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p Wittgenstein’s views in his later period are mainly propounded in his Philosophical Investigations. In this period Wittgenstein kept as before to the basic principle of semantic philosophy: the only task of philosophy is the analysis of language. But the drastic change in Wittgenstein’s later attitude toward language led, as Thomas E. Hill has correctly pointed out, to a change in his view of the nature and function of philosophy.

p Previously (in the period of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) Wittgenstein had maintained that the origin of philosophical, or “metaphysical” problems was to be sought in the complexity of ordinary language, and thus in order to 52 eliminate these problems we should concentrate on an analysis of perfect logical language. The search for the latter was connected with a construction of language as a system of abstract signs with the precise structure of a formula of logical calculus, and reflecting the structure of the world (the theory of “reflection”, “isomorphism”).

p In his later period, Wittgenstein believed that the origin of “metaphysical” philosophical problems was not the complexity of ordinary language but its “metaphysical” use. He now saw it as the task of philosophy “to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use" (1, 48). The scholar’s efforts should now be directed towards the explanation and description of the latter as well as a revelation of the ways language is misused “metaphysically”.

p Natural language is normally used, asserts Wittgenstein, not for the single purpose of reflecting the world, “ describing" facts in the form of true or false statements, but for the realisation of the most diverse aims (giving orders, making up a story, a joke, asking etc.) (1, 12). Language is not a reflection opposed to the world, but a part of the world, linguistic activity, included in a complex network of linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. All this requires the scholar to pay the closest attention to linguistic practice in all its variety. In the theory of meaning Wittgenstein now took up the position that “the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (1, 20). A multiplicity of uses means that meanings can be grouped into sets of variants of meanings, which in its turn leads to the element of uncertainty in meaning, something inevitable and often useful in language. The use of linguistic expressions is subordinated to a set of rules and norms of working with signs, which admit a certain freedom and possible alternatives. All this gave Wittgenstein cause to compare language to a game (1, 23). There are different “ language-games”, connected with different forms of human activity and irreducible one to the other. There are no properties or groups of properties equally common to all the games. A similarity can only be partial, like a “family resemblance": some people have similar eyes, others noses, and others have some other feature in common.

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p As Soviet scholar Maria Kozlova has convincingly shown in her study Philosophy and Language Wittgenstein’s new approach to language, which rejected some of his previous errors, contains a number of positive elements, but, taken as a whole, it shows “the metaphysician hurtling from one extreme to the other”. Thus, the positive tendency to overcome the abstract logicism in his former approach to language, to rely on facts of speech communication in the varied process of social activity and to take into account the pragmatic aspect of language, in actual fact led Wittgenstein the neopositivist to a one-sided, narrowly empirical description of the concrete variations of linguistic behaviour. The metaphysical logomorphism of the Tractatus was succeeded by an opposite extreme-the point of view of unrestrained polymorphism, which provided a favourable soil for linguistic naturalism, empiricism and relativism (11, 161). Wittgenstein’s theory of meaning contained, in addition to a positive tendency to overcome the errors of “mentalism” and “realism”, and to take into account the system nature of language, the role of context, etc., a strong bias towards the use of language in human behaviour. This accent on the “code” functions of language brings Wittgenstein’s position close to the errors of behaviourism and operationalism. The problems of the relation of the sign to the object (25), of the cognitive function of language, and of the “mirror” aspect of meaning were in essence eliminated from his linguistic philosophy, and this in its turn could not fail to leave the imprint of subjectivism and relativism on his conception.

p In Wittgenstein’s interpretation “language-games”, as a useful abstraction and model for the description and understanding of certain of the functions of language, reveal his tendency towards a conventionalist, anti-historical, “ isolationist" approach to the explanation of “languages” in different sign systems.

p Wittgenstein’s positive tendency to avoid the extremes of abstract “metaphysical” thought leads him, however, to the no less absurd opposite extreme, which can be distinctly observed in the “therapeutics” for the deliverance of language which, in the philosopher’s opinion, proceed from the 54 picture of the real use of natural language he proposes. Wittgenstein correctly points out that the mingling of different meanings (usages) of one and the same linguistic expression or of outwardly similar grammatical forms, the proclivity to use words which have no precisely fixed meaning just as if their meaning was strictly determined in definitions, and many other features can serve as the source of “linguistic traps”, generating confusion. Wittgenstein examined the real difficulties and inevitable losses that occur when the flexible and plastic meanings of everyday language are “translated” into the language of theoretical and in particular philosophical abstractions and idealizations. However, instead of opposing a scientific, dialectical conception of abstraction to the dogmatically speculative metaphysical passion for generalizations, Wittgenstein advanced the conception of “family resemblance" : the philosophical essence of this conception consists in the typically positivist fear of any generalization, the rejection of such an important tool of the theory of knowledge as abstraction, and an underestimation of definitions. No surprise, either, that the theory of “family resemblance" was used by all those who wished to undermine theoretical thought which operates with scientific concepts and generalizations. This applies above all to philosophical cognition, for philosophy without generalizations is philosophy-without philosophy. Wittgenstein’s neo-positivist anti-philosophical weapon turned out to be a traditional one: nominalism and empiricism.

Such are the basic ideas of Wittgenstein in his later period, the starting point of “analytical aesthetics".