Category: Wittgenstein

 

 

 

 “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) [1] The First World War had been raging for months; Wittgenstein was serving as an outlook on an Austrian gunboat; but he remained determined to continue the philosophical work he had been doing before the war with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge. “Logic must take care of itself,” had been the opening entry in his new notebook on August 22. He called it “a singularly profound and significant insight.” (p. 2) The sentence was intended to say, first of all, that logic is self-contained, that it does not rest on anything outside it. But by putting it at the head of his notebook Wittgenstein may also have been expressing the hope that his work in logic would not be affected by the vagaries of the war. “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.[2] 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 wrote on December 6.[3] But progress was often slow and he feared that “the redeeming word has not been spoken.”[4] As long as that was the case, he could only go over the same ground again and again. His most vexing problem at the time was that of “the logical form of the proposition,” a topic he had been exploring with Russell in the preceding years. But his view on the topic was still far from settled. “Does the subject-predicate form exist,” he now asked himself. “Does the relational form exist? Do any of the forms exist at all that Russell and I were always talking about?” (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 scholars in 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’s discussions with Wittgenstein proved equally 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.”[5] 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 now increasingly as a piece of unbearable dogmatism. That conclusion sparked new investigations which led him on an exhausting journey, ”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.”[6] 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. 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.”[7]

There emerges from all this the picture of a restless thinker set on constantly revisiting and reworking what he has previously thought. 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 elaborate 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 stern, 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 them had originally been surrounded by doubts and questions. Some of those propositions came from notes Wittgenstein had compiled for Russell in 1913; many others were taken from the philosophical notebooks he kept during the First World War. 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 the war-time notebooks. Though not all of them have survived, the three notebooks that have permit us to reconstruct much of Wittgenstein’s course of thinking from the beginning of the First World War to January 1917. What we find in them is the record of an intricate back and forth in his thinking on a wide range of philosophical topics. They document continuous small shifts as well as some major turns in Wittgenstein’s thinking and in the end the emergence of a radically new way of conceiving philosophy. The Tractatus was a record of this entire development. Taking note of the long, treacherous journey that led to its composition is, in fact, indispensable for understanding its highly condensed formulations and for recognizing their varied and unstable subsoil.

The journey recorded in Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks begins with questions provoked by Russell’s logical atomism. Russell had come to that doctrine in the late 1890s as a result of his break with F. H. Bradley’s monistic idealism.  His friend G. E. Moore had led the way in an 1899 essay on “The Nature of Judgment.” With the help of a somewhat rudimentary logic Moore had sought to establish that reality was not a single thing – Bradley’s “One” – but  consisted of a multitude of concepts.[8] This so-called turn to realism was thus, in effect, one to a metaphysical pluralism. Russell readily adopted Moore’s pluralistic view and found support for it in the philosophy of Leibniz.[9] 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.”[10] But he remained quite uncertain about the nature of those simples. Were they concepts and judgments, as Moore had 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 the logic he had devised in the previous years and, in particular, his theory of descriptions which seemed to allow one to distinguish between merely apparent objects that could be analyzed away and objects resistant to further analysis.

While Wittgenstein’s war-time notebooks show him deeply immersed, from the first page,  in the problems of logical atomism it wasn’t, however, this doctrine that had initially brought him to work with Russell. When Wittgenstein got to Cambridge in 1911, he was mostly familiar with Russell’s 1903 book The Principles of Mathematics. As a result he had visited Gottlob Frege in Jena, whose logical theories Russell had discussed in a long appendix, and Frege had advised him to go to Cambridge to study with Russell; he had also become fascinated with Russell’s discussion of the logical paradoxes in a second appendix to his book and had written short piece on that topic. He was thus initially primed to focus on Russell’s logic and convinced that he could make a contribution to its further development. “Logic is still in the melting pot,” he wrote brazenly to his mentor in 1912 within a year of having embarked on that project. He was sure that it “must turn out to be a totally different kind than any other science.”[11] Russell, who had spent years of excruciating work on his logic, seems to have taken the remark in good spirits. But, as far as Wittgenstein was concerned, that logic still lacked sufficient unity and simplicity. In logic, he wrote later on in the Tractatus, simplicity was a sign of correctness. In June 1913, he informed Russell accordingly of some ideas he had in this respect: “One of the consequences of my ideas will – I think – be that the whole of logic follows from one proposition only.”[12] His efforts to improve on Russell’s logic took form in two early writings: a set of dense notes written for Russell in 1913 and another set of equally dense remarks dictated to G. E. Moore a year later.[13] Fundamental in them was the distinction between propositions and proper names. “Frege said ‘propositions are names’, Russell said ‘ proposiitons 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 was that they had two poles of in that they could be either true or false. This bi-polarity of the proposition he expected to be one of the unifying principles of his 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 the logic of generalized propositions unexplained and Wittgenstein found himself wrestling with that topc.  In addition there was also still the need to solve the logical paradoxes with helps of a theory of types whose justification was, however, again a problem. 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..

Wittgenstein’s preoccupation with these technical problems, however, made Russell anxious that his student would remain a narrow specialist, lacking an understanding of the broader and deeper philosophical issues with which Russell saw himself concerned. That was, however, a misjudgment. At the end of his notes for Russell, Wittgenstein had sought to to soothe Russell’s anxieties by announcing that “philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics. Logic is its base.” (p. 106) So, metaphysics was after all the goal of Wittgenstein’s project. But he added at this point three other propositions that must have given Russell some pause. “In philosophy there are no deductions; its 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 whose logical atomism was meant precisely to give a deductive and scientific picture of reality. It is far from clear how Wittgenstein himself thought of ho those claims were to be reconciled with his belief that philosophy consisted of logic and metaphysics. He held consistently that philosophy was not a science and in this respect he was certainly at odds with Russell and that proposition was not necessarily incompatible with saying philosophy was made up of logic and metaphysics. But the two other propositions were more of a challenge. How could philosophy be purely descriptive and how could it not give a picture of reality while being at the same time a metaphysics?  As it turned out, Wittgenstein 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. And that philosopher might not be able to provide a picture of reality became clear to him only in the course of his war-time reflections. It entered from there into the Tractatus and became one of Wittgenstein’s leading ideas in the 1930s.

Two things are, in any case, clear from Wittgenstein’s notes for Russell. The first is that already in 1913 Wittgenstein subscribed to a broader philosophical agenda than Russell realized and the second is that this agenda remained undeveloped until he turned to Russell’s logical atomism. That his wartime notebooks begin with than examination of key issues of logical atomism signals, thus, one of those transitions in Wittgenstein’s thinking that were to become definitive of his philosophical life. But it is not difficult to understand why he embarked at this point on the exploration of logical atomism. Atomism has proved an attractive position in the history of philosophy. Democritus and Leucippus were inspired by it and they invented the word “atom for the assumed simple elements.  Plato sketched a version of it in the Theaetetus. Leibniz became its most prominent exponent in modern philosophy and even today it lives a ghostly life in what we call model theory. Wittgenstein himself had, however, grown up with other, more holistic forms of thinking and so Russell’s atomism must have come to him as an appealing and liberating alternative.

His war-time notebooks indicate that he initially identified with much of the program of Russell’s atomism though by no means to all of its details.  He never bought into his mentor’s entire philosophy and certainly not into his social and political opinions. His philosophical discussions with Russell were often stormy. In the notes he wrote for his mentor in 1913, he highlighted various disagreements and laid out how he meant to go beyond Russell’s work.  The war-time notebooks continue that independent line of thinking. From the start, Wittgenstein objects to Russell’s appeal to self-evidence in order to settle questions about logical structure and the nature of the simple objects. “Russell would say ‘Yes! That’s self-evident,’” he wries, but Wittgenstein considers this ridiculous. (p. 3)  Russell had, in fact, devoted a whole chapter of his Theory of Knowledge to defend his reliance on self-evidence, but for Wittgenstein the idea of self-evidence “is and always was whole deceptive.” (p. 4) Such disagreements did not mean that Wittgenstein rejected logical atomism altogether. But 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 most difficult one was, perhaps, how the doctrine could be justified. It could, obviously, not be deduced from observation since that would never deliver “ultimate constituents.” Some kind of analysis was called for and that analysis had to use some kind of logic. That raised, however, immediately two set 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 and for months 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? 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 no satisfactory account of how this was to be done. In his Theory of Knowledge he had said only that the proposition “A is similar to B” is true “when there is a complex composed of A and B and similarity.”[14] 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. According to Russell, those lectures reflected the state of their joint thinking at the moment the war broke out and Wittgenstein was forced to return to Austria. 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 .”[15] But this was not yet enough in Wittgenstein’s eyes. Early on in his war-time notebook he still expresses 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 has 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?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 must 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. “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.62) But was it obvious that the analysis would lead to simple, unanalyzable elements? Was that already contained in the concept of analysis? Or could the analysis go on ad infinitum? Perhaps, one could even speak of simple constituents. Wittgenstein was willing to put particular weight on the transcendental argument that Leibniz had used in his Monadology to argue for the existence of simples. There had to be simples because there were complexes.[16] Had Wittgenstein been inspired by Russell’s book to adopt this Leibnizian line of reasoning? Or had he read Leibniz on his own? There are certainly surprising similarities between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Monadology even though the simples they speak of are quite different. What unites the two writings is their logical starting-point, their contraposition of will and representation, the denial of causal relations, and most of all the course of their reasoning from metaphysical foundations to the questions of ethics, not to speak of the numbering of their propositions. It is useful to remind ourselves here that Wittgenstein drew not only on Frege and Russell for philosophical inspiration. From the private war-time diaries we learn that he was also reading Tolstoy, Emerson, and Nietzsche at the same time as he was laboring over Frege’s and Russell’s ideas. Traces of all these influences are, in fact, noticeable at some point in his notebooks.

