Taking Our Time: Slow Learning, Cautious Teaching

In his later works, Wittgenstein offers some remarks that seem to point to the importance of slowness in various kinds of learning. A principal object of his interest is the making of progress in philosophy. In Culture and Value (1980, 80e), we read that philosophers should greet each other by saying “Take your time!” and that “In philosophy the winner of the race is the one who can run most slowly. Or: the one who gets to the winning post last” (34e). Wittgenstein notes that his own writing – his own “sentences,” as he puts it, which here must mean his philosophical writing – is “all to be read slowly” (57e, emphasis in original). His other remarks on the importance of slowness include, in the collection of fragments published as Zettel, the warning that “In philosophy we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important” (§ 382). The emphases are in the original: they seem themselves to enjoin a slow reading.

In this short chapter,...