Zettel

Zettel is German for "slips of paper", and that is literally what this book is. After Wittgenstein's death, his literary executors found a box of cuttings he had snipped from his own typescripts, some loose, some clipped together in bundles. Elizabeth Anscombe and G.H. von Wright edited them, numbered them from 1 to 717 and published them in 1967 with Anscombe's translation facing the German.

The result is a short, varied book that reads like a workshop of the later philosophy: remarks on thinking, intending, imagining, pain, colour, mathematics and the nature of philosophy, many of them sharper and more compact than their counterparts elsewhere.

How it came about

Most of the slips come from typescripts dictated between 1945 and 1948, the period of the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology; a few go back as far as 1929. Wittgenstein seems to have used the box as a working store: he cut out remarks he wanted to keep, added handwritten ones, and arranged and rearranged them, probably as material for further work. The editors kept his bundles together where they existed and grouped the loose slips by theme, with help from Peter Geach. Some details of the ordering are therefore theirs, not his.

The University of California Press reissued the bilingual edition in 2007 for its fortieth anniversary. Since the Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology appeared in 1980, readers can see that a large share of Zettel was cut from the first volume of that work.

What it says

There is no single argument, but several clusters stand out.

• Thinking and intending. Is thinking an inner process that accompanies speech? Wittgenstein keeps showing how little the picture of a hidden mental mechanism explains.
• Sensation and expression. Pain behaviour is not evidence from which we infer pain; it is part of what we mean by pain. Here the material overlaps with the private language discussion in the Philosophical Investigations.
• Imagination and images. Imagining is subject to the will in a way seeing is not; you can be told to imagine something, but not to see it.
• Mathematics and rules. Short remarks on calculation, infinity and proof, close to his earlier work on the foundations of mathematics.
• Philosophy itself. Some of his best one-liners on method and the philosopher's position.

Der Philosoph ist nicht Bürger einer Denkgemeinde. Das ist, was ihn zum Philosophen macht.

The philosopher is not a citizen of any community of ideas. That is what makes him a philosopher.

Zettel §455

The tone is often lighter than in the Investigations, and the remarks are less embedded in long dialogues, which makes them easy to quote and easy to misread out of context.

How to read it

Zettel is one of the most approachable later texts. Each remark can be read on its own, so you can open it anywhere and browse. That is also its risk: without the surrounding argument, a slip can sound like an aphorism when it is really a step in a longer train of thought.

The standard edition is the bilingual Blackwell or California edition in Anscombe's translation. French readers have Fiches (Gallimard, 1970, translated by Jacques Fauve). There is, as far as we know, no complete Dutch translation. A good use of Zettel is as a companion while reading the Investigations: when a passage there feels obscure, the index of topics in Zettel often leads you to a clearer, shorter version.

Why it matters

For a long time Zettel was the main published source for Wittgenstein's late philosophy of psychology, between the Investigations (1953) and the publication of the large manuscripts in the 1980s. It shaped how philosophers like Anscombe, Peter Geach and later P.M.S. Hacker understood his views on mind and action. Today its scholarly role is smaller, since the fuller sources are available, but it remains the best short selection, partly because Wittgenstein himself chose what to cut. It also offers a glimpse of how he worked: by cutting, sorting and reshuffling his own sentences until they found their place, a method that fits his view of philosophy as an activity rather than a doctrine.

Verdict

Read this if you have started the Investigations and want a lighter companion, or if you like to read philosophy in small doses. It is an ideal book to keep on the bedside table. Do not treat it as a collection of sayings, and do not expect a structured argument: it is a box of tools, and it rewards readers who already know what the tools are for.