Ludwig Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius

This is an absolutely astounding piece of work. Ray Monk's book on Ludwig Wittgenstein is phenomenally well-made.

Metadata

• Author: Ray Monk
• Full Title: Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius
• Category: #books

Highlights

• About the Author
  Ray Monk gained a first class degree in Philosophy at York University and went on to Oxford, where he wrote his M.Litt. thesis on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of mathematics. (Location 34)
• Logic and ethics are fundamentally the same, they are no more than duty to oneself.   Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (Location 114)
• Recollections of Wittgenstein have been published by the lady who taught him Russian, the man who delivered peat to his cottage in Ireland and the man who, though he did not know him very well, happened to take the last photographs of him. (Location 123)
• ‘Why should one tell the truth if it’s to one’s advantage to tell a lie?’
  Such was the subject of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s earliest recorded philosophical reflections. Aged about eight or nine, he paused in a doorway to consider the question. Finding no satisfactory answer, he concluded that there was, after all, nothing wrong with lying under such circumstances. In later life, he described the event as, ‘an experience which if not decisive for my future way of life was at any rate characteristic of my nature at that time’. In one respect the episode is characteristic of his entire life. Unlike, say, Bertrand Russell, who turned to philosophy with hope of finding certainty where previously he had felt only doubt, Wittgenstein was drawn to it by a compulsive tendency to be struck by such questions. Philosophy, one might say, came to him, not he to philosophy. Its dilemmas were experienced by him as unwelcome intrusions, enigmas, which forced themselves upon him and held him captive, unable to get on with everyday life until he could dispel them with a satisfactory solution.
  Yet Wittgenstein’s youthful answer to this particular problem is, in another sense, deeply uncharacteristic. Its easy acceptance of dishonesty is fundamentally incompatible with the relentless truthfulness for which Wittgenstein was both admired and feared as an adult. It is incompatible also, perhaps, with his very sense of being a philosopher. ‘Call me a truth-seeker’, he once wrote to his sister (who had, in a letter to him, called him a great philosopher), ‘and I will be satisfied.’ This points not to a change of opinion, but to a change of character – the first of many in a life that is marked by a series of such transformations, undertaken at moments of crisis and pursued with a conviction that the source of the crisis was himself. It is as though his life was an ongoing battle with his own nature. In so far as he achieved anything, it was usually with the sense of its being in spite of his nature. The ultimate achievement, in this sense, would be the complete overcoming of himself – a transformation that would make philosophy itself unnecessary. (Location 142)
• His father, Karl Wittgenstein, had shown a similar independence from the atmosphere in which he was brought up, and the same determination to manufacture his own. Karl was the exception among the children of Hermann and Fanny – the only one whose life was not determined by their aspirations. He was a difficult child, who from an early age rebelled against the formality and authoritarianism of his parents and resisted their attempts to provide him with the kind of classical education appropriate to a member of the Viennese bourgeoisie. At the age of eleven he tried to run away from home. At seventeen he got himself expelled from school by writing an essay denying the immortality of the soul. Hermann persevered. He tried to continue Karl’s education at home by employing private tutors to see him through his exams. But Karl ran off again, and this time succeeded in getting away. After hiding out in the centre of Vienna for a couple of months, he fled to New York, arriving there penniless and carrying little more than his violin. He managed nevertheless to maintain himself for over two years by working as a waiter, a saloon musician, a bartender and a teacher (of the violin, the horn, mathematics, German and anything else he could think of). The adventure served to establish that he was his own master, and when he returned to Vienna in 1867 he was allowed – indeed, encouraged – to pursue his practical and technical bent, and to study engineering rather than follow his father and his brothers into estate management. (Location 203)
• In 1898, having amassed a huge personal fortune which to this day provides comfortably for his descendants, Karl Wittgenstein suddenly retired from business, resigning from the boards of all the steel companies he had presided over and transferring his investments to foreign – principally US – equities. (This last act proved to be remarkably prescient, securing the family fortune against the inflation that crippled Austria after the First World War.) He was by this time the father of eight extraordinarily talented children. (Location 221)
• parvenu. (Location 234)
• Fifteen years separated Karl’s eldest child, Hermine, from his youngest, Ludwig, and his eight children might be divided into two distinct generations: Hermine, Hans, Kurt and Rudolf as the older; Margarete, Helene, Paul and Ludwig the younger. By the time the two youngest boys reached adolescence, the conflict between Karl and his first generation of children had dictated that Paul and Ludwig grew up under quite a different régime. The régime within which Karl’s eldest sons were raised was shaped by Karl’s determination to see them continue his business. They were not to be sent to schools (where they would acquire the bad habits of mind of the Austrian establishment), but were to be educated privately in a way designed to train their minds for the intellectual rigours of commerce. They were then to be sent to some part of the Wittgenstein business empire, where they would acquire the technical and commercial expertise necessary for success in industry. With only one of his sons did this have anything like the desired effect. Kurt, by common consent the least gifted of the children, acquiesced in his father’s wishes and became in time a company director. His suicide, unlike that of his brothers, was not obviously related to the parental pressure exerted by his father. It came much later, at the end of the First World War, when he shot himself after the troops under his command had refused to obey orders. (Location 289)
• On Hans and Rudolf, the effect of Karl’s pressure was disastrous. Neither had the slightest inclination to become captains of industry. With encouragement and support, Hans might have become a great composer, or at the very least a successful concert musician. Even by the Wittgenstein family – most of whom had considerable musical ability – he was regarded as exceptionally gifted. He was a musical prodigy of Mozartian talents – a genius. While still in infancy he mastered the violin and piano, and at the age of four he began composing his own work. Music for him was not an interest but an all-consuming passion; it had to be at the centre, not the periphery, of his life. Faced with his father’s insistence that he pursue a career in industry, he did what his father had done before him and ran away to America. His intention was to seek a life as a musician. What exactly happened to him nobody knows. In 1903 the family were informed that a year earlier he had disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, and had not been seen since. The obvious conclusion to draw was that he had committed suicide. Would Hans have lived a happy life had he been free to devote himself to a musical career? Would he have been better prepared to face life outside the rarefied atmosphere of the Wittgenstein home if he had attended school? Obviously, nobody knows. But Karl was sufficiently shaken by the news to change his methods for his two youngest boys, Paul and Ludwig, who were sent to school and allowed to pursue their own bent. (Location 300)
• For Rudolf, the change came too late. He was already in his twenties when Hans went missing, and had himself embarked upon a similar course. He, too, had rebelled against his father’s wishes, and by 1903 was living in Berlin, where he had gone to seek a career in the theatre. His suicide in 1904 was reported in a local newspaper. One evening in May, according to the report, Rudolf had walked into a pub in Berlin and ordered two drinks. After sitting by himself for a while, he ordered a drink for the piano player and asked him to play his favourite song, ‘I am lost’. As the music played, Rudi took cyanide and collapsed. In a farewell letter to his family he said that he had killed himself because a friend of his had died. In another farewell letter he said it was because he had ‘doubts about his perverted disposition’. Some time before his death he had approached ‘The Scientific-Humanitarian Committee’ (which campaigned for the emancipation of homosexuals) for help, but, says the yearbook of the organization, ‘our influence did not reach far enough to turn him away from the fate of self-destruction’. (Location 311)
