The Blue and Brown Books

What they are and how they came about

In the academic year 1933-1934 Wittgenstein dictated notes to the students attending his Cambridge classes. The notes were duplicated and bound in blue covers, hence the name. The following year he dictated a second, more carefully built text to two students, Francis Skinner and Alice Ambrose. Three copies were typed and bound in brown. Both texts circulated privately, passed from hand to hand, copied and recopied, long before anything of the later Wittgenstein was in print.

They are unusual in one respect: Wittgenstein dictated them in English, so this is his own voice, not a translation. In 1936 he started to rework the Brown Book in German, gave up, and judged the attempt worthless. Soon afterwards he began what would become the Philosophical Investigations. Rush Rhees published both texts together in 1958 under the title Preliminary Studies for the "Philosophical Investigations", generally known as the Blue and Brown Books.

What they say

The Blue Book opens with a question: "What is the meaning of a word?" Instead of answering it head on, Wittgenstein asks how we explain the meaning of a word, and suggests that the question itself tempts us to look for some thing that a word stands for. Much of the book diagnoses where such temptations come from. One source is what he calls our craving for generality: the urge to find something common to everything we call by the same name, and the habit of copying the method of science, which seeks the simplest general law.

Instead of "craving for generality" I could also have said "the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case".

Blue Book, p. 18

Against this he sets the idea that the things we call "games" need have nothing in common, only a network of overlapping similarities. This is the first appearance of family resemblance. The rest of the Blue Book treats thinking (is it a process going on "in the head"?), private experience, solipsism, and the curious grammar of the word "I". Many of these pages anticipate the later discussion of private language.

The Brown Book is built differently. Part I is a series of numbered, ever richer language games, starting with a builder and his assistant who use a handful of words for building stones. Each game adds something: numbers, pointing, names, past tense. Part II turns to recognising, reading, being guided, and the feeling of familiarity. Rather than state theses, Wittgenstein makes you watch language in simple, imagined settings until the philosophical puzzle loses its grip.

How to read them

Start with the Blue Book. It is the easiest book Wittgenstein left us: continuous prose, a lecturer's tone, plenty of examples. You can read it in two or three sittings. The Brown Book is slower. Its language games only work if you actually picture them, so read with a pencil and play each game in your head before moving on. The standard edition is Blackwell's, available in many reprints. No knowledge of the Tractatus is required, though it helps to know that some of his targets are his own earlier views.

Why they matter

Through those circulating copies, the Blue and Brown Books spread Wittgenstein's new ideas well before 1953, and helped shape philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s. Language games, family resemblance, the critique of the craving for generality and the treatment of private experience all appear here first in a form an outsider could follow. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy treats them as a key text of the middle period; the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy calls them preliminary studies for the later work.

That label, chosen by the editor, is itself a reading. Some scholars think the Brown Book deserves to be read as a work in its own right, with a method of graded examples that the Investigations later abandoned. And some topics, such as solipsism and the use of "I", are treated more fully here than anywhere in the later work.

Verdict

Read this if you want to start with the later Wittgenstein. For most readers the Blue Book is a better first step than the Investigations: clearer, more patient, and in his own English. Do not expect the compression and depth of the finished work. Expect instead a fine teacher thinking aloud, which is often exactly what a beginner needs.