesting one indeed, in contrast to Heidegger, whose life, apart from his involvement with Nazism, was pretty uneventful). I would then recommend that one try reading one of Wittgenstein's other books first. I believe that either ON CERTAINTY or ZETTEL or CULTURE AND VALUE would be a much easier way into Wittgenstein's work than reading the INVESTIGATIONS.

Philosophical Investigations is a classical work in the history of philosophy. It is a book which holds a position similar to that of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, Plato's Meno and Heidegger's Sein und Zeit.

Let's take a look at Wittgenstein's investigations. I have presented Wittgenstein's life in my review of Ray Monk's Wittgenstein biography, let me here focus more on his philosophy.

Wittgenstein starts with a quote from St Augustine. Augustine belived that the principal function of language is to refer to external reality, he believed that all words function similar to names and according to Wittgenstein he seems to have held the view language is learned through ostensive defintions. Wittgenstein, however, rejects this referentialist view of language, believing that language is far more complex than what Augustine thought. Language is an activity, or connected to a number of activitites, which Wittgenstein called language-games. Language-games have different puprposes, not all of them are centered around refering. There are many contexts for using words and many kinds of speach acts. While the logical positivists believed that the meaning of a statement was its method of verification, and Frege believed in two different entities (Sinn and Bedeutung), Wittgenstein rejects these views. According to this thinker from Vienna, meaning is use, and to understand a linguistic expression is to master how to use it and the accompanying techniques, not mereley to understand the verification principle, grasping some Platonic/Fregian entity or have some sense impression in one's head (Locke).

Language is behaviour, practive give the words their sense according to Wittgenstein. This also relates to the private language argument, presented in paragraphs 199ff. Wittgenstein argues that the rules of language must be public and behavioral. It is not, as some like Peter Winch or Kripke have thought, an argument for the principle social nature of language, but for the behavioral aspect of rule-following. Mental terms, according to LW, cannot enter into the language without intimately being connected to overt behavioral patterns. Thus the mentalism of Hume and Locke is rejected, and Wittgenstein shows how knowledge must be more than just access to private sense data. There goes Russell, the British aristocratic sensualists and the Cartesian idea of priveleged access. Sometimes Wittgenstein may seem like a Marxist: it is the practical part of human life that provides that basis for our thoughts and rationality. Being a rational creature, according to Wittgenstein, is not what the rationalist Descartes thought or the empiricists thought; you cannot isolate the intellect or private sensations, because human rationality is based on practical and concrete, physical behavioral patterns.

Througout the investigations Wittgenstein tries to challenge many of the positions held by previous philosophers. He once said that he didn't write for philosophers, but I do think that knowledge of the history of philosophy sheds light over his investigations. he said that WHAT he said would be simple, but understanding WHY he said it, would be difficult.

But even though you are not a professional philosopher, you may receive vital inputs from Wittgenstein. If you can grasp the essence of his ideas of language-games, rule-following, form of life, anti-mentalism and conceptual therapy, you will have knowledge of some of his key ideas ideas.

If you supply your reading of Philosophical Investigations with Ray Monk's marvellous "Ludwig Wittgenstein. The Duty of Genius" you can understand the horizon of this great thinker. Also important, are Baker and Hacker's books on Wittgenstein.

Finally, a word on interpretation. Burton Dreben once had a seminar at the University of Oslo, where he said that if you don't know Frege and Russell, you won't understand Wittgenstein. I completely agree with Dreben that Wittgenstein was much inspired by the philosophers and logicians Frege and Russell. However, one should understand that Wittgenstein was deeply fascinated by poetry, religion and existential questions. Among his favourite writers were Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy and Kierkegaard. When this is taken into account, one can understand Wittgenstein in depth. Wittgenstein was a thinker with great analytical abilities, but never forget that he had a poetic soul. "I am not a religious man, but I cannot help seeing everything from a religious point of view" he once said to one of his friends. The ideas he had on language-games, forms of life and rule-following should be seen in light of some of the profound and important questions a religious man or an existentialist may ask himself.

This book inspires heartfelt testimony. My own experience is that it liberates. Wittgenstein introduces a method that's fitted to the questions he treats, so that anyone who is bothered by the same questions can finally get a decent grip on them. The questions I mean are the usual philosophical ones: what is value? what is a fact? what is logic? what makes a thing what it is? what is essence? what is explanation? what is thinking? and so on. But (and this is a clue to his method) the basic question among all of these is about meaning: what is it, what conditions it, and what is the relationship between meaning and world (it turns out to be intimate).

