‘My sentences are all to be read slowly’

What Norman Malcolm says of the Investigations can, I believe, be said just as fairly said of Remarks on Colour: ‘An attempt to summarize [Wittgenstein's thoughts] would be neither successful nor useful. […] What is needed is that they be unfolded and the connections between them traced out’ (‘Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations’, p. 96). There is, I have been attempting to show, much to be learnt from a remark-by-remark examination of the text. Very little is incidental to the question of the logic of colour concepts that occupies Wittgenstein in the body of the text, and a great deal is lost when the book is read through quickly and its remarks treated selectively and out of order. Though hard to prove, it is harder still to deny that a detailed study of the kind attempted here highlights aspects of the text otherwise hidden and brings to the fore themes likely to be ignored or discounted on hastier readings. (Compare Culture and Value (p. 65): ‘Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all to be read slowly.’) It only remains to take stock and consider what the present discussion teaches about Wittgenstein's thinking and philosophical approach in addition to the lessons listed in the final section of Chapter 5. The second half of Part III and Part I reinforce the lessons that Part II and the first half of Part III teach. But there is much else that deserves emphasizing and further discussion.

One notable point, flagged more than once in the last four chapters, is that a slow reading of Remarks on Colour beginning with Part II and leaving Part I until last brings out how critically motiviated Wittgenstein was by the problem of explaining the impossibility of transparent white. When Part I is read first, it is by no means apparent that he set down the remarks in the book on coming to see –in all likelihood after reading Runge's letter to Goethe –that he needed to show that ‘transparent white’ is as logically monstrous as ‘reddish green’.