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1.
“In this work more than in any other it is worth looking at apparently solved questions again and again from new sides as unsolved,“ Ludwig Wittgenstein jotted in his philosophical notebook in November of 1914. “Don’t get stuck with what you once wrote. Think always of a fresh beginning, as if nothing had as yet happened.” (p. 30) The First World War had been raging for some months; Wittgenstein was serving as an outlook on an Austrian gunboat; but he was determined to continue the work in logic and philosophy he had been doing before the war with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. To affirm that determination he had begun a new notebook on August 22 after being inducted into the Austro-Hungarian army. “Logic must take care of itself,” had been its opening sentence as if to say that nothing would distract him from pursuing its study. “Will I be able to work now?” he had asked himself anxiously on the first page of the private diary he attached to his philosophical notebook. It turned out that he could do so even under heavy bombardment. “Canons shook the boat as they fired near us at night. Worked much and with success,” he recorded on December 6.
The first sentence of his new war-time notebook was to be Wittgenstein’s manifesto for the following years. It expressed, as he wrote, “a singularly profound and significant insight.” (p. 2) But spelling this out proved more difficult than he had expected. Progress was slow and he feared that “the redeeming word has not yet been spoken.” As long as that was the case, he could only go over the same ground again and again. His most vexing problem at the start was that of the logical form of the proposition of which Russell had spoken. His own views on the topic were still far from settled. “Do any of the forms exist at all that Russell and I were always talking about,” he asked himself. (pp. 2-3) And so it went with questions but no definitive answers.
Some fifteen years later, Friedrich Waismann was trying to pin down Wittgenstein’s thinking for an expository book he was hoping to write. Wittgenstein had by then achieved some fame with his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, composed as the war was ending and published in 1921 with Russell’s effusive introduction. Back in Austria, the members of the Vienna Circle treated the work as a revelation. But their attempts to get its author to explain the book to them met with little success. Waismann’ was one of the few Wittgenstein agreed to talk to. But those conversions proved often frustrating. “He has the wonderful gift of always seeing things as if for the first time,” Waismann noted. “He always follows the inspiration of the moment and tears down what he has previously sketched out.” After ten years of almost complete philosophical silence, Wittgenstein’s thinking had just entered a newly volatile phase. In 1930 he returned to Cambridge to sort out what he now thought to be missing in his earlier work. He began to lecture on the themes of the Tractatus, but the book struck him increasingly as a piece of unbearable dogmatism. That conclusion sparked new investigations which led him on exhausting new journeys, ”criss-cross over a wide field of thought,” in which “the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions and new sketches made,” as he wrote later in the preface to his Philosophical Investigations. Many of these sketches, he added, “were badly drawn or lacking in character, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected, a number of half-way decent ones were left, which then had to be arranged.” This is how the new book was composed. It was a collection of remarks, no more than “an album.”
Wittgenstein never quite finished his Philosophical Investigations. Its initial parts were firm enough in his mind, but he was unsure about how to complete the book. In 1948 he began to look at the issues once again in new ways. His steps were hesitant; he found himself going back over the same ground again and again. At the end, he confided to yet another notebook: “I do philosophy now like an old woman who is always mislaying something and having to look for it again: now her spectacles, now her keys.”
2.
There emerges from all this the picture of a restless thinker, constantly revisiting what he has previously thought, constantly on the road. Waismann who had initially heard of Wittgenstein as the author of the Tractatus had expected a very different person. The book consisted of apodictic statements put forth with a minimal amount of argument and formulated in an often hieratic style. Its aura of absolute certainty was reenforced, moreover, by the numbering of its propositions that Wittgenstein had adopted from Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead’s majestic logical treatise. The Tractatus presented itself thus to the unwary reader as a work of a strict logical order and the author as someone endowed with unconditional truths.
That was, however, a piece of fiction. The book was, in fact, largely composed by extracting diverse propositions from earlier writings and each one of those propositions had originally been immersed in doubts and questions. The Tractatus was, in this respect, just like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, more of “an album” of sketches made on an extended intellectual journey than a tightly constructed treatise. We can see this clearly when we turn from the book to the source of its propositions in Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks. There were probably seven of them to begin with. Only three of them have survived. But we can, even so, reconstruct some of Wittgenstein’s course of thinking from the beginning of the First World War to January 1917. What we find is the record of an intricate back and forth on a wide range of philosophical topics. There are continuous small shifts of perspective as well as major breaks in his reasoning. The Tractatus is a precipitate of this course of development. In order to understand its highly condensed formulations, we must take note of its varied and unstable subsoil and the long, treacherous journey that preceded its composition.
3.
Wittgenstein’s philosophical journey had begun when he read Arthur Schopenhauer’s great treatise The World as Will and Representation at the age of 16. It appears that his first philosophy became, in his own words, “a Schopenhauerian epistemological idealism.” He had, however, found no opportunity to explore those ideas further as a student; he was, instead, forced to take up the study of engineering at the insistence of his father. But that had not stilled his philosophical mindset. The practical issues of engineering alerted him to questions concerning mathematics. Why was it possible to predict physical effects through mere calculation? A fellow student, drew his attention to Russell’s 1903 book The Principles of Mathematics and that book was to change the course of his life.