His attachment to Russell was to weaken as the war went on. Nine months into the conflict, Wittgenstein’s notebook records a first rupture with Russell’s way of thinking and an indication that a major transition in Wittgenstein’s thinking is on the way. The passage in question occurs in the middle of extensive reflections on the simple constituents of reality. On May 23, 1915, Wittgenstein writes in a tone quite alien to anything he had written before in his notebook: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. There really is only one world soul, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others.” This, he adds, provides the key for deciding “in how far solipsism is a truth.” (p. 49) In the same tone he continues two days later: “The urge towards the mystical comes 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.” (p. 51) None of those words had been prepared by anything earlier in his notebooks. The limits of language and the world, the stress on “my language,” the conception of a world soul, solipsism, the limits of science, the non-scientific character of “our problems,” the mystical — none of those themes had been addressed in the earlier pages. All of them were, moreover, entirely foreign to Russell and his mode of thinking. 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.”[17] His caustic remark provoked Wittgenstein, in turn, to accuse Russell of not having understood his book. 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 to further reflections on the nature of the simple objects – almost, as if nothing had happened. But those few sentences mark, nonetheless, a first step away from Russell and his program and, as it turns out, also from Russell’s understanding of philosophy itself.

From where, then, did these strange new thoughts come? What motivated their intrusion into Wittgenstein’s apparently straightforward attempt to sort out the problems of logical atomism? We don’t know exactly what occasioned them. Was there an external motivation for them? Wittgenstein’s first sentence on May 23 may, in fact, be read as continuing his preceding discussion of simple objects but In a new register suggesting that we have no language-independent means of establishing what is simple. Some such thought had, indeed, already occurred to him two weeks earlier: “The simple thing for us is: the simplest thing that we know – the simplest thing to which our analysis can advance – it need appear only as a prototype, as a variable in our propositions.” (p. 47) Even so, the new emphasis on language being “my language” introduces an element of the subjective into Wittgenstein’s thinking that had not been visibly there before and that has no equivalent in Russell’s philosophy. Wittgenstein’s turn against Russell becomes even more evident in the next two sentences with their talk of solipsism and the world soul, themes onc again alien to Russell. And, if this is not enough, his subsequent appeal to the mystical and his insistence that there are “personal” problems that cannot be resolved scientifically are clearly meant to draw a line between his own view and Russell’s scientistic outlook.

Though none of these reservations had made an appearance before in his notebook, Wittgenstein was also not making them up on the spot. He was not just relying here on momentary inspiration. His turn against Russell signaled, rather, a return to another, earlier set of ideas that had become submerged when he went to Cambridge and had aligned himself there with Russell’s program. Those earlier ideas had come to Wittgenstein largely from Arthur Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation. Georg Henrik von Wright recalled later that Wittgenstein had told him once that “his first philosophy was a Schopenhauerian epistemological idealism.”[18] This is not implausible since Schopenhauer’s book had been immensely a popular in Fin de Siècle Vienna. Its pronounced pessimism and implied skepticism fitted the mood of the Austro-Hungarian empire in decline. From Ludwig Boltzmann to Sigmund Freud and from Fritz Mauthner to Otto Weininger, the Viennese authors with whom Wittgenstein was familiar, had all been affected by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. But we have to assume that by the time he arrived in Cambridge Wittgenstein had abandoned (or was about to abandon) this early excursion into philosophy. He may have been drawn to Russell’s atomism, in fact, precisely because it provided an antidote to the overwhelming cultural influence of Schopenhauer’s view of the world as unindividuated metaphysical will. But it would be mistaken to think that the association with Russell completely extinguished Wittgenstein’s interest in Schopenhauer.  The later parts of his war-time notebooks and the Tractatus itself show how much Schopenhauer was still very much on his mind. He appears to have remained particularly attracted Schopenhauer’s heterodox views on ethics which rejected moral rules and, in particular Kant’s categorical imperative, and described ethics as a way of seeing the world rather than of acting in it. Wittgenstein’s notebooks and the Tractatus also draw on   Schopenhauer’s reflections on the will and, not least, on his philosophy of art.  Most striking is perhaps that the beginning and end of the Tractatus mimic the first and last sentence of Schopenhauer’s book.

Just as significant as the presence of Schopenhauer in the notebook passage from May 23 is that of Fritz Mauthner, the author of three expansive volumes of Contributions to a Critique of Language. The work argued for “a critique of language which would be a meta-critique of reason” in a phrase Mauthner had borrowed from Fritz Jacobi, the friend of Immanuel Kant, who had taken the idea in turn from the dark musings of Johann Georg Hamann. Wittgenstein had certainly read the first volume of Mauthner’ book by the beginning of the war and would later familiarize himself with Hamann’s writings.[19] He was interested, thus, in ways of thinking about language that were distinct from what he had learned from Frege and Russell. It was Mauthner who impressed on him the idea that what we abstractly call “language” is  in reality always “my language.” It was Mauthner also who had discussed solipsism and the world soul in his magnum opus.. Wittgenstein’s notebook entry of May 23 marks thus a tur and return not only to Schopenhauer but also to Mauthner. And this return to Mauthner was potentially most devastating for his attachment to Russell’s atomism For it would lead Wittgenstein in the later parts of his notebooks to adopt Mauthner’s skepticism about all philosophical theorizing. It was this “pyrrhonian” Mauthner who supplied him with his concluding metaphor in the Tractatus of the ladder one must throw away after one has climbed up on it. Even so, Wittgenstein’s adoption of Mauthner’s views had been selective. In the  Tractatus he was still sufficiently in the thrall of Russell’s logic to conclude that critique of language could not be conducted “in Mauthner’s sense” by remaining within the confines of ordinary language.[20] At that point Wittgenstein had still faith in Russell’s distinction between the apparent and the real logical form of the proposition. It was only after he had abandoned the Tractatus that he discovered the whole force of Mauthner’s meta-critique of reason by means of a critique of language.

Perplexing as Wittgenstein turn and return to Schopenhauer and Mauthner on May 23 proves to be, just as perplexing is the abrupt way the excursion ends. Within two days, we find him back at the pains-taking task of trying to determine the identity of the simples of atomist lore. It was as if nothing had happened. But how solid was his 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 notes covering that period are now lost. But it is clear from the following notebook that a year later he has not yet given up on logical atomism. That notebook begins 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. On April 15 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 simple objects are not immediately accessible to us, our claim that there are such comes to being 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 even be the case 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)

All the same, his notes indicate also a growing distance to Russell’s version of logical atomism. That becomes dramatically apparent in the spring of 1916. The episode begins on May 6 with Wittgenstein addressing once more the theme of the limits of science. “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 fresh attention to Schopenhauer and Mauthner who both question the explanatory power of science. There follows a short passage on logical operations followed by a hiatus of three weeks in which Wittgenstein remains silent. When he resumes his notebook entries on June 11 we are faced with the unexpected question: “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” (p. 72) The two topics prove to be intimately linked for him. “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.”  The question about God and the purpose of life initiates 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 exploded into 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 away from the problems of logical atomism only to return to them shortly afterwards, these new reflections continue for several months interspersed with only occasional glances back at his previous concerns with the atomist program. Finally, on November 21, the current of speculative thought appears to be running dry and we find Wittgenstein fretting once more over the question of the general form of the proposition. While we can’t say 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 in the war. How can one find inner peace in this situation?  “Only by living in a way that pleases God. Only in this way is it possible to bear life.”[21] 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.” [22] Worse is still to come. In June, the Russians launch a major attack on the Austrian forces in the so-called “Brusilov offensive.” Thousands of Austrian soldiers lose their lives, many others 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…”[23]

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 logical ratiocination. 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 the 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 dual picture. We can find it 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 says that what we call “the world” is really always 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? Russell had talked of knowledge as based on a fundamental relation of acquaintance and of acquaintance as “a dual relation between a subject and an object.”[24]  But this subject, he had insisted, was not to be identified with an I or self. There was no need to assume a persistent self. Wittgenstein had never felt much attraction to Russell’s doctrine of acquaintance. His work was not meant to be epistemological in character. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology,” he had written to Russell in 1913, and as such of minor interest. (p. 106) That was also something he also meant to convey in his programmatic statement that logic must take care of itself. In his notebook he rejects Russell’s conception of acquaintance out of hand. “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 writes, 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) This 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) This subject or self it to be conceived will as he writes, once again in line with Schopenhauer. 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. Ethics is thus not concerned with advancing 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 philosophy now in a new, profoundly different way. It will take him the rest of his life, though, to discover the consequences of this revelation.

