Silliman's Papers

Counting Wittgensteins,
Understanding the relationship of early and late Wittgenstein

In reading Ludwig Wittgenstein, we must each eventually approach the question of continuity, must consider how the 40 year span of his work hangs together. We cannot consider the texts of Wittgenstein without somewhere considering how they relate and the consideration of their relation may be the most basic first step to understanding these texts. How we answer the questions of continuity, discontinuity, and development serves as the fundamental frame within which we will understand these works and will serve as our first characterization of each work. The reading of Wittgenstein is filtered and interpreted through this answer, making it a primary and necessary question to consider carefully. To read Wittgenstein is to take a position on the continuity of his thought.

There is a standard reading of Wittgenstein that understands him as to be understood in two parts, two stages, so that there are two Wittgensteins, an early one and a late one. The early Wittgenstein is defined as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published in 1922, and the later one as the Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953. Between these two works is held a “fundamental division” by which we may understand the whole of Wittgenstein’s thought. There is, in fact, a middle period of his thinking, collected notably in The Blue and Brown Books, which is generally considered to be transitional and is primarily read as work preliminary to later thinking. There is, also, a later period of works written at the end of his life, e.g. Zettel, Remarks on Colour, and On Certainty, which are considered to be peripheral to and not a marked shift away from the Investigations. So while there are four periods of work and could conceivably be a theory of “four Wittgensteins,” the general consensus of the standard understanding counts only two.

While this is the general consensus, there are three main positions on the continuity of the Wittgensteinian corpus operas:
1) no continuity, a sharp division of early and late Wittgenstein,
2) soft continuity, a development of thought but constant in themes and concerns,
3) strong continuity, Wittgenstein always holding to his “late” project.
It has been said that in the study of Wittgenstein, every possible interpretation has been held by some scholar and the question of continuity is no different. There are other positions on Wittgenstein’s continuity, but these are the main one and the ones which will be considered in this paper. This paper will consider each position, present relevant critiques, and argue that the second interpretation is the most reasonable and the most tenable.

For the standard position holding no continuity between the early and late work, there are three arguments: the obvious presence of stylistic changes, Wittgenstein’s own testimony of his change, and the specific propositions explicitly proposed in the Tractatus and then explicitly rejected in the Investigations.

Even the most superficial reader would have to notice Wittgenstein’s stylistic shift. The Tractatus is a dense and highly compressed work, with cryptic sentences of a vatic tone arranged in a numbered nesting. At the top layer, the work is only seven sentences long and the fully expanded work takes up less than 60 pages. The later works, everything after the Tractatus, particularly the Investigations, are written in series of numbered paragraphs, often making use of examples and thought experiments and considering particular cases. The writing is neither dense nor cryptic and exhibits the looseness of rambling reflections rather than the rigidity of sequences of logic.

Both Wittgenstein’s biography and his writing attest to a discontinuity, to a break between the early and later thought. After writing and publishing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein gave up philosophy. In a period biographers call “the lost years,” Wittgenstein gave up philosophy after publishing the Tractatus. He taught grammar school in Austria, worked as a gardener’s assistant in a monastery near Vienna, worked on the design and construction of a modernist-styled house, sought to emigrate to the Soviet Union and do manual labor, but did nothing in the way of philosophy because, we are told, he believed that he had solved philosophy and there was no philosophy left to be done after the work of the Tractatus. In his biography we see a severe break between the publication of the early work and the undertaking of the later work. Wittgenstein writes that he only returned to philosophy, only undertook the later work, because, having reason to re-read and re-examine the Tractatus, he realized that he had made “grave mistakes” in what he had written. He does not hold up the two works as unified but rather says the later to work is to be understood as corrective, understood in contrast. In letters he describes the early work as “arrogance” and “dogmatism,” saying that “only in recent years have I broken away” from the early work.

Finally, and probably most importantly, there is an explicit change of theory. The Tractatus sets forth a theory of a perfect language which is atomistic, fully analyzable, with a logical structure that pictures the world. The Investigations rejects this theory for a theory of everyday and common language. Norman Malcolm writes that Wittgenstein made this shift with full knowledge of the change he was making, and his later writings form a “massive attack on the principle ideas of the Tractatus.” Malcolm lists 15 propositions held in the early Wittgenstein’s work and rejected in the later:
1 That there is a fixed form of the world, an unchanging order of logical possibilities, which is independent of whatever is the case.
2 That the fixed form of the world is constituted of things that are simple in an absolute sense.
3 That the simple objects are the substratum of thought and language.
4 That thoughts, composed of ‘psychical constituents,’ underlie the sentences of language.
5 That a thought is intrinsically a picture of a particular state of affairs.
6 That a proposition, or a thought, cannot have a vague sense.
7 That whether a proposition has sense cannot depend on whether another proposition is true.
8 That to understand a proposition it is sufficient to know the meaning of its constituent parts.
9 That the sense of a proposition cannot be explained.
10 That there is a general form of all propositions.
11 That each proposition is a picture of one and only one state of affairs.
12 That when a sentence is combined with a method of projection the resulting proposition is necessarily unambiguous.
13 That what one means by a sentence is specified by an inner process of logical analysis.
14 That the pictorial nature of most of our everyday propositions is hidden.
15 That every sentence with sense expresses a thought which can be compared with reality.