It was not, however, Russell’s own thinking that initially struck him. What drew his attention was rather a 22-page appendix in which Russell had described the logical and mathematical doctrines of Gottlob Frege. We can be sure that Wittgenstein had never heard of Frege before – neither in Vienna nor in England where he had gone to pursue his study of engineering. While Russell was already an internationally recognized figure, Frege was still largely unknown and certainly so to English-speaking philosophers. Russell’s appendix was the first text to draw the attention of an international philosophical audience to Frege and his nw logic. Impulsively, Wittgenstein now decided to visit Frege at Jena and his meetings left him impressed with both the man and the way he thought. He was later to tell von Wright that Frege’s conceptual realism had, in fact, made him abandon his earlier Schopenhauerian views. And when he presented Frege with some of his unformed thoughts on mathematics, Frege, as he put it later, wiped the floor with him. We have to assume that as a result of his visit, Wittgenstein also began to read Frege’s writings. We can see, in any case, that he became eventually familiar with all of Frege’s major works though it is impossible to tell when that was. But we can be confident in concluding that this encounter inspired in him an entirely new concern with logic. Frege who felt old and worn out by this time, advised Wittgenstein to go back to England and work on logic with Russell. When he arrived in Cambridge he had thus already undergone a number of changes in his philosophical trajectory from his early attachment to Schopenhauer, through a somewhat unformed enthusiasm for the philosophy of mathematics, to a newly awakened interest in logic.
But by 1911, when Wittgenstein appeared in Cambridge, Russell was no longer doing new work in logic. Principia Mathematica, his great achievement in this field, had been finished in 1908 and was in the process of being published. Russell was interested now in applying his logic to other and broader philosophical issues. He was returning, in particular to the atomistic metaphysics that he had first spelled out in his Principles of Mathematics eight years earlier. Russell had come to that metaphysical doctrine in the late 1890s as a result of his break with F. H. Bradley’s monistic idealism. On Russell’s new view, ultimate reality was not a single, integrated whole – Bradley’s “One” – but consisted of a multiplicity of separate and irreducible elements. His view was, as he later put it, “that you can get down in theory, if not in practice, to ultimate simples out of which the world is built, and that those simples have a kind of reality not belonging to anything else.” But he was still uncertain about the exact nature of those simples. Were they concepts and judgments, as Moore had once maintained? Were they particulars or universals or, perhaps, both? Could they be spatial points or even sense data? When Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge in 1911, he found Russell at work on a theory of knowledge that was to settle the issue. Russell’s tool for achieving that end was, in particular, his new theory of denoting, what he called his theory of descriptions, which he hoped would allow him to distinguish between merely apparent objects that could be analyzed away and objects resistant to further analysis, the ultimate components of reality.
This is not what had brought Wittgenstein to Cambridge. He was, rather, sharply focused on logic itself. “Logic is still in the melting pot,” he wrote brazenly to his mentor in 1912 within a year of having embarked on his philosophical studies. He was sure that it “must turn out to be a totally different kind than any other science.” As far as Wittgenstein was concerned, Russell’s logic still lacked the required unity and simplicity. In logic, he wrote later on in the Tractatus, simplicity was the sign of correctness. In June 1913, he informed Russell accordingly: “One of the consequences of my ideas will – I think – be that the whole of logic follows from one proposition only.” His efforts to improve on Russell’s logic took shape in two sets of notes, one written for Russell in 1913 and the other dictated to G. E. Moore a year later. Fundamental in them was his rejection of both Frege’s and Russell’s account of propositions. “Frege said ‘propositions are names’, Russell said ‘propositions correspond to complexes’. Both are false; and especially false is the statement ‘propositions are names of complexes’,” he wrote in the first set of notes. (p.97) The distinctive characteristic of propositions, according to Wittgenstein, was, rather, that they had two poles in that they could be either true or false. And this bi-polarity of the proposition he expected to be the unifying principle of logic. It justified truth-functional logic, it suggested a diagrammatic representation of their relations, and eventually their depiction in a system of truth-tables. But that still left Wittgenstein wrestling the question how the logic of general propositions could be explained in this manner. Wittgenstein’s notes for Russell and Moore were suggestive, but they did not make a conclusive case for a newly unified and simplified science of logic. But Russell was happy to leave the matter in Wittgenstein’s hands. When one of Wittgenstein’s sisters came to visit, Russell confided in her that he expected the next great development in logic to be achieved by her brother. Privately, though, he grumbled that Wittgenstein’s fierce preoccupation with the technical problems of logic would make him only a narrow specialist, unable to face the philosophical problems that Russell considered to be more important.
4.
