Wittgenstein’s Phenomenology

Abstract

According to his surviving works, published or otherwise, it is evident that throughout his entire philosophical life Wittgenstein’s philosophical attention is directed to immediate experience. Seemingly, Wittgenstein is concerned with empirical knowledge and its foundations for which his mentor Russell cared much. But Wittgenstein’s problem is much more complicated and interesting than just epistemological grounding, for at the heart of the matter it involves what we may properly call phenomenology. It is not entirely surprising to see that Wittgenstein actually deals with phenomenological problems if we carefully review and examine his writings. Most notably, Wittgenstein himself uses the term ‘phenomenology’ or ‘phenomenological’ in his writings after 1929 when he came back to professional philosophy at Cambridge. The first four notebooks of 1929–30,¹ the Philosophical Remarks,² and the Big Typescript³ are the chief sources in which Wittgenstein’s own references to phenomenology occur most frequently. In particular, the Big Typescript contains a chapter entitled “Phenomenology,” which begins with a section title “Phenomenology is Grammar.” This simply cannot be viewed as a special case of, or a digression from his entire philosophical context. We even have a report of Wittgenstein declaring in his own words “You could say of my work that it is ‘phenomenology’.”⁴