Wittgenstein’s Phenomenology

Abstract

The Big Typescript is the one of the last works of Wittgenstein where we can find a strong support for the project of a “phenomenology” as it was formulated in 1930 in the Philosophische Bemerkungen. It is in chapters 94 through 107 of the Big Typescript that we find in its most accomplished form the project of a phenomenology as the grammar of our statements describing the whole field of the “immediately given”. By the end of 1933, when Wittgenstein dictates the Blue Book, this project was clearly abandoned. Curiously enough, some preoccupations very similar to those that we find in the Big Typescript are to be found in the manuscripts he wrote during the last months his life. Wittgenstein goes back to old problems, like the grammar of colors, which were formerly attached to a global treatment of the phenomenal field. We feel as though some old questions were still unsolved, and needed a fresh start—or at least some further reflections. Of course, the tentative answers could not be the same, and even the problems could not be formulated as they used to be. But the basic questions still seem to be there. How to account for the reappearance of the color exclusion problem, for instance? How to deal with these problems without postulating a fixed structure for our experiences, with the logical syntax of grammar working as a logical mirror of reality? Why did these old problems seem so pressing to Wittgenstein in the last days of his life?

I thank very much the two blind referees of my paper for the useful suggestions they made.