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(3) Here one might be pointing to a mirror-image. Under certain
circumstances, however, one might touch a body and ask the question.
In others it means the same as: "Does my body look like that?"
(4) Which sensation does one mean by 'this* one? That is: how is
one using the demonstrative pronoun here? Certainly otherwise than
in, say, the first example! Here confusion occurs because one imagines
that by directing one's attention to a sensation one is pointing to it.
412. The feeling of an unbridgeable gulf between consciousness
and brain-process: how does it come about that this does not come
into the considerations of our ordinary life? This idea of a difference in
kind is accompanied by slight giddiness,—which occurs when we are
performing a piece of logical sleight-of-hand. (The same giddiness
attacks us when we think of certain theorems in set theory.) When does
this feeling occur in the present case? It is when I, for example, turn
my attention in a particular way on to my own consciousness, and,
astonished, say to myself: THIS is supposed to be produced by a
process in the brain!—as it were clutching my forehead.—But what
can it mean to speak of "turning my attention on to my own conscious-
ness"? This is surely the queerest thing there could bel It was a
particular act of gazing that I called doing this. I stared fixedly in
front of me—but not at any particular point or object. My eyes were
wide open, the brows not contracted (as they mostly are when I am
interested in a particular object). No such interest preceded this gazing.
My glance was vacant; or again like that of someone admiring the
illumination of the sky and drinking in the light.
Now bear in mind that the proposition which I uttered as a paradox
(THIS is produced by a brain-process!) has nothing paradoxical
about it. I could have said it in the course of an experiment whose
purpose was to shew that an effect of light which I see is produced by
stimulation of a particular part of the brain.—But I did not utter the
sentence in the surroundings in which it would have had an everyday
and unparadoxical sense. And my attention was not such as would
have accorded with making an experiment. (If it had been, my look
would have been intent, not vacant.)
413. Here we have a case of introspection, not unlike that from
which William James got the idea that the 'self' consisted mainly of
'peculiar motions in the head and between the head and throat'.
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And James' introspection shewed, not the meaning of the word "self"
(so far as it means something like "person", "human being", "he him-
self", "I myself"), nor any analysis of such a thing, but the state of a
philosopher's attention when he says the word "self" to himself and
tries to analyse its meaning. (And a good deal could be learned from
this.)
414. You think that after all you must be weaving a piece of cloth:
because you are sitting at a loom—even if it is empty—and going
through the motions of weaving.
415. What we are supplying are really remarks on the natural
history of human beings; we are not contributing curiosities however,
but observations which no one has doubted, but which have escaped
remark only because they are always before our eyes.
416. "Human beings agree in saying that they see, hear, feel, and
so on (even though some are blind and some are deaf). So they are
their own witnesses that they have consciousness"—But how strange
this is! Whom do I really inform, if I say "I have consciousness"?
What is the purpose of saying this to myself, and how can another
person understand me?—Now, expressions like "I see", "I hear",
"I am conscious" really have their uses. I tell a doctor "Now I am
hearing with this ear again", or I tell someone who believes I am in a
faint "I am conscious again", and so on.
417. Do I observe myself, then, and perceive that I am seeing or
conscious? And why talk about observation at all? Why not simply
say "I perceive I am conscious"?—But what are the words "I perceive"
for here?—why not say "I am conscious"?—But don't the words "I
perceive" here shew that I am attending to my consciousness?—which
is ordinarily not the case.—If so, then the sentence "I perceive I am
conscious" does not say that I am conscious, but that my attention is
disposed in such-and-such a way.
But isn't it a particular experience that occasions my saying "I am
conscious again"?—What experience? In what situations do we say it?
418. Is my having consciousness a fact of experience?—
But doesn't one say that a man has consciousness, and that a tree
or a stone does not?—What would it be like if it were otherwise?—
Would human beings all be unconscious?—No; not in the ordinary
sense of the word. But I, for instance, should not have con-
sciousness——as I now in fact have it.
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419. In what circumstances shall I say that a tribe has a chief?
And the chief must surely have consciousness. Surely we can't have a
chief without consciousness!
420. But can't I imagine that the people around me are automata,
lack consciousness, even though they behave in the same way as
usual?—If I imagine it now—alone in my room—I see people with
fixed looks (as in a trance) going about their business—the idea is
perhaps a little uncanny. But just try to keep hold of this idea in the
midst of your ordinary intercourse with others, in the street, say!
Say to yourself, for example: "The children over there are mere
automata; all their liveliness is mere automatism." And you will either
find these words becoming quite meaningless; or you will produce
in yourself some kind of uncanny feeling, or something of the sort.
