philosophical method in wittgenstein‘s on certainty

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA,

IRVINE

Philosophical Method in Wittgenstein‘s On Certainty

DISSERTATION

submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements

for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

in Philosophy

by

Brian Bruce Rogers

Dissertation Committee:

Distinguished Professor Penelope Maddy, Chair

Professor David G. Stern, University of Iowa

Professor Emeritus Alan Nelson Assistant Professor Jeremy Heis

2011

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

LIST OF FIGURES iv

LIST OF TABLES v

LIST OF SYMBOLS vi

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS vii

CURRICULUM VITAE viii

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION xi

INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER 1: The Right Frame of Mind for Doing Philosophy 19

CHAPTER 2: The Final Manuscripts 46

Source Manuscripts for Wittgenstein‘s Final Publications 76

Selected Pages from the Final Manuscripts 77

CHAPTER 3: On Certainty and Wittgenstein's 'Works' 82

CHAPTER 4: Therapeutic Readings 94

CHAPTER 5: Theory and Therapy in On Certainty 125

CHAPTER 6: The Reception of On Certainty 162

BIBLIOGRAPHY 179

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: MS 169, p. 81r 47

Figure 2: MS 169, p. 78r 48

Figure 3: MS 171, Front Cover 53

Figure 4: MS 173, p. 31v 63

Figure 5: MS 175, p. 79 77

Figure 6: MS 176, p. 22r 78

Figure 7: MS 175, p. 34v 79

Figure 8: MS 176, p. 19v 80

Figure 9: MS 176, p. 24r 81

Figure 10: MS 176, p. 46v 85

v

LIST OF TABLES

Page

Table 1: Source Manuscripts for Wittgenstein's Final Publications 76

vi

LIST OF SYMBOLS

The following abbreviations for Wittgenstein‘s philosophical publications are

used in this work:

BT The Big Typescript, TS 213, eds. Luckhardt & Aue, Blackwell,

Oxford, 2005.

LWPP2 Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. II, eds. von

Wright & Nyman, Blackwell, Oxford, 1992.

OC On Certainty, eds. Anscombe & von Wright, Blackwell, Oxford,

1969.

PI Philosophical Investigations, 4th Ed., eds. Hacker & Schulte,

Blackwell, Oxford, 2009.

RoC Remarks on Colour, ed. Anscombe, University of California Press,

Berkeley, 1977.

vii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thinking on Wittgenstein‘s philosophy has benefitted from discussions with Pen Maddy, David Stern, Alan Nelson, Jeremy Heis, Kai

Wehmeier, and Josef Rothhaupt. I‘m especially grateful for Pen‘s support,

encouragement, and keen criticism over the years. The work of David and

Josef has served as an ideal toward which I have strived.

Work on the first three chapters of this dissertation was carried out in

Europe while participating in an exchange program with the University of

Salzburg. I would like to recognize the assistance provided during this time

by Jonathan Smith at the Wren Library in Trinity College, Cambridge, Alois Pichler at the Wittgenstein archives at the University of Bergen, Joseph

Wang at the Brenner Archive at the University of Innsbruck, and Johannes

Brandl at the University of Salzburg.

I thank Oxford University Press, the University of Bergen, and the

Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge for permission to include selected

images from the Bergen Electronic Edition of Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass in my

dissertation.

Financial support was provided by the Graduate Division, School of

Social Sciences, and Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the

University of California, Irvine.

viii

Brian Rogers

Curriculum Vitae

University of California, Irvine

Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science

EDUCATION

Ph.D, Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, 2011

M.A., Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, 2009 B.A., Philosophy (minor in Religion) (Summa cum Laude), University of

Northern Iowa, 2004

AREAS OF SPECIALIZATION

History of Analytic Philosophy, Wittgenstein

AREAS OF COMPETENCE

Logic (through Incompleteness), Philosophy of Logic, Philosophy of

Language,

Early Modern Philosophy, Epistemology, Philosophy of Science

DISSERTATION

Theory and Therapy in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty

Committee: Penelope Maddy (chair), Jeremy Heis, David Stern (Iowa), Alan

Nelson (North

Carolina, Chapel Hill)

ARTICLES

Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Methods in On Certainty

Language and World, V. Munz, K. Puhl, & J. Wang (eds.), Kirchberg am Wechsel 2009: Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, pp. 360-362.

Descartes’ Logic and the Paradox of Deduction (with co-author Alan

Nelson)

Gods and Giants in Early Modern Philosophy, P. Easton (ed.), U. of Toronto Press (forthcoming).

ix

BOOKS

Wittgenstein’s Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, from the Notes of G.E. Moore (with co-editors David Stern and Gabriel Citron)

Cambridge University Press (forthcoming)

WORKS UNDER REVIEW

Tractarian First-Order Logic: Identity and the N-Operator (with co-

author Kai Wehmeier)

PRESENTATIONS

‗Propositional Functions and Expressive Completeness of Tractarian Logic‘

American Philosophical Association/Association for Symbolic Logic, San

Diego, CA, April 2011

‗Propositional Functions and the N-Operator‘ University of California, Irvine, Dept. of Logic & Philosophy of Science,

April 2011

‗Tractarian First-Order Logic: Identity and the N-Operator‘ (with co-author Kai Wehmeier)

Southern California History & Philosophy of Logic & Mathematics

Group, October 2010

‗Wittgenstein‘s Philosophical Methods in On Certainty‘

32nd International Wittgenstein Symposium, Kirchberg, Austria, August

2009

‗Wittgenstein‘s N-Operator and the Question of Expressive Completeness‘ University of Salzburg, Department of Philosophy, June 2009

‗Cognition and Inference in Descartes‘ (presented by second author Alan

Nelson) Yale University History of Philosophy Series, April 2009

x

RESEARCH ACTIVITIES

August 2009 Research on Wittgenstein‘s correspondence at the Brenner Archiv in Innsbruck, Austria.

February 2009 Research at the Wittgenstein archive at the Wren Library,

Trinity College, University of Cambridge.

February 2009 Research at the G.E. Moore archive at the Cambridge

University Library, University of Cambridge.

February 2009 Visitor at the Wittgenstein Archives in Bergen, Norway.

2008-2009 UC Irvine/Salzburg University exchange program participant.

AWARDS

Graduate Dean’s Dissertation Fellowship for dissertation research.

(Spring 2011)

Social Science Associate Dean’s Fellowship for research. (Fall 2010)

Social Science Pre-Dissertation Fellowship for dissertation research. (Spring 2007)

Logic and Philosophy of Science Summer Fellowship for research.

(2010, 2008, 2007, 2006)

Social Science Merit Fellowship for graduate study. (2004-2009)

xi

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Philosophical Method in Wittgenstein‘s On Certainty

by

Brian Bruce Rogers

Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy

University of California, Irvine, 2011

Distinguished Professor Penelope Maddy, Chair

In Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein aims to demotivate

philosophical theorizing by examining the conditions under which

philosophical puzzlement arises. His goal is to enact this ‗therapy‘ without

advancing controversial philosophical theories himself. The implementation

of this new methodology distinguishes the late Wittgenstein from the early

Wittgenstein of the Tractatus.

After completing work on the Investigations, Wittgenstein continued to

write philosophical remarks, including those published in On Certainty, until

xii

his death in 1951. Recently, some interpreters have called for the

recognition of a third phase of Wittgenstein‘s career associated with On

Certainty, during which Wittgenstein purportedly lost interest in the

therapeutic goals of his second phase and adopted a systematic approach to

classical epistemological problems. In this dissertation I challenge the idea of

a ‗third Wittgenstein‘ by arguing that Wittgenstein retained his therapeutic

aims in On Certainty – although he was not always successful in fulfilling his

methodological goals.

A survey of Wittgenstein‘s correspondence reveals that he consistently

criticized the quality of his writing throughout the year 1950. Yet in the

spring of 1951, just weeks before his death, Wittgenstein reported that he

had regained his philosophical capacities and was doing his best work in

years. These fluctuations in Wittgenstein‘s assessment of his writing

correspond to the dates he underwent cancer treatments that affected his

cognitive abilities.

The results of philological investigation show that the first half of On

Certainty was written during Wittgenstein‘s self-critical phase, while the

second half was written during his final weeks of satisfactory work. The early

remarks of the book contain a response to G.E. Moore‘s attempt to refute

skepticism that is based on a theory of ‗hinge propositions‘. Later in the book

Wittgenstein implements a more therapeutic, less dogmatic method in his

treatment of Moore. By exploring the ways that Moore‘s philosophical

xiii

assertions can be used in everyday contexts, Wittgenstein wishes to lead us

to question whether we fully understand what Moore is trying to say. I argue

that Wittgenstein was satisfied by this latter response to Moore because it

fulfilled the therapeutic and anti-theoretical aims of his later philosophy.

1

Introduction

76 Storeys Way

Cambridge 16.4.51.

Dear Norman,

Thanks for your letter. Apart from a certain weakness

which has constant ups & downs I'm feeling very well these days. My room here is much more agreable than the one in

Oxford. Not that anyone could possibly be kinder to me than

Miss Anscombe was; & I was very happy there, too, while I was

ill. But now that I'm up the whole day I prefer it here. Thanks for

sending me the book Kon-tiki. I've often heard of it & it's bound to be interesting. – I saw Moore twice recently & had discussions

with him. One very bad one, the other fairly good. I was

responsible for the bad one's being bad. An extraordinary thing

has happened to me. About a month ago I suddenly found myself in the right frame of mind for doing philosophy. I had

been absolutely certain that I'd never again be able to do it. It's

the first time after more than 2 years that the curtain in my

brain has gone up. – Of course, so far I've only worked for about 5 weeks & it may be all over by tomorrow; but it bucks me up a

lot now.

I'm indoors most of the time, all the more as the weather

is pretty rotten & very cold, but I can go out for short strolls. – I

want to go to Oxford before long to visit Smythies & Bouwsma if all goes well with me.

Miss Anscombe sends her good wishes. Give my love to

everybody.

Affectionately

Ludwig

Remember me to Dr Mooney. I like to think of her.1

1 Letter written by Wittgenstein to Norman Malcolm on April 16, 1951. All quotations from Wittgenstein‘s correspondence in this work are from (Wittgenstein 2004). The spelling and grammatical errors occasionally encountered in these letters have been reproduced without correction in the quotations.

http://library.nlx.com/xtf/view?docId=witt_gb_de/witt_gb_de.02.xml;chunk.id=div.witt.gb.4804;toc.id=div.witt.gb.4804;brand=default#Ziel-5903

2

This is the final known letter of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He wrote it just

two weeks before his death. Wittgenstein had recently moved into the home

of his personal doctor in Cambridge to receive constant medical attention.

Just over a year earlier he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. The

prognosis was now dire; Wittgenstein was told he only had a few weeks left

to live.

As Wittgenstein reports in his letter to Norman Malcolm, in March of

1951 something ―extraordinary‖ happened to him. He had suddenly found

himself in the finest mental condition for engaging in philosophy that he had

been in for two years. During that time he had remained convinced that,

given his age and state of ill health, he had completely lost his ability to do

philosophy. One might naturally assume from this letter that Wittgenstein

had completely abandoned philosophical activity for some time, but this is

not the case. Over the previous eighteen months Wittgenstein had

composed a significant number of philosophical remarks. Selections from

this material were published posthumously in Culture and Value, Remarks on

Colour, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II, and On

Certainty.

The remarks published as On Certainty begin by addressing G.E.

Moore‘s famous attempt to prove the existence of the external world by

remarking, ―Here is one hand…and here is another‖ (Moore 1939, p. 166).

Wittgenstein then goes on to consider the epistemological concepts of doubt,

3

certainty, and knowledge, as well as the variety of uses that the terms for

these concepts are put to. Since its publication in 1969, themes from On

Certainty have received a good amount of attention from Wittgenstein

scholars in numerous articles and a handful of book-length treatments.

A new surge of interest in the book over the last decade is largely due

to Danièle Moyal-Sharrock. She has advocated for assigning On Certainty a

special place in the Wittgenstein corpus, arguing that it marks a final phase

in his career that should be distinguished from the phase associated with

Philosophical Investigations. When this book was published shortly after his

death, the thematic and methodological differences between the Tractatus

and Philosophical Investigations were so striking to readers that it became

commonplace to figuratively speak of two Wittgensteins: the early

Wittgenstein, whose work finished with the publication of the Tractatus and

a move to rural Austria to become a schoolteacher, and the late

Wittgenstein, whose career began in the early thirties in Cambridge and

culminated in the publication of Philosophical Investigations.2 Work on the

typescript for Part II of the Investigations was completed in 1949, but as

mentioned above, after this point Wittgenstein continued to produce new

2 The appropriateness of sharply dividing Wittgenstein‘s career into these two phases has in recent decades become the subject of scholarly debate, though the terminology of ‗early‘ and ‗late‘ remains entrenched. See (Stern 2005) for a survey of this literature.

4

philosophical writing until his death in 1951. The phase consisting of these

final writings has thus come to be known as the third Wittgenstein:3

the development in Wittgenstein‘s thought is such as to warrant

the distinction of a post-Investigations, a third Wittgenstein,

from the indiscriminate assemblage of what is referred to as the second or the later Wittgenstein. This demarcation

would…indicate not only a new phase in Wittgenstein‘s thinking,

but also that Wittgenstein was the author of three, not two,

philosophical masterpieces. (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, p. 1)

The introduction of this distinction in Wittgenstein‘s career has been lauded

and adopted by several interpreters, most notably Avrum Stroll, who

describes the recognition of a third Wittgenstein as

a deep and original insight…I am in agreement with Moyal-

Sharrock that we should divide Wittgenstein‘s career into three

phases: the First Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the Second of the Investigations, and the Third of On Certainty.4 (2004, p. 22)

3 In the present work I adopt the following terminology for the phases of Wittgenstein‘s career. ‗The second Wittgenstein‘ will refer to the phase beginning with a return to

Cambridge in 1929 and finishing with the construction of the typescript now known as Part II of Philosophical Investigations in 1949. (For simplification, I include what some have called Wittgenstein‘s ‗middle‘ or ‗transitional‘ period – approximately 1929-1933 – in the ‗second‘ Wittgenstein.) I designate the notebooks composed between 1949 and 1951 as the ‗final‘ writings. I mention the ‗third‘ Wittgenstein when referring to the particular interpretation of Wittgenstein‘s project in the final writings espoused by Moyal-Sharrock et al. Finally, I associate the ‗later‘ Wittgenstein with all of the writings after 1929. The ‗later‘ phase thus includes both the ‗second‘ and ‗final‘ phases. 4 Moyal-Sharrock demarcates the ‗third Wittgenstein‘ corpus as ―essentially [the] post-1949 (post-PI) work; for the most part, notes that have been divided into what we know as: Remarks on Colour, the second volume of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology and On Certainty‖ (Moyal-Sharrock 2002, p. 294 fn. 2). In a later characterization of the third Wittgenstein (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, 2), the demarcation is expanded to include all of the writings from 1946 onward. In addition to the publications previously mentioned, this

expansion also includes remarks published as Part II of the Philosophical Investigations, most of the remarks in Zettel, both volumes of Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, volume 1 of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, and a selection of remarks from Culture and Value. In this dissertation I focus on the earlier, narrower characterization of the third Wittgenstein as comprised only of the 1949-1951 notebooks. (See the beginning of chapter 3 for the justification of this choice.) For an account of Wittgenstein‘s writings from 1946 to 1949, see (Schulte 1993).

5

The case for distinguishing a post-Investigations phase of

Wittgenstein‘s career rests on three major claims.

1) The philosophical importance and quality of On Certainty is of

comparable stature to the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations;

indeed, ―Wittgenstein was the author of three, not two great works: On

Certainty is Wittgenstein‘s third masterpiece‖ (Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner

2005, p. 1).

2) After 1949 Wittgenstein‘s thought moves in new directions: ―On

Certainty is a highly original work, in many ways quite different from the

Investigations‖ (Stroll 1994, p. 7). The philosophical issues in On Certainty

are confronted by Wittgenstein for the first time, for ―the theme of this work

[is] different from anything that Wittgenstein produced earlier‖ (Stroll 2004,

p. 22).

3) Wittgenstein‘s post-Investigations writing reveals a shift in

philosophical method. One of the most salient differences between the

Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations concerns the apparent methods

applied in the texts. While in the Tractatus Wittgenstein is primarily

concerned to answer fundamental questions of metaphysics and

philosophical logic5, in Philosophical Investigations he adopts a new

5 This is at least Wittgenstein‘s aim according to standard readings of the Tractatus. Such readings have in recent decades come under attack by interpreters who argue that Wittgenstein employs a therapeutic methodology in this book as well. In the present work I will not enter into this debate about the Tractatus, for my argument relies merely on an understanding of Wittgenstein as being driven by deflationary and therapeutic intentions in

6

deflationary, therapeutic method that seeks to make ―philosophical problems

completely disappear‖ (PI 133) and ―not advance any kind of theory‖ (PI

109). The transition from Wittgenstein‘s second career phase to his third is

also characterized by a methodological break, for ―the third

Wittgenstein…somehow lost interest in the therapeutic enterprise in his last

years‖ (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, p. 5).6 Wittgenstein abandoned his

therapeutic goals in his final years, instead attempting to answer traditional

epistemological questions in a theoretical and systematic manner:

the highly therapeutic thrust of the Investigations is much

diminished in On Certainty. Wittgenstein is himself caught up in

relatively straightforward, classical philosophical concerns about

the nature of certainty and its relationship to human knowledge. (Stroll 1994, p. 7)

The goal of this dissertation is to present what could be called a

‗therapeutic reading‘ of On Certainty. In using this terminology I am not,

however, claiming to give an interpretation that is analogous to recent

therapeutic readings of the Tractatus.7 Such a reading would require an

understanding of On Certainty as a carefully planned and executed text that

consistently works towards a therapeutic goal. On the contrary, I will argue

that Wittgenstein did not consistently satisfy his therapeutic ideals in his

Philosophical Investigations, and such a position is well established in the secondary

literature. 6 A similar opinion is held by Frongia and McGuinness, who suggest that there is ―a pronounced change in Wittgenstein‘s attitude towards constructive and systematic ways of doing philosophy. Certainly there seems to be a loss of interest in the ‗therapeutic‘ aim of removing ‗mental cramps‘‖ (1990, p. 35). 7 Thus I will provide an interpretation that differs from what Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner identify as ―the ‗therapeutic reading‘ approach[ing] On Certainty in the spirit of ‗New Wittgenstein‘ commentators‖ (2005, p. 3).

7

final writings. But this does not mean that he abandoned the methodological

goals of the Investigations in his final years, for, as I will show, Wittgenstein

was most satisfied with work during this time when it succeeded in meeting

these ideals.

My interpretation directly challenges the third claim made by the

authors above. In his final years Wittgenstein did not adopt a new

philosophical method. Those remarks that some readers take to indicate a

change in Wittgenstein‘s later methodology should instead be understood as

indicating periods during which Wittgenstein was not successful in satisfying

his metaphilosophical goals. The case for recognizing a third phase in

Wittgenstein‘s career is severely destabilized when its third pillar – the claim

that Wittgenstein changed his philosophical methodology in On Certainty – is

removed. The recent work of Kim van Gennip, tracing the development of

themes addressed in On Certainty in writings, lectures, and discussions from

the thirties and forties, has also undermined the second pillar concerning the

supposed uniqueness and separability of On Certainty with respect to the

rest of Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass.8 This leaves only the first pillar, namely the

claim that ideas attributed to Wittgenstein by certain readers are of high

philosophical value. I will not contest this evaluation, but rather argue that it

is not sufficient to warrant the recognition of a distinct phase in

Wittgenstein‘s philosophical development.

8 (van Gennip 2008)

8

A fundamental assumption held by most interpreters who advocate for

the recognition of a third phase of Wittgenstein‘s career is that On Certainty

is one of Wittgenstein‘s works. This assumption makes it possible for them

to afford the book a status similar to that of Philosophical Investigations and

the Tractatus – the two publications widely agreed to be works of

Wittgenstein. I will argue that the conception of On Certainty as one of

Wittgenstein‘s works is unwarranted. The question of whether this title is

appropriately assigned to a piece of historical writing is of real importance to

interpreters, for the notion of a ‗work‘ is bound together with a number of

suppositions concerning the writing‘s internal structure and the author‘s

attitudes about this writing. In particular, a ‗work‘ is generally taken to

systematically develop a theme, consist of a carefully planned structure, and

be conceived by the author to form a cohesive unit. The satisfaction of these

conditions is what legitimates common interpretive techniques in the history

of philosophy such as rational reconstruction, including the attempt,

particularly by advocates of the recognition of a third Wittgenstein, to

reconstruct the purported underlying epistemological theory not explicitly

stated in the text of On Certainty.

The conception of On Certainty as a self-standing work was enabled by

its editors, who in their preface claimed that it ―constitutes a single

sustained treatment of the topic‖ of Moore‘s attempted proof, ―which he

apparently took up at four separate periods during this eighteen months‖.

9

These claims have had a real effect on how commentators have come to

understand the nature of these final notes; indeed, advocates for the

recognition of a third Wittgenstein have cited these very editorial claims as

evidence that On Certainty is one of Wittgenstein‘s works. For the editors to

call the book a ―sustained treatment‖ invites the reader to assume that

Wittgenstein had already worked out its fundamental ideas before beginning

composition, and that his eighteen-month process of composition was one of

continually developing a single theme. In the first two chapters of this

dissertation I will show that these editorial claims are very misleading, by

carefully investigating the biographical and philological details of the

composition of On Certainty. This will result in a more accurate

understanding of the nature of the book, the relation of its source

manuscripts to contemporaneous items in Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass, and the

degree to which its structure is a result of editorial construction.

I believe that an interpretation of On Certainty can benefit from being

informed by details relating to the conditions under which it was composed.

Yet a preliminary defense of this extended investigation of historical

circumstances may be called for. Such an investigation might be considered

by some to be merely of historical interest and irrelevant to a strictly

philosophical interpretation of a historical text:

a philosophical historian of philosophy … [is] someone who postpones until the very last moment the abandonment of belief

in the reasonableness of the views of the philosophers she

studies; a piece of philosophical history of philosophy is an

10

attempt to reconstruct the justification for a philosophical view.

A non-philosophical intellectual historian, by contrast, will be

happy to appeal to non-justificatory explanatory factors at a much earlier stage in her account of a view, or of a change of

view. (Morris 2008, p. 9)

As declared earlier, the legitimacy of submitting a historical text to the

technique of argumentative reconstruction depends on very basic

assumptions about the nature of that text and the author‘s relation to it.

While such assumptions are satisfied in the large majority of cases, the

evidence I will provide shows that they are unfounded with respect to On

Certainty. This means that an investigation into the very nature of the text

itself is necessary to inform an appropriate reading of the book. Indeed, the

revised understanding I provide of the status of On Certainty in the

Wittgenstein corpus will serve as the foundation for my account of the

methodologies applied in those remarks. Thus, a historical investigation into

the composition of a text can in some cases serve as preparation for better

philosophical interpretations which account for what kind of text the book

actually is.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation constructs an account of Wittgenstein‘s

philosophical activities during the final two years of his life from extant

letters written to friends, colleagues, and family members. Special emphasis

is placed on Wittgenstein‘s own assessment of the quality of his work during

this time, as well as the relation of his philosophical productivity to the

major events of his final years, particularly the treatment he underwent for

11

prostate cancer. Wittgenstein was prompted to consider the topics discussed

in On Certainty during a visit to his former student Norman Malcolm in the

fall of 1949. After returning home he maintained a correspondence with

Malcolm, and these letters show that Wittgenstein was consistently critical of

his work throughout 1950 and the beginning of 1951. However, as seen in

his final letter to Malcolm quoted above, Wittgenstein subsequently reported

that he was finally mentally capable of doing satisfactory work in philosophy,

a state he had not achieved for the past two years. By March of 1951, when

this change happened to Wittgenstein, he had already composed the

remarks that make up roughly the first half of On Certainty. In the six weeks

following this event his pace of work greatly accelerated, and he succeeded

in penning the remarks that constitute the final half of the book, working

until April 27, two days before he died of complications due to his illness.

This change in Wittgenstein‘s attitude should not be written off or ignored by

biographers, for it coincides with the commencement and cessation of

hormone treatments for prostate cancer. They should also be acknowledged

and accounted for by Wittgenstein‘s interpreters, for they show that he

judged the final remarks in On Certainty to be of higher quality than those at

the beginning of the publication. This makes interpretations which

characterize On Certainty as a cohesive, well-developed, or systematic work

less attractive, and suggests that a better reading should characterize On

Certainty as composed of multiple parts. Since Wittgenstein was more

12

satisfied with some of these parts than others, a reading of the text should

account for this by showing what properties are to be found in the final

sections of On Certainty that are missing from the initial remarks. The first

step in providing such a reading, of course, is to determine exactly which

remarks were composed during Wittgenstein‘s period of optimism and which

were penned earlier.

Chapter 2 takes on the task of determining which individual remarks in

On Certainty are associated with Wittgenstein‘s optimistic phase, and which

are associated with his pessimistic phase, by delving into the large Nachlass

of notebooks, manuscripts, and typescripts that were left behind after his

death. The remarks that make up On Certainty are spread out among a

series of notebooks composed during the last two years of his life,

interspersed with other remarks concerning mostly color concepts and

philosophical psychology. The goal of this chapter is to describe and date all

of the items in Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass from the last two years of his life, in

order to understand how his various phases of self-assessment relate to the

entirety of his final writings. This task is simple for the few notebooks that

were dated by Wittgenstein himself, but most were not dated. For these

manuscripts, philological and biographical research can be utilized to

estimate their dates of composition. Wittgenstein‘s early literary executors

attempted to date these materials, though these estimates were not always

accurate or precise. Some estimates of composition dates can now be

13

narrowed (at least to the degree that the evidence allows), and a few

corrections can be made to the executors‘ initial attempts at dating

Wittgenstein‘s final notebooks. Two significant corrections deserve mention

here. First, a revision of material on the topic of color, printed as part 1 of

Remarks on Colour, was originally thought to have been composed during

Wittgenstein‘s optimistic phase; however, evidence from letters and

notebooks is presented that indicate this material was actually written during

the pessimistic phase. Second, a manuscript containing the first 65 remarks

of On Certainty was deemed by the executors to have been composed

during Wittgenstein‘s pessimistic phase, but evidence from letters and

memoirs suggests that these remarks were in fact penned in America during

his visit to Malcolm, before Wittgenstein began to consistently pan the

quality of his work.

The investigative results of these two chapters allow for an informed

consideration of whether the posthumous publications culled from

Wittgenstein‘s final writings should be considered to count among his works.

In chapter 3 I argue that Joachim Schulte provides a good framework for

approaching this question, providing three independent scales – concerning

the author, the reader, and the text, respectively – by which the status of a

piece of writing may be evaluated. The previous biographical and philological

investigations are shown to refute a number of claims made by

Wittgenstein‘s editors – and advocates for the recognition of a third

14

Wittgenstein – concerning the composition of On Certainty and

Wittgenstein‘s attitudes towards it, thereby leading to the conclusion that

this piece of writing fails to be a work according to the first and third criteria.

This leaves the second criterion, concerning the reader‘s impressions of a

text. Though some readers feel that On Certainty is an ‗intense‘ and

‗sustained‘ effort – and for this reason ought to be considered one of his

works – I counter that these impressions are only possible because On

Certainty is a constructed artifact not of Wittgenstein‘s making, the result of

his editors splicing together segments of text from various sources. I

conclude that even though On Certainty fails a number of tests for counting

as a work, the editorial decision to publish these text-fragments together in

a single volume was not a mistake. For provided that readers are given an

accurate account of the manuscript sources of On Certainty and their

relation to contemporaneous notes on other topics, the book can provide

them with an insight into one facet of Wittgenstein‘s thought in his final

years.

A central component of my reading of On Certainty is the claim that

Wittgenstein‘s final optimistic writing phase is characterized by a therapeutic

approach. In preparation for that conclusion I present a characterization of

the late Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project in chapter 4. In a number of well-

known passages, Wittgenstein compares his philosophical method to

psychotherapy and denies that he intends to advance any kind of theory.

15

This shows that Wittgenstein does not subscribe to a traditional conception

of the aims and methods of philosophy, which are usually taken to include

the construction of theories in the service of answering philosophical

questions. Instead, Wittgenstein tends to see philosophical bewilderment

itself as a problem which stands in need of treatment.

Despite the familiarity of Wittgenstein‘s metaphilosophical remarks,

many of his readers tend to attribute philosophical theses to him in their

textual interpretations, even some of those who give a central place to the

remarks on therapy. One reason for a reluctance to take Wittgenstein‘s anti-

theoretical claims seriously may be his frequent use of multiple voices in

dialogue, many of which do indeed appear to advance philosophical theses.

On the other hand, Wittgenstein‘s most sympathetic readers sometimes

appear to use his stated desire not to advance any kind of theory as a

means for deflecting any principled criticism of his philosophy. I argue that if

we take Wittgenstein‘s remarks on therapy at face value as descriptions of

his metaphilosophical goals, yet still leave open for evaluation the degree to

which he succeeded in meeting these goals, it is then possible to take

Wittgenstein seriously as a therapist without thereby sacrificing grounds for

legitimate critique.

Such a critique is made from a perspective which I call the observer;

this person‘s task is to monitor, describe, and evaluate Wittgenstein‘s

methods. That perspective should be distinguished from what I call the

16

patient - someone who attempts to personally undergo Wittgensteinian

therapy. This distinction helps to ease a current debate in the Wittgenstein

literature over whether interpreters should read the Philosophical

Investigations in a ―text-immanent‖ manner, limiting themselves only to the

remarks printed in the book, or whether they should approach the book in a

―contextual‖ manner, helping themselves to Wittgenstein‘s earlier drafts,

lecture notes, correspondence, and other outside material that could shed

light on the text.

The results of chapters 1-4 are put to use in chapter 5, where I

present a therapeutic reading of On Certainty that is informed by my

account of the book‘s structure. I follow the strategy of taking Wittgenstein

seriously as a therapist outlined in Chapter 4 by distinguishing between

Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic goals and the degree to which he succeeded in

satisfying them. My thesis is that the final half of On Certainty, written when

Wittgenstein expressed satisfaction with his work, exhibits the qualities that

Wittgenstein desires in a therapeutic philosophy to a greater extent than the

book‘s earlier remarks, which he consistently panned as unsatisfactory.

