Last notes on Wittgenstein’s penultimate notebooks

My notes on what I call the penultimate notebooks were left incomplete. For a while I feared that it was approaching senility that left me incapable of illuminating these Wittgenstein notebooks that I considered so important and left me having to make do with writing notes on Gödel, but it turned out to be a medical condition curable by rather radical surgery (and here I must thank Mr Edwards of Bronglais Hospital, Aberystwyth, for his heroic efforts). My consequent confidence that I was safely back in the academic saddle and could take my time over convalescing was broken by a request from the London Library to return Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology, Volume II, which I had left unread on my shelves since my months of despondency. I had to make extremely rapid notes on it and found that they were much more useful than any I had made two years previously. Having completed the notes and posted the book I turned to my other borrowing, Last Writings Volume I.

Though neither set of notes is extensive they merit being published on this site, and I do so here, but it seems to me that in what time is left to me, instead of writing more on the same notebooks I should write about Last Writings Volume II, on which I can contribute my memories of the notebooks themselves from 1952 onwards, and which I fortunately own. When I have done that I must find a way of getting my two chapters (2 and 3) about Wittgenstein’s ‘Phenomenological Language’ episode onto the site, in preparation for revising and publishing the whole book, still obstinately entitled Climbing out of the Swamp, that being one of Wittgenstein’s own terms for the episode when he viewed it in retrospect. [But on 3.8.04 I must add, as I have also added on the 'Home Page', that this has proved quite unfeasible, and in any case my book is so near ready for finding a publisher that there is now no need for the chapters to be put on my website.]

The dictation on which Rem Phil Psy Pt II was based broke off in the middle of MS 137, where he wrote “bis hierher diktiert”, and what follows in MS 137 and MS 138 is what, minus personal asides, is what is printed as Last Writings Volume I. To my great relief I find that up to that point I had copied from the Cornell microfilms completely, or as completely as those microfilms allowed; but from there on I had copied only a few scattered paragraphs. I was obsessed by wanting to identify one of the personal passages that Elizabeth Anscombe had cut out and burnt. There were two of these, one of whose burnings I had witnessed. One comes earlier than “bis hierher diktiert” and one later. They must both be clearly evident on the full Bergen CD edition, and so there is no point in my trying to identify them from my Cornell copyings and notes, and quite certainly, even when I do obtain the Bergen edition, there will be no way in which I can identify which of the two I saw burnt. [But again, on 3.8.04, I must add that I obtained the Bergen edition early in 2003 with the help of a legacy, and a careful examination has convinced me that I can specify which I saw burnt, and I have done so in my book.]

Here, then, I shall simply copy, without dates (they were all May 2002) and with a minimum of editing, my recent notes, in the hope that they will be found helpful and that my mere noting that such and such paragraphs deal with such and such subjects will at least help students find their way for themselves. The notes follow now.

About to return Rem Phil Psy Vol II I find an old note for § 185 where I have said “W’s need to believe in the need for a language before there can be wordless thoughts.”

This is not unfair to W, who did admit them but believed that language must stand behind them. As I get older I am more aware of ‘wordless thoughts’ --- eg I visualise two ways of doing something and simply choose the better one. Köhler’s apes might have done much the same. John Evenett [a story told in my Born under the Pleiades, I hope to be published soon] needed no language to consider his socks to be an ill match for his trousers. He needed a language in order to report to me that that was what he had wordlessly thought, but he did not seriously need a language in order to assess his socks. Causally, very probably, he needed a language-background in which he could have heard people say “is that a good match”, which the apes certainly didn’t --- they just needed to be hungry.

What of § 185, where there is a pause of which we say “he is considering”? The apes might well have paused (I find in my senility that I don’t). I think we might say “if words were passing through his mind we should call that considering, but if not we might say he was (like the apes) weighing up alternatives wordlessly, by letting visual images pass through his mind”. Some people might call that considering, but in that case “considering” doesn’t imply “describing alternatives in words”.