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.”[25] That treatise was still to be written a year later. Wittgenstein did not get around to that concluding task till the middle 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 set to work on the text of the Tractatus. The assumption is that he completed at least one more notebook and possibly two before that he began work on his book.  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 displayed the same kind of  back and forth in his thinking. There was, no doubt, also additional 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 two write a deductive 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 the material as 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.

In putting his material together, Wittgenstein sought to impose on it a semblance of order by arranging his propositions according to the numbering system he had borrowed from Principia Mathematica. There were the major proposition numbered 1 through 7. Others were given decimal figures to indicate their place in the text and their relations to each other. Proposition 1.1 was meant to be subsidiary to proposition 1 and proposition 1.11 to 1.1, and so on. Some propositions ended up with lengthy decimals to indicate their minor place in the whole, as, e. g., proposition 5.47321. The scheme was ingenious and the scholars have been busy trying to decipher its significance. But how seriously can one take it? Not all of the seven major propositions appear to be of equal weight. Proposition 6 provides a notation for truth-functions which appears to be a greatly more specific subject-matter than the ones he addresses in the other major propositions. The principle that “logic must take care of itself” has been relegated to number 5.473 even though Wittgenstein had declared it to be a singularly profound insight in his initial notebook entry and the proposition retained a fundamental significance. Russell’s distinction between the apparent form of a proposition and its real logical form on which so much in Wittgenstein’s own account of atomism depends is mentioned only in 4.0031. The claim that logical constant do not represent anything, which Wittgenstein himself characterizes a Grundgedanke, is stated only in 4.0312. Caution is thus in place. One must not be seduced by Wittgenstein’s numbers.

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. Looked at from the perspective of his war-time notebooks, the text suggests rather a course of thinking that leads from an apparently self-evident logical atomism to the concluding call to overcome its propositions in order to see the world in the right way. We should the perhaps read the Tractatus despite its name not as a treatise but as the record of a philosophical journey that Wittgenstein has undertaken in the previous years. Interpreters tend to look at philosophical texts in another way. They operate on a principle of charity which assumes that a philosophical text must be advancing a a coherent theory. In the face of obvious difficulties in applying that principle they often struggle in their attempts to find the expected theoretical lesson. The readers of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus have often done so by focusing only on part or another of the text. Some have taken it to be a straightforward contribution to the philosophy of logical atomism; others have considered it to be of piece of logic and a theory of meaning. For yet another group of interpreters the Tractatus is a lesson in philosophical skepticism. There are finally those for whom it is an essay on ethics. Each one of those interpretations has to ignore, reject, or downplay parts of the text. The Tractatus is, in fact, all and none of what the interpreters have made of it. It is an exercise in philosophical thinking that takes one over uncharted territories and produces a map that can be confusing. It exemplifies what philosophy is like when once one has crossed such territories and tried to decipher their maps. Wittgenstein’s hope in the Tractatus was that after this exercise one might be able to leave philosophy alone. Philosophy is “not a doctrine but a practice. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations.”[26] At the time, Wittgenstein thought that one would have to give such elucidations only once and could thus be done with the work of philosophy. That was an error as he came ultimately to see.

When he spoke to members of the Vienna Circle in 1929 Wittgenstein appeared once again to be drawn to the question how to understand atomism. He still wanted to think of  propositions as pictures of states of affairs, but he allowed now that they might turn out to be  “incomplete pictures” that represented only some features of what they depicted. An identity of sign and signified was thus not required. 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.”[27] 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, there was no more talk of simple objects. G. E. Moore attended his lectures in this period and kept copious notes of them but in none of them did Wittgenstein contemplate 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.”[28]  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.”[29]

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 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’.” [30] There were numerous kinds of language-games. There were multiple world views, he said in his late notes, each with its own internal logic. And there were even multiple kinds of mathematics. Russell’s atomism, it appears, had cured him once and for all of a hankering for an ultimate unity of things.

But his own reflections on logical atomism had also cured him of the wish to look for a 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.”[31] That sort of  philosophizing he now considered to be dead and what was left of it was dispersed in different places. His own work concerned only some of what remained. ”One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called ‘philosophy’.”[32] In a daring 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 in transition.

 

 

Notes

[1] Page references are to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-1916, edited by G.H. von Wright and G.E.M Anscombe; 2^nd edition, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1979. Translations modified (Text also referred to hereafter as NB)

[2] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Geheime Tagebücher 1914-1916, edited by Wilhelm Baum, Turia & Kant, Vienna 1991, p. 13. (Hereafter referred to as GT)

[3] GT, p. 49.

[4] GT, p. 45.

[5] Brian McGuinness, “Vorwort,” in Friedrich Waismann: Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, edited by B. F. McGuinness, Basic Blackwell, Oxford 1967, p. 26.

[6] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte, Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester 2009, p. 3.

[7] Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright, Harper & Row, New York 1972, p. 70.

[8] G. E. Moore, “The Nature of Judgment,” Mind, vol. 8, 1899, p. 182: “It seems necessary then to regard the world as formed of concepts.”

[9] Bertrand Russell, A Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibniz, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 1900

[10] Bertrand Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomism,” in Russell, Logic and Knowledge. Essays 1901-1950, edited by Robert Charles Marsh, George Allen & Unwin, London 1956, p. 270.

[11] Letter to Russell of June 12, 1912, NB, p. 120.

[12] Letter to Russell of October 30 1913, NB, p. 123.

[13] Published as appendix I and II in NB.

[14] Bertrand Russell, Theory of Knowledge. The 1913 Manuscript, edited by Elizabeth Ramsden Eames, Routledge, New York and London 1992, p. 149.

[15] Russell, “The Philosophy of Logical Atomismn,” p. 275.

[16] Leibniz, Monadology 1-3.

[17] Bertrand Russell, „Introduction,“ in Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London 1922, p. 22

[18] Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir with a biographical sketch by Georg Henrik von Wright, Oxford U. P., London 1962,  p. 5.

[19] Alexander Stern, The Fall of Language: Benjamin and Wittgenstein on Meaning, Harvard U. P. Cambridge Mass. 2019.

[20] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 40031.

[21] GT, p. 70.

[22] GT, p. 71.

[23] GT, p. 74.

[24] Russell, Theory of Knowledge, p. 5.

[25] Georg Henrik von Wright, “The Origin of the Tractatus,” in v. Wright, Wittgenstein, Blackwell, Oxford 1982, p. 70

[26] Tractatus, 4.112.

[27] Wittgenstein und der Wiener Kreis, p. 42.

[28] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933. From the Notes of G. E. Moore, edited by David G. Stern, Brian Rogers, and Gabriel Citron, Cambridge U. P., Cambridge 2016, p. 253

[29] Lectures, Cambridge 1930-1933, p. 88.

[30] Philosophical Investigations, 23

[31] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books, Harper & Row, New York 1960,  p. 18.

[32] The Blue and Brown Books, p. 28.

Schopenhauer as educator

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, and Adolf Hitler, the dictator, were born just six days apart in the Spring of 1889 – Wittgenstein into golden luxury in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hitler into a modest family and a provincial town at the Empire’s border to Germany. Different as those backgrounds were, Wittgenstein’s and Hitler’s life-paths came to parallel each other at certain points and occasionally even to intersect. I am concerned in this essay with Wittgenstein’s pessimism about his time but have found it useful to look also at Adolf Hitler as an antithetical figure propelled by another kind of pessimism. The contrast between the two men may help to illuminate questions about their and our age, about technology and technological thinking, and, possibly, about pessimism itself.

