The Concept Of Wittgenstein's"Phenomenological Language"

In 1929, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge and put forward his Phenomenology with the core theory of phenomenological language. Phenomenological language was advanced to describe our immediate experience, that is, phenomenon. Wittgenstein divided our descriptions of a subject into two ways: one way was taking the subject as a physical object and describing it in physical language; the other was we could only describe the logical form of a subject by using phenomenological language, for the subject is the phenomenon coming from our sense and immediate experience. A typical example for phenomenological language descriptions taken by Wittgenstein was the“color incompatibility problem” repeatedly mentioned by him. “Color incompatibility problem” means that two colors cannot be in one place at the same time. The possibility of color incompatibility is not fact possibility, but logical possibility, for color incompatibility derives from the logical form of color system and the proposition to describe the color phenomenon is also subject to the syntax within the proposition. Therefore, phenomenological language is a priori study. However,phenomenon is the specious present, which is contradictory to phenomenological language in time. What's more, like the private language, once phenomenological language exists, it can cause the loss of function of language expression and communication, for what phenomenological language describes is individual sense and immediate experience. So it is impossible that phenomenon and phenomenological language exist in one community. Thus, by the end of the year 1929, due to external and internal reasons, Wittgenstein gave up the phenomenological language, and shifted his focus onto ordinary language, and then, gradually launched his late philosophy.