This contrast can most clearly be seen by comparing Wittgenstein‘s

reactions to G.E. Moore in the two halves of the book. In the earlier

remarks, Wittgenstein tends to react to Moore‘s assertions of having basic

items of knowledge, e.g. ―I know this is a hand‖ or ―I know this is a tree,‖ by

saying that these assertions are inappropriate because they lack sense. The

17

notion of having ‗sense‘ is given what appears to be a theoretical foundation

in these early sections, based on the characterization of what have come to

be known as ‗hinge propositions.‘ In what at points reads like a theoretical

treatise, Moore‘s statements are deemed meaningless for failing to satisfy

these criteria for sensical utterances. However, in the later sections of On

Certainty, Wittgenstein personally engages with G.E. Moore, thereby shifting

his focus from solving a philosophical problem to resolving a particular case

of philosophical bewilderment. Rather than declare Moore‘s claims

meaningless at the outset, Wittgenstein imagines a series of situations in

which it might be natural to make one of those claims, situations in which

they would indeed ―make sense‖ (where this phrase is given an everyday

meaning rather than a theoretically loaded one). These are opportunities for

Moore to give his statements a determinate everyday sense, but if he

continually rejects these options as not truly capturing the elevated

philosophical sense he intends to convey, at some point he may question

whether he really does have a determinate meaning in mind, and thus

decide to cease making these statements. This can be understood as an

administration of Wittgensteinian therapy, which proceeds not by advancing

arguments, but rather seeks to allow the patient to once again function in

the linguistic community through the dissolution of the grip that a

philosophical problem formerly had over him.

18

In the later sections of On Certainty Wittgenstein also submits his

earlier pronouncements about hinge propositions to critical scrutiny. These

statements are now criticized as being ‗suspicious‘ and ‗too general‘, as well

as for apparently having different meanings when uttered in an everyday

context rather than a philosophical one. Here Wittgenstein appears to realize

that his earlier hinge-theoretical response to Moore‘s utterances involves the

same kind of peculiar philosophical uses of language committed by Moore.

Thus, the later sections of the book exhibit both therapeutic and anti-

theoretical elements, as required by Wittgenstein‘s metaphilosophy.

I discuss the main trends of On Certainty interpretation in Chapter 6,

pointing out that most readings do not account for the book‘s internal

structure or explain how its remarks might serve a therapeutic end. Both of

these considerations are central to my interpretation of the book. After

identifying a number of competing pieces in the secondary literature in

which these two considerations are also addressed, I conclude by specifying

some advantages my interpretation has over these rivals.

19

Chapter 1

The Right Frame of Mind for Doing Philosophy

In the fall of 1946, when he was 57 years old, Wittgenstein began to

seriously consider retiring from his position at Cambridge, expressing doubt

to colleagues about the effectiveness of his teaching and frustration over not

being able to focus on completing Philosophical Investigations, which he had

worked on for over a decade (Malcolm 1984, p. 53). By the summer of 1947

he was nearly resolved not to return the next year:

I am almost certain that I shall resign my professorship in

Autumn....I'ld like to be alone somewhere & try to write & to

make at least one part of my book publishable. I'll never be able

to do it while I'm teaching at Cambridge. (August 27, 1947; letter to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein did indeed submit his resignation of his chair before the

Michaelmas Term of 1947, but was told that he still had an available term to

take for sabbatical. He did so, and during the fall of 1947 dictated a

typescript of material he had worked on for the past few years. This

typescript was published posthumously as Remarks on the Philosophy of

Psychology, Vol. 1 (Monk 1990, p. 518).1 After completing his sabbatical

term and officially resigning his chair in December of 1947, he moved to

Ireland, hoping to find a peaceful place to work in solitude:

1 In this chapter I mention some uncontroversial dates of composition for manuscripts in order to orient the reader. In the next chapter I investigate the dating of Wittgenstein‘s final manuscripts in detail.

20

I can't, so far, say anything about my work ... Wish me luck!

(December 9, 1947; letter to Rhees)

He soon found a small farmhouse where he could stay as a guest. While he

suffered from bouts of physical ill health, for a few months he was able to do

satisfactory work. When his friend Drury came from Dublin to visit,

Wittgenstein reported the good news:

Sometimes my ideas come so quickly that I feel as if my pen was being guided. I now see clearly that it was the right thing

for me to give up the professorship. I could never have got this

work done while I was in Cambridge. (Drury 1981, pp. 153-154)

At times the inspiration came so intensely that a neighbor is reported to

have seen Wittgenstein, out on one of his regular walks with notebook in

hand, ―sitting in a ditch, writing furiously, oblivious of anything going on

around him‖ (Monk 1990, p. 521).

Around Easter his work stopped for a few weeks due to insomnia.

Wittgenstein then decided to move into an empty cottage in Rosro, an even

more secluded location on the west coast of Ireland. There he was able to

find solitude and once again do some work (ibid., p. 528). He stayed there

until August, when he left to visit his dying sister Hermine in Vienna. Upon

returning, he stopped off in Cambridge to have a typescript made of his

work over the past year. This is now published as Remarks on the

Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II (ibid., p. 535).

Upon returning to Dublin in October, Wittgenstein found himself once

again in a good state for working. Rather than risk the harsh winter at the

21

cottage where he had been the previous summer, he decided to stay in

Dublin:

I arrived here about 3 weeks ago after staying in Cambridge a

fortnight & dictating some M.S.S.. When I came here I found to

my surprise that I could work again; & as I'm anxious to make hay during the very short period when the sun shines in my

brain I've decided not to go to Rosro this winter but to stay here

where I've got a warm & quiet room. (November 6, 1948; letter

to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein found a room in Ross‘s Hotel and was able to visit with his

friend Drury nearly every day. The conditions for writing were excellent;

Drury reports that he ―seemed...to be writing copiously; when I went up to

his room he was nearly always working and would continue to do so for

some time before we went out‖ (Drury 1981, p. 156). Some of these

writings have since been published in Last Writings on the Philosophy of

Psychology, Vol. I. Over the winter Drury had frequent discussions with

Wittgenstein, and he would sometimes talk about what he was currently

writing. He appeared to be making progress towards finishing the book, for

he was now considering what title to use; lately he had preferred

―Philosophical Remarks‖ (ibid., p. 160). For the next four months

Wittgenstein reported to various colleagues that, despite some occasional

physical illness, his work was going pretty well.2 This fruitful period came to

2 As seen in the following: I can still work moderately well & that, on the whole makes me feel well. (December 12, 1948; letter to Rhees) I am well & working pretty hard. (December 16, 1948; letter to Moore)

22

an end in March, when weakness exhausted both his physical and mental

strength:

My work went fairly well, & sometimes even very well, in all this

time; I was too ill to work for only 4 or 5 days; but about a

fortnight ago I almost suddenly became exhausted, my ideas petered out, & now I'm completely incapable of thinking about

philosophy. This doesnt necessarily mean that I couldn't discuss

philosophy, but I can't write. God knows if I'll ever be able to

work again, but I feel that I'll certainly not be able to work soon. Perhaps a holiday of a couple of months would make me fit

again. (March 16, 1949; letter to Rhees)

The cause for Wittgenstein‘s exhaustion was later diagnosed as anemia by a

Dublin doctor. He was prescribed iron and liver extract, which gradually

helped him improve physically (Monk 1990, p. 542).

The letters leading up to March 1949 thus confirm part of

Wittgenstein‘s claim in his final letter to Malcolm in April of 1951 (quoted in

full in the introduction): for several extended periods after his retirement

from Cambridge, the ‗curtain in his brain‘ had been up, allowing him to do

I, too, am working a fair amount & still moderately well. I wish my luck could hold for another 6 months, for by then I could get a good chunk of work done. (December 31, 1948; letter to Malcolm) I can still work fairly well though not as I did a month ago. (December 31, 1948; letter to Moore) I had a pretty good turn of work in the last 3 months, or so, but I fell ill with some sort of infection of the intestines about 3 weeks ago & it hasn‘t yet cleared up...Of course it hasn‘t done my work any good. I had to interrupt it completely for a week & after that it just crawled along, as I do when I take a walk, these days. (January 28, 1949; letter to Malcolm) I am doing well. I was ill for a while with an intestinal infection, but it is over and I‘m

getting strong again. My work isn‘t going badly, either. (Translation of: ―Mir geht es gut. Ich war einige Zeit krank mit einer Darminfektion, aber sie ist vorüber & ich werde wieder kräftig. Auch meiner Arbeit geht es nicht schlecht.―) (February 17, 1949; letter to Koder) My work is still going fairly well, though not as well as, say, 6 weeks ago. That‘s partly due to the fact that I‘ve been a bit ill, & also that a number of things are really worrying me. – Money is not one of them. I am, of course, spending rather a lot, but I‘ll have enough for another 2 years, I think. During that time, God being willing, I‘ll get some work done; & that, after all, was why I resigned my professorship. (February 18, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

23

work that, on the whole, he was excited about and satisfied with. As we will

now see, Wittgenstein‘s correspondence between March 1949 and his final

letter to Malcolm also confirms his other claim in that letter, namely that

during this time he was unable to do any particularly satisfactory

philosophical work and despaired that this situation would not change before

his death. Over the next two years Wittgenstein‘s reports to colleagues

about the state of his work were consistently negative.

As mentioned in the above letter to Rhees, Wittgenstein thought that a

holiday might help him get back to working. He already had a particular

vacation in mind; he was considering a trip to America to visit Norman

Malcolm. Malcolm had come to Cambridge to study under Moore in 1938,

and while there he attended Wittgenstein‘s lectures. The two got along very

well and began a correspondence after Malcolm took a position at Princeton

in 1940. The personal and professional friendship was further strengthened

when Malcolm visited Cambridge during the 1946-1947 academic year. In

addition to sitting in on Wittgenstein‘s final year of lectures on the

philosophy of psychology, Malcolm also met with him once a week to discuss

the latest version of Philosophical Investigations. After a time these

discussions began to move away from the text of the typescript, but this

nevertheless shows how much confidence Wittgenstein placed in Malcolm to

comprehend his writings. As Wittgenstein explained to Malcolm, ―the reason

I am doing this is so there will be at least one person who will understand

24

my book when it is published‖ (Malcolm 1984, p. 44). Malcolm now had a

position at Cornell and had invited Wittgenstein to come to Ithaca for an

extended stay. After some initial reluctance, Wittgenstein finally committed

to the visit and booked a ticket for July on a transatlantic ocean liner. He

hoped that visiting his old friend might spur him back to doing philosophical

work:

I have booked a passage to New York on the Queen Mary for

July 21...I haven't been doing any work at all for the last 2-3

weeks. My mind is tired & stale, partly, I think because I'm a bit exhausted, partly because lots of things worry me terribly just

now. I think I could still discuss philosophy if I had someone

here to discuss it with, but alone I can't concentrate on it. (April

1, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

Some of the things worrying him included the health of his eldest sister, who

he came to Vienna to visit in April.

After returning to Dublin in May, Wittgenstein made frequent visits to

his doctor, hoping to cure his anemia. The prescribed medications slowly had

a positive effect on his physical health, though he still was in no shape to do

philosophical work:

I'm taking iron & liverextrat, but if I'm getting better at all it's a

very slow process. I haven't been able to work for over three months. I'd been feeling lousy for a long time before they made

a blood test & found what was the matter. That only happened 3

weeks ago. (June 8, 1949; letter to Fouracre)

Wittgenstein nevertheless was optimistic that his health and mental

capacities would improve. What he especially hoped for was to be able to

participate in philosophical discussions with Malcolm by the time he arrived

25

in America. Wittgenstein hoped to show Malcolm the fruits of his labors the

past winter, and thus planned to have a typescript of this work made up

before he departed:

At present I am quite unable to do any philosophy & I don't think I'd be strong enough to have even a moderately decent

discussion. In fact at present I'm sure I couldn't do it. But of

course it's possible that by the end of July I may have recovered

sufficiently for my brain to work again. I intend to go to Cambridge in about 2 weeks & to dictate some stuff if I feel

strong enough. That will show me where I stand & I'll let you

know the result. (June 4, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

Fortunately, by the time he was about to leave for Cambridge and then

proceed on to Ithaca, the medications had succeeded in alleviating many of

his physical ailments:

My anaemia is as good as cured, but unfortunately I'm still not

the same I was before I got ill. (July 8, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein then went to Cambridge for a short time to prepare his

typescript. This was eventually published as Philosophical Investigations,

Part II. On July 21, the Queen Mary set sail for New York.

The trip seemed to provide just the refreshment that Wittgenstein was

seeking. En route to New York, he reported to his friend Koder

The passage is very smooth and physically I‘m doing quite well.3 (July 24, 1949; letter to Koder)

Indeed, upon his arrival in America Wittgenstein was vigorous and energetic,

as Malcolm saw when he picked up Wittgenstein at the dock:

When I first saw him I was surprised at his apparent physical

vigour. He was striding down the ramp with a pack on his back,

3 Translation of: ―Die Überfahrt ist sehr glatt & es geht mir körperlich ganz gut.‖

26

a heavy suitcase in one hand, cane in the other. He was in very

good spirits and not at all exhausted and he would not allow me

to help him with his luggage. My chief recollection of the long train ride home is that we talked about music and that he

whistled for me, with striking accuracy and expressiveness,

some parts of Beethoven‘s 7th Symphony. (Malcolm 1984, p. 68)

For the first six weeks of his stay, Wittgenstein‘s health remained stable.

This allowed him to actively participate in a number of philosophical

discussions with faculty members and graduate students at Cornell. A range

of topics were covered, including Frege‘s essay ―On Sense and Reference‖

and the Tractatus. As Wittgenstein had brought along copies of both

typescripts now known as parts I and II of Philosophical Investigations, he

attempted once more to explain his book to Malcolm in private sessions,

though again these soon fell through.

One set of discussions was of particular importance for Wittgenstein,

for they stimulated thoughts that would eventually be published in On

Certainty. Malcolm had recently published an article in Philosophical Review

criticizing Moore‘s use of ―I know‖ in his papers ―A Defence of Common

Sense‖ and ―Proof of the External World‖.4 It was Malcolm‘s contention that

Moore had not used these words in their ordinary sense, and thus that they

constituted a misuse of language, thereby failing to serve the purpose of

defending common sense. Malcolm had sent an offprint of the article to

Moore, who then composed a critique of the paper and defense of his own

position. Moore agreed that he had used these words in circumstances in

4 (Malcolm 1949)

27

which they are not usually uttered, but disagreed that this constituted a

misuse of the words; he further argued that his use of the words ―I know‖

was the very same as their ordinary sense, because their truth-conditions

are identical. This reply Moore sent off to Malcolm on July 21, the same day

that Wittgenstein‘s ship set sail for New York.

Malcolm was eager to hear Wittgenstein‘s take on Moore‘s reply. This

prompted a series of discussions on Moore‘s papers, and, more generally,

the concepts of knowledge and certainty. These took place in August;

Bouwsma was also in attendance at a discussion that began with

consideration of Moore‘s ―I know that this is a hand‖ on August 20

(Bouwsma 1986, p. 30). On September 2, Malcolm sent a long reply to

Moore, claiming that most of the ideas were due to Wittgenstein, but that he

had given them his own slant. If Moore composed a response it has not been

preserved, but it is clear from the notes he wrote in the margins of

Malcolm‘s letter that he was not convinced.

There is evidence to suggest that Wittgenstein may have composed

some philosophical remarks during his visit to America. He had, after all,

brought along a selection of his recent notebooks (Drury 1981, p. 168),

presumably in the hope of making additional entries while on vacation.

Bouwsma‘s recounting of a discussion from August 5 suggests that

Wittgenstein had recently attempted to start writing again:

...he spoke...of the way he worked. He worked in spurts. There

were times when he was so dull that he could scarcely believe he

28

had written what he had written. And he had been ill since

March, and now for the first time since, he was beginning to do

something. (Bouwsma 1986, p. 10)

By the end of August, after the discussions on Moore had taken place,

Wittgenstein reported:

I'm doing some philosophy, but my work's no good. I have

discussions with Malcolm & some other people, & sometimes

they (the discussions) aren't too bad. (August 31, 1949; letter to

Rhees)

This letter does not definitively prove that Wittgenstein was writing new

remarks, since by ―doing some philosophy‖ he might have only been

referring to his philosophical discussions. But his mention of ―my work‖

strongly suggests that he was also attempting to do some of his own

philosophical work, aside from the many discussions he was taking part in

while in Ithaca. Despite this attempt to get back to writing, Wittgenstein was

not satisfied with the results, as he often mentioned to Malcolm:

More than once, Wittgenstein said to me that it was a problem

for him as to what to do with the remainder of his life. ‗When a

person has only one thing in the world – namely, a certain talent – what is he to do when he begins to lose that talent?‘ he asked.

(Malcolm 1984, p. 76)

This was typical of the pessimism about his prospects of doing good work

again that he would repeatedly express over the next eighteen months in

letters to colleagues.

During the latter part of Wittgenstein‘s trip he became ill once again.

Malcolm arranged for him to have a brief stay in the hospital, where he was

seen by a Dr. Mooney (mentioned in the letter in the introduction), with

29

whom Wittgenstein got along quite well. No diagnosis of his condition was

able to be made, which was actually a relief to Wittgenstein, who did not

want to undergo treatment in America. He returned to England at the end of

October, and immediately fell ill with the flu. This prevented him from doing

any philosophical work, and also from returning to Dublin, as had been his

intention before going to America:

My health is bad and I must lie down for a large part of the day

and can‘t work.5 (November 25, 1949: letter to Koder)

Wittgenstein instead stayed for several weeks in Cambridge with his former

student Georg Henrik von Wright, so that he could undergo several

examinations by Dr. Edward Bevan, who was a friend of Drury‘s and also

happened to be von Wright‘s family physician. Dr. Bevan was able to make a

diagnosis: Wittgenstein was suffering from prostate cancer. His condition

was terminal but it would be possible to prolong his life for a few years with

hormone therapy. Wittgenstein was not overly pleased about prolonging the

inevitable:

The doctors have now made their diagnosis. I have cancer of the

prostate. But this sounds, in a way, much worse than it is, for

there is a drug (actually some hormones) which can, as I'm told, aleviate the symptoms of the disease, so that I can live on for

years. The doctor even tells me that I may be able to work

again, but I can't imagine that. I was in no way shocked when I

heard I had cancer, but I was when I heard that one could do something about it, because I had no wish to live on. But I

cou[l]dn't have my wish. I am treated with great kindness by

5 Translation of: ―Meine Gesundheit ist schlecht & ich muß einen großen Teil des Tages liegen & kann nicht arbeiten.‖

30

every one & I have an immensely kind doctor who isn't a fool

either. (undated, ca. November 28, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

Knowing that his days were numbered, Wittgenstein decided to make

an extended trip to visit his family in Vienna. Even though his sister Hermine

was suffering from cancer herself, Wittgenstein vowed to keep the real

extent of his ill health a secret from his family. He wrote to his sister Helene:

I‘m considering the idea of coming to Vienna not long from now. My health is quite bad and thus I can‘t work...I‘m taking a

medication which the doctor says will help me.6 (November 28,

1949; letter to Salzer)

Wittgenstein did not want to give the details of this medication, lest his

family learn of his cancer. Over the next two years he repeatedly implored

his friends and acquaintances in correspondence not to reveal his diagnosis

to members of his family. He stayed in Cambridge another month, not

succeeding in getting any work done, but optimistic that this might change

after the treatments were given some time to have an effect:

I am getting slowly better & the doctor tells me that after some

months I may be well enough to work. (Though I can't imagine that I'll ever work again.)...I think of going to Vienna for some

time as soon as possible. There I'll just do nothing & let the

hormones do their work. (December 2, 1949; letter to Rhees)

On December 24th he flew to Vienna and spent the holiday season with his

family.

For the next two months Wittgenstein was able to relax, play music

with his old friend Koder, and spend time with his ailing sister. Though he

6 Translation of: ―Ich überlege den Gedanken, in nicht langer Zeit nach Wien zu kommen. Meine Gesundheit ist recht schlecht & ich kann daher nicht arbeiten...Ich nehme ein Mittel, welches, wie der Arzt sagt, mir helfen wird.‖

31

had not been writing any new remarks, he did report some intellectual

stimulation coming from an attempt to read Goethe:

I am very well indeed now & am anything but depressed...My

brain works very sluggishly these days but I can't say I mind.

I'm reading various odds & ends, e.g. Goethes Theory of colour which, with all its absurdities, has very interesting points &

stimulates me to think...If we could meet you'd find me pretty

slow & stupid; I've only got very few 'lucid moments'. I'm not

writing at all because my thoughts never sufficiently crystallize. (January 16, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

A week later he reported that he had finally attempted to begin writing

again, though he was far from satisfied with the results:

My brain is mudled & sluggish but I can't say I mind. I have

been reading again parts of Goethes "Farbenlehre" which

attracts & repels me. It's certainly philosophically interesting, &

I've been thinking about it & even written down some weak remarks. (January 22, 1950; letter to Rhees)

These remarks now form the first part of the posthumous publication

Remarks on Colour.

After having been sick for some time, in February his sister Hermine

finally succumbed to the cancer and passed away. Over the next month

Wittgenstein‘s health slowly improved, and he was able to do some more

writing, as well as participate in discussions with Anscombe (who was in

Vienna working to improve her German skills) and Feyeraband. At the end of

March he returned to Cambridge to visit Dr. Bevan again, and found he had

received an invitation from Ryle to give the John Locke lectures in Oxford.

Despite the fact that his physical health had somewhat improved, he decided

to turn down the offer:

32

I had a letter from Oxford the other day, inviting me to give 6

lectures on philosophy. There are to be lectures of that sort

every year by people outside Oxford. The lectures are called John Locke lectures & I'd get £ 200 for them. I was told,

however, that I'd have to expect a large audience, over 200

students, & there mustn't be any discussion during the lectures.

I haven't yet given them any definite answer but I think I'll reply in the negative. I don't think I can give formal lectures to a large

audience that would be any good. – I feel fairly well, though not

quite as good as I did in Vienna, & I'm very dull & stupid. (April

5, 1950; letter to Malcolm)

A week later, Wittgenstein received an offer from the Rockefeller Foundation

for a research grant. Malcolm had contacted their director in the hope of

securing funds for his mentor to focus on his work. Wittgenstein thought

hard about the offer, but decided that he could not in good faith accept the

grant unless the Foundation understood his current state of his health and

philosophical work, which he explained in detail:

The truth is this...a) I have not been able to do any sustained good work since the beginning of March 1949. b) Even before

that date I could not work well for more than 6 or 7 months a

year. c) As I'm getting older my thoughts become markedly less

forceful & crystallize more rarely & I get tired very much more easily. d) My health is in a somewhat labile state owing to a

constant slight anaemia which inclines me to catch infections.

This further diminishes the chance of my doing really good work.

e) Though it's impossible for me to make any definite

predictions, it seems to me likely that my mind will never again work as vigorously as it did, say, 14 months ago. f) I cannot

promise to publish anything during my lifetime...My health at

present is pretty good. I'm doing some work but I get stuck over

simple things & almost all I write is pretty dull. (April 17, 1950; letter to Malcolm)

33

Wittgenstein continued to attempt to work, though as just seen, he was

never satisfied with the results. He soon moved into the home of Anscombe

in Oxford, where he would stay for the next five months.

Wittgenstein spent the summer trying his best to continue his work.

The medications were keeping him in relatively stable health, but he had not

been able to regain his mental vigor or philosophical ability that had last left

him over a year ago. His work continued to be disappointing, and

Wittgenstein soon became depressed with the thought of continuing on with

such an unfulfilling state of being:

I'm working a bit but my work's no good...I'm just not in the

right frame of mind; my work only mildly interests me; & you can imagine what under these circumstances the stuff is like I'm

writing down. – I'm moderately well. Dr Bevan in Cambridge

wrote to a London specialist about me, giving him the history of

my case up to the present time & the expert replied that I might easily live for five more years. Nice prospect! Another year of

this half-life would have been ample. (May 7, 1950; letter to

Rhees)

During this time Wittgenstein continued working on the remarks on color

concepts that he had begun in Vienna earlier that spring, as well as some

passages that would eventually appear in Last Writings on the Philosophy of

Psychology, Vol. II. Despite his efforts, he consistently reported

dissatisfaction with what he was producing.7 Later in the summer he hoped

7 As shown by the following: I‘m working, sometimes more, sometimes less, but not really well. I think much less sharply and clearly than I used to. (Translation of: ―Ich arbeite, manchmal mehr, manchmal weniger, aber nicht wirklich gut. Ich denke viel weniger scharf & klar als früher.‖) (May 22, 1950; letter to Koder)

34

to spend some time in Norway with his friend Richards, but this was delayed

for a few months. In the intervening time Wittgenstein revisited the

epistemological topics he had discussed one year ago with Malcolm. He does

not seem to have been any more enthusiastic about these writings than the

ones on color he had produced earlier in the summer:

I'm pretty well, & I'm working but not particularly well. I get tired soon....I have hardly any philosophical discussions. I could

see students if I wanted, but I don't want to. I've got all sorts of

unclear thoughts in my old head which perhaps will remain there

for ever in this unsatisfactory state. (July 30, 1950; letter to Malcolm)

By the end of the summer whatever ability Wittgenstein had to work was

slowly draining:

My health is good, but my work is getting more and more

worthless. That‘s no complaint.8 (August 26, 1950; letter to

Hänsel)

A couple weeks later he had all but abandoned more attempts to continue

working:

I did some work, though not good work, for quite a time, but I've hardly done anything for the last 3 weeks, & anyhow my

Physically I‘m quite well, but various things are troubling me; especially my terribly small ability to work. That makes the rest of life more difficult. (Translation of: ―Mir geht es körperlich ganz gut, aber verschiedenes bedrückt mich; besonders meine schrecklich geringe Arbeitsfähigkeit. Die erschwert das ganze übrige Leben.‖) (May 29, 1950; letter to Hänsel) I‘m doing quite well, except that I‘m working slowly and poorly. (Translation of: ―Es geht mir recht gut, außer daß ich langsam & schlecht arbeite.‖) (June 23, 1950; letter to Hänsel)

I'm well & getting more & more stupid every day. I think there must be a leak somewhere in my head & my brain is slowly running out. Even now when I bump my head on anything it sounds like a kettledrum. (June 23, 1950; letter to Fouracre) I‘m working poorly & that will probably no longer change. (Translation of: „Ich arbeite schlecht, & das wird sich auch wahrscheinlich nicht mehr ändern.‖) (July 13, 1950; letter to Koder) 8 Translation of: ―Meine Gesundheit ist gut, aber meine Arbeit wird mehr & mehr wertlos. Das ist keine Klage.‖

35

ability for philosophical work seems to have practically vanished.

(September 6, 1950; letter to von Wright)

Wittgenstein‘s writing ceased on September 23, after which he prepared for

what was hoped to be a relaxing and refreshing vacation in Norway.

The trip was fraught with difficulties, for Wittgenstein‘s travel partner,

Richards, fell ill with bronchitis twice and had to spend time in the hospital.

Since he spent a good deal of time caring for Richards he was not able to do

any of his own work. Still, the peaceful surroundings of Norway made

Wittgenstein optimistic that he could work again during a future visit:

I had intended to do some work but I didn't do any. I may

possibly go back to Norway before long & try to work; it's the

only place I know where I can have real quiet. Of course it's

possible that I'm no longer able to do any decent research, but it's certainly worth while finding out if I am or not...My health is

not too bad but I am very dull & stupid indeed (as this letter

shows). (December 1, 1950; letter to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein booked a ticket to return to Norway at the end of the month,

determined to give an attempt to resume working his best shot. The plan

unfortunately fell through, because the host he had intended to stay with

had notified him that space would in fact not be available. Around the same

time, Wittgenstein fell ill once again and had to spend Christmas at Dr.

Bevan‘s home.

His health rapidly deteriorated in January. He was again staying with

Anscombe in Oxford, who called Bouwsma on the 10th to tell him that

Wittgenstein had fallen ill. Bouwsma was visiting Oxford to give the very

John Locke lectures that Wittgenstein had declined several months earlier.

36

The next day the director of the Rockefeller Foundation, who had offered

Wittgenstein a grant in the spring of the previous year, visited to once again

offer research funds. Wittgenstein refused a second time, telling the director

that

...in my present state of health & intellectual dullness I couldn't

accept a grant; but I said that if, against all probability & hope, I

should one day find that I could again do worthwhile work in philosophy, I'd write to him. (January 12, 1951; letter to

Malcolm)

It was suggested that if Wittgenstein was not capable of working right now,

that the money might be used to publish some of his papers.9 But

Wittgenstein did not feel that much of it was worth publishing, responding,

―But see, I write one sentence, and then I write another – just the opposite.

And which shall stand?‖ (Bouwsma 1986, p. 73). The same day Bouwsma

heard Wittgenstein say ―something about the rot people publish, going on

writing after they‘ve stopped thinking. They don‘t know when to quit.

Russell!‖ (ibid.). This suggests that Wittgenstein was uncomfortable with the

thought of publishing the remarks that he had written in the past year,

during which he had regularly complained of the low quality of his work.

These remarks were, nevertheless, published posthumously side by side with

other notes that Wittgenstein considered to be of higher quality (as we will

see was the case with On Certainty). On the 16th Bouwsma again visited

Wittgenstein, who was now in severe pain and hardly eating, and at times

9 After Wittgenstein‘s death, the Rockefeller Foundation provided funding for his literary executors to catalog his papers and publish selections from them.

37

appeared to be welcoming the prospect of approaching death (ibid.). During

this time Wittgenstein had to travel frequently to Cambridge to see Dr.

Bevan, which added further hardship to his already poor condition.

At the beginning of February Wittgenstein moved into the Cambridge

home of Dr. Bevan so that he could be under constant supervision and

undergo frequent radiation treatments at the hospital. These changes had a

positive effect, but Wittgenstein still was not able to do any philosophical

work:

As you see I'm in Cambridge; I'm staying with my doctor who is

an extremely kind man & an excellent doctor. I also saw a

speciallist here & I'm to have deep X-ray treatment again, this

time for my spine. I've had a pretty bad time at Oxford but am feeling much better now (for reasons no one knows), I have very

little pain & discomfort....I can't even think of work at present, &

it doesn't matter, if only I don't live too long! I'm not depressed

though....I wish I could have a talk again with you, Doney & Nelson. But even if I could be with you you'd find that my head

was empty. (It was half empty already when I was in Ithaca.)

(undated, approx. February 8, 1951; letter to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein had a year earlier expressed a desire not to die in an English

hospital, and Dr. Bevan had said that Wittgenstein could spend his final days

at the doctor‘s home. But in the middle of February Wittgenstein was still

holding out hope that his lodging situation would only be temporary, if his

health would improve:

I‘m being treated with X-rays now and it is possible that this will

bring about a quick improvement. – I haven‘t been working any

for months, but I don‘t feel unhappy about that. I‘m now living

38

here in my doctor‘s house for a while.10 (February 19, 1951;

letter to Koder)

At the end of February Dr. Bevan concluded that the hormone and X-ray

therapies were no longer going to be of help and thus should be terminated.

