MS 116

General note on MSS 116-122 (Bände XIII to XVIII)

Chronologically speaking, the first two (of four) parts of MS 116 (= 116_i and 116_ii), the first part of MS 117 (= 117_i), the whole of MS 118 and most of MSS 119 and 120 are very closely connected, even interrelated; at some points one might speak of overlap. Many entries bear a date or are easy to date.

            The connections between the relevant parts of MSS 117-120 can, very roughly speaking, be described as follows: MSS 117_i-120_i are Wittgenstein’s notebooks from the time he spent in Norway after his return there in August1937. The earliest entries can be found in MS 118 (continuously dated from 13.8. to 24.9.37). Similar observations apply to MS 119, which is the immediate continuation of MS 118 (beginning on 24.9., running on to 19.11.), and virtually all of MS 120_i (beginning on 19.10. and running on to 10.12. — the day before Wittgenstein’s departure from Skjolden).

            MSS 118 and 119 resemble each other in several respects: both of them are used by Wittgenstein as notebooks from which he picks certain remarks which are then transferred and revised in MS 117; both of them contain a fair number of diary remarks chronicling the history of Wittgenstein’s contemporary writings as well as of his moods, impressions, and feelings. MS 117_i, on the other hand, is basically a reservoir of more or less polished remarks selected from MS 118 and to a small extent from MS 119, and in contrast to these latter two does not contain a journal.

            Owing to the existence of this journal we are informed about an interruption in Wittgenstein’s work, which can be dated as having occurred more or less exactly on 23 October 1937. The interruption is due to his having taken out his »old typescript« (as he calls it now), that is to say, a copy of the Big Typescript (= TS 213). From this point onwards he re-reads large parts from the first half of this typescript and works on it in the following sense: he selects remarks that arouse his interest and copies them in more or less revised form into a very large and so far unused manuscript book. This is MS 116_i, which as it were contains the result of Wittgenstein’s temporary loss of interest in the work he was doing in MSS 117-119.

            One of the most striking features of volumes XIV to XVI is the journal Wittgenstein keeps in these manuscript volumes. Many, but by no means all, of the remarks forming this journal were written in code. This habit of regular journal-writing was interrupted around the time Wittgenstein spent in Dublin in February and March 1938. This was the time of the Anschluss and increased worries about the safety of his relatives. These worries and the difficulty, or impossibility, of concentrating on his own problems and writings may have been a crucial factor contributing to Wittgenstein’s giving up on his journal.

            Of course, this is not the only difference between volumes XIII to XVI, on the one hand, and the last two (XVII and XVIII), on the other, but it is a convenient way of marking a break. At the same time, we must remember that volume XIII (= MS 117) itself forms a composite structure made up of heterogeneous parts: its first part is closely connected with MSS 118 and sections of 119, but other parts of MS 117 are in no way connected with this conglomerate, while its last part (= MS 117_v) even brings up the rear inasmuch as it constitutes the continuation and terminus of the train of remarks making up MS 122. This latter manuscript volume is the last one of those Bände Wittgenstein marked as belonging to a special series by assigning Roman numbers to them. Perhaps there is a certain irony in the fact that the tail end of the series is not to be found in the as it were »officially« last volume but was tucked away in an earlier one.

Notes on MS 116 (Band XII)

This manuscript volume is the biggest one in Wittgenstein’s whole Nachlass. It is a large ledger containing 347 manuscript pages. The volume is customarily divided into four parts as follows: MS 116_i = pp. 1-136, MS 116_ii = pp. 136-264, MS 116_iii = pp. 265-315, MS 116_iv = pp. 316-347. This last part is the only one bearing a date in Wittgenstein’s hand: »May 1945«. The third part, however, cannot be much older than this, as von Wright recognized on the basis of the specific content of these remarks; he tentatively characterized them as being connected with material written in 1944. The second part, on the other hand, is clearly continuous with part one. While it does not carry on the work on TS 213 (the Big Typescript) commenced in part one, it proceeds in a way similar to the earlier presentation of remarks and is hence not obviously distinguishable from earlier remarks. Most of the material used in the second part originates in MS 120, which is to say that it was first written down between November 1937 and March 1938.

