‘We connect what is experienced with what is experienced’

The next 66 remarks in Part III to be examined deserve the same detailed treatment as III.1–229, the remaining 55 not as much. While the first group of remarks, III.230–295, mostly treat topics already discussed –in particular transparency, luminosity, the kinship between brown and yellow, colour blindness, colour harmony and perfect pitch –Wittgenstein apparently believed he needed to say more about them or he could express better what he had previously written. More than a few of the remarks in III.230–295 supersede those in III.1–229 and turn up in their place in Part I. In III.296–350, by contrast, Wittgenstein focuses on the logic of psychological concepts rather than the logic of colour concepts and there is little direct relationship between them and III.1–295. The bulk of these last remarks is devoted to how our mental goings-on are connected to our behaviour and to claims about ‘the inner and the outer’ that Wittgenstein finds suspect, for instance the claim that seeing is a two-step process in which light rays are first received, then interpreted. It is even likely that III.296–350 would have been omitted from Remarks on Colour were it not for the fact that three remarks, III.328, III.331 and III.338, on the psychological concept of seeing are recycled in Part I. (Not without reason III.296–350 are also reproduced almost in their entirety, unnumbered, in volume 2 of Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology.)

The first new remark, III.230, concerns Goethe's concept of a ‘primary phenomenon [Urphänomen]’, the idea, roughly speaking, that embedded within each ordinary thing and underlying the structure, behaviour and growth of everyday phenomena is an archetype, a quintessential instance or form made manifest. While Wittgenstein does not mention Goethe by name, he had to be thinking of him and, none too surprisingly, he finds his promotion and exploitation of the concept problematic. He thinks philosophers –Hegel would be one –are wrong to appeal to the idea of an Urphänomen in their discussions of Being and the fundamental nature of things but restricts himself in III.230 to observing that the idea is ‘a preconceived idea that takes possession of us’ and offering as an example what Freud discerned in ‘wish-fulfilment dreams’. As Wittgenstein sees it, the problem is not the concept of an Urphänomen as such. Uses for it are readily conjured up.