A couple of "warnings": Wittgenstein is not a philosopher who likes jargon, in fact the tendency to jargon cuts directly against his philosophical point that language is just fine the way it is. But he can be weirdly hard to read anyway and very smart people walk away from him bewildered all the time. Mostly (I think) that's because the questions are uniquely "close to us" and Wittgenstein's approach is totally unlike familiar approaches to problem-solving (in science, math, politics, car mechanics, etc.) It's as though we are used to inspecting things at arm's length but what's at issue in these questions changes at arm's length, the problem is only right at our noses. So he takes another approach which you'll have to see first-hand - what he himself called his "new method". Now every rule must have an exception, and that brings me to the second point. Actually Wittgenstein does rely on some technical vocabulary - nothing far-out, but it can present an obstacle to deeper reading. Words like "sense", "reference", "assertion", "truth-value", "concept", and "object" stem from logic and the theory of meaning as Frege developed them. To go more deeply into PI, a person would have to read - or somehow be comfortable with ideas from - at least two of Frege's articles: "On Sense and Reference" and "On Concept and Object" [collected in The Frege Reader, Beaney ed.]. These articles are practically the fountainhead of analytic philosophy and also clear, precisely written, and intensely brilliant. More to the point, they contain many of Wittgenstein's insights in germinal form, and many of Wittgenstein's most significant moves are implicit or explicit criticisms of Frege. So to really get to the bottom of PI you'll probably need to read Frege.

Anyway, the bottom line is: if you've come this far, it's for you.

I read the PI as part of a class on Wittgenstein that I took in my final semester of college, and I don't think I would be going too far in saying that it tied together everything I had read up to that point. For me it made clear how and in what sense every preceding philosopher had "gone wrong" and opened the door for a meaningful examination of the language we use not just in philosophy, but in everyday life. In addition, it showed me how the language we use to make sense of the world is a sort of framework that we lay over what is, in some sense, still a mystery. This is the most important and one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. Of course, it follows from what is written in the book that different readers will interpret it (and any other work) in different ways. All I can recommend is that you read it and see what you get out of it.

I recommend your own reading of this Wittgenstein. Do not lean on others to show you the path. LW is clear enough if you go slowly, paragraph by paragraph. No one will know more of him than you. #1Paragraph, for instance, is his take on a piece from a church writer of millenia ago -- not that he's particularly devoted to Christian scholars, but that he uses the piece to show where others are in this matter of learning language from one's elders. From this rudimentary start, he goes on to develop other languages, set in rather a very limited word-language range. He shows how it works within these limited ways of life and cultures. "Purchasing apples" in a store is one scene for us to look at LW. A construction set-up "with four words and four actions" are all of another particular way-of-life, and the total use of a simple language form. Note LW's very simple beginnings. You can easily get the gist of his words and expositions here. Read slowly and carefully. Remember his presentations. He will refer to them again. I recommend that when you return to your reading to continue your study, that you start not exactly where you left off. Start the new readings a few paragraphs before your previous last. Get a running start into the new.
"Philosophical Investigations" does come with a German text also, but is not necessary for this excellent translation.
I find that another who has struggled over this book as you will, can offer some other assistance -- but don't depend on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein says about those who will come after him in this subject material, it is necessary that you do it mainly by yourself, to get the most out of him and it. Only by immersing oneself in what he is saying, can one come out of it touched, a bit perplexed, but into this new introduction to language, ways of life, Wittgentstein, and yourself.
Good luck in your meeting with this most interesting fellow, dead in 1951 at the age of 62, but writing his ideas until a day or so before he slowly died (these latter remarks have been gathered into a book, "On Certainty").

By the way, after his death, his remaining papers and writings have been combined into other books. He gave his all to his calling. Rest assured, you too will have to give something of yourself as you too get something from a most interesting fellow human being.

I'm not sure how one goes about reviewing a book like this since it cannot be captured in a paragraph or two. Suffice it to say, when I read it in my undergraduate days it was an eye-opener.

