The Unfinished Grammar of Life: Wittgenstein’s Posthumous Archive of the Philosophical Investigations
Vorwort (Preface) — The Fragmentary Condition
We begin at the threshold of the *Wiener Ausgabe*, a monumental editorial project that reconstructs Wittgenstein’s unpublished manuscripts from 1929 to the mid-1930s, the period during which he returned to Cambridge and began dismantling the *Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus* from within. The *Wiener Ausgabe* is not a finished book but a scholarly edition of the *Nachlass* — the papers Wittgenstein left behind — and it opens with a preface that immediately announces its own provisional status. The editors, led by Michael Nedo, orient the reader toward the peculiar ontology of the material: these are not polished dictations or final drafts but working notebooks, deeply layered with crossings-out, alternative formulations, and recursive revisions. The work does not begin with a thesis; it begins with a problem of presentation.
The crucial passage appears early in the editorial apparatus, where the editors state that Wittgenstein’s method in these years was one of “fortwährenden Umformung” — continuous transformation. Wittgenstein did not write toward a fixed endpoint but instead circled around his questions, approaching them from multiple angles, deleting entire pages only to return to the same thought in a different idiom. The editors emphasize that the *Wiener Ausgabe* therefore cannot present a linear argument; it must instead display the *process* of thought as itself the philosophical content. The manuscripts are not preparatory sketches for a finished work; they are the work itself in its authentic, restless condition.
What this means for the reader is disorienting by design. The *Wiener Ausgabe* refuses the comfort of a finished system. Where the *Tractatus* had offered a ladder to be thrown away after climbing, these notebooks offer no ladder at all — only the movement of climbing, the constant testing of footholds, the repeated slips. The preface thus prepares us for an experience that will feel less like reading a book and more like observing a mind thinking in real time, with all the missteps, hesitations, and sudden breakthroughs that entails. The editorial principle is not to smooth these over but to make them visible, so that the reader encounters Wittgenstein’s philosophy not as doctrine but as a practice of clarification that is never finally complete.
MS 105 (Band I) — The Return to Philosophy and the Collapse of the Picture Theory
The first substantive manuscript volume, MS 105, records Wittgenstein’s earliest attempts to re-engage with philosophy after his decade-long silence in Austria. He had returned to Cambridge in January 1929, and these pages, written in the late spring and summer of that year, show him struggling against the very framework he had once considered definitive. The orientation here is archaeological: we are watching the *Tractatus* being taken apart from the inside, its foundational assumptions unearthed and examined under a new, more skeptical light.
A key moment occurs when Wittgenstein writes about the relationship between elementary propositions and truth-functions. In the *Tractatus*, he had held that all propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions, which picture atomic states of affairs. Now, in MS 105, he begins to question whether this picture actually holds for ordinary language. He writes (in a close paraphrase, as the passage resists exact verbatim reproduction across the editorial layers): “When I say ‘The book is on the table,’ do I first consult some atomic facts and then combine them? Or do I simply mean the object I see?” The shift is subtle but seismic. The *Tractatus* had treated language as a calculus, a logical mechanism that could be fully analyzed into simple elements. Here, Wittgenstein begins to suspect that this analysis is not a discovery about language but a grammatical decision — a choice to see language in a certain way, not the uncovering of its hidden essence.
This passage matters because it marks the moment when the picture theory of meaning starts to dissolve. For the early Wittgenstein, a proposition was a picture of reality because it shared a logical form with what it depicted. Now he wonders whether this “sharing” is itself a grammatical illusion — something we project onto language rather than something we find in it. The illumination here is that Wittgenstein is not yet abandoning the picture theory; he is first recognizing its incompleteness. The notebooks show him probing the edges of his own system, finding that the *Tractatus* could not account for the way language actually functions in everyday life — the way we use words without performing a complete logical analysis, the way meaning depends on context and practice rather than on a hidden atomic structure.
MS 107 (Band II) — The Turn to Grammar and the Rejection of Logical Atomism
By the time we reach MS 107, written in 1930, Wittgenstein’s self-critique has deepened into a positive project. The orientation shifts from deconstruction to reconstruction: he is no longer merely questioning the *Tractatus* but beginning to formulate an alternative conception of language as grammatical rule-following. The key concept emerges in a passage where Wittgenstein distinguishes between “Satz” (proposition) and “Satzsystem” (proposition-system). He argues that individual propositions do not carry meaning in isolation; rather, they belong to entire systems of rules that determine what counts as a meaningful statement in a given context. The idea is that language is not a collection of pictures but a network of activities — a language-game in embryonic form.
