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On the Making of Von Wright and Wittgenstein’S Culture and Value SATS 2017; 18(2): 79–113 Christian Erbacher* “Among the omitted stuff, there are many good remarks of a general nature”–On the Making of von Wright and Wittgenstein’s Culture and Value https://doi.org/10.1515/sats-2017-0004 Abstract: This paper uses archival material to contextualize Georg Henrik von Wright’s making of Vermischte Bemerkungen (Culture and Value), an edition that assembles Wittgenstein’s remarks on cultural topics. Von Wright was parti- cularly interested in these remarks but initially regarded them as too detached from philosophy to be published. In 1967-68, however, he began seeing socio- political questions as belonging to philosophy. He then resumed editing Wittgenstein’s ‘general remarks’ and published them in 1977. Von Wright did not read Culture and Value as a philosophical work, but as a means for helping readers understand Wittgenstein in relation to his times. It is argued that the intention to provide documents enabling readers to recognize the historical Wittgenstein motivated much of von Wright’s work as one of Wittgenstein’s literary executors. Moreover, through making available his own archives, he inspired the same documentary approach to fathom the history of editing Wittgenstein in its historical context. Keywords: History of Analytical Philosophy, Philosophical Editing, Editorial Studies, Cultural Criticism, Sociology of Philosophy 1 Constructively contextualizing the making of Culture and Value Georg Henrik von Wright’s work as one of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s literary execu- tors is informed by his concern to preserve the historical documents of Wittgenstein’s writings and to make them available for research. This concern is most strikingly reflected in von Wright’s and Norman Malcolm’s initiative to This article is a substantially revised and elaborated version of Erbacher 2015a. *Corresponding author: Christian Erbacher, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany, E-mail: [email protected] Open Access. © 2017 Erbacher, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. 80 Christian Erbacher produce a complete microfilm copy of Wittgenstein’s papers. Together with; Von Wright’s (1969) corresponding catalogue, the microfilm provided the main source for most of the subsequent historical and philological research into Wittgenstein’s writings, leading to large-scale editorial projects such as the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Tübingen in the early 1980s, and the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, which made Wittgenstein’s Nachlass available in its entirety through the Bergen Electronic Edition (Wittgenstein 2000a). Von Wright’s own editorial work also increasingly bore traces of critical philology. He became convinced that it would be best to publish Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts with as little editorial inter- vention as possible and eventually published some of them “in toto” (cf. Wittgenstein 1992, preface). With help from assistants, he traced remarks in the Philosophical Investigations to their manuscript sources and thus recon- structed the book’s pre-versions (cf. Maury 1981; Maury 1994; Erbacher 2015b, 189–191). In addition to these Wittgenstein editions in a strict sense, von Wright published contextual sources written by Wittgenstein and his friends, such as letters and memoirs (e.g. Wittgenstein 1969a, 1973, 1974, 1983, 1994a; Pinsent 1990) and a series of scholarly essays that shed light on the historical context of Wittgenstein’s work (Von Wright 1955, 1971, 1979, 1992a). These essays have become classics in the study of how Wittgenstein gradually distilled more finished versions of his work from his notes. Together, they can be read as the factual backbone of Wittgenstein’s work-biography (Von Wright 1982). The sum of all these pioneering achievements became the point of departure for the critical-genetic edition of the Philosophical Investigations (Wittgenstein 2001), a book that can be seen as a high point of the scholarly text-genetic approach that von Wright developed as an editor of Wittgenstein’s writings. Due to this scholarly and source-oriented approach to editing Wittgenstein’s papers, von Wright’s edition Culture and Value (Wittgenstein 1977; first English edition Wittgenstein 1980; from now on abbreviated CV) seems at first sight not to fit. CV is a collection of aphoristic remarks which Wittgenstein wrote on general topics such as religion, music, literature, history and art, but in contrast to the other volumes that von Wright edited, it was von Wright himself who assembled the passages from various places in the Nachlass, according to his own personal taste and judgment. This was an untypical editorial procedure for him, and it may raise suspicions