The World as I Found It Read Online Free Page B

examining it in all its particular crotchets and uses. For the philosopher, he felt, the problem was much like that of seeing the rabbit within the duck — that is, seeing with the freshness of second sight , holding in mind the image of what one first saw while yet bringing to it the force of what one saw later, since one was always seeing more in the picture. Still, in an age addicted to scientific leaps, he knew the ambiguous, ongoing, necessarily fragmentary nature of the search was not exactly a cheering prospect. Like many a stealthy thinker who presents something difficult and vaguely uncongenial, he was often at some pains to make himself clear, at times even dropping broad hints. Once, for instance, he told a friend that where the usual thinker wants to show unexpected resemblances, his task was rather to show many discrete differences among the various families of language, families that each have their own resemblances and eccentricities, their rules and disguises. Their duck-rabbits, so to speak.
    In contrast to his early hostility to Freudian thinking, Wittgenstein now spoke of himself as a disciple of Freud but warned that Freud had to be read extremely critically. Since when, asked a young man to whom he had given this advice, had he ever read anything uncritically? Wittgenstein laughed. But here was another hint, and he was pleased when someone later remarked that the seemingly unordered remarks that composed his Philosophical Investigations and other late works had the cumulative effect of a kind of linguistic psychoanalysis designed to help the analysand overcome the muddles that cloud understanding. Suspicious of the dubious virtues of order and equally suspicious of how order could lead to error and intellectual complacency, Wittgenstein found this a fair analogy. Still, it was a somewhat guilty explanation: despite his misgivings, he and others had expended much labor in a fruitless effort to organize his ideas. But the river would not be diverted: he could not change the course of his mind. Like analysis, and indeed like thinking itself, the method was not linear but circular, obsessively returning to the same general concerns: concepts of meaning and understanding, states of consciousness, logic, the nature of propositions and philosophy and, above all, the “games” through which language is acquired and transmitted. A question would appear, disappear, then resurface again a few pages later in altered form, clouded as thought, tricky as talk. Yet he still felt that the indeterminacy of his method was oddly appropriate to the very ambiguity and indeterminacy of the subject, his point being to present thought as a process , rather than a canned result to be read and forgotten. And finally for him, these investigations went even beyond the more parochial concerns of philosophy. After all, he asked, what was the use of studying philosophy if it did not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life? The investigation is eternally open, longer than life, as endless. Thinking is begetting. We do not practice philosophy, or think, in order to forget.
    Wittgenstein often spoke of the “bewitchments” of language, but he was far less mindful of the bewitchments of his own personality.
    Surely, nothing could have been more disagreeable to him than the mounting spectacle of his own influence, engulfing other minds. The last thing he wanted was to found another school or movement, yet he could plainly see it coming and, wittingly and unwittingly, he fostered it. He hated to see his students unconsciously mimic his gestures and parrot his expressions, and he was even more distressed to see his unpublished ideas pirated and distorted. Indeed, at times, he feared he would leave nothing but a collection of mannerisms: the Do-This-in-Remembrance-of-Me School.
    Inevitably, he had his rivals and detractors, chief among them his former teacher and mentor, Bertrand Russell. It pained