Abstract
That we know what Wittgenstein wrote is in more than one respect largely due to the efforts of Georg Henrik von Wright. He is, as one of Wittgenstein’s heirs as well as one of the editors or co-editors of several volumes containing Wittgenstein’s writings, responsible for the format in which we read Wittgenstein. He has, as generous provider and observant keeper of what he himself modestly likes to call the “Wittgenstein Materials” at the Helsinki Department of Philosophy, helped many interested students and scholars to consult copies of Wittgenstein’s writings and other materials relevant to understanding Wittgenstein’s work. And he has, as the author of a catalogue of the Wittgenstein papers and several painstaking and at the same time eminently readable studies of the origins of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations, made us familiar with the astonishing volume of Wittgenstein’s literary Nachlaß and the background of the two books which made Wittgenstein’s name famous.1
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Notes
Cf. “The Wittgenstein Papers”, “The Origin of the Tractatus” and “The Origin and Composition of the Philosophical Investigations”,all of them reprinted in von Wright’s book Wittgenstein,Blackwell, Oxford 1982. In this context, it is also important to remember von Wright’s edition of Wittgenstein’s Letters to C. K. Ogden (Blackwell, Oxford 1973) and the enormous, and enormously valuable, work that went into Wittgenstein’s Cambridge Letters,edited by McGuinness and von Wright (Blackwell, Oxford 1995). A more recent version of von Wright’s article on the Wittgenstein papers can be found in Philosophical Occasions: 1912–1951,ed. by James Klagge and Alfred Nordmann, Hackett, Indianapolis, Indiana 1993.
That the Philosophical Investigations and the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics were intended as companion volumes is borne out by the fact that on the back of early editions of these books the numbers “1” and “2” are printed in large type.
Here there is also a practical point rightly stressed by Hintikka when he writes that reading Wittgenstein’s “notebooks requires a constant series of comparisons between different pages of the same notebook and between different notebooks, which is agonizingly difficult on a microfilm machine” (“An Impatient Man and His Papers”, Synthese,87, 1991, p. 191.
An exception appear to be the egregiously titled Geheime Tagebücher,Turia and Kant, Wien-Berlin 1991. This unfortunate pamphlet was clearly aimed at an audience keen on reading scandalous titbits from a famous thinker’s private life. It is high time that Wittgenstein’s notes be published where they belong, namely, alongside the text of Notebooks 1914–1916,whose title is, in view of the actual time of composition — 1914–1917 — also fairly odd.
Cf. my review of the first two volumes of this edition in Information Philosophie,December 1995, pp. 54–60.
There must be a certain irony in the fact that David Stern arrives at the conclusion that for me it should be an unwelcome result that Bemerkungen II might count as a “work” according to my criteria. Cf. Stem: “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”, in Hans Sluga and David Stem (eds.): The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, pp. 442–76, in particular p. 458.
Joachim Schulte: Wittgenstein: Eine Einführung, Reclam, Stuttgart 1989, American trans. by W. H. Brenner and J. F. Holley: Wittgenstein: An Introduction, State University of New York Press, Albany 1992.
Stem: “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy”, cit., p. 462. Further page references to this article will be given in brackets in the main text.
Of course, one sees why the translators inserted that “finished”. The English word “work” is a much wider term than the German word “Werk”. In English the “countable uncountable” difference is important: all the draft writings by Wittgenstein are his work, but it may well be that none of these writings constitutes a work by him.
One author who seems to have found these criteria helpful is Oliver Scholz. Cf. his “Zum Status von Teil II der Philosophischen Untersuchungen”, in Eike von Savigny and Oliver R. Scholz (eds.): Wittgenstein über die Seele, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 24–40.
That Wittgenstein planned to publish earlier versions of the Philosophical Investigations is described by von Wright in his “The Origin and Composition of the Philosophical Investigations”,cit., pp. 120–22.
Cf. the editor’s note at the end of Philosophische Bemerkungen.
Cf. e.g. parts of MS 116 and TSS 228, 229, 232.
Schulte, p. 54; p. 35.
Cf. Anthony Kenny: “From the Big Typescript to the Philosophical Grammar”,in Jaakko Hintikka (ed.): Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G. H. von Wright,North-Holland Publishing Co., Amsterdam 1976, pp. 41–53. There Kenny draws what seems to be the only reasonable conclusion, viz. “that the most prudent editorial policy would have been to print the original Big Typescript as it stood rather than to seek for a definitive revision of it” (p. 52).
As Wittgenstein says of the “book on Ethics which really was a book on Ethics”, cf. “Lecture on Ethics”, in Philosophical Occasions,cit., p. 40.
Of course, a particularly sanguine reader might want to use the argument Wittgenstein himself applied to the case of the Tractatus: “Either my piece is a work of the highest rank, or it is not a work of the highest rank. In the latter (and more probable) case I myself am in favour of its not being printed. And in the former case it’s a matter of indifference whether it’s printed twenty or a hundred years sooner or later. After all, who asks whether the Critique of Pure Reason,for example, was written in 17x or y.” (Letter to Russell, 6.5.20., trans. Brian McGuinness, Cambridge Letters,p. 154 f.) Presumably the fact the Critique of Pure Reason was avaible did make a difference to a few people living towards the end of the eighteenth century.
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Schulte, J. (1999). What Wittgenstein Wrote. In: Egidi, R. (eds) In Search of a New Humanism. Synthese Library, vol 282. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1852-3_7
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