A dense paragraph from this manuscript (paraphrased closely) reads: “The meaning of a word is not the object for which it stands, but the rule for its use. When I say ‘This is red,’ I am not naming a simple quality; I am applying a rule that connects this sample to other uses of the word ‘red’ in my language.” This is a decisive break with the *Tractatus*, which had treated names as directly referring to objects. Wittgenstein now insists that reference itself is mediated by grammar — by the rules that govern how words are employed in actual practices. The red patch on the wall does not guarantee the word’s meaning; rather, the word’s meaning is constituted by the rule that links this patch to other red things, to color comparisons, to descriptions, to instructions.
What this achieves in the overall trajectory of the *Wiener Ausgabe* is the introduction of rule-following as the central problematic. If meaning is rule-governed, then philosophy’s task is no longer to uncover the logical structure of reality but to describe the rules we actually follow — and to diagnose what happens when we mistake grammatical rules for metaphysical truths. Wittgenstein is redefining philosophy itself: not as a theory of reality, but as a therapeutic clarification of our own linguistic practices. The manuscripts from this period show him testing this new conception against concrete examples: color words, number words, sensations, mental states. Each test reveals that the *Tractatus* had been too rigid, too abstract, too trusting in the power of logical form to capture the messy texture of lived language.
MS 108 (Band III) — The Philosophy of Mathematics as a Test Case
MS 108 plunges into the philosophy of mathematics, the domain where Wittgenstein’s new grammatical method faces its most severe challenge. The orientation here is crucial: mathematics had been the paradigm of logical necessity in the *Tractatus*, and if Wittgenstein can show that even mathematical propositions are grammatical rules rather than descriptions of a Platonic realm, his entire approach gains extraordinary force. These pages are among the densest in the *Wiener Ausgabe*, but they reveal a mind working at full intensity.
A striking passage (paraphrased) captures the core insight: “The proposition ‘2 + 2 = 4’ does not describe a fact about numbers, any more than the rule ‘This is called red’ describes a fact about the color. It is a grammatical rule of our numerical language-game. To say that it is necessary is only to say that we treat it as fixed, that we cannot imagine departing from it without changing the game itself.” This is not a skeptical denial of mathematical truth but a re-grounding of it in human practice. Wittgenstein is arguing that mathematical necessity is not something we discover in the world but something we institute through our rules — and that this institution is not arbitrary but deeply connected to our forms of life.
The illumination here is both philosophical and methodological. Wittgenstein is showing that his grammatical method can dissolve the apparent mystery of mathematical necessity without reducing it to mere convention. The rule “2 + 2 = 4” is not a description of pre-existing objects (numbers) but a standard of representation — a rule that governs how we apply the signs “2,” “+,” and “4.” If someone were to calculate differently, we would not say they had discovered a new fact about numbers; we would say they were not playing our game. This reinforces the larger argument of the *Wiener Ausgabe*: that philosophy’s task is to describe these games, not to justify or ground them. The notebooks from this period are thus a workshop in which Wittgenstein forges the tools — grammatical investigation, language-game, form of life — that will later appear in the *Philosophical Investigations*.
MS 109 (Band IV) — The Blue Book in Proto-Form and the Invention of the Language-Game
In MS 109, composed during the early 1933 lectures that would become the *Blue Book*, the concept of the language-game finally crystallizes. The orientation is one of dramatic insight: Wittgenstein is now able to articulate what had been gesturing in the earlier manuscripts. He writes (in close paraphrase) that we must imagine “complete languages” that are simpler than our own — for example, a language consisting only of the words “block,” “pillar,” “slab,” and “beam,” used by builders to coordinate their work. In such a language, meaning is not a matter of reference but of use within an activity. The word “slab” does not stand for an object; it is a command, a request, a response — its meaning is exhausted by its role in the building game.
This is the passage that every reader of the *Investigations* recognizes, but here it appears in its raw, working form. What is striking is Wittgenstein’s own excitement with the example: he returns to it repeatedly, adding variations, testing its limits. The language-game is not a metaphor but a methodological device — a way of isolating the essential features of language by constructing simplified models. The builders’ language strips away the metaphysical assumptions we bring to familiar speech, forcing us to see that even a primitive language is a complete language, needing nothing added to it to be meaningful.
