Philosophical remarks

What it is and how it came about

Philosophical Remarks (Philosophische Bemerkungen) is a typescript Wittgenstein put together in the spring of 1930, little more than a year after he came back to Cambridge and to philosophy. After the Tractatus he had written almost nothing philosophical for ten years. From January 1929 the notebooks filled quickly. For this book he selected remarks from the manuscripts of 1929 and early 1930, cut them up and ordered them by theme.

The occasion was practical. Trinity College had to decide whether to keep funding him, and Bertrand Russell was asked to assess the new work. Russell reported that the theories were new, very original and certainly important, adding that he did not know whether they were true. Which typescript Russell actually received, TS 208 or the more finished TS 209, is still debated by Nachlass scholars. TS 209 is the text that Rush Rhees edited and published in German in 1964. The English translation by Raymond Hargreaves and Roger White followed in 1975.

What it says

The book has no single thesis, but it has a direction. The Tractatus pictured language as a set of independent elementary propositions, each true or false on its own. In 1929 Wittgenstein saw that this fails for something as ordinary as colour. If a patch is red all over, it is not also green, and that exclusion does not follow from logic in the Tractatus sense. Propositions come in systems, like the marks on a ruler: you lay the whole ruler against an object, never a single mark.

A great deal follows from that one crack. Wittgenstein gives up the idea of a special primary language that would describe immediate experience. He starts to speak of grammar: the rules for the use of our words, which we do not discover in the world but lay down ourselves. He asks what it means to verify a proposition, a theme that made him interesting to the Vienna Circle, whose members Moritz Schlick and Friedrich Waismann he met regularly in those years. Long chapters deal with mathematics: number, infinity, proof, and the idea that a mathematical statement gets its sense from the way it is proved.

The foreword has a very different tone. It says the spirit of the book differs from the great stream of European and American civilisation, and that Wittgenstein writes for a small circle of readers.

Dieses Buch ist für jene geschrieben, die seinem Geist freundlich gegenüberstehen.

This book is written for those who are sympathetic to its spirit.

Philosophische Bemerkungen, Vorwort

How to read it

This is not a book for beginners. The remarks are short, dense and often technical, and roughly half the volume is about the foundations of mathematics. A workable route: read the foreword, then the opening chapters on language, grammar and verification, then the sections on colour, time and memory. Leave the mathematics for later unless that is your main interest.

Keep the picture theory of the Tractatus fresh in your mind, because many pages argue with it, often without saying so. The Blackwell edition (English, or the original German) is the standard one. Facsimiles and a transcription of the typescript are freely available at Wittgenstein Source, the Bergen Nachlass edition.

Why it matters

Philosophical Remarks is the clearest window onto the moment the Tractatus starts to come apart. You can watch the later Wittgenstein appear sentence by sentence: from logical form to grammar, from hidden structure to the rules we actually follow. How sharp that break was remains disputed. Some readers see a gradual development, others a real turn around 1931 or later. Both camps use this book as evidence. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy counts it among the core texts of the middle period, next to the Big Typescript.

It is also a historical document. It shows how close Wittgenstein briefly came to the verificationism of the Vienna Circle, and how quickly he moved away from it again.

Verdict

Read this if you know the Tractatus and want to see exactly why its author stopped believing in it. Skip it if you are new to Wittgenstein: start with the Blue and Brown Books, and come back here once you know where the story ends. For anyone working on Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics, it is indispensable.