Naturally, if this chap [described in Wittgenstein’s pen picture] was weighing up wordlessly, we don’t need to presuppose that he had a language in which to express his weighing up to himself, only that he would have needed a language in which to tell us how he had been weighing things up. Causally, of course, he definitely did need a language in which to be instructed by his teacher [in the pen picture he was engaged in an activity requiring an apprenticeship].

But in § 186 Wittgenstein says the same rather more imaginatively.

§ 193 . . . Ist Denken eine Tätigkeit? Nun, man kann Einem befehlen “Denk darüber nach!” So thinking it over is an activity. Is thinking it over and muttering to oneself two activities?

§ 213, the problem explicit . . . “Man kann auch wortlos denken” irreleitend. Cf “Man kann auch lessen ohne die Lippen zu bewegen”. But centuries ago, the idea of reading without moving one’s lips seemed a conceptual impossibility.

§ 219 --- Is this a portrait of Yorick [Smythies], noted by me in copying?

§ 224 Köhler’s apes turn up. “ . . . der Affe müsse den Vorgang vor dem geistigen Auge gesehen haben . . . Ich will, der Affe solle sich etwas überlegen . . .” See my note to § 185. “ . . .oder so ein Bild könnte ich einfach vorschieben. Aber das wäre doch wieder Zufall. Er hätte dieses Bild nicht durch nachdenken gewonnen . . .” He is making a meal of this. In my seventies I can assure him that there is no need to suppose that a mental image that solves a problem has to be “durch Nachdenken gewonnen” before we are entitled to call the process “sich etwas überlegen”. It is quite possible for images to come into one’s (or an ape’s) consciousness simply out of the stimulus of the problem. It does not need to be durch Nachdenken gewonnen. The upshot is the same --- and one can call this process (images called up by a problem, leading to a choice between images, leading to action) sich überlegen and problem solving simply because that is a natural thing to call it. W does not need to presuppose anything else before he considers this description appropriate. Incidentally, Luckhardt and Aue call the apes monkeys.

In § 227 he says “aber man stellt sich das Denken vor, als dasjenige was unter der Oberfläche dieser Hilfsmittel strömen muss . . .” suggesting that this is what one naively imagines, but in § 228 he asserts that thinking is . . . no, in calling it the imaginäre Hilfstätigkeit he is still implying that this is the naïve thinker’s view, untrained by Wittgenstein. And § 229 is quite correct --- one can observe two apes and say that one is thinking and the other isn’t.

In § 238 W has himself, in dictating, changed “angerägtes Gespräch” to “angenehmes Gespräch”, spoiling his meaning. He was half asleep.

§ 245 “Auswuchs des Begriffs” (souls and needles --- dancing on them no doubt) must have a stronger meaning than “outgrowth”. He is thinking of something like an outgrowth of a tumour. [excrescence upon?]

From a footnote to § 246, “Schubert heiss ich, Schubert bin ich” is a Zitat aus Grillparzer. I had never noticed that.

§ 262 Übungsbuch, see §235. What this means is that there is a difference, as it were in context, but no need for it to be a difference in mir geschend.

§ 263 is a contribution to Pt II.

§ 274 Ich sagte früher, die Intention habe keinen Inhalt. I ought to know when he said that, but I don’t.

§ 276 Wenn ich bei mir denke “Ich halte es nicht mehr aus, ich will gehen”, so denke ich doch eine Absicht. Not “I am thinking of an intention”. But of pokers, doch!

§ 277 is a seed of Certainty.

§ 280 is Moore’s paradox, much noted by me elsewhere.

§ 283 “Angenommen, ich glaubte es sei so” should have become “Suppose I believed it was so”, not “Suppose I believe it is so”.

§ 289 Mancher wird sagen, dass mein Reden über den Begriff des Wissens irrelevant sei. Very interesting paragraph, but which Reden does he mean?