The illumination at this moment is twofold. First, Wittgenstein is showing that the *Tractatus* had been wrong to think that everyday language is somehow incomplete, requiring analysis into a hidden logical form. The builders’ language is perfectly transparent; there is nothing beneath its surface. Second, the language-game concept allows Wittgenstein to connect meaning to practice and context — to the shared activities and forms of life within which words have their life. This is the positive alternative to the picture theory: meaning is not representation but participation in a rule-governed activity. The *Wiener Ausgabe* here shows us the birth of this idea in real time, with all the excitement and tentativeness that attended its creation.
MS 110 (Band V) — The Transition to Philosophical Grammar and the Problem of Sensation Language
We now arrive at what the editors identify as a crucial transitional manuscript, written in 1931. Here Wittgenstein begins to grapple more directly with the problems that will eventually crystallize as the private language argument. The orientation shifts from the external, public language-games of the builders to the seemingly internal realm of sensations, pains, and feelings. Wittgenstein is asking: how does language actually work when we talk about what is supposedly most private and interior?
The key passage occurs in a discussion of how we learn the word “pain.” Wittgenstein writes something like this: one might think that the word “pain” gets its meaning by being connected to a private, inner sensation that only the speaker can directly know. But the child who cries out in pain is not engaging in a private ostensive definition — rather, the child’s natural expression of pain is gradually replaced by learned linguistic behavior. The word “pain” does not name a private object; it takes the place of the natural pain-behavior. The grammar of “pain” thus reveals that the supposed inner object is not logically prior to the word but is constituted by the language-game in which the word is embedded.
What Wittgenstein is illuminating here is a decisive break with the Cartesian picture of mind that had implicitly structured much of Western philosophy. If the *Tractatus* had treated all propositions as pictures of states of affairs — including propositions about sensations — then sensations would have to be pictured objects. But Wittgenstein now sees that this leads to absurd consequences. If “pain” named a private object, then how could two people ever mean the same thing by the word? How could I check whether my use of “pain” corresponds to yours? The private object would be epistemically inaccessible, making communication about sensations a miracle. By showing that the grammar of sensation-language is rooted in public, natural expressions, Wittgenstein dissolves the problem rather than solving it. The grammar of sensation is not a bridge between inner and outer; it is a practice that constitutes what we call “inner” in the first place.
This connects directly to the language-game method developed in MS 109. Just as the builders’ language functions without any hidden logical substructure, sensation-language functions without any hidden inner object. The word “pain” does its work perfectly well in the stream of life — in sympathy, in help, in avoidance, in groaning — without requiring that it corresponds to a discrete mental entity. Wittgenstein is showing that the philosophical problem of other minds arises only when we take a particular grammatical picture (the name-object model) and apply it thoughtlessly to sensation-words. The *Wiener Ausgabe* here records the moment when this insight first dawns: the recognition that the supposed privacy of sensations is not a metaphysical fact but a grammatical illusion.
MS 111 (Band VI) — Rules, Interpretation, and the Regress of Justification
Moving into 1931-32, manuscript 111 confronts one of the most famous problems in Wittgenstein’s later philosophy: the nature of rule-following. The work has already established that language-games are rule-governed activities. But what does it mean to follow a rule? The danger is that we imagine rule-following as a kind of mental act — an interpretation that guides our behavior. Wittgenstein now shows that this picture leads to an infinite regress.
The crucial passage in this manuscript appears in a discussion of a mathematical example. Consider someone learning to continue a number series: 2, 4, 6, 8… and so on. How do they know that “and so on” means to add 2? One might say: they have understood the rule “add 2.” But then we might ask: how do they apply this rule to the next case? Do they need another rule for how to apply the first rule? And then another rule for that? This regression threatens because the interpretation of a rule is itself a mental act that would stand in need of its own justification. Wittgenstein’s insight — already visible in these pages — is that rule-following must ultimately be a practice, not an interpretation. At some point, the regress bottoms out in the fact that we just go on in the same way, without further justification.
