Philosophical Investigations Paperback – November 6, 2009

It's more than a little presumptuous to attempt a short review of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. After all, it's one of the few most important philosophical works of the twentieth century. This edition is sorely awaited by some, after years of close examination and criticism of the Anscombe translation.First, the geeky stuff on the translation and editing. Like the Anscombe translation, this one with Hacker and Schulte joining their efforts to Anscombe's, presents the original German and the English translation on facing pages. As a reader with a spotty knowledge of German, this gives me the opportunity to refer to the original where the English seems obscure, ambiguous, or just plain impenetrable. If you're a student of Wittgenstein, Hacker and Schulte have helpfully addressed numerous, controversial aspects of Anscombe's translation -- many of these, such as the difficulty with the German "Satz" (translated relative to context by "sentence" or "proposition", two very different English words) and "Seele" ("soul" sometimes but "mind" others by context in English), are discussed in their Preface.If you are a quasi-casual reader, many of these points of translation are probably less important than overall readability. And I think Hacker and Schulte have improved readability, updating the feel of Wittgenstein's writing, which is often colloquial, to something more modern.They've also added over 20 pages of sometimes helpful footnotes, where additional information about the translation or about Wittgenstein's thoughts are enlightening. And they've recast "Part II" of the Investigations itself as "Philosophy of Psychology -- A Fragment" -- their reasoning for that is given in their Preface.Like most great philosophical texts, no matter how many times I read the Investigations, it's different each time, and I feel foolish for having understood so little the previous time. The new translation offers a great excuse to give it another read.There are many themes to pick up, including the great variety of linguistic behavior (as contrasted with naive views of language as representing or naming, or with Wittgenstein's own view in the Tractatus), the illusions of distinctive mental activities (such as "meaning" a word while uttering it, or translating the inner to the outer or public), and the general theme of philosophical problems arising when "language goes on holiday".It's the last that continues to grab my attention, persistently through readings, with different remarks jumping out of the text each time. The simple view is that Wittgenstein thinks ordinary language (what we all say and do in practical contexts every day) is fine as it is, but that it's when we detach ordinary language from those practical contexts that we get in trouble. We fall into perplexing philosophical quandaries, supposing ourselves to really wonder whether the external world or other minds exist, or whether objects are material or ideal.But philosophical exercises of language are exercises of language, after all. It's not as though we can simply say, "Don't do that" when philosophers speak, and point out that they've left the "ordinary" behind. It's not a simple mistake, and the line between the "ordinary" and the "philosophical" is crossed sometimes without special notice. And it's not even the exclusive province of professional philosophers (amateurs seem even more impressed than the professionals sometimes by their own metaphysical musings).Certainly, there is more to say about the mistake that philosophers, amateur and professional, make. In particular, there is Wittgenstein's distinction between empirical remarks (remarks about facts in the world) and grammatical remarks (by contrast, remarks about how we speak or are to speak about those facts in the world). The philosopher mistakes the one for the other, thinking that, for example, by adopting what we call an idealist grammatical position (when we talk of objects in the world, we are really talking of mental or ideal objects) we have really discovered something about the objects and not just made a statement about how we should speak of them. Much more to say on this, of course -- which is why a short review is so presumptuous. In fact, it's Wittgenstein's thoughts on why we fall victim to such a misunderstanding that I puzzle most about.

It was time for a complete re-think of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations and an opportunity to incorporate the fruit of a lot of scholarly discussion on the text that has accumulated since its original collation, which was not Wittgenstein's own doing. It is important to point out that philosophy in the Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein lineage, has moved on since Wittgenstein, and largely because of his thinking, particularly his manner of doing philosophy, starting from, and remaining in contact with palpable experience as the reference of any possible reality explanation.Since it is fairly certain Wittgenstein would have found it sad if his work were to have become uniquely a chalk-lined pitch for territorial calculatons of measurable status-honors and award citations in professional circles, it is incumbant upon us to see his work as the product of a man debating the events of his time with himself, and to take his hint that the point of doing what he was doing was to "show" us what we might well choose to do in our own time and circumstance. Is being a conscious creature post-Enlightenment-- "modern" if you must --necessarily anti-historical or science-paradigm processed in infinite circular limbo? Wittgenstein's writings and intellectual development suggests a way to wonder such matters is to develop critical apptitudes for responding responsibily to desires to find a sense of permanence (historical) while also responding to desires to take subjective first-person responsibility for believing what is rigorously factual (science). In this sense, Philosophical Investigations, is a trail of evidence left of one persons work-in-progress.Wittgenstein, it is fair to say, believed whatever sort of thought-work philosophy supposes itself to be doing, it ought to be doing it where the work demand for work leads. His life was practically bookended by the two World Wars, a surface phenomenon that had long been brewing. The spectacular failure of social authority that "was" the two World Wars announced the end of governance by genetics-selected social elites and recognition of the political importance of public opinion in the consensus building process.Wittgenstein was famously uncomfortable talking philosophy in academia, for him the mental finishing schools of moribund authority structures, but he found minds there ready and able to demand a lot of themselves in the ways his thinking would require. He was even more allergic to group-think, especially operating in the so-called 'social sciences,' under the guise of science. Wittgenstein saw well before most-- and there's his genius --that a reality deprived by historical events of a crushing nature opposed to human purposes, hopes and desires, a collective world organized sufficiently to insulate itself against the imposing necessities of material scarcity, could no longer be ordered collectively from outside the individual; if any collective order can be possible under such a changed condition, it must come as an organizing principle inside conscious thinking, from an individuals taking within his own conceptual powers the responsibility to justify whatever he might accept to believe as fact, or what is the case.Wittgenstein's brand of self-questioning, for readers prepared to go mentally active as 'authors' of their own authority, is presently continued in spirit in the work of John R. Searle, Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, P.F. Strawson and G.E.M Anscombe. Philosophical Investigations is not any easy text to read because its compilation of remarks on loosely associated themes reads like reports of Wittgenstein ruminating to himself, like raw epiphanies of a moment's inspiration without the subject's mapping assumptions. Like Socrates, Wittgenstein believed he could assist at the birth of active consciousness, but could not force a passive mind into the world, or mystify it into existence with mind-candy-- or, even less, to 'sell it.'Books that disturb our complacency, that change us because we are aware of something at point B we weren't aware of at point A, are perhaps not for everyone, but they are about all that some of us may want to bother to read.