That fear proved, however, unwarranted. Under Russell’s influence, Wittgenstein’s attention was soon beginning to turn his attention back to questions of metaphysics. We can consider this a sign of a new turn in Wittgenstein’s philosophical trajectory. In order to soothe Russell’s anxieties he wrote to him in his 1913 notes that “philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics. Logic is its base.” (p. 106) Metaphysics was after all the goal, but not the speculative metaphysics of Schopenhauer. The new metaphysics would be constructed on the basis of logic. It would be a pluralistic metaphysics of the sort Russell had in mind, not the monism of Schopenhauer for whom the world was ultimately a single unified force or will. But having agreed with Russell in this respect, Wittgenstein added three caveats in his 1913 notes that must have given Russell some pause. He wrote: “In philosophy there are no deductions; it is purely descriptive. Philosophy gives no picture of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation.” (p. 106) These posed, in effect, a direct challenge to Russell who assumed that logical atomism would provide us precisely with a deductive and scientific picture of reality. It is far from clear how Wittgenstein thought to reconcile his ne belief that philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics with these three propositions. He certainly held consistently that philosophy was not a science and in this respect he was surely at odds with Russell. Wittgenstein’s two other propositions were even more of a challenge. How could philosophy be concerned with metaphysics while also being purely descriptive and how could a metaphysical theory not give a picture of reality? He was not to make anything more of these pronouncements till later. It was only in the 1930’s when the Tractatus system had broken down that he came back to the idea of philosophy as a purely descriptive undertaking. But at that point he also rejected the pursuit of metaphysics as illusory. The thought that philosophy might not be able to spell out a metaphysical picture of reality became clear to him, however, already in the course of his war-time reflections. The notebooks reveal, in fact, two more steps of transition in Wittgenstein’s thinking: the first being a new engagement with Russell’s style of logical atomism and the second a turning away from it.
To get a sense of Wittgenstein’s initial commitment to the metaphysics of logical atomism we must look beyond the writings we have from his time with Russell. Many of those have unfortunately disappeared. The main evidence for Wittgenstein’s attachment to an atomistic metaphysics at that time comes from a note Russell appended to his “Lectures on Logical Atomism” that Russell he delivered and published in The Monist in 1918. The note says that those lectures “are very largely concerned with explaining certain ideas which I learned from my friend and former student Ludwig Wittgenstein. I have had no opportunity of knowing his views since August, 1914, and I do not even know whether he is alive or dead.” We should not assume that Wittgenstein would have agreed with all the details of Russell’s exposition, but the note leaves no doubt that Wittgenstein subscribed at the time to the principles of logical atomism. .
It i in this light then hat we must approach Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks. In the notes he had written for his mentor in 1913, he had highlighted various disagreements and laid out how he intended to go beyond Russell’s views in logic. The war-time notebooks continue along the same line of inquiry. From the start, Wittgenstein objects to Russell’s appeal to self-evidence as a means for settling questions about logical structure and the nature of the simple objects. “Russell would say ‘Yes! That’s self-evident,’” he writes, but he considers this to be laughable. (p. 3) Russell had, in fact, devoted a whole chapter of his Theory of Knowledge to defend his reliance on self-evidence, but Wittgenstein sniffed that the appeal to self-evidence “is and always was whole deceptive.” (p. 4) Logical atomism could not be justified in that way. The doctrine needed sifting and clarification. In contrast to Russell – and, in fact, in contrast to all the earlier atomists – Wittgenstein recognized the profound challenges the doctrine raises. The doctrine could bot be justified with through observation; that would never deliver “ultimate constituents.” Some kind of logical analysis was called for. That raised, however, immediately two sets of questions. The first concerned the logic to be used in the process of analysis, and the other the outcome of the analysis, the determination of the sought-after simples. Wittgenstein’s notebooks show him to be working tenaciously on these interconnected issues.
As for the logic, Wittgenstein asked himself at the start of his notebooks what logical structures the process of analysis could discover. Hence, his preoccupation with the question of the logical form of propositions. How could one be sure that one had given the right analysis of a proposition? And how could one determine that the analysis was complete? Wittgenstein struggled hard over these questions. There were seemingly insurmountable difficulties with negative propositions and likewise with the generalized ones. The notebooks contain, in consequence, repeated reminders such as: “In all these considerations I am somewhere making some sort of FUNDAMENTAL MISTAKE.” (p. 10) Russell had naively assumed that one could read the structure of reality off from the logical form of our propositions. But he had given no satisfactory account of how this was to be done. In his Theory of Knowledge he had said only that the particular type of proposition of the form “A is similar to B” that it is true “when there is a complex composed of A and B and similarity.” Wittgenstein had at first agreed with this, writing in his 1913 notes: “The form of a proposition has meaning in the following way… I say that if an x stands in the relation R to a y the sign ‘xRy’ is to be called true to the fact and otherwise false. This is a definition of sense.” (p. 91) But that was certainly no definition. Both Russell and Wittgenstein were considering only particular relational propositions. They soon moved on, however, to a more considered view, if we can trust the lectures on the philosophy of logical atomism Russell delivered in 1918. Their view was, in Russell’s words, that “in a logically correct symbolism there will always be a certain fundamental identity of structure between a fact and the symbol for it …and the complexity of the symbol corresponds very closely with the complexity of the facts symbolized by it .” But this was not yet enough in Wittgenstein’s eyes. Early on in his war-time notebook he continued to express uncertainty over “the logical identity of sign and signified.” (p. 3) We must, perhaps, think of a proposition as a model in which “a world is as it were put together experimentally.” Or, better still, we must think of it as a picture. (p. 7) But was that satisfactory? “On the one hand my theory of logical depiction seems to be the only possible one, on the other there seems to be an insoluble contradiction in it.” (p. 17) It is not obvious what contradiction Wittgenstein had in mind. It seems to have involved generalized propositions. His dissatisfaction with the “theory of logical depiction” is, any case, evident. One of its problems is that there are different ways or methods of representation. And: “The method of depiction must be completely determinate before we can at all compare reality with the proposition to see whether it is true or false.” (p. 25) That answer created, however, problems of its own. Would one not have to be able to identify both the structure of the proposition and that of the fact in order to see whether they were one and the same? The logical atomists assumed, however, that one could read the structure of reality off from that of the fully analyzed proposition. That was the whole strategy of their position. But what would guarantee that the structure of the proposition was a clue to that of the facts?