The first thing Wittgenstein and Hitler shared was, of course, that both were born into an increasingly unstable multi-national empire. This was, perhaps, less of a problem for Hitler who always thought of himself as German and who grew up hostile to the Empire with its Jewish and Slavic populations. But many others – such as the Wittgensteins with their place in Viennese society and their Jewish ancestry – felt seriously threatened by the unravelling of their social and political order. Pessimism was in the air in Vienna. We hear that Arthur Schopenhauer, the early 19th century pessimist, was avidly read by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Boltzmann, the physicist, Karl Kraus, the literary critic, and Gustav Klimt, the painter, among many others. Ludwig Wittgenstein was no exception. Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation was the first work of philosophy he read, long before he took up the subject at Cambridge in 1911 and it made a lasting impression on him. Even Hitler came under the spell of Schopenhauer and later recounted that “during the whole of World War I carried the five volumes of Schopenhauer’s work in my pack. I have learned much from him.”

In 1904, Wittgenstein’s and Hitler’s paths almost crossed when they both attended the Technical High School at Linz. But they probably never knew each other, because Wittgenstein was one year ahead and Hitler one year behind. Eleven years later both became soldiers in the First World War with Wittgenstein volunteering to join the Austrian forces, while Hitler enlisted, instead, characteristically in the German army. Both came out of the war burned and traumatized. After that their lives began to move in sharply different directions. Wittgenstein saw himself confirmed in his Schopenhauerian pessimism. Hitler, meanwhile, turned from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche whom he misread as an advocate of nationalism and anti-Semitism and the prophet of men like himself – “artist-tyrants” – who would destroy the existing moribund culture and create a new global order “made to endure for millennia.” If he had been a more perceptive reader, he would have realized that Nietzsche’s assertiveness had its own pessimistic underside in the belief in the inevitable coming of nihilism.

We don’t know why two people with more or less similar experiences can nevertheless draw diametrically different conclusions. Are there psychological reasons that make the one withdraw from the world and the other to seek active engagement? Or are the reasons social in that each one of them has been conditioned by background and upbringing to react in a distinctive way – one becoming wary of technological progress and the other a self-declared technophile? Or is it that historical circumstances are configurations – puzzle pictures, in other words, – that can be perceived in utterly different ways and make the one a philosopher and the other into a dictator? But to see Wittgenstein and Hitler simply as antagonistic figures may still be too simple. Could we not also understand them as representing two complementary kinds of pessimism – one of skeptical withdrawal, the other of ideological engagement? One a nihilist in his denial of the will, the other a nihilist in its affirmation?

The First World War had been a war like no other before it. It was a new technological war fought with an array of never before seen weapons: gigantic navies, submarines, planes, bombs, tanks, long-distance cannons, machine guns, and poison gas. Technology displayed itself thus with a heretofore unknown power, foreshadowing yet further advances in armaments in the later parts of the twentieth century and the first decades of our own. The experience of this newly dehumanized warfare, the military defeat of the axis powers on whose side both Wittgenstein and Hitler had fought, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular, convinced both of them that Europe and, indeed, the West as a whole had entered a moment of historical crisis.

We know what brutal conclusions Hitler drew from that conviction. In 1941 he said: “I went to war out of pure idealism; but then one saw thousands maimed and killed and one became conscious of the fact that life is a continuous cruel struggle which ultimately serves the preservation of the race. Some must perish so that others can live.” By then, Hitler had become convinced that the most advanced modern technology was needed for victory in this struggle. One official who saw him in action in that period, describes Hitler as “altogether the type of the totally technologically minded man, the homo faber of modern civilization.” The official had no doubts about Hitler’s “extraordinary interest and uncontestably strong talent in the area of modern technology.” But he also felt that Hitler displayed all the flaws of this type: such as an “atrophy of all powers of the soul” and an entire lack of human feeling. In 1942, Hitler commented on his own preoccupation with technology: “In technological warfare the winner is the one who has a superior weapon at the right moment… One must possess technical superiority at the decisive point. I am, I admit it freely, obsessed with technology (ein Narr der Technik).” Hitler’s obsession with technology extended in all directions. In the military field, he took personal charge of the development of new weapons and during the war “set the monthly target, direction, and size of every production of weapons and ammunition in every detail.” Elsewhere he was obsessed with techniques for propaganda, with the control of large populations, the capturing, transporting, and interning of those he deemed hostile, technical means of mass sterilizing and exterminating . He displayed the same technological drive in the civil arena. Symptomatic for this was the “people’s motorization” campaign he began as soon as he came to power. On September 23, 1933, Hitler addressed workers on the first German “Autobahn” concerning his gigantic project. “Today we stand at the threshold of a tremendous task. .. In future decades transportation will be coupled with these great new roads which we now plan to build throughout Germany.” The engineer Ferdinand Porsche was given the task of creating an affordable “people’s car” (i.e. “Volkswagen”). Hitler himself came lay the foundation stone of the new factory and returned for the rolling out of the first car. The new car technology was to be propagated by car races at the Nürburgring in the Eifel and at the AVUS track in Berlin, events that were transmitted by radio all over Germany.

“I am completely powerless.”

If this was Hitler’s response to the experience of the First World War, how did Wittgenstein react to it? Strangely enough, Wittgenstein, like Hitler, saw the war initially also as a racial struggle. In his diary he wrote on October 25, 1914: “I feel today more than ever the terrible situation of the German race. For it seems to me as much as certain that we cannot prevail against England. The English – the best race in the world – cannot lose. But we can lose and will lose, if not this year then the next. The thought that our race should be beaten depresses me terribly, for I am totally and completely German.” But the lesson he drew from this was very different from Hitler’s for he concluded that one must not let oneself depend on chance, “neither the lucky nor the unlucky one.” In an almost Buddhist spirit (inspired, no doubt, by Schopenhauer), he sought to foster in himself an attitude of acceptance of whatever happens and to free himself thus from the demands of the will.

We can see from Wittgenstein’s war-time diary how he came to this view-point, what it meant for his philosophical thinking, and how it eventually came to shape his Tractatus. He had begun work on that book as soon as he had enrolled in the army. During the course of the war he maintained a series of philosophical notebooks from which he eventually extracted his book. The Tractatus is thus, in the most literal sense, a war book reflecting the course of his thinking in the years from 1914 to 1918.

When he had shown up in Cambridge in 1911, Wittgenstein had initially aligned himself with Russell’s way of seeing and doing philosophy. Russell was imagining at the time “the possibility and importance of applying to philosophical problems certain broad principles of method which have been found successful in the study of scientific questions.” This, he wrote, would make philosophy ultimately “indistinguishable from logic.” As such, it would investigate the logical forms of propositions and the various types of facts and their constituents. Russell concluded programmatically: “A scientific philosophy such as I wish to recommend will be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences; … This possibility of successive approximations to the truth is more than anything else, the source of the triumphs of science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure a progress in method whose importance it would be almost impossible to exaggerate.” Logic, science, and progress were thus the leading ideas in Russell’s philosophical thinking and there is no doubt that Wittgenstein for a while adopted the same objectives. In his “Notes on Logic” from 1913, he declared in the spirit of his philosophical mentor: “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics… Philosophy is the doctrine of the logical form of scientific propositions.” During this period, Russell came to think of Wittgenstein as, in fact, dangerously one-sided in his preoccupation with logic. To his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morell, he wrote of Wittgenstein: “He has not a sufficient wide curiosity or a sufficient wish for a broad survey of the world. It won’t spoil his work in logic, but it will make him always a very narrow specialist.” Russell did evidently not realize that other and older philosophical concerns were also already swirling in Wittgenstein’s mind.

But it needed Wittgenstein’s war experience to bring them back to the surface. The early entries in Wittgenstein’s war-time notebook show how he was still caught in the spirit of Russell’s philosophizing. But this was to change as the war dragged on. In June 1916, Wittgenstein was pulled into the so-called “Brusilov Offensive,” a Russian military campaign in which Wittgenstein’s unit lost 12,500 men out of a total of 16,000. Wittgenstein himself was unsure that he would survive. And he realized at this moment that there was nothing he could do to change that situation. It was then that his philosophical notebook turned from deliberations on logic to thoughts about the world at large and its meaning. “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” he wrote. “I know that this world exists… That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it… I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.”

