These were notes of lectures, primarily taken by Yorick Smythies, given by Wittgenstein to a small group of students in his private rooms at Cambridge, during the summer of 1938. Wittgenstein began by trying to clarify that language should be looked at in regards to its use and not to its form. “I have often compared language to a tool chest, containing a hammer, chisel, matches, nails, screws, glue. It is not a chance that all these things have been put together—but there are important differences between the different tools—they are used in a family of ways.” Pertaining to aesthetics proper, he begins on the importance of a system of rules. “If I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgment. In learning the rules you get a more and more refined judgement. Learning the rules actually changes your judgment.” Aesthetics is not purely personal. It is not simply a matter of taste. “To describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period.” Aesthetics also involves tradition and conventions. “In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living.” However, there is also a subjective component. It is by no means scientific. “The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react…. You cannot arrive at the explanation by means of psychological experiment…. The puzzles which arise in aesthetics, which are puzzles arising from the effects the arts have, are not puzzles about how these things are caused.”
The notes on Freud were taken by Rush Rhees after conversations with Wittgenstein between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein thought Freud always had “something to say,” even when he was completely wrong. Freud was one of the few people in any field whom Wittgenstein deigned to read, in fact. On Freud’s theory of anxiety, Wittgenstein states that it has a similar usefulness to it as did ancient myths. “Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this by reference to evidence—for he could not do so. But it is an idea which has a marked attraction. It has the attraction which mythological explanations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before.” For Wittgenstein, the genius of Freud was in the prism with which his theories allowed you to reimagine the world. The process was a new presentation of established facts. “It makes certain ways of behaving and thinking natural for them [his patients]. They have given up one way of thinking and adopted another.” However, Wittgenstein felt that Freud pushed his theories too much to the extreme. “It seems muddled to say that all dreams are hallucinated wish fulfillments…. It is probable that there are many different sorts of dreams, and that there is no single line of explanation for all of them…. [Freud] wanted to find some one explanation which would show what dreaming is. He wanted to find the essence of dreaming. And he would have rejected any suggestion that he might be partly right but not altogether so.”
Wittgenstein begins his lectures on religion by stating the different ways in which the term belief may be used. “There are instances where you have a faith—where you say “I believe”—and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest. How should we compare beliefs with each other? What would it mean to compare them?” He goes on to question those who believe in the Last Judgment. “Am I to say they are unreasonable? I wouldn’t call them unreasonable. I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that’s obvious. ‘Unreasonable’ implies, with everyone, rebuke. I want to say: they don’t treat this as a matter of reasonability. Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn’t pretend to be.” Finally on God, “If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God, it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of…. One talks of believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as one does ordinarily.”
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