§§ 293-6, colour, did it get into Rothhaupt? [Farbthemen in Wittgensteins Gesamtnachlass, Beltz Athenäum Verlag, Weinheim 1996]

§§ 300-3, Wissen.

§§ 304-5, Aspekt.

§§ 312 ff, more colour.

§ 319, das Kind, ein Sessel; and §§ 336-339, Schlachtrufe, a term he used in the thirties to claim that there was no difference in the ways idealists and realists lived their lives, and very little between the ways they taught their children: the terms were merely war-cries.

§ 355 F written symmetrically, I remember it from the microfilm. Much aspect until §§ 338 and 339, which is Port/Starboard, and a bad diagram. I leave the bad diagram as an exercise for the reader. Port/Starboard is about a joke that occurred to me when reading the microfilms. Wittgenstein has an idea for a pair of colour words, one meaning green on one side of a line and red on the other, with the other word vice versa. The line should be down the middle of a boat. Red objects to port and green objects to starboard would be called navigational-coloured, while green objects to port and red objects to starboard would be counter-navigational-coloured. Wittgenstein was too much of a landlubber to think of this, which would have brought his idea to life.

I then made notes on where various topics are to be found, such as aspect, the next number in a series, the Moore paradox, colour and aspect again. § 477 is among those and said that one could not see a point as looking in a direction. Remembering a picture on a Greek vase which I had seen in the library upstairs, with an eye as a dot looking in a particular direction, I broke off to go and look at it again. Fortunately I took my spectacles with me. The picture was of a naked Apollo being admired by a robed girl who was looking, I remembered, at his genitals. No --- with my spectacles I could see that she was looking at his face, but it was not a closer inspection of her eye-dot that told me this, but the context of her eyebrows and face. One up to Wittgenstein.

Aspect, I noted, continued until § 557, including music and meaning-aspect. § 558 is das Innere. § 571 is Bedeutungsblindheit, “und ähnliches, including das Innere”. § 605 is where one might find things so different from what one supposed that one feared for one’s sanity, an idea which comes in the Certainty notes. Dissimulation (Verstellen) starts with § 609, going on to §§ 612-3, which contribute to Pt II. § 658 is “colour in other worlds”, which I leave readers to elucidate. “All the rest is very Pt II-ish, though few actual contributions; § 736 is Wissen, § 737 is Niemand ausser ein Philosoph . . .”

That was where my notes on the dictated passages had to end, and I turned to Last Writings, Volume I, first noting that in these there is another anticipation of Certainty, in §§ 831-834. The fact that in §§ 825-6 the words "weiss" and "Wissen" appear doesn't give them the status of anticipations of the subject of knowledge: they simply hark back to old discussions of what might or might not accompany what. And on this point, "Ich sage es einfach" doesn't entail that nothing accompanies the words, but "Kümmre dich nicht" --- the question isn't important.

Actually, what I have called the penultimate notes are really the antepenultimate, because MSS 130 – “bis hierher …” in MS 137 do differ from the notes from there to the end of MS 138. At a first reading of the notebooks one feels that Wittgenstein dictated the two tss and then carried on in the same way but felt too fagged to dictate any more. I don’t think I am influenced by the break from one printed volume to another in thinking now that there was also a break in style of thought. Allerdings, a lot of the early stuff does get into Pt II, and conversely, the bits in Last Writings that get into Pt II are by no means thick and fast (to start with, at least).

I need to note § 40. “ . . . und wenn ich ihre Ausserung höre und fühle, . . .” means if I hear myself saying these words, while L & A’s “and if I hear and feel them being expressed” doesn’t make this clear. No need to stick to “Ausserung” because the idea is put over in hearing and feeling myself. Aaron [my son] is going to LA on Sunday. I am nitpicking L & A.

