Ludwig Wittgenstein

Copyright © 1 969, 1 970 by David Pears . All rights reserved. Published in 1 970 in a hardbound and a paperbound edition by The Viking Press, Inc . , 625 Madison Avenue, New York, N.Y. 1 0022. SBN 670-44432-4 (hardbound ) SBN 670-0 1 9 1 0-0 (paperbound ) . Library of Congress catalog card number : 77- 1 04 1 4 9. Printed in U.S.A.

T O

I R I S

M U R D O C H

Just

don't

pull

the knot tight before being certain that

you have got hold of the right end. -LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Notebooks, 1914-16, p. 47

P R EF A CE

Some of this book appeared

in

a briefer form

in

the

New York Review of Books of January 16, 1969. I would

like to express my gratitude to Professor P. F. Strawson and to Mr. P. L. Gardiner for reading it in its present form and suggesting improvements. The first part of the book owes much to Mr. B. F. McGuinness, with whom I have discussed the early philosophy of Wittgen­ stein frequently and extensively.

C O N TEN T S

ix

Preface

Introduction Part

1:

1

Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy

i

/

The Beginnings

ii

/

The Limits of Language

iii

/

Pictures and Logic

iv

/

Part 2:

Beyond

39 51

67

83

Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy

V

/

The Task

vi

/

The Method

vii

/

Necessity

viii

/

ix

/

Sensations 14 9 The True Center

95 106

132

Biographical Note Short Bibliography Index

20 7

179 201 203

Introduction

T HE GENERAL

CHARACTER

' OF W T 1 TGEN STEIN S

P HIL O S OP HY

Wittgenstein's philosophy is a strange product of genius, which differs in very many ways from the work of his contemporaries and predecessors. The most striking thing about his achievement is that he produced two different philosophies, one in the Tractatus Logico­ Philosophicus , which he published in 1921, and the other in Philosophical Investigations, which appeared in 1953, two years after his death , and which is the most finished example of his later work. There are, of course , many lines connecting his early and his later ideas, but the differences between them are clear-cut, and their development is separated by an interval in which he gave up philosophy, taught in Austrian village schools, and designed and supervised the building of a house for his sisters in Vienna. In some periods in the history of philosophy there

L UDW I G

W I T T G E N S T E I N

2

is general agreement about its aims and the best way of achieving them, but soon after the beginning of this century a change in the conception of philosophy began to spread from Cambridge, where it had been initiated by Russell and Moore. It was no longer seeJl .. ,as the / direct study' "o� ,thought," �I1d ideas bt,it: ratb"er, as the study of "them through the intermediary of language. Latei;"Iil tbe 192os, Vienna became the second home of this linguistic philosophy. Wittgenstein followed the new method and made a great contribution to it, par­ ticularly in his later period. He was always aware that philosophy is a more extraordinary subject than it is commonly taken to be, and he never ceased to be preoccupied with the questions, what it is, and what it ought to be, and how it ought to be done. An examina­ tion of his philosophy must, therefore, take account not only of changes of doctrine between his early and late periods, but also of changes in method. In both periods his aim was to understand the structure and limits of thought, and his method was to study the structure and limits of language. His philosophy was a critique of language very similar in scope and purpose to Kant's critique of thought. Like Kant, he believed that philosophers often unwittingly stray beyond the limits into the kind of specious non­ sense that seems to express genuine thoughts but in fact does not do so. He wanted to discover the exact location of the line dividing sense from nonsense, so that people might realize when they had reached it and stop. This is the negative side of his philosophy and it makes the first, and usually the deepest, impression on his readers. But it also has another, more positive side. His purpose was not merely to formulate instruc­ tions which would save people from trying to say what

Introduction

3

cannot be said in language, but also to succeed in understanding the structure of what can be said. He believed that the only way to achieve this understanding is to plot the limits, because the limits and the struc­ ture have a common origin. The nature of language dictates both what you can and what you cannot do with it. All Wittgenstein's doctrines are related to his idea that language has limits imposed by its internal struc­ ture. FOrexampre,-rntlle-TTactafus�-he"�'puts�'forward a-theory of logic deduced, like his theory of the limits of language, from his early views about the nature of propositions, and he places religion and morality , beyond the limits because they do not meet the require­ ments of what can be said. Similarly, in Philosophical Investigations he rejects the theory that we might have developed a language for reporting our sensations with­ out the help of the language in which we describe the external world, on the ground that such a language would fail to meet a requirement that must be met by any language.1 There are two main changes in Wittgenstein's doc­ trines between his early and his later periods. First" he abandoned the idea that the str:ucture of reaiity !\ deterrinesth�"-St�� ��L of' Jl;l�gl;l,ag�, �p.d suggested 1 that"1t is really the other way round; our ,language determines' our view of reality, because we see things thr