ABSTRACT

Wittgenstein’s discussion of the will in Philosophical Investigations has not been ignored by subsequent philosophers. But it has received very little in the way of systematic exegesis,1

even though it is refined almost to the point of unintelligibility. Instead, it has usually been quarried: individual remarks have been ripped from their context (the most common example of this is the question posed in §621) and discussed or developed in isolation. If my own reading of the secondary literature is anything to go by, hardly anyone seems to have felt the bafflement which I had always felt when confronted with the discussion’s opening sentence in §611: ‘“Willing too is merely an experience”, one would like to say.’ Why on earth should this be something that one would like to say? What is going on here? Are we just witnessing Wittgenstein’s struggle with some private obsession? Or, perhaps more interestingly, is the idea that willing is merely an experience something which had been put forward independently, so that it seemed to Wittgenstein worth writing about? Or, as the impersonal ‘one’ suggests, is there some reason which, regardless of other philosophical commitments, anyone might share for thinking in his apparently quite unappealing way? It was through asking myself such questions as these that I came to examine the much rougher and more discursive texts that lie behind the polished surface of the discussion in Philosophical Investigations, texts which are far more revealing and which cast a great deal of light on the purpose and outcome of that discussion. I do not claim to have made any startling discoveries or to have a dramatic new interpretation with which to confound other students of Wittgenstein. More modestly, I offer readings of superficially puzzling passages which render

them less puzzling and which show Wittgenstein’s discussion of the will to exemplify certain themes which are leitmotifs of the Philosophical Investigations.