In §§ 35, 36, 37, 43 the one thing he doesn’t mention is a dispassionate account of symptoms given to a doctor or nurse, in the case of pain, and why not a similar account of fear given to a psychotherapist? And in § 43, I can’t help feeling that while the variety of things an utterance can mean is relevant to the philosophy of language, the fact that we can normally tell by listening to tone and observing behaviour, and so do not need to ask, is a straightforward fact of psychology and has no place in philosophical notes.

§ 48, “Nichts ist ihm ferner, als” is translated by L & A as “Nothing is further from his intention than”. No --- “Nothing is further from his mind”.

§ 54, Eine Schrift, in der das durchgestrichene Wort, der durchgestrichene Satz ein Zeichen ist is of course his own --- things crossed out are W-significant.

§ 55, two meanings of “so meinen” --- !!! [experiencing a way of meaning a word and simply meaning it in this way or that, without any particular experience]

§§ 72-3, I am astounded --- I thought he was serious about “Schubert” being Schubert. He is serious about e being yellow.

Reading § 73 again [the next day] I think he is serious, but he is pointing out (not with commendable honesty but as a simple fact) that the status of this serious view is that it is pathological, and as such a remark about himself.

§ 74 is deep and complicated. First, he wants to allow for the possibility that his beckoning with his hand was not preceded by an inwardly expressed wish that his friend would come towards him, but that the gesture constituted the wish. Then, having allowed for that, he wants to say that even so it would be cuckoo for him to answer “My wave was the origin of the explanation that I am now giving you, namely ‘come here’.” Why? Could it be merely cuckoo but still meaningful? No, because we (trained by Wittgenstein) accept that it is perfectly possible for a wish to be constituted by a gesture and not need a prior mental ‘sensation of wishing’, which is to say that we regard what the gesture constitutes as a wish, making it meaningless to separate out the gesture from the wish as its origin and then jump from the gesture to the explanation as if it originated that.

§ 75 is an example of his irritating use of “hier” meaning “going back to the last paragraph but one”.

§ 76 is a very lucid account of what I have tried to express in my note on § 73. “nennen soll” should be “if one ought to call it an illusion”.

§ 77 He imagines a physiological explanation for “Schubert”’s being Schubert to be found . . . but the fact still remains that we fell like saying something that isn’t normal (ie we still don’t have to say it, we merely feel inclined to, but this simple conclusion is muddied by Wittgenstein’s declaring that the physiological --- neurological --- discovery had no interest for him).

§ 80 may express what I dimly saw in § 77, but there is a difference. § 77 seems to suggest a neurological explanation, how our synapses caused us to take the preposterous seriously, but here he explains how certain similarities led us astray, giving us false grounds for our conclusion, not a causal explanation of it. The plain fact that the conclusion is a very odd one still stands. And he admits that coloured sounds are an equally odd conclusion.

§ 83 is very interesting but I believe wrong. It is about a language in which we don’t say “I believe that p” but assert p in a particular tone of voice. These people will say “this chap is inclined to say that p”. Someone might say “Suppose I were inclined to say that …” but will not say “I am inclined to say that …” --- they will just say that … in this distinctive tone of voice. Fine, but this doesn’t follow, for as an alternative they can perfectly well say “I am inclined to say that …” in their ordinary tone of voice. This would still leave them not needing a verb corresponding exactly to our “believe”, which is what Wittgenstein is after because of its relevance to Moore’s paradox.

§ 85: similarly, these awkward people who refuse to obey Wittgenstein’s rules could say “I am inclined to say that p but in actual fact not p is the case” and come close to expressing Moore’s paradox. The lack of a first person present for his composite verb is just Wittgenstein’s fiat, not a linguistic necessity. He is still right in so far as the composite verb is weaker than “believe”. In saying one believes that p one is backing p.