if measured against today’s philological ‘gold standard’ of scholarly critical editing. It may be accused of being “unfaithful” (Venturinha 2010: 1) to the sources, possibly even misleading concerning Wittgenstein’s philosophy, as has happened in some cases of editions sourced from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (cf. Stern 1996). However, what may appear as an editorial deficit from the perspective of critical editorial philology, can provide a Among the omitted stuff, there are many good remarks 81 fruitful starting point for an investigation from another perspective: by inquiring into von Wright’s reasons and motives for creating and publishing his selection, we may gain insight into von Wright as an editor and his understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy. For this, it is necessary to understand his editing process not exclusively as a series of context-less philological operations but as philosophically relevant acts that took place in specific working contexts, through cooperation with friends and colleagues and with an elaborated under- standing of the edited materials. This may be called constructively contextualiz- ing, as it takes into account the relevant historical context for constructing a helpful understanding of the editorial intentions that critical text philology identifies as editorial biases (cf. Erbacher 2016a, 2017). This step from a ‘critical’ to a ‘post-critical’ investigation of editions from Wittgenstein’s writings is what this paper tries to achieve for the case of von Wright and Wittgenstein’s CV. Taking seriously the editorial intentions for CV, it is important to note right away that the book was never intended as a presentation of a philosophical work by Wittgenstein. Despite it often being treated as such, von Wright did not regard his collection of general remarks as directly belonging to Wittgenstein’s philosophical writings, as he made unmistakable clear in his preface to CV. Whether Wittgenstein himself ever contemplated composing a book of remarks on broader cultural topics is an issue of debate (cf. Rothhaupt and Vossenkuhl 2013; Rothhaupt 2013, 2017). While working on and revising his texts, Wittgenstein marked sections that may be read as remarks on culture, and he transferred such remarks into fair copies (e.g. Ms 1681; cf. Rothhaupt 2017). But scholars have questioned whether the philological evidence suffices to conclude that Wittgenstein worked on a selection of cultural remarks as part of his philosophical work or even that he planned a book containing such a selection (Majetschak 2013; Stern 2013). In any case, with regard to Wittgenstein’s literary executors, there is no indication that they thought the selection in CV would resemble anything Wittgenstein would have wanted to publish as his contribu- tion to philosophy. Hence, the literary executors did not regard CV as another work by Wittgenstein, but as a collection of remarks illuminating his intellectual orientation. The editor, Georg Henrik von Wright, was convinced that CV tells “us more than any other written source about Wittgenstein’s intellectual char- acter and view of life, and also how he regarded his relationships with his times” (Von Wright 1982: 203). According to von Wright, CV thus shows Wittgenstein as an intellectual phenomenon (“geistige Erscheinung”), which is “to view his personality and work in relation to phenomena outside the strictly professional 1 Identification of Nachlass items follows the numbering system that was introduced by Von Wright (1969). 82 Christian Erbacher sphere of philosophy – for example, trends in contemporary literature or art, or political and social ideas” (Von Wright 1982: 2). Making readers aware of this intellectual orientation was, for von Wright, related to correcting a dominant picture of Wittgenstein in the reception of his works (mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world), where the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations had become pillars in the canon of professional analytical philosophy: The vogue of ‘Wittgensteinianism’ of the first two postwar decades was rather narrowly ‘professional’. It disregarded the broader cultural perspectives. An explanation for this is perhaps the fact that whereas Wittgenstein’s influence then was mainly in the Anglo-Saxon world, his background was central European. The portrait of the man implicit in the writings of his British and American pupils and followers was – as an Italian writer put it – that of a cultural illiterate. Partly as a consequence of the gradual reception of Wittgenstein’s philosophy by the German-speaking and Latin worlds this portrait is now being corrected. The publication of the Vermischte Bemerkungen (1977) will, I hope, contribute to a better understanding both of Wittgenstein’s roots in
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