When he was told that he would not live for more than a few more months,

it ―came as an enormous relief to him‖ (Monk 1990, p. 577).

Remarkably, in March, soon after the cancer treatments had come to

an end, Wittgenstein‘s mood and mental clarity improved, though he

continued to be quite weak physically. Still, he was able to take strolls

around Cambridge and visit friends. A few weeks after the cessation

Wittgenstein wrote to Malcolm about his condition and mentioned something

troubling that he had read recently:

I'm feeling much better now than I did a month ago. I have

hardly any pain. The improvement is probably due to the deep x-ray treatment I took for a few weeks...I am of course very weak

& there seems no doubt that this isn't going to change for the

better as time goes on. I hardly think that I'll be on this earth

when you come to Cambridge in Autumn '52. Still, one doesn't know....I am not depressed in the least, by the way....I saw

Moore yesterday & we talked philosophy. But it was no good

because I was far too dull & hazy. When I'm alone I am

sometimes a bit brighter. – The other day I saw a laudatory

review of two philosophical books in the "New Statesman". One was by a man Toulmin, who come to my classes while you were

in Cambridge, I think; the other seemed to contain articles by

Wisdom, Waismann, Ryle & other charlatans. The review I read

particularly praised one remark of Waismann's which came straight out of my lectures. I'd like to see a review some day

10 Translation of: ―Ich werde jetzt mit Röntgenstrahlen behandelt & es ist möglich, daß das eine rasche Besserung bewirken wird. – Ich habe schon seit Monaten nichts mehr gearbeitet, fühle mich aber darüber nicht unglücklich. Ich wohne jetzt für einige Zeit im Haus meines Arztes hier.‖

http://library.nlx.com/xtf/view?docId=witt_gb_de/witt_gb_de.02.xml;chunk.id=div.witt.gb.4800;toc.id=div.witt.gb.4800;brand=default#Ziel-5897

39

which debunks these people.11 (March 19, 1951; letter to

Malcolm)

The review article in question handed out praise to certain ―linguistic

philosophers‖ such as Waismann for ―illustrating the influence of language

on our thoughts‖ (McGuinness 2008, pp. 476-7). Since Wittgenstein was

throughout his career known to be hyper-sensitive to anyone making use of

ideas he considered to be his own, his reaction is not particularly deserving

of prolonged consideration. What is especially interesting about this episode,

however, is that it apparently served as a goad for Wittgenstein to begin

writing again for the first time in over five months. This book review was

published on March 10; on the same day Wittgenstein began writing a series

of notes which now appear as the second half of On Certainty. The editors of

that book chose not to publish the very first passage that Wittgenstein wrote

that day, immediately before proceeding on to what now appears as remark

300:

Suppose a poet said: ―If this character in my tragedy lives a

pious and good life, he will prosper, but if he sins, then he will

perish.‖

...This is no way excuses the theft from my ideas that is being

committed today by some university professors. For even though I attach little value to what they are able to take away, they

themselves consider it valuable, & it is indeed better than what

they can think up themselves.

/This doesn‘t excuse the theft by those who have adorned their publications with my unpublished ideas for years./12 (MS 175 pp.

34v-35r)

11 Wittgenstein sent a letter to Rhees criticizing the same article on March 14.

40

Wittgenstein apparently was upset that his former students and colleagues

were receiving praise for advancing what he considered to be watered-down

and poorly-understood versions of ideas that he had first arrived at during

his lectures, and thereby managed to feel plagiarized and mischaracterized

at the same time. After many month of producing no writing whatsoever, the

sense of injury that Wittgenstein felt from this incident is apparently what

sparked him to final put pen to paper once again.13

In his final letter to Malcolm on April 16, Wittgenstein says that he

regained his ability to work about five weeks earlier, which indeed coincides

very closely with the time that he read this book review and began

composing new remarks. The last few weeks of his life stand in contrast to

the eighteen months before them. After his cancer diagnosis, Wittgenstein

was often in relatively stable physical condition, but almost never was he

12 Translation of: ‗Denke, ein Dichter sagte: ―Wenn dieser Charakter in meiner Tragödie fromm und gut leben wird, so wird es ihm gut gehen, wird er sich aber versündigen, so wird er unkommen.― ...Damit ist der Diebstahl, der von manchem Universitätslehrer heute an meinen Einfällen begangen wird, durchaus nicht entschuldigt. Denn, wenn ich auch, was sie davontragen können, gering achte, so halten sie selbst es doch für wertvoll, & es ist auch besser, als was sie selbst erdenken können.― /Damit ist der Diebstahl derer nicht entschuldigt die seit Jahren ihre Publikationen mit meinen unveröffentlichten Einfällen schmücken./‘ The final sentence surrounded by slash-marks is one of several variants in the text for the second quoted sentence. The date ‗10.3.51‘ actually occurs after the first sentence, but the consistent ink color before and after the date (see Figure 7 in Chapter 2), as well as the dependence of the content of the second sentence on that of the first, it is very likely that these lines were composed together. 13 This was actually not the first time that Wittgenstein was motivated to write after feeling that his ideas were being mishandled by members of the philosophical community. Cf. the preface to Philosophical Investigations: ―Until recently I had really given up the idea of publishing my work in my lifetime. All the same, it was revived from time to time, mainly because I could not help noticing that the results of my work (which I had conveyed in lectures, typescripts and discussions), were in circulation, frequently misunderstood and more or less watered down or mangled. This stung my vanity, and I had difficulty in quieting it.‖

41

satisfied with his mental state. This thought of carrying on this ―half-life‖

with a dead mind but a body that continued to survive was depressing. Yet

in his final six weeks he was energetic and optimistic, even while his body

was deteriorating:

I am, on the whole, pretty well, rather weak of course, &

occasionally having very mild pain. I have no cause to grumble!

(March 30, 1951; letter to Rhees)

Wittgenstein enjoyed the next few weeks and took advantage of his

newfound mental vigor, visiting Moore for philosophical discussions,

shopping for his favorite recordings of Bach to send off to his sister, and

developing a friendship with Mrs. Bevan. The two would walk to the pub

each evening, where Wittgenstein never drank, but always took great

pleasure in trying to covertly pour out his beer into a plant (Monk 1990, p.

577).

Now that he was in the right frame of mind for doing philosophy, he

committed to completing as much work as possible:

Wittgenstein was feeling extremely well and working furiously.

At the time when ‗the curtain went up‘ he said to Mrs. Bevan: ‗I

am going to work now as I have never worked before!‘ (Malcolm

1984, pp. 80-81)

Indeed, over the next six weeks Wittgenstein wrote enough remarks to fill

over half of On Certainty, as well as a short set of remarks included in a

section of Last Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II. When his

friend Drury came to visit in mid-April, he was still committed to working, in

face of his surely approaching death:

42

Isn‘t it curious that, although I know I have not long to live, I

never find myself thinking about a ‗future life‘. All my interest is

still on this life and the writing I am still able to do. (Drury 1981, p. 169)

This is surely how he had hoped to live out his last days: spirited and lively,

rather than vegetative and depressed.

The final remark of On Certainty was composed on April 27. Later that

night, Wittgenstein fell very ill. By the next day it was clear that the end was

near. Mrs. Bevan phoned Anscombe, Drury, Richards, and Smythies to stand

by his bedside. He passed away on April 29, and his burial the next day was

also attended by Moore and von Wright.

The report that Wittgenstein gave to Malcolm about his mental health

over his final two years is thus borne out by an investigation of his

correspondence over this period. After March of 1949 he did not have

another satisfactory productive working phase for two years. Between

November 1949 and March 1951 he was never able to ‗lift the curtain in his

brain‘; he consistently complained that his mind was not functioning well and

he worried that this situation would never change. Even though he managed

to write some remarks during this period, at no time did he express any

satisfaction with them to colleagues; on the contrary, he continually

criticized these writings for their low quality. However, from March 1951

until his death at the end of April, Wittgenstein‘s energetic spirit and

philosophical capacities were restored, allowing him to work fruitfully and

produce writing that was to his satisfaction.

43

A reader of this correspondence might naturally be incredulous that

such a dramatic change at the end of Wittgenstein‘s life could be possible,

and thus be inclined not to assign particular significance to the final letter to

Malcolm. How could Wittgenstein‘s capacities to work suddenly improve,

even as he was nearing death? It is likely that this change was in part due to

the termination of the hormone treatments by Dr. Bevan. Between

November 1949 and March 1951 he appeared to constantly suffer from

clouded cognition and possibly even depression, both of which are symptoms

associated with the use of estrogen therapy in prostate cancer patients.14

Soon after Wittgenstein stopped taking these medications, the curtain began

to lift, and he regained many of the capacities that had surely been

dampened by the hormones. This explanatory hypothesis gains further

support from the fact that two of his closest friends appear to have held it to

be true, as well as Wittgenstein himself. Denis Paul, a friend of Elizabeth

Anscombe, recalls ―her story of how unable to think Wittgenstein had been

under the influence of his anti-cancer drugs‖ (Paul 2007, p. 297). The

biographer Ray Monk claims that Wittgenstein also believed that the

hormones were having an effect on his mental capacities:

He attributed his ‗intellectual dullness‘ in part to the oestrogens that he was taking to alleviate the symptoms of his cancer.

While taking them he found the intense concentration required

to write philosophy difficult to achieve. (Monk 1990, 566)

14 See (Chen and Petrylak 2005) and (Salminen et al. 2004).

44

Rush Rhees concurs, further adding that the change in philosophical ability

was due to the cessation of the estrogen treatment:

From the end of November 1949 to, roughly, the end of

February 1951, he was, as he wrote to me, ‗letting the hormones

do their work‘, and more often than not he felt that he could not write anything worth putting down. He recovered his power of

mind when he left off the hormones. (Rhees 1984, p. 225)

It should be noted that this hypothesis is only meant to explain how such

dramatic, and perhaps initially unbelievable, shifts in Wittgenstein‘s

philosophical capacities could even be possible. Whether or not this

explanation is convincing remains independent of the significant amount of

evidence provided in this chapter that such a dramatic change indeed took

place.15

The clear shifts in Wittgenstein‘s evaluation of his work are not merely

biographical curiosities, but events that are relevant to an exegesis of On

Certainty and need to be accounted for by its readers. For if Wittgenstein

believed that the first half of the text was ―mostly dull‖, while the second

half was composed ―in the right frame of mind‖, then it is difficult to

construe On Certainty as being a unified, coherent text, or in its editors‘

words, a ―single sustained treatment‖ (OC Preface). Thus the status of On

Certainty as one of Wittgenstein‘s works, and the interpretive assumptions

that go along with such a status, are undermined. The text should be

15 It might be suggested that the pessimism about his work during the hormone treatments can be written off as a symptom of depression, and thus that Wittgenstein‘s criticism should not be taken at face value. But this suggestion is not persuasive, because even in April of 1951, with the ‗curtain lifted from his brain‘, Wittgenstein did not reappraise his previous judgment that his earlier work was of low quality, but rather, confirmed it.

45

understood as a collection of parts rather than a unified, consistently

developed treatise, and interpreters should give some account of the

unequal status of these parts.

The following chapters carry out a project of comparing the remarks in

On Certainty written during Wittgenstein‘s final fruitful period in spring of

1951 with those written earlier, in order to identify what characteristics the

later material possesses that the earlier material lacks, and then explain why

Wittgenstein would consider the later work to be of higher quality. The first

step in such a project is simply identifying when the remarks of On Certainty

were written. Since Wittgenstein often did not date the remarks that he

composed in his notebooks, this is a significant philological task. It is also

necessary to determine when Wittgenstein‘s other late writings which were

not selected for inclusion in On Certainty were composed, for remarks that

now appear in Remarks on Colour and Last Writings on the Philosophy of

Psychology, Vol. II were penned at the same time. The forthcoming

interpretation identifies characteristics that are to be found in the final half

of On Certainty that are lacking in the earlier material. Thus, these

differences should also be seen in comparing these additional remarks

written after March of 1951 to those written before that time. It is then

necessary to date, as precisely as possible, all of Wittgenstein‘s writings

from the last two years of his life. The next chapter takes up this task.

46

Chapter 2

The Final Manuscripts

As shown in the previous chapter, Wittgenstein did not consider all of

the writings from the last two years of his life to be of equal value. This

naturally suggests an investigation to determine exactly which parts of those

writings, which are now published as On Certainty, Remarks on Colour, and

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, Vol. II,1 were considered to

be of high quality and which were not. Such an investigation would be

straightforward if Wittgenstein had dated all of his notebook entries during

this time, but most of these entries are undated. The three publications

named above are each the result of Wittgenstein‘s editors splicing together

selections from his final notebooks, in which remarks go back and forth

between various subjects. G.H. von Wright greatly facilitated research into

Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass by cataloging its contents (von Wright 1982, pp. 35-

62). He gave the source manuscripts for these final publications the labels

MS 169 through MS 177, in what he took to be their sequential order. A

further complication of this investigation, though, is that these notebooks

were not actually completed in a simple linear sequence, for as we will see,

Wittgenstein would sometimes write new remarks in notebooks next to

others written significantly earlier, and he may have even written in multiple

1 A small selection of remarks from MSS 169-171 was also included in Culture & Value. There is also a handful of remarks from the final notebooks that have not been published.

47

manuscripts simultaneously. This makes the task of dating Wittgenstein‘s

final manuscripts a considerable undertaking.

MS 169 is a small pocket notebook, which appears in its entirety as

the first part of LWPP2. It was purchased in Dublin, as indicated by a sticker

inside the back cover:

Figure 1: MS 169, p. 81r

Wittgenstein must have purchased this notebook during his stay at Ross‘s

Hotel in Dublin from November 1948 to April of 1949. The precise dating of

this notebook is controversial. In the preface to LWPP2, von Wright and

Nyman describe the notebook as having two parts. The first, which they

conjecture was written during Wittgenstein‘s time in Dublin, contains a

number of remarks that have similar counterparts in MSS 137 and 138,

published posthumously as Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology,

vol. I. Due to the terse and abbreviated style of the remarks occurring in the

first part of MS 169, von Wright and Nyman conclude that it likely

constitutes a preliminary study for MSS 137 and 138. Rothhaupt (1996, p.

369) agrees with this conclusion, arguing that part one of MS 169 was

composed between November 1948 and February 1949 since its

48

counterparts in MSS 137 and 138 appear in dated entries between

December 1, 1948, and February 27, 1949. In contrast, Pichler (1994, p.

138 fn. 117) and Nedo (1995, p. 46) date the composition of the entire

notebook to late 1949 in Cambridge. They thus take part one to be a further

extension of the remarks in MSS 137 and 138, rather than a preparation for

them. In support of this contention Pichler points out that several remarks in

MS 169 appear to be excerpts or summaries of their counterparts in MSS

137 and 138. Van Gennip (2004, p. 130) cites the same evidence in support

of her claim that the notebook was composed after the summer of 1949.

A note written in the penultimate page of the book provides further

dating information:

Figure 2: MS 169, p. 78r

49

Notice the lines ―3rd middle July‖, ―2nd end May‖ and ―£5‖ at the top of the

crossed-out section. These are surely notes taken by Wittgenstein while

visiting a travel agency to look into the cost of traveling to New York to visit

Malcolm:

I went to a travel agency to enquire about going to

America...I‘m not allowed to take with me more that £5...If I

booked a 3rd class passage right away I couldn‘t get a birth before the middle of July; if I booked 2nd class, which is much

more expensive, I could travel towards the middle, or end of

May. (March 19, 1949; letter to Malcolm)

Wittgenstein thus had this notebook in his possession while in Dublin at the

end of March 1949. According to the dating hypotheses of Pichler, Nedo, and

van Gennip, Wittgenstein must have made this entry in the back of an

empty notebook and then waited several more months to enter the first

philosophical remark in its pages. A more plausible supposition is that

Wittgenstein wrote these lines in the back of MS 169 because it was the

notebook in which he was currently working in March of 1949. I thus suggest

that part one of MS 169 was completed by the spring of 1949. Stronger

confidence in this tentative conclusion would need to be supported by a

thorough investigation of the series of manuscripts leading up to

Wittgenstein‘s dictation of part II of Philosophical Investigations in the

summer of 1949, a task that is beyond the scope of the present work.

The dating of part two of MS 169 is equally challenging but more

relevant to our concerns here, since according to von Wright and Nyman, it

is more developed stylistically and closely related in content to the other

50

remarks published in LWPP2.2 Even small sections of remarks thematically

related to those occurring in On Certainty and Remarks on Colour appear in

the final pages of the notebook. Wittgenstein‘s March 19 notes from the

travel agency bear on this investigation as well. Since a philosophical remark

begins at the bottom of the left-hand page opposite this note, and is

continued, mid-sentence, immediately below the note (see ―das

Physikalische...‖ above), Wittgenstein probably made this entry before either

of these pages contained any other remarks, which means that the remarks

at the end of MS 169 were written after March 19. Indeed, Rothhaupt (1996,

pp. 370-372) argues that the final 30 pages, written mostly in pencil, were

actually composed one year later in Vienna, after Wittgenstein‘s return from

America, because of similarities between this material and some of the

remarks concerning color concepts from the spring of 1950. Similarly, van

Gennip (2004, p. 130) argues that these entries must have been composed

either during or shortly after Wittgenstein‘s trip to America, due to thematic

similarities between some of the remarks in the latter part of MS 169 and

topics that were discussed between Wittgenstein and Malcolm in Ithaca (see

Malcolm 1984). However, there does not seem to be a discernable difference

between the pencil used in the March 19 note and the surrounding remarks,

suggesting that even the final remarks of MS 169 may have been composed

2 The fact that von Wright and Nyman are unable to determine a precise demarcation point between the two parts complicates matters, and may count as evidence against the appropriateness of dividing MS 169 into different sections. Rothhaupt (1996, p. 369 fn. 3) identifies two possible locations that may be construed as indicating breaks in the text.

51

in the spring of 1949. Thus, the available evidence is insufficient to precisely

determine when, between spring 1949 and spring 1950, part two was

composed. Rothhaupt (1996, p. 372) does however show that the notebook

was completed no later than April 24, 1950, for the final remarks in MS 169

appear again in revised form in MS 174 under this date.

Only the first 10 of the 80 pages of MS 170 contain remarks; the rest

are left blank. They are now published as part 2 of LWPP2. The date of

composition of these remarks is uncertain and controversial, as no dates

appear in the notebook. All three of the major themes of Wittgenstein‘s last

writings – psychology, color, and certainty – are addressed in this handful of

remarks. Based on the relation of its content to certain remarks on color in

MS 173, Rothhaupt (ibid., 373-374) speculates that MS 170 may come from

spring or summer of 1950. The relevance of one the remarks in MS 170 to

the discussions of Moore in On Certainty prompts van Gennip to assign this

notebook‘s date of composition to Wittgenstein‘s time in America or shortly

thereafter. Von Wright dates it to early 1949, contemporaneous with MS

169. Some pieces of evidence speak in favor of this hypothesis: the binding,

size, and number of pages of MS 170 appear to be the same as MS 169,

which was purchased in Dublin. This suggests that MS 170 may have also

been purchased, and thus presumably also used for composing remarks,

while Wittgenstein was in Dublin in the winter and spring of 1949. On the

other hand, MS 170 does not include the same sticker inside the back cover

52

that is found in MS 169, thus lowering somewhat the probably that the two

notebooks were purchased together. Von Wright‘s contention is further

supported by the similarity between Wittgenstein‘s alternating use of pencil

and dark black pen in MS 170 and the final pages of MS 169. Of course,

establishing that MSS 169 and 170 are contemporaneous cannot serve to fix

a precise date of composition for MS 170 when the dating of MS 169 remains

uncertain.

MS 171, like MSS 169 and 170, presents a challenge, as none of the

remarks are dated. It has a unique appearance; unlike Wittgenstein‘s other

notebooks from this time, which have a standard binding on the left side, MS

171 is a reporter‘s notebook, spiral-bound at the top. Only 14 pages contain

remarks, and the same number of blank pages is also to be found at the

end. The entirety of MS 171 appears as part 3 of LWPP2. Its editors von

Wright and Nyman claim that ―chronologically [it is] probably closely

connected to MS 169 and [was] written in the year 1949‖ (LWPP2, p. xi).

Von Wright dates the volume to either 1949 or 1950 in his catalog, while a

note now attached to the notebook (by one of Wittgenstein‘s literary

executors) indicates that the remarks are from ―early 1950‖. A note on the

front cover mentions that the design of the notebook is covered by a United

States patent:

53

Figure 3: MS 171, Front Cover

While it is certainly possible that such a notebook might have been sold in

Europe, this is at least prima facie evidence that Wittgenstein purchased this

volume during his trip to New York in early fall 1949. The content of the

some of the remarks is also consistent with the hypothesis that this

notebook was used for composition sometime during or after Wittgenstein‘s

time in America, for the last three remarks in the notebook concern

inner/outer, color, and certainty, respectively, all of which are topics that he

wrote on in 1950. Like some of the final remarks in MS 169 mentioned

earlier, some passages from MS 171 are very similar to others appearing in

MS 174 under the date April 24, 1950, suggesting that MS 171 was

composed before then (Rothhaupt 1996, p. 374). A letter to Malcolm from

December 1, 1950 is written on pages ripped from this notebook,3 though

we cannot conclude from this that Wittgenstein was still using MS 171 in

December to pen new remarks; indeed he may have been comfortable

ripping these pages out of the notebook precisely because he was no longer

using it.

3 This was verified by an inspection of the documents at the Wren Library in Cambridge.

54

We thus see that there is a lack of evidence available for precisely

dating the composition of MSS 169-171. It may be the case that these

notebooks were not filled during relatively continuous writing sessions, but

rather were completed piecemeal over a span of a year of more, and thus

cannot be definitively associated with a particular phase of the development

of Wittgenstein‘s evaluation of his own work.4 For this reason, an

interpretation for these remarks will not be attempted in later chapters.

Nevertheless, it is important to note that these manuscripts include a few

remarks that clearly are related to the content of On Certainty and Remarks

on Colour, but were not included in those publications. This undermines the

common belief that these publications contain all of Wittgenstein‘s writings

concerning the topics of certainty and color during his final years. Further,

the fact that remarks concerning various topics are mixed together and not

clearly delineated in the manuscripts undermines the common impression

that Wittgenstein consistently marked off these topics in his late notebooks,

and thus that he understood himself to be working on three self-standing

works in his final years.

Like MS 171, MS 172 is also a unique document; it consists of six

loose large format sheets of foolscap, each of which are folded in half to

produce four pages (somewhat misleadingly described in von Wright‘s

4 While it is uncertain exactly when these notebooks were composed between 1948 and 1950, it is clear that they were not composed during Wittgenstein‘s final fruitful phase beginning in March 1951, since they lack the physical characteristics consistently exemplified in those final writings, which will be fully described later in the chapter.

55

catalog thusly: ―Manuscript on loose sheets...24 pp.‖ (1982, p. 46)). Four of

the pages contain writing on the subject of color; these now make up part 2

of the publication Remarks on Colour. The other 20 pages contain remarks

on Moore and knowledge; these now form the first 65 remarks of On

Certainty. Wittgenstein‘s literary executors did not know of the existence of

these pages when they originally planned on publishing his remarks on

epistemological concepts and terms. As reported by Paul (2007, p. 297),

these were discovered in Anscombe‘s home ―shortly before...early in 1967‖,

two years before the publication was to finally appear in print. Since MS 172

was found in Anscombe‘s home, this means that Wittgenstein did not bring it

with him when he moved into Dr. Bevan‘s home in Cambridge at the

beginning of February 1951, and thus that its remarks must have been

composed before that date. It is unknown whether Wittgenstein intentionally

left this manuscript at Anscombe‘s home. Since they weren‘t discovered until

16 years after his death, it is possible that Wittgenstein had already

misplaced or forgotten about this manuscript before moving to Bevan‘s

home.

The pages of MS 172 are undated, but Anscombe speculates that they

were written in early 1950:

These [sheets] Wittgenstein left in his room in G.E.M.

Anscombe‘s house in Oxford, where he lived (apart from a visit

to Norway in the autumn) from April 1950 to February 1951. I (G.E.M.A.) am under the impression that he had written them in

Vienna, where he stayed from the previous Christmas until

56

March; but I cannot now recall the basis of this impression. (OC

Preface)

Von Wright comes to the same conclusion in his catalog:

These manuscript pages – dealing with the topics of colour and

of certainty – were probably written by Wittgenstein during his

last visit to Vienna in the early months of 1950. (1982, p. 54)

Both of these descriptions invite the assumption that even though MS 172

addresses two different subjects, its parts were composed as a single

document at one time. A note attached to MS 172 by one of the executors

says that ―the first 4 pages are on colours,‖ further suggesting that the

pages together constitute a single document. But the manuscript does not in

fact have a first page, for none of the folio sheets are dated and they are not

bound together to provide a definite sequence. Nevertheless, from

inspection of the pages one can determine the page sequences for the

individual sections on color and certainty (though see Rothhaupt 1996, p.

379 for an alternate sequence of the color pages). This still does not

determine whether the color material comes before or after the remarks on

certainty, because the remarks on color are isolated to the four pages

produced by a single portfolio sheet, so no sheet contains remarks on both

subjects, which would be helpful in determining a sequence.

There is evidence from Wittgenstein‘s correspondence that appears to

confirm Anscombe‘s impressions about the dating of MS 172, at least with

respect to the portion on color. In fact, from his letters we can pinpoint

almost the precise date that these remarks were composed. I will argue,

57

however, that further evidence suggests that the remarks from MS 172 on

certainty were composed at a different time. Recall from the last chapter

that after having spent 3 weeks with his family in Vienna, Wittgenstein

reported that he was not doing any writing:

I'm reading various odds & ends, e.g. Goethes Theory of

colour...I'm not writing at all because my thoughts never

sufficiently crystallize. (January 16, 1950; letter to Malcolm)

Three days later he also mentioned to von Wright that he was reading

Goethe‘s work on color, but did not make any mention of writing:

The last two weeks I read a great deal in Goethe‘s

―Farbenlehre‖. It‘s partly boring and repelling, but in some ways

also very instructive and philosophically interesting. (January 19,

1950; letter to von Wright)

Another three days after that, Wittgenstein says that his reading of Goethe

has prompted him to finally attempt some writing:

I have been reading again parts of Goethes "Farbenlehre" which attracts & repels me. It's certainly philosophically interesting, &

I've been thinking about it & even written down some weak

remarks. (January 22, 1950; letter to Rhees)

Thus Wittgenstein must have written these remarks sometime between

January 19 and January 22. That‘s not much time to write, especially for

someone who hasn‘t picked up a pen in months and claims that his ―brain is

mudled & sluggish‖ (ibid.). The four pages of MS172 on color are about the

length one might expect, and Goethe is indeed mentioned in these remarks.

Thus I conclude that the section of MS 172 on color was composed at this

time.

58

McGuinness argues in the most recent bound edition of Wittgenstein‘s

Cambridge correspondence that his claim to have ―written down some weak

remarks‖ in the above letter to Rhees

...is in slight contradiction to...the letter to Malcolm above: ―I‘m not writing at all.‖ That remark throws some doubt on the

hypothesis that Part II of Remarks on Colour was composed in

Vienna since the remarks in it are inserted in a longer set of

reflections, mostly on themes to do with certainty. (2008, p. 458)

I find it hardly a contradiction, but rather evidence for the precise dating of

these remarks: on January 16, the date of the letter to Malcolm,

Wittgenstein had not yet begun to write, but by January 22 he had

completed these remarks. McGuinness‘ reasoning is based on the false belief

(encouraged by misleading descriptions of MS 172 by various editors) that

the color remarks are ―inserted‖ in the remarks on certainty. But even

though these two sets of remarks are written on the same type of paper and

were discovered together, the fact that they are written on separate sheets

leaves open the possibility that they were not composed together and do not

constitute a unified document. In fact, the information from Wittgenstein‘s

correspondence above suggests just this, for he never mentioned that he

was thinking about Moore or certainty – just Goethe and color, and the fact

that he described what we had written in at most three days as ―some weak

remarks‖ makes it unlikely that he was referring to all 24 pages of what now

constitute MS 172.

59

So when was the section of MS 172 on certainty written, then? Since

on January 16 Wittgenstein said he was ―not writing at all‖ it could not have

been written in Vienna before that date. One might then think that it was

written in Vienna sometime after January 22. But this is also doubtful for two

reasons: 1) Wittgenstein did not mention that he was thinking or writing

about Moore or certainty in his letters during this time, and 2) on March 24,

1950, the day after he returned to England from Vienna, he started

composing additional dated entries on color, making it unlikely that his

thinking about color was interrupted by a period of writing on Moore and

certainty.

There is evidence to support the contention that the first 65 remarks

of On Certainty were written during Wittgenstein‘s stay in America,5 for they

mention subjects that we know he had been discussing at the time. Malcolm

mentions in his memoir that he and Wittgenstein met several times to

discuss Moore‘s papers, Malcolm‘s recent criticism of these papers, and

Moore‘s response contained in the letter he wrote on July 21, 1949. It

response to Moore, Malcolm wrote:

It was very fortunate for me that Wittgenstein is here. I read

your letter to him and we have had a great many discussions of

5 This conclusion influences the interpretation of On Certainty presented in Chapter 5. Since these remarks were likely composed in autumn 1949, rather than in February 1950 (as Wittgenstein‘s editors have claimed), this means that Part 1 of On Certainty was written before the commencement of Wittgenstein‘s hormone treatments, and thus, before he began to consistently criticize the quality of his work.

60

it and your philosophical papers. (September 2, 1949; letter

from Malcolm to Moore)6

Bouwsma was also in attendance for one of these discussions, which he

dates to August 20: ―The subject was Moore‘s: ‗I know that this is a hand.‘

And the background was Norman‘s article and Moore‘s letter‖ (Bouwsma

1986, p. 30). Moore‘s statement that ―here is one hand‖ is mentioned in the

very first remark on On Certainty. Malcolm recalls that in these discussions

Wittgenstein investigated the relationship between claiming to know

something and being able to make sure of it (Malcolm 1984, p. 72), as well

as the roles that mathematical propositions can play in language (ibid., p.

71). Both of these subjects are also mentioned in the opening sections of On

Certainty.

