From Seeing to Practice

In his work as an architect, Wittgenstein gained important insights that would lead him to a new philosophical thinking. They are contained in the notes originally published in the Wiener Ausgabe, which are of inestimable value for understanding the path leading to the Philosophical Investigations. His new orientation is centered around practical human action and the spatial dimension of thought. The human body, movements, and actions now come into play. In Wittgenstein’s new way of doing philosophy, one can see that his architectural work seems to have developed a spatial and object-oriented engagement with things in the world. In this chapter of this book, Gebauer shows how Wittgenstein integrated the physical space of action into his thinking, and how he incorporated the self into this world.