• The standards of musicality that prevailed in the family were truly extraordinary. Paul, the brother closest in age to Ludwig, was to become a very successful and well-known concert pianist. In the First World War he lost his right arm, but, with remarkable determination, taught himself to play using only his left hand, and attained such proficiency that he was able to continue his concert career. It was for him that Ravel, in 1931, wrote his famous Concerto for the Left Hand. And yet, though admired throughout the world, Paul’s playing was not admired within his own family. It lacked taste, they thought; it was too full of extravagant gestures. More to their taste was the refined, classically understated playing of Ludwig’s sister Helene. Their mother, Poldy, was an especially stern critic. (Location 335)
• Weltanschauung. (Location 368)
• ‘Just improve yourself’, Wittgenstein would later say to many of his friends, ‘that is all you can do to improve the world.’ Political questions, for him, would always be secondary to questions of personal integrity. The question he had asked himself at the age of eight was answered by a kind of Kantian categorical imperative: one should be truthful, and that is that; the question ‘Why?’ is inappropriate and cannot be answered. Rather, all other questions must be asked and answered within this fixed point – the inviolable duty to be true to oneself. (Location 418)
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• Schopenhauer’s transcendental idealism, as expressed in his classic, The World as Will and Representation, formed the basis of Wittgenstein’s earliest philosophy. The book is, in many ways, one that is bound to appeal to an adolescent who has lost his religious faith and is looking for something to replace it. For while Schopenhauer recognizes ‘man’s need for metaphysics’, he insists that it is neither necessary nor possible for an intelligent honest person to believe in the literal truth of religious doctrines. To expect that he should, Schopenhauer says, would be like asking a giant to put on the shoes of a dwarf. (Location 431)
• Schopenhauer’s own metaphysics is a peculiar adaptation of Kant’s. Like Kant, he regards the everyday world, the world of the senses, as mere appearance, but unlike Kant (who insists that noumenal reality is unknowable), he identifies as the only true reality the world of the ethical will. It is a theory that provides a metaphysical counterpart to the attitude of Karl Kraus mentioned earlier – a philosophical justification of the view that what happens in the ‘outside’ world is less important than the existential, ‘internal’ question of ‘what one is’. Schopenhauer’s idealism was abandoned by Wittgenstein only when he began to study logic and was persuaded to adopt Frege’s conceptual realism. Even after that, however, he returned to Schopenhauer at a critical stage in the composition of the Tractatus, when he believed that he had reached a point where idealism and realism coincide. (Location 436)
• Taken to its extreme, the view that the ‘internal’ has priority over the ‘external’ becomes solipsism, the denial that there is any reality outside oneself. Much of Wittgenstein’s later philosophical thinking about the self is an attempt once and for all to put to rest the ghost of this view. (Location 443)
• It was during Wittgenstein’s first term at Linz that Weininger became a cult figure in Vienna. On 4 October 1903, his dying body was found on the floor in the house in Schwarzspanierstrasse where Beethoven had died. At the age of twenty-three, in an act of self-consciously symbolic significance, he had shot himself in the home of the man whom he considered to be the very greatest of geniuses. Sex and Character had been published the previous spring, and had received, on the whole, fairly bad reviews. Had it not been for the sensational circumstances of its author’s death, it would probably have had no great impact. As it was, on 17 October, a letter from August Strindberg appeared in Die Fackel, describing the work as: ‘an awe-inspiring book, which has probably solved the most difficult of all problems’. Thus was the Weininger cult born. (Location 447)
• Indeed, Wittgenstein himself began to feel ashamed that he had not dared kill himself, that he had ignored a hint that he was de trop in this world. This feeling lasted for nine years, and was overcome only after he had convinced Bertrand Russell that he possessed philosophic genius. His brother Rudolf’s suicide came just six months after Weininger’s, and was, as we have seen, executed in an equally theatrical manner. (Location 457)
• Wittgenstein’s acknowledgement of Weininger’s influence, more than that of any other, ties his life and work to the environment in which he was raised. Weininger is a quintessentially Viennese figure. The themes of his book, together with the manner of his death, form a potent symbol of the social, intellectual and moral tensions of the fin de siècle Vienna in which Wittgenstein grew up. (Location 460)
• Sex and Character is dominated by an elaborately worked out theory intended to justify Weininger’s misogyny and anti-Semitism. The central point of the book, he says in the preface, is to ‘refer to a single principle the whole contrast between men and women’. (Location 475)
• The book is divided into two parts: the ‘biological-psychological’, and the ‘logical-philosophical’. In the first he seeks to establish that all human beings are biologically bisexual, a mixture of male and female. Only the proportions differ, which is how he explains the existence of homosexuals: they are either womanly men or masculine women. The ‘scientific’ part of the book ends with a chapter on ‘Emancipated Women’, in which he uses this theory of bisexuality to oppose the women’s movement. ‘A woman’s demand for emancipation and her qualification for it’, he claims, ‘are in direct proportion to the amount of maleness in her.’ Such women are, therefore, generally lesbians, and as such are on a higher level than most women. These masculine women should be given their freedom, but it would be a grave mistake to let the majority of women imitate them. (Location 477)
• The essence of Woman, he says, is her absorption in sex. She is nothing but sexuality; she is sexuality itself. Whereas men possess sexual organs, ‘her sexual organs possess women’. The female is completely preoccupied with sexual matters, whereas the male is interested in much else, such as war, sport, social affairs, philosophy and science, business and politics, religion and art.15 Weininger has a peculiar epistemological theory to explain this, based on his notion of a ‘henid’. A henid is a piece of psychical data before it becomes an idea. Woman thinks in henids, which is why, for her, thinking and feeling are the same thing. She looks to man, who thinks in clear and articulated ideas, to clarify her data, to interpret her henids. That is why women fall in love only with men cleverer than themselves. Thus, the essential difference between man and woman is that, whereas ‘the male lives consciously, the female lives unconsciously’. (Location 488)
• Weininger draws from this analysis alarmingly far-reaching ethical implications. Without the ability to clarify her own henids, woman is incapable of forming clear judgements, so the distinction between true and false means nothing to her. Thus women are naturally, inescapably, untruthful. Not that they are, on this account, immoral; they do not enter the moral realm at all. Woman simply has no standard of right or wrong. And, as she knows no moral or logical imperative, she cannot be said to have a soul, and this means she lacks free will. From this it follows that women have no ego, no individuality, and no character. Ethically, women are a lost cause. (Location 496)
• Turning from epistemology and ethics to psychology, Weininger analyses women in terms of two further Platonic types: the mother and the prostitute. Each individual woman is a combination of the two, but is predominantly one or the other. There is no moral difference between the two: the mother’s love for her child is as unthinking and indiscriminate as the prostitute’s desire to make love to every man she sees. (Weininger will have nothing to do with any explanation of prostitution based on social and economic conditions. Women are prostitutes, he says, because of the ‘disposition for and inclination to prostitution’ which is ‘deep in the nature of women’.) The chief difference between the two types is the form that their obsession with sex takes: whereas the mother is obsessed with the object of sex, the prostitute is obsessed with the act itself. (Location 501)