These seemingly obvious changes have led many to view Wittgenstein’s work as discontinuous, reading it as two distinct and different periods. For these reasons most commentators hold that we are to understand two Wittgensteins, Wittgenstein in two parts, and that “no unbroken line leads from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations; there is no logical sequence between the two books, but rather a logical gap. The thought of the later work is a negation of the thought of the earlier.”

This understanding, though, seems overstated, exaggerating the change until it is construed as some sort of radical conversion. The view is straightforward enough, but seems to lack some needed nuance, and we ought not let go unquestioned this method of emphatic implications.

First, the stylistic changes are undeniable, but what is not so obvious is the import of those changes. If, at a younger age, Wittgenstein constructed his works in more highly complex artifices, this could be understood as a youthful intensity that would later mellow. If, at an older age, Wittgenstein wrote less tightly, less cryptically and less pointedly, it could be accounted for as the result of a development of temperance. There are many reasons a writer’s style might change, and it seems odd to understand these different styles as something besides a natural development of age. The implication that this shift marks some total break and radical disconnection between two periods in a thinker’s thought seems an extreme and possibly post hoc conclusion.

Second, Wittgenstein’s own testimony is being interpreted in the broadest of senses. He was a perfectionist notoriously reticent to publish his work, so the fact that he found “grave mistakes” when re-reading something he wrote years before ought really to be understood as the statement of man who held himself to very high standards. Even if we accept his analysis, accept that there were “grave mistakes,” it does not follow that the entire early period is to be understood as a grave mistake and misdirection. We might well do better to understand those mistakes as particular mistakes, to understand Wittgenstein as rejecting particular pieces of his work and not the entire thing and everything that was associated with it.

Third, Malcolm’s 15 changed propositions focus on the atomism and the picture theory which, while present in the early work, is not really the whole of it. Again it is only by exaggeration that we can move from holding that some things changed in Wittgenstein’s thought to the idea that everything important changed and that this thought is without continuity.

This reading is marked by exaggerations, overstatements, and generalizations. We ought especially to be wary of this counting of two Wittgensteins with its theory of a logical gap as it might lead us to not look at ways in which later Wittgenstein was influenced by earlier work, and earlier work might have latently held later Wittgenstein. By declaring this radical change and a logical gap, this theory casts a darkness over a whole aspect of Wittgenstein, saying it is unknowable.

The second option regarding the continuity of Wittgenstein’s work, which this paper will argue for, is the interpretation of soft continuity. This reading understands there to be a change in Wittgenstein, two projects which can be divided into early and late periods of his work, but an overall constancy of themes and concerns. There is no unexplainable gap between two Wittgensteins, but a normal, natural and quite explainable development of the thinking of a smart man.

While the theory of language can be seen to change so that picture theory, atomism, and the impulse towards a logically perfect language are held and promoted by the younger Wittgenstein and rejected by the older Wittgenstein, this change is structured around what remains for Wittgenstein very important and central themes and concerns. There are, in particular, three constants: his disposition towards ‘philosophy,’ his fundamental turn towards language, and his understanding of the analysis of meaning or sense as key to dissolving confusion.

Wittgenstein’s aim, in both the Tractatus and the Investigations, is the dissolution of philosophy. He is never kindly disposed to philosophy and consistently throughout the “change” describes philosophy as confusion, as a bump on the head of thinking. In the early era he thinks this is due to attempting to move past the limits of language, in the later due to attempting to find the occult secret, the “sublime” that is better than language. “It is quite true that his new and old ways of thinking are poles apart,” writes K. T. Fann, “(h)owever, there is an important continuity in Wittgenstein’s conception of the nature and tasks of philosophy.” For all the change, then, there is a fundamental and important consistency here.

In some sense, then, Wittgenstein’s project was markedly constant, and this continuity could actually be understood as the cause of the particular changes. Wittgenstein didn’t undergo some radical conversion where he was knocked off his horse, but rather realized his earlier work participated and perpetuated that which it was intended to oppose. Wittgenstein then returned to his work, which was the same work, determined this time to accomplish what his earlier attempt had failed to do. If this continuity is ignored, how would we explain Wittgenstein’s return to philosophy? The goal of his writing, the final dissolution and abandonment of the confusion called philosophy, does not change.