It was In this situation that his attention returned to authors he knew from his early life in Vienna: Schopenhauer and his treatise The World as Will and Representation; Otto Weininger and his book Sex and Character with its reflections on the nature of the human self; and Fritz Mauthner and his monumental Contributions to a Critique of Language whose preoccupation with ordinary language he still rejected in the Tractatus but whose skepticism about the powers of philosophy he came to share. In addition he was reading others like Tolstoy, Emerson, and Nietzsche. And all these influences converged with the philosophical inspiration he had drawn from the logical writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and flowed into his book. His ultimate goal, he declared at the end of the book, was to see the world aright; but in order to do so one had first to work oneself through the propositions of philosophy but only to overcome them finally and set them aside. “The right method in philosophy,” he concluded was this: “To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. … something that has nothing to do with philosophy.”

These conclusions were certainly no longer inspired by Russell’s way of thinking. In the introduction to the Tractatus which Russell wrote for its original bilingual edition, he praised the work as an achievement in “logical theory” and as such “a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance” but he only skirted the broader concerns of the book. Of Wittgenstein’s new doubts about the possibility of saying anything philosophical Russell wrote sarcastically: “What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.” No wonder that Wittgenstein was incensed by Russell’s words. He accused him of having failed to understand the book and threatened to withdraw it from publication, if it could appear only with Russell’s introduction. He wrote to Russell: ”Now I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical propositions is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions … and what cannot be expressed by propositions.” To another correspondent he wrote: “The point of the book is ethical … my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within as it were, by my book … All of that which many are babbling of today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.

Russell had clearly touched a raw nerve in the author of the Tractatus. He had identified an apparent paradox in the book in that much of it, despite its call for philosophical silence, remained preoccupied with thoughts about logical structure and form. Was Wittgenstein then not, after all, continuing on the track of Russell’s philosophizing? Russell did evidently not see that such a preoccupation could be split off from his own faith in science and progress. He failed to be aware of the modernist conviction that whatever is “higher” (the aesthetic, the ethical, the spiritual) could no longer be represented concretely and in traditional terms but could be made manifest only in its absence by means of abstractions. It was this conviction that drove Adolf Loos, with whom Wittgenstein was at that time closely connected, to conceive of an architectural aesthetics of pure form, stripped of all historical references and ornamentation. The impact of this view on Wittgenstein is apparent in the house that he built in Vienna in the late 1920’s together with his friend, the architect Ludwig Engelmann who had, in turn, be a student of Loos. It was this same modernist awareness that expressed itself in the same period also in the work of Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky.

“May the spirit live,” Wittgenstein had written in his war-time diary. “It alone is the safe harbor, protected, far away from the desolate, infinite, gray sea of happening.” The sentence expresses both the positive and the negative side of the conclusions he was to draw in his Tractatus. On the positive side there was a turn to a new “spirituality”, vividly present in his “Lecture on Ethics” of 1929, on the negative one a turning away from Russell’s faith in science and progress, a turning away from all philosophical theorizing, and distrust of the culture in which it flourished.

“Spengler could be better understood in this way.”

It was more than a decade later that Wittgenstein returned to the philosophical matters he had raised in the Tractatus. That moment proved to be of profound philosophical and personal significance to him; it affected how he would go on to think about philosophy and it certainly changed how he thought about himself and his time.

The turn to the 1930’s was first of all the moment when Wittgenstein began to question the assumptions about logic and language that he had laid out in the Tractatus. He now discovered that he could no longer subscribe to Russell’s conception of logical analysis and his conviction that language could be understood on the model of the logical calculus. He found himself, instead, drawn Mauthner’s view on language which he had explicitly rejected in the Tractatus. “All philosophy is ‘critique of language’,” he had written there, “(but not in Mauthner’s sense).” This despite the sympathy he felt even then for Mauthner’s skepticism about philosophy. Adopting a metaphor borrowed from Mauthner’s book – who had taken it, in turn, from Sextus Empiricus, the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptic – Wittgenstein had concluded the Tractatus by saying that one had to abandon his philosophical propositions to see the world aright. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way,” he had written: “He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” The Tractatus had, in effect, used Russell’s conception of logic, language, and meaning to motivate Mauthner’s skepticism. By 1930, Wittgenstein, however, began to discard these remnants of Russell’s view of philosophy.

The turn to the 1930’s was also of profound personal significance for Wittgenstein. It was the moment at which in reaction to the rising wave of antisemitism, stirred up by Hitler and his followers, he became for the first fully conscious of his own Jewish family background. And thus he could no longer retain the thought that he was “totally and completely German” and that recent history had to be understood as the struggle between his own, the German race, and the English one. When Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, he found himself reluctantly having to make a choice between a German and an English passport. He weighed the possibility of Irish citizenship, but in the end, for practical reasons and without deeper convictions, agreed to become a British subject. Some of his family members stayed behind in Vienna. In the end, after handing over their foreign stocks, they managed to obtain a certificate from Berlin declaring Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, the grandfather of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and all his descendants to be purely Aryan even though Hermann Christian’s father had been Moses Mayer who had changed his name and had his son baptized. It has been said that Hitler personally approved this certificate.

The political turmoil of the late 1920’s and early 30’s affected Wittgenstein’s entire outlook on the world. This turn comes first into focus in a projected preface from 1930 for a book he never completed. He wrote then that the spirit of his work was not “the spirit of the great stream of European and American civilization.“ The words make clear that Germany and England were for him now part of one single civilization and as such equally problematic. He also wrote: “The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time. In its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author.” Modern civilization, he added, was obsessed with the idea of progress. “Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure.” In reading these words, we are reminded that Wittgenstein’s father had been a dedicated engineer and wealthy industrialist who had long insisted that his son should follow him in that career. Wittgenstein had veered away from this trajectory already before the war when he abandoned his engineering studies and had begun to work on logic with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. But by 1930, Wittgenstein felt just as alienated from Russell’s scientific conception of philosophy as he had earlier from his father’s preoccupation with engineering and industry. So, in his 1930 note he added that the spirit of the typical western scientist was also alien to him. “He will in any case not understand the spirit in which I write… I am not interested in building a structure … I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists.”

Such thoughts sharpened his view of what he himself was seeking to do in his philosophy. In his Blue Book he spoke of a mistaken “craving for generality” that spoiled philosophy. One of the reasons for that craving was the modern obsession with science. “Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted 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.” In this modern age, Wittgenstein told his students at the same time, “the nimbus of philosophy has been lost.” We have now philosophers skillfully operating their formal methods. “But once a method has been found the opportunities for the expression of personality are correspondingly restricted. The tendency of our age is to restrict such opportunities; this is the character of an age of declining culture or without culture.”

Wittgenstein’s skepticism about the age in which he was living was re-enforced by his belated reading of Oswald Spengler’s book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). The book had been an instant bestseller when it appeared in 1918, at the end of the First World War. The title suggested an account of the military disaster that had befallen the central European powers. But Spengler’s book had, in fact, been conceived before 1914 and was meant to provide a much more ambitious “sketch of a morphology of world history,” as its subtitle said. Wittgenstein, reading the book ten years after its appearance, the end of the war, and the completion of his Tractatus, understood immediately what the book was really about.
Spengler had been motivated by two great ideas: the first was cultural pluralism and the second historical determinism. He had rejected the conception of world history as a single, linear, and cumulative process. Instead he had described it as constituted by a series of separate, self-contained cultures that each had their own unifying idea – a ground-plan that determined every element of the culture from its art and religion to its science and mathematics. Spengler admitted therefore “no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico · separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.” Every culture had for Spengler “its own possibilities of self-expression.” “I see world-history,” he wrote, “as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.” The development of each culture and its formative idea followed, moreover, – so Spengler sought to show – the same fixed course which led organically from an initial larval state through an age of unfolding maturity to a terminal phase, which Spengler called “civilization.’’ “Every Culture,” Spengler insisted, “has its own civilization … Civilization is the inevitable destiny of a Culture. … Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.”

Spengler concluded that his comparative analysis of world-cultures could reveal also the current state and future of the West. It would show that Western culture had entered now into the age of civilization. And with the assumption of historical determinism in hand, Spengler went on to argue that such a comparison of the West with cultures that had already completed their course (such as that of ancient Hellenism) one could foresee the inevitable end of Western culture. The first phase of that process, he thought, had already begun around 1800 and was to conclude around the year 2000. It was characterized by “the domination of money, “democracy,” and of economic powers permeating the political forms and authorities.” The second phase, from 2000 to 2200 would bring about “Caesarism, the victory of power-politics over economics, increasing primitiveness of political forms, the decline of nations into a formless populations, and an imperium of gradually increasing crudity and despotism.” The final phase after the year 2200 would lead to “a world of spoils,” to “Egypticism, Mandarinism, Byzantium,” and finally to “primitive human conditions slowly thrust up into the highly civilized mode of living.”