• All women, whether mothers or prostitutes, share a single characteristic – ‘a characteristic which is really and exclusively feminine’ – and that is the instinct of match-making.18 It is the ever present desire of all women to see man and woman united. To be sure, woman is interested first and foremost in her own sexual life, but that is really a special case of her ‘only vital interest’ – ‘the interest that sexual unions shall take place; the wish that as much of it as possible shall occur, in all cases, places and times’. (Location 507)
• As an adjunct to his psychological investigation of woman, Weininger has a chapter on Judaism. Again, the Jew is a Platonic idea, a psychological type, which is a possibility (or a danger) for all mankind, ‘but which has become actual in the most conspicuous fashion only amongst the Jews’.20 The Jew is ‘saturated with femininity’ – ‘the most manly Jew is more feminine than the least manly Aryan’.21 Like the woman, the Jew has a strong instinct for pairing. He has a poor sense of individuality and a correspondingly strong instinct to preserve the race. The Jew has no sense of good and evil, and no soul. He is non-philosophical and profoundly irreligious (the Jewish religion being ‘a mere historical tradition’). Judaism and Christianity are opposites: the latter is ‘the highest expression of the highest faith’; the former is ‘the extreme of cowardliness’.22 Christ was the greatest of all men because he: ‘conquered in himself Judaism, the greatest negation, and created Christianity, the strongest affirmation and the most direct opposite of Judaism’. (Location 512)
• Weininger himself was both Jewish and homosexual (and therefore possibly of the psychologically female type), and the idea that his suicide was, in some way, a ‘solution’ could therefore be easily assimilated within the most vulgar anti-Semitic or misogynist outlook. Hitler, for example, is reported as having once remarked: ‘Dietrich Eckhart told me that in all his life he had known just one good Jew: Otto Weininger who killed himself on the day when he realised that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples.’ And the fact that fear of the emancipation of women, and, particularly, of Jews, was a widespread preoccupation in Vienna at the turn of the century no doubt accounts to some extent for the book’s enormous popularity. It would later provide convenient material for Nazi propaganda broadcasts. (Location 522)
• The choice that Weininger’s theory offers is a bleak and terrible one indeed: genius or death. If one can only live as a ‘Woman’ or as a ‘Jew’ – if, that is, one cannot free oneself from sensuality and earthly desires – then one has no right to live at all. The only life worth living is the spiritual life. (Location 566)
• In its strict separation of love from sexual desire, its uncompromising view of the worthlessness of everything save the products of genius, and its conviction that sexuality is incompatible with the honesty that genius demands, there is much in Weininger’s work that chimes with attitudes we find Wittgenstein expressing time and again throughout his life. So much so, that there is reason to believe that of all the books he read in adolescence, Weininger’s is the one that had the greatest and most lasting impact on his outlook. (Location 568)
• Of particular importance, perhaps, is the peculiar twist that Weininger gives to Kant’s Moral Law, which, on this account, not only imposes an inviolable duty to be honest, but, in so doing, provides the route for all men to discover in themselves whatever genius they possess. To acquire genius, on this view, is not merely a noble ambition; it is a Categorical Imperative. Wittgenstein’s recurring thoughts of suicide between 1903 and 1912, and the fact that these thoughts abated only after Russell’s recognition of his genius, suggest that he accepted this imperative in all its terrifying severity. (Location 572)
• He may well have been led to Hertz by reading Boltzmann’s Populäre Schriften, a collection of Boltzmann’s more popular lectures, published in 1905. The lectures present a similarly Kantian view of science, in which our models of reality are taken to our experience of the world, and not (as the empiricist tradition would have it) derived from it. So ingrained in Wittgenstein’s philosophical thinking was this view that he found the empiricist view difficult even to conceive. (Location 591)
• matriculated (Location 601)
• He goes on to describe his physical and emotional isolation, and his deep need for a close companion. At the inn he was the only guest apart from ‘a certain Mr Rimmer who makes meteorological observations’, and at the observatory the only time he had company was on Saturdays, when Petavel arrived with some of his students:
  'Because I am so cut off I naturally have an extraordinarily strong desire for a friend and when the students arrive on Saturday I always think it will be one of them.' (Location 640)
• He was too reticent to approach the students, but shortly after this letter a friend came to him. William Eccles, an engineer four years older than himself, came to the observatory to conduct meteorological research. On his arrival at the Grouse Inn, Eccles walked into the common living room to find Wittgenstein surrounded with books and papers which lay scattered over the table and floor. As it was impossible to move without disturbing them, he immediately set to and tidied them up – much to Wittgenstein’s amusement and appreciation. The two quickly became close friends, and remained so, with interruptions, until the Second World War. (Location 645)
• He began to develop an interest in pure mathematics, and to attend J. E. Littlewood’s lectures on the theory of mathematical analysis, and one evening a week he met with two other research students to discuss questions in mathematics. These discussions led to a consideration of the problems of providing mathematics with logical foundations, and Wittgenstein was introduced by one of his fellow students to Bertrand Russell’s book on the subject, The Principles of Mathematics, which had been published five years previously.
  Reading Russell’s book was to prove a decisive event in Wittgenstein’s life. Though he continued for another two years with research in aeronautics, he became increasingly obsessed with the problems discussed by Russell, and his engineering work was pursued with an ever-growing disenchantment. He had found a subject in which he could become as absorbed as his brother Hans had been in playing the piano, a subject in which he could hope to make, not just a worthwhile contribution, but a great one. (Location 661)
• The central theme of The Principles of Mathematics is that, contrary to the opinion of Kant and most other philosophers, the whole of pure mathematics could be derived from a small number of fundamental, logical, principles. Mathematics and logic, in other words, were one and the same. It was Russell’s intention to provide a strictly mathematical demonstration of this by actually making all the derivations required to prove each theorem of mathematical analysis from a few trivial, self-evident axioms. This was to be his second volume. In fact, it grew into the monumental three-volume work Principia Mathematica. In this, his ‘first volume’, he lays the philosophical foundations of this bold enterprise, taking issue principally with Kant’s at that time widely influential view that mathematics was quite distinct from logic and was founded on the ‘structure of appearance’, our basic ‘intuitions’ of space and time. For Russell, the importance of the issue lay in the difference between regarding mathematics as a body of certain, objective, knowledge, and regarding it as a fundamentally subjective construction of the human mind. (Location 669)
• Russell did not become aware until The Principles of Mathematics was being printed that he had been anticipated in the main lines of his enterprise by the German mathematician Gottlob Frege, who in his Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (the first volume of which was published in 1893) had attempted precisely the task that Russell had set himself. He made a hurried study of Frege’s work and appended to his book an essay on ‘The Logical and Arithmetical Doctrines of Frege’, praising the Grundgesetze. (Location 677)