This blind spot of Wittgenstein’s may have been shared by Elizabeth Anscombe. In the fifties she read a paper to the Cambridge Moral Science Club on memory in which she concocted a verb “rember”, which did not share with “remember” the implication that what one claimed to remember had to be true if one could count as remembering it. (Academic implication, that could be called --- compare my natural use of the word in remembering Apollo, above.) Although she could not put her finger (at least in my discussions with her) on what was wrong with this paper, she was dissatisfied with it and never published it. I was too terrified of her to express my own objections to it.

§ 88 I find Wittgenstein’s sketch as printed here quite meaningless, or at least not to illustrate the meaning of PU II, x, p 192 g as I remember that from 1952 --- the natural meaning, I am inclined to say, that curved lines can coincide for a while and then diverge.

On § 89, seeing as and meaning as start, seeing as having started already with § 52.

§§ 93 ff centre round his insistence that experiences at the time of speaking are not necessarily relevant, but that we want to think that they are. ff seem to be up to § 138; §§ 139 and 140 are mathematical rules.

But § 141 seems to be falsified by Frege’s use of “wähnen” to mean “believe falsely”. Can one not say “I am in the grip of the illusion that . . .”? M’s paradox goes on till § 145.

§ 146 is seeing as. All the way to § 180.

§ 181 is Gedanken erraten, leading (in § 182) to guessing intention and thus (in §§ 184-5) to pain hidden, future hidden.

In § 186, future a kind of divine privacy? There is no need for this idea if one understands the unprophetic nature of so-called prophecies.

§ 188: “Die Zukunft kann man nicht Wissen” ist eine grammatische Bemerkung über den Begriff ‘wissen’. Earlier he would have said it was a grammatical observation about our language concerning time. Is this any better? Certainly, in the hindsight of his final notes, it is a very feeble thing to say compared with the intricate subtlety of our use of the terms “certainty” and “knowledge”.

§ 190 is the speaking lion leading to das Innere.

§§ 192-196 are an impenetrable set.

In § 199 I find a seed of Certainty: to doubt an arithmetical calculation is one thing, but to doubt an account of direct experience requires us (if not expecting a lie) to say we don’t know what this chap is saying, he is dreaming, he is not in his right mind. This leads to people who are clones --- we shouldn’t know where we are with them --- and to § 203, the race who don’t know pain-hypocrisy. He resists the temptation to be too clever.

But if he resists the temptation to be too clever in § 203, he doesn’t in § 202. I hadn’t noticed that there was also an underclass like us, all different. I can see a point in dreaming up a race of clones and saying we shouldn’t know how to react to them, but making these clones a ruling class --- what is the point of that?

§ 206 is incomprehensible but somehow leads to colour.

§ 212 is ethnic decimals, § 213 is back to colour, six pure, not brown. (Hering’s four plus black and white. Hering classified red, yellow, green and blue as ‘visual’, sometimes called ‘psychological’ primaries. The text books say he followed Leonardo, who pointed out that however often we have mixed green from yellow and blue, we do not see it as containing yellow and blue. If correct, this is a very remarkable insight for a painter, but in much amateur browsing in Leonardo’s notebooks I have never found such a passage. Can anyone tell me where it comes?)

§ 214: “Das Licht ist weiss, Farben sind schon ein Schatten” sounds to me like Goethe. (Or it may have been Runge, who influenced Goethe.) And § 218, where "Mehrere Schatten geben zusammen das Licht" could seem to be eine höllische Verdrehung der Wahrheit --- which truth? It is certainly eine höllische Verdrehung of the relationship between additive and subtractive colour mixing. It always used to annoy me that Wittgenstein never, in his colour notes of the thirties or his final ones, took an interest in these technicalities. In his early years he did. He seems to have given up following the latest developments in colour technology sometime in the twenties. Incidentally, in § 214 "Helligkeit" should be "brightness".

§ 224 is pretence leading to das Innere in the §§ that follow, up to § 271.

§ 272 is Bedeutung again. By § 305 it really does turn into Pt II thick and fast, but retaining meaning and meaning as. Seeing as comes at § 429 --- see a note on this ahead.