            It was only when it became clear to scholars that journal entries of 23 to 26 October 1937 (in MS 119) report on the genesis of MS 116_i that they came to see why this material is not to be regarded as a continuation of the two Umarbeitungen contained in MSS 114_ii, 115_i and 140. In the autumn of 1937 Wittgenstein looked at these writings with completely different eyes from 1933/34. Now he was studying remarks belonging to an earlier period of his thought, and owing to this change of perspective he could only select but not really develop this older material. In MS 119, 79r ff. Wittgenstein reports:

I started to look at my old typescript and to separate the wheat from the chaff. If only they could be separated more neatly! […] In examining my old remarks I feel as if I were supposed to restore the household goods of a flat by pulling objects out from a rubbish heap and subsequently trying in a fussy way to examine and clean them […]. Am reading my old remarks. The great majority strikes me as fairly indifferent; a great many of them are feeble. […] The best ones are those that simply articulate a problem. […] There is plenty of thought behind these remarks. But only a few of them can without revision be used for a book.

In MS 116_i Wittgenstein introduces a way of referring to his remarks which readers need to be aware of in studying relevant manuscripts or typescripts: the individual remarks on each page are numbered 1, 2, …, and this way of numbering is then applied to the remarks on every fresh page. Thus, »97/3« would refer to the remark numbered »3« on p. 97 of MS 116_i. The fact that the same way of numbering remarks was then applied to MS 116_ii — that is, to remarks that do not come from the Big Typescript but mostly from MS 120 — suggests that at one point Wittgenstein must have thought that he could make further use of the remarks in both parts for the same purpose or, at any rate, for related purposes.

            However this may be, MS 116_i covers §§ 1 to 44 of the BT, that is, a great part of the chapters on Understanding, Meaning, Proposition: Sense of a Proposition, Immediate Understanding and the Application of a Word in Time, and the Nature of Language. Especially towards the end of this part of MS 116 readers will find a number of new remarks that may have been inspired by reading the old remarks from the BT. Here it is important to remember that a substantial selection of remarks from this part found their way into Bemerkungen I and II (= TSS 228 and 230), and hence into PI, since TS 228 was one of Wittgenstein’s chief sources in composing the last version of the Investigations.

            As we pointed out before, MS 116_ii mainly draws on MS 120. Especially at the beginning there are a fair number of remarks without known predecessors. A few remarks are derived from MS 158 (begun on 24 February 1938, in Dublin). So it is likely that work on MS 116_ii was done during Wittgenstein’s stay in Dublin or a little later. A number of the remarks in this part of MS 116 were later selected and transferred to TS 228 and, in some cases, to the last draft of the Investigations.

            MS 116_iii is a bit of a miracle: none of the remarks contained in this part seems to have a known antecedent. On the other hand, most of them do not in the least look like first drafts. At any rate, if one judges these remarks by their contents, von Wright must be right in supposing that the bulk of this material was written in or around 1944. Again, a fair number of these remarks were selected and by way of dictation transferred to TS 228. From here, some of them found their way into the Investigations.

            The fourth part, MS 116_iv, is the only part bearing a date in Wittgenstein’s hand (»May 1945«). As it seems, all or virtually all of these remarks are new in the sense that no antecedents can be found in earlier manuscripts. And again, even though they do contain a few corrections and deletions, they do not really look like remarks belonging to a first draft. A fair number of them were transferred into TS 228, and many of these found their way into PI. Perhaps one will regard it as hard to believe that such a great proportion of remarks that in Wittgenstein’s judgement were up to standard had no predecessors in earlier manuscripts. But it may of course be the case that at this point (in the summer of 1945) he knew exactly what he needed in order to fill gaps he perceived in the penultimate version of his work and thus tried hard to write precisely what he required.

(For the complicated story behind our present view of MS 116, see von Wright’s account of the matter in »The Wittgenstein Papers« [in: Wittgenstein, 50-52; or in: PO, 494-5] and in »The Origin and Composition of the Philosophical Investigations« [in: Wittgenstein, 122-125]. Another part of the story is told in my paper »The Role of the Big Typescript in Wittgenstein’s Later Writings«, in: Nuno Venturinha [ed.], The Textual Genesis of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations [2013], 81-89.)