• During his second year at Manchester, Wittgenstein abandoned his attempt to design and construct a jet engine and concentrated instead on the design of the propeller. His work on this was taken sufficiently seriously by the university for him to be elected to a research studentship for what was to be his last year there, 1910–11. He himself was confident enough about the importance and originality of his work to patent his design. His application, together with a provisional specification of his design for ‘Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial Machines’, is dated 22 November 1910. On 21 June 1911 he left a complete specification, and the patent was accepted on 17 August of that year. By this time, however, Wittgenstein’s obsession with philosophical problems had got the better of his resolve to pursue a vocation in engineering. Though his studentship was renewed for the following year, and he is still listed as a student of Manchester University in October 1911, his days as an aeronaut were finished during the summer vacation of that year, when, 10‘in a constant, indescribable, almost pathological state of agitation’, he drew up a plan for a proposed book on philosophy. (Location 740)
• AT THE END of the summer vacation of 1911 Wittgenstein, having drawn up a plan of his projected book on philosophy, travelled to Jena to discuss it with Frege – presumably with a view to finding out whether it was worth going on with, or whether he should instead continue with his work in aeronautical research. Hermine Wittgenstein knew Frege to be an old man and was anxious about the visit, fearing that he would not have the patience to deal with the situation, or the understanding to realize the momentous importance the meeting had for her brother. In the event, so Wittgenstein later told friends, Frege ‘wiped the floor’ with him – one reason, perhaps, why nothing of this proposed work has survived.1 Frege was, however, sufficiently encouraging to recommend to Wittgenstein that he go to Cambridge to study under Bertrand Russell. The advice was more propitious than Frege could have known, and was not only to lead to a decisive turning point in Wittgenstein’s life, but also to have a tremendous influence on Russell’s. For at the very time when Wittgenstein needed a mentor, Russell needed a protégé. The year 1911 was something of a watershed in Russell’s life. He had, in the previous year, finished Principia Mathematica, the product of ten years of exhausting labour. ‘My intellect never quite recovered from the strain’, he writes in his Autobiography.2 ‘I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before.’ With the completion of Principia Russell’s life, both personally and philosophically, entered a new phase. In the spring of 1911 he fell in love with Ottoline Morrell, the aristocratic wife of the Liberal MP Phillip Morrell, and began an affair that was to last until 1916. During the height of his passion he wrote Ottoline as many as three letters a day. These letters contain an almost daily record of Russell’s reactions to Wittgenstein – a record which provides a useful corrective to some of the anecdotes he told about Wittgenstein in his later years, when his love of a good story frequently got the better of his concern for accuracy. (Location 752)
• The Russell Wittgenstein met in 1911, then, was far from being the strident rationalist, the offender of the faith, he later became. He was a man in the grip of romance, more appreciative than he had been before, or was to become, of the irrational and emotional side of human character – even to the extent of adopting a kind of transcendental mysticism. Perhaps more important, he was a man who, having decided that his contribution to technical philosophy was finished, was looking for someone with the youth, vitality and ability to build upon the work which he had begun. (Location 791)
• He had not, apparently, made any prior arrangement with Russell, when, on 18 October – about two weeks into the Michaelmas term – he suddenly appeared at Russell’s rooms in Trinity College to introduce himself. Russell was having tea with C. K. Ogden (later to become the first translator of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) when:   … an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering at Charlottenburg, but during his course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me.6   Two omissions in Wittgenstein’s self-introduction are immediately striking. The first is that he does not mention that he had been advised to come to Russell by Frege. The second is that he omits to tell Russell he had studied (indeed, officially, was studying) engineering at Manchester. These omissions, though strange, are perhaps indicative of nothing more than Wittgenstein’s extreme nervousness; if Russell had the impression that he spoke very little English, he must indeed have been in quite a state. (Location 799)
• Russell’s lectures on mathematical logic attracted very few students, and he often lectured to just three people: C. D. Broad, E. H. Neville and H. T. J. Norton. He therefore had reason to feel pleased when, on the day he first met Wittgenstein, he found him ‘duly established’ at his lecture. (Location 813)
• My German engineer, I think, is a fool.10 He thinks nothing empirical is knowable – I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn’t. [2.11.11] (Location 824)
• Over the next term Wittgenstein pursued his studies in mathematical logic with such vigour that, by the end of it, Russell was to say that he had learnt all he had to teach, and, indeed, had gone further. ‘Yes’, he declared to Ottoline, ‘Wittgenstein has been a great event in my life – whatever may come of it’: (Location 859)
• I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve – all kinds of problems that are raised by my work, but want a fresh mind and the vigour of youth. He is the young man one hopes for. (Location 863)
• These hints, though, are enough to suggest that Wittgenstein’s work was, from the beginning, not directed to the problem: ‘What is mathematics?’ but to the still more fundamental question: ‘What is logic?’ This, Russell himself felt, was the most important question left unanswered by Principia. (Location 870)
• Wittgenstein’s friendship with Moore was to develop later. But, with Russell, an affectionate bond quickly developed. Russell’s admiration knew no bounds. He saw in Wittgenstein the ‘ideal pupil’, one who ‘gives passionate admiration with vehement and very intelligent dissent’.24 As opposed to Broad, who was the most reliable pupil he had had – ‘practically certain to do a good deal of useful but not brilliant work’25 – Wittgenstein was ‘full of boiling passion which may drive him anywhere’. (Location 891)
• Russell noted with approval that Wittgenstein had excellent manners, but, even more approvingly, that: ‘in argument he forgets about manners & simply says what he thinks’:32   No one could be more sincere than Wittgenstein, or more destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth; but he lets his feelings and affections appear, and it warms one’s heart. (Location 912)
• Wittgenstein talked about Beethoven:   … how a friend described going to Beethoven’s door and hearing him ‘cursing, howling and singing’ over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage. That’s the sort of man to be. (Location 950)
• Similarly, Russell gave Wittgenstein the licence to behave in the same way, because he recognized in him the quality of genius. He later described Wittgenstein as:   … perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. (Location 958)
• Lytton Strachey. Wittgenstein became what, in Apostolic jargon, was known as an ‘embryo’ (Location 996)
• Russell then asked him how he would feel if he were married to a woman and she ran away with another man:   [Wittgenstein] said (and I believe him) that he would feel no rage or hate, only utter misery.53 His nature is good through and through; that is why he doesn’t see the need of morals. I was utterly wrong at first; he might do all kinds of things in passion, but he would not practise any cold-blooded immorality. His outlook is very free; principles and such things seem to him nonsense, because his impulses are strong and never shameful. (Location 1078)
• Wittgenstein was not one to debate his most fundamental convictions. Dialogue with him was possible only if one shared those convictions. (Thus, dialogue with Russell on ethical questions was soon to become impossible.) To one who did not share his fundamental outlook, his utterances – whether on logic or on ethics – would, as likely as not, remain unintelligible. It was a tendency that began to worry Russell. ‘I am seriously afraid’, he told Ottoline, ‘that no one will see the point of what he writes, because he won’t recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view.’ (Location 1109)
