A Whole New Game

For about a month, my bus reading has been Wittgenstein's The Blue and Brown Books, which he dictated in the 1930s, before starting on Philosophical Investigations. A 16th Street bus is not the best setting for reading philosophy: there are cell phone conversations, couples flirting, flirtations carried on over cell phone, ninth-grade boys talking tough among themselves, etc. But The Blue and Brown Books are perhaps easier to follow in a noisy environment than, say, The Critique of Pure Reason, and definitely easier on the shoulder and the bag than The Critique and other works one could name.

In The Blue and Brown Books, Wittgenstein uses the notion of "language games" to explore the relation between words and meaning. He spends a good deal of time questioning the notion of mental states accompanying recognitions, recollections, "seeing as" and so on. In the course of all this, there are examples of drawings--the square with diagonals, that interrupted slightly at the corner might be seen as a swastika; the figure of seven lines that might be a rhomboid or a plane figure; circles with dashes or curves inside that might be a face, and as a face expressing something.

It was the last example, in section 23 of the Brown Book, that surprised me. There is a series of three "faces", circles having within them dashes, curves, and dots. The first two one might take as having closed eyes invisible under the strokes for brows, varying only in that the second has a diagonal dash above the left brow--for irony, perhaps? The third has dots under the brows, presumably as open eyes. I looked at that, and thought, "Good grief! Emojis?"

Wittgenstein was a couple of decades in the grave before the first "emoticons", typographical ancestors of the emojis, appeared. Do the Wittgensteinians in philosophy departments now discuss the language games that might be played with emojis?