§ 277 is a refinement of an old theme: awareness of meaning is not a matter of what one is conscious of as one speaks a word but of what one would say about it in certain circumstances if asked.

§ 286, mastering and comparing several languages. This doesn’t mean that Wittgenstein is doing linguistics --- but that familiarity with language does give grist to his mill as a philosopher.

§ 298 He has a very restricted idea of what kind of interest in words a philosophically naïve person might have, someone who notices the way a word crops up with different meanings but never asks what its different functions are. I believe that someone who followed my Sweet-Skeat “thinking about language more and more” could be quite clear about the differences between “non” and “ne” (the remark at the end of TS 222 that Rhees overlooked for the first edition of Remarks on the Philosophy of Mathematics) without developing a philosophical sensitivity. Indeed, I am not at all sure what this extra philosophical sensitivity actually is. It might be a good service to the memory of Wittgenstein if we all just “thought about language more and more” and gave up altogether any ambition to do so philosophically.

I feel that if Wittgenstein had taken my Sweet-Skeat line he would never have imposed on himself many of his questions, like those in § 304.

§ 307 “Ei, ei” is an Ausruf, an exclamation, but more particularly a salutation to children rather like “diddums then!” with a stroke of the cheeks. I told Elizabeth that in 1952 but she doesn’t seem to have told L & A.

§ 325 - § 350 is a series which centres on meaning at different levels, with what I think an unnecessary distinction between the philosophical and the naïve, and with a more important distinction between the natural and the capricious in variations of meaning. His example of the latter (in § 328) of a verb that means “write” in the first person, “love” in the second and “eat” in the third is a caricature of the capricious to the point of absurdity (unless it is a Freudian slip revealing the nature of his love-life: I write to you, my distant beloved, you love me from afar, while he, giving the whole thing up as useless, consoles himself by eating and getting fat, rather like my love-life these days).

§ 334, in the middle of this series. My version: “He got out of his tube-train at the Bank to go to the Bank”; and “When I count up to ‘five’ I’ve got five of something” (difference ordinal and cardinal, as Wittgenstein’s example is of the difference between quantity number and cardinal number).

Lots of the §§ in this sequence refer to “non” and “ne”.

§§ 351-938 are remarkably thick in Pt II contributions. I can only guess what § 939 - § 979 (the end) were to contribute to --- perhaps to das Innere and Certainty as a kind of Pt III. (If he did think of those as going together, I can’t believe he thought of Colour as also being part of that unity.)

At § 429 the Pt II bits start being mainly on aspect, and typically these start “Das Phänomen, von der wir reden, ist das Aufleuchten des Aspekts”, when he hasn’t been talking about aspect since § 180.

§§ that have struck me in reading through include §§ 362-3, in which he says people who do not associate colours with vowels could almost be called colour-blind. This is insane. But elsewhere, in my other recent notes [presumably § 73], he calls vowel-colour pathological (as I would).

§ 406 is, or becomes, a wonderful paragraph near the beginning of Pt II that bowled me over when I read it in typescript in 1952.

§ 463 has one of Wittgenstein’s uses of the medical term “chronic”. It always intrigues me that although he picked up the chronic-acute distinction from his hospital war-service, he never did the sign-symptom distinction, which would have been so useful to him in his post-war reworkings of his pre-war ‘private language’ texts.

In § 470 there is the chronic mistranslation of “Hase” (hare) as “rabbit”.

§§ 535-6: it struck me that this old, familiar Messer und Gabel is a distant seed for Certainty --- one doesn’t normally say “I know this is a chair that I’m sitting in”.

§ 559: “I just saw a shadow flitting by” should be “I only saw . . .” Of course, that’s what L & A mean by “just”, not “Honey I just shrank the kids” as I thought.

§ 613 Intriguing distinction between “im omnibus” and “des Omnibusses” (the German genitive singular, not the English plural mis-spelt) which I’d like to check in ts and ms.

