Brief Encounters by Anthony Kenny

Author:Anthony Kenny [Kenny Antony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780281079216
Publisher: SPCK

Georg Henrik von Wright of the Academy of Finland

In his will, of 29 January 1951, Wittgenstein bequeathed to Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright ‘all the copyright in all my unpublished writings; and also the manuscripts and typescripts thereof to dispose of as they think best’. These heirs were to publish ‘as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit’, and were to share the royalties and other profits equally between themselves.

Wittgenstein’s heirs reflected three different aspects of his own character. Von Wright, a logician and philosopher of science, corresponded to the austere and technical philosophy of Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus; Anscombe was the most suitable proponent of his late philosophy of mind; and Rhees had an affinity for the mystical streak in his early and late thought.

The legacy placed a heavy burden on the heirs. Because of Wittgenstein’s inability to bring his work into a form he thought suitable for publication, a vast quantity of material of great philosophical value remained unpublished at his death. Each of the heirs was assigned an initial task: Anscombe was to edit and publish the Philosophical Investigations, von Wright was to published selections from Wittgenstein’s work on the foundations of mathematics, and Rhees was to edit the Big Typescript, the nearest to a conventional book that Wittgenstein had produced in his lifetime.

The work of the first two heirs was well received, but when, in 1970, Rhees published a highly edited version of the Big Typescript under the title Philosophische Grammatik, it was widely criticized. Of the heirs, Rhees was the one I knew least, but I got to know him briefly when I was commissioned to prepare an English translation of the Grammatik, which appeared in 1974. While working on the text, I visited Rhees in his house in Swansea from time to time to discuss translation problems. There he lived alone, guarded by a massive German shepherd dog that would place his paws on the shoulders of incoming visitors. I became aware that the text Rhees had published, on the basis of a certain stage of Wittgenstein’s own revisions, was only one of many possible orderings that could claim Wittgenstein’s authority. The chief fault of Rhees’ published text was that it gave no indication at all of the amount of editorial activity that lay behind it. Cuts were made silently, and transpositions merely hinted at; important material in the Typescript was simply omitted.

In the course of translating Rhees’ text I drew up a full account of the editorial decisions he had made, along with their justification – when there was one – in Wittgenstein’s papers. I wished to put this as an introduction to the English version, but Rhees forbade it on the ground that it would ‘come between Wittgenstein and the reader’. Eventually I presented my account as a separate piece entitled, ‘From the Big Typescript to the Philosophical Grammar.’ I published this in a Festschrift for von Wright in 1976. By this time, he had become the one of the trustees whom I knew and loved best.

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