There is too an important continuity of method. At some point very early Wittgenstein became convinced that philosophy was an exercise of confusion and that these confusions arose from the misunderstanding of language. From this he never wavers. There is no period where Wittgenstein turns to metaphysics or epistemology, for instance. For although Wittgenstein shifts sharply from seeking perfect language to taking language as perfectly good, throughout both periods his work is always turned towards the understanding of language as fundamental to the understanding of the world. The entirety of both the early Tractatus and the later Investigations are concerned with language.

In particular he is always interested in the use of words and the analysis of meaning and sense. His understanding of what makes up the meanings of words changes, and his understanding of how meanings relate changes, but there is constancy to at least this part of his method. He develops his question from “What is the structure of language?” to later opposing that assumption of a possible final analysis and complete exactness, and he moves to the question of why that first question was confused and to a consideration of normal natural language. Even his understanding of language is not a discontinuous as we have supposed, for in both the Tractatus and the Investigations he seeks to justify the vagueness of ordinary propositions, writing in the Tractatus that “all the propositions of our everyday language, just as they stand, are in perfect logical order,” and in the Investigations that “what we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.” This is not to say that the manner does not change, but to illustrate that there certainly is a continuity and a constancy between the two works that ought to be understood.

There is, then, a change in the Wittgensteinian corpus operas, but it not a total change with two unconnectable parts. If we frame our understanding of Wittgenstein within this theory of soft continuity – the moderate middle position on his continuity – we are able to hold to a development in his thought that seems natural and reasonable. We don’t see two radically different and distinct Wittgensteins, but the natural and normal development of a thinker from his early to later thought. This theory does not fall apart when compared to his biography, and it does not result in weird or tortured reading of some part of the work, nor in too easy dismissals. It seems, then, to be quite reasonable and to be the theory that gives us the best account of Wittgenstein’s work.

The third option regarding Wittgenstein’s continuity is strong continuity, notably held by the “New Wittgensteinians.” The idea of strong continuity is that Wittgenstein never changed his theories, which is the theory normally categorized as “later” Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein does not, the founders of the New Wittgensteinian reading Cora Diamond and James Conant think, come later to think that the thrust of the Tractatus is nonsense, but rather always thought so. There is a continuity without development in Wittgenstein’s corpus operas, though it’s a sort of secret one.

This idea depends on two metaphors for Tractatus. The first metaphor, found within the Tractatus, is the metaphor of the scaffold or the ladder. Wittgenstein closes the Tractatus with the words,
My sentences are illuminating in the following way: to understand me you must recognize my sentences – once you have climbed out through them, over them, over them – are senseless. (You must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.)
You must climb out through my sentences; then you will see the world correctly.

The Investigations’ proclamation that the Tractatus is nonsense is not a change, not a shift, for the Tractatus proclaimed the Tractatus to be nonsense. Any reading of the Tractatus that takes it to be actually proposing a sensible and possible theory has, the New Wittgensteinian theory says, missed the conclusion. Under this we read the Tractatus to ‘work through’ its nonsense sentences—to struggle to make sense of them—but only in order to experience them ‘dissolv[ing] from inside,’ or ‘crumbling in upon themselves’ in the attempt. By means of this process, which some have described as a ‘dialectic,’ the reader is supposed to unmask the disguised nonsense that constitutes the ‘body’ of the Tractatus. …Tractarian nonsense nonetheless possesses enough psychological suggestiveness to generate the illusion of sense and, for some advocates of this view, to count as ‘ironically self-destructive.’

This leads us to the second metaphor, that of the stage. The Tractatus, on this theory, was an elaborate stage on which the problem was presented only in the last act to be shown false. The bulk of the work was a ruse, a prank, a mask, a falsity whereby the reader would come to think that nonsense was sense only to have it revealed as nonsense in the final scene. We ought to frame the relationship of the Wittgenstein, then, not into two distinct and separable periods but as a continuous project unchanged. This view – the so called “resolute reading” – holds that the Tractatus proposed no theses and was but an exercise in the debunking of nonsense.

This reading is, above all else, clever. It fails, however, in four areas that ought to lead us to at least seriously question this theory and probably to reject it. First, there is a misreading of the tone of Wittgenstein’s work and biography. Nowhere does Wittgenstein ever take the pose or the tone that would be necessary for this strong continuity to be true. Second, this theory cannot tell us why one Wittgenstein ought to be believed when the other is acting out a deception, thus leaving the reading either unstable or arbitrary. Third, this theory allows one to dismiss and not take seriously the early work. Fourth, this theory recreates the first theory’s two Wittgensteins and thus suffers from those problems in addition to creating new ones.