Considerations of this kind led Wittgenstein, in turn, to ones concerning the supposed elements of reality. Like Russell, he kept going back and forth over the possibilities. Were they sense-date? Could they be universals? Were they spatial points? Was it obvious that logical analysis would eventually lead to simple, unanalyzable elements? Or could the analysis go on ad infinitum? And so on. In the end he came to ask himself whether logic could even tell us in principle what they were. Perhaps it could assure us only that there were such but without identifying the atoms themselves. He was certainly ready to assume that “the world has a fixed structure.” (p. 62) This was equivalent, he thought, to saying that our words have definite sense since “the demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.” (p. 60) One could then conclude that there were ultimate constituents of reality, “simple objects,” without having to specify their exact nature. Wittgenstein was thus prepared to go along with the transcendental argument that Leibniz had used in his Monadology to argue for the existence of simples. In short: There had to be simples because there were complexes. In June 1915 he concluded: “It seems that the idea of the simple is already to be found contained in that of the complex and in the idea of analysis, and in such a way that we come to the idea quite apart from any examples of simple objects, or of propositions which mention them, and we realize the existence of the simple object – a priori – as a logical necessity.” (p.60)
5.
That went, of course, far beyond Russell’s way of thinking. Russell had always expected it to be possible to identify the simple objects. His whole project of logical analysis was, in fact, designed to bring that identification about. Wittgenstein’s conclusion was, nonetheless, still within the framework of atomistic metaphysics though it gave that it now a more severely abstract and formalistic character. But his notebooks also show that he was beginning to veer away from Russell’s program in a more determined fashion.
The first indication of this had come on May 23, 1915, when he had written: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” (p. 49) Nothing in the preceding pages of his notebook had prepared that statement. There had been no talk before of the limits of language or the limits of the world. And while he had repeatedly written about language and the world, he had never spoken before of “my language” and “my world.” As if to comment on his statement, Wittgenstein added the same day: “I have long been conscious that it would be possible for me to write a book: “What kind of world I have come upon.” (p. 49) He had discovered, so it seems, that the world he had been writing about was, in fact, his world and , that the very notion of world contained a subjective component. He would express this thought most succinctly later on in the Tractatus writing; “The world is my world.”
But from where did this new thought come? Had it just sprung up in his head from nowhere? Its most likely source is to be found Fritz Mauthner’s Contributions to a Critique of Language, published in Vienna in 1901, a book with which he was certainly familiar by 1914. Mauthner had been a student of Ernst Mach who had turned to literature rather than philosophy for a living. He became a highly influential and feared theater critic in Berlin but published at the same a series of books on philosophical and other topics. His sprawling, three volume Critique of Language was meant to point out the limits of language. On Mauthner’s view, language was a practical instrument completely unfit to deliver an adequate metaphysical view of the world. A Pyrrhonian skeptic, he quoted Sextus Empiricus in his book saying that we must eventually throw away the ladder of language after we have climbed up on it. Wittgenstein was, in turn, to borrow that metaphor from Mauthner ‘s book and insert it into the coda of the Tractatus. Mauthner held, moreover, that “Language” was a fiction, that there were really are idiolects, my and your language. Wittgenstein not only drew on such ideas but also included Mauthner’s name in the small number of carefully selected names he chpse to mention in the Tractatus. That reference to him does not, however, do justice to the significance Mauthner was to have for Wittgenstein. In the Tractatus we read only that all philosophy is indeed a critique of language “though not in Mauthner’s sense.” The passage gives credit, instead, to Russell’s method of logical analysis as a means for “showing that the apparent logical form of a proposition need not be its real one.” Mauthner’s kind of critique of language anticipates, however, significant features of Wittgenstein’s later thinking about language.
