Abstract

In Chapter IV of his Schreiben und Denken , the Austrian linguist Hanspeter Ortner distinguishes and describes ten writing strategies (“Schreibstrategien”). One of them is “syncretistic writing”. 1 A simple application of Ortner’s defi nition and description of syncretistic writing to the genesis of the Philosophical Investigations (PI) makes clear that the PI can be said to be of syncretistic origin. 2 Wittgenstein’s writing of the PI 3 can be characterized by Ortner’s eight features of syncretistic: his writing (1) hops all over the place (“Sprunghaftigkeit”); (2) combines disparate elements from his writings (“Verbindung von weit Auseinanderliegendem”); (3) is semantically open, under-determined and under-determining (“Unterdeterminiertheit und semantische Offenheit”); (4) postpones gestalt-formation/ elaboration (“Aufschub der Gestaltbildung”); (5) invites and offers many opportunities for creative ideas (“viele Chancen für und Einladungen an den kreativen Einfall”); (6) gives freedom to choose the points of departure and reference (“Freiheit bei der Wahl des/der Startpunktes/e und des/der Gesichtspunktes/e”); (7) is hierarchically under-determined (“hierarchische Unterbestimmtheit”); (8) works side-by-side with the already “fi nished” and the newly begun, which implies long text building processes and parallel operations (“lange ‘Bauzeit’ und Nebeneinander von Fertiggestelltem und Neubegonnenem”). 4 In the following, I will try to show in more detail how the genesis of the PI is characterized by these eight features. First, the writings that constitute the PI’s genesis are characterized by a strong discrepancy between the sequence of remarks in their textual order and the sequence of remarks in their physical order. Texts are put together from chronologically and argumentatively dispersed units. One example is Wittgenstein’s rearrangement of remarks from an earlier dictation (TS 208) into a new text in 1930 (TS 209, published by Rush Rhees as Philosophical Remarks ). In this new text, he abandoned both the original argumentative order and the chronological order and did not necessarily obey the criteria of consistency and coherence, not even on linguistic levels such as demonstrative reference. The work that emerges is seen by many as an unordered agglomerate of remarks, although I have argued that this view can be challenged. 5 The second example is the revision and rearrangement of the so-called Big Typescript (TS 213) in 1933-34, which is paradigmatic in its triple use of (1) the text in the typescript, (2) the handwritten revisions of it in the typescript, and (3) text in other manuscripts. In his edition of the Philosophical Grammar (1969), Rush Rhees has tried to take this complicated network of revisions into account and to follow it painstakingly and faithfully; by looking at the manuscript sources for this edition 6 one realizes how much “hopping all over the place” was going on in the originals. Thirdly, MS 142, the “Urfassung” of the PI, was produced in 1936-37 from remarks stemming from different places in manuscripts and typescripts and various loci of discourse. MS 157b, 13v, contains a list of references to pages in TS 213 from which parts of the text were to be taken to write the “philosophy chapter” of this fi rst PI version; other sources include MS 140 (last page), MS 152, MS 156a, MS 156b and MS 157a, all yielding materials, lists and drafts for the text of MS 142. The fi nal example is TS 228: in the later stages of the PI genesis, Wittgenstein selected about 400 remarks from this typescript to include in TS 227, the typescript used as the printer’s copy for the PI.