Culture and Value

The German original, Vermischte Bemerkungen, was edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with Heikki Nyman and published in 1977, with Peter Winch translating the English edition in 1980. The editors chose passages from a large body of manuscripts that mixed philosophical and personal material, and they arranged them chronologically. The selection therefore reflects their judgment of what was suitable to publish. A revised bilingual edition, with additional material and corrections, appeared in 1998. Scholars drawing on the book should note which edition they use and, where possible, check the remarks against the manuscripts.

Several remarks treat the understanding of music as a matter of seeing how a theme or phrase belongs to its surroundings, closer to understanding a gesture or a face than to applying a theory. He refuses to explain aesthetic appreciation by pointing to causes or feelings alone. These comments connect to his lectures on aesthetics and to his later attention to the use of words in context. They are suggestive rather than systematic, and scholars debate how far they amount to a coherent philosophy of art or simply to occasional insights.

The remarks express a serious but unorthodox religious sensibility, in which religious belief is closer to a way of living or a commitment than to a hypothesis about the world. Wittgenstein resists attempts to justify faith by evidence. These passages are often read alongside his early lecture on ethics and later remarks on religious belief recorded by students. Interpreters such as D. Z. Phillips developed a Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion from them, while critics such as Kai Nielsen charged that the approach isolates religious language from rational assessment.

Some passages express a pessimistic view of twentieth-century European culture, in which he sees scientific and industrial progress as lacking a corresponding spiritual direction. He distances himself from the spirit of the age and from the type of academic philosophy that follows it. These comments are personal and sometimes severe, and scholars caution against treating them as a worked-out cultural theory. They are valuable mainly as evidence of the outlook from which he approached his philosophical work.

Because it contains remarks on his own style, vanity, and difficulties as a thinker, it is a common source for biographical and interpretive work. Brian McGuinness and Ray Monk, among others, have drawn on such material in their accounts of his life, while Stanley Cavell and others have treated the personal voice as integral to the philosophy. Other scholars warn that reading private notes as a key to the doctrines risks psychologizing the work. The book supports both uses but settles neither.

A frequent misreading treats it as a single treatise on culture and value, with a thesis to be extracted. It is a selection of unconnected remarks written over decades, some tentative and some later abandoned. Another misreading quotes individual passages as Wittgenstein's settled views on art, religion, or civilization. Because the remarks were chosen and arranged by editors, and because their original context is often unclear, careful readers treat them as evidence of the way he thought rather than as doctrine.