Seeing a living human being as an automaton is analogous to seeing
one figure as a limiting case or variant of another; the cross-pieces of a
window as a swastika, for example.
421. It seems paradoxical to us that we should make such a medley,
mixing physical states and states of consciousness up together in a
single report: "He suffered great torments and tossed about restlessly".
It is quite usual; so why do we find it paradoxical? Because we want
to say that the sentence deals with both tangibles and intangibles at
once.—But does it worry you if I say: "These three struts give the
building stability"? Are three and stability tangible?——Look at the
sentence as an instrument, and at its sense as its employment.
422. What am I believing in when I believe that men have souls?
What am I believing in, when I believe that this substance contains
two carbon rings? In both cases there is a picture in the foreground,
but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the
picture is not easy to survey.
423. Certainly all these things happen in you.—And now all I ask
is to understand the expression we use.—The picture is there. And I
am not disputing its validity in any particular case.—Only I also want
to understand the application of the picture.
424. The picture is there; and I do not dispute its correctness. But
•what is its application? Think of the picture of blindness as a darkness
in the soul or in the head of the blind man.
425. In numberless cases we exert ourselves to find a picture and
once it is found the application as it were comes about of itself. In
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this case we already have a picture which forces itself on us at every
turn,—but does not help us out of the difficulty, which only begins
here.
If I ask, for example: "Plow am I to imagine this mechanism going
into this box?"—perhaps a drawing reduced in scale may serve to
answer me. Then I can be told: "You see, it goes in like this"; or
perhaps even: "Why are you surprised? See how it goes here; it is the
same there". Of course the latter does not explain anything more: it
simply invites me to apply the picture I am given.
426. A picture is conjured up which seems to fix the sense un-
ambiguously. The actual use, compared with that suggested by the
picture, seems like something muddied. Here again we get the same
thing as in set theory: the form of expression we use seems to have been
designed for a god, who knows what we cannot know; he sees the whole
of each of those infinite series and he sees into human consciousness.
For us, of course, these forms of expression are like pontificals which
we may put on, but cannot do much with, since we lack the effective
power that would give these vestments meaning and purpose.
In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by side-
roads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we
cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.
427. "While I was speaking to him I did not know what was going
on in his head." In saying this, one is not thinking of brain-processes,
but of thought-processes. The picture should be taken seriously.
We should really like to see into his head. And yet we only mean what
elsewhere we should mean by saying: we should like to know what he
is thinking. I want to say: we have this vivid picture—and that use,
apparently contradicting the picture, which expresses the psychical.
428. "This queer thing, thought"—but it does not strike us as
queer when we are thinking. Thought does not strike us as mysterious
while we are thinking, but only when we say, as it were retrospectively:
"How was that possible?" How was it possible for thought to deal
with the very object itself? We feel as if by means of it we had caught
reality in our net.
429. The agreement, the harmony, of thought and reality consists
in this: if I say falsely that something is red, then, for all that, it isn't red.
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And when I want to explain the word "red" to someone, in the sen-
tence "That is not red", I do it by pointing to something red.
430. "Put a ruler against this body; it does not say that the body is
of such-and-such a length. Rather is it in itself—I should like to say—
dead, and achieves nothing of what thought achieves."—It is as if
we had imagined that the essential thing about a living man was the
outward form. Then we made a lump of wood in that form, and were
abashed to see the stupid block, which hadn't even any similarity to a
living being.
431. "There is a gulf between an order and its execution. It
has to be filled by the act of understanding."
"Only in the act of understanding is it meant that we are to do
THIS. The order—— why, that is nothing but sounds, ink-marks.—"
432. Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?—In use
it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?—Or is the use its life?
433. When we give an order, it can look as if the ultimate thing
sought by the order had to remain unexpressed, as there is always a
gulf between an order and its execution. Say I want someone to make
a particular movement, say to raise his arm. To make it quite clear, I
do the movement. This picture seems unambiguous till we ask: how
does he know that he is to make that movement"?— How does he know at all
what use he is to make of the signs I give him, whatever they are?—
Perhaps I shall now try to supplement the order by means of further
signs, by pointing from myself to him, making encouraging gestures,
etc. . Here it looks as if the order were beginning to stammer.
As if the signs were precariously trying to produce understanding in
us.—But if we now understand them, by what token do we under-
stand?
434. The gesture—we should like to say—tries to portray, but
cannot do it.
435. If it is asked: "How do sentences manage to represent?"—the
answer might be: "Don't you know? You certainly see it, when you
use them." For nothing is concealed.
How do sentences do it?-—Don't you know? For nothing is hidden.