This is a moment of extraordinary philosophical tension in the *Wiener Ausgabe*. Wittgenstein is working out a view that will later be credited as the foundation of the rule-following considerations in the *Philosophical Investigations*. He writes that following a rule is not a matter of having a mental representation that determines all future applications; rather, it is a matter of being trained into a form of life, of acquiring a skill that manifests as spontaneous, non-reflective behavior. The signpost does not leave room for doubt about which way it points — not because there is some metaphysical compulsion, but because we have been trained to respond to it in a particular way. The agreement in judgments that Wittgenstein posits is not an agreement in opinions but in forms of life — in the shared ways of acting that make rule-following possible at all.
The *Wiener Ausgabe* thus shows the rule-following problem emerging directly from the collapse of the *Tractatus* picture. In the *Tractatus*, the logical form of a proposition determines its application in all possible worlds; there is no room for interpretation because the sense is fully determinate. But once Wittgenstein abandons the idea of a transcendent logical form, he must account for how rules determine their applications from within language itself. The answer he sketches in these manuscripts is that the determination is not conceptual but practical: the rule and its application belong to the same language-game, and that language-game is a pattern of activity that we simply *do*. The regress of interpretations is not solved by finding a better interpretation but by seeing that interpretation comes to an end in action.
MS 112 (Band VII) — The Big Typescript Begins: The Systematization of the New Method
With manuscript 112, composed in 1932-33, the *Wiener Ausgabe* reaches a major milestone: the material that will eventually be typed up as the so-called Big Typescript, Wittgenstein’s first systematic attempt to organize his post-*Tractatus* ideas into a book. This is not a clean, final text but rather a working document — a compilation and reorganization of earlier thoughts, full of crossings-out, revisions, and marginal notes. The orientation here is more architectural: Wittgenstein is trying to see whether the scattered insights of the previous manuscripts can be assembled into a coherent structure.
A central passage in this manuscript concerns the concept of meaning as use. Wittgenstein writes that for a large class of cases — though not for all — the meaning of a word can be explained as its use in the language. This is presented not as a philosophical thesis but as a grammatical remark: a description of how the word “meaning” actually functions in our language. The passage shows Wittgenstein self-consciously moving away from any attempt to define meaning in terms of reference, mental representation, or correspondence. “Use” becomes the placeholder for everything that the *Tractatus* had tried to capture with the notion of logical form.
What is striking about this manuscript is the experimental quality of the writing. Wittgenstein will introduce a concept, then immediately test it with examples from mathematics, psychology, or ordinary conversation. He asks: does “use” cover all cases? What about the meaning of a mathematical proof? What about the meaning of a musical phrase? The *Wiener Ausgabe* records his dissatisfaction with easy answers. He does not claim to have a complete theory of meaning; rather, he is developing a method for dissolving philosophical problems by attending to the actual practice of language. The concept of use is a tool, not a final answer.
This manuscript also contains some of the earliest formulations of what will become the critique of the Augustinian picture of language — the idea that words are simply labels for objects, and that language is essentially a naming-system. Wittgenstein sees this picture as deeply embedded in Western philosophy, from Augustine to the *Tractatus* itself. The Big Typescript material attacks this picture not by proposing an alternative theory but by showing the multiplicity of functions that words actually serve: giving orders, making reports, telling stories, singing songs, greeting, praying, and so on. The *Wiener Ausgabe* documents the moment when the later Wittgenstein’s characteristic therapeutic stance takes shape — the recognition that philosophy’s task is not to construct theories but to untangle the confusions that arise when language goes on holiday.
MS 113-114 (Band VII-VIII) — The Problems of Color and the Grammar of Visual Space
A remarkable feature of the *Wiener Ausgabe* in this period is Wittgenstein’s sustained engagement with the philosophy of color and visual perception. Manuscripts 113 and 114, from 1933-34, contain extensive explorations of color concepts, color exclusion, and the grammar of visual space. This may seem like a detour from the main lines of argument, but it is in fact a crucial testing ground for the new method. The *Tractatus* had treated colors as simple objects, taking for granted that “red” and “green” could not occupy the same place at the same time. Now Wittgenstein examines this with fresh eyes.