The proposition that the world is my world should also remind us of Schopenhauer whose first sentence in The World as Will and Representation was that the world is my representation. That Wittgenstein was also thinking of Schopenhauer on May 23 becomes clear from some further and even more astonishing propositions he adds to his notebook that day. We read: “There really is only one world soul, which I in my own case name my soul and as which alone I comprehend what I name the souls of others.” This remark, he goes on, provides a key for deciding to what extent solipsism is a truth. And he concludes, still on May 23, that in the book “The world I have come upon” there would be talk of my body but not of a subject and this would show that in a philosophically significant sense there is no such thing as the individual subject. (p. 50) Here we are truly far away from Russell’s philosophical project. With Mauthner and Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein has returned to thoughts coming from his Viennese background.
Schopenhauer did not actually use the term “world soul” (though Mauthner did), but his way of thinking about “the mind,” “the subject,” or “self” has affinities with that idea. The concept of the world soul goes back all the way to Pre-Socratic philosophy and the assumption that the cosmos is ensouled and not just material, that we can speak accordingly of a psyche kosmou of which our individual souls are mere facets. Schopenhauer, like these Pre-Socratic thinkers rejected the idea of there being individual selves in a metaphysically relevant sense. The individuation of human souls was for him only a fact in our representation of the world.
The target of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on this matter must have been Russell understanding of logical atomism. Russell’s Theory of Knowledge of 1913 had begun with an analysis “of the simplest and most pervading aspect of experience” which Russell called “acquaintance.” (p,. 5) His belief was that acquaintance can put us in contact with the ultimate constituents of reality which, he thought, at this point to be sense-data. Russell went on to say that “there is a certain unity, important to realize but hard to analyze, in ‘my present experience’ [and] we might suppose that ‘my present experience’ might be defined as all the experiences which ‘I’ have ‘now.’” (p. 8) But the I is not an object of acquaintance, we must define it, rather in terms of the notion of my present experience. But Russell had by 1914 advanced from this view to the conclusion that the I or subject was a simple constituent of reality. How else was one to argue for the unity of experience and the unity of judgment? This, he thought, did not commit him to the assumption that there was a persistent “Cartesian” I, only to momentarily existing self. This is what he was to lay out in 1918 in his Lectures on Logical Atomism. Russell claimed , of course, that what he said in those lectures fully conformed to Wittgenstein’s views. In that he was certainly mistaken. But he was probably right in thinking that Wittgenstein was familiar with the views expressed in those lectures. This gives s reasons to conclude that his remarks on the “the subject” on May 23 was meant to be a direct attack on Russell and a sign that Wittgenstein felt no longer committed to Russell’s kind of logical atomism.
The impression that he was becoming increasingly critical of Russell’s atomistic metaphysics is reenforced by a further entry into the notebook the very next day, May 24, when he writes: “The urge towards the mystical stems from the non-satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all. Of course in that case there are no questions any more, and that is the answer.” (p. 51) Russell’s attempt to construct a scientific metaphysics is thus in vain. No metaphysics can, in fact, touch on “our problem.” There remains no question that could be answered by any kind of metaphysical theory.
In his Introduction to the Tractatus, Russell would later dismiss such speculative thoughts with the words: “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.” This caustic remark provoked Wittgenstein, in turn, to accuse Russell of not having understood his book. He threatened initially that his book could not be published with Russell’s introduction and he gave in only because he realized that his book would never see daylight without it. May 23, 1915 marks thus a first major break with Russell and his way of doing philosophy even though its full implications may not have been obvious to Wittgenstein at the time since he turns immediately back from his speculative remarks on the subject to reflections on the nature of the simple objects – almost, as if nothing unusual had ben said .
But how solid was this apparent recommitment to the atomist program? Where was he moving to at this point? We have unfortunately no record of the course of Wittgenstein’s thinking between June 2015 and April 2016 since the notebooks covering that period are now lost. But it is clear from the third notebook in our possession that a year later he has not yet given up completely on logical atomism. That notebook begins on April 15 with further reflections on simple objects and the form of the proposition. But his words echo now what he had said the previous year about the subjective character of our thinking about them. That first day he writes: “We can foresee only what we ourselves construct. But then where is the concept of the simple object still to be found?” (p. 71) Since he assumes that simple objects are not directly accessible to us, our claim that there are such comes to a prediction that logical analysis will ultimately deliver them. But if we can foresee only what we ourselves construct, then our account of the simple objects will depend on our construction. He goes on to speak similarly of the construction of simple functions and since such functions determine the form of the propositions in which they occur, it now appears that the forms of propositions we can identify must also be relative to what we are able to construct. The realistic picture of logical atomism seems to have given way here to a constructivist one. But the issue is not yet completely settled. A year earlier he had already entertained the possibility that one might need to distinguish between what is simple for us and what is simple absolutely speaking. Could it not be that when we speak of an ordinary object, such as the watch on the table, we treat it, in effect, as logically simple? Even so, there may still be absolute simples in addition. What if our construction is somehow determined by what is out there? In that case, it may still be possible to give a definite and “objective” answer to the question of the simple objects and the logical forms of the proposition. Towards the end of the notebook, on Nov. 11, Wittgenstein gets back to this point once more when he writes that it must be possible “to set up the general form of the proposition, because the possible forms of propositions must be a priori.” (p. 89)On May 6, he comments once more critically on Russell’s scientistic view of the world: “The whole world view of the moderns is grounded in this illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of the natural phenomena. We thus stop with the ‘laws of nature’ as something inviolable just as the ancients did with God and fate. And both are right and wrong. The old ones are, however, clearer in that they acknowledge a clear endpoint, whereas it appears in the new system, as if everything was grounded.” (p. 72) This renewed critique of scientism expresses at once reservations about Russell’s world view and draws fresh attention to Schopenhauer and Mauthner who both question the explanatory power of science.