In his earlier Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had sought to build a picture of the world by exploring how language mirrors reality in order to capture it. In Philosophical Investigations, a book which became the bible for a whole new way of philosophical thinking (but which he never published in his lifetime), Wittgenstein scrapped all that for the view that language ultimately WAS the world because it contained it. A subtle but powerful difference in the way one sees things. He achieved this not through a traditional and long-drawn out philosophical argument but rather by a series of pithy, note-like questions and answers to himself. The argument does not so much build as unfold, as the reader sees more and more (from a multiplicity of angles) the nature of language as Wittgenstein came to conceive it in his later years. What it did for me back then was to wean me away from a narrow and rigorous positivism, which had previously colored everything I did and said, allowing me to see the value of many of the "non-concrete" forms of life in which we find ourselves. It doesn't answer the ethical or metaphysical questions of traditional philosophy so much as it builds a "world" in which they seem intelligible if one approaches them in the non-traditional, Wittgensteinian way which is so crisply demonstrated here.

In this book, no less than in his later teachings, Wittgenstein radically altered (dare one say revolutionized?) the way we think about language and knowledge and even thinking itself. And how we view the philosophical project. If, in the end, we have not given up the struggle to solve philosophical problems in favor of "dissolving" them, which he generally recommends here, it is not because he did not offer us new insight into the matter but rather because his strategy leads to a more open and broader view of the world in which we find ourselves. Because of this book I found greater comfort in the company of the great metaphsyicians and existentialists, for all the fuzziness of their language (which Wittgenstein implicitly criticizes), and learned to feel at ease with phenomenologists and even religionists (is that a fair formulation for those who embrace the concept of deity in any of its many variants?). And that, it seems to me, is what philosophy must be about in the end, about the big questions, Ludwig Wittgenstein's technical queries and explorations notwithstanding. But he gets you there if you will give him the time and attention necessary to crack the world open, like the opaque and rather hard-boiled egg it often seems to be.

Could this have been a better book? Philosophical Investigations and Darwin's "Origin of Species" were both the "precipitate" of 20 years of personal exploration of intellectual problems. Darwin had reasons for publishing his work that Wittgenstein did not have. Alfred Wallace independently discovered some of Darwin's ideas, forcing Darwin to rush his work to print. In contrast, Wittgenstein lamented the poverty and darkness of his time and had to hope that his ideas might be appreciated in the future. Given the difficult conditions of its construction, it is hard to fault the form of this book.

Is there anyone who could have been the equivalent for Wittgenstein of what Wallace was for Darwin? Darwin and Wallace could both get out in the world and make the types of observations needed to discover the same ideas. Wittgenstein had to create the Tractatus, an experience that eventually led him to reject the conventional approach for trying to explain language. However, other philosophers seemed to be immunized against coming to interpret the Tractatus in the way that Wittgenstein did. Wittgenstein was dealing with ideas that were also starting to be incorporated into other intellectual disciplines, so could Wittgenstein's Wallace have come from another discipline such as computer science?

Maybe Alan Turing could have tried to program computers to use human language and in so doing taken another path to the conclusion that formal logical systems cannot account for human language behavior. Unfortunately, when Wittgenstein was done working on the material that was later published in Philosophical Investigations, the first computer programs were just being run. Turing was interested in the idea of artificial intelligence, but the computer hardware was not there in time. That only one man was able to make the intellectual journey described in Philosophical Investigations is the great story behind the story.

The problems Wittgenstein confronted "from inside", by way of introspection, are the problems that neurobiologists are now confronting "from the outside". For example, Wittgenstein used the "duckrabbit" as an example of "aspect seeing". The drawing of the "duckrabbit" can be seen either as a duck or a rabbit. In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein made explicit the analogy between the meaning problem for human language and our mental power of aspect seeing. Sure, we can write a definition for a word to put into a dictionary, but does that mean that we have "captured" THE meaning of the word? No more than seeing one aspect of the duckrabbit means that we know its meaning.

Wittgenstein was horrified by the way Freudians had abused the term "unconscious", so he mostly avoided using it. "We remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all everyday language-games because the clothing of our language makes everything alike." This one sentence indicates the main point of the entire work and gives a short answer to the question of what went wrong in the Tractatus. Philosophical Investigations is a workbook in which Wittgenstein attempts to march across this central idea in so many ways that eventually the disease of our former way of thinking about language is cured.

