The Big Typescript

What it is and how it came about

The Big Typescript is a nickname, not a title. Wittgenstein never called it that. Scholars did, because it is by far the largest single typescript in his Nachlass, catalogued as TS 213. It runs to 768 pages, with a table of contents, chapters and numbered sections, which makes it the most book-like thing he produced between the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations.

It was made in stages, with scissors. From 1929 Wittgenstein filled large manuscript volumes. He dictated selections from them to a typist, cut the typescript into slips, rearranged the slips by theme, and had the result typed again. The Big Typescript is the outcome of that cycle, dictated in 1932 and 1933. Almost at once he began to correct it by hand, in the margins and on the back of the pages, and those revisions later became the Philosophical Grammar.

For decades readers knew it only in fragments. The sections on philosophy appeared in English in Philosophical Occasions (1993). The full German text came out in 2000 as volume 11 of the Wiener Ausgabe, edited by Michael Nedo. In 2005 Blackwell published a German-English edition translated by C. Grant Luckhardt and Maximilian A. E. Aue, which marks Wittgenstein's deletions, variants and marginal notes.

What it says

The table of contents reads like a map of the later philosophy. There are chapters on understanding, meaning, the proposition and its sense, intention and depiction, expectation and fulfilment, thinking, grammar, the foundations of mathematics, and one bluntly titled "Phenomenology is grammar". The guiding idea is that many philosophical problems are not about facts but about the grammar of our words. Ask what meaning is, as if it were an object hidden behind the word, and you are already heading the wrong way. Look instead at how the word is used and explained. That is the root of the idea that meaning is use.

The best-known pages are the sections on philosophy (§§86-93). Here philosophy is not a theory but a kind of work: tidying up concepts, removing misunderstandings, giving a clear overview of how words are used. The difficulty, he says, is not intellectual, as in the sciences, but a matter of changing one's attitude and overcoming a resistance of the will.

Die Arbeit an der Philosophie ist … eigentlich mehr die Arbeit an Einem selbst. An der eigenen Auffassung. Daran, wie man die Dinge sieht.

Working on philosophy is … really more a matter of working on yourself. On your own way of seeing. On how you look at things.

Big Typescript, p. 407

This is where the therapeutic view of philosophy first takes clear shape. Many sentences from these pages return, often only lightly changed, in the Investigations §§89-133.

How to read it

Do not read it from cover to cover unless you are writing a thesis. Start with the sections on philosophy: short, vivid and self-contained. Then choose a theme. The chapters on meaning and understanding prepare the opening of the Investigations; "Phenomenology is grammar" shows how Wittgenstein left his plans of 1929 behind; the chapters on mathematics are hard going without some logic.

The bilingual Wiley-Blackwell edition is the one to use. Its notation of crossings-out and alternatives takes some getting used to, but it lets you watch the thinking in motion. Facsimiles of TS 213 can be consulted at Wittgenstein Source.

Why it matters

Its full publication changed the study of the middle period. Before 2000 most readers met this material through the Philosophical Grammar, where an editor had already combined several layers of revision. Now the text Wittgenstein himself had typed can be read as a whole. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists it among the main sources for his thought of 1932-1933.

Its status remains disputed. Some scholars treat it as a book Wittgenstein completed and then abandoned; others insist it is only a stage in an ongoing process of rewriting, and that calling it a work gives it a finality he never intended. Both sides agree that it is the missing link between the Philosophical Remarks and the Investigations.

Verdict

Read this if you already know the Investigations and want to see its workshop, or if you study the development of Wittgenstein's thought. It is not a place to start. But the twenty or so pages on philosophy are worth reading for anyone curious about what Wittgenstein thought philosophy is for.