***************************************************************** * * Titel: Book review Seeing the Wood with the Help of the Trees Autor: Denis Paul - Aberarth, England Dateiname: 16-2-96.TXT Dateilänge: 13 KB Erschienen in: Wittgenstein Studies 2/96, Datei: 16-2-96.TXT; hrsg. von K.-O. Apel, N. Garver, B. McGuinness, P. Hacker, R. Haller, W. Lütterfelds, G. Meggle, C. Nyíri, K. Puhl, R. Raatzsch, T. Rentsch, J.G.F. Rothhaupt, J. Schulte, U. Steinvorth, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, W. 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Those articles and excerpts from * * articles which the subscriber wishes to use for his own * * private academic purposes are excluded from this * * restrictions. * * * ***************************************************************** Two Wittgenstein publications of 1996 stand out as requiring comment, and both exemplify my title: the fifth (and alas possibly the last) volume of the Wiener Ausgabe, edited by Michael Nedo and published by Springer, and Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlass by Josef Rothhaupt, published by Beltz. There is, of course, still a place for well-distanced, perspective views of the wood. I have found Ayer and Pears (the latter fortunately still alive) both helpful in this respect; for a forty five year long acquaintance with Wittgenstein's trees, branches, twigs, leaves and undergrowth, and twenty years of studying them in the form of the Cornell microfilms, does, one must admit, take some assimilating. Nevertheless, if we are to understand how Wittgenstein's mind worked when he turned philosophy upside down for us, we have to brave the detail. Rothhaupt's strategy is to take colour as a composite and slowly changing thread running through Wittgenstein's philosophical work of clarification (his Klärungszweck, as he called it), and to relate all the other detail to it. Nedo's is simply to give us everything that Wittgenstein wrote by hand in a series of ten large manuscript books (he used smaller ones as well, not all of which have survived) between 2nd February 1929 and 5th June 1932, when he paused, not so much for breath as for dictating the Big Typescript. These five printed volumes sit on my working desk and are a delight -- and a great relief to my eyes, ruined by twenty years of microfilms. I do hope, whether Nedo's attempt at full publication is completed or not, that scholars, after their unadventurous neglect of the Cornell microfilms, will not now write them off altogether. Quite the contrary -- the Wiener Ausgabe should inspire them to use the microfilms all the more, and besiege the few university libraries that have troubled to buy them. Marred (but not always) by bad photography and (frequently) by infuriating slips of paper insisted on by nanny to stop us reading private remarks, they can now be seen as having a charm of their own, and they are enormously useful for filling gaps. Eventually, the Bergen CD edition will in theory make them obsolete, but it is bound to be so expensive that even then there will still be a use for them among the underfunded. Nedo points out in the introduction to his third volume that Wittgenstein's manuscripts give us his original trains of thought, whereas the typescripts were largely designed for his own use in preparing much-modified reworkings that might eventually express his ideas in a form (which he never attained) fit for posterity. This is true on the whole but not absolutely. Wittgenstein used his mind like a wordprocessor. There is an example of this in Rothhaupt's Farbthemen. On pp 564-578 he prints a facsimile of pages on colour in the Big Typescript, some originally written in January and February of 1930 and some in November 1931 (and not typed in chronological order). It is very difficult to resist the conclusion that Wittgenstein knew perfectly well that he was going to supplement his 1930 notes by later ones when he found time for them. Intrigued readers can find other examples, in Farbthemen, in the microfilms and in the Wiener Ausgabe. I have one of my own to offer from the latter. On 28.10.30 Wittgenstein noted If logicians describe the psychological operations which they take for thought and the interpretation of sentences, it is always a marvel how anything so definite as a judgement is supposed to be able to come from such vague processes, anticipating a story he is going to tell on 23. 8.31 from Keller's Simplicissimus, about two academics speaking academic German who wonder how labourers mumbling in Swiss German can do anything so difficult as build a bridge. Then, on 28. 