§§ 614-621 are an intriguing set of paragraphs on introspection, while in § 622 ‘seeing as’ starts up again, and whereas these returns to an old subject are often simply that (ie an abrupt return), the case here seems to be that the return arises out of the preceding paragraphs. Those start with Rhees saying that his mood was like a grey cloud. Wittgenstein has said often that phrases like “I am afraid” can be simple expressions of fear, like a cry, or descriptions of one’s feelings, or both, or something in between; and now, a propos of Rhees’s cloud, he asks whether self-observation is also involved, and whether, sometimes, this observation modifies, for better or worse, what is observed.

But in §§ 619-620 he declares that looking at something does not involve observing his visual image, only observing the thing he is looking at, and ‘looking’ at his grief does not involve observing the impressions that his grief gives him. Yet observing his visual images and observing impressions which his emotions make on him seem to be exactly what he does in the many remarks that follow, particularly in the ‘seeing as’ contributions to Pt II. Lest this seems to be a contradiction he asks in § 621 whether thinking about an impression (which he clearly intends to be doing, again and again) is a distinct activity from observing what gives him that impression. This is the question that leads to § 622, where he clearly does not break off to return to ‘seeing as’, but embarks on an enquiry in the spirit of the question put in § 621. He asks what someone who says “Now I see it as …” is conveying to us, and says that there are many possibilities. One consequence, for example, will be that in seeing the duck-hare as a hare one will not be able to describe the duck’s expression --- but what, I ask, if one has a distinct memory of the duck’s face when one had seen it as a duck? Wittgenstein’s own drawings of the duck-hare in these notebooks are very expressive indeed.

Careful return to the beginning before I put this to rest. I thought I had noted “mich fürchteln”. Why has it no first person present? Because Wittgenstein ordains that it hasn’t, not because it can’t. “I am torturing myself with [unnecessary] fearful thoughts [and ought to stop]”. “I am just having an anxiety fit. It will pass if I breathe quietly”. Or perhaps it is only being able to have those insights that makes its first person present meaningful. “He is in the grip of self-produced fears and can’t see that he is” can’t be put into the first person present. (Let alone what might be the meaning of the first person plural present.)

§ 6 separates ‘truth functional’ implication from ‘predicate calculus implication’, which is what he means by “formal”. “(x). Øx > Ýx” I can understand, but what is added by tacking on “and there is an x such that Øx”? Presumably “and we are going to carry out an experiment in which there will be an x such that Øx”.

§ 10, true, but for the most trivial reason. A fear-verb restricted to animals would have no first person because they can’t speak.

§ 13, “I’m furious”, “ich bin wütend”, “ich bin zornig” --- the latter goes with Selbstbetrachtung but not the former, because “zornig” is weaker than “wütend”. “I’m furious” could be someone I remember from prep school teaching: “I’m furious. You’ll all stay in for half an hour.” “Ich bin zornig” would rather mean “I’m feeling angry (and I can’t think what to say to them)”. Genuine Selbstbetrachtung. But isn’t he exaggerating a very small difference?

§§ 14-15: impenetrable, but one is referred to Pt II ix, p 188b, which comes in a context which helps one understand, as do § 16 and § 22. Reading all these and that context as well illuminates the way Wittgenstein polished.

§18 “bestimmter” means “more precisely” here rather than “definitely”. Bestimmt!

§ 35 is the region where these notes came in, but I will add a little more. I left out § 39 because it always bewildered me (Pt II, p 174 e). In lächelndem Ton?

§ 45: Das Problem is doch dies . . . It isn’t a problem at all, because when one has been trained by Wittgenstein one takes it for granted.

§ 52 moves to Pt II xi, but to the region (starting on page 214 --- “Die Wichtigkeit dieses Begriffs . . .”) where seeing as gives way to meaning as.