Theodor Adorno, who was well aware of weaknesses of Spengler’s thought would later write that “the course of world history vindicated his immediate prognoses to an extent that would astonish if they were still remembered.” In criticizing Spengler, he added, “German philosophy and science could bring to bear only pedantic punctiliousness in concrete matters, the rhetoric of conformist optimism in its ideas, and often enough an involuntary admission of weakness in the form of the assurance that things aren’t really all that bad.” Spengler saw himself, in fact, as a realist rather than a pessimist. But it is easy to see why he attracted readers, like Adorno and Wittgenstein who saw the world in a dark light. Almost twenty years after first reading Spengler’s book, Wittgenstein was still sufficiently in thrall with it to write: “My own thinking about art and values is far more disillusioned than would have been possible for someone 100 years ago… I have cases of decline (Untergang) before my mind which were not in the forefront of people’s minds at that time.” He remained convinced that he was living in an age of civilization in Spengler’s sense, a time in which no real culture was possible anymore and, hence, a time also which limited the power and productivity of intellectual labor – his own included. In such an age, Wittgenstein noted, “forces become fragmented and the power of an individual man is used up in overcoming opposing forces and frictional resistances.” He was thus prepared for the possibility “that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known.”

The traces of Wittgenstein’s encounter with Spengler can be found everywhere in his later work. For one thing, Wittgenstein came to see the world in temporal and historical terms – something that had been sorely missing in the Tractatus. In that work he had treated language as an essentially timeless structure mapping on to the equally timeless structure of the world. The Tractatus had barely acknowledged the temporality of things and it had not even mentioned that the world had a history. “What has history to do with me?” he had written in his war-time notebook. “Mine is the first and only world.” The Tractatus foreshadowed thus the coming of a philosophical movement that would eschew history in the name of formal analysis. But Wittgenstein’s own thinking after 1930 was to diverge from this new trend. Not that he ever became a systematic philosopher of time and history. But he began to think about language under the sign of its temporality. What mattered to him now was the use of language, rather than its supposedly determinate, a-temporal structure. And this use, he recognized, takes place in time and changes over time. Wittgenstein’s late reflections in On Certainty about the existence of different world-views with their own distinct internal logic was evidently in debt to Spengler. Like Spengler, he came to think that world-history divides into different cultures that cannot be ordered along a single axis of progress. There are, Wittgenstein concluded, different world-views which have their internal coherence and which allow thought to move within them. Each of these views is committed to assumptions that it takes for granted. But these assumptions may still change over time. The riverbed of thought may move and so one world-view may emerge out of another one; one culture may change into another.

For all that, Wittgenstein was not an uncritical reader of Spengler’s book. From the start, he never accepted the claim that each culture is characterized by one single formative idea that determines all its significant contents. And he also never subscribed to Spengler’s historical determinism. He argued, instead, that we can compare cultures with human families: “Within a family there is family resemblance, though you will also find a resemblance between members of different families.” It was in this encounter with Spengler that Wittgenstein first came to the notion of family resemblance that was to play such a crucial role in his subsequent reflections on language, meaning, mathematics, and the mind. In critiquing Spengler, he meant to say that individual cultures, far from being hermetically sealed off from each other by their formative ideas, should be thought of as diverse and multi-featured just like any biological family. While Spengler had written of a pluralism of cultures, Wittgenstein thus sought, in addition, to emphasize pluralism within cultures. He also refused to agree with Spengler’s view that human cultures are so different from each other that there cannot be any understanding across the lines of cultural division. On Spengler’s view, we have to assume that they are, in effect, incommensurable whereas Wittgenstein stressed the resemblances between cultures that allow for the possibility of mutual understanding and interaction.

“Perhaps, one day this civilization will produce a culture.”

It would be wrong to think of Wittgenstein as denying the insights of science or of wanting to destroy the works of technology. What concerned him, rather, was the fact that science and technology have become the template on which the entire culture, including its philosophy, were shaping themselves. This, he felt in agreement with Spengler, would lead to the death of living culture and thus to the petrified state of civilization. His thinking met at this point with that of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, like Wittgenstein and Hitler, had been born in 1889. He, too, had been a soldier in the First World War, and while his experience had been less traumatizing than that of these two others, the war and his aftermath had still convinced him that he was living at a moment of world-historical crisis. Like Wittgenstein he read and was influenced by Spengler’s, Decline of the West. In 1920, two years after the publication of that work and early on in his own career, he delivered a lecture on the book. Its text is unfortunately lost and we have no report on its contents, but Spengler’s book certainly retained Heidegger’s attention. In his subsequent writings Spengler’s name occurs frequently. While those references are often critical in tone, it is clear that without Spengler’s influence Heidegger might never have conceived of his own time in the way he did: as an age of the complete forgetting of the question of being and one in which everything is reduced to being a mere resource. Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, was no technophobe or enemy of science; both of them rather sought to remind us of the need to resist a merely technological form of thinking.

Against the tendencies of the culture, Wittgenstein sought to define a new way of doing philosophy whose aim was neither scientific nor technological. Where he saw science as motivated by the search for general, explanatory laws, he wanted philosophy to attend to the particular. “Where others pass by, I stand still,” he wrote. His new philosophy was to be alert in particular to what differentiates things, to their multiplicity and diversity. For this reason he had contemplated giving his Philosophical Investigations the motto: “I will teach you differences,” a phrase chosen from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Instead, he eventually adopted an equally apt sentence from the Austrian poet Nestroy which said that progress “looks always greater than it really is.” Wittgenstein was convinced that the most pressing and deepest philosophical puzzles came from not paying attention to what is close and at hand. The solution of these puzzles, he was certain, would not be found in ever more elaborate theorizing. The true goal of philosophy was, rather, to free the mind from the illusionary tendencies to which it is prone. “What is your aim in philosophy?” he asks in his Philosophical Investigations and he replies: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” The aim of philosophy was, in other words, to liberate the mind from its entrapments by letting it retrace the particular steps by which it had got into its dilemma. Wittgenstein recognized at this point an affinity to Freud’s psychoanalysis. While he rejected Freud’s elaborate and reductive theorizing, he identified with his psycho-analytic practice which he considered a model for the proper conduct of philosophy, “The philosopher treats a question as one treats a disease.” And like the work of the psychoanalyst, that work “consists in resembling reminders”

Time has passed. The protagonists of my story are long gone. Spengler died in 1936 at odds with the regime that Hitler had brought to power but also convinced that he had correctly predicted the appearance of a new “Caesarist” form of rule. Hitler killed himself in 1945 in the rubble of the empire he had meant to last for a thousand years. Wittgenstein died peacefully in 1951. In one of his last notes he wrote: “It is so difficult to find the beginning.” But knowing that he would soon be dead, he added: “Here is still a big gap in my thinking. And I doubt whether it will be filled now.” For all his anxiety about the times through which he had lived, his final message to his friends was: “Tell them that I have lived a happy life.” Heidegger died in 1976, still looking somberly at his age. He concluded an interview with the magazine Spiegel that he wanted to be published after his death, with a word from his favorite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Only a God can save us.”

The West is still powerful today and, perhaps, even flourishing. Science and technology have made further strides. The scars of the First and Second World War are hardly visible any longer. There is still creative life, or so it seems. Can we then still speak of a decline of the West? The answer is “yes” if we mean the term in the way Spengler, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger understood it. Their concern was not with science and technology as such but with the fact that they have become increasingly the templates on which everything else in society is understood, judged, and adjudicated. They saw this as an end-stage in the development of a culture, as a becoming cold and rigid of something that had once been alive and vital. Wittgenstein, in particular, worried over how we have reduced philosophy to the model of scientific theorizing and how this has distorted and impoverished what philosophy can be and once was.

We certainly need to modify and expand Spengler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Heidegger’s perspective. They saw science and technology as part of Western culture and understood the threat they pose as specific to the West. We have come to understand since then that science and technology are cross-cultural forces. They bear on every culture in the world, from the smallest to the biggest, from the indigenous cultures of the Amazonian Indians to a grand one like China. Science and technology and the modes of thinking they bring along affect every human form of life, transform it, and press it into a particular pattern. If this is so, and this represents a threat to living culture, we must speak no longer only of a decline of the West but of the possibility of a global decline – one that manifests itself here in China, in India, in every continent on earth and not only in the Western world. In China we see today a country that has made great and necessary progress in science and technology, but we also see a place in which the danger of losing the vitality of its ancient culture is most evident.