The key passage involves the proposition “This patch is red and this patch is green” — where the two patches are in the same location. In the *Tractatus*, the impossibility of such a state of affairs was treated as a matter of logical form: the colors had incompatible logical structures. But now Wittgenstein asks: is this really a logical impossibility? Or is it a grammatical rule — a convention of how we use color words? He writes that the exclusion of red and green from the same point in visual space is not something that logic can capture with the tools of truth-functional analysis. It is a material incompatibility that shows the limits of formal logic. The grammar of color terms has its own internal relations that cannot be reduced to the tautologies of the propositional calculus.
This investigation reveals something profound about the nature of grammar itself. Wittgenstein is showing that the boundaries of language are not set by logic alone but by the specific, diverse grammars of different regions of discourse. Color-grammar, pain-grammar, number-grammar, object-grammar — each has its own internal relations, its own rules of exclusion and inclusion, its own forms of evidence and justification. The *Wiener Ausgabe* here demonstrates Wittgenstein’s conviction that philosophy must abandon the search for a single, unified logical form and instead attend to the multiplicity of language-games — each with its own criteria, its own standards of correctness, its own kind of necessity.
The color discussions also connect to a theme that will become central in Wittgenstein’s later work: aspect-perception and the idea that seeing is not a simple, passive reception of sense-data but an activity governed by concepts. The visual field, Wittgenstein suggests, is not a neutral space into which colors are inserted; rather, the concepts of color, shape, and location are internal to the grammar of visual experience. To see a red patch is already to have mastered a technique of describing, comparing, and discriminating. The *Wiener Ausgabe* thus prefigures the famous discussion of “seeing as” that will appear in the *Philosophical Investigations* — a discussion that challenges the very idea of pure, unconceptualized perception.
MS 115 (Band VIII) — The Blue Book Dictation and the Crystallization of the Method
Manuscript 115, dating from 1933-34, is of exceptional importance because it contains the dictation material that Wittgenstein prepared for his Cambridge students and that would later be edited as the Blue Book. This manuscript represents the most systematic presentation of the new philosophy up to that point. Here the orientation is pedagogical: Wittgenstein is not just thinking aloud but trying to communicate his method to others, which forces him to clarify his own positions. The result is a text of remarkable lucidity and power.
The central passage in this manuscript concerns what Wittgenstein calls the craving for generality — the philosophical tendency to search for unifying essences and to dismiss particular cases as mere examples of universal laws. He argues that this craving has misled philosophers into thinking that language must have a single essence (representation, picturing, naming) and that meaning must be a mental accompaniment of speech. Against this, he proposes a method: look at the actual use of words, not their imagined meanings. The Blue Book material is filled with concrete examples — the stick that looks bent in water, the puzzle about time, the problem of thinking machines — each used to show how philosophical confusion arises from misreading the grammar of our language.
What emerges in manuscript 115 is a distinctive therapeutic conception of philosophy. Wittgenstein writes that philosophy is not a set of doctrines or theories but an activity of clarification. The philosopher’s job is not to discover new facts about the world but to clear up the conceptual confusions that arise when we take language out of its ordinary context and try to make it serve transcendental purposes. The *Wiener Ausgabe* shows this conception being forged in real time — a conception that will define the entirety of Wittgenstein’s later work.
This manuscript also contains the first sustained presentation of the private language argument in a form that will become canonical. Wittgenstein imagines someone trying to name a private sensation — say, a particular kind of pain or after-image — by focusing attention on it and saying “this.” He then shows that such an act of ostensive definition cannot establish a rule for correct use because there is no criterion of correctness independent of the speaker’s memory. The private diarist, as he will be called in the *Investigations*, cannot distinguish between seeming to follow the rule and actually following it. The *Wiener Ausgabe* records this argument in its earliest, most exploratory form, with all the hesitations and reformulations that precede its final polished version.
MS 116 (Band IX) — The Color-Exclusion Problem and the Phenomenological Turn
We enter a manuscript layer that is often considered the philosophical peak of the *Wiener Ausgabe*: the intensive engagement with the problem of color-exclusion that had haunted Wittgenstein since the *Tractatus*. In the *Tractatus*, Wittgenstein had claimed that propositions like “A is red and A is green” were not false but nonsensical, because the logical product of two elementary propositions could not be contradictory if they were truly independent. The *Tractatus* solved this by positing that colors are in fact incompatible in the logical structure of reality itself, but this solution was always fragile. Now, in MS 116, Wittgenstein returns to this problem with his new grammatical method, and the result is a radical reconception of the relationship between logic and experience.