Further thematic connections between these remarks and topics

discussed in Ithaca can be identified. 1) Part of a discussion with Malcolm,

Bouwsma, and Max Black on August 4 concerned Moore‘s sentence ―I am

here‖ (Bouwsma 1986, p. 14); this statement is mentioned at OC 10. 2) The

statement ―I know that this is a bit of paper‖ is mentioned at OC 60, and this

sentence was of particular interest to Malcolm. Almost a year prior, Moore

had used this sentence in correspondence:

I do know in particular cases that I have conclusive evidence for so-and-so, e.g. now that I am writing on a piece of paper

(perception)... (November 20, 1948; letter from Moore to

Malcolm)

6 Quotations from the Malcolm-Moore correspondence come from (Rothhaupt, Seery, and McManus 2003).

61

Malcolm responded that this sentence was representative of the statements

that he thought Moore was misusing, and that he would soon send Moore

...an article which I have written about your philosophical practice of making

assertions like ―I have conclusive evidence now that I am writing on a piece

of paper‖ (which you said in your letter to me)...‖ (January 18, 1949; letter

from Malcolm to Moore). Malcolm later sent Moore an offprint of this article,

whose contents he later discussed with Wittgenstein in Ithaca. It is thus

likely that Malcolm mentioned this sentence in conversation with

Wittgenstein. 3) The first remark of On Certainty begins with Moore‘s

statement ―here is one hand‖, and then ends with the parenthetical remark

―(On this a curious remark by H. Newman)‖, a reference to Cardinal John

Henry Newman, whose apologetic work Grammar of Assent had interested

Wittgenstein over the past few years. This is the only mention of Newman in

Nachlass.7 On August 22, two days after the discussion prompted by

consideration of Moore‘s ―here is a hand‖, Wittgenstein brought up Newman

in conversation with Bouwsma:

Later he asked me, had I read Newman? He was much impressed by Newman. Kingsley accused him of insincerity. But

Newman was sincere. He, W., had read Grammar of Assent too.

That was puzzling. How a man of such learning and culture could

believe such things! Newman had a queer mind. (Bouwsma 1986, p. 34)

7 The only other mention of ―Newman,‖ found in MS 117, is a reference to the Cambridge mathematician Max Newman, as shown by Kienzler (2006, p. 118).

62

This shows that Wittgenstein was puzzled about Newman‘s ―curious‖

apologetic remarks right around the same time as he was also thinking

about Moore‘s statement ―here is a hand.‖ Thus it is likely that the first

remark of On Certainty, which attempts to draw a connection between

Moore and Newman, was composed around this time in late August 1949

when Wittgenstein was reflecting on both thinkers.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, there is some evidence that

Wittgenstein was writing while in America: he said to Bouwsma on August 5

that he ―was beginning to do something,‖ wrote to Rhees that he was ―doing

some philosophy‖ on August 31, and appears to have purchased a new

notebook in Ithaca (MS 171). After he returned to England he wrote to

friends that he was not working, and as argued above, it is unlikely that the

remarks in question were written in February or March of 1950 while in

Vienna. Given the significant thematic overlap between these remarks and

the discussions held in Ithaca, I find it even more unlikely that they would

have been composed after March 1950, since it is doubtful that Wittgenstein

would remember the content of his earlier discussions in such detail some

eight months after the fact. Thus, I conclude that the opening remarks of On

Certainty, constituting part 1 of MS 172, were written during or shortly after

Wittgenstein‘s discussions of Moore with Malcolm, sometime between August

and October of 1949.

63

MS 173 is a large notebook completely filled with remarks on both

sides of its 100 pages. It contents appear split up in different posthumous

publications. The editors chose to split the material because of lines that

Wittgenstein occasionally used in his final manuscripts:

Figure 4: MS 173, p. 31v

The writings from 1949-1951 focus primarily on three themes: certainty and

knowledge, color, and the ‗inner‘ and the ‗outer‘ in psychology. This line

from p. 31v of MS 173 seems to indicate the end of material on the subject

of color and the beginning of remarks on the philosophy of psychology.

There is certainly good reason to think of this line as demarcating a border

between different texts, for all of the remarks preceding this line are crossed

out with a vertical line (indicating that Wittgenstein had finished going

through them for the purpose of revision), while those after the line are not.

64

Because of lines like these in the manuscripts, the editors of On Certainty

claimed that the book ―is not a selection; Wittgenstein marked it off in his

notebooks as a separate topic‖ (OC Preface). As will be discussion in the

next chapter, not all of the places where the editors made breaks in the

manuscripts were marked off by Wittgenstein with a horizontal line, nor

were all of Wittgenstein‘s horizontal lines interpreted as manuscript breaks,

so this editorial claim requires further scrutiny.

On p. 47v there is another line, after which the remarks move back to

the topic of color. The first and third sections (i.e. the material before the

first line plus the material after the second one) appear as Part III of

Remarks on Colour (the editors do not indicate that Part III is the result of

splicing sections 1 and 3 together). Section 3 of MS 173 clearly starts out

with remarks on color, but near the end of the notebook some of the

remarks also seem to be relevant to the philosophy of psychology. The

editors thus decided to publish section 2 of MS 173 (i.e. the material

between the two horizontal lines), plus pp. 87r-100r (a portion of section 3)

as Part 4 of LWPP2. Again, no indication was made that Part 4 is actually the

result of splicing together two texts separated by 80 pages in the notebooks.

The entries in the first section are dated. They were written between

March 24 and April 12, 1950, and consist of remarks on the topic of color

that Wittgenstein began working on the day after arriving back in England

from his final visit to his family in Vienna. The rest of the notebook does not

65

contain dates; von Wright dates the entire notebook to 1950 in his catalog,

which is surely correct, because the material on color appears in revised

form in MS 176, which was composed no later than March 1951, so MS 173

must have been completed before then. Since Wittgenstein‘s correspondence

indicates that he did no writing between September 1950 and March 1951,

MS 173 must have been completed by September 1950 at the latest (though

in the sequel I argue that it was probably completed even before September,

along with the revision found in MS 176).

MS 174 is a large notebook; only the first 40 of its 88 sheets contain

remarks. It contains two sections, marked off by a horizontal line. The first

28 pages constitute section 1 and deal with the philosophy of psychology.

These remarks now appear as Part 5 of LWPP2. Only one date occurs in this

notebook, in the first section, just a few pages from the beginning – April

24, 1950. A plausible story about the relationship between the two sections

from MSS 173 and 174 on the philosophy of psychology can be constructed

from this date. Section 1 of MS 173, on color, is dated and ends on April 12.

After a horizontal line comes section 2 on the philosophy of psychology. It is

not particularly long, only 32 pages. In MS 174, section 1, also on the

philosophy of psychology, has April 24 as its first date. Wittgenstein may

have thus composed section 2 of MS 173 between April 12 and April 24, and

then decided to mark off the remarks in MS 173 with a horizontal line so

that he could continue his work on the philosophy of psychology in a new

66

notebook, namely MS 174, on April 24, and then later continue his work on

color in MS 173. Section 2 of MS 174 contains remarks on certainty, likely

the first time Wittgenstein revisited this topic since MS 172 (dated to

autumn 1949 earlier in the chapter). This section is now published as OC 66-

192. It is uncertain when section 2 was composed; von Wright dates the

entire volume from 1950 in his catalog. It is also unclear why nearly half of

the volume is left blank, especially when considered in relation to the next

manuscript.

MS 175 is a small pocket notebook with 80 sheets, all filled with

remarks on certainty, though not all composed together. It consists of two

sections (not divided by a line, but definitely distinguishable). The material

from the first 68 pages now appears as remarks 193-299 of On Certainty.

Only one date appears in the section – September 23, 1950 – a few pages

from the end, so this section was composed before that date. These appear

then to be Wittgenstein‘s final writings of 1950, since he traveled to Norway

in October and didn‘t do any more writing until the spring of 1951. The

relationship between the remarks in section 1 of MS 175 and those in section

2 of MS 174 is unclear. Since the editors of On Certainty placed the remarks

from section 1 of MS 175 after those of section 2 of MS 174 in the book, one

natural hypothesis is that this is the sequence in which they were written,

i.e. that MS 175 was begun after MS 174. This contention is at least

supported by the few occurrences of dates in these notebooks: section 2 of

67

MS 174 has no dates, though the section preceding it begins with April 24,

while section 1 of MS 175 lists September 23 as the final date of

composition. Thus one may suspect that the two sections were written

sometime between April 24 and September 23, with Wittgenstein switching

from MS 174 to MS 175 at some point during this span. But this hypothesis

cannot account for why the second half of MS 174 is blank. Wittgenstein did

not switch from MS 174 to MS 175 because he had filled all of the pages in

the first volume and needed to move on to a new one. An alternative

hypothesis that may account for the blank pages in MS 174 is that these two

sections were not written sequentially. MS 174 and MS 175 are different

types of notebooks: the former is fairly large and would have likely been

kept in Wittgenstein‘s room, while the latter is quite small and can fit in

one‘s pocket. Wittgenstein was known to bring a pocket notebook along with

him on strolls, so that he could immediately write down remarks when he

found inspiration. It may be that Wittgenstein was writing remarks on

certainty in both volumes concurrently. This would at least explain why, in

late September, both volumes were only half-filled.

Section 2 of MS 175 consists of the first remarks written after the

improvement of Wittgenstein‘s mental faculties in March of 1951. They start

on March 10, with Wittgenstein‘s paranoid comment about the theft of his

ideas (quoted in the previous chapter), and continue with remarks on

certainty until the pages of the notebook are exhausted on March 21. Unlike

68

in 1949 and 1950, in which only sporadic dates appear in the manuscripts,

all of the entries from March 10 to the end of Wittgenstein‘s life are dated,

and they show that he indeed had an intense and fruitful stretch of work,

since remarks are composed nearly every day during this time. The entries

in section 2 of MS 175 now constitute remarks 300-425 of On Certainty.

The larger sized MS 176 consists of 4 sections. The first fills pp. 1r-22r

and is a revision of the sections on color from MS 173. The dating of this

section will be addressed shortly. Section 2 is a direct continuation of the

remarks on certainty that ended on March 21 at the end of MS 175. Like

those at the end of MS 175, these remarks are all consistently dated

throughout the remainder of the notebook and entries are included almost

daily. All of the remarks from p. 22r to p. 81, the final page of the notebook,

concern certainty, except for a short group of remarks on the philosophy of

psychology that are marked off with horizontal lines. These were composed

between April 14 and 15, after which Wittgenstein returned immediately

back to his remarks on certainty. The material between these dividing lines –

section 3 of MS 176 – is now printed as Part 6 of LWPP2. The remarks on

either side of this brief interruption together form remarks 426-637 of On

Certainty. Like in other cases, the editors seamlessly splice together the

remarks separated from sections 2 and 4 of MS 176, not alerting the reader

that they are interrupted by a short set of remarks on the philosophy of

psychology. These remarks on certainty continue until the end of MS 176;

69

the final date to appear is April 24. Wittgenstein immediately continues

these remarks at the beginning of MS 177 on April 25. For three days he

continues to write and fill the first 21 pages with remarks. The final remark

in the notebook, and in the Wittgenstein Nachlass, was written on April 27.

That evening Wittgenstein became very ill; he passed away two days later,

on April 29. MS 177 is published as remarks 638-676 of On Certainty, the

final 39 remarks of the book.

The dating of the revision of the remarks on color, i.e. the first section

of MS 176, is a challenge, as it contains no dates. In the preface to Remarks

on Colour Anscombe claims that it was ―written in Cambridge in March

1951.‖ If true this would mean that the final remarks on color were written

after Wittgenstein had regained his faculties for doing philosophy, when he

claimed that he was doing his best work in years. But if they were composed

before this time, then they are part of the writings that he considered to be

of low quality. It is thus important to determine when section 1 of MS 176

was composed, in order to know what opinion Wittgenstein held of it.8

Anscombe‘s belief that the revision of the color remarks was written in

March of 1951 may stem from its location in the manuscript sequence: MS

175 ends with remarks in March of 1951, and MS 176 also includes remarks

8 I will argue that this section was actually written during Wittgenstein‘s pessimistic phase in 1950, and not during his final optimistic phase in 1951, as claimed by Anscombe. This conclusion is crucial for my contention, presented in Chapter 5, that the writings of Wittgenstein‘s final phase are characterized by their therapeutic character. In his remarks on color, Wittgenstein appears to be engaged in the theoretical task of providing philosophical analyses of color concepts, so it is important for my reading of On Certainty that that section 1 of MS 176 was not written during Wittgenstein‘s final weeks.

70

from March. But it cannot be the case that MS 176 was begun after MS 175

was completed.9 The last remark of MS 175 was written on March 21 (see

Figure 5 below). The very same day, Wittgenstein continued his remarks on

certainty in MS 176 on p. 22r (Figure 6), after the revision of the remarks on

color, which means that they must have already been completed no later

than March 21. That leaves a small window of time for the revision to have

been completed during Wittgenstein‘s final productive phase. In his final

letter to Malcolm of April 16 he says that he has been working for about 5

weeks; this makes it very likely that the beginning of his last fruitful phase

began on March 10, the day that new remarks on certainty began to be

entered in MS 175 (see Figure 7). If the hypothesis that the revision of the

color remarks was completed during this final phase is true, it must have

been composed between March 10 and March 21.

Evidence from the notebooks undermines the veracity of this

hypothesis. Assuming it were true, it would have to be the case that

Wittgenstein wrote the revision of the color remarks in MS 176 while he was

at the same time writing new remarks on certainty in the end of MS 175,

since the final section of MS 175 contains dated entries from March 10 to

March 21. But the characters of these two texts – section 1 of MS 176 and

section 2 of MS 175 – are quite different. The certainty remarks from MS

9 As, for example, claimed by Nedo: ―On February 8 Wittgenstein is back in Cambridge, with Dr. Bevan, continuing his work on MS 175, and starting MS 176 around 21 March‖ (Nedo 1995, p. 47).

71

175 are all dated, along with all the other certainty remarks from March and

April, as well as the remarks on the philosophy of psychology from April 14

and 15, i.e. sections 2, 3, and 4 of MS 176 and all of 177 (cf. Figures 5, 6,

and 7). Section 1 of MS 176, on the other hand, does not contain any dates.

Further, all of the dated material from March and April is written in a blue

pen (see Figures 5, 6, 7, and 9), while the revision of the color remarks is

written in a variety of inks – some remarks are in blue, others are light

black, and others are dark black (see Figures 6 and 8). It is also remarkable

that the notes on certainty in MS 176 from March 21 begin immediately after

the revision of the color remarks, rather than on a new page or even in a

new notebook. Also noteworthy is the difference in handwriting between the

revision of the color remarks and the dated material from March and April

1951. The revision is written with a generally steady hand, while the

remarks on certainty from 1951 are written somewhat sloppily and hastily

(cf. Figures 8 and 9). Anscombe‘s hypothesis would then require that for 11

days Wittgenstein simultaneously wrote material he thought to be of high

quality in two notebooks, including dates and using a consistent blue ink in

one but no dates and a variety of inks in the other, only to then cut off the

possibility of extending the revision of the color remarks on March 21 by

writing new remarks on certainty immediately after them in MS 176.

A more likely hypothesis is that the revision in MS 176 had already

been completed sometime prior to March 10, and thus during the period in

72

which Wittgenstein thought his work to be of low quality. This would make

the differences in ink and dates more plausible. It also can help explain why

the certainty remarks on March 21 were put immediately after the remarks

on color in MS 176, for if the revision had already been completed during

Wittgenstein‘s unsuccessful writing phase, he may have had no intention of

continuing it further, and thus had no qualms about cutting off the revision

with the introduction of new remarks.

If the revision of the color remarks was not written during

Wittgenstein‘s fruitful phase, then when was it written? One possibility might

be that it was written sometime between February 8 and March 10, while he

was staying at Dr. Bevan‘s house but before the hormone treatments had

been terminated and Wittgenstein had found himself in the right frame of

mind for doing philosophy. This too seems doubtful, based on his letters

from this time. Soon after arriving at Dr. Bevan‘s home he wrote to Malcolm,

―I can‘t even think of work at present‖. About ten days later on February

19th, he wrote to Koder that he hadn‘t done work in months, and on March

9, the day before reading a book review would prompt him to begin writing

again, he wrote to Rhees, ―I‘m very weak physically and mentally‖, and

didn‘t mention any developments in his work. This all suggests that the

revision of the color remarks was already completed before he moved into

Dr. Bevan‘s house. Thus it must have been completed by, at the very latest,

the end of September 1950, because Wittgenstein did not do any work from

73

the time of his trip to Norway in October 1950 until his stay at Dr. Bevan‘s

home. But since it is a revision of the remarks on color in MS 173, it of

course must have been begun after their completion. The last section of MS

173 is not dated, so we do not know exactly when it was completed.

However, since the remarks on the philosophy of psychology in section 2 of

MS 173 stop abruptly and appear to be continued at the beginning of MS

174, which is dated April 24, it is plausible that the color remarks in section

3 began around this date, and may have been completed within a month or

two. It is noteworthy that the remarks on color in section 3 of MS 173 go

until the end of the notebook but are not continued further in another

volume. One hypothesis that may explain this would be that after

Wittgenstein reached the end of MS 173, he thought it an appropriate place

to stop writing new remarks and begin a revision of the material on color in

MS 173 in the fresh volume MS 176. Thus I suggest that section 1 of MS 176

was composed in the summer of 1950.

This excursion into dating the final manuscripts has led to the following

conclusions: the writings from Wittgenstein‘s last fruitful phase consist of

remarks 300-676 of On Certainty and the short section of remarks included

as Part 6 of LWPP2. Remarks 66-299 of On Certainty, Parts 4 and 5 of

LWPP2, and everything included in Remarks on Colour were all composed

during the time when Wittgenstein was undergoing hormone treatments and

consistently declared the quality of his work to be subpar. In his letter to

74

Malcolm of April 16, 1951, Wittgenstein says that the curtain in his brain has

not gone up for over two years, and in his letter of April 17, 1950 he says

that he has ―not been able to do any sustained good work since the

beginning of March 1949‖. The remarks forming the first two parts of LWPP2

are undated but appear to have been written before this date. There is thus

a period of interest, between March 1949 and November 1949, when he

began undergoing hormone treatments, in which Wittgenstein claims to not

have done any ―sustained‖ good work, and during which he did not speak

well of the quality of the work he was doing, though not as intensely as he

criticized the quality of his work after November 1949. This may be

considered a period in which Wittgenstein was not satisfied with the quality

of his work, but was dissatisfied to a lesser extent than during his hormone

treatments.10 During this time, I have argued, Wittgenstein likely composed

the first 65 remarks of On Certainty.11 These conclusions are summarized in

the table below.

Our results further support the conclusion of Chapter 1, namely that

On Certainty should not be thought of as a unified work. This research

suggest that On Certainty be conceived of as consisting of three parts: 1)

remarks 1-65, with which Wittgenstein was somewhat dissatisfied, 2)

10 Wittgenstein‘s letter to Malcolm of February 8, 1951 lends support to associating this period with moderate dissatisfaction: he can‘t participate in philosophical discussions right now because, he reports, ―my head [is] empty‖, although ―it was half empty already when I was in Ithaca‖ in the fall of 1949. 11 It remains unclear whether MS 171 was composed before the start of hormone treatments or afterward, though clearly it was not written after their cessation.

75

remarks 66-299, with which he was very dissatisfied, and 3) 300-676, which

he considered to be of better quality than other writings he had produced

over the past two years. This division of On Certainty into parts will be

utilized in the sequel. Chapter 5 will present a reading of On Certainty that is

informed by its division into multiple parts with very different characters,

and Chapter 6 will show that most readers of the book do not appreciate

that Wittgenstein did not consider all of its remarks to be of equal value.

76

MS Part MS Pages MS Dates Publication Section Remarks/Pages

169 ii-81r undated, prob. late 1948 - early 1949 LWPPv2 1 pp. 2-49

170 1r-5v undated, prob. 1949 LWPPv2 2 pp. 51-53

171 1-14 undated, prob. late 1949 or early 1950 LWPPv2 3 pp. 55-59

172 1 1-20 undated, prob. autumn 1949 OC 1 rem. 1-65

2 21-24 undated, prob. Feb. 1950 RoC 2 rem. 1-20

173 1 ii-31v March 24 - April 12 1950 RoC 3 rem. 1-130

2 31v-47v undated, prob. 1950 LWPPv2 4 pp. 61-71

3 47v-100r undated, prob. 1950 RoC 3 rem. 131-350

87r-100r undated, prob. 1950 LWPPv2 4 pp. 71-79

174 1 1r-14v April 24 - ? (prob. Late Spring 1950) LWPPv2 5 pp. 81-90

2 14v-40 undated, prob Summer 1950 OC 2 rem. 66-192

175 1 1r-34v (prob.) Summer - September 23, 1950 OC 2 rem. 193-299

2 34v-79 March 10 - March 21, 1951 OC 3 rem. 300-425

176 1 1r-22r undated, prob. Summer 1950 RoC 1 rem. 1-88

2 22r-46v March 21 - April 14, 1951 OC 3 rem. 426-523

3 46v-51v April 14 - April 15, 1951 LWPPv2 6 pp. 92-95

4 51v-81 April 15 - April 24, 1951 OC 3 rem. 524-637

177 1r-11 April 25 - April 27, 1951 OC 3 rem. 638-676


169 ii-81r undated, prob. late 1948 - early 1949 LWPPv2 1 pp. 2-49

170 1r-5v undated, prob. 1949 LWPPv2 2 pp. 51-53

171 1-14 undated, prob. 1949 LWPPv2 3 pp. 55-59

173 2 31v-47v undated, prob. 1950 LWPPv2 4 pp. 61-71

3 87r-100r undated, prob. 1950 LWPPv2 4 pp. 71-79

174 1 1r-14v April 24 - ? (prob. Late Spring 1950) LWPPv2 5 pp. 81-90

176 3 46v-51v April 14 - April 15, 1951 LWPPv2 6 pp. 92-95


176 1 1r-22r undated, prob. Summer 1950 RoC 1 rem. 1-88

172 2 21-24 undated, prob. Feb. 1950 RoC 2 rem. 1-20

173 1 ii-31v March 24 - April 12 1950 RoC 3 rem. 1-130

3 47v-100r undated, prob. 1950 RoC 3 rem. 131-350


172 1 1-20 undated, prob. autumn 1949 OC 1 rem. 1-65

174 2 14v-40 undated, prob Summer 1950 OC 2 rem. 66-192

175 1 1r-34v (prob.) Summer - September 23, 1950 OC 2 rem. 193-299

2 34v-79 March 10 - March 21, 1951 OC 3 rem. 300-425

176 2 22r-46v March 21 - April 14, 1951 OC 3 rem. 426-523

4 51v-81 April 15 - April 24, 1951 OC 3 rem. 524-637

177 1r-11 April 25 - April 27, 1951 OC 3 rem. 638-676

Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology, vol. 2

Remarks on Colour

On Certainty

Table 1: Source Manuscripts for Wittgenstein's Final Publications

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Selected Pages from the Final Manuscripts

Figure 5: MS 175, p. 79 (the last page of MS 175, written March 21)

78

Figure 6: MS 176, p. 22r (end of color revision and continuation of certainty remarks)

79

Figure 7: MS 175, p. 34v (Wittgenstein‘s initial remarks after

reading the book review, written on March 10 in blue ink)

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Figure 8: MS 176, p. 19v (steady and clean handwriting from the color revision in a variety of inks)

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Figure 9: MS 176, p. 24r (page from the final certainty notes, written in consistent blue ink with unsteady handwriting)

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Chapter 3

On Certainty and Wittgenstein‘s ‗Works‘

The investigations carried out in the previous two chapters now enable

us to effectively assess whether On Certainty qualifies as one of

Wittgenstein‘s works. The claim that it does, as we have seen, is central to

the case for recognizing a third Wittgenstein, which is claimed to be

definitively characterized by On Certainty in just the way that the first and

second phases of Wittgenstein‘s career achieve their definitive expression in

the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations.1 In response to the possible

objection that On Certainty shouldn‘t count as a work because its remarks

were not revised, Moyal-Sharrock offers a defense for applying this term to

the book. While recognizing that the criteria for what counts as a work is

debatable, she notes the use of the term by Wittgenstein‘s own editors,

1 As Stroll argues, ―we should divide Wittgenstein‘s career into three phases: the First Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, the Second of the Investigations, and the Third of On Certainty‖ (2004, p. 22). The central place given to On Certainty in the third Wittgenstein is why I consider only Moyal-Sharrock‘s initial characterization of this phase as made up of the

1949-1951 writings (cf. footnote 4 of the introduction). For while most of the early material from the first Wittgenstein can be seen as developing towards the Tractatus, and similarly for the writings of the second Wittgenstein in relation to Philosophical Investigations (though there are good reasons for recognizing a middle Wittgenstein), the work on philosophical psychology from 1946-49 does not have this relation to On Certainty. Thus, On Certainty cannot be definitive of the years 1946-1951 in a way that is analogous to how the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations relate to their associated phases of Wittgenstein‘s career.

83

Anscombe and von Wright, and cites their descriptions of the notes as

evidence of their unique status.2

In the preface to On Certainty, after telling how Wittgenstein began to

think about the issue of Moore‘s controversial statements when he visited

Malcolm in fall of 1949, Anscombe and von Wright state that ―this book

contains the whole of what Wittgenstein wrote on this topic from that time

until his death.‖ They go on to justify their decision to publish the notes as a

single volume:

It seemed appropriate to publish this work by itself. It is not a

selection; Wittgenstein marked it off in his notebooks as a

separate topic, which he apparently took up at four separate

periods during this eighteen months. It constitutes a single sustained treatment of the topic.

In a subsequent essay, also quoted by Moyal-Sharrock as evidence of On

Certainty‘s status as a work, von Wright claims that ―during the last year

and a half of his life Wittgenstein wrote almost exclusively about knowledge

and certainty‖ and refers to the book as a ―treatise‖ (von Wright 1982, p.

165). On the basis of these editorial statements, advocates for recognizing a

third Wittgenstein have claimed that On Certainty is an ―autonomous

collection‖ (Stroll 1994, p. 9) and ―not…a compilation effected by someone

other than Wittgenstein‖ (Moyal-Sharrock 2005, p. 2), representing ―an

astonishingly intense treatment of a topic over a period of 18 months‖ (ibid.,

p. 3). They have thus concluded that On Certainty, as well as the other two

2 (Moyal-Sharrock 2002, p. 294 fn. 3)

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publications culled from contemporaneous notes – Remarks on Colour and

LWPP2 – are ―wholly self-standing works‖ (Moyal-Sharrock 2004, p. 2).

These editorial claims deserve close scrutiny, because they have been

heavily influential in how interpreters have come to conceive of the notes

comprising On Certainty. They are revealed to be misleading when we

consult Wittgenstein‘s correspondence and Nachlass. When told that the

discussion of Moore and certainty was marked off as a separate topic, one

naturally suspects that Wittgenstein utilized a notation in his notebook

identifying whether a remark belonged to his investigations of certainty,

color, or psychology. This then gives rise to the notion that he saw himself

as concurrently composing three books, and that the editors were following

Wittgenstein‘s own editorial directives when they cut and spliced his final

notebooks to create the publications On Certainty, Remarks on Colour, and

LWPP2. If this were the case then indeed it would be true that the

responsibility for compiling the materials for On Certainty does not rely

primarily with the editors.

The claim that Wittgenstein ‗marked off‘ distinct investigations in his

notebooks must surely be a reference to the horizontal lines3 that are

occasionally used by Wittgenstein, such as this one from MS 176, p. 46v:

3 The following discussion of Wittgenstein‘s use of horizontal lines in the final manuscripts relies on a number of observations made in (van Gennip 2004) and (van Gennip 2008).

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Figure 10: MS 176, p. 46v

These lines are not accompanied by any labels or instructions, though in

many cases it is pretty clear that the line is intended to separate material on

different topics. 10 pages after the line shown above, another line occurs on

p. 51v, thereby marking off a section of remarks from its surrounding

context. The editors took these lines to indicate that the marked-off section

should be published separately, in LWPP2, from the surrounding remarks,

which appeared in On Certainty.4 Inspection of the notebooks shows this to

have been a reasonable decision by the editors, but it should still be noted

that Wittgenstein nowhere explicitly indicates that the remarks above p. 46v

and below p. 51v are part of the same investigation. A similar line occurs on

p. 14v of MS 174, which the editors took to also mark a separation between

LWPP2 and On Certainty.

Lines just like the one above occur at several points in the final

manuscripts where their purpose is not so clear, and in these cases the

4 No indication was given in the published text of On Certainty that this splice, which occurs between remarks 523 and 524, had occurred.

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editors did not take them to indicate that distinct investigations were being

marked off. For example, on p. 21r of MS 173 a pair of lines occurs around a

single remark, apparently separating this statement concerning the terms

‗know‘ and ‗believe‘ from the surrounding material on Goethe‘s reflections on

color. Rather than include this remark in On Certainty, the editors chose to

publish it in its original context as Remarks on Colour section III, #93,

replacing the horizontal lines with square brackets. An identical line

occurring on p. 22r of the same manuscript was not interpreted as specifying

a demarcation, since it was simply passed over without indication on the

next page of Remarks on Colour between remarks 95 and 96. A striking case

occurs on the last two pages of MS 172 included in On Certainty. These

pages include five horizontal lines, none of which were taken by the editors

to indicate a demarcation, since none of them were reproduced in sections

60-65 of On Certainty.5 It is not clear what Wittgenstein intended these lines

in MS 172 to indicate. Maybe they indicate the completion of work performed

at one sitting, or alternatively, extended lengths of time between the

composition of remarks. Van Gennip speculates that they may ―signify the

importance Wittgenstein attached to each of these remarks,‖ though she

concedes, ―it is equally probable that these lines have no particular purpose

at all‖ (2008, p. 53). We now see that the horizontal lines in Wittgenstein‘s

5 Similarly, the complete contents of MSS 171 and 169 appeared in LWPP2, yet the editors of that publication (including von Wright) did not reproduce any of the 6 horizontal lines occurring in the former manuscript or the nearly 20 lines occurring in the latter. Thus they clearly did not take these lines to demarcate separate investigations.

87

late manuscripts do not all serve a clear and consistent purpose, and thus

that they cannot simply be taken for granted as marking off a separate topic

without further interpretation.

Wittgenstein‘s editors also separated a number of notebooks at points

which were not characterized by the occurrence of a horizontal line. Nothing

separates the remarks on color and those on certainty in MS 172 apart from

the fact that they occur on distinct loose sheets. As seen in Figure 6 in the

previous chapter, Wittgenstein does not explicitly distinguish between the

remarks on color and those on certainty on p. 22r of MS 176. The break

between remarks from 1950 and those from 1951 are represented by a

horizontal line in the published text of On Certainty below section 299, even

though no such demarcation symbol occurs in the manuscript, reproduced as

Figure 7 in the previous chapter. Nor does any line occur on p. 87r of MS

173, which the editors splice together with the line at p. 31v to produce

what is published as part 4 of LWPP2, devoid of any indications that a splice

has occurred. It is thus clear now that the horizontal lines do not by

themselves serve to clearly demarcate separate investigations and that the

editors in most cases did not in fact take them to serve such a function.