The decline we face has a peculiar character. It may go together with gigantic systems of economic and political power. It may even see those systems persist and grow ever more complex. The decline may be all around us, confining and distorting, while we imagine that we are flourishing. The paradox is that the power, order, stability, and efficient organization of 21st century states may turn out to be exactly signals of this decline. Spengler could still be hopeful in his view, despite his forebodings over the state of Western civilization, since he thought of the decline as confined to the West and thus leaving open the possibility of the emergence of a new vital culture in some other place on earth. But if the condition he diagnosed is truly global, this hope is no longer available to us. It seems to me possible that Wittgenstein came eventually close to that view. It may have been in consequence of it that he began to think that, if there was the hope for a new culture, it would have to arise in the middle of the old and not elsewhere.

In the years after 1930, he began to think intensively about a kind of philosophizing that was needed free ones from the confining modes of science and technology – a liberating sort of philosophy that could deliver us, the West and the rest, from the bewitchments of the mind amongst which was for him our obsession with scientific and technological progress and with scientific and technological forms of thinking. This thought had been with him in some form or other ever since the Tractatus. There he had conceived of a philosophical attitude that would set aside theorizing in the scientific style in favor of a genuine seeing of the world. We can call this a visionary attitude, if we want to. With the 1930’s and Spengler’s influence on him, he began to realize that there were different ways of viewing the world, different world-views and that the task of philosophy was not to persist in any one of them, certainly not in our modern scientific and technological view of things, but perhaps also not in that view-point of complete powerlessness he had adopted in the Tractatus. But after his encounter with Spengler, he came to look for a more active way of opposing the slide into the dead end of civilization. At this time he undertook a critique of the British anthropologist Frazer who had argued that mythological thinking was just a step towards scientific theorizing. Wittgenstein concluded that the mythological form of thought has its own grammar and justification different from that of the logic of scientific reasoning. Mythological thought, he maintained, was not after reductive and causal explanation of phenomena and their subsumption under general laws; it aimed rather at interpreting and giving meaning to the concrete phenomena of human life. There was, of course, no way of returning to mythological thinking. The question was now whether philosophy could develop its own distinctive way of looking at things. This might involve thinking in terms of a visionary form of philosophy, or of descriptive and phenomenological one, or even a therapeutic forms but none of these would be engaged in formulating general theories, striving to attain the status of a progressive science..

Wittgenstein understood how difficult this project would be and how difficult it would be to move an entire culture from the track on which it was traveling. In the preface of his Philosophical Investigations he spoke of “the darkness of this time” that would make it unlikely that his thought would be understood and he expressed fear the work, “in its poverty,” might not succeed in doing what it intended to do. He wrote in another place in the same spirit: “The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it is only possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured through a changed mode of thought and life, not through a medicine invented by an individual. Think of the use of the motor-car producing or encouraging certain sicknesses, and the human species being plagued by such sicknesses until, from some cause or other, as the result of some development or other, it abandons the habit of driving.”

Was Wittgenstein thinking here of Hitler’s “people’s motorization” campaign? We should not dismiss that possibility. But more important is his conclusion that philosophical thinking alone cannot bring the technological Behemoth under control. What is needed is more than a changed mode of thought; life itself must change. What when was he doing in the face of this realization? What did he assume his philosophizing to amount to? Did he see it as a mere place holder? Keeping a form of thinking alive, perhaps for only a few, until a new culture would emerge? Or was it meant to be a first, tentative step towards such a culture? Was Wittgenstein returning here to his earlier sense of being completely powerless? Martin Heidegger leaves us with similar questions. What did he think he was doing by recalling the question of being? Did he mean simply to remind us in an age of forgetfulness that there was more than one way to conceive of being – not only as a resource as our technological made of life continuously suggests? In the end, Heidegger could only say that we would have to wait for a new clearing, to ready ourselves for a new understanding of being that might come to us some day, perhaps unasked for. What more could the philosopher do?

Wittgenstein’s Tractatus begins with two stark assertions about the world and these are followed by a series of further remarks on the same topic later in the text. These assertions deserve more attention than our interpreters have given them so far because they open up to some of the deepest layers of the Tractatus as I have tried to show in an essay entitled “Wittgenstein’s World.” I now want to turn to a second, closely connected topic that Wittgenstein also addresses in the Tractatus that calls equally for more examination. It is the topic of our relation to the world. The Tractatus speaks of this in three interconnected ways. Where the book had begun with an assertion about the world being all that is the case, it ends with the admonition that we must “see the world rightly.” (TLP, 6.54) Throughout the Tractatus as well as in later writings, Wittgenstein speaks of the seeing of things and of seeing them in the right way. We should therefore ask what it means to see the world in the right way. Second, Wittgenstein also talks in the Tractatus of our view or views of the world. There is, he says, a modern view of the world (Weltanschauung): “At the basis of the whole modern view of the world lies the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanation of natural phenomena.” By contrast “the ancients,” i.e., the world view of the ancients, stopped with God and Fate as unassailable. Both the moderns and the ancients, Wittgenstein adds, “are right and wrong.” “But the ancients were clearer, in so far as they recognized one clear terminus, whereas the modern system makes it appear as though everything were explained.” (TLP 6.371-6.372) Somewhat later he remarks on the same topic: “The view of the world sub specie aeterni is its view as a – limited – whole.” (TLP, 6.45 The notion of a world view is again one that Wittgenstein comes back to in other writings. We want to ask what a world view consists in, according to him, what it means to have a world view, and what it is to see the world as a limited whole.

Finally, the Tractatus speaks of descriptions of the world. “Newtonian mechanics,” we read, “brings the description of the world (Weltbeschreibung) to a unified form.” In the unusually detailed passage 6.341, Wittgenstein imagines different nets superimposed on a surface of irregular spots. Each net can be used to give a description of the surface “in a unified form.” The form of the net, he asserts, is arbitrary but a description of the surface in terms of one net may be simpler than one in terms of another net and for that reason presumably preferable. “To the different networks correspond different systems of describing the world. Mechanics determines one form of the description of the world.” And in conclusion, he emphasizes once again: “Mechanics is an attempt to construct all true propositions that we need for the description of the world according to one single plan.” (TLP, 6.343)

My intention here is to focus first of all on the notion of a description of the world and to work myself forward to an examination of the notion of world view as Wittgenstein uses it, and to raise finally the question what it means to see the world rightly.

Von Humboldt’s Weltbeschreibung

In 1827, Alexander von Humboldt, the famous explorer of the Americas and natural scientist, delivered a much-acclaimed series of lectures in Paris and Berlin in which he sought to bring his entire knowledge of the natural world together into a single narrative account. Almost twenty years later he began to work this material into the form of a book. Its first volume appeared in 1845. Three others followed in the years up to 1859. To indicate the scope and intention of the work von Humboldt revived a term from Pythagorean and Platonic philosophy and called his book: Kosmos. “What provided me the main impetus,” he wrote, “was the desire to see the manifestations of bodily things in their general context, nature as a whole moved and animated by inner forces.” He had, so he added, initially conceived of a description of the earth (an Erdbeschreibung) based on the knowledge he had gathered in his journeys. But his perspective had widened and he was now trying to give an account encompassing everything on earth and in the heavens and so he subtitled his book: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung which we might translate as “Project design for a description of the physical world.”

To von Humboldt’s surprise, his book became an instant bestseller, was quickly translated into the major European languages, and reprinted a number of times during the following decades. After that it was largely forgotten, surpassed by new scientific discoveries and attitudes. But more recently the book has gained some new readers because of its holistic and ecological perspective. In the present context, Humboldt’s work is of interest to me because of the light in throws on Wittgenstein’s use of the somewhat unusual term “Weltbeschreibung.” This is not to suggest that Wittgenstein had read von Humboldt’s work. I am unaware of any evidence to that effect. But given the fame of the work we should not exclude the possibility. Von Humboldt’s thinking and terminology may also, of course, have reached Wittgenstein in another, more indirect fashion. His remarks on the topic of a world description anticipate, in any case, some of Wittgenstein’s thoughts though they also diverge from him in other significant respects. But I assume that Wittgenstein’s thinking on the topic profited in both respects either directly or indirectly from von Humboldt’s treatment.