• ‘I am glad you read the lives of Mozart and Beethoven’, he told Russell.69 ‘These are the actual sons of God.’ He told Russell of his delight on reading Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat: ‘Have you ever read it? If not, you ought to, for it is wonderful.’ (Location 1178)
• On their walks the talk would mostly be of logic, Wittgenstein continuing to educate Pinsent on the subject: ‘I am learning a lot from him. He is really remarkably clever.’79   I have never yet been able to find the smallest fault in his reasoning: and yet he has made me reconstruct entirely my ideas on several subjects. (Location 1248)
• table d’hôte (Location 1258)
• For Pinsent it had been: ‘the most glorious holiday I have ever spent!’84   The novelty of the country – of being free of all considerations about economising – the excitement and everything – all combine to make it the most wonderful experience I have ever had. It leaves almost a mystic-romantic impression on me: for the greatest romance consists in novel sensations – novel surroundings – and so forth, whatever they be provided they are novel.   Not so for Wittgenstein. What remained in his memory were their differences and disagreements – perhaps the very occasions mentioned in Pinsent’s diary – Pinsent’s occasional irritability, hints of his ‘Philistinism’, and the incident with the ‘bounder’. He later told Pinsent that he had enjoyed it, ‘as much as it is possible for two people to do who are nothing to each other’. (Location 1272)
• Wittgenstein’s criticisms disturbed me profoundly. He was so unhappy, so gentle, so wounded in his wish to think well of me. (Location 1310)
• He would, according to Russell, ‘pace up and down my room like a wild beast for three hours in agitated silence’. Once, Russell asked: ‘Are you thinking about logic or your sins?’ ‘Both’, Wittgenstein replied, and continued his pacing. (Location 1324)
• Wittgenstein’s conviction that he was unpopular needs some qualification. During this term, at the very peak of his nervous irritability, he did succeed in making some new and important friendships. In particular, he gained the respect and affection of John Maynard Keynes, who was to be a valuable and supportive friend for the greater part of Wittgenstein’s life. (Location 1365)
• During the vacation he sketched an outline of the way in which he proposed to treat the problem:30   Physics exhibits sensations as functions of physical objects.31 But epistemology demands that physical objects should be exhibited as functions of sensations. Thus we have to solve the equations giving sensations in terms of physical objects, so as to make them give physical objects in terms of sensations. That is all.   ‘I am sure I have hit upon a real thing’, he told Ottoline, ‘which is very likely to occupy me for years to come.’32 It would require ‘a combination of physics, psychology, & mathematical logic’, and even the creation of ‘a whole new science’. In the letter of January 1913, Wittgenstein was faintly dismissive of the whole project: ‘I cannot imagine your way of working from sense-data forward.’ By the beginning of 1913, then, we see Russell and Wittgenstein working on very different projects – Russell on the creation of his ‘new science’, and Wittgenstein on the analysis of logic. Russell was now fully prepared to accept the latter as Wittgenstein’s field rather than his own. (Location 1473)
  • Note: Russell.
• A couple of weeks after this, upon being convicted by Wittgenstein that some of the early proofs in Principia were very inexact, Russell commented to Ottoline: ‘fortunately it is his business to put them right, not mine’.34 The co-operation between the two had come to an end. In the field of logic, Wittgenstein, far from being Russell’s student, had become his teacher. (Location 1492)
• In 1907 Russell had stood as a parliamentary candidate for the Women’s Suffrage Party. Perhaps prompted by this fact (they had just returned from one of Russell’s lectures), Wittgenstein and Pinsent got into an argument about women’s suffrage. Wittgenstein was ‘very much against it’:36   … for no particular reason except that ‘all the women he knows are such idiots’. He said that at Manchester University the girl students spend all their time flirting with the professors. Which disgusts him very much – as he dislikes half measures of all sorts, and disapproves of anything not deadly in earnest.   Wittgenstein’s work on logic did nothing, apparently, to improve the rigour of his thought on political questions. It is perhaps this inability – or, more likely, unwillingness – to bring his analytical powers to bear on questions of public concern that prompted Russell to criticize Wittgenstein for being ‘in danger of becoming narrow and uncivilised’. (Location 1503)
• As the wearer of Russell’s mantle in logic (it is hard to remember that Wittgenstein was still only twenty-four, and officially an undergraduate reading for a BA), Wittgenstein was asked to review a textbook on logic – The Science of Logic by P. Coffey – for the Cambridge Review. This is the only book review he ever published, and the first published record of his philosophical opinions. In it he presents a Russellian dismissal of the Aristotelian logic advanced by Coffey, but expresses himself with a stridency that exceeds even Russell’s, and borders on the vitriolic:   In no branch of learning can an author disregard the results of honest research with so much impunity as he can in Philosophy and Logic. To this circumstance we owe the publication of such a book as Mr Coffey’s ‘Science of Logic’: and only as a typical example of the work of many logicians of to-day does this book deserve consideration. The author’s Logic is that of the scholastic philosophers and he makes all their mistakes – of course with the usual references to Aristotle. (Aristotle, whose name is so much taken in vain by our logicians, would turn in his grave if he knew that so many Logicians know no more about Logic to-day than he did 2,000 years ago.) The author has not taken the slightest notice of the great work of the modern mathematical logicians – work which has brought about an advance in Logic comparable only to that which made Astronomy out of Astrology, and Chemistry out of Alchemy. Mr Coffey, like many logicians, draws a great advantage from an unclear way of expressing himself; for if you cannot tell whether he means to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, it is difficult to argue against him. However, even through his foggy expression, many grave mistakes can be recognised clearly enough; and I propose to give a list of some of the most striking ones, and would advise the student of Logic to trace these mistakes and their consequences in other books on Logic also.   There follows a list of such mistakes, which are, for the most part, the weaknesses of traditional (Aristotelian) logic customarily pointed out by adherents of Russellian mathematical logic – for instance, that it assumes all propositions to be of the subject-predicate form, that it confuses the copula ‘is’ (as in ‘Socrates is mortal’) with the ‘is’ of identity (‘Twice two is four’), and so on. ‘The worst of such books as this’, the review concludes, ‘is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of Logic.’ (Location 1528)
• For Wittgenstein, his absorption in logical problems was complete. They were not a part of his life, but the whole of it. Thus, when during the Easter vacation he found himself temporarily bereft of inspiration, he was plunged into despair. On 25 March he wrote to Russell describing himself as ‘perfectly sterile’ and doubting whether he would ever gain new ideas:   Whenever I try to think about Logic, my thoughts are so vague that nothing ever can crystallize out. What I feel is the curse of all those who have only half a talent; it is like a man who leads you along a dark corridor with a light and just when you are in the middle of it the light goes out and you are left alone.40   ‘Poor wretch!’ Russell commented to Ottoline.41 ‘I know his feelings so well. It is an awful curse to have the creative impulse unless you have a talent that can always be relied on, like Shakespeare’s or Mozart’s.’ (Location 1560)
• But though Russell could turn a deaf ear to Wittgenstein’s personal haranguing, he could not withstand the power of his philosophical onslaughts. During this summer Wittgenstein had a decisive influence on Russell’s development as a philosopher – chiefly by undermining his faith in his own judgement. Looking back on it three years later, Russell described it as: ‘an event of first-rate importance in my life’, which had ‘affected everything I have done since’:55   Do you remember that at the time when you were seeing Vittoz [Ottoline’s doctor] I wrote a lot of stuff about Theory of Knowledge, which Wittgenstein criticised with the greatest severity? … I saw he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was shattered, like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater. I became filled with utter despair … I had to produce lectures for America, but I took a metaphysical subject although I was and am convinced that all fundamental work in philosophy is logical. My reason was that Wittgenstein persuaded me that what wanted doing in logic was too difficult for me. So there was no really vital satisfaction of my philosophical impulse in that work, and philosophy lost its hold on me. That was due to Wittgenstein more than to the war. (Location 1657)