In the last section of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein condemns psychology for its conceptual confusion and barrenness, noting that psychologists get bewitched by their experimental methods. Psychology, as a black-box study of the mind, must fail as surely as do the attempts by philosophers to describe mind and language as formal systems.

Only after the death of Wittgenstein did the black-box of the mind begin to be opened and understood well enough to start the process of explaining mind in terms of brain physiology. We now know that the human ability to think of something and form a mental image of it (which gets extensive investigation in Philosophical Investigations) is mediated by the spread of activity down into the lowest domains of the visual cortex in a way that reverses the flow of information that makes perception possible. We can now begin to understand aspect seeing in terms of the existence of mutually competitive semantic networks in brains, only one of which can stabilize within consciousness at one time. Our experience of word meaning is just a special example of how our brains deal with fluid concepts and can shrink associative networks around individual words or relax them to encompass phrases or entire sentences.

Just as no living organism makes sense outside of the network of life within which it is embedded, nothing within human language has meaning outside of the semantic networks that form inside the brains of human children. Of course, most of the activity of these networks takes place within what George Lakoff calls the "cognitive unconscious", the ocean of unseen brain activity upon which our introspectively accessible and behaviorally expressible brain activity floats. It will be a fitting tribute to Wittgenstein's courage and vision if the neuroscientists who are working from the outside of the brain to reveal the workings of the cognitive unconscious will be able to join with those philosophers who are working on Wittgenstein's research project and building towards the same goal from the inside. Towards this end, Philosophical Investigations deals with issues that are still very much on our "to do" list.

Is it useful to read some of Frege's work or Wittgenstein's Tractatus before reading Philosophical Investigations? An alternative is to make use of the secondary literature, for example Garth Hallett's thick Companion to Philosophical Investigations. I suggest opening up Philosophical Investigations and pretending that you are sitting right in front of Wittgenstein in a classroom. When he says, "now think about this," put the book down and think about it! When he asks a question, write it out in your own words and then write out your answer. If you see a word or phrase that confuses you, write it down in your personal glossary along with the location in the text where you find it. Check in Hallett or online for help with these confusing words. Think in the direction that Wittgenstein pointed.

There isn't much point in my criticizing Wittgenstein's crowning work, which is without a doubt one of the most important philosophical works of all time. Philosophers must read it.

This edition is good, but readers should be aware that it carries only the English text (in Anscombe's translation). The translation is standard and superb, but I advise serious students to consider buying the bilingual edition of the _Philosophische Untersuchungen_ (Routledge).

Perhaps something the other reviewers fail to see is the significance of this work. Wittgenstein is one of the most important philosophers of this century and this work is key to understanding his philosophy as it developed in his later years. All to often the lay philosophy-reader is drawn to existentialism and other such soft and questionable philosophies, but to the true student, this work cannot be underestimated. As a purely literary work, however, it is not such a good read; thus the lack of the fifth star.

This is obviously one of the most important books of 20th cent. philosophy, so no point in restating its fine points of linguistic theory etc.

More important (to me) is how it makes you feel, particularly since its enduring value will be defined, not by how professional philosophers think of it, but by how its received by ordinary people (who work in drab offices, let's say).

Wittgenstein unfolds a strange dialogue with himself and with hypothetical interlocutors. There are various problems presented. But just when your head is hurting from all the possibilities, like a Zen master, LW just disolves the problems with a subtle aphorism. It's a strange feeling, I tell you! Similar to reading eastern philosophy.

His aphorisms such as "philosophy shows the fly out of the bottle" or "understanding language is like understanding a way of life" or (the best) "if a lion had language, we would not understand him" have a way of getting under your skin and forcing you to really observe the world in a new way. The other day I was speaking with a female attorney about hostile workplace law and how language can be a tool for keeping women out of certain jobs, and I kept thinking, "This is straight Wittgenstein." In fact a lot of "postmodern" ideas about language can be traced to this book.

Whether Wittgenstein's ideas are technically right seems of more concern to linguists and psychologists. For me, good philosophers give the world fresh insights and new models. And P.I. certainly does that. If you aren't familiar with his work, I would check out Derek Jarman's elegant film "Wittgenstein" (screenplay by Terry Eagleton), then flip through this book and see if your perspective doesn't change and if you don't suddenly break up the next office meeting shouting: "The limits of my language are the limits of my world!"