Ludwig
Witttgenstein: The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1972)
Extract
from ‘The Blue Book’ (pp. 34-44)
Ludwig
Wittgenstein was probably the single most influential philosopher of
the 20th
Century. During his life-time, Wittgenstein published a short but
hugely
influential book, the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus and one brief journal article. However, he
taught in
the University of Cambridge, and the fact that he did not publish his
thoughts
may only have added to the considerable mystique that surrounded him.
After his
death, his unfinished manuscripts and notes based on his lectures were
published, and they have been puzzling philosophers ever since.
The Blue
Book and the Brown Book were dictated by Wittgenstein for the benefit
of his
students, and it seems that he intended to publish the Brown Book.
(They are so
called because of the covers in which the original books were bound).
The Blue
Book, from which this extract is taken, was dictated in the years
1933-1934.
In this
passage, Wittgenstein deals with a topic that he returned to throughout
his
career, the relationship between language and thought. My way of
reading this
passage is as follows: Wittgenstein is trying to move us away from a
picture
according to which language is an outward representation of thought,
where
thought is something essentially private and unknowable. Instead, he
wants us
to think of language, something that is essentially public, as being
what makes
thought possible. Language is public in that we learn it from other
people, and
the standards we must follow are set by a community: I cannot make a
unilateral
decision as to what I am going to mean by a word. We do not merely
guess that
you use the word ‘rabbit’ to mean what I mean by ‘rabbit’: the way in
which
everyone uses the word is precisely what gives it the meaning it has,
and if I
were not capable of joining in this shared pattern of usage
(participating in
the language-game, as Wittgenstein would have put it), I do not know
the
meaning at all.
Of course,
once I have learned a language, I am able to use it in private – to
write words
in a journal that only I will read (and perhaps write them in a code
that only
I understand). I can also speak when I am alone, or speak silently to
myself.
Wittgenstein does not think that everyone is a mind-reader. However,
notice
that he is trying to persuade us that there is a close connection
between what
we are capable of thinking and what we are capable of expressing in
language.
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