Wittgenstein argues that the impossibility of a patch being simultaneously red and green is not a logical impossibility in the sense of formal contradiction, but rather a grammatical impossibility — a rule of our color-language that cannot be captured by the truth-functional calculus. The *Wiener Ausgabe* shows him experimenting with the idea that color-words belong to a system of internal relations, and that understanding “red” already presupposes understanding its place within the color space. This is not a fact about the world but a fact about our grammar: the rules for the use of color terms exclude certain combinations not because of the nature of objects but because of the nature of language.
The passage that crystallizes this turn is Wittgenstein’s discussion of the “phenomenological” character of color grammar. He considers the statement “I see a red circle” and asks whether this is a genuine proposition or merely a description of a visual impression. The key move is his recognition that the grammar of sensation-language differs fundamentally from the grammar of physical-object language. When I say “There is a red circle on the wall,” I am making a claim that can be verified or falsified by further investigation. When I say “I see a red circle,” I am expressing a visual experience, and the “cannot” of color-exclusion operates differently in each register.
“The difficulty here is that we want to describe a phenomenon — but our grammar doesn’t allow it. Because grammar always already contains the interpretation of the phenomenon.”
This passage illuminates the core of Wittgenstein’s late method. The problem is not that we lack a language for describing color experience; the problem is that our grammar *pre-forms* any such description, embedding within it the very structures we are trying to investigate. The color-exclusion problem is not a problem about color at all — it is a problem about the relationship between grammar and the phenomena it purports to describe. Wittgenstein’s solution is not to find a more adequate logic but to dissolve the demand for such a logic by showing that the grammar of color already contains all that we need, provided we stop trying to reduce it to something else.
MS 117 (Band IX) — The Critique of Phenomenological Language
This manuscript represents one of the most dramatic moments in the *Wiener Ausgabe*: Wittgenstein’s explicit and self-critical rejection of “phenomenology” as a linguistic project. For a period in the early 1930s, Wittgenstein had entertained the idea of constructing a “phenomenological language” — a primitive language that would directly describe sense-data without the distortions of ordinary grammar. MS 117 records the dissolution of this project and its replacement by the concept of grammar as the only legitimate form of investigation.
Wittgenstein begins by noting that the very idea of a phenomenological language is confused. If such a language is supposed to describe immediate experience without interpretation, then it cannot be a language at all — because every language presupposes rules, and rules presuppose interpretation. The attempt to get “behind” grammar to some pure given is the same illusion that motivated the *Tractatus*’s search for elementary propositions. But now Wittgenstein sees that the given is not something prior to grammar but is itself constituted by grammar. The “phenomena” we seek to describe are always already embedded in forms of life and language-games.
The decisive passage comes when Wittgenstein compares the desire for a phenomenological language to the desire to step outside one’s own skin. He writes that we cannot describe the “given” because the “given” is not something that can be described — it is the form of description itself. This is not a skeptical conclusion but a grammatical one: the limits of language are not limits on what we can know but are the conditions of sense. The attempt to go beyond these limits leads not to deeper understanding but to nonsense.
“I can’t describe the phenomenon because the phenomenon is the description.”
This sentence carries the entire weight of Wittgenstein’s transformation from the *Tractatus* to the *Investigations*. In the *Tractatus*, the world was composed of facts, and language pictured those facts. Here, the phenomenon and its description are identified: there is no “fact” independent of the grammar that constitutes it. The color-exclusion problem, the private language problem, the problem of sensation-language — all of these are dissolved not by finding a better theory but by recognizing that the grammar we already have is not deficient but simply *is* the phenomenon in its linguistic form. The *Wiener Ausgabe* records this recognition in real time, with all the false starts and reversals that make it so valuable for understanding Wittgenstein’s development.
MS 118 (Band X) — The Asymptote of the Investigations: Rules, Grammar, and the Everyday
This manuscript moves steadily toward the form that will become the *Philosophical Investigations*, though many of its passages remain in an earlier, more tentative state. The central theme is the nature of rule-following and its relationship to the “everyday” use of language. Wittgenstein is now fully committed to the view that philosophical problems arise when language “goes on holiday” — when we take words out of their ordinary contexts and try to understand them in isolation. The *Wiener Ausgabe* shows him testing this thesis against a wide range of examples, from mathematics to aesthetics to the philosophy of psychology.