Indeed, as van Gennip describes the situation, ―not only are Wittgenstein‘s

‗marks‘ ambiguous, but the editors applied their own demarcations in the

notebooks as well‖ (2004, p. 129).

88

It is clear from these considerations that On Certainty is a compilation

of texts selected not by Wittgenstein himself but by his editors, since the

strings of remarks comprising this book were neither consistently marked off

from other discussions nor expressly indicated to count as a single

investigation. The notion that the composition of these remarks was an

intense and sustained task must also be corrected. The remarks on certainty

are interspersed with extended discussions of color and psychology, so

Wittgenstein was clearly not committing his undivided attention to Moore‘s

remarks for 18 straight months. From Wittgenstein‘s correspondence we also

see that he repeatedly complained of his inability to produce good work in

1950, and even reported that he was unable to work at all for stretches of

several months. His philosophical activities in 1950 then cannot be

accurately described as ‗sustained‘.6 This description would perhaps only be

appropriately applied to the final six weeks of Wittgenstein‘s life in which he

expressed satisfaction with the state of his work.

While many editorial statements used by Moyal-Sharrock and Stroll to

argue for On Certainty‘s status as a work have been challenged, we still

need to consider what criteria for a work are most appropriately applied to

Wittgenstein‘s writings, and the extent to which they are satisfied by On

Certainty. Joachim Schulte provides possibly the most extended discussion

6 The characterization of On Certainty as a ‗single sustained treatment‘ is also challenged by van Gennip (2008, pp. 54-58), who draws attention to remarks from MSS 169-171, as well as others from over a decade earlier, which bear upon the themes addressed in the book but were not selected by the editors for inclusion.

89

in the secondary literature of the notion of a work in Wittgenstein.7 He points

out that the standards one applies in evaluating this question should be

shaped by an understanding of Wittgenstein‘s writing process. After filling

notebooks with first-draft remarks, Wittgenstein would often identify a

selection of these remarks, rearrange them, and then edit them individually

in an attempt to product an organic text. This revision process was

performed to greater or lesser degrees on a number of texts. Rather than

lay down a number of necessary conditions that must be fully satisfied for a

piece of writing to count as a work, Schulte suggests that one consideration

we should take into account is where a text is situated within a range of

texts that are revised to different degrees. This is not the sole criterion to be

considered, for Schulte also suggests that a text can be considered a work to

the extent that Wittgenstein himself deemed it to count as an organic whole,

as well as the extent to which we the readers can discern a line of thought,

supplemented by examples, reasons, objections, and so on (Schulte 2005,

p. 361). These do not together form a set of conditions that must all be

satisfied, but rather are three fairly independent scales concerning the

author‘s attitudes, the reader‘s perceptions, and the form of the text itself

that ―must be weighed against each other because they may (but need not)

conflict‖ (Schulte 1999, p. 83).

7 See (Schulte 1992), (Schulte 1999), and (Schulte 2005).

90

Schulte shows how these criteria may be used by applying them to

three sections of Philosophical Investigations, viz. remarks 1-188, 189-421,

and 422-693 (Schulte 2005, p. 362). All three sections rank high on the

textual scale by having undergone significant revisions. The relative

obscurity of the third section, however, makes it certainly rank much lower

on the reader scale than section 2 (containing the discussions of rule-

following and private language), in which many readers have found a well-

discernable train of thought. But section 2 may satisfy the author criterion to

a lesser degree than section 1, which ―survived several stages of revision in

nearly unchanged form‖ (ibid.), indicating that Wittgenstein was probably

satisfied with the organization and presentation of this material.

Since no other text from the Nachlass satisfies the three criteria in a

comparable way to Philosophical Investigations, that text surely deserves

the title of ‗work‘, even if it does not fulfill all the criteria to the fullest

possible extent. We should now evaluate the text of On Certainty with

respect to these criteria. Surely these remarks rank very low on the textual

scale since they underwent no rearrangement or significant revision. All the

writings form 1949-1951 have a similar status, save possibly for the

remarks on color in MS 176 that underwent a first stage of revision. With

respect to the criterion of Wittgenstein‘s satisfaction with the form of his

writing, the remarks from spring 1949 to spring 1951 (including the revision

of the color remarks) clearly rank very low, since their quality was

91

consistently panned. Perhaps the remarks from the final half of On Certainty

rank somewhat higher on this scale since Wittgenstein indicates some

satisfaction with them, though they still constitute first-draft material that

surely would have satisfied him to a greater extent if they had been able to

undergo revision.

Schulte agrees that with respect to On Certainty, the criteria just

considered ―are clearly not satisfied at all,‖ though he points out that the

criterion concerning the reader‘s ability to trace a line of thought in the text

―may lead us to think very highly of this book‖ (Schulte 2005, p. 363). This,

indeed, appears to be the fundamental consideration driving Moyal-

Sharrock‘s claims about the status of the book:

I believe that On Certainty should be recognized as one of

Wittgenstein‘s three great works – if only because it gives us the key to one of philosophy‘s most intractable problems: the

problem of skepticism about the external world. (2005, p. 164)

While I am not concerned to contest the value of the philosophical solution

that is attributed to Wittgenstein, I do want to suggest that a text certainly

does not need to qualify as a work in order to contain important

philosophical ideas. When we separate our evaluation of the ideas found in

Wittgenstein‘s writings from the mostly historical task of determining

whether it qualifies as one of his works, we are still able to find value in

these texts without thereby distorting our picture of his intellectual

development.

92

The reader‘s perceptions are nevertheless an important consideration

in determining the status of a piece of Wittgenstein‘s writings, but our

historical investigations have made clear that perceptions of On Certainty as

a ‗sustained‘ or ‗intense‘ effort, or even as ―thematically more homogenous,

concentrated and contiguous‖ (Moyal-Sharrock 2009, p. 559) than

Philosophical Investigations are possible precisely because the structure of

the book is due to its editors. Had the final notebooks all been published

sequentially as a single volume, rather than split up by content into separate

publications, the descriptions above would not apply to such a book.8 This

suggests that even if our evaluation of On Certainty‘s contents lead us to

deem the book a work, it should not be considered one of Wittgenstein’s

works since those perceptions are very much dependent on a misleading

picture of how and what Wittgenstein actually wrote. As a comparison, if one

were to collect all of the remarks from Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass concerning,

say, the concept of negation, one might indeed produce a text that achieved

a striking thematic homogeneity and concentration. Such a text could very

well serve to illuminate certain aspects of Wittgenstein‘s philosophy, but it

surely would not count as one of his works.

Despite all of the considerations given here, I do not believe that the

editors‘ choice to publish On Certainty was a mistake, even though I take it

8 Stern argues that ―there is a good case‖ for producing such a volume, since ―there is a sense in which the 1949-51 manuscripts form a relatively self-contained epilogue to the Wittgenstein papers‖ (1996, p. 447).

93

to be an editorial compilation that does not constitute one of Wittgenstein‘s

works. For I agree with van Gennip that ―surely the choices of the editors

[were] not unreasonable or illogical‖ (van Gennip 2004, p. 129). When one

reads through Wittgenstein‘s final notebooks, the remarks selected by the

editors certainly appear to be thematically related, even if Wittgenstein did

not mark them off as a distinct or unified discussion.9 By isolating these

remarks, On Certainty gives us an illuminating perspective on Wittgenstein‘s

final thoughts. It should thus be welcomed as a posthumous Wittgenstein

publication, as long as readers are not led to believe that it offers a

privileged or authoritative perspective on Wittgenstein‘s final thoughts by

having been constructed according to editorial intentions clearly indicated in

his notebooks. The writings from Wittgenstein‘s Nachlass that deserve to be

published are not restricted to just his works, so it is not incumbent on his

editors to prove that the texts they produce achieve this special status.

9 There are a handful of remarks from MSS 169, 170, 171, and 173 that also strike one as related, but one can understand the editors‘ reluctance to include these in On Certainty since they tend to be less distinguishable and detachable from their surrounding contexts, and it is sometimes unclear where they fit in the sequence of remarks published in the book.

94

Chapter 4

Therapeutic Readings

A central component of the case for recognizing a third phase of

Wittgenstein‘s career is the claim that his final writings are characterized by

a shift from a therapeutic methodology to one that seeks systematic

theoretical solutions to traditional philosophical problems. In this chapter I

argue for a particular therapeutic reading of Philosophical Investigations, the

central text of the second Wittgenstein, to lay the groundwork for my claim

in the next chapter that Wittgenstein does not in fact abandon these

therapeutic methodological goals in his final writings. When we take

Wittgenstein as seriously engaged in this therapeutic project, unfamiliar yet

fascinating modes of criticism reveal themselves to be appropriate for

evaluating his philosophy.

Many of the selections from the Wittgenstein oeuvre that are most

quoted and discussed in the literature involve descriptions of the goals and

methods of his philosophical project. In these passages Wittgenstein denies

an intention to advance theses or make controversial assertions and instead

claims that his philosophical approach is comparable to a therapeutic

procedure. Incorporating these metaphilosophical remarks in an

interpretation of Wittgenstein‘s writing can prove difficult, for they seem to

undercut the possibility of applying the usual methods of philosophical

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critique. A significant number of interpreters of Wittgenstein‘s later

philosophy discount the seriousness of these remarks by describing

Wittgenstein as constructing theories, presenting arguments, arguing with

other philosophers, and solving philosophical problems. Construing

Wittgenstein‘s work as advancing arguments then sets the groundwork for

these readers to apply familiar forms of philosophical critique such as

argumentative analysis.

A smaller group of ‗therapeutic‘ readers has argued that Wittgenstein‘s

interpreters should take his methodological statements at face value and

read his work as advancing no philosophical theories. Many interpreters have

not found this option promising, for two main reasons. First, despite insisting

that Wittgenstein‘s work cannot be criticized for advancing faulty arguments

(for it purportedly contains no arguments at all), many interpretations from

therapeutic readers nevertheless appear to involve a number of controversial

philosophical theses, either by assuming these themselves or by attributing

them to Wittgenstein. This can give the impression that either Wittgenstein‘s

descriptions of therapy are an attempt to deflect legitimate criticism of his

work, or that his readers are using his metaphilosophical statements to

shield their own philosophical commitments from criticism. Second, readers

may reason that if Wittgenstein‘s work really does contain no arguments,

reasons, or controversial theses, then his writing offers nothing that can be

subjected to philosophical critique. Thus, if Wittgenstein‘s talk of therapeutic

96

methodology isn‘t really serious, as in the first case, then it serves merely as

a roadblock to rational philosophical critique; on the other hand, if the

methodological claims are true, then it appears that philosophical critique of

his work is not even possible. For these reasons, Wittgenstein's

metaphilosophical statements often don‘t influence how his readers interpret

the rest of his philosophical work.

In this chapter I offer a way to take Wittgenstein seriously as a

therapist while still allowing his work to be subject to legitimate critique. I

begin by giving a reading of Wittgenstein‘s methodological statements and

then applying them to one set of remarks in the Investigations. Even though

familiar modes of philosophical criticism are inappropriately applied when we

take Wittgenstein seriously as a therapist, I argue that new methods of

critique are possible if we attempt to evaluate Wittgenstein‘s therapy on its

own terms. A brief comparison with Freud suggests two perspectives that

one might adopt in relation to Wittgenstein‘s therapy: the patient and the

observer. The project of identifying multiple voices in Wittgenstein‘s writing

is then presented as one of the observer‘s descriptive tasks, and finally some

of the observer‘s possible modes of critique are explored.

Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic methodology stems from his unique

description of philosophical problems:

A philosophical problem has the form: ‗I don‘t know my way about‘. (PI 123)

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This strikes one immediately as an unusual way of formulating a problem.

Why, we might ask, does this formulation characterize a particular person‘s

situation, rather than describe a logical or conceptual difficulty that anyone

is free to reflect on? For that is the form that philosophical problems are

ordinarily taken to have, and responses to such problems typically come by

way of philosophical theories or explanations of the notions in question. Yet

Wittgenstein characterizes a philosophical problem as a statement which

essentially expresses the speaker’s own confusion and disorientation. Of

course, ―I don‘t know my way about‖ is not what the philosopher actually

says when discussing a philosophical problem, but this is Wittgenstein‘s

description of what a philosopher‘s concerns about a philosophical problem

display about the philosopher himself.

By focusing his attention on philosophers in the grip of a problem

rather than the abstract characterizations of those problems themselves,

Wittgenstein is surely engaged in something quite unlike the traditional

philosophical enterprise. His own project characterizes philosophical

problems as symptoms of a philosopher‘s state of confusion.1 The goal of his

philosophical project, then, is not to solve philosophical problems, but rather

to treat them, i.e. to attempt to cure the philosopher of the unease which

reveals itself in the symptom of obsession over certain philosophical

problems:

1 For detailed elaborations of the notions of ‗illness‘ most appropriate for Wittgenstein‘s project, see (Fischer 2004) and (Kuusela 2008).

98

The philosopher‘s treatment of a question is like the treatment of

an illness. (PI 255)

Wittgenstein is not here offering a radical reinterpretation of what

philosophers have been doing for thousands of years; instead he is

prescribing how his unique philosophical project is to proceed.

The philosophical problems of concern to Wittgenstein often arise, he

claims, from our making unreasonable demands upon our concepts and

languages. For example, concepts and their logical interrelations are often

taken to have an absolute fixed structure or ―crystalline purity‖ (PI 107) that

admits of no vagueness or indeterminacy. And when struggling with

conceptual problems in philosophy, we often attempt to resolve our

difficulties by, as it were, revealing the true natures of these concepts

through a process of analysis. Yet we discover that the terms of our

everyday language are ill-suited for this analytical task due to their

indeterminacies. This roadblock can lead to intense frustration with the

crudeness of natural language, indeed it can put us on the road to

wondering how our radically insufficient language could at all possibly

succeed in serving the needs of communication and representation:

When we believe that we have to find that order, the ideal, in

our actual language, we become dissatisfied with what are

ordinarily called ―sentences‖, ―words‖, ―signs‖. (PI 105)

The more closely we examine actual language, the greater

becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. (PI 107)

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We are particularly apt to run into these problems when we attempt to

reflect on conceptual essences, divorced from the contingencies of how their

corresponding terms are put to use in particular circumstances:

The confusions which occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing work. (PI 132)

So naturally, one way of resolving these problems is to draw our attention to

the details of how language manages to function in our everyday activities,

and thereby ―bring words back from their metaphysical to their

everyday use‖ (PI 116).

Under a traditional conception of philosophical problems, the natural

philosophical response to a problem will be an attempt to solve it by

advancing new theories, and one might think that Wittgenstein‘s resolution

of these dilemmas would involve articulating a theory of language. Yet

surprisingly he claims that

taking care of a philosophical problem is not a matter of

pronouncing new truths about the subject of the investigation. (BT p. 307)

If the goal of Wittgenstein‘s project is not to try to convince a philosopher of

the truth of particular propositions, then the ―difficulty of philosophy‖ is not

that of changing our opinions, but rather ―the difficulty of a change of

attitude‖ (BT p. 300). Strikingly, success in this endeavor is not found in

answering a question, but in making it go away:

Philosophical problems should completely disappear. (PI 133)

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This result is to be achieved by ―marshalling recollections for a particular

purpose‖ (PI 127), drawing our attention to general facts about the

functioning of our language that are obvious but not often reflected upon

due to their mundaneness:

One can be obsessed by a certain language form… A

philosophical trouble is an obsession, which once removed it

seems impossible that it should ever have had power over us. It seems trivial. (Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 97-8)

Wittgenstein‘s project is thus successful to the extent that philosophical

problems are dissolved away. This technique is performed on a philosopher,

rather than on a problem understood abstractly:

Suppose someone said ‗My craving is to get a general

comprehensive picture of the universe. Can you satisfy this craving?‘ I would say ‗No‘…Let us see whether doing such and

such, or thinking such and such a way will, not satisfy the

craving, but make you cease to have it. (Ambrose 1989, p. 109)

Thus a philosophical problem is solved when the philosopher is simply no

longer captivated by it, and not when he comes to achieve a certain insight

– not even an insight about the nature of the previously captivating problem.

I claim then that Wittgenstein‘s philosophical goals truly are best

characterized as therapeutic and anti-theoretical, for they aim to eliminate

the problems of philosophers, and not to solve philosophical problems.

Wittgenstein‘s person-specific therapeutic endeavor is thus most

appropriately evaluated by the degree to which it succeeds in helping

particular philosophers let go of particular philosophical obsessions.

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We can see Wittgenstein putting this method into practice in his

discussion of ostensive definition in the early remarks of Philosophical

Investigations. When learning a foreign language the first words one tends

to begin with are simple nouns such as ‗house‘, ‗car‘, or ‗book‘. Upon

reflection, we notice that these names are also the kinds of words first

learned by children in their native language. We may then come to think

that names are the fundamental components of any language, and thus

―that learning language consists in giving names to objects‖ (PI 26). In

teaching language to children we usually convey these names through

pointing, i.e. via ostension. We may thereby come to believe that ostensive

definition is the fundamental act on which the words of our language depend

for their meaning. Yet reflection on the idea of ostension may lead us to

worry that it is not sufficiently precise to securely fix the meanings of our

terms:

Now, one can ostensively define a person‘s name, the name of a

colour, the name of a material, a number-word, the name of a

point of the compass, and so on. The definition of the number

two, ―That is called ‗two‘‖ – pointing to two nuts – is perfectly

exact. – But how can the number two be defined like that? The person one gives the definition to doesn‘t know what it is that

one wants to call ―two‖; he will suppose that ―two‖ is the name

given to this group of nuts! —– He may suppose this; but

perhaps he does not. He might make the opposite mistake: when I want to assign a name to this group of nuts, he might

take it to be the name of a number. And he might equally well

take a person‘s name, which I explain ostensively, as that of a

colour, of a race, or even of a point of the compass. That is to say, an ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in any

case. (PI 28)

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The possibility that this particular case of ostension might not succeed led us

to question whether ostension is determinate at all, since it seems that any

act of pointing can be misinterpreted. Suddenly ostension appears to be an

extremely poor foundation for our language, and we may begin to think it

miraculous that successful communication is even possible.

The clever philosopher will notice a way to eliminate the ambiguity of

ostension. When pointing to an object and giving a name, we can make our

meaning precise by indicating the category of thing being named. Thus the

potential confusion resulting from saying ‗round‘ while pointing to a balloon,

and then saying ‗red‘ while pointing to the same object, can be prevented by

using either the phrase ‗this shape is round‘ or ‗this color is red‘. We may

then come to think of this as how ostension truly works – the act of pointing

accompanied by a name and a category-determination. Yet further reflection

reveals that this added term may be just as ambiguous as the one it is being

used to clarify:

Perhaps someone will say, ―two‖ can be ostensively defined only

in this way: ―This number is called ‗two‘.‖ For the word ―number‖

here shows what place in language, in grammar, we assign to the word. But this means that the word ―number‖ must be

explained before that ostensive definition can be understood. –

The word ―number‖ in the definition does indeed indicate this

place – the post at which we station the word. And we can prevent misunderstandings by saying ―This colour is called so-

and-so‖, ―This length is called so-and-so‖, and so on. That is to

say, misunderstandings are sometimes averted in this way. But

does one have to take the words ―colour‖ and ―length‖ in just this way? – Well, we‘ll just have to explain them. Explain, then,

by means of other words! And what about the last explanation in

this chain? (Don‘t say: ―There isn‘t a ‗last‘ explanation.‖ That is

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just as if you were to say: ―There isn‘t a last house in this road;

one can always build an additional one.‖) (PI 29)

We thus appear to be forced into the head-spinning conclusion that our

language may be entirely indeterminate since it rests on such feeble

foundations. We may then valiantly try to save ostension by coupling it with

some other process of determining meaning, e.g. a mental act like intention,

but this too will likely leave us unsatisfied.

Right where we would expect Wittgenstein to solve this problem by

proceeding with a thorough investigation of the foundational mechanisms

that determine the meaning of our terms, we instead find the following

reply:

Whether the word ‗number‘ is necessary in an ostensive

definition of ‗two‘ depends on whether without this word the

other person takes the definition otherwise than I wish. And that

will depend on the circumstances under which it is given, and on the person I give it to.

And how he ‗takes‘ the explanation shows itself in how he uses

the word explained. (PI 29)

The philosopher intensely caught up in this metaphysical problem might find

such a response surprising. After all, what Wittgenstein says here is so

obvious that one wouldn‘t usually think to even utter it. Whether I need to

clarify my attempt at ostension with a category-term of course depends on a

number of mundane considerations such as the external circumstances

surrounding the act and the other person‘s ability to understand me. And

how he goes on to use the word I‘ve just taught him will show if he has

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understood correctly. If he has misunderstood, then I will make further

attempts to clarify my utterance, but if a number of further attempts are

unsuccessful I may simply come to the conclusion that he isn‘t able to

understand me. This may lead me to have a low opinion of his intellect, but

it certainly won‘t make me question whether the words of my language have

any determinate meaning whatsoever.

Wittgenstein thus does not attempt to solve this metaphysical problem

by articulating a philosophy of language, but rather tries to effect a change

in attitude in the philosopher. If the therapy is successful, then after being

confronted with these mundane facts about how our language actually

works, the philosopher will probably consider the problem to be so ill-

conceived and uninteresting that it deserves no further attention. The

philosopher will thus not come to a stage of enlightenment after

encountering some philosophical insight imparted on him by Wittgenstein,

but rather brought back to a healthy state of mind in which one does not

even recognize the problem. That is, if the therapy is successful. There is

nothing in Wittgenstein‘s remarks, e.g. no deductive argument, that compels

the philosopher to abandon his interest in the metaphysical problem.

Wittgenstein‘s therapy will either work or it will not, and we will have to

evaluate it according to its results.

Therapeutic readings like the one outlined above have encountered a

certain amount of resistance. This may be because Wittgenstein‘s readers

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have been suspicious of his claims to not be advancing any controversial

theses. Such claims might be read as an attempt to place a set of

philosophical commitments beyond dispute. One certainly gets the

impression of this possibility from certain passages in Gordon Baker‘s later

work:

…Wittgenstein was fully aware of the inclination among philosophers to dispute the correctness of ‗identifying‘ thinking

with operating with signs. He made clear why he did not give

way to these objections: having asserted nothing at all (even

about how ‗think‘ is used), he had nothing to surrender or withdraw….his slogan [‗Belief is calculating with signs‘] (like his

strategy) is logically immune to refutation. (Baker 2004, p. 169)

...most of the discussions that try to refute or rebut

Wittgenstein‘s ‗theory‘, as well as most of those that try to

defend it against attack, are misconceived. There is literally nothing to attack – as being incorrect. And nothing to defend –

as being an accurate description of the grammar of our

language. To engage in these controversies is already to take

Wittgenstein‘s philosophical investigations in the wrong spirit. (ibid., p. 276)

Peter Hacker finds such passages concerning, for they appear to prohibit any

potential critical engagement with Wittgenstein‘s texts:

If one reads Wittgenstein as Baker did in his last writings, the

figure that emerges is indeed secure from criticism…His

philosophical position is completely immune to counter

argument. (2007, p. 116)

The fact that interpreting Wittgenstein as engaged in a therapeutic project

can easily lead to shielding his work from all criticism (whether intentionally

or not) makes such readings even more suspect when one considers that

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most therapeutic readers are also advocates of Wittgenstein‘s project.2 This

imbalance creates a conflict of interest by which therapeutic readers can

make their descriptions of Wittgenstein‘s project, which often appear to

include a number of controversial philosophical theses, exempt from critique.

At the same time, many readers who are critical of Wittgenstein tend to read

him as advancing theses. This dichotomy needs to be broken. It must be

possible to take Wittgenstein seriously as engaging in therapy and still leave

open the possibility for legitimate critique of his project.

Such a stance is possible if we take Wittgenstein‘s metaphilosophical

statements not to be true descriptions of how his project fares in all cases,

but rather as standards and goals that he hopes his best efforts will meet.

That is, Wittgenstein‘s description of his philosophical project as advancing

no controversial theses and resulting in the complete disappearance of

problems and cravings should not be read as describing what his efforts

have in fact achieved, but instead as describing what he hopes they will be

able to achieve. The observer will then have the latitude to criticize

Wittgenstein in those instances when these ideals aren‘t met. Certainly some

such instances should be able to be found, for Wittgenstein once confessed

to Rush Rhees that he was not meeting one of his philosophical ideals: ―In

2 Indeed, Peterman (1992), Savickey (1999), Fischer (2011), and Read and Hutchinson

(2010) all attempt not just to explain and illuminate Wittgenstein‘s later method, but also advocate a therapeutic conception of philosophy. And as Glock notes of one group of therapeutic readers of the Tractatus, ―the New Wittgensteinians not only ascribe [therapeutic] views to Wittgenstein, they also subscribe to them. They endorse the austere conception of nonsense‖ (2007, p. 56).

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my book I say that I am able to leave off with a problem in philosophy when

I want to. But that‘s a lie; I can‘t‖ (Hallett 1977, p. 230).

When reading Wittgenstein‘s writing one is often unsuccessful in trying

to discern and follow a train of thought or an argument. Wittgenstein

sometimes suggests that this is simply due to the nature of the philosophical

problems, for the complicated confusions of philosophical obsession require

complicated resolutions:

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its result must be simple, but its activity as complicated as the knots it

unravels. (BT p. 311)

Despite this remark, many readers view the complicated structure of

Wittgenstein‘s Investigations as a symptom of his failure to compose a

philosophical treatise in the standard fashion.3 Other commentators have

argued that Wittgenstein‘s claim to not be advancing theses is merely an

attempt to avoid criticism.4 Such commentators assign themselves the job of

locating the actual philosophical theses lurking beneath the roundabout

language of the Philosophical Investigations:

Wittgenstein‘s writings seem to me not only summarizable but in positive need of summary…it [is not] true that Wittgenstein‘s

writings contain no systematically expressible theories, for

indeed they do. It is the difference between what Wittgenstein

says and the way he says it which is relevant here; the fact that his later writings are unsystematic in style does not mean that

they are unsystematic in content. In both his ‗early‘ and ‗late‘

work Wittgenstein puts forward certain key theses, with relations

of logical dependence between them, which can be discerned,

3 See e.g. (Glock 2007).

4 For example (Kripke 1982, pp. 69-70).

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stated, and explained just as with any philosophical theory.

(Grayling 1988, pp. v-vi)

The theory has an identifiable structure and content, even if neither, in their turn, are as transparently stated and as fully

spelled out as they might be. And a good deal of the difficulty

with Wittgenstein‘s work is that this theory is not presented as

such, since it is not officially meant to be there at all – it emerges in bits and pieces, in an ad hoc way, and therefore its

crucial conceptions are left unclear and often unargued.

(Grayling 1988, p. 118)

Wittgenstein was no less systematic than Kant, even if his aphoristic style and method of exposition was not linear. (Hacker

2001, p. 342)

Such an approach to Wittgenstein‘s work is unsatisfactory, for it requires

that we characterize Wittgenstein as either systematically violating his

metaphilosophical standards willingly, and thus misleading us about his

project‘s real goals, or violating them unwillingly, and therefore being

seriously deluded about the actual nature of his project. A therapeutic

reading, in contrast, can give us a more plausible understanding of

Wittgenstein‘s methods and intentions.

If we take Wittgenstein as a systematic philosopher advancing theses

in response to traditional philosophical questions, we are likely to find some

of his answers disappointing, since we are bound to find few or no

arguments given in their support. After studying Wittgenstein‘s works in this

manner, one commentator laments that ―Wittgenstein‘s later philosophy is

not as it stands persuasive‖ (Grayling 1988, p. 111). But Wittgenstein claims

that his goal is not to persuade others to adopt particular positions. The

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purpose of Wittgenstein‘s project is to cure, even when it appears that

Wittgenstein is advancing theses:

We are interested in language only insofar as it gives us trouble.

I only describe the actual use of a word if this is necessary to

remove some trouble we want to get rid of. Sometimes I describe its use if you have forgotten it. Sometimes I have to lay

down new rules because new rules are less liable to produce

confusion or because we have perhaps not thought of looking at

the language we have in this light. Thus we may make use of the facts of natural history and describe the actual use of a word; or

I may make up a new game for the word which departs from its

actual use, in order to remind you of its use in our own

language. The whole point is that I cannot tell you anything about the natural history of language, nor would it make any

difference if I could. (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 97)

Wittgenstein frequently states that he is not engaged in traditional theory-

driven philosophy, but rather in a form of therapy that attempts to rid us of

certain philosophical inclinations. This therapy, he claims, does not advance

theses, but aims to change the attitude of the patient. Having just seen the

results of applying familiar modes of philosophical critique to Wittgenstein‘s

project, I now suggest that we instead critique Wittgenstein by his own

standards – that we evaluate the degree to which he succeeds in achieving

his stated goals.5

When we take Wittgenstein‘s descriptions of therapy seriously as

criteria for the success of his philosophical project, then we must apply the

interpretive principle of charity to the text in an unfamiliar manner. Since

this principle admonishes us to characterize the philosopher in question as

5 For an example of how to take Wittgenstein‘s methodological statements seriously and still

engage in legitimate and responsible critique of his therapeutic project, see (Maddy 2011), which also includes critiques of the therapeutic philosophies of Kant, Carnap, and Austin.

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having the strongest and most reasonable possible defense of his position,

administering this policy with respect to a philosophical text usually involves

reconstructing arguments that lack clarity and rectifying enthymematic

reasoning.6 Peter Carruthers has argued that ―in interpreting Wittgenstein –

as any great philosopher – the principle of charity is, and must be, the

fundamental principle of interpretation‖ and that following this principle

leads to an ―obligation…to attempt to supply arguments that might explain

why he says the things that he does‖ (Carruthers 1984, p. 477). But this

manner of applying the principle cannot be appropriate if we understand

Wittgenstein‘s philosophical project as guided by therapeutic standards, for

we would quite uncharitably characterize Wittgenstein as constantly failing in

his attempt to abstain from advancing arguments. To take Wittgenstein

seriously as a therapist is to apply the principle of charity in such a manner

that 1) he is not characterized as being intentionally misleading, i.e. willfully

using therapy as a smokescreen to protect his philosophical commitments

from criticism, and 2) he is not characterized as being deluded, i.e. believing

that his project is therapeutic when it is actually of a very different

character.

Applying the principle of charity to a therapeutic reading of

Wittgenstein‘s project does not, however, entail that his therapeutic

endeavors must always be characterized as fully succeeding in achieving

6 Recall Morris‘ claim (quoted in the introduction) that to abandon this interpretive maxim is to forgo a philosophical history of philosophy.

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their desired goals or adhering to their ideal methodology. This is where the

observer is able to find legitimate grounds to critique Wittgenstein‘s work.