• It is a measure of Russell’s lack of confidence that, even though he did not understand Wittgenstein’s objections, he felt they must be justified. ‘But even if they are’, he wrote with unconvincing equanimity, ‘they won’t destroy the value of the book.60 His criticisms have to do with the problems I want to leave to him.’ In other words, Wittgenstein’s criticisms were logical rather than metaphysical. But if, as Russell believed, the problems of philosophy were fundamentally logical, how could it not affect the value of the book? How could the book be sound if its foundations were not? When Wittgenstein was finally able to put his objections in writing, Russell admitted defeat, unreservedly. ‘I am very sorry to hear that my objection to your theory of judgment paralyses you’, Wittgenstein wrote.61 ‘I think it can only be removed by a correct theory of propositions.’ Such a theory was one of the things that Russell had wanted to leave to Wittgenstein. Being convinced that it was at once necessary and beyond his own capabilities, he came to think that he was no longer able to contribute to philosophy of the most fundamental kind. The conviction produced in him an almost suicidal depression. The huge work on the Theory of Knowledge, begun with such vigour and optimism, was now abandoned. But as he was contractually obliged to deliver the series of lectures in America, he had to continue with his preparations for them, even though he was now convinced that the material he had written for them was fundamentally in error. ‘I must be much sunk’, he told Ottoline, ‘it is the first time in my life that I have failed in honesty over work.62 Yesterday I felt ready for suicide.’ Four months previously he had written: ‘Ten years ago I could have written a book with the store of ideas I have already, but now I have a higher standard of exactness.’63 That standard had been set by Wittgenstein, and it was one he now felt unable to live up to. He did not recover faith in his work until Wittgenstein was out of the way – and even then he felt it necessary to reassure himself in his absence that: ‘Wittgenstein would like the work I have done lately.’ (Location 1688)
• Pinsent had arranged to meet Wittgenstein under the impression that he would then be taken on a holiday to Spain. When they met, however, he was told there had been a change of plan. Spain had (for some unspecified reason) given way to three other alternatives: Andorra, the Azores or Bergen, in Norway. Pinsent was to choose – ‘He was very anxious to shew no preference for any particular scheme and that I should choose unbiased’ – but it was quite obvious that Wittgenstein’s choice was Norway, so Pinsent opted for that.68 (Actually, he would have preferred the Azores, but Wittgenstein feared they would meet crowds of American tourists on the boat, ‘which he can’t stand!’) (Location 1727)
• The quarrel on the train seemed to mark some kind of turning point in their relationship. Wittgenstein is now referred to as ‘Ludwig’ for the remainder of Pinsent’s diary. (Location 1764)
• The tourist office found them a place satisfying all their conditions – a small hotel in a tiny village called Öistesjo, on the Hardanger fjord, at which they would be the only foreign tourists, the other ten guests being Norwegian. Once there they went for a short walk, Pinsent, ever the keen photographer, taking his camera, ‘which was the cause of another scene with Ludwig’:74   We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for a moment to take a photo: And when I overtook him again he was silent and sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him what was the matter. It seemed, my keenness to take that photo: had disgusted him – ‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we made it up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself. (Location 1771)
• In an ironically apt comparison, Pinsent remarks: ‘at present it is no exaggeration to say he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were’. Perhaps he had not been told that Wittgenstein regarded Beethoven as exactly ‘the sort of man to be’. (Location 1780)
• AS MIGHT BE expected, Russell thought Wittgenstein’s plan to live alone in Norway for two years a wild and lunatic one. He tried to talk him out of it by presenting various objections, all of which were brushed aside:   I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight.1 I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.) (Location 1857)
• Eventually he managed to get some written record of Wittgenstein’s thoughts by asking the secretary of Philip Jourdain (who had come into Russell’s room to borrow a book) to take shorthand notes while Wittgenstein talked and Russell asked questions. These notes were supplemented by a typescript which Wittgenstein dictated a few days later while he was in Birmingham saying his goodbyes to Pinsent. Together, the dictation and typescript constitute Notes on Logic – Wittgenstein’s first philosophical work. (Location 1875)
  • Note: Russell. Extremt tydande om W:s geni och vansinne.
• In addition to this embryonic Theory of Symbolism, Notes on Logic contains a series of remarks on philosophy which state unequivocally Wittgenstein’s conception of the subject, a conception that remained – in most of these respects at least – unchanged for the rest of his life:   In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive.3 Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing. (Location 1886)
• What Wittgenstein needed (or felt he needed) in 1913 was solitude. He found the ideal place: a village called Skjolden, by the side of the Sogne fjord, north of Bergen. There he lodged with the local postmaster, Hans Klingenberg. ‘As I hardly meet a soul in this place’, he wrote to Russell, ‘the progress of my Norwegian is exceedingly slow.’5 Neither statement is entirely true. In fact, he made friends with a number of the villagers. As well as the Klingenbergs, there was Halvard Draegni, the owner of a local crate-factory, Anna Rebni, a farmer, and Arne Bolstad, then a thirteen-year-old schoolboy. And his progress in Norwegian was so swift that within a year he was able to exchange letters with these friends in their native language. Admittedly, the language in these letters was not excessively complicated or sophisticated. But this was due less to the limitations of his Norwegian than to the nature of the friendships. They were, in fact, the kind of simple, direct and brief letters he liked best: ‘Dear Ludwig, how are you? We often think of you’ might be a typical example. (Location 1901)
• Russell, meanwhile, was doing his utmost to digest the Notes on Logic in readiness for his Harvard lectures. In the preface to the published version of those lectures, he states:   In pure logic, which, however, will be very briefly discussed in these lectures, I have had the benefit of vitally important discoveries, not yet published, by my friend Mr Ludwig Wittgenstein.8   But there were points about which he was still unclear, and he sent Wittgenstein a series of questions hoping for elucidation. Wittgenstein’s answers were brief and, for the most part, helpful. But he was too full of new ideas to find the process of going over old ground congenial: ‘An account of general indefinables? Oh Lord! It is too boring!!! Some other time!’9   Honestly – I will write to you about it some time, if by that time you have not found out all about it. (Because it is all quite clear in the manuscript, I think.) But just now I am SO troubled with Identity that I really cannot write any long jaw. All sorts of new logical stuff seems to be growing in me, but I can’t yet write about it.   