ABSTRACT
Wittgenstein states in Philosophical Investigations §133 that the ‘proper [eigentliche] discovery’ in philosophy is the one that ‘gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question’. This is an intriguing remark, but characteristically opaque and puzzling, especially given his declaration on the preceding page of the Investigations (§126) that one might call philosophy ‘what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions’. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein gives us no obvious clues as to the nature of the ‘tormenting questions’ which allegedly bedevil the discipline (perhaps even to the extent that the discipline itself comes across as a suspect and dubious enterprise). Given the lack of elaboration in §133 one can only assume that the sort of ‘discovery’ proper to philosophy and which would bring relief to a philosophical perplexity is markedly different from the ‘new discoveries’ that Wittgenstein seems to shun in §126 as inessential to the philosophical enterprise. Thus the different modifiers (neuen and eigentliche) could only have been a deliberate attempt to distinguish between the sort of discoveries that are not philosophy’s concern, and those that he felt are appropriate to philosophy-though Wittgenstein might have been better off not using the word ‘discovery’ for the latter. The expression ‘new discovery’ would seem to be a redundancy, and to the extent that one can discover something that is not new, it would perhaps be better to use an expression such as ‘rediscovery’, or ‘recollection’ (depending on the nature of what is recovered). Immediately following §126 this would seem to be Wittgenstein’s point, when he characterizes philosophy as a matter of ‘assembling reminders’ (§127)—a recalling of something familiar rather than a discovering of something new.