This is not the critique of a positive philosophical system, but rather the

critique of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project as therapy. There are several

modes of evaluation open to the observer, though the legitimate avenues of

criticism sharply differ from that of traditional philosophical critique.

Wittgenstein suggests that his approach to philosophy can be thought

of as something like psychotherapy:

There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed

methods, like different therapies. (PI 133)

While Wittgenstein certainly didn‘t model his procedure on psychoanalysis,

aspects of his philosophical project can be illuminated through comparison

with some of Freud‘s descriptions of the therapeutic process.7 For example,

neither the psychoanalyst nor Wittgenstein intend to state opinions or assert

theses in the process of their treatment. The psychoanalyst treats the

patient‘s neuroses by questioning the patient about how he feels and thinks,

not by telling the patient what he thinks or should think:

7 Read and Hutchinson argue for a closer analogy between Wittgenstein‘s method and Freudian psychoanalysis than I do, highlighting Wittgenstein‘s observance that ―a psycho-

analysis is successful only if the patient agrees to the explanation offered by the analyst‖ (Moore 1955, p. 21) and claiming ―Wittgenstein held that the same was true of philosophy‖ (Read and Hutchinson 2010, p. 158 n. 9). While Wittgenstein did write in the early 30s that ―we can only prove that someone made a mistake if he (really) acknowledges this expression as the correct expression of his feeling‖ (BT p. 303), I think that the above statement about Freud isn‘t exactly analogous to the procedure in Philosophical Investigations, since Wittgenstein there claims not to offer any explanations or to request assent to any controversial statements.

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Psycho-analysis follows the technique of getting the people

under examination so far as possible themselves to produce the

solution of their riddles. (Freud 1920, p. 123)

Likewise, Wittgenstein‘s treatment does not consist in suggesting an answer

to the question that is puzzling the philosopher:

On all questions we discuss I have no opinion; and if I had, and

it disagreed with one of your opinions, I would at once give it up

for the sake of argument because it would be of no importance

for our discussion. (Wittgenstein 1979, p. 97)

Rather, his treatment involves probing the philosopher to reveal the nature

of his own captivation with a philosophical problem. Thus Wittgenstein does

not argue with the philosopher in his treatment,8 but instead provokes him;

indeed ―one could teach philosophy solely by asking questions‖ (ibid.). Yet

as Freud realized, patients aren‘t always willing to be entirely forthcoming in

the therapeutic process. Some even come to resent the therapist and his

methods:

The work of interpreting dreams is carried out in the face of a

resistance, which opposes it and of which…critical objections are

manifestations. (Freud 1920, pp. 141-2)

Wittgenstein, too, understands that philosophers will resist his technique, for

―this sort of investigation is…very much against the grain of some of you‖

(Wittgenstein 1975, p. 103).

8 While the presence of arguments can certainly be detected in the Investigations, they are

intended to serve as an instrument of therapy, rather than a vehicle for convincing one to assent to a conclusion. And due to Wittgenstein‘s use of multiple voices in dialogue, even when arguments are identified one cannot thereby automatically attribute them to Wittgenstein himself. This issue is addressed later in the chapter.

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I contend that if we take Wittgenstein‘s philosophy to be therapeutic,

two perspectives open themselves for approaching Wittgenstein‘s work. Due

to the unusual nature of Wittgenstein‘s project, these perspectives are quite

different from our usual understanding of the philosophical commentator and

critic. Applying the comparison between Wittgenstein‘s philosophy and

Freud‘s therapy, we can understand the target of Wittgenstein‘s philosophy

as the patient, and Wittgenstein as the therapist. The patient is the intended

reader of the Philosophical Investigations. Another perspective is that of an

outside observer of the dialogue between Wittgenstein and the patient.

The observer‘s task is to accurately describe Wittgenstein‘s project and

methods. Her reports resemble what a therapist‘s superior might produce in

an employment evaluation: she describes what the therapist takes to be

illnesses, his methods for diagnosing them, and his techniques for treating

those illnesses. She also evaluates the effectiveness of his therapeutic

method and provides suggestions for improvement. The observer reports on

what the therapist says and how the patient responds to these treatments.

Her focus is on what techniques work, i.e. what therapeutic methods cause

the patient to exhibit fewer symptoms.9

The perspectives of patient and observer are quite different. One

adopts the perspective of the patient by directly engaging with the text of

Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein‘s most developed attempt to make

9 An interesting related investigation is found in (Cunning 2010), where Descartes‘ pedagogical procedures in the Meditations are described and evaluated.

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his work accessible to the public. Unlike a historian of philosophy, the patient

is not particularly concerned to reconstruct Wittgenstein‘s thought or

characterize its development, but to, as it were, participate in a direct

discussion with Wittgenstein by working carefully through his text. However,

one adopts the standpoint of the observer when one wishes to describe and

evaluate Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project. Neither of these perspectives

resemble the stance of a traditional philosophical commentator, whose

customary job is to explicate or reconstruct a philosopher‘s arguments. If

Wittgenstein is truly a therapist, then such an approach is not applicable to

his work, since he claims to ―not advance any kind of theory‖ (PI 109). If no

theses are available for explication, then one can only become acquainted

with Wittgenstein‘s philosophy either by experiencing the therapy first-hand

as a patient or by describing it as a neutral observer.

This distinction between the patient and the observer may help to

resolve a current debate in the Wittgenstein literature over what methods

should be used in the interpretation of the Investigations. ‗Contextual‘

readers often utilize outside sources in the interpretation of Wittgenstein‘s

texts; for example, they might trace the development of a particular

passage through its earlier versions, or consult notes from Wittgenstein‘s

lectures to better determine his intentions.10 Defenders of a ‗text-immanent‘

method have argued that we should limit our sources only to the text itself,

10 This approach is developed extensively in (Baker and Hacker 2005) and subsequent

volumes of the series.

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and thus that Wittgenstein‘s extra-textual intentions and the contexts of his

writing are irrelevant to the interpretation of the Investigations.11 Our

distinction shows that both methods can be appropriate, depending on one‘s

reason for approaching the Investigations. For the patient, the immanent

approach is certainly the most appropriate, because he needs to have the

therapy administered to him, and not to learn new truths about

Wittgenstein‘s project. But the contextual approach is right for the observer,

since Wittgenstein‘s intentions, goals, and variety of methods are the target

of her investigation.12

Part of the observer‘s task is to describe Wittgenstein‘s techniques for

dissolving various philosophical problems and explain how they work (or at

least, how they are intended to work).13 This descriptive project is certainly

not straightforward, for Wittgenstein only rarely announces what methods

are being applied (for indeed he is usually attempting to administer therapy;

not to give instruction on therapeutic method). One open project for the

observer is to describe the apparent use of multiple voices in the

Investigations and to explain how they are to contribute to Wittgenstein‘s

therapeutic project. While reading the text one often gets the sense that a

change in voice has taken place, but it is generally difficult to determine

what characters these voices are to be associated with, and particularly

11 The most fully-developed example of this approach is (von Savigny 1994-1996).

12 Further discussion of the relative merits of contextual and text-immanent readings, see

(von Savigny 1990), (Glock 1990), (Glock 2007), and (Pichler 2007). 13 Recent works that have taken on this descriptive project include (Savickey 1999) and

(Kuusela 2008).

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difficult to determine which voice, if any, is Wittgenstein‘s own. Some

readers suggest that two voices appear in the Investigations. In one such

reading the patient is thought to identify herself with the voice expressing

philosophical theses, and to identify Wittgenstein with the voice expressing

dismissal of such theses:

The interlocutor‘s voice…expresses our desire for explanation and succumbs to the traps that our language presents,…while

the therapeutic voice works against these inclinations by

examining concrete examples as a means to achieving a new

way of looking at things. (McGinn 1997, pp. 23-4)

On this reading the two voices are those of the patient and Wittgenstein

themselves; thus, this reading characterizes therapy as consisting of a direct

dialogue between Wittgenstein and the patient.

David Stern has challenged the two-voice reading, suggesting that the

Investigations has three voices14, and that Wittgenstein‘s actual voice is

rarely heard:

Two different voices…are usually lumped together as ‗Wittgenstein‘s‘. On the one hand we have the voice of

Wittgenstein‘s narrator – who does argue for positive

philosophical theses – and on the other hand we have

Wittgenstein‘s commentator…who dismisses philosophical problems and compares his way of doing philosophy to therapy.

(2004, p. 5)

Readers are too ready to identify the author‘s viewpoint with

whatever conclusions the reader attributes to Wittgenstein‘s

narrator, and so fail to take account of the overall character of the book. At the very least, a careful reader must be aware that

14 These two approaches do not exhaust all the possibilities of locating voices in the

Investigations. Pichler (1997) argues for a ‗polyphonic‘ reading of the Investigations that identifies a large number of unique voices.

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the author‘s use of certain arguments does not amount to an

endorsement of them. (ibid., p. 186)

Stern brings up an important problem that must be addressed: Wittgenstein

claims to not be asserting philosophical theses, yet some of the voices of the

Investigations certainly appear to be engaged in proposing, refuting, and

adopting theses. This tension can be relieved by recalling that Wittgenstein

claims to have no opinion on the judgments that he puts forth. The point is

for the patient to take the claims as serious judgments, not the therapist. So

the observer needs to account for the interesting fact that Wittgenstein

intends to relieve the patient of his desire to philosophize by engaging him in

something that looks very much like a philosophical discussion. Stern‘s

three-voice interpretation provides one way of resolving such a tension:

This third voice, which is not always clearly distinct from the

narratorial voice, provides an ironic commentary on their exchanges, a commentary consisting partly of objections to

assumptions the debaters take for granted, and partly of

platitudes about language and everyday life they have both

overlooked. Most readers treat both of these voices as expressions of ‗Wittgenstein‘s‘ view, with the result that they are

unable to reconcile the trenchant and provocative theses

advocated by the narrator and the commentator‘s rejection of all

philosophical theses. (Stern 2004, pp. 22-3)

Perhaps Wittgenstein engages the reader in philosophical argument only to

later bring her to see that this very discussion is in certain ways

problematic.15

15 Another unexplored possibility might be that the patient isn‘t to identify with any of the voices in the text, but instead that the patient‘s experience of witnessing the various voices interacting is intended to somehow be therapeutic. Thus an open and interesting question for the observer is to explain how Wittgenstein utilizes voices in his therapeutic project.

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One important question the observer must answer is: Does

Wittgenstein‘s therapy work, i.e., are patients really cured from philosophical

impulses after undergoing Wittgenstein‘s treatment? There is certainly

evidence that his therapy has at times been successful. One of

Wittgenstein‘s former students recalled the following therapeutic experience:

The considerable difficulty in following the lectures arose from the fact that it was hard to see where all this often rather

repetitive concrete detailed talk was leading to – how the

examples were interconnected and how all this bore on the

problem which one was accustomed to put oneself in abstract terms. (Gasking and Jackson 1951, p. 51)

This much we should expect. The student, interested in solving traditional

philosophical problems, was confused about where Wittgenstein‘s

investigations were going, and found looking at tedious details to be

philosophically irrelevant and unsatisfying. But eventually a transformation

took place:

At first one didn‘t see where all the talk was leading to. One

didn‘t see, or saw only very vaguely, the point of the numerous examples. And then, sometimes, one did, suddenly. All at once,

sometimes, the solution to one‘s problem became clear and

everything fell into place…The solution, once seen, seemed so

simple and obvious, such an inevitable and simple key to unlock

so many doors so long battered against in vain. One wondered how one could possibly fail to see it. But if one tried to explain it

to someone else who had not seen it one couldn‘t get it across

without going through the whole long, long story. (ibid., p. 52)

This experience appears to meet some of the standards that Wittgenstein

sets for his therapeutic project. After suffering through Wittgenstein‘s

confusing technique, the student experienced an abrupt change in attitude

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(notice that Wittgenstein did not convince the student to change his attitude

– the student simply experienced the change). What had once appeared to

him as a complex, abstract, deep philosophical problem now seemed simple,

obvious, and superficial. The student‘s resolution did not result from having

received a philosophical answer to his question, for he was incapable of

explaining his change in attitude to other philosophers. If the result of the

therapy had been a philosophical thesis, the student could have simply told

his friends the answer. But he instead found himself needing to recount the

entire experience.

This is a nice example of how Wittgenstein‘s therapy can work, but the

last half-century of the history of philosophy has shown that such

experiences are uncommon. Relatively few philosophers have undergone the

transformations that Wittgenstein sought to effect in his patients while

reading the Investigations. To many Wittgenstein‘s text has seemed to only

insist that one should not be concerned with particular philosophical

problems, rather than successfully effect such a change in attitude in the

reader. Perhaps this is evidence that Wittgenstein was sometimes a

successful therapist in person, but that his therapy is less effective when

performed in print. This might be seen as a natural result of the person-

specific character of Wittgenstein‘s methods: in conversation Wittgenstein

can address the specific concerns of his interlocutor, while in print he can‘t

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take the each patient‘s specific cravings into account and thus must deal

with problems that not all readers suffer from.16

Wittgenstein states that his therapy involves no theses, and that the

result of his therapy should be the abandonment of certain philosophical

attitudes, but it should also leave our everyday practices as they are. So

patients successfully coming out of therapy should hold fewer significant

philosophical commitments than before the therapy began, and they

certainly should not hold new philosophical commitments as a result. We can

then evaluate whether Wittgenstein‘s therapy meets its own standards by

observing whether his treatment results in patients asserting new

philosophical theses. A simple internet search reveals a trend among some

thinkers who have engaged with Wittgenstein‘s writings:

Wittgenstein taught us that all linguistic behavior, indeed all

meaning activity, presupposes a social context in which common

practices, established intuitions, and consensual standards exist.

(Arrington 1985, p. 489)

As Wittgenstein taught us…being rational or reasonable is not

merely a matter of thinking in a certain manner but also a

matter of thinking certain things. (Kazepides 1989, p. 392)

As Wittgenstein taught us, the meaning of language is

determined by social speech habits…and not by the things which

16 Savickey argues that in Wittgenstein‘s methodology, ―emphasis is placed on the speaking

of language as part of an activity or form of life‖ (1999, p. 119), and thus that his therapeutic procedure is not well-suited for the medium of a printed book: ―Part of Wittgenstein‘s methodological difficulty, and part of his struggle in writing a philosophical book, involves whether or not it is possible to do what he is attempting to do in words and in writing. Is it possible, for example, to return language to its everyday context in a philosophy book? … Is it possible to de-textualize our understanding of language-use in a text? These questions and difficulties may help explain why Wittgenstein‘s later methods allow him to teach well but not to write a book‖ (ibid., p. 123).

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language can at best be made to refer to obliquely. (Munz 1990,

p. 137)

Wittgenstein has taught us that religious belief is indigenous to the religious community and can only be understood and seen as

meaningful from inside that distinctive or isolated language-

game and/or form or life. (High 1981, p. 262)

Wittgenstein has taught us that meaning and use are not separate things; the meaning of a word is compounded out of its

uses. (Kavka 1974, p. 1472)

If these thinkers have truly undergone Wittgensteinian therapy, then by

Wittgenstein‘s own lights his treatment has not succeeded, for these

thinkers all appear to hold new substantive philosophical theses about

language meaning, reference, rationality, and belief as a result of their

interaction with Wittgenstein‘s work. The observer is then tasked with

explaining how such theses manage to find their way into Wittgenstein‘s

therapeutic procedure. The principle of charity dictates that we not attribute

to Wittgenstein the intention to pass on these theses to his patients. But

they might surface in more subtle ways during the therapeutic process.

Perhaps some of the arguments presented during therapy manage to be

convincing to the patient, despite the therapist‘s intention not to use them to

advance any theses. Or maybe Wittgenstein doesn‘t realize that some of his

beliefs really are controversial philosophical theses, and he unwittingly

transmits these theses to the patient.17 Another possibility may be that the

17 The possibility that Wittgenstein may have unwittingly been committed to some

philosophical theses, despite his desire to avoid them, is suggested by Stroud: ―Wittgenstein from the very beginning of his work in the Tractatus was suspicious of, and later explicitly

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entire therapeutic project, while not intended to advance any theses in its

application, is itself underwritten by a number of controversial philosophical

commitments.18 This remains an open question for the observer.

One natural response to cases of patients leaving therapy with new

philosophical commitments, like those mentioned above, might be to argue

that these thinkers did not undergo Wittgenstein‘s therapy correctly. One

could cite quotations, such as the following from Wittgenstein‘s lectures,

implying that those who assert ―meaning is use‖ have misunderstood

Wittgenstein‘s intention:

The question has been raised how far my method is the same as what is called description of meaning by exemplification. That

sounds as if I had invented a method, a means of giving a

meaning which is just as good as definition. The point of

examining the way a word is used is not at all to provide another

method of giving its meaning. When we ask on what occasions people use a word, what they say about it, what they are right to

substitute for it, and in reply try to describe its use, we do so

only insofar as it seems helpful in getting rid of certain

philosophical troubles. (Wittgenstein 1979, pp. 96-7)

Such thinkers might very well be misunderstanding Wittgenstein‘s intention

in associating meaning and use. But patients who come away from therapy

set against, the whole idea of a philosophical theory of a philosophical proposition. That alone does not mean that he managed to avoid them completely, of course‖ (1982, p. 79). 18 In a recent interpretation and defense of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project, Kuusela

argues that ―the roots of Wittgenstein‘s conception of philosophy might be said to lie in his

emphasis on the difference between true or false factual statements and expressions of exceptionless necessity‖ (2008, p. 3) and that ―Wittgenstein characterizes the failure to distinguish between these two kinds of sentences as the central confusion and unclarity of philosophy‖ (ibid., p. 294). But this distinction is a philosophical one that is rarely drawn in everyday contexts, and how exactly it should be characterized (or indeed if such a distinction should be made at all) is a matter of philosophical controversy. This reading thus identifies a controversial philosophical commitment as the foundation of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project.

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with this misunderstanding can‘t be faulted for coming to this belief. Such a

criticism would confuse the independent perspectives of the patient and the

observer. While Wittgenstein‘s above methodological justification for

attending to word use is available to the observer, the patient can‘t and

shouldn‘t be expected to know this or any other piece of information on how

Wittgenstein intends for his method to function. A psychotherapist does not

preface the administration of her therapy with a lesson on psychological

theory; likewise, knowledge about how Wittgenstein‘s procedure is supposed

to function cannot be required for a successful application of the therapy.

Otherwise, only observers could be successful patients.

Finally, the observer may legitimately criticize Wittgenstein for his

views about therapy and his decision to be a therapist in the first place.

While Wittgenstein claims not to hold substantive theses, it is clear that his

method is based on a certain conception of what counts as a philosophical

illness. But this conception is not up for critical evaluation; it is assumed and

not argued for. For this reason Glock accuses Wittgenstein of succumbing to

―the myth of mere method…the illusion that one can fashion philosophical

methods in a presuppositionless manner‖ (2007, p. 59).19

One might also legitimately employ a moral critique of Wittgenstein‘s

choosing to adopt the role of a therapist in the first place. Certainly Freud

and his descendants of psychoanalysts have received plenty of legitimate

19 Similarly, Hintikka (1996) argues that Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project is based on a

controversial assumption that language cannot represent itself.

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criticism over the years. A therapist can diagnose the patient‘s illness and

engage in therapy without keeping the patient informed about what he is

doing, refuse to honestly give his opinion if the patient requests it, or

determine that any patient who displays ‗resistance‘ is in denial, thus

preventing the patient from being able to critically evaluate the therapeutic

process. To the extent that Wittgenstein‘s project has these characteristics,

and the above concerns are legitimate, one might likewise criticize

Wittgensteinian therapy.

We have identified a number of new and interesting modes of critique

available to the observer of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic project. If we take

Wittgenstein seriously as a therapist, then our job as critics should not be to

describe and evaluate a body of philosophical theses, but rather to describe

the methods of his therapy and evaluate their effectiveness. One final task

of the observer we have not discussed is to suggest improvements on

Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic methods. This might be a particularly fruitful task

for those readers who identify themselves as ‗Wittgensteinians‘ and wish to

carry on his legacy, for one can then view Wittgenstein‘s work as a resource

of attempted therapies – some successful, some not – that can be learned

from and improved upon. Rather than constructing defenses of

Wittgenstein‘s work as actually practiced, these philosophers might best

serve his legacy by doing his work – and better.

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Chapter 5

Theory and Therapy in On Certainty

From our investigation in Chapter 1 of the fluctuations in both

Wittgenstein‘s capacity for philosophical work in his final years and his

evaluation of those attempts, as well as the effort in Chapter 2 to date his

writings with respect to these fluctuations, we were able to conclude that On

Certainty divides itself into three parts, each associated with distinct phases

of Wittgenstein‘s self-assessment. The first part, comprised of remarks 1-65,

was dated to the fall of 1949, during or shortly after Wittgenstein‘s visit to

Norman Malcolm in Cornell. The composition of Part 2, comprised of remarks

66-299, was dated to 1950, a time when Wittgenstein repeatedly expressed

dissatisfaction with the results of his attempts at philosophical writing.

Remarks 300-676, making up Part 3, were all written in the spring of 1951,

when Wittgenstein expressed renewed satisfaction with his work and

optimism about its future development. Wittgenstein‘s writings from the fall

of 1949 precede his cancer diagnosis and the subsequent decline in his

work, though they still belong to the two years between the springs of 1949

and 1951, deemed in hindsight to have been less successful than his final

weeks.

According to the editors‘ preface to On Certainty, ―the material falls

into four parts‖, with divisions after remarks 65, 192, and 299. Anscombe

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and von Wright thus consider two parts to be included in what I have called

‗Part 2‘. This is because these remarks come from two separate notebook

sources, MSS 174 and 175.1 Yet their divisions are not consistently

determined by the distinct source manuscripts, since they count material

from MS 175 as comprising two different parts, while the final part is

comprised of four distinct blocks of continuous text drawn from three

separate manuscripts. Thus I believe that my consistent division of parts

according to their association with distinct phases of composition has better

support.

The structure of the book and its relation to Wittgenstein‘s phases of

working is not merely a philosophical or biographical curiosity, but a datum

that calls for explanation by interpreters of Wittgenstein‘s writings. That is, I

believe that a successful interpretation of On Certainty should point out what

characteristics are lacking in Part 2, exhibited in Part 3, and only partially or

unsatisfactorily exhibited in the Part 1 of the book, and then explain why

Wittgenstein himself would be satisfied or disappointed with the respective

exhibition or lack of these qualities in his work. This cannot be accomplished

if we read On Certainty as a work, because it lacks the cohesion, consistent

development, and author‘s intention normally associated with this notion, as

shown in Chapter 3. Consequently, in this chapter I treat the book as a

1 While the editors‘ placement of the entirety of the MS 175 remarks in On Certainty after those from MS 174 gives one the impression that the latter remarks were composed after the former, I argued in Chapter 2 that it is also conceivable that Wittgenstein drafted remarks in these notebooks concurrently, and thus that the temporal sequence of composition may be more complicated than initially thought.

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collection of thematically related texts spanning a series of composition

phases, thereby providing a reading of On Certainty that accounts for the

variety of its component parts.

In chapter 4 I argued that the metaphilosophical goals of the second

Wittgenstein should be understood as therapeutic and anti-theoretical in

character. Yet even when we attribute therapeutic goals to Wittgenstein, it is

important to distinguish between his methodological ideals and his actual

practice. Indeed, this is the key to taking Wittgenstein seriously as a

therapist while still leaving room to critically evaluate his project on its own

terms, for Wittgenstein did not always succeed in fulfilling his methodological

ideals.

The considerations of all the preceding chapters bear upon the reading

of On Certainty given here. My thesis is that many of the remarks in Part 3

of the book exhibit qualities that Wittgenstein desires in a therapeutic

philosophy, that Part 2 often fails to achieve these characteristics by

providing what appears to be a theoretical response to the philosophical

problems in question, and that Part 1 displays these qualities only to a

limited extent. This contrast is seen particularly when comparing

Wittgenstein‘s reactions to Moore‘s assertions of having basic items of

knowledge such as ‗here is a hand‘ or ‗I know that that‘s a tree.‘ Although in

Part 1 Wittgenstein announces his intentions to give a therapeutic response

to Moore, he tends to argue in Part 2 that Moore‘s statements are

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inappropriate because they are among a special class of propositions that,

according to the theory presented there, lack sense. However, in Part 3

Wittgenstein personally engages with Moore, attempting to lead Moore to a

frame of mind in which he does not feel compelled to make these

philosophical assertions by exploring a number of ways in which his

statements could be given an understandable non-philosophical use. In

these latter remarks Wittgenstein also begins to call his own prior theoretical

claims from Part 2 into question, wondering if – like Moore‘s statements –

the too in fact lack the determinate senses provided by everyday contexts.2

For Wittgenstein, a therapeutic response to a problem that succeeded

in allowing one to relinquish prior obsessions without taking on new

theoretical commitments was an achievement that was sought but not

always fulfilled in actual practice. Many of the well-known declarations of

Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic intentions were first formulated in the early

thirties, during the so-called ‗middle period‘ when he returned to Cambridge

to begin philosophical work once again. A number of these methodological

statements persisted through the thirties and found their way into the text

of Philosophical Investigations, even though some of the theories or proto-

2 This reading relies on my characterization of Wittgenstein as pursuing therapeutic

methodological ideals. But I want to leave open the possibility of other readers using the structure of On Certainty to develop alternative interpretations of the book. For no matter what characteristics interpreters believe that Wittgenstein hoped his most polished writings would achieve (and there is a wide range of opinions on this subject), I believe that their readings of On Certainty would benefit from comparing the remarks written in 1950 with those from 1951, trying to determine what characteristics the later material has that the earlier material lacks, and explaining why they believe Wittgenstein would think that the later work was of higher quality.

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theories adopted during this middle period were themselves submitted to

therapeutic treatment in that text.3 Philosophical Investigations thus did not

become a therapeutic text because Wittgenstein planned from the very

beginning for it to have the dialogical structure that it does. During multiple

stages of revision, additional voices would be added to the text – often

therapeutic voices attempting to undermine or deflate Wittgenstein‘s own

earlier dogmatic statements.4 Wittgenstein thus often became his own

therapeutic patient, for despite his oft-stated goal of bringing words back to

their everyday use, he often found himself caught up in metaphysical

theorizing.

This description of the development of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic

writings and his personal struggles with theory-avoidance may help to

explain why he was disappointed with the remarks in Part 2 of On Certainty.

Achieving a therapeutic resolution to a philosophical problem was often the

result of working through theoretical considerations, prompted either by

himself or by other philosophers who were to be subjected to treatment. The

muddled and sluggish cognition of which he complained after undergoing

hormone treatments for his cancer may have contributed to his inability to

move beyond his theoretical considerations in 1950 and find that therapeutic

voice he constantly sought. Since this voice finally makes an extended

3 E.g. see (Stern 1995) on Wittgenstein‘s adoption of an analogy between language and a system of rules, and his subsequent attempts to undermine this idea. 4 For this reason, therapeutic readings that portray the Tractatus as a book whose theories Wittgenstein had always intended to become destabilized by the end of the text do not in fact treat the book as having a structure comparable to Philosophical Investigations.

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appearance in the final part of On Certainty, the interpretation presented

here might be called a ‗therapeutic‘ reading of the book. But it is important

to note that this is not a reading of On Certainty as an intentionally

therapeutic ‗work‘, i.e. as having a structure that was planned an

implemented, for Part 2 was not intentionally written to serve as a setup for

Part 3.

It is equally important not to treat the individual parts of On Certainty

as if they were self-standing theoretical or therapeutic works. All of the

remarks in the book constitute first-draft material, so we should not expect

Wittgenstein‘s philosophical explorations to have either the thematic

consistency or structured organization of a revised text. It is certainly not

the case that nothing of a therapeutic character can be found in Part 2 and

that Part 3 is devoid of all theorizing. But according to my reading, the

remarks in Part 2 taken together lend themselves to a theoretical reading,

while Part 3 is characterized by the emergence of questions that bring the

stability of these theories into question, as well as a new approach to

Moore‘s knowledge-claims that is oriented around the speaker of those

utterances rather than an abstract characterization of the peculiar class of

propositions that they represent.

The text of On Certainty begins with a direct challenge to one of G.E.

Moore‘s most famous claims:

If you do know that here is one hand, we‘ll grant you all the rest.

(OC 1)

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This was the crucial premise of Moore‘s attempt to prove the existence of

the external world.5 By giving a statement, concerning the existence of a

particular external object, that he claimed to know with certainty, he thereby

claimed to have established the existence of external objects and thus that

of the external world. This, he contended, constituted a refutation of

external world skepticism. Most philosophers concerned with the problem of

skepticism found Moore‘s solution to be entirely unsatisfactory, charging him

with begging the question by simply reasserting a premise already

challenged by the skeptic and providing no additional proof of its truth.

Wittgenstein‘s extensive consideration of this and similar claims was

prompted by discussions with Norman Malcolm in the fall of 1949.6 Malcolm,

a former student of Moore‘s, had just recently published a unique criticism of

not only the premise of Moore‘s proof also a number of other common sense

propositions that he had claimed to know with certainty, e.g. ‗the earth had

existed for many years before my body was born.‘7 In this essay Malcolm

charged that Moore‘s use of the expression ‗I know‘ in making these

assertions was ―contrary to ordinary and correct use‖ (Malcolm 1949, p.

202), and was thus a misuse of language. Three necessary conditions for the

correct use of the expression ‗I know‘, which Moore‘s utterances failed to

satisfy, were identified by Malcolm (ibid, p. 203):

5 (Moore 1939) 6 It was not, however, the first time that Wittgenstein thought seriously about Moore‘s writings or attempted to form a response to them. See (van Gennip 2008) for a discussion of several philosophical encounters between Moore and Wittgenstein. 7 (Moore 1925)

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1) There is a question at issue and a doubt to be removed.

2) The person asserting a knowledge claim is able to give

supporting reasons.

3) The question at issue could be settled by carrying out some

investigation.

Malcolm‘s response can be characterized as a theoretical one, for it attempts

to alter Moore‘s behavior by getting him to assent to the controversial thesis

that sensible uses of language are determined by adherence to a number of

precise rules, and it also requires these rules to be systematically

catalogued.

Malcolm sent a copy of his article to Moore, who returned a critical

response in a letter that arrived around the same time that Wittgenstein

made his visit to Cornell. Wittgenstein read the article and Moore‘s response,

and participated in several discussions with Malcolm on their contents.