In the excitement of this peak of intellectual creativity he found it particularly irksome to give explanations of points he felt were already clear and well established. In a letter of November he tried to explain why he thought the whole of logic had to follow from a single primitive proposition. But when Russell still did not get it, his patience was exhausted:   I beg you to think about these matters for yourself, it is INTOLERABLE for me, to repeat a written explanation which even the first time I gave only with the utmost repugnance.10   Nevertheless, he did make an effort to clarify the point. It hinged on his conviction that, given the correct method of displaying the truth possibilities of a proposition, a logical proposition can be shown to be either true or false without knowing the truth or falsity of its constituent parts. Thus: ‘It is either raining or not raining’ will be true whether ‘It is raining’ is true or false. Similarly, we need know nothing about the weather to know that the statement: ‘It is both raining and not raining’ is certainly false. Such statements are logical propositions: the first is a tautology (which is always true), and the second a contradiction (always false). Now, if we had a method for determining whether or not any given proposition is a tautology, a contradiction or neither, then we would have a single rule for determining all the propositions of logic. Express this rule in a proposition, and the whole of logic has been shown to follow from a single (primitive) proposition. This argument works only if we accept that all true logical propositions are tautologies. That is why Wittgenstein begins his letter to Russell with the following oracular pronouncement:   All the propositions of logic are generalizations of tautologies and all generalizations of tautologies are propositions of logic.11 There are no other logical propositions. (I regard this as definitive.)   ‘The big question now’, he told Russell, is: ‘how must a system of signs be constituted in order to make every tautology recognizable as such IN ONE AND THE SAME WAY? This is the fundamental problem of logic!’ He was later to tackle this problem using the so-called Truth-Table Method (familiar to all present-day undergraduate students of logic). But, for the moment, the peak of the crescendo had passed. As Christmas approached, exhilaration gave way to gloom and Wittgenstein returned to the morbid conviction that he had not long to live, and that he would therefore never publish anything in his lifetime. ‘After my death’, he insisted to Russell, ‘you must see to the printing of the volume of my journal with the whole story in it.’ The letter ends: ‘I often think I am going mad.’ The insanity was two-edged, the mania of the previous few months turning into depression as Christmas approached. For, at Christmas: ‘I must UNFORTUNATELY go to Vienna.’ (Location 1923)
• Like his logic, this work on himself could best be done in solitude, and he returned to Norway as soon as possible. ‘It’s VERY sad’, he wrote to Russell, ‘but I’ve once again no logical news for you’: (Location 1988)
• As his relationship with Russell was first severed, and then placed on a less intimate footing, Wittgenstein’s overtures to Moore became ever more insistent. Moore was dragging his feet somewhat about the proposed visit, and was probably regretting ever having promised to undertake it. But Wittgenstein’s demands would brook no refusal: ‘You must come as soon as Term ends’, he wrote on 18 February:19   I am looking forward to your coming more than I can say! I am bored to death with Logik and other things. But I hope I shan’t die before you come for in that case we couldn’t discuss much.   ‘Logik’ is probably a reference to a work which Wittgenstein was then in the process of writing, and which he planned to show Moore with the intention of its being submitted for the BA degree. In March he wrote: ‘I think, now, that Logic must be very nearly done if it is not already.’20 And although Moore, meanwhile, had come up with a new excuse – he needed to stay at Cambridge to work on a paper – Wittgenstein would have none of it:   Why on earth won’t you do your paper here? You shall have a sittingroom with a splendid view ALL BY YOURSELF and I shall leave you alone as much as you like (in fact the whole day, if necessary). On the other hand we could see one another whenever both of us should like to. And we could even talk over your business (which might be fun). Or do you want so many books? You see – I’ve PLENTY to do myself, so I shan’t disturb you a bit. Do take the Boat that leaves Newcastle on the 17th arriving in Bergen on the 19th and do your work here (I might even have a good influence upon it by preventing too many repetitions).   Finally, Moore overcame his reluctance to face the rigours of the journey – and the even more daunting prospect of being alone with Wittgenstein – and agreed to come. He left for Bergen on 24 March and was met there by Wittgenstein two days later. His visit lasted a fortnight, every evening of which was taken up with ‘discussions’, which consisted of Wittgenstein talking and Moore listening (‘he discusses’, Moore complained in his diary). (Location 2060)
• After Moore’s visit Wittgenstein relapsed, as we have seen, into a state of exhaustion. Incapable, for the moment, of doing further work in logic, he devoted himself instead to building a small house on the side of the Sogne fjord, about a mile away from the village. It was intended to be a more or less permanent residence – or at least a place to live until he had finally solved all the fundamental problems in logic. But work on it was not finished when, in July, he returned to Vienna to escape the tourist season in Norway. He intended to spend only the summer away, partly in Austria with his family and partly on holiday with Pinsent. But he was not to return to Norway until the summer of 1921, by which time the fundamental problems of logic had – temporarily at least – been solved. (Location 2129)
• Eccles had written asking Wittgenstein’s advice on a proposed suite of bedroom furniture – wardrobe, medicine chest and dressing table – which Eccles had designed and was proposing to have manufactured. Such faith did he have in Wittgenstein’s judgement on these matters that his new drawing room was a copy of Wittgenstein’s room in Cambridge: blue carpet, black paint, yellow walls. ‘The effect,’ he told Wittgenstein, ‘is greatly admired by everyone.’ (Location 2146)
• While in Norway Wittgenstein had had Kraus’s Die Fackel sent to him, and came across an article written by Kraus about Ludwig von Ficker, a writer who was an admirer of Kraus, and who was himself the editor of a Krausian journal published in Innsbruck, called Der Brenner (‘The Burner’). On 14 July Wittgenstein wrote to Ficker offering to transfer to him the sum of 100,000 crowns, with the request that he distribute the money ‘among Austrian artists who are without means’. ‘I am turning to you in this matter’, he explained, ‘since I assume that you are acquainted with many of our best talents and know which of them are most in need of support.’3 Ficker was, quite naturally, dumbfounded by the letter. He had neither met Wittgenstein nor heard of him, and this offer to place at his disposal such a large sum of money (100,000 crowns was the equivalent of £4000 in 1914, and therefore of perhaps £40,000–£50,000 of today’s currency) needed, he thought, to be checked. He replied asking whether he could really take it that the offer was meant in all seriousness, that it was not a joke. ‘In order to convince you that I am sincere in my offer’, Wittgenstein answered, ‘I can probably do nothing better than actually transfer the sum of money to you; and this will happen the next time I come to Vienna.’4 He explained that upon the death of his father he had come into a large fortune, and: ‘It is a custom in such cases to donate a sum to charitable causes.’ He had chosen Ficker ‘because of what Kraus wrote about you and your journal in the Fackel, and because of what you wrote about Kraus’. (Location 2163)
• Ficker had already decided who his three main beneficiaries should be: Rainer Maria Rilke, Georg Trakl and Carl Dallago. Each would receive 20,000 crowns. Rilke is one of the few modern poets that Wittgenstein is known to have admired, and he welcomed Ficker’s suggestion. Trakl’s name, too, he accepted readily. About Dallago he made no comment. Dallago was a bohemian figure, well known at the time as a writer and philosopher. A regular contributor to the Brenner, he espoused an anti-materialistic, anti-scientific outlook that embraced Eastern mysticism and a celebration of the emotional, ‘feminine’, side of human nature. Of the remaining 30,000 crowns, 5000 each went to the writer Karl Hauer (a friend of Trakl’s and an erstwhile contributor to Die Fackel) and the painter Oskar Kokoschka; 4000 to Else Lasker-Schüler (a poet and a regular contributor to Der Brenner); 2000 each to Adolf Loos and the writers Theodor Haecker, Theodor Däubler, Ludwig Erik Tesar, Richard Weiss and Franz Kranewitter; and 1000 each to Hermann Wagner, Josef Oberkofler, Karl Heinrich and Hugo Neugebauer. (Location 2196)
• Of only three of the beneficiaries can one say with any certainty that Wittgenstein both knew of their work and admired it: Loos, Rilke and Trakl. And even here we must add the provisos that, though he admired the tone of Trakl’s work, he professed himself incapable of understanding it; that he came to dislike Rilke’s later poetry; and that, after the war, he denounced Loos as a charlatan. (Location 2223)