The key innovation in MS 118 is the explicit connection between rule-following and the concept of training (Abrichtung). Wittgenstein argues that learning a rule is not a matter of grasping a Platonic entity or understanding a mental representation; it is a matter of being trained to respond in certain ways, to participate in a practice. The regress of interpretations — where every rule requires another rule for its application — is halted not by finding a final interpretation but by recognizing that at some point we simply *act*, and this action is the bedrock of language.
The passage that anchors this section is Wittgenstein’s discussion of how a child learns to continue a series of numbers. He imagines the child being shown the sequence “1, 3, 5, 7” and asked to continue it. The child might continue “9, 11, 13” — and this is correct. But why? Wittgenstein argues that there is no “fact of the matter” about the rule that compels this continuation; rather, the child has been trained into a practice, and the judgment “correct” is simply the expression of that practice. The *Wiener Ausgabe* emphasizes that this is not skepticism about rules but a description of how rules actually function in human life.
“The rule goes with the practice — it is not something that stands behind it.”
This passage marks the culmination of Wittgenstein’s long struggle with the concept of rule-following that began in MS 111. The “paradox” that every rule admits of multiple interpretations is dissolved by recognizing that interpretation is not the fundamental relation between a rule and its application. The fundamental relation is *training* and *practice* — the embodied, social, habitual dimension of language that the *Tractatus* had entirely ignored. The *Wiener Ausgabe* shows that this insight was not reached in a single stroke but emerged through hundreds of pages of painstaking grammatical investigation, each page clearing away a different misunderstanding.
MS 119 (Band X) — The Transition to the Final Form: Certainty, Doubt, and the Limits of Justification
The final manuscript bands of the *Wiener Ausgabe* show Wittgenstein approaching the themes that will occupy him in *On Certainty*, though always within the framework of grammatical investigation. The central problem is the relationship between doubt and certainty — not as epistemological categories but as moves within language-games. Wittgenstein is concerned to show that radical doubt is not a more rigorous form of inquiry but a *grammatical confusion* — a misuse of the word “doubt” that strips it of its ordinary function.
The key passage in MS 119 involves an extended comparison between mathematical certainty and empirical certainty. Wittgenstein notes that when we say “I know that 2+2=4,” we are not making a claim about a mental state but about the grammar of arithmetic. The word “know” here does the same work as the word “must” in a mathematical proof: it marks a rule, not a fact. Similarly, when we say “I know that I have a hand,” we are not expressing extraordinary certainty about an ordinary fact; we are expressing a grammatical certainty — a proposition that stands fast as a hinge around which other propositions turn.
“The wrong use of ‘I know’ is a symptom of a wrong conception of the grammar of the word.”
This passage illuminates the continuity between the *Wiener Ausgabe* and Wittgenstein’s later work. The critique of “I know” as a pseudo-psychological claim is the same method he used to critique the private language, the sense-datum theory, and the picture theory of meaning. In each case, the problem is that a word has been taken out of its ordinary language-game and given a metaphysical use that appears to promise insight but actually produces confusion. The cure is always the same: to bring the word back to its ordinary use and see that the philosophical problem disappears.
The *Wiener Ausgabe* ends not with a conclusion but with a continuation — the last pages show Wittgenstein still at work, still questioning, still refining. The book that began with the fragmentary notes of the *Tractatus*’s aftermath ends with the fragments of a method that has finally found its voice. The *Investigations* are not far away; indeed, many of its most famous passages can already be found here, in earlier, more tentative, but often more revealing forms. The *Wiener Ausgabe* is not a finished work but the *work of thinking itself* — and it is this that makes it indispensable for anyone who wants to understand not just what Wittgenstein thought, but how he thought it.
MS 120a and MS 120b (Band XI) — The Proto-Investigations: The Dictation and the First Attempt at Order
We have now reached the final notebooks in the *Wiener Ausgabe*, and the character of the writing shifts decisively. MS 120a contains Wittgenstein’s dictation to Friedrich Waismann for the never-completed collaborative book project, while MS 120b shows Wittgenstein’s own attempts to order and rewrite these materials into what would eventually become the *Philosophical Investigations*. This is the moment where the scattered remarks of the preceding notebooks begin to coalesce into the distinctive form of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy.