But given this answer: "But you know how sentences do it, for
nothing is concealed" one would like to retort "Yes, but it all goes by
so quick, and I should like to see it as it were laid open to view."
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436. Here it is easy to get into that dead-end in philosophy, where
one believes that the difficulty of the task consists in our having to
describe phenomena that are hard to get hold of, the present experience
that slips quickly by, or something of the kind. Where we find ordinary
language too crude, and it looks as if we were having to do, not with
the phenomena of every-day, but with ones that "easily elude us, and,
in their coming to be and passing away, produce those others as an
average effect". (Augustine: Manifestissima et usitatissima sunt, et
eadem rusus nimis latent, et nova est inventio eorum.)
437. A wish seems already to know what will or would satisfy it;
a proposition, a thought, what makes it true—even when that thing
is not there at all! Whence this determining of what is not yet there?
This despotic demand? ("The hardness of the logical must.")
438. "A plan as such is something unsatisfied." (Like a wish,
an expectation, a suspicion, and so on.)
By this I mean: expectation is unsatisfied, because it is the expectation
of something; belief, opinion, is unsatisfied, because it is the opinion
that something is the case, something real, something outside the
process of believing.
439. In what sense can one call wishes, expectations, beliefs, etc.
"unsatisfied"? What is our prototype of nonsatisfaction? Is it a
hollow space? And would one call that unsatisfied? Wouldn't this
be a metaphor too?—Isn't what we call nonsatisfaction a feeling—say
hunger?
In a particular system of expressions we can describe an object by
means of the words "satisfied" and "unsatisfied". For example, if
we lay it down that we call a hollow cylinder an "unsatisfied cylinder"
and the solid cylinder that fills it "its satisfaction".
440. Saying "I should like an apple" does not mean: I believe an
apple will quell my feeling of nonsatisfaction. This proposition is
not an expression of a wish but of nonsatisfaction.
441. By nature and by a particular training, a particular education,
we are disposed to give spontaneous expression to wishes in certain
circumstances. (A wish is, of course, not such a 'circumstance'.) In
this game the question whether I know what I wish before my wish is
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fulfilled cannot arise at all And the fact that some event stops my wish-
ing does not mean that it fulfills it. Perhaps I should not have been
satisfied if my wish had been satisfied.
On the other hand the word "wish" is also used in this way: "I
don't know myself what I wish for." ("For wishes themselves are a
veil between us and the thing wished for.")
Suppose it were asked "Do I know what I long for before 1 get it?"
If I have learned to talk, then I do know,
442. I see someone pointing a gun and say "I expect a report".
The shot is fired.—Well, that was what you expected; so did that
report somehow already exist in your expectation? Or is it just that
there is some other kind of agreement between your expectation and
what occurred; that that noise was not contained in your expectation,
and merely accidentally supervened when the expectation was being
fulfilled?—But no, if the noise had not occurred, my expectation would
not have been fulfilled; the noise fulfilled it; it was not an accompani-
ment of the fulfilment like a second guest accompanying the one I
expected.—Was the thing about the event that was not in the expecta-
tion too an accident, an extra provided by fate?—But then what was
not an extra? Did something of the shot already occur in my expecta-
tion?—Then what mas extra? for wasn't I expecting the whole shot?
"The report was not so loud as I had expected."—"Then was there
a louder bang in your expectation?"
443. "The red which you imagine is surely not the same (not the
same thing) as the red which you see in front of you; so how can you
say that it is what you imagined?"—But haven't we an analogous case
with the propositions "Here is a red patch" and "Here there isn't a
red patch"? The word "red" occurs in both; so this word cannot
indicate the presence of something red.
444. One may have the feeling that in the sentence "I expect he is
coming" one is using the words "he is coming" in a different sense
from the one they have in the assertion "He is coming". But if it were
so how could I say that my expectation had been fulfilled? If I wanted
to explain the words "he" and "is coming", say by means of ostensive
definitions, the same definitions of these words would go for both
sentences.
But it might now be asked: what's it: like for him to come?—-The
door opens, someone walks in, and so on.—What's it like for me to
expect him to come?—I walk up and down the room, look at the
clock now and then, and so on.—But the one set of events has not
the smallest similarity to the other! So how can one use the same
words in describing them?—But perhaps I say as I walk up and down:
"I expect he'll come in"—Now there is a similarity somewhere. But
of what kind?!
445. It is in language that an expectation and its fulfilment make
contact.
446. It would be odd to say: "A process looks different when it
happens from when it doesn't happen." Or "A red patch looks
different when it is there from when it isn't there—but language
abstracts from this difference, for it speaks of a red patch whether it
is there or not."