• The weekend during which Wittgenstein and Ficker discussed the allocation of money to the artists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the weekend that sealed the fate of that empire. The Austro-Hungarian ultimatum to Serbia had been presented on 23 July, and the deadline for their acceptance of its terms was Saturday 25 July, at 6 p.m. No acceptance was received, and accordingly, on 28 July, Austria declared war on Serbia. (Location 2233)
• The spiritual value of facing death heroically is touched upon by William James in Varieties of Religious Experience – a book which, as he had told Russell in 1912, Wittgenstein thought might improve him in a way in which he very much wanted to improve. ‘No matter what a man’s frailties otherwise may be’, writes James:18   if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically, in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. (Location 2269)
• ‘Now I have the chance to be a decent human being’, he wrote on the occasion of his first glimpse of the enemy, ‘for I’m standing eye to eye with death.’19 It was two years into the war before he was actually brought into the firing line, and his immediate thought was of the spiritual value it would bring. ‘Perhaps’, he wrote, ‘the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me.’ (Location 2275)
• He enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war against Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front. (Location 2282)
• His sense of isolation was made complete by the knowledge that the people in his life who had helped him to overcome the feeling of loneliness he had had since a pupil at Linz – Russell, Keynes, Pinsent – were ‘on the other side’. ‘The last few days I have often thought of Russell’, he wrote on 5 October. ‘Does he still think of me?’ He received a letter from Keynes, but it was of a purely businesslike nature, asking him what should happen after the war to the money that he had arranged to give to Johnson.fn2 ‘It hurts to receive a letter of business from one with whom one was once in confidence, and especially in these times.’ But it was, above all, to Pinsent that his thoughts turned: ‘No news from David. I am completely abandoned. I think of suicide.’ (Location 2324)
• To his few German and Austrian friends Wittgenstein sent greetings in the form of military postcards, and received in reply letters of encouragement and support. The Jolles family in Berlin, in particular, were frequent and enthusiastic correspondents. Elderly and patriotic, they took a vicarious pleasure in reading the news from the Front of their ‘little Wittgenstein’, and, throughout the war, badgered him to provide more detailed accounts of his exploits. ‘I have never thought of you so often and with such joy in my heart as now’, wrote Stanislaus Jolles on 25 October.29 ‘Let us hear from you often and soon.’ They ‘did their bit’ by sending him regular parcels of chocolate, bread and cigarettes. (Location 2331)
• During his first month in Galicia, he entered a bookshop, where he could find only one book: Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. The book captivated him. It became for him a kind of talisman: he carried it wherever he went, and read it so often that he came to know whole passages of it by heart. He became known to his comrades as ‘the man with the gospels’. For a time he – who before the war had struck Russell as being ‘more terrible with Christians’ than Russell himself – became not only a believer, but an evangelist, recommending Tolstoy’s Gospel to anyone in distress. ‘If you are not acquainted with it’, he later told Ficker, ‘then you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.’ (Location 2343)
• More stimulating was a writer whose view could not have been more antithetical to the Tolstoyan Christianity that Wittgenstein had come to embrace: Friedrich Nietzsche. Wittgenstein had bought in Kraków the eighth volume of Nietzsche’s collected works, the one that includes The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche’s blistering attack upon Christianity. In it, Nietzsche rails against the Christian faith as a decadent, corrupt religion, ‘a form of mortal hostility to reality as yet unsurpassed’. Christianity has its origins, according to him, in the weakest and basest aspects of human psychology, and is at root no more than a cowardly retreat from a hostile world:   We recognize a condition of morbid susceptibility of the sense of touch which makes it shrink back in horror from every contact, every grasping of a firm object.48 Translate such a psychological habitus into its ultimate logic – as instinctive hatred of every reality, as flight into the ‘ungraspable’, into the ‘inconceivable’, as antipathy towards every form, every spatial and temporal concept, towards everything firm… as being at home in a world undisturbed by reality of any kind, a merely ‘inner world’, a ‘real’ world, an ‘eternal’ world… ‘The kingdom of God is within you’…   This hatred of reality, and the idea to which it gives rise, of the need for redemption through the love of God, are, in Nietzsche’s view, the consequence of: ‘an extreme capacity for suffering and irritation which no longer wants to be “touched” at all because it feels every contact too deeply… The fear of pain, even of the infinitely small in pain – cannot end otherwise than in a religion of love.’ (Location 2460)
• Though ‘strongly affected’ by Nietzsche’s hostility towards Christianity, and though he felt obliged to admit some truth in Nietzsche’s analysis, Wittgenstein was unshaken in his belief that: ‘Christianity is indeed the only sure way to happiness’: (Location 2474)
• … but what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless. But why not lead a senseless life? Is it unworthy?   Even from this it can be seen how close Wittgenstein was, despite his faith, to accepting Nietzsche’s view. He is content to discuss the issue in Nietzsche’s psychological terms; he does not see it as a question of whether Christianity is true, but of whether it offers some help in dealing with an otherwise unbearable and meaningless existence. In William James’s terms, the question is whether it helps to heal the ‘sick soul’. And the ‘it’ here is not a belief but a practice, a way of living. This is a point that Nietzsche puts well:   It is false to the point of absurdity to see in a ‘belief’, perchance the belief in redemption through Christ, the distinguishing characteristic of the Christian: only Christian practice, a life such as he who died on the Cross lived, is Christian… Even today such a life is possible, for certain men even necessary: genuine, primitive Christianity will be possible at all times…Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things, a different being… States of consciousness, beliefs of any kind, holding something to be true for example – every psychologist knows this – are a matter of complete indifference and of the fifth rank compared with the value of the instincts… To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding of something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness.51   This, we may feel sure, was one of the passages in The Anti-Christ that persuaded Wittgenstein that there was some truth in Nietzsche’s work. The idea that the essence of religion lay in feelings (or, as Nietzsche would have it, instincts) and practices rather than in beliefs remained a constant theme in Wittgenstein’s thought on the subject for the rest of his life. Christianity was for him (at this time) ‘the only sure way to happiness’ – not because it promised an after-life, but because, in the words and the figure of Christ, it provided an example, an attitude, to follow, that made suffering bearable. (Location 2477)
• More to Wittgenstein’s taste also were probably the short notes he received from the villagers in Skjolden: Halvard Draegni, Arne Bolstad and the Klingenberg family. ‘Thanks for your card. We are all healthy. Speak of you often’, runs a typical card from Draegni. Wittgenstein’s replies were no doubt just as brief, and just as warmly received. The news from Norway was that work on his hut had been completed. ‘We all hope’, wrote Klingenberg, ‘that you will soon be able to return to your new house, which is now finished.’61 Wittgenstein paid the workers via Draegni, who was surprised to be sent the money; he had not expected Wittgenstein to pay, he wrote, until his return. Draegni was apologetic about the cost: ‘If one wants to build as solidly as you have had it made’, he explained, ‘it will always be more expensive than one initially reckons.’ (Location 2539)
• At the beginning of February Wittgenstein was put in charge of the forge in the workshop, and this added