Moore protested against Malcolm‘s charges:

You wanted…to say that my use of that expression was a

―misuse‖ & ―incorrect‖ … But that I used it under circumstances

under which it would not ordinarily be used is no reason at all for saying I misused it or used it incorrectly, if, though this was so, I

was using it in the sense in which it is ordinarily used – was

using it to make the assertion which it is ordinarily used to

make. (Rothhaupt, Seery, and McManus 2003, p. 266)

The assertion made by a sentence, which Moore here identifies with its

sense, is characterized by the necessary and sufficient conditions under

which it is true (ibid, p. 265). Therefore, Moore argued, a consideration of

the conditions in which a statement is uttered should be entirely distinct

from a consideration of its sense. Under this understanding of senses as

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determined by truth-conditions, the meaning of a proposition is independent

of the uses to which it may ordinarily, correctly, or incorrectly be put. By

claiming of his utterance that he ―was using it in the ordinary sense, though

not under ordinary circumstances‖ (ibid., 266), Moore was thus relying on an

understanding of language that distinguishes meaning (or sense) from use.

Wittgenstein wrote Part 1 of On Certainty with these discussions about

Moore in mind. In these early remarks we see both theoretical and

therapeutic elements at work, and this is associated with Wittgenstein‘s

retrospective moderate dissatisfaction with the content of Part 1. While he

declares his intentions here to provide a therapeutic treatment of the

problems raised by Moore‘s statements, the few constructive attempts he

makes end up sharing some of the characteristics of Malcolm‘s theoretical

response.

In these early remarks Wittgenstein states a goal that is consistent

with his desire in Philosophical Investigations to eliminate ―confusions which

occupy us arise when language is, as it were, idling, not when it is doing

work‖ (PI 132):

The propositions which one comes back to again and again as if

bewitched--these I should like to expunge from philosophical

language. (OC 31)

Thus we expunge the sentences that don't get us any further.

(OC 33)

This objective of getting philosophers to abandon those propositions that

entrance us and thereby prevent progress in our endeavors should certainly

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be understood as a therapeutic one, for it is aimed at ―clearing up the

ground of language‖ (PI 118) that houses many philosophical stumbling

blocks. Notice that Wittgenstein‘s own characterizations of his goals don‘t

conform to the standard accounts of On Certainty. Wittgenstein does not

claim to be interested in a class of propositions with a peculiar logical status;

he is interested in certain propositions to the extent that they tend to

bewitch philosophers. He wishes not to characterize these propositions, but

rather to expunge them. And they should be removed from philosophical

language not because they display our ignorance of the structure of

language games, but simply because they aren‘t useful and don‘t get us any

further in our investigations.

A therapeutic procedure for bringing about this change in philosophical

language is also sketched in Part 1:

If we imagine the facts otherwise than as they are, certain

language-games lose some of their importance, while others become important. And in this way there is an alteration – a

gradual one – in the use of the vocabulary of a language. (OC

63)8

This non-theoretical technique of leading a philosopher to new perspectives

and ways of using language is described but not put into practice in Part 1.

Likewise, Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic statement of purpose to expunge

8 Cf. the procedure laid out in Part II of Philosophical Investigations for making alternative conceptions intelligible: ―…if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something that we realize – then let him imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him‖ (PI Part II, 366).

135

bewitching propositions is merely programmatic. This goal is not achieved in

the brief set of remarks constituting Part 1 nor in Part 2, but only realized

later in the remarks of Part 3. The beginning of a challenge to Moore‘s

conception of an expression‘s sense as independent of the variety of ways

that it might be employed is also articulated: ―…a meaning of a word is a

kind of employment of it‖ (OC 61). But this idea is not fully developed until

the later remarks, where Wittgenstein highlights the influence of context and

use on the meaning of an expression in particular circumstances.

In these early remarks Wittgenstein briefly attempts to clarify the

nature of external-world skepticism, for when Moore tries to refute this

skepticism by holding up his hands, it appears that he does not fully

appreciate just how radical his opponent‘s position really is. The skeptic (or

‗the idealist‘ as Wittgenstein calls him in Part I), in wanting a proof of the

external world, is not doubting the existence of any particular object, such

as one‘s hands:

"Doubting the existence of the external world" does not mean for

example doubting the existence of a planet, which later

observations proved to exist. (OC 20)

The skeptic‘s doubt is placed on a different level than ordinary doubt about

the existence of certain objects. If I claim to know that my hands or other

ordinary objects exist,

then a reasonable man will not doubt that I know. Nor will the

idealist; rather he will say that he was not dealing with the practical doubt which is being dismissed, but there is a further

doubt behind that one. (OC 19)

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Wittgenstein wants to bring out into the open the demands of the skeptic –

he does not want to know that a particular thing exists, but wants to be

shown how anything can exist; he does not want particular knowledge

claims to be demonstrated but demands a proof of how any knowledge at all

is possible.9

Notwithstanding the expression of programmatic statements of

therapeutic intentions in Part 1, a number of Wittgenstein‘s early remarks in

On Certainty invite a theoretical reading and indeed appear to be

comparable to the theoretical treatment of Moore‘s remarks in Malcolm‘s

article. For Wittgenstein, too, is inclined here to accuse Moore of using

language incorrectly:

Now, can one enumerate what one knows (like Moore)? Straight

off like that, I believe not. – For otherwise the expression ―I know‖ gets misused. (OC 6)

This illegitimate employment of ‗I know‘ results from a misunderstanding of

the rules regulating that expression, for ―we just do not see how very

specialized the use of ‗I know‘ is‖ (OC 11). Like Malcolm, Wittgenstein

attempts to explicitly articulate some of the necessary conditions for the

proper use of this phrase:

If e.g. someone says ―I don‘t know if there‘s a hand here‖ he

might be told ―Look closer‖. – This possibility of satisfying

9 It is debatable whether Moore was actually ignorant of the radical nature of the skeptic‘s demands; he does, after all conclude his proof by admitting, ―I am perfectly well aware that, in spite of all that I have said, many philosophers will still feel that I have not given any satisfactory proof of the point in question‖ (1939, p. 148). Moore is even aware that ―what they really want is…something like a general statement as to how any propositions of this sort may be proved‖ (ibid., p. 149).

137

oneself is part of the language–game. Is one of its essential

features. (OC 3)

In these early remarks he also provides hints of the theoretical response to

both Moore and the skeptic that is regularly associated with his work in Part

2, according to which both parties fail to make sense by claiming to either

know or doubt so-called ‗hinge propositions‘, to which these propositional

attitudes don‘t apply:

I know that a sick man is lying here? Nonsense! I am sitting at

his bedside, I am looking attentively into his face. – So I don‘t

know, then, that there is a sick man lying here? Neither the question nor the assertion makes sense ... one thinks that the

words ―I know that...‖ are always in place where there is no

doubt, and hence even where the expression of doubt would

unintelligible. (OC 10)

Finally, specific instances of hinge propositions are given and declared to

have a special status: ―… ‗There are physical objects‘ is nonsense‖ (OC 35).

We can thus see from these initial remarks in On Certainty why Wittgenstein

referred to the fall of 1949, which actually preceded the beginning of the

hormone therapies associated with his regular reports of clouded cognition,

as nevertheless a period when the ‗curtain in his brain‘ had not gone up. For

even though he announces his intentions to develop a therapeutic response

to Moore‘s unusual attempts at knowledge claims, the product of these initial

efforts is mostly theoretical and in fact reminiscent of Malcolm‘s own

published critique of Moore.

In a few passages from Part 2, Wittgenstein appears to continue

Malcolm‘s project of identifying rules governing the correct use of the

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expression ‗I know‘: ―One says ‗I know‘ when one is ready to give compelling

grounds‖ (OC 243). Like Malcolm, he accuses Moore of misusing language by

violating these rules:

The wrong use made by Moore of the proposition ―I know...‖ lies in his regarding it as an utterance as little subject to doubt as ―I

am in pain‖. (OC 178)

But Wittgenstein makes it clear that he is not particularly concerned with

Moore himself in these remarks, but rather with the special status of the

propositions that he tends to utter:

Moore‘s assurance that he knows... does not interest us. The

propositions, however, which Moore retails as examples of such

known truths are indeed interesting. (OC 137)

The focus of Part 2, then, tends not to be on confusions specific to particular

philosophers, but rather on abstract philosophical problems surrounding the

meaning of certain propositions.

For these reasons many of Wittgenstein‘s remarks in this part lend

themselves to be read as forming the basis of a theoretical response to both

Moore and his skeptical opponent. As we will see, this group of remarks has

received particular emphasis by his interpreters to draw conclusions about

the theoretical nature of his endeavors in On Certainty. Methodological

remarks in this part lend credence to such a reading:

Naturally, my aim must be to give the statements that one would like to make here, but cannot make meaningfully

[sinnvoll]. (OC 76)

139

Here we see an apparent shift from Wittgenstein‘s stated intentions in Part

1, merely to eliminate troublesome expressions from philosophical language,

to now wanting to show that Moore‘s knowledge claims are in fact nonsense.

He does this by delimiting a certain class of propositions and determining

their semantic status. The various propositions that Moore asserts, we are

told, are in fact all members of a special class:

When Moore says he knows such and such, he is really

enumerating a lot of empirical propositions which we affirm

without special testing; propositions, that is, which have a peculiar logical role in the system of our empirical propositions.

(OC 136)

The propositions presenting what Moore ‗knows‘ are all of such a

kind that it is difficult to imagine why anyone should believe the

contrary. (OC 93)

The propositions forming this class are thus distinguished by their

justificatory roles and their status of nearly universal acceptance.

As Wittgenstein reminds us, any series of justifying the grounds for

our assertions by giving further grounds must come to an end at some

point: ―to be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end‖

(OC 192).10 Moore‘s assertions are actually claims to know those

propositions that we give at the end of such a series, and for which we can

produce no further grounds. Wittgenstein gives several metaphorical

descriptions of these sorts of propositions: as the solid river-banks

supporting our rivers of investigation (OC 99), as the propositions that

10 Cf. OC 110.

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―stand fast for me‖ by serving as an axis for rotation (OC 152), and as the

―hinges‖ around which our disputes turn (OC 341).11 Though the term

―hinge‖ only occurs three times in On Certainty (at remarks 341, 343, and

654), the members of this class have come to be known as ‗hinge

propositions‘ in the secondary literature.

Wittgenstein says that there are ―countless‖ such hinge propositions,

―general empirical propositions that count as certain for us‖ (OC 273), and

readers of On Certainty have gone on to clearly identify various examples:

Our investigations rest upon many kinds of foundations. We are

certain that the world existed before our birth, that we can rely

upon induction, that we know our own names, and that we

cannot be mistaken about our hands being our own. (Morawetz 433)

These statements have the appearance of being normal empirical

propositions, but they differ from empirical propositions and acquire their

special status by the fact that ―we don‘t … arrive at any of them as a result

of investigation‖ (OC 138). This is not due to our disinterest in making such

inquiries, but instead an essential feature of the role these propositions play

in our system of judgments. They cannot be given any grounding or justified

by further evidence and thus ―must be regarded as…beyond question and

beyond validation‖ (Strawson 1985, p. 25). By serving as the stopping-

points of all justification, they ultimately determine what counts as evidence

in our investigations and are constitutive of our contexts of giving reasons

11 Stroll (2004) brings attention to the variety of metaphors employed by Wittgenstein in On Certainty.

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and evidence. As a result hinge propositions cannot be falsified or

confirmed; in fact the concepts of truth and falsity do not apply to them at

all: ―if the true is what is grounded, then the ground is not true, not yet

false‖ (OC 205).12 So while hinge propositions may appear to be empirical,

their constitutive properties make them function more like logical

propositions or rules.13

Some propositions might serve a foundational role in one context, yet

be available for evaluation in others. We are free in fact to form new

contexts of evaluation by taking an empirical proposition and turning it into

a hinge proposition. Wittgenstein makes such a claim multiple times in Part

2:

Can‘t an assertoric sentence, which was capable of functioning

as an hypothesis, also be used as a foundation for research and action? (OC 87)

…the same proposition may get treated at one time as

something to test by experience, at another as a rule of testing.

(OC 98)

It is clear that our empirical propositions do not all have the

same status, since one can lay down such a proposition and turn

it from an empirical proposition into a norm of description. (OC

167)

While this assertion is made repeatedly in Part 2, we will soon see that it is

brought into question in the later remarks of On Certainty.

12 Yet in the next remark Wittgenstein admits that ―if someone asked us ‗but is that true?‘ we might say ‗yes‘ to him‖ (OC 206). 13 Kober explicates remark 205 by describing the status of hinges in the latter way: ―Certainties are like the rules of games and belong to the constitutive rules of a (discursive) language-game. Certainties are neither true nor false, rather they define truth with regards to the epistemological aspects of a language-game‖ (1996, p. 424).

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The entire collection of hinge propositions forms a system that is

internally structured (OC 102). Like with his vivid descriptions of hinge

propositions, Wittgenstein alternatively describes this system as ―our frame

of reference‖ (OC 83), ―the scaffolding of our thoughts‖ (OC 211), and ―the

whole picture which forms the starting-point of belief‖ (OC 209). He stresses

that this system serves a foundational role by providing evidential support

for empirical inquiries.14

Hinge propositions, by serving as the ultimate foundation of our

reasoning, are responsible for the very possibility of that activity. As

Wittgenstein frequently emphasizes, they condition and are constitutive of a

number of human practices:

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis

takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our

arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an

argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as

the element in which arguments have their life. (OC 105)

It may be for example that all enquiry on our part is set so as to

exempt certain propositions from doubt, if they were ever

formulated. They lie apart from the route travelled by enquiry.

(OC 88)15

The scope of hinge propositions is immense. Not only do they condition

empirical enquiry, they also apparently lie at the very foundation of all our

14 Many readers take the foundational role of this system to be one of the central theses of On Certainty. The extent to which these claims rely on remarks in Part 2 is striking. For example, after quoting eight remarks – all from Part 2 – Buchanan concludes: ―It is clear from these remarks that Wittgenstein envisions Moore type propositions as forming a ‗system‘ which plays a foundational role in determining the course of all enquiry and assertion about how things are in the world‖ (2000, p. 216) 15 See also OC 103 and 253.

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linguistic practices by fixing the meanings of our words: ―if you are not

certain of any fact, you cannot be certain of the meaning of your words

either‖ (OC 114).

Our systems of hinge propositions is not the result of inquiry, i.e.

hinges are not adopted because they are believed to be correct. Rather, they

serve as the standards of truth:

But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of

its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its

correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. (OC 94)

These propositions are then not available for me to doubt, for bringing them

into question would topple my very system of judgments. This makes the

skeptic‘s attempt to doubt absolutely everything self-undermining, for the

act of doubting itself (just like the act of believing) is constituted by a

framework of hinge propositions. Since ―the game of doubting itself

presupposes certainty‖ (OC 115), it is actually impossible to simultaneously

bring every proposition into doubt.16

Wittgenstein‘s account of hinge propositions and the constitutive roles

they play in our practices of expressing belief and doubt provide the means

for convicting both Moore and the skeptic of ―overstepping the boundaries of

sense‖ (Buchanan 2000, p. 214). Both parties attempt to engage in practices

that aren‘t licensed by our conceptual system by engaging, or at least

attempting to engage, in an evaluation of the truth of particular hinge

16 See also OC 150.

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propositions. But the skeptic undercuts the very ground that makes doubting

possible by trying to doubt hinge propositions, and Moore cannot possibly

have any grounds for his claim to know them because they form the

foundation of our practice of giving reasons.

Both parties in the dispute between Moore and the skeptic engage in

nonsense because of their ignorance of the true structure of our linguistic

activities. They suffer from the ―misunderstanding‖ that language games,

―and the criteria of relevant evidence implicit in them, ought to be grounded

in reality in the way true propositions are grounded in the facts

corresponding to them‖ (Brenner 2005, p. 124). Wittgenstein‘s philosophical

explorations in Part 2 thus allow for one of the great philosophical debates

between skeptics and realists to be dissolved.

One might be inclined to characterize Wittgenstein‘s treatment of this

dispute as a therapeutic one, because it aims at ultimately changing the

behavior of both the participants, i.e. at getting both of them to lose interest

in defending their respective positions. But it is important to see that this

response to skepticism does not satisfy Wittgenstein‘s conditions for a

successful therapy. Wittgenstein insists that he is not interested in

advancing philosophical theories, but the account of hinge propositions

sketched here is certainly comparable to a number of grand metaphysical

schemes encountered in the history of philosophy (and commentators have

been quick to point this out). Crucially, Wittgensteinian therapy does not aim

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to get the patient to achieve an insight into the essential nature of things.

Yet the treatment in Part 2 requires the participants in the skeptical debate

to realize that their positions are nonsensical by first being convinced of the

truth of a theory specifying the conditions under which propositions make

sense. Thus, Wittgenstein‘s response to Moore‘s knowledge claims in Part 2

of On Certainty must be classified as theoretical.

The remarks in Part 3 exhibit a shift in style from Part 2, and this new

style is more conducive for achieving the qualities that Wittgenstein desires

in a therapeutic philosophy. These latter remarks are particularly

characterized by the frequent introduction of voices, i.e. sentences couched

in quotation marks or set off by dashes in order to indicate that multiple

characters or voices are interacting with one another. For example we are

often told (or rather, Wittgenstein is telling himself) to imagine that a

speaker utters a certain sentence in specific circumstances; afterwards

Wittgenstein either attempts to respond to this hypothetical speaker,

formulates what he might want to say in such a situation, or makes some

general observations on what is taking place, e.g. how the speaker is

standing in relation to the circumstances of his utterance. The experience of

reading such a text differs from that of reading a philosophical treatise,

where the reader is generally only asked to consider the truth of the

statements asserted and the cogency of the reasoning used by the author.

When reading a Wittgenstein text involving multiple voices, the demands are

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in some ways greater on the reader, who is constantly trying to determine

what identities or characters should be assigned to the voices encountered,

particularly the reader‘s own identity and that of Wittgenstein. The need to

encounter and adopt new standpoints can facilitate the change in

perspective that Wittgenstein‘s therapy strives for.

The use of multiple characters and voices, as well as other familiar

techniques of Wittgensteinian philosophical investigation, such as the

consideration of imaginary scenarios, unusual cultures, and unfamiliar uses

of language, are encountered to a considerably lesser extent in the earlier

parts of On Certainty. There the focus tends to be more on characterizing

the essential features of language games by identifying the distinctive

characteristics of hinge propositions. The impersonal and abstract character

of this investigation makes the realization of Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic goals

unlikely, since they call for the treatment of a philosopher in the grip of a

problem, not the resolution of a problem considered in isolation.

In Part 2 Wittgenstein articulated the basis for a theory of hinge

propositions that could be put towards questioning the sense of both radical

skepticism and the attempt to refute it. Yet in Part 3 he almost entirely

ignores the skeptic and focuses his attention on Moore. So Wittgenstein is

returning to the project of treating the philosopher‘s condition, for while in

fact practically no one actually is a radical skeptic, Moore represents a

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significant number of philosophers who devote considerable energy to

developing a satisfactory refutation of the imaginary skeptic‘s position.

At the outset of On Certainty Wittgenstein stated the desired outcome

of his notes about Moore‘s unusual claims: to expunge from philosophical

language those bewitching propositions that don‘t get us anywhere. Now in

Part 3 Wittgenstein has a particular phrase in mind:

One is often bewitched by a word. For example, by the word

"know". (OC 435)

Wittgenstein apparently thus believes that Moore has been ‗bewitched‘ by

this word, and that this is shown in his insistence on using it in very peculiar

ways. In Philosophical Investigations, a procedure is spelled out for dealing

with cases when philosophers are captivated by certain language forms:

When philosophers use a word – ―knowledge‖, ―being‖, ―object‖,

―I‖, ―proposition/sentence‖, ―name‖ – and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word

ever actually used in this way in the language in which it is at

home? –

What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use. (PI 116)

The procedure for dealing with a philosopher intending to speak

metaphysically is thus to consider the use of the expression in question. This

is what Wittgenstein does in the later remarks of On Certainty by

considering a number of everyday uses of ‗I know‘. ‗Everyday uses‘ are not

restricted, as one might possibly assume, to just those cases in which the

expression has an established use in ordinary speech (i.e. the cases typically

148

studied by ordinary language philosophers), but rather include any situation

in which the expression could conceivably be put toward some practical end,

even ones that are completely contrived.

As we saw in his response to Malcolm‘s critical article, Moore takes the

meaning of an expression to be fixed independently of the various uses to

which it might be put in linguistic interaction. We can imagine then that

Moore would not expect that the consideration of various uses of an

expression could in any way resolve confusions surrounding its meaning.

Wittgenstein realizes that an interlocutor with this dubious picture of

meaning might insist that one of his peculiar uses of an expression ‗made

sense‘ simply by considering the proposition and not its employment:

I am told: ―You understand this expression, don‘t you? Well then

– I‘m using it with the meaning you‘re familiar with.‖ As if the meaning were an aura the word brings along with it and retains

in every kind of use.

(If, for example, someone says that the sentence ―This is here‖

(saying which he points to an object in front of him) makes sense to him, then he should ask himself in what special

circumstances this sentence is actually used. There it does make

sense.) (PI 117)

The treatment Wittgenstein offers to such a philosopher is just to consider

special circumstances in which the expression makes sense, i.e. cases in

which it is actually used (or could conceivably be used) towards a practical

end. By confronting a series of examples like this, it is hoped that the

philosopher will lose his grip on the idea that he understands the expression

in isolation, and thus lose interest in attempting to use it in curious

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philosophical contexts. This is in fact the procedure that Wittgenstein follows

with Moore in Part 3, presenting him with a series of examples in which the

propositions he wishes to assert make sense, hopefully leading Moore to the

consideration that his own use of this expression does not fit naturally in this

class, i.e. that his own attempt to make sense may not be successful.

Interestingly, in Part 3 we also see Wittgenstein in the beginning

stages of applying this same treatment to his own urges to speak

metaphysically. After recognizing that he sometimes wishes to respond to

Moore with a theory of language games (as he did frequently in Part 2),

Wittgenstein then considers what practical consequences actually follow

when one utters these philosophical claims in everyday situations. By

bringing them into normal contexts, Wittgenstein deflates much of the

theoretical punch from these propositions. So in Part 3, Wittgenstein‘s

attempts to ―bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday

use‖ (PI 116) even involve the attempt to deflate his own apparently

metaphysical locutions about hinge propositions and their constitutive roles

in our linguistic and epistemic practices.

Rather than focus on general characterizations of an entire class of

propositions, as he did with hinge propositions in Part 2, in the later remarks

Wittgenstein engages in a lengthy consideration of a particular knowledge

claim by made by Moore: ―I know that that‘s a tree‖. Malcolm describes the

context behind this real-life example:

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When we sat in the back-garden of his home on Chesterton

Road, arguing over the concepts of knowledge and certainty,

Moore, wanting to give an example of something he knew for certain, would point to a tree a few feet away, and say, with

emphasis, ―I know that that’s a tree‖. He would claim that he

had made an assertion that was perfectly meaningful (as well as

true), and I would dispute this claim. (Malcolm 1984, pp. 217-218)

This was then a real assertion that Moore would make, in person, in

discussion with fellow philosophers, in support of his attempts to prove

either that there are some things we can know with certainty, or that the

external world exists. While writing the remarks constituting Part 3 of On

Certainty in Cambridge in the spring of 1951, Wittgenstein was able to make

several visits to Moore‘s home and participate in philosophical discussions.17

It is very likely that their discussions involved Moore‘s utterance of this very

assertion, since it plays such a prominent role in the notes that Wittgenstein

was composing at the time.18 This personal interaction with Moore may have

contributed to the conversational style of Part 3, for the earlier remarks tend

17 The occurrence of at least three such meetings can be inferred from these two philosophers‘ letters to Malcolm. Wittgenstein mentions a meeting on March 18 (in his letter of March 19), Moore mentions a meeting on April 14 (in his letter of April 30), and on April 16 Wittgenstein mentions two recent meetings, one of which surely was the one on April 14 reported by Moore. 18 The tone of some remarks in On Certainty also strongly suggest that Wittgenstein was not

simply considering the possibility of Moore making such a claim, but rather that he was reporting on his actually having witnessed such an event: I am sitting with a philosopher in the garden; he says again and again "I know that that's a tree", pointing to a tree that is near us. Someone else arrives and hears this, and I tell him: "This fellow isn't insane. We are only doing philosophy. (OC 467) When one hears Moore say "I know that that's a tree‖, one suddenly understands those who think that that has by no means been settled. The matter strikes one all at once as being unclear and blurred. It is as if Moore had put it in the wrong light. (OC 481)

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to read like a response to Malcolm‘s impression of Moore, based on Moore‘s

articles and letters.

In prior remarks, Wittgenstein‘s reaction to Moore‘s assertions was to

categorize their status. Now he responds quite differently:

"I know that that's a tree." Why does it strike me as if I did not

understand the sentence? though it is after all an extremely

simple sentence of the most ordinary kind? It is as if I could not focus my mind on any meaning. (OC 347)

Wittgenstein starts anew with a fresh response to Moore‘s statement. Here

his reaction in the face of unusual uses of ‗know‘ is now confusion, a far cry

from his previous philosophical response about the proper conditions for

using the word. Wittgenstein no longer presumes to know what Moore is

intending to do with this statement (nor what he is actually doing with it).

He is sincerely puzzled.

Moore likely responded to Wittgenstein‘s confusion in the same way as

he did to Malcolm – namely by insisting that he was using the expression in

its normal sense. This response stems from his conception of the meaning of

an expression as being fixed despite its various possible uses. Wittgenstein

brings this picture into question:

Isn‘t the question ―have these words a meaning?‖ similar to ―Is

that a tool?‖ asked as one produces, say, a hammer? I say ―Yes,

it‘s a hammer.‖ But what if the thing that any of us would take for a hammer were somewhere else a missile, for example, or a

conductor‘s baton? Now make the application yourself. (OC 351)

The suggestion, I take it, that Wittgenstein is making here is that something

isn‘t a hammer simply by having certain internal properties, but rather that

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it can become a hammer if we put it to such a use. Likewise, what an

expression means cannot be entirely divorced from the way that it is used in

our linguistic interactions.

While Moore claimed that he was using his expression in its normal

sense but admittedly in unusual circumstances, Wittgenstein wants to

challenge whether we can really understand what is actually going on when

Moore makes such an assertion. Why one would actually say such a thing in

those circumstances is not clear:

If someone says, ―I know that that‘s a tree‖ I may answer: ―Yes,

that is a sentence. An English sentence. And what is it supposed

to be doing?‖ Suppose he replies: ―I just wanted to remind

myself that I know thing like that‖? – (OC 352)

If someone was constantly making knowledge claims like these for no

apparent reason, we would not just say that they were using language

abnormally, but possibly that they hadn‘t really mastered the technique of

using language at all:

My difficulty can also be shown like this: I am sitting talking to a

friend. Suddenly I say: ―I knew all along that you were so– and–

so.‖ Is that really just a superfluous, though true, remark?

I feel as if these words were like ―Good morning‖ said to

someone in the middle of a conversation. (OC 464)

Wittgenstein would be more likely to consider this a meaningless utterance

than merely something superfluous if it were not possible to discern the

speaker‘s purpose in saying it.

153

Moore‘s statements aren‘t declared to be essentially nonsensical,

however. Wittgenstein points out that a proposition with no clear meaning

can suddenly become meaningful to him if its place in a larger context is

clarified:

In the middle of a conversation, someone says to me out of the

blue: ―I wish you luck.‖ I am astonished; but later I realize that

these words connect up with his thoughts about me. And now they do not strike me as meaningless any more. (OC 469)

The problem is not simply that Moore‘s claim to know that that‘s a tree is

superfluous or obvious. Even superfluous utterances have a role in our

language. What is at issue is that nothing in the surrounding context of the

utterance has been called upon to help fix a precise meaning of this

statement at all:

Just as the words ―I am here‖ have a meaning only in certain

contexts, and not when I say them to someone who is sitting in front of me and sees me clearly, – and not because they are

superfluous, but because their meaning is not determined by the

situation, yet stands in need of such determination. (OC 348)

Wittgenstein is inviting Moore to clarify how the meaning of his assertion is

made determinate by some particular conditions in which it is stated. If he

does so, he will thereby make his meaning clear. As Wittgenstein notices,

whenever he tries to ―think of an everyday use of the sentence instead of a

philosophical one, its meaning becomes clear and ordinary‖ (OC 347). So

Moore is not being set to an impossible task; it is quite possible for ‗I know

that that‘s a tree‘ to be given a determinate sense, though this is achieved

most readily by giving it a non-philosophical use.

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Wittgenstein imagines a variety of understandable ways that this

sentence could be used. By doing so, he is demonstrating for Moore how one

can make an utterance clear: by connecting its purpose with the surrounding

circumstances of its utterance.

―I know that that‘s a tree‖ – this may mean all sorts of things: I

look at a plant that I take for a young beech and that someone

else thinks is a black–currant. He says ―that‘s a shrub‖; I say it is a tree. – We see something in the mist which one of us takes

for a man, and the other says ―I know that that‘s a tree‖.

Someone wants to test my eyes etc.etc. – etc.etc. Each time the

‗that‘ which I declare to be a tree is of a different kind.

But what when we express ourselves more precisely? For

example: ―I know that that thing there is a tree, I can see it

quite clearly.‖ – Let us even suppose I had made this remark in

the context of a conversation (so that it was relevant when I

made it); and now, out of all context, I repeat it while looking at the tree, and I add ―I mean these words as I did five minutes

ago‖. If I added, for example, that I had been thinking of my

bad eyes again and it was a kind of sigh, then there would be

nothing puzzling about the remark.

For how a sentence is meant can be expressed by an expansion

of it and may therefore be made part of it. (OC 349)

This is then a demonstration to Moore of how to – literally – make sense.

One doesn‘t make sense merely by uttering a sentence associated with

determinate truth conditions under any circumstances whatsoever. The

meaning of a proposition is left indeterminate without a surrounding context,

and one can make sense of a previously unclear statement by expanding it,

i.e. by giving further information related to why we are using it. Wittgenstein

imagines even far-fetched possible uses of this statement that, though

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unusual and certainly not established in common practice, could

nevertheless be made meaningful by attendant circumstances:

This is certainly true, that the information "That is a tree", when

no one could doubt it, might be a kind of joke and as such have

meaning. A joke of this kind was in fact made once by Renan. (OC 463)

The possible ways that this sentence can make sense are thus countless and

unforeseeable. This distinguishes Wittgenstein‘s response to Moore from that

of Malcolm. Wittgenstein is not specifying a list of conditions that must be

satisfied for ‗I know‘ to be used correctly. That phrase has a variety of

legitimate uses as well as many potential ones that are as yet unconceived.

The response here also differs from that provided by Wittgenstein‘s

earlier account of hinge propositions. There Moore was accused, without

qualification, of using language in ways that produced outright nonsense.

