Culture and value

Culture and Value (Vermischte Bemerkungen, literally "miscellaneous remarks") is a selection of short notes Wittgenstein wrote between 1914 and 1951 on everything except technical philosophy: music, architecture, religion, Shakespeare, his own character, the decline of a civilisation. G.H. von Wright, with Heikki Nyman, picked them out of the manuscripts and published them in German in 1977. The English bilingual edition, translated by Peter Winch, followed in 1980; a revised edition by Alois Pichler appeared in German in 1994 and in English in 1998.

How the book came about

Wittgenstein never wrote a book called Culture and Value. In his notebooks, between philosophical remarks, he wrote others of a personal or cultural kind, sometimes in a code he used for private entries. Von Wright noticed that these did not belong in the philosophical editions but were too good to lose, and spent years making a selection. The remarks are printed in chronological order, each with its year. Nearly half date from after 1945.

The English title is the translator's and publisher's invention, and some readers find it misleadingly grand. The German title is more honest: these are fragments, gathered from many contexts.

What it says

There is no single argument, but there are recurring themes. Wittgenstein writes about music with real expertise, on Brahms, Mendelssohn, Bruckner and above all Schubert and Beethoven. He writes about style and about the difficulty of being honest in one's own work. He expresses a deep unease with what he calls the spirit of contemporary European and American civilisation, its faith in progress and construction.

On religion he is at his most striking. Christianity, he says in one remark, is not a doctrine about what has happened or will happen, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life; it does not rest on historical truth. Belief appears less as holding a hypothesis than as a way of living, a theme that links to the Lecture on ethics and the Remarks on Frazer.

He also writes about himself as a thinker, often harshly. In a remark from 1931 he lists those who influenced him (Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa) and calls his own talent reproductive rather than original. The same year he uses the phrase family resemblance in a note on Spengler, years before the Investigations. And he sums up his attitude to philosophy in one line:

Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.

Philosophy ought really to be written only as poetry.

Culture and Value, 1933-34

Not everything is admirable. Some remarks from the early 1930s on Jews and Jewishness, written by a man of Jewish descent, use stereotypes of the time and make uncomfortable reading. An honest reading includes them.

How to read it

This is the easiest Wittgenstein book to pick up and the hardest to use well. Open it anywhere and you will find a sentence worth copying out. But each remark is cut from its context, and the context often changes the meaning. Use the 1998 revised edition, which gives the manuscript source for each entry, and treat it as a companion to the main works rather than a summary. Researchers can trace remarks back to their place in the Bergen Nachlass Edition; the Bergen archive has worked on an annotated electronic edition. The Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Wittgenstein's aesthetics shows how much of his thinking about art rests on these notes.

Why it matters

For readers outside academic philosophy, Culture and Value is often the book that makes Wittgenstein human: a cultured Viennese, troubled, religious without a creed, severe with himself. Its remarks are quoted by composers, writers and theologians. The risk is that a few beautiful sentences come to stand for the whole philosophy. Von Wright's selection is also a selection, and scholars still debate what it leaves out.

Verdict

Read this if you want to know Wittgenstein the person and the moralist, or if you care about music, art and religion more than about logic. Keep it by the bed and read a few pages at a time. Do not take it as an introduction to his philosophy: it shows the climate in which that philosophy grew, not the philosophy itself.