MS 115
XI. Philosophische Bemerkungen
Fortsetzung von Band X. (= MS 115i, pp. 1-117)
Philosophische Untersuchungen. Versuch einer Umarbeitung (= MS 115ii, pp. 118-292)
General note on MSS 105-122 (Bände I to XVIII)
Between 1929 and 1940 Wittgenstein produced 18 large manuscript volumes. He himself numbered them as Bände I to XVIII and gave most of them general titles like “Philosophical Remarks” or “Philosophical Grammar”. This indicates that he himself perceived these volumes as belonging to a series. Some of them evidently contain new material spontaneously written down and not drafted in other notebooks. Parts of several of these volumes, however, are based on earlier remarks recorded in pocket notebooks, for example, while other parts contain revisions of earlier manuscript volumes or typescripts. The best-known case of this last kind are MSS 114ii and 115i (Bände X and XI), which contain a revision (erste Umarbeitung) of parts of TS 213 (The Big Typescript). The same typescript forms the basis of the first section of volume XII (MS 116), but the process of selecting remarks from the TS and transferring them into Band XII is such that most people would not feel inclined to speak of a process of revision. At any rate, there are clear breaks between the earlier portion of MS 114 and the subsequent revision of TS 213 contained in the same ledger as well as between the first half (winter 1933-34) of volume XI and its second half, which was written in the late summer and the autumn of 1936 (containing the German revision of the Brown Book, entitled “Philosophische Untersuchungen”).
Notes on MS 115 (Band XI)
This manuscript book bears the title “Philosophical Remarks”, but on account of the fact that its second part (the German translation and revision of the Brown Book) should be regarded as a separate (part of the) manuscript, this title may be seen as only applying to the first 117 pages of this volume. The pagination is Wittgenstein’s own throughout.
On the inside of the cover of this manuscript book Wittgenstein wrote a note (in code) to the effect that, even though it may well be possible to shorten this book, it would be extremely difficult to do so properly. To this he added the rider that his observation does not apply to his attempt at producing a revised German version of the Brown Book. This shows that the coded remark was probably written two and a half years later than MS 115i: this latter part of the volume was begun on 14 December 1933, and there is no reason to suppose that it took Wittgenstein more than a few months to complete the rest of his work. So, probably MS 115i was completed before or in the spring of 1934. The German revision of the Brown Book, on the other hand, is dated “Ende August 1936”. The last remark of this revision is followed by the well-known words:
Dieser ganze ›Versuch einer Umarbeitung‹ von Seite 118 bis hierher ist nichts wert.
That is, Wittgenstein regarded his attempted translation-cum-revision as completely worthless. It is probable that, after giving up work on MS 115ii, it took him a while to get started on the earliest version (Urfassung) of what we know as Philosophical Investigations in November (MS 142). So we may suppose that he worked on this second part of MS 115 from August to September or October 1936.
The first 117 pages of volume XI (often referred to as MS 115i, i.e. the first part of MS 115) constitute a continuation of the work contained in MS 114ii, and hence a continuation of work on a revision of TS 213 (plus manuscript corrections). Some of it is meant to be inserted into MS 114ii; a great part of the first 35 pages or so is based on MS 146 (“C2”), a number of later remarks on MSS 147 (“C3”) and 157a; and many of the remarks to be found in MS 115i were at a much later stage (ca. 1945) copied into TS 228, some of them ending up in publications like Philosophical Investigations or Zettel.
Parts of pp. 95 and 100 as well as the whole of pp. 96-99 consist of typed material from an (almost clean) copy of TS 213, pp. 393-398 (= 211, pp. 604-609). These remarks are chiefly on the principle of induction and related topics, cf. the 470s and 480s of PI.
The second, and somewhat larger, section of MS 115 (= 114ii) continues Wittgenstein’s pagination (118-292). The underlined title (Philosophische Untersuchungen.) was squeezed into the space between the first line (“Versuch einer Umarbeitung”) and the page number; it is hence likely to have been added at a later stage. The date (“Ende August 36”) is squeezed in even more tightly than the title; so there is a certain probability that it too was added at a later time.
There is an obvious, and obviously interesting, question about the identity of the English version of the Brown Book that Wittgenstein relied on in translating and revising this text. Some of his modifications are pretty radical; others seem slight but on closer inspection turn out to be important clarifications. Serious work on comparing different versions, especially various Ambrose copies of the Brown Book and the Skinner copy of Wittgenstein’s dictation, will need to be done in the future. Some of Wittgenstein’s additions and corrections in the Skinner copy as well as the emotional value that this particular copy must have had for Wittgenstein speak in favour of accepting the conjecture that it was this latter copy which Wittgenstein took with him to Skjolden and used in the process of producing MS 115ii.
The great number and characteristic style of corrections in this manuscript show that Wittgenstein worked directly on the text as contained in this volume, that is, he probably did not rely much on other (smaller and more tentative) notebooks to compose this version of “Philosophische Untersuchungen”.
The contents of MS 115ii are known to readers of the German version of the Brown Book (ed. by Rush Rhees and published under the title Eine philosophische Betrachtung).