The new “Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings” website

Introducing a new online resource, built by software developer and long-time LWP colleague Frederic Kettelhoit, which lays the later part of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass at your fingertips: the “Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings” website.

Publishing Wittgenstein’s Nachlass

On Certainty, Zettel, Culture and Value, Movements of Thought, The Big Typescript: if Ludwig Wittgenstein could read this list, it would not mean much to him.

Most of the books that carry Wittgenstein’s name and a title on the cover are not the result of Wittgenstein’s own intention of writing and publishing something under that title.

They are the result of an editor, or board of editors, identifying a manuscript (or several sections from several manuscripts) among the papers he left behind after his death as having a relative unity of philosophical significance, and deciding that it made sense to publish it (or them) as a book.

Although some of the particular choices made by the editors sparked controversy, the fact that many of his manuscripts were edited for publication was in no way in contrast with Wittgenstein’s own dispositions.

During his lifetime, Wittgenstein published a couple of short pieces of writing in academic journals; his early philosophical masterpiece, the Tractatus; and a dictionary designed for elementary-school pupils.

Even if so little of what he worked on became known while he was alive, Wittgenstein wrote tirelessly. At the time he died, in 1951, there existed thousands of pages of his manuscript and typescript remarks. This corpus of unpublished material is what we call Wittgenstein’s Nachlass (where Nachlass is the generic German word to designate an estate—so that other notable literary Nachlässe include Leibniz’s and Nietzsche’s).

In his last will, Wittgenstein had appointed three literary executors among his students and friends and gave them a mandate to publish “what they thought fit” from the Nachlass. They (Rush Rhees, G.E.M. Anscombe, G.H. von Wright) spent the next decades working to accomplish this enormously challenging task.

Some of the manuscripts that Wittgenstein had left behind were first drafts; others, and especially the typescripts, were curated selections of remarks which Wittgenstein probably had, at some point, thought about publishing.

Depending on the nature of the material, but also on their personal editorial approach, the work done by the literary executors varied in quantity and quality. In some cases, it consisted in little more than the normalisation of the formatting and spelling of what was already a nearly finished book; in many others, it involved selecting, ordering and collating sections or even individual remarks from different manuscripts and typescripts.

The work done by Rhees, Anscombe and von Wright was invaluable in making Wittgenstein’s philosophy available to the public. But, given the complexity of the relationship between the edited, titled books and their source materials, it has always been desirable for the Nachlass itself to be accessible in its unedited form.

Already in 1967–1968 a facsimile edition of most of the Nachlass, based on the technology of microfilm and Xerox prints from microfilm, was prepared and published at Cornell University under the direction of von Wright and Norman Malcolm.

An early attempt at producing a computer-based transcription of the Nachlass, led by a group of researchers at the University of Tübingen in the 1970s and early ‘80s, was unsuccessful. Expanded conservation microfilms were made in Cambridge by the Trinity College Library and in Vienna by the Austrian National Library, but these were not published. A machine-readable transcription of the Nachlass was created by the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen in the 1990s and published as the CD-based Bergen Electronic Edition in 2000. Nowadays, the Bergen transcriptions are available on the WAB’s websites.

In 2022, the copyrights on Wittgenstein’s writings expired in many countries around the world. This made it possible for the LWP’s friend and colleague Frederic Kettelhoit, who studied the Wittgenstein papers extensively and worked on both source transcriptions and metadata as part of his research stay at the WAB, to create a new online edition of the Nachlass, which we are happy to introduce in this post.

A new sonnet about love

This new website is designed to be complementary to the WAB’s resources rather than compete with them. The WAB’s transcriptions, especially through the Interactive Dynamic Presentation and the Semantic Faceted Browsing tools, provide the reader with highly detailed meta-information and use formatting to preserve a lot of the features of the original page. The new website, on the other hand, attempts to offer a smooth reading experience through heavily normalised transcriptions, where it is harder to become aware of the formatting oddities and complex layering of Wittgenstein’s originals but it is easier to focus on the philosophical content.

To quote the Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings homepage:

This website presents a fragment of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass and prioritizes readability over a strict reproduction of the manuscript layout. It is not a diplomatic edition: line breaks, underlining, and textual variants have been normalized.

The website’s scope is currently limited to Wittgenstein’s writings from 1937 to 1951—the period from the first draft of what later became the Philosophical Investigations all the way up to Wittgenstein’s death. There are, however, plans to drop the “(Late)” in the site’s name and include the writings from 1914–1936 as well.

The available transcriptions can be browsed as cohesive manuscripts and typescripts, numbered according to von Wright’s catalogue. The individual remarks those transcriptions consist of can also be viewed in the arrangement they were given by the editors when they were published in book form, thus making it possible to read, say, Cause and Effect and effortlessly trace the remarks back to their sources.

This becomes easier still thanks to diagrams that visualise the relationship between the Nachlass items and the published books.

Moreover, links to the facsimiles—scans—of the originals are available next to each remark, so that the reader can access a faithful photographic reproduction of the original text if they become curious what it looks like—which can be particularly interesting in the case of exotic mathematical notation or graphics, but may as well reveal deletions, alternatives and marginalia which the linear transcription does not include. It may also, alas, reveal mistakes in the transcription, but that’s another part of the reason the facsimiles are so important.

Another valuable feature is the search box, where readers can input a phrase or as little as a few letters and get the list of matches, in context, in response.

The interface is deliberately minimal and focused on putting Wittgenstein’s writings front and centre, without much in the way of editorial comments or explanation. This might change in the future, as the website will hopefully grow to incorporate more guidance on how to explore the Nachlass.

The above may be enough to persuade most of the usefulness of the new website and of the fact that its existence is justified even in light of the WAB’s excellent resources. If this is not the case—if someone is still wondering: “Why another Nachlass edition, since there is already one?”—to that one might answer with the old joke: it’s like telling a poet: “There is already a sonnet about love”.

The new “Wittgenstein’s (Late) Writings” website

Publishing Wittgenstein’s Nachlass

A new sonnet about love

Further reading