447. The feeling is as if the negation of a proposition had to make
it true in a certain sense, in order to negate it.
(The assertion of the negative proposition contains the proposition
which is negated, but not the assertion of it.)
448. "If I say I did not dream last night, still I must know where
to look for a dream; that is, the proposition 'I dreamt', applied to
this actual situation, may be false, but mustn't be senseless."—Does
that mean, then, that you did after all feel something, as it were the
hint of a dream, which made you aw
r
are of the place which a dream
would have occupied?
Again: if I say "I have no pain in my arm", does that mean that I
have a shadow of the sensation of pain, which as it were indicates the
place where the pain might be?
In what sense does my present painless state contain the possibility
of pain?
If anyone says: "For the word 'pain' to have a meaning it is necessary
that pain should be recognized as such when it occurs"—-one can reply:
"It is not more necessary than that the absence of pain should be
recognized."
449. "But mustn't I know what it would be like if I were in pain?"
—We fail to get away from the idea that using a sentence involves
imagining something for every word.
We do not realize that we calculate, operate, with words, and in the
course of time translate them sometimes into one picture, sometimes
into another.—It is as if one were to believe that a written order for a
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cow which someone is to hand over to me always had to be accompanied
by an image of a cow, if the order was not to lose its meaning.
450. Knowing what someone looks like: being able to call up an
image—but also: being able to mimic his expression. Need one imagine
it in order to mimic it? And isn't mimicking it just as good as imagin-
ing it?
451. Suppose I give someone the order "Imagine a red circle here"
—and now I say: understanding the order means knowing what it is
like for it to have been carried out—or even: being able to imagine
what it is like ..... ?
452. I want to say: "If someone could see the mental process of
expectation, he would necessarily be seeing what was being expected."
—But that is the case: if you see the expression of an expectation, you
see what is being expected. And in what other way, in what other sense
would it be possible to see it?
453. Anyone who perceived my expectation would necessarily
have a direct perception of what was being expected. That is to say, he
would not have to infer it from the process he perceived!—But to say
that someone perceives an expectation makes no sense. Unless indeed
it means, for example, that he perceives the expression of an expecta-
tion. To say of an expectant person that he perceives his expectation
instead of saying that he expects, would be an idiotic distortion of the
expression.
454. "Everything is already there in ... ." How does it come
carry in it something besides itself? — "No, not the dead line on paper;
only the psychical thing, the meaning, can do that." — That is both
true and false. The arrow points only in the application that a living
being makes of it.
This pointing is not a hocus-pocus which can be performed only by
the soul.
455. We want to say: "When we mean something, it's like going
up to someone, it's not having a dead picture (of any kind)." We go
up to the thing we mean.
456. "When one means something, it is oneself meaning"; so one is
oneself in motion. One is rushing ahead and so cannot also observe
oneself rushing ahead. Indeed not.
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457. Yes: meaning something is like going up to someone.
458. "An order orders its own execution." So it knows its execu-
tion, then, even before it is there?—But that was a grammatical
proposition and it means: If an order runs "Do such-and-such" then
executing the order is called "doing such-and-such."
459. We say "The order orders this— " and do it; but also "The
order orders this: I am to ... ." We translate it at one time into a
proposition, at another into a demonstration, and at another into
action.
460. Could the justification of an action as fulfilment of an order
run like this: "You said 'Bring me a yellow flower', upon which this
one gave me a feeling of satisfaction; that is why I have brought it"?
Wouldn't one have to reply: "But I didn't set you to bring me the
flower which should give you that sort of feeling after what I said!"?
461. In what sense does an order anticipate its execution? By
ordering just that which later on is carried out?—But one would have
to say "which later on is carried out, or again is not carried out."
And that is to say nothing.
"But even if my wish does not determine what is going to be the
case, still it does so to speak determine the theme of a fact, whether
the fact fulfils the wish or not." We are—as it were—surprised, not
at anyone's knowing the future, but at his being able to prophesy at
all (right or wrong).
As if the mere prophecy, no matter whether true or false, fore-
shadowed the future; whereas it knows nothing of the future and
cannot know less than nothing.
462. I can look for him when he is not there, but not hang him
when he is not there.
One might want to say: "But he must be somewhere there if I am
looking for him."—Then he must be somewhere there too if I don't
find him and even if he doesn't exist at all.
463. "You were looking for him? You can't even have known if
he was there!"—But this problem really does arise when one looks
for something in mathematics. One can ask, for example, how was it
possible so much as to look for the trisection of the angle?
464. My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised
nonsense to something that is patent nonsense.
points'? Doesn't it seem to
about that this arrow
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