BEGINNING AT THE BEGINNING

This chapter is devoted to questions raised by the opening words of the Philosophical Investigations, words that are usually ignored or passed over rapidly by most interpreters. The motto is not only of interest in its own right; it also provides a particularly direct introduction to some of the central themes of the Philosophical Investigations as a whole. It also allows us to contrast the strengths and weaknesses of the two main approaches to the text: a genetic approach, on which passages are elucidated by appeal to the author's intentions, as shown in his previous drafts, and an immanent approach, which focuses on a rational reconstruction of the arguments that the reader finds in the text of the published book. While both of these approaches are valuable, single-mindedly following either of them will not enable us to do justice to the dialogical and context-oriented character of the text that follows the motto. The motto is puzzling on first reading; I propose that Wittgenstein expected it to be puzzling, and wanted his readers to reflect on what it might mean, reflection that requires us to think about the different contexts it belongs to, and the sense it makes in each of those contexts. In so doing, we can see an anticipation of the central role that context and circumstance play in our understanding of language, a leading theme of the book as a whole.