HOW DID HERTZ INFLUENCE WITTGENSTEIN' S PHILOSOPHICAL DEVELOPMENT?

Allan JANIK Brenner Archivellnnsbruck University

I don't believe that I have ever invented a way of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized upon it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification ... Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have in• fluenced me. Wittgenstein, Cu/ture and Va/ue. 1ge

It was an awful thought to go and sit there among logical positivists ... Wittgenstein to Rush Rhees, 13.VII.38

From the very beginning the seemingly unscientific, virtually anti• scientific, "everyday", character of Wittgenstein's mature concep• tion of philosophy struck many of his contemporaries as either absurdly trivial or perversely false. Thus Bertrand Russell could accuse Wittgenstein of becoming lazy no longer possessing the intellectual rigor that real philosophizing demands, and of making a doctrine out of his laziness I , whereas Ernest Gellner railed against "the authoritarian, capricious, messianic and elusive characteristics ofWittenstein's practice" and its odious influence upon a generation of philosophers transformed into sophists.2 The ideas that, description should replace explanation, it is not

1. Bertrand RusselI, My Philosophical Development (London: Allen & Un• win, 1959), 261f. 2. Emest Gellner, Words and Things (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959),264-5. 20 possible to advance theses in philosophy, that c1arity is a matter of understanding language, rather than rigorous logical analysis, and, that philosophy leaves everything as it is, implied for many philo• sophers and others as well that the later Wittgenstein had rejected the critical values of the Enlightenment associated with his early logical positivism for an irrationalist obscurantism. On Gellner's view the situation was even worse; for Gellner directed his efforts at demonstrating that these perfidious tendencies were already present in the mystical silence with which the Tractatus conc1udes. Despite major alterations in our picture of Wittgenstein in the intervening years a shocking number of philosophers (and others) have retained that image to this day. Moreover, Wittgenstein's own statements about science seemed to confirm the views of Russell and Gellner. In discussing the nature of philosophy in the Philosophical Investigations he remarks, "our considerations could not be scientific ones"3 whereas in Culture and Value he would write: "I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic ques• tions do that. At bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort" (7ge). On Certainty provided yet more evidence for the thesis that Wittgenstein had become unhinged

3. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophicallnvestigations, trans., (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958), I, 109. Hereafter referred to parenthetically in the text as PI with paragraph number: other works by Wittgenstein will also be referred to in the text parenthetically with page; date, or seetion number as is appropriate as folIows: BBB with page number = The Blue and Brown Books, ed. Rush Rhees (New York: Harper's, 1956); C&Vwith page number = Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); GT with date = Geheime Tagebücher, ed. W. Baum (Vienna: Turia & Kant, 1992); N with page number = Notebooks 1914-16, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Black• weil, 1961); OCwith paragraph number= On Certainty, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe & Denis Paul (NewYork: Harper's; 1969); TL-P with proposition number = Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans, D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (Lon• don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961); W-F with letter number = Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker, ed. G.H. von Wright ("Brenner Studien" Vol. 1; Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1969); WV with page number = Wörterbuch für Volksschulen (Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1977); WWK with page number = Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis shorthand notes by F. Waismann, ed. B.P. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell. 1967).