6..
But all this comes to an abrupt end on May 11, 1916, and a month after a month of complete silence we find ourselves on June 11 in completely new territory. The problems of atomism have been wiped of the table, Instead, we read: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (p. 72) These two topics prove to be intimately linked. “To believe in God means that life has a sense,” he writes shortly later. (p. 74) We can, in fact, call the meaning of life by the name of God. We can also identify God with fate and even with the world. Prayer he says is “thinking of the meaning of life.” These considerations initiate a whole series of further thoughts on the world and our place in it, on good and evil, and the nature of the will. As he pursues these themes still other topics make their appearance: the human self, idealism and solipsism, ethics and art, happiness, death and suicide. The tightly argued examination of logical atomism in the earlier pages of his notebooks has been abandoned and we face, instead, a wild array of bewildering new thoughts. “Yes,” he writes, “my work has expanded from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world.” (p. 79)
In contrast to the previous moment in May 1915 when he had turned from the problems of logical atomism to reflections about the world being my world only to return shortly to his preoccupation with atomistic metaphysics, these new reflections continue for several months, interspersed with only occasional glances back at his previous concern with the atomist program. Finally, on November 21, the current of speculative thought starts to run dry except for some final thoughts on suicide, elementary sin, and the nature of ethics.
While we don’t know what had occasioned the disruption of his train of thought in May 1915, we do know what triggered this one. On May 6, five days before Wittgenstein asks his disturbing question about God and the purpose of life, his private diary records that he feels in imminent danger of losing his life. How can one find inner peace in this situation? He answers himself: “Only by living in a way that pleases God. Only in this way is it possible to bear life.” He adds on May 10: “I am doing well now due to the grace of God. … He will not abandon me in this danger.” On May 16: “I am sleeping today under infantry fire and will likely perish. God be with me. I surrender my soul to the Lord.” Worse was to come. In June, the Russians launched a major attack on the Austrian forces in the so-called “Brusilov offensive.” Thousands of Austrian soldiers lose their lives, many become Russian prisoners of war. Wittgenstein’s own unit is directly engaged in this deadly battle which lasts till the middle of August. He is certain that he will not survive. On July 29 he writes: “I was shot at yesterday. Was scared. I was afraid of death. I have such a wish now to go on living. And it is difficult to renounce life…”
His thoughts in this period are often feverish and obscure – as he realizes. “Here I am still making crude mistakes. No doubt about that.” he notes on July 29. (p. 78) “I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences.” (p. 79) They are driven by existential anxieties rather than logic. Only some of them will make it into the Tractatus. His reflections on God do not, but those on the meaning of life will become essential for the coda of his book. The world” will also remain a topic of concern in it and that in two ways. The world is all that is the case, as the first sentence of his book will say, and as such a matter of logic. But ethics also demands that we see the world in the right way, as the end of the book will declare. “Ethics does not treat of the world,” he writes in his notebook. It is, rather, “the condition of the world, just like logic.” (p. 77) We don’t have to look far to find the inspiration for this picture. We can find it once again in Schopenhauer World as Will and Representation.
But what is the right way to look at the world? The question leads Wittgenstein to pose two others. What is the place of the subject, the I, the self in relation to the world? And where do we find good and evil? As to the first question, he reaffirms that what we call “the world” is only “my world.” Or as he puts it provocatively: “The world and life are one.” (p. 77) Death is therefore not an event or fact in the world. In death the world ceases to be. But what makes the world my world? What is the subject? “The representing subject is surely mere illusion,” he writes. But: there is still the I or self to be considered as distinct from the Russellian subject. “The I, the I is what is deeply mysterious.” (p. 80) The I is mysterious because we never confront it as an object. I am in the world, he notes, in the way my eye is in my visual field. The perceiving eye is, in fact, not part of the visual field. It is what makes the visual field possible. In the same way the I is not part of the world but makes my world possible. It makes its appearance “through the world’s being my world.” (p. 80) That I is, however, not the individual self, but the “one world soul” of which he had said a year earlier that it manifests itself as that “which I for preference call my soul.” (p. 49) While the representing subject is a mere illusion, “the willing subject exists.” (p. 80) But the will must not be conceived as a causal power by which the individual can affect events in the world. For “the world is independent of my will.” (p. 73) Standing apart from the world, the will can only define an attitude to the world as a whole. It can lead us to reject or accept the world for what it is.