Here in Part 3, Moore‘s statement is not being assigned a final semantic

status. Wittgenstein freely admits that it has the possibility of becoming

completely meaningful:

I want to say: it made sense for Moore to say ―I know that that

is a tree‖, if he meant something quite particular by it. (OC 387)

As yet, the meaning of Moore‘s statement is not fully determined, resulting

in confusion when one hears the utterance. But it is entirely possible to give

this statement a clear a determinate meaning, and thereby to clear up the

confusion, by adding additional information that helps clarify its purpose.

156

The response in Part 3 to Moore‘s claim, ‗I know that that‘s a tree,‘ is

intended to serve the therapeutic end laid down at the beginning of On

Certainty. There Wittgenstein stated his wish to expunge from philosophical

language the propositions that bewitch us and prevent us from making

progress, and Moore‘s assertion is an example of such a sentence. The

treatment of Moore‘s statement in Part 3 succeeds in fulfilling the anti-

theoretical goals of Wittgenstein‘s metaphilosophy much more than the

theory of hinge propositions advanced in Part 2. Moore is not here being

urged to adopt a philosophical theory of meaning, realize that his statements

are nonsensical under this theory, and for that reason choose to stop making

them. He is in fact being presented with multiple examples of how his

utterance can be given sense, and urged to engage in this attempt himself.

What will hopefully become apparent to Moore is that every time his

utterance is given a determinate sense, it no longer produces the

philosophical conclusions that he was seeking to establish with it:

Every one of us often uses such a sentence, and there is no

question but that it makes sense. But does that mean it yields

any philosophical conclusion? (OC 388)

But now it is also correct to use ―I know‖ in the contexts which

Moore mentioned, at least in particular circumstances. (Indeed, I

do not know what ―I know that I am a human being‖ means. But

even that might be given a sense.)

For each one of these sentences I can imagine circumstances

that turn it into a move in one of our language-games, and by

that it loses everything that is philosophically astonishing. (OC

622)

157

After repeatedly giving various definite senses to his utterance, yet only

producing sentences that are philosophically impotent, Moore may come to

have the same observation as Wittgenstein, namely that this sentence

seems to only become clear once it is given a practical, non-metaphysical

use. This may lead Moore to then question if he really does mean anything

definite with his use of this statement. Recurrent failure in producing a

statement with the metaphysical strength that he seeks may lead him,

ultimately, to simply give up his attempt to make such an utterance, not

because he has been definitively convinced that his utterance is nonsense,

but because he has lost all confidence that he really means anything definite

at all by it. Of course, the success of this therapeutic response will depend

on whether Moore in fact reacts in this way to repeated failure to make

sense. But if he does, it will have succeeded in causing a shift in a

philosopher‘s point of view without having done so by advancing any

controversial philosophical theories.

The therapeutic method of Part 3 is not only applied to Moore, but

sometimes to Wittgenstein himself, especially when he feels compelled to

repeat the theoretical conclusions of his investigation on hinge propositions

in Part 2. Wittgenstein is certainly not free of the urge to speak

metaphysically in Part 3, but for the first time, in these later sections, he

follows these philosophical claims by immediately questioning their sense.

The method of PI 116 is thereby applied to some of the central tenets of his

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theory of hinge propositions, for after stating these metaphysical doctrines in

Part 3, he often questions what practical uses those propositions can be put

to. And when he does this, he realizes that they too don‘t have the

philosophical strength that he intends them to have.

Recall that in Part 2 Wittgenstein repeatedly claimed that an empirical

proposition can always be treated as uncontestable and thus become a hinge

proposition. At the beginning of Part 3 he is apt to repeat these claims

again:

Is it that rule and empirical proposition merge into one another?

(OC 309)

But wouldn‘t one have to say then, that there is no sharp

boundary between propositions of logic and empirical propositions? The lack of sharpness is that of the boundary

between rule and empirical proposition. (OC 319)

Yet immediately after formulating these statements he expresses his

dissatisfaction with them, because they are too theoretical for his

sensibilities:

Isn‘t what I am saying: any empirical proposition can be

transformed into a postulate – and then becomes a norm of

description. But I am suspicious even of this. The sentence is too

general. One almost wants to say ―any empirical proposition can,

theoretically, be transformed...‖, but what does ―theoretically‖ mean here? It sounds all too reminiscent of the Tractatus. (OC

321)19

So Wittgenstein is now shying away from some of his previous remarks that

have the appearance of philosophical theories, in keeping with his stated

intention not to produce any new truths.

19 Wittgenstein had already compared his thinking in Part 2 to the Tractatus at OC 203.

159

Another important feature of hinge propositions that Wittgenstein had

previously wanted to emphasize was that one cannot be mistaken when

uttering them. He was earlier making this statement in a philosophical

context, but now it is implied that such a use was questionable:

―I can‘t be making a mistake‖ is an ordinary sentence, which

serves to give the certainty–value of a statement. And only in its

everyday use it is justified. (OC 638)

He now begins to consider the practical uses and consequences of this

sentence that he was earlier prone to give a metaphysical emphasis:

What practical consequences has it if I give a piece of

information and add that I can‘t be making a mistake about it?

(OC 668)

The sentence ―I can‘t be making a mistake‖ is certainly used in

practice. But we may question whether it is then to be taken in a perfectly rigorous sense, or is rather a kind of exaggeration

which perhaps is used only with a view to persuasion. (OC 669)

When this expression in used in practice, he sees, it really tends only to be a

kind of exaggeration aimed at persuading someone, rather than the strictly

metaphysical proposition that he intended to utter in Part 2. This may lead

him to question the sense of his original utterance.

In these later sections, Wittgenstein realizes that he too, like Moore,

may at times be susceptible to the urge to want to think of the meaning of

an expression as something fixed, rather than consider the ways in which it

can be used:

There is always the danger of wanting to find an expression‘s

meaning by contemplating the expression itself, and the frame

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of mind in which one uses it, instead of always thinking of the

practice. (OC 601)

Noticing himself wanting to speak metaphysically, he immediately replies by

considering the use of the phrase in question:

I am inclined to say: ―That cannot be false.‖ That is interesting. But what consequences has it? (OC 437)

He is now starting to more promptly catch himself after making

metaphysical statements, and quickly move to an investigation of use. The

urge to speak metaphysically was something that Wittgenstein continually

struggled against, but here in Part 3 we see him succeeding in resisting that

urge more successfully than in Part 2.

In his critique of Moore and the skeptic in Part 2, Wittgenstein

described hinge propositions as being constitutive of our epistemic practices,

and thus not even eligible for doubt, which is a practice that takes place only

within a system. He therefore holds to the position that no experience can

possibly force us to revise these foundational beliefs, for that would show

that they weren‘t really serving as the foundation of our inquiry:

Isn‘t the question this: ―What if you had to change your opinion

even on these most fundamental things?‖ And to that the answer

seems to me to be: ―You don‘t have to change it. That is just what their being ‗fundamental‘ is.‖ (OC 512)

Once again, Wittgenstein calls this statement into question soon after

formulating it:

But might it not be possible for something to happen that threw

me entirely off the rails? Evidence that made the most certain

thing unacceptable to me? Or at any rate made me throw over

161

my most fundamental judgements? (Whether rightly or wrongly

is beside the point.) (OC 517)

Wittgenstein does not come to a definite conclusion on whether it would be

possible for our most fundamental judgments to be overturned by new

experience, and if it were, how we would react to such an experience. Yet an

important part of the treatment in Part 2 is that hinge propositions provide

the foundation that makes all judgment possible. If Wittgenstein no longer

knows how to respond to these questions in Part 3, then he probably is no

longer comfortable with the strong theoretical account of language games

seen in the earlier remarks.

We thus see Wittgenstein at the beginning stages of submitting his

own metaphysical utterances to a therapeutic treatment in Part 3 of On

Certainty. Had he lived longer, continued to work on these remarks, and

been able to revise them with a view to publication, we may have been

presented with a book with a much different structure than the one

published posthumously by his literary executors. For the theoretical

characterization of hinge propositions and language games in Part 2, which

has attracted the most attention from Wittgenstein‘s interpreters, may have

itself been subjected to a therapeutic treatment.

162

Chapter 6

The Reception of On Certainty

On Certainty has received a significant amount of attention in the

recent philosophical literature.1 This is surely a result of the perception that

Wittgenstein addresses a variety of topics of contemporary philosophical

interest in the work. Interpreters of On Certainty have found various

projects within its pages. Accounts of Wittgenstein‘s treatment of skepticism

are the most common.2 Standard interpretations see Wittgenstein as

condemning both the skeptic and Moore for not realizing that certain hinge

propositions are exempt from doubt because they serve as norms for claims

concerning knowledge or doubt. Some readers focus on the semantic status

of hinge propositions.3 Such discussions focus on whether hinge

propositions are true or whether they instead lack a truth value altogether.

If they are neither true nor false, then it must be nonsense to utter them,

1 Book-length treatments of On Certainty include (McGinn 1989), (Morawetz 1978), (Rhees 2003), (Moyal-Sharrock 2005), and (Stroll 1994). Chapter-length treatments can be found in (Ayer 1985), (Fogelin 1987), (Kenny 2006), and (von Wright 1982). Anthologies that substantially address On Certainty include (Kölbel & Weiss 2004), (Löffler & Weingartner

2004), (McManus 2004), and (Moyal-Sharrock 2004). (Moyal-Sharrock & Brenner 2005) is a unique collection, aiming to showcase the wide variety of readings currently available for consideration. 2 See e.g. (Bogen 1974), (Buchanan 2000), (de Pierres 1996), (Fielding 2004), (Fogelin 1981), (Kober 1994), (Malcolm 1988), (Moyal-Sharrock 2002), (Moyal-Sharrock 2003), (Orr 1989), (Rudd 2005), (Williams 2004a), (Williams 2004b), (Wright 2004a). 3 (Ashdown 2001), (Conant 1998), (Cook 1980), (Fronda 2004), (Glock 2004), (Orr 1989), (Stiers 2000), (Williams 2004b).

163

some have argued. This debate, as some commentators have remarked,4

shares some similarities with current disputes on the sense of tautologies in

the Tractatus. Another group of readers has focused on the implications of

On Certainty for the distinction between logical and empirical propositions.5

Hinge propositions such as ‗the world has existed for many years‘ appear to

be empirical, yet as hinges they are unable to be confirmed or disconfirmed,

and thus don‘t appear to be contingent. Hinge propositions thus seem to

occupy an interesting middle ground between logical and empirical

propositions. The affinities between this account of Wittgenstein‘s hinge

propositions and Kant‘s conception of the synthetic a priori is apparent, as

several commentators have noted.6 Some interpreters have found in On

Certainty a more systematic characterization of Wittgenstein‘s concept of a

‗language-game,‘7 while others have investigated the consequences of the

work on the theory of knowledge.8

Regardless of what aspects of the book have drawn the interest of

interpreters, most of these readings share two common characteristics: 1)

They take Wittgenstein to be engaged in a familiar theoretical philosophical

activity, such as specifying the conditions for knowledge, attempting to

4 (Conant 1998), (Hutto 2004), (McGuinness 1972) 5 (Ellenbogen 2003), (Garavaso 1998) 6 (Brenner 2005), (Morawetz 1974), (Williams 1990) 7 (Haller 1988), (Hertzberg 1976), (Stock 2007), (Stroll 2002), (Winch 1988), (Wolgast 1987) 8 (Bouchard 2004), (Caraway 2004), (Garver 2004), (Kober 1996), (Koethe 2004), (Luckhardt 1978), (Pritchard 2005), (Soles 1982), (Stroll 2002), (Stroll 2004), (Stroll 2005), (Wright 2004b)

164

refute skepticism, developing a general account of language, or

characterizing the class of necessary or a priori propositions. In doing so,

they offer theoretical interpretations of the book. 2) They treat On Certainty

as a work by citing remarks from various parts of the book indiscriminately

and assuming that Wittgenstein‘s philosophical goals and methodologies

remain constant throughout the text.

Many of Wittgenstein‘s remarks in On Certainty invite theoretical

interpretation. Yet in associating these theoretical remarks with

Wittgenstein‘s overall goals in the book, readers come to an understanding

of On Certainty that is in tension with his repeatedly stated intentions to

avoid theories and engage in therapy.9 The editorial preface to the book also

encourages it to be read as a work, but sufficient evidence has now been

presented to conclude that On Certainty is actually a collection of

thematically related texts that Wittgenstein did not consider to be

continuous or of equal status.

In the preceding chapters I aimed to show that these two assumptions

are unfounded, and thus that a satisfactory reading of the text should be

based on an account of that book‘s structure, with a particular focus on

identifying Wittgenstein‘s therapeutic goals and procedures. In what follows,

I identify items from the secondary literature that take the two factors of

therapeutic method and textual structure into consideration, in order to

9 Orr (1989) and Buchanan (2000) have explicitly pointed out this tension.

165

establish the context in which my interpretation is best situated. Then I

show that each of these readings faces an interpretive dilemma that is

avoided or overcome in my account of On Certainty.

Edward Minar‘s essay, ―On Wittgenstein‘s Response to Scepticism: The

Opening of On Certainty‖ (2004), seeks to develop a reading of the book

that does not focus on characterizing the status of hinge propositions. For

this reason his piece is included as an example of the ‗therapeutic reading‘ in

Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner‘s anthology.10 The focus of his reading is on the

first 65 remarks (i.e. Part 1), which are ―relatively continuous notes from a

single manuscript in which direct mention of such things as propositions

which ‗stand fast‘, hinges, world pictures and frameworks is absent‖ (ibid.,

p. 255). Two leading interpretations of On Certainty are briefly considered:

the ‗propositional‘ approach of McGinn (1989), which identifies hinge

propositions and explains their semantic and normative status, and the ‗non-

propositional‘ account of Stroll (1994), which seeks to transition from talk of

abstract propositional entities to consideration of how certainty is manifested

in a way of acting.

Both of these approaches, Minar contends, are not only unsuccessful in

refuting skepticism, but they also misinterpret Wittgenstein as intending to

advance a philosophical theory:

Wittgenstein is not offering a theory of hinges that shows the limits of inquiry, thought or language (with the intended

10 (Moyal-Sharrock & Brenner 2005)

166

consequence that the sceptic shall see that his questions lie

beyond the limits). What he does instead is to provide reminders

for the purpose of undoing the confusions that lie behind the quest for philosophical accounts of such limits. (ibid., p. 260)

The skeptic emphatically holds to ―the notion that knowledge has a real,

practice-transcendent structure‖ (ibid., p. 266). Wittgenstein is read as

trying to undermine the grip of this false picture by calling upon the skeptic

to explain why our epistemic practices are suspect. Ultimately, the purported

stance outside all of our practices from which the skeptic wishes to make his

challenge is seen to be illusory, for the skeptic ends up undercutting his own

grounds for critique when he brings into question the legitimacy of our

practices in toto. This demonstration should help the skeptic to abandon his

radical doubts:

Wittgenstein‘s reminders prod the sceptic to account for his

sense that something is amiss in our dealings with the world. The anticipated result is that the sceptic will no longer find his

questions natural or mandatory. Wittgenstein‘s is a strategy for

responding to both scepticism and the impulse to refute it. (ibid.,

p. 254)

This treatment also aims at Moore, then, for if it is incoherent to doubt the

legitimacy of all our practices simultaneously, then it is likewise impossible

to defend them wholesale. So the attempt to refute skepticism is misguided.

Minar‘s reading has several advantages. He places himself among the

relatively small number of readers who acknowledge some kind of internal

structure in On Certainty by noticing that most of the resources for

constructing a theory of hinge propositions occur in Part 2 of the book. It is

167

also wise for him to avoid attributing philosophical theories to Wittgenstein.

And he appears to be accurately picking up the aim of one strand of the

remarks in Part 1, namely that of clarifying just how radical skepticism really

is by showing how it rules out the possibility of a response that relies on any

of our normal epistemic methods, e.g. looking at one‘s hands in a well-lit

room.

This reading, however, puts Wittgenstein‘s focus on the skeptic, rather

than Moore. It is difficult to see how an attempt to demotivate skeptical

urges could have been prompted by discussions with Malcolm about his

recently-published article, whose aim was to criticize the manner in which

Moore went about trying to refute skepticism. While I agree that

Wittgenstein uses some of these early remarks to show that the skeptic is

posing an ‗external‘11 question, this is being done, I believe, for Moore’s

benefit, to help him see how no skeptic could possibly accept his purported

refutation. It is also not entirely evident what makes this treatment a

therapeutic one; though Minar is described by Moyal-Sharrock and Brenner

as a therapeutic reader, explicit talk of therapy does not actually enter in to

his discussion. Most troublesome, though, is that Minar seems to avoid

attributing theories to Wittgenstein simply by avoiding the large number of

remarks in Part 2 that invite such a reading. As it stands, this reading offers

no explanation of the relationship between Part 1 and the remaining remarks

11 Stroud (1984) uses this term to characterize the peculiar character of the skeptic‘s demands in his discussion of Moore‘s proof.

168

in On Certainty, and thus provides us little understanding of that book as a

whole. On this point I believe my interpretation proves more successful by

acknowledging and accounting for the variety of remarks found in On

Certainty.

In ―Wittgenstein‘s Refutation of Idealism‖ (2005), Michael Williams

also limits his focus to just the remarks of Part 1. Like Minar, he takes one

aim of Wittgenstein‘s to be the demonstration of just how radical the

skeptic‘s demands are, but like me he sees this as being done mostly for

Moore‘s benefit. In a nicely structured presentation, Williams then argues

that sentences such as ―there are physical objects‖ are not examples of

hinge propositions that need to be appropriately characterized, but actually

nonsense, since ―‘physical object‘ is a piece of logical or semantic

vocabulary, thus unsuitable for formulating the empirical hypothesis the

sceptic or idealist would like to express‖ (ibid., p. 86). In what is called the

―therapeutic phase‖ (ibid., p. 88) of the presentation, Wittgenstein shows

that the skeptic is assuming a very questionable stance that experiential

knowledge (e.g. sense-data) is epistemically basic. The alternative to this

view is a ―pragmatic‖ one, according to which ―the normative structure of

doubting and justifying is implicit in practices of enquiry which, as human

institutions, are subject to change‖ (ibid., p. 95). Williams thus operates

with a much different conception of ‗therapy‘ than the anti-theoretical one I

have attributed to Wittgenstein in these chapters, for the intended result of

169

this therapeutic encounter is for us to adopt something like a contextualist

theory of knowledge.

James Conant (1998) offers one of the most developed therapeutic

readings of On Certainty in the literature. His presentation focuses on the

therapeutic encounter with Moore (beginning at OC 347) that was of

considerable interest to us in the last chapter, though he also draws

connections to other thinkers and texts, including Frege and the early

Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Conant is especially interested in

Wittgenstein‘s use of the term ‗nonsense‘, and wants to clarify what

Wittgenstein is doing when he accuses Moore of speaking nonsensically. Like

some of the readers we‘ve already encountered, Conant aims to criticize

those who attribute a theory of hinge propositions to Wittgenstein, such as

McGinn, who ―understand Moore-type propositions to belong to a special

class of judgements: those that are immune to doubt‖ (ibid., pp. 224-5).

These readers take the theory of hinge propositions to underwrite

Wittgenstein‘s use of ‗nonsense‘ as a term of criticism; nonsense results

from asserting something which, in that particular context, cannot be

meaningfully asserted. As Conant understands them, these readers treat

Moore‘s (or the skeptic‘s) propositions as if they already are fully

meaningful, but cannot be meaningfully uttered in these particular

circumstances:

McGinn, in effect, has Wittgenstein saying that there isn‘t any

problem about what claim the skeptic want to make – there isn‘t

170

any problem about what his proposition means – … the problem

just is that these claims run into conflict with various, as it were,

additional (pragmatic) constraints on assertibility. (ibid., p. 226)

This, Conant argues, implies that there are two kinds of nonsense: one,

concerning the meaningfulness of sentences themselves, and another,

concerning the intelligibility of asserting these propositions in particular

contexts.

In contrast to this reading, Conant claims that Wittgenstein is accusing

Moore of failing to mean anything in particular with his words, and not with

meaning something that it can‘t make sense to assert in these conditions.

The basis for this line of criticism is traced to Frege‘s context principle, and

Wittgenstein is claimed to already have put this principle to work in the

Tractatus in his declaration that a sign only has sense if we recognize it as a

symbol – i.e. as having an application. The later Wittgenstein generalizes

this principle, moving from words only having sense in the context of a

proposition, to sentences only having sense in the context of a language-

game (ibid., p. 239).

Wittgenstein‘s criticism of Moore is not that he has used a particular

phrase in the wrong context, but rather that ―it is not clear, when these

words are called upon in this context, what is being said – if anything‖ (ibid.,

p. 241). This understanding of sentences as acquiring sense through their

employment in particular circumstances is, as we saw in the last chapter,

171

contrary to Moore‘s belief that a sentence retains a fixed meaning

independent of its use:

The philosopher takes there to be something which is the

thought which the sentence itself expresses. (ibid.)

Wittgenstein‘s criticism of Moore‘s statement as ‗nonsense‘ is thus not

directed at the sentence, but at Moore himself for not providing a context for

his sentence to acquire a meaning – not giving it anything to do.

Conant‘s reading has a number of affinities with the one presented in

the previous chapter. In particular, he calls upon the remarks at §§ 347 ff.

to argue that Wittgenstein is not presenting a theory of sense and then

accusing Moore (and the skeptic) of overstepping those bounds. Instead he

is claiming that Moore‘s statements have not yet been given a sense at all.

Wittgenstein‘s stated confusion at OC 347 about what the sentence ‗I know

that that‘s a tree‘ means in this particular context (if anything) is sincere and

not feigned, for Moore has yet to provide that sentence with a particular

context or use. Since Wittgenstein claims that the meaning of this

proposition is, or now at least, not determinate, this shows that he is

opposed to Moore‘s view that the meaning of a sentence is fixed once and

for all by the meanings of its internal components.

Despite these similarities, Conant‘s interpretation suffers from a

number of problems that my reading is able to avoid or rectify. Similarly to

how Minar and Williams focused solely on the remarks in Part 1, in this

article Conant limits his attention to the handful of remarks around OC 350

172

that are particularly susceptible to a therapeutic reading,12 remaining silent

on the rest (and the majority) of the book. Yet as we have seen, clusters of

remarks in other parts of the book invite other kinds of readings, some of

them highly theoretical. Without having an account of those passages,

Conant‘s reading becomes just another voice competing for attention in the

shouting match of On Certainty interpretation. I believe that my reading

improves on Conant‘s by recognizing that there are multiple sections of the

book that invite different readings. Further, I explain why this is the case by

investigating the conditions under which its manuscript sources were

composed, as well as the editorial decisions involved in turning those

manuscripts into a book. I then provide grounds from Wittgenstein‘s

correspondence for favoring one of these possible readings – namely the

therapeutic one – over the others as most approaching what Wittgenstein

intended for his best writing.13

Although Conant emphasizes the lack of a substantial theory of hinge

propositions underwriting Wittgenstein‘s critique of Moore, there is relatively

little explanation of how this encounter is supposed to be therapeutic. We

don‘t see Wittgenstein attempting to bring about a change in Moore‘s

12 He also brings OC 31, OC 33, and PI 117, into his reading, all of which are given a central

place in the interpretation in the previous chapter. 13 Just because there are grounds for believing that Wittgenstein preferred the therapeutic remarks in On Certainty over the theoretical ones, that of course does not mean that his readers need to reach the same conclusion. One may still think that hinge propositions are of philosophical interest and look to Wittgenstein‘s text for insights concerning them. That is already an entirely legitimate way of approaching the text, so it is not necessary to distort the historical picture of Wittgenstein‘s development to justify reading On Certainty to that end.

173

behavior; instead, he is mostly trying to combat particular philosophical

positions according to this reading. In contrast I take the discussions of

confusion and of the failure of words to be given particular meanings in

context, and then connect them to the many instances in which Wittgenstein

does give Moore‘s proposition a sense. When this is coupled with the

observation that these successful attempts at making sense are immediately

followed by a loss of everything that is philosophically interesting (OC 622),

a therapy is found. Moore is set upon the task of working through a number

of examples, each resulting in the satisfaction of making sense and the

dissatisfaction of failing to establish a philosophically interesting point. The

intent of this activity, I claim, is to get Moore to at some point give up and

just move on to those sentences that actually help him get further in his

endeavors (OC 33), not for him to reach an insight into the nature of

languages and practices, or to become clear on the conditions for making

sense and thereby understand why his utterances failed to meet those

conditions.

Finally, in Conant‘s interpretation the waters are muddied by

controversial readings of the Tractatus and the works of Frege. The

background for what Wittgenstein is doing can be clearly found in his later

conception of therapy. The attempt to ground Wittgenstein‘s actions in

Frege‘s theoretical writings makes the therapeutic endeavors in On Certainty

look to be theoretically tinged. But the way that sentences are given

174

determinate meanings in contexts is not a well-known theoretical insight

that Wittgenstein is trying to pass on to Moore; for Wittgenstein, it is

entirely ―queer‖ and surprising that certain statements strike him as

―unjustified and presumptuous‖ when they are uttered without any occasion,

yet seem ―perfectly justified and everyday‖ if they are uttered when there is

some need for them (OC 553). Wittgenstein seems to be discovering this

remarkable fact right along with Moore.

Thomas A. Meyer makes similar criticisms of Conant in his article, ―A

Gesture of Understanding: Wittgenstein, Moore, and ‗Therapy‘‖ (2004).

Meyer is suspicious of the attempt to extend the ―austere interpretation of

the role of nonsense in the Tractatus…to account for the project of

Wittgenstein‘s later writings as well‖ (ibid., p. 236). After granting to Conant

that Moore is accused of speaking nonsense in some early remarks of the

book, Meyer rightly notes that

On Certainty does not appear to rest with its conclusion that

Moore‘s epistemology advances nonsense. Wittgenstein instead

appears to search for a way of capturing the sense that Moore‘s

references to knowing he has hands, or that he is a human

being, might be able to have. (ibid.)

Meyer makes two important observations that we can concur with: first,

Wittgenstein does not merely state that Moore‘s propositions are

nonsensical, but also attempts (and succeeds) in giving them a sense, and

second, the positive search for sense after the negative declaration of its

lack suggests there is an internal structure to the book, such that

175

Wittgenstein is not always engaged in the same activity at every point.

Meyer doesn‘t clearly specify the joints of this structure as I do in the

previous chapters, but it is nevertheless noteworthy that he recognizes On

Certainty to be a heterogeneous text, for this is not generally recognized.

Since Conant devotes much of his attention to what is involved in

accusations of nonsense, and little to Wittgenstein‘s successes in actually

producing determinate senses for Moore‘s propositions, Meyer takes the

occurrence of these successful attempts to refute the therapeutic reading of

On Certainty. As I have attempted to show in these chapters, it is possible to

give a therapeutic reading of On Certainty that is not an extension of a

resolute reading of the Tractatus.14 Meyer wishes to stake a middle ground

between the therapeutic reading of Conant and the theoretical reading of

Hacker, Conant‘s frequent interpretive opponent. Yet his description of the

result of making sense with Moore-type propositions as illuminating the

grammar of our language puts him quite close to Hacker‘s account of

Wittgenstein‘s philosophy as attempting to identify grammatical rules:

The notion that Wittgenstein does find a sense for Moore‘s remarks makes it difficult to maintain that these ‗do not say

anything‘ according to Wittgenstein‘s more developed account:

what they say is, at least possibly, that Moore speaks a language

14 Moyal-Sharrock & Brenner‘s claim that ―the ‗Therapeutic reading‘ approaches On Certainty in the spirit of ‗New Wittgenstein‘ commentators‖ (2005, p. 3) invites the impression that this is the only way that a therapeutic interpretation can be given to the book.

176

within which certain statements characterize the grammar and

can be regarded as true. (ibid., p. 237)15

A difficulty for this reading is accounting for how success is sometimes

achieved in trying to give Moore‘s propositions a sense. For when Meyer sees

these propositions being given a sense, he argues that philosophical

conclusions concerning grammar can be drawn. Yet this is in tension with

Wittgenstein‘s observations that he generally only succeeds in giving a

proposition sense when he puts it in an everyday context, and that when he

does so, nothing of philosophical interest remains.

One reader who has recognized phases in Wittgenstein‘s thinking in his

final years, and even taken this information into consideration when

discussing the structure of On Certainty, is Denis Paul, who was responsible

for translating a portion of the book‘s remarks from German to English. He

was a friend of Anscombe‘s and was granted access to some pieces of the

Nachlass after Wittgenstein passed away. Paul tells about hearing

Anscombe‘s ―story of how unable to think Wittgenstein had been under the

influence of his anti-cancer drugs‖ in 1950 (2007, p. 297). Initially, he took

this to indicate that Part 3 of On Certainty had a special status, especially

since ―§ 300 onwards (starting 10.3.51) is certainly written more fluently

than the rest‖ (ibid.). Yet he later decides that he had ―been over-

15 Even though the evidence Meyer cites when observing that Moore‘s statements can be

given a sense comes from Part 3 of On Certainty, the theoretical-sounding conclusions

about what results from this activity are drawn from remarks in Part 2. Thus the vague

demarcation he makes between earlier and later remarks isn‘t specific enough to separate

the remarks of Part 2 and Part 3.

177

impressed by [Anscombe‘s] story‖ of Wittgenstein‘s diminished capacity to

work in 1950, noting that ―§ 66 onwards … reads fluently enough‖ (ibid., pp.

297-8). This leads him to conclude that ―§§ 66-676 form a unit, to which §§

1-65 are only a prelude‖ (ibid., p. 298).

I agree with Paul that there is a noticeable shift in style at the

beginning of Part 3 of the book. As indicated in the previous chapter,

multiple voices are now more frequently introduced. The individual remarks

also tend now to be longer, and Wittgenstein is better able to sustain a train

of thought over multiple remarks and even multiple days of writing (this may

be what Paul has in mind when he speaks of these later remarks as reading

―fluently‖). But it is not merely the style of Part 3 that is noteworthy, but the

content and method as well. Paul appears to presume that the anti-cancer

drugs were at most affecting Wittgenstein‘s ability to write flowing and

readable prose. Finding Part 2 to be sufficiently readable, he is thus inclined

to disregard the cessation of Wittgenstein‘s cancer treatments as marking a

significant phase in the final writings. But from our comprehensive survey of

Wittgenstein‘s correspondence in Chapter 1, we saw that he did not simply

complain of being unable to write clearly during 1950, but also that he could

not even think clearly, and furthermore that the ideas he was able to

produce were not deemed to be of high quality. Thus the ‗curtain lifting from

Wittgenstein‘s brain‘ in the spring of 1951 does mark a significant break, so

the remarks from Parts 2 and 3 should not be lumped together as a single

178

unit. At the least, we should examine not just Wittgenstein‘s writing style

when trying to ascertain the structure of On Certainty, but also the content

of its remarks and the philosophical methods at work in them.

179

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