Von Humboldt’s animating thought was that of the world as a whole. He wanted to achieve, as he put it, “insight into the order of the universe (Weltall).” In the third volume he restated the point once more by explaining that “the main principle of my work … is contained in the drive to understand the phenomena of the world as a principle of nature, to show how in particular groups of these phenomena their shared determination has been recognized, i.e., the rule of great laws, and how one rises from these laws to the investigation of their original interconnection.” Von Humboldt was clear that natural science would always have to do with the investigation of particulars. The project of a world-description was by no means itself a science. “What I call a physical world-description … does therefore not lay claim to the rank of a rational science of nature; it is a thoughtful reflection on the empirical phenomena as a natural whole (als eines Naturganzen).” He even called his book at times very modestly “conversations about nature.” He also spoke of it as a poetic and artistic work and as nature painting (Naturgemälde), analogous, perhaps, to a landscape painting. Von Humboldt was not even sure whether we could ever come up with a complete world-description and he certainly didn’t assume that he was giving one. The natural sciences are still developing, he wrote, and their researches may never come to an end. Often we lack knowledge of the causal relations. The kind of world description that was now possible was therefore, in fact, “only in some parts a world-explanation. The two expressions can as yet not be considered to mean the same.” For all these reasons, von Humboldt called his book a mere “Entwurf” for a world-description – a project design, as I translate the term; we might also say a sketch.

He qualified his project moreover, by calling it a “physical” world-description or a description of the physical world. It was the material universe that concerned him, not any separate ideal or spiritual reality. But he wanted to describe this physical world in an integral manner from the most distant stars to the smallest plants on earth. His account was meant to unite the “uranological and telluric spheres,” as he put it, the astronomical and the terrestrial domain as well as their interconnection. He saw human life, moreover, as part of this whole, not as separated from it. “Nature is for thoughtful reflection a unity in a multiplicity, a combination of a manifold in form and mixture, an encompassing notion of natural object and natural forces as a living whole.” The human species reworks the material that the sense present and “the products of such mental labor belong just as essential to the domain of the cosmos as the internally reflected phenomena.’’ The diversity of human cultures and human languages are part of the cosmic whole. “World-description and world-history are for that reason located in the same experiential plain.”

While he considered the project of a physical world-description as new, von Humboldt assumed that even our most primitive ancestors had a dark feeling “of the unity of the natural powers, of the mysterious tie that connect the sensory and the supersensory.” But in the absence of sufficient empirical knowledge, these world views had been expressed in numerous, different, and sometimes fantastic forms. In the Introduction to his first volume von Humboldt promised, among other things, a “history of world views, i.e., of the gradual dawning of the concept of the interaction of forces in nature as a whole.” In the end he limited himself, however, to a summary account of this development from the early Greeks to Newton. The ancient Greeks had initially venerated “the rule of spiritual powers in human form.” More abstract forms of world view had been developed by the Ionian and Pythagorean philosophers. Von Humboldt treated with sympathy, in particular, the Aristotelian view of the world but then jumped quickly to an “expansion of cosmic views” in the 13th and 14th century. With a mere reference to Roger Bacon, Albertus Magnus and his Liber Cosmographicus, and Peter d’Ailly, he jumped to Giordano Bruno, Kepler and his Mysterium cosmographicum, Descartes and his Traité du Monde, and from there to what he called Newton’s “immortal work.” Newton, he wrote, had taken an essential step in the development of world views; he had “elevated physical astronomy into a solution of one of the great problems of mechanics, a mathematical science.” His words made clear that he saw Newton as a forerunner to his own physical world description.

Two points stand out in von Humboldt’s story. The first is his pre-occupation with the concepts of unity, oneness, wholeness, of “inner links between the universal and the particular.” He would sometimes speak of this totality (Weltall, Naturganzes) in a scientific spirit as held together by universal laws (Weltgesetze), as something to be accounted for in the spirit of Newton with the help of a mathematized science of mechanics; but he would also allow himself at times a more Romantic characterization of this totality as a “living whole,” as something built on a world plan (Weltplan) and embodying an all-encompassing idea (Weltgedanke).

The second important is that he considered this concern with the totality of the world a an essential human drive for “the first, highest, and inner purpose of intellectual activity consists in the discovery of natural laws, the exploration of the orderly structure of natural formations, insight into the necessary connection of all changes in the universe.” But contemplation of the world as a unity had in addition a still deeper meaning. It gives aesthetic (and implicitly moral) satisfaction. Nature, von Humboldt wrote “is the realm of freedom” and it can provide us with a deep sense of freedom. What we call the enjoyment of nature is entrance in to this freedom (Eintritt in das Freie).” The early pages of von Humboldt’s Kosmos are for that reason devoted to impress on his readers the idea of the enjoyment of nature. This enjoyment is by no means diminished, it is, in fact, deepened, by a proper scientific understanding of the world.

My project is simple but demanding. I am trying to reread Wittgenstein from the beginning without, however, relying on any established interpretations. My question is whether we can look at his work with fresh eyes. Ignoring the halo of secondary writing that now surrounds that work does not mean that I will always end up disagreeing with what previous interpreters have said. But my plan is to re-discover their insights where they are such and otherwise go my own way.

In doing this, I want to look more thoroughly at Wittgenstein’s own words than has previously been done. I don’t know how far I will get with this but completeness is not my goal. It is rather to start with the first sentence of the Tractatus and work myself forward from there as far as I can manage.

This will obviously be slow going, So far I have not got far beyond the first sentence of the Tractatus. Thinking about any particular sentence or phrase will, of course, often take me both backwards and forwards in Wittgenstein’s writings. So my approach will be less atomistic than it might sound. As far as my thoughts on the first sentence go, I have put two things down in this website. There is a power point file on the topic (in English) and there is the text of a lecture on it (in German).

I am about to add part of a third piece that explores Wittgenstein’s notion of a “world description.”

Rene Descartes said famously that I am a thinking substance and thus, presumably, that every self or subject is a thinking substance. That claim is, however, flawed. Does the statement that I believe this or that mean that there is a substance somewhere that believes this or that? Does the claim that I am in pain mean that there is a substance somewhere that is in pain? In these two cases we are not making factual statements about substances but we are affirming a belief of our own and expressing our own pain. Wittgenstein concluded that we don’t, in fact, use the word “I” to refer to anything. There is no such thing as the I, the self, or subject that the word “I” could refer to. Following Lichtenberg, he suggested that our grammar may mislead us. We tend to assume that a noun has meaning always by referring to some object and we hold that the same is true of the pronoun “I.” But both assumptions are wrong. We should think, instead, of sentences like “I am in pain,” Lichtenberg said, as we do of “It is raining.” In the latter case there is obviously no it that does the raining and so, similarly, we should conclude that there is no I that has the pain.

But this Lichtenberg-Wittgenstein view has difficulties of its own. Let us grant that we say “I am in pain” in order to express pain. Wittgenstein goes so far in this case as to maintain that we could actually replace the sentence with a moan to the same effect and thus with something that doesn’t contain the word “I” at all. But what about “Yesterday, I was in terrible pain”? This must be a true or false statement about an incidence of pain. It is certainly not an expression of pain. But the statement doesn’t mean that somewhere or other there was terrible pain yesterday. It means to say that I was the one who suffered. But who then is that I?

When I am asked who I am, I will usually recite certain facts about myself. But when I think about myself, I think rather of my life experiences, my hopes and aspirations. Others may identify me with some external characteristics: the appearance of my face, the sound of my voice, certain characteristic ways of moving. To myself I am, however, someone with certain experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts etc. And here I get back to the theme of privacy, to the fact that the large body of my experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts, etc. is not in practice accessible to others. The one who I am is not a substance with its own identity from the first moment of my existence. I become myself, I become who I am, rather, in the course of my life, as experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts accumulate. But this being who I have become is not fully transparent to others. I relate to it in a way in which I don’t relate to anyone else. I am a being with hidden, secreted corners and I am aware that others are in this respect just like me. (The question of the nature of the self and that of the degree to which our sensations, feelings, thoughts are private belong thus together.) Click here

In proposing this view, I am turning one of Wittgenstein’s arguments on its head. It is one of the few explicit arguments in his Tractatus – one that concern the self or subject. Wittgenstein argues in that passage that there cannot be a thinking self. Such a self, he says, would have to be simple, but a thing that thinks must have an internal complexity in order to entertain thoughts since facts and propositions have both a complex structure. I want to turn this argument around and conclude that a thinking self cannot be a simple substance but must be complex and that its complexity is determined by the complexity of its experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts.

One conclusion Descartes and his followers drew from their picture of the self as a simple substance was that this self could not come into existence or cease to exist through the normal processes of growth and decay. These would be always processes of composition and decomposition but in a simple substance there would be neither. This seemed to him to give us some assurance of the immortality of the soul. The alternative picture of a complex soul or subject allows us, on the other hand, to see this subject precisely as something that is formed in a natural way and that dissolves again in a natural fashion as our experiences, feelings, memories, thoughts disintegrate and fade away.