§ 59 . . . der Witz des Spiels . . . e sei gelb seems at first sight to back up something noted above [§ 73 again] that concedes that the idea is pathological, but on careful examination he is serious in decrying people who don’t see e’s yellowness. L & A have correctly translated “Witz” as “point”, though it can of course mean “joke”, which would give the meaning “Isn’t the joke precisely that we say e is yellow [when it clearly isn’t]”. Alas, that is precisely not what Wittgenstein means.

§ 62 I don’t agree that experiencing the right word is the same as experiencing a meaning. One might never have experienced a meaning in one’s life and yet see immediately that “tribute” is the stronger word than “compliment” that one was looking for (in a recent letter of mine to a publisher).

Perhaps § 69, in keiner Beziehung des Passens steht, is where I thought that in coming clean about Schubert and “Schubert” he was coming clean about e and yellow. See my note above on §§ 72-3.

§ 116: I ought to have noted that I have no idea what tennis without a ball means. Tennis without a raquet is Eton Fives, which we used to play at Colfe’s before the war. Intriguingly, my dictionary not only confirms my old-fashioned spelling but tells me that the word comes from an Arabic one meaning the palm of the hand. My fives court has been bombed but Eton’s has survived. [But I have since found a tennis-without-a-ball explanation and it is in my book.]

Having ended on that note of nostalgia I must now add a postscript for the benefit (if there are any) of readers of my contributions to recent Wittgenstein Studies. In two of these I have perpetrated an error which certainly comes under the heading of “jumping to conclusions”. Cornelia Sperlich, a friend whom I have known since before the currency reform of 1948, drew my attention to this error. It concerns the term “Rentenmark”. She tells me that this currency came into use after the collapse of the old Reichsmark in 1923 and was replaced by a new Reichsmark in 1924. I saw a Rentenmark note in Oberhausen in 1946, so some of these notes must have stayed in circulation. An Oberhausen friend told me that the term derived from the fiction that the value of the notes was backed by German land, not by gold or foreign securities. Presumably, in the course of 1924 the Reichsbank had acquired enough gold and securities to make a fresh start, and the fiction was no longer required. The conclusion I jumped to, from seeing this one note, was that all German post-war notes were termed Rentenmarks until exchanged, in very limited numbers and ten for one, for D Marks. This is clearly wrong. I must have handled many notes with the proper name in the course of purchasing, with the help of British Forces currency, goods for Oberhausen charities. I have no excuse for not noticing what the notes I was legally but ingeniously exchanging were called. I cannot impose on the editors of Wittgenstein Studies by asking them to publish this retraction, so I do it here.

And as an August 2004 postscript, I must give an account of the current state of my book. In June I found two sets of letters thatt I had overlooked. One can be found in Wittgenstein-Jahrbuch2001/2002, and is a Moore / Malcolm correspondence that I had been sent by Josef Rothhaupt, one of its editors. The other comes in the second edition of the Malcolm Memoir, unfortunately poblished by OUP only in cheaply and indeed shabbily printed paperback, unlike the first edition. Putting both sets together I made the moving discovery that while in Cambridge for the last weeks of his life Wittgenstein had twice visited Moore for conversations, and then, while out for a walk on the 18th of April 1951, had met him for a third time, and assured him that he felt very well. He wrote his last philosophical notes on the 27th, lost consciousness on the 28th, when Drury was due to visit him, and died on the 29th.

That was added to my text, but two details remain. One is waiting for Alois Pichler of Bergen to send me a typescript of Philosophische Grammatik, which he cannot do until mid-August, so that I can correlate it with the printed version, and the other is to consult the Monk biography in case I have made a howler by insisting that someone I always called Cavalry Twilll when I met him at Elizabeth's place in 1952 was one Roy Fouracre. Forgotten in one of my website pieces and rediscovered while editing it is the admission that he could have been someone called Barry Pink, mentioned by Monk. Once those two thiings have been deaalt with, my book will be ready for me to find a publisher. Or could, by then, a publisher be trying to find me?