The dictation material is particularly revealing, for here Wittgenstein is forced to formulate his thoughts with a clarity and presentation suitable for publication. One passage from the dictation addresses the nature of philosophical method directly: Wittgenstein dictates that philosophy is not a theory but an activity, not a body of propositions but a method of clarification. The philosopher does not produce new facts but rather unties knots in our understanding, showing that apparent problems arise from misunderstandings of how language works. The method is therapeutic rather than constructive.
This passage illuminates the radical break with the *Tractatus* that has been developing throughout the *Wiener Ausgabe*. The early Wittgenstein had believed that philosophy could produce a definitive analysis of language that would reveal the logical structure of reality. The later Wittgenstein now sees this project as itself a kind of confusion, the desire for a “crystalline purity” that language does not possess. The task of philosophy is not to reveal an ultimate logical order beneath ordinary language but to disentangle the confusions that arise when we take ordinary language out of its natural context. The dictation form forces Wittgenstein to state this explicitly, and the result is the first clear formulation of the therapeutic conception of philosophy that would define his later work.
MS 121 (Band XI) — The Philosophical Investigations in Embryo: The Ordering of Remarks
MS 121 represents perhaps the most important single document in the *Wiener Ausgabe*, for it contains Wittgenstein’s first attempt to arrange his remarks into a continuous, ordered text that would eventually become the *Philosophical Investigations*. The numbering system that Wittgenstein developed for this manuscript — a series of remarks numbered from 1 to several hundred — provides the direct genetic link between the *Wiener Ausgabe* and the published *Investigations*. Here we can see, with extraordinary precision, how Wittgenstein selected, ordered, and revised remarks from the earlier notebooks.
A key passage in this manuscript shows Wittgenstein reflecting on the nature of his own method: he writes that the philosopher must not advance theses in philosophy, for to do so would be to engage in the very kind of theory-building that leads to confusion. Instead, the philosopher must assemble reminders for a particular purpose, placing ordinary uses of language side by side so that the differences and similarities become visible. The difficulty is not to solve problems but to dissolve them — to show that the apparent problem was based on a misunderstanding of how words actually work.
This passage marks the full emergence of Wittgenstein’s mature philosophical method. The assembling of reminders replaces the construction of theories; the dissolution of problems replaces their solution; the description of ordinary language replaces the search for hidden logical structures. What the *Wiener Ausgabe* has shown us, across eleven volumes of manuscript material, is the painful birth of this method from the ruins of the *Tractatus*’s logico-metaphysical project. The numbered remarks of MS 121 are the direct ancestors of the *Philosophical Investigations*, and seeing them in their original context — surrounded by the experimental remarks, the false starts, the abandoned projects that preceded them — gives us a radically different understanding of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy than reading the polished final text alone could provide.
MS 122 and MS 123 (Band XII) — The Final Revisions: The Path to Publication
The last two volumes of the *Wiener Ausgabe* contain Wittgenstein’s final revisions and expansions of the material that would become the *Philosophical Investigations*. MS 122 shows him working on the early sections of the book, particularly the famous passage about Augustine’s picture of language and the introduction of the concept of language-games. MS 123 contains revisions of later sections, including the discussion of rule-following and private language. These manuscripts are not merely fair copies but show Wittgenstein still struggling with the formulations, still cutting and pasting, still questioning whether he has found the right way to express his thoughts.
One remarkable passage from MS 123 shows Wittgenstein returning to a problem he had first encountered in MS 105, more than a decade earlier: the relationship between a rule and its application. He writes that the idea that every step in following a rule is determined by the rule itself is a picture that holds us captive — the picture of a track that forces the train to move along it. But a rule does not force anything; it is only in the practice of applying the rule that the rule has meaning. The rule is not a cause of action but a standard against which action is measured, and this measurement is itself a human activity embedded in forms of life.
This final return to the rule-following problem shows the continuity of Wittgenstein’s thinking across the entire period covered by the *Wiener Ausgabe*. The problem that had first appeared as a technical difficulty in the philosophy of mathematics — how do we know that we are applying a rule correctly? — has now been transformed into a fundamental insight about the nature of language, meaning, and human practice. The practice of rule-following, the form of life within which rules have meaning, the agreement in judgments that makes communication possible — these are the concepts that Wittgenstein has been working toward throughout the *Wiener Ausgabe*, and they now stand fully articulated, ready for the book that would change the course of twentieth-century philosophy.
