The ‘Blue Book’ is a rare gift for enthusiasts of Wittgenstein’s late philosophy: a lucidly conveyed articulation of some of the philosopher’s key arguments during his tenure at Cambridge, dictated from his lectures and endorsed by Wittgenstein himself as a satisfactory prelude to his ‘promised manuscript’, the posthumously published ‘Philosophical Investigations’. Admittedly I have yet to read ‘Philosophical Investigations’ in its entirety, due in part to my personal dislike of aphorisms and my ambition to absorb all I can that leads up to this seminal work of philosophy. My prior studies on the subject had ill-prepared me for the sparse clarity of the ‘Blue Book’ which stands in direct contrast to the deliberately elusive style of Wittgenstein’s pedagogical method. Purists may consider this a deficiency on the part of the book, but I disagree – if only because I have an aesthetic preference for works which are explicit in their intentions. Also, elusiveness is a dangerous trait in philosophy because it has the potential to infer a hierarchal conception of ‘meaning’, especially when it pervades throughout a wide array of revered works; this results in an esotericism which unnecessarily inhibits the masses from engaging in anything overtly philosophical. Simplicity is not the only criterion for good philosophy, but it is an essential one to me. even zen teachings can be simply explained, its just important to emphasize that these explanations exist separate from the essential experience (which works from an active involvement within the zen koan lessons), just as the ‘Blue Book’ can be used to simply explain the framework of what Wittgenstein is proposing without including the essential experience (which works from an active involvement within the language games).
I am now going to quote several passages from the ‘Blue Book’. First, a useful (though not complete) definition of philosophy, which also aptly describes the purpose of the ‘grammatical method’:
“philosophy… is a fight against the fascination which forms of expression exert upon us” (pg. 27)
on language games:
“[language games] are ways of using signs simpler than those in which we use the signs of our highly complicated everyday language. Language games are the forms of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The study of language games is the study of primitive forms of language or primitive languages. It we want to study the problems of truth and falsehood, of the agreement and disagreement of propositions with reality, of the nature of assertion, assumption, and question, we shall with great advantage look at primitive forms of language in which these forms of thinking appear without the confusing background of highly complicated processes of thought. When we look at such simple forms of language the mental mist which seems to enshroud our ordinary use of language disappears.” (pg. 17)
on the fallacy of ‘mental activity’ as a private internal process prior to articulation:
“We easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the mechanism of the mind. All the more as such hypotheses or pictures of the working of our mind are embodied in many of the forms of expression of our everyday language” (pg 40)
“I have been trying in all this to remove the temptation to think that there ‘must be’ what is called a mental process of thinking, hoping, wishing, believing, etc., independent of the process of expressing a thought, a hope, a wish, etc. And I want to give you the following rule of thumb: If you are puzzled about the nature of thought, belief, knowledge, and the like, substitute for the thought the expression of the thought, etc. The difficulty which lies in this substitution, and at the same time the whole point of it, is this: the expression of belief, thought, etc., is just a sentence;—and the sentence has sense only as a member of a system of language; as one expression within a calculus. Now we are tempted to imagine this calculus, as it were, as a permanent background to every sentence which we say, and to think that, although the sentence as written on a piece of paper or spoken stands isolated, in the mental act of thinking the calculus is there—all in a lump. The mental act seems to perform in a miraculous way what could not be performed by any act of manipulating symbols. Now when the temptation to think that in some sense the whole calculus must be present at the same time vanishes, there is no more point in postulating the existence of a peculiar kind of mental act alongside of our expression. This, of course, doesn’t mean that we have shown that peculiar acts of consciousness do not accompany the expressions of our thoughts. Only we no longer say that they must accompany them.” (pg. 41-2)
the library analogy of skeptical philosophy:
“The situation in a way is typical in the study of philosophy; and one sometimes has described it by saying that no philosophical problem can be solved until all philosophical problems are solved; which means that as long as they aren’t all solved every new difficulty renders all our previous results questionable. To this statement we can only give a rough answer if we are to speak about philosophy in such general terms. It is, that every new problem which arises may put in question the position which our previous partial results are to occupy in the final picture. One then speaks of having to reinterpret these previous results; and we should say; they have to be placed in a different surrounding.
Imagine we had to arrange the books of a library. When we begin the books are higgledy-piggledy on the floor. Now there would be ‘many ways of sorting them and putting them in their places. One would be to take the books one by one and put each on the shelf in its right place. On the other hand we might take up several books from the floor and put them in a row on a shelf, merely in order to indicate that these books ought to go together in this order. In the course of arranging the library this whole row of books will have to change its place. But it would be wrong to say that therefore putting them together on a shelf was no step towards the final result. In this case, in fact, it is pretty obvious that having put together books which belong together was a definite achievement, even though the whole row of them had to be shifted. But some of the greatest achievements in philosophy could only be compared with taking up some books which seemed to belong together, and putting them on different shelves; nothing more being final about their positions than that they no longer lie side by side. The onlooker who doesn’t know the difficulty of the task might well think in such a case that nothing at all had been achieved.—The difficulty in philosophy is to say no more than we know. E.g., to see that when we have put two books together in their right order we have not thereby put them in their final places.” (pg 44-5)
The entire text of the ‘Blue Book’ is online here. Technorati Tags: Wittgenstein, Blue Book