8.31, he refers back to this story, and on 9.10.31 he does so again. In other words: the notebooks do give us the workings of his thoughts but not always their train, because it is part and parcel of the way his mind worked that he should sometimes juggle the train. That he does this in his typescripts and other reworkings is notorious, but one also has to be prepared for his doing so in his apparently 'first-thought' notebooks as well. Rothhaupt traces Wittgenstein's thoughts on colour from his first 1914 notebook through to his final work on colour from 1946 to 1950 or 1951. All this work had a philosophical axe to grind, and Rothhaupt makes this clear -- beginning with the colour incompatiblity problem, that if a minimum visual area is of one colour it cannot simultaneously have another colour, in contradiction to the Tractatus requirement of absolute mutual independence of atomic propositions. (This contradiction is already implicit in the Tractatus itself -- another point I owe to Rothhaupt.) In 1929 Wittgenstein returned to writing philosophy, convinced of the basic accuracy of the Tractatus but wanting to refine its approach by devising what he called a phenomenological language, in order to facilitate descriptions of sense data that could be unbeholden to hypothetical explanations of what their causes might be. Within eight months he came to the conclusion that this attempt was otiose: the (idealist) avoidance of hypotheses did not conflict with the (realist) acceptance of them because they were merely alternative descriptions of the same state of affairs, and neither description dealt with hypotheses in any proper sense. Within three more months atomic propositions had been practically abandoned (with an important reservation which you will find quoted on Rothhaupt's page 65, from Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, page 74), and in little more than a further year other aspects of the Tractatus were beginning to go. By the end, grinding a philosophical axe was not quite the right metaphor. What kept Wittgenstein going in respect of colour until the last months of his life was, rather, the reverberations in his mind of the philosophical axes that he had been grinding. In settling these reverberations he gives the impression of having been indefatigable in reading the theories of colour scientists (of particular interest to me, I found evidence in his late notes that he knew the work of the colour psychologist and neurologist Hering, and Rothhaupt has found evidence that he already knew him in 1929), but he was not, unfortunately, indefatigable enough. For example, he never seems to have taken in the additive (light addition) effect of red combining with green to give yellow, even though he will certainly have read references to this in William James's Principles of Psychology. It just goes to show that reading about something isn't the same as experiencing it. Nor did he take advantage of having William Rushton at Trinity to help him understand colour science. As with Hering, there is evidence in the late notebooks that he knew of Rushton's experiments, but Rushton himself assured me, in 1978, the year before he died, that Wittgenstein never once asked him to explain details of colour science to him. Wittgenstein was positively partisan in maintaining a four-primary-colour viewpoint, even though he admitted that this was a matter of 'language games'; but over and above the fact that three-primary and four-primary 'games' can coexist in our verbal descriptions of colour, there is the more radical fact that they coexist in colour science itself. Four visual primaries go with the neurology of the brain, three input primaries go with the neurology of the eye. The clearest explanation of this that I know can be found in two articles in the Oxford Companion to the Mind, the titles being Colour vision: brain mechanisms and Colour vision: eye mechanisms, the latter by Rushton and very probably the last thing he wrote. Wittgenstein enthusiasts may find these criticisms of mine mere carping quibbles, but to me it is precisely my enthusiasm for his 'colour concept analysis' that makes me resent his not taking it further. Finding out more about empirical colour science would have given him a richer investigation of concepts. And subtle possibilities of colour observation and problems of colour description abound for the amateur, let alone the colour scientist. My view of the matter is that one should read Wittgenstein's final exposition (printed as part I of Remarks on Colour) and then treat that as a spring-board for an adventure of colour-exploration of every possible kind. (The best recent contribution to the richness of colour language is The Gardener's Book of Colour by Andrew Lawson, published by Frances Lincoln.) On the other hand, if Wittgenstein's final colour effort enthuses you as much with his mode of thought on the subject as with colour itself, then Rothhaupt's Farbthemen should be your guide. Provided you can read German it will keep you busy for many a long winter evening to come.