Wittgenstein and the Blue and Brown Books

 

 

 

When I was at Temple University I was a speech major, focusing on rhetoric and public debate. One of my studies was the field of General Semantics, and when later I took a course in the language of religion, a major portion of which was the Philosophical Investigations by Ludwig Wittgenstein. I recognized how closely General Semantics was to the work of Wittgenstein.

 

 

Although I left school in the middle of my senior year for other pursuits I began a life long private study of how Wittgenstein viewed many issues, relating them to my interest in General Semantics.

 

 

I am nothing like an expert, but these works kept me thinking, nevertheless.

 

 

Wittgenstein fell into philosophy, literally pushed by Bertrand Russell, so impressed at he was of the early writings of Wittgenstein he got him his Doctorate. But Wittgenstein kept thinking and changed his approach to what language was, In the course of that process he had his students keep notes for several years of what his lectures were becoming. He never published that thinking, but it grew up to become his Philosophical Investigations. And he never ceased working or thinking, but really was not into publishing.

 

 

After his death, his students published those notebooks they kept, the Blue and the Brown Book. Together they show how his thinking kept developing.

 

 

On the whole people do not think a great deal about how language is used or even what it is. So I am going to share a few passages from my copy, just in case anyone wants to push their mind a bit.

 

 

 

 

The Blue and Brown Books by Ludwig Wittgenstein

 

 

Page x

 

1.     When I describe certain simple language games, this is not in order to  construct from them gradually the processes of our developed language – or of thinking – which only leads to injustices (Nicod and Russell). I simply set forth the games as what they are, and let them shed their light o9n the particular problems.

 

Page 46

 

2.     There are propositions of which we may say that they describe facts in the material world (external world). Roughly speaking, they treat of physical objects, bodies, fluids, etc. I am not thinking in particular of the laws of natural sciences, but of any such proposition as :the tulips in our garden are in full bloom”, or “Smith will come in any moment”. There are on the other hand propositions describing personal experiences, as when the subject in a psychological experiment describes his sense-experiences, say his visual experience. Independent of what bodies are actually before his eyes, n.b.,  independent of any processes which might be observed to take place in his retina, his nerves, his brain, or other parts of his body. (That is independent of both physical and physiological facts.)

 

At first sight it may appear (but why it should can only become clear later) that here we have two kinds of words, worlds built of different materials. A mental workd and a physical world. The mental world in fact is liable to be imagined as gaseous, or rather, aethereal. But let me remind you here of the queer role which the gaseous and the aethereal play in philosophy, - which we perceive that a substantive is not used s what in general we should call the name of an object, and when therefore we can’t help saying to ourselves that is the name of an aethereal object. I mean, we already know the idea of ‘aethereal objects’ as subterfuge, when we are embarrassed about the grammar or certain words, and when all we know is that they are not used as names for material objects. This is a hint how the problem of the two materials, mind and matter, is going to dissolve.

 

 

I only offer this to begin the process about how do we view the world, and what does the use of language  we use actually mea