With this we have entered the domain of value or ethics and aesthetics. To accept the world for what it is means to be happy and happiness is what we should strive to attain. The happy life, is one lived in accord with the world. It is in this state that we grasp the meaning of life. “Is this not the reason why human beings to whom after many doubts the meaning of life has become clear, cannot then say in what that meaning consists.” (p. 74) The problems of life find their solution in their disappearance. No metaphysical theory can help us here. Ethics is certainly not concerned with advancing such a theory; it does not assert propositions or promulgate rules. It is, in fact, clear that ”ethics cannot be expressed in words.” (p. 78) . Ethics, he says, is thus “transcendent” – or, rather, “transcendental,” as he will phrase it in the Tractatus. It is a way of seeing the world from outside as a whole sub specie aeternitatis. And this is, at the same time, the aesthetic way of seeing things. “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis, and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.” (p.83) Ethics is the aesthetics of the world.
The claim that ethics cannot put into words puts Wittgenstein on the path to an even more radical conclusion. He had previously talked of logical limits to what can be said. What do I know when I understand a proposition but do not know whether it is true or false, he had asked himself in 1914. And he had replied to that question: “At this point I am again trying to express something that cannot be expressed. (p. 31) That had been, in fact, yet another thought embedded in the first, introductory sentence of his war-time notebook. That logic must take care of itself meant among other things that “all we have to do [and, in fact, all we can do] is to look and see how it does it.” (p. 11) But Wittgenstein’s conclusion that ethics, too, cannot be put into words, adds a new dimension to those earlier considerations. Since logic and ethics form the arc on which Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking in this period moves he is made to conclude: “The correct method would be to say nothing, except what can be said, i.e. what belongs to natural science, i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy.” (p. 94) And with this conclusion, the break with Russell has become complete. The entire project of logical atomism has been consigned now to what cannot be said and is therefore without sense. Wittgenstein’s thinking has broken through all the earlier layers in which it had been confined and confronts the tsk of philosophy now in a profoundly new way. It will take him the rest of his life, though, to discover the consequences of this revelation.
7.
But his thoughts in the summer and fall of 1916 were not yet the end of the road he had been traveling since the beginning of the war. The year before he had written to Russell: “I have recently done much work and, I believe, with good result. I am now busy bringing the whole thing together and writing it down in the form of a treatise.” That treatise was still to be written even a year later. Wittgenstein did not get around to that concluding task till the summer of 1918. The war-time notebooks in our possession end unfortunately in January of the preceding year. It is thus impossible for us to track the course of Wittgenstein’s thinking to the moment when he actually sat down to work on completing the text of the Tractatus. The assumption is that by then he had two more notebook to work with. It is plausible to think that whatever he wrote in that period was more or less like the earlier notebooks, that he continued to record individual thoughts on variety topics and put them down as they struck him. Those lost notes may have covered much of the same ground as the notebooks we have and are likely to have displayed the same kind of back and forth in his thinking. There was, no doubt, also additional new material in them. Some passages in the Tractatus have no precedents in the existing notebooks. One striking example is the discussion of mathematics in the Tractatus. Was that part of the book based on notes he made between the end of 1916 and the middle of 1918? We can be fairly certain, however, that he did noy sit down in this period a systematic treatise. All he had, when he finally began to write the Tractatus was a set of scattered notes from which he quickly excerpted his text. That should, in fact, be evident from the look of the finished product.
When he started the composition of his book in the summer of 1918, Wittgenstein was on a temporary leave from the war front. Time was short and he was determined to bring the work to an end. There was no other option for him than to draw on what he had written earlier. He relied for this purpose on all the notes he had made in the previous five years and selected from them what he found suitable. That was no easy task, since his thinking had changed so much in those years and in so many different directions. His ambition was, surely, to present a single coherent whole. In putting it together and selecting from what he had, he must have sought to clarify and unify what he wanted to say. But how far did he succeed in this? How far could he have succeeded, given that his thinking had moved across such a wide arc from the foundations of logic, through Russell’s atomism, to Schopenhauer’s ethics and Mauthner’s critique of language.
While the formal presentation, the sustained voice of certainty, and the rhetorical pull of the propositions suggest a unitary system of ideas, it is far from clear that Wittgenstein has succeeded in producing any such thing. Seen against the backdrop of the war-time notebooks, the text looks rather as if it was describing a course of thinking that has led Wittgenstein from his initial commitment to logical atomism to the concluding call to overcome its propositions in order to see the world in the right way. We will then come to recognize that the book has a narrative structure, that it tells a story, that it is the record of the philosophical journey Wittgenstein has undertaken in the previous years. Interpreters tend to look at the Tractatus in another way. They see it as an attempt to describe a single theoretical position. In dealing with parts of the text that do not fit this assumption they operate with a “principle of charity” that allows them to set aside bits of the text or to “interpret” them till they are reconciled with the presumed theory. The result has been that some have taken it to be a straightforward contribution to the philosophy of logical atomism; others have considered it to be contribution to logic and the theory of meaning. For yet other interpreters the Tractatus offers a straightforward lesson in skepticism. And there are finally those for whom it is nothing but an essay on ethics. Each one of those interpretations has had to ignore, reject, or downplay parts of the text that don’t fit its account. In the case of the most “resolute” readings of the Tractatus large swaths of the text, almost everything in it, are dismissed as simply nonsensical. The first sentence of the book is said to be sheer nonsense and Wittgenstein’s apparent assertion is declared to be a piece of irony. But if he meant it as such, why is the irony not recognizable? There are, after, all ways to make irony explicit. Why did he not begin the Tractatus with the words: “Some philosophers want to assert such things as ‘The world is everything that is the case,” I want to show that such statements are, in fact, nonsensical”? Why the apparent obfuscation? The fact is that the book is an exercise in philosophical thinking that takes us over uncharted territories. It exemplifies what philosophy is like when once one crosses such territories and tries to decipher their maps. Wittgenstein’s hope in the Tractatus was that after this exercise one might be able to leave philosophy alone. He writes in it that philosophy is “not a doctrine but a practice. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.” We might take this to mean that philosophy is meant to produce propositions that can serve as elucidations of other propositions. But we can also read the sentence to be saying that the whole process of philosophy from its initial metaphysical certainties to its final sobering conclusions is an elucidatory process, that it is depiction of the entire course of thinking from the first to the last sentence of the Tractatus that provides the sought for elucidation. At the time of writing the Tractatus, Wittgenstein seem to have assumed that one could go once through this process and the work of philosophy would be done. That was an error as he eventually came to see.
When he spoke to members of the Vienna Circle in 1929, he got once again entangled in the problems of logical atomism. He went back to the idea that propositions are pictures of states of affairs. But he allowed now that they might be “incomplete pictures” that captured only some features of what they depicted. No identity of sign and signified had to be assumed. The form of the elementary proposition could, moreover, not be determined once and for all by logic. It could be determined only in an empirical fashion. “It is simply ridiculous to believe that we can do here with the usual forms of ordinary language, with subject-predicate, with two-place relations, and so on.” Objects were simply “equivalent elements of the representation;” they might be represented, for instance, by the equations of physics.
But after his return to Cambridge, when he began to think more systematically about the lessons to be dawn form the Tractatus, he quickly gave up on such speculations. There was no more talk of simple objects. In his lectures, he never once referred to such simples. Instead, he said now that both he and Russell had been confused about what logical analysis could deliver, “thinking that further work at logic would show us the elements…. Russell had no right to say that the result of analysis would be 2-term, 3-term relations, etc. … I was wrong in supposing that it had any sense to talk of [the] result of [a] final analysis.” They had both been misled by relying on an idea of analysis derived from natural science. “To analyze water is to find out something new about water… In philosophy we know all we need to know at the start, we don’t need to know any new facts.”
That doesn’t mean that he had given up altogether on the pluralism that had been integral to the atomistic view-point. But his pluralistic outlook took now a different, non-metaphysical form. How many kinds of sentences are there, he asked in his Philosophical Investigations. “There are countless kinds, countless different kinds of use of all the things we call ‘sign’, ‘words’, sentences’.” There were numerous kinds of language-games. There were multiple world views, he said in later notes, each with its own internal logic. And there were even multiple kinds of mathematics.
His entanglement with logical atomism had also cured him of the wish to look for any single, unifying philosophical theory. Looking back at the Tractatus in 1932, he told his students: “Philosophical trouble is essentially this: You seem to see a system, yet [the] facts don’t seem to fit it; & you don’t know which to give up. Near it looks like a stump., then like a man. Then again…” His experience with the atomist program made him give up on the traditional understanding of philosophy as aiming at the construction of a theory. He now thought that this kind of theorizing was due to philosophers being blinded by the method of science which had tempted them “to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.” That traditional kind of philosophizing he now considered to be dead and what was left of it was dispersed in different places. In his own work he was concerned only with some of what was left. With a new modesty he declared: ”One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy’.” In an illuminating metaphor he suggested that the only kind of philosophy that was now possible was like arranging books on a bookshelf. The goal was to achieve a transparent order but there was no ideal, absolute, final arrangement. He tried several formulas for characterizing the task of this new philosophizing. Philosophy, he said, was purely descriptive. Its goal was to describe the different ways we speak and think. It was phenomenological in trying to present a perspicuous overview of our grammar. It was therapeutic somewhat in the way Freud’s psychoanalysis was, relieving us of our perplexities. It was meant to liberate us from ways of thinking that entrapped our minds like flies in a fly-bottle. Philosophy was, in fact, a continuous battle against the bewitchment of our mind by language We were bound to find ourselves again and again not knowing our way about. There could be no end to these entanglements. We were bound to remain on the road.
Notes