First, this theory of strong continuity ignores the tone of the Wittgensteinian texts. Wittgenstein is, throughout, saturated with a tone of earnestness. He’s not interested in the games or elaborate ruses of the Continental philosophers Jacques Derrida or Slovoj Zizek. Even when Wittgenstein is employing various and entertaining examples, he does so quite seriously. Yet strong continuity depends on reading early Wittgenstein and the Tractatus up to sentence 6.4 as an elaborate fake secretly demonstrating the failure of perfect language theory, philosophy, et al. Framed thus, for example, the 15 theses pointed out by Malcolm as proposed in the early work and rejected in the latter, were never really proposed but actually examples of what Wittgenstein wanted to disabuse us of all along.

If this is the case, we would have to think that Wittgenstein always attempts to deceive us about what he was saying in the early stages of his work, that he can be believed in some places though not in others though there is little or no textual distinction that could alert us to the deceptions, and that he moved from an elaborately clever way of demonstrating a point to a mostly straightforward one. If framed this way the break, too, the “lost years” in his constant project, would have to be interpreted as a change of at least some sort. The stylistic change, here, cannot avoid understood being read as a change. It becomes even more dramatic – rather than a shift from prose that is compressed to prose that is loose, Wittgenstein is said to move from an elaborate trap of lies to an honest presentation. Unless his abandonment of philosophy was a pre-planned silence with which to take in the suckers who took seriously his early work, he must have believed his first work, the staged demonstration, to have been sufficient to this project and later have changed his mind, deciding that more was needed.

Second, it is unclear how, if we count two Wittgensteins, one of which is deceptive, we are to know where to believe the text and where to reject it. New Wittgensteinians take the preface and the last few sentences as the guidelines within which to understand the fake-philosophizing that takes place in between them. But why ought we to take that Wittgenstein as earnest and not as some further mask demonstrating nonsense? Introducing this instability into the text cannot help but leave all the corners highly unstable, untrustworthy, and unbelievably. There is no way to limit this method of skepticism once it introduces what are essentially conspiratorial and Gnostic readings. If we accept that at some points or in some periods Wittgenstein is demonstratively deceptive, we lose the good faith with which we might take him at other points or in other periods to be honest.

Third, this reading of strong continuity allows one to simply dismiss the early work, where the Tractatus need not be read seriously because it was, by this theory, never meant to be more than a failure. Rather than engage the text, this theory is poised to dismiss it at any point where it becomes challenging. It was never honestly, they say, held by Wittgenstein and only believed by those taken in by what, essentially, was a philosophical prank. Thus when reading confusing things within the Tractatus a New Wittgensteinian may, on this reading, not attempt to consider how it could be the case and might make sense, but rather wave a hand and attribute anything difficult to intentional errors.

Fourth, this move of strong continuity perversely comes to reassert the “logical gap” and total disconnectedness of the Tractatus to the Investigations that the consensus proposal made in the first position regarding Wittgenstein’s continuity. While strong continuity wants to maintain that Wittgenstein the man was always consistent and nowhere developed, this framing also implies that Wittgenstein the text can be understood as divided into two radical periods. This is to say that the theory of strong continuity supports the framing of no continuity, which, as was argued above, is unsustainable and is an exaggeration or overstatement.

The whole theory of strong continuity, then, results in wild readings, bad readings, and an explanation that everywhere is collapsing on itself. While it has the merit of being interesting in its complications, it is not a theory that seems to be, in any real way, probable. It is a wild story with little basis in the text, none in Wittgenstein’s life, and no way to explain the relationships of the periods of his text and his life without undermining itself into meaninglessness.

This we ought to contrast with the extreme normality and plausibility of the soft continuity theory. If we fame these period’s relationships so that they show natural developments and normal consistencies, we see Wittgenstein’s work come into focus without these contortions. It would seem that in the end of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein became troubled with the possibility that his attempt to show the limits was the sort of transgression of the limits he had wanted to avoid. He worked with that fissure and thought that he had resolved it in such a manner that his theory of language and the world was sound and was right. Thus, thinking he had dissolved the process producing philosophical problems, he left philosophy intending to spend the rest of his life in other pursuits. Years later, having reason to re-read his work, to hear other’s explanations, and to attempt himself to explain it, he recognizes those “grave mistakes” that he had worried about formerly and that he had thought he had resolved. He thinks that the fissure is serious enough that it condemns the whole artifice and he sets to work rethinking the manner in which he approached his project, which resulted in the later period of his work. There is no unexplainable logical gap here, no secret, no mystery. We have, rather, the open and obvious development of a great of the thinkers of the 20th century who strongly opposed illogical sequences and assumptions of secrets. This, Wittgenstein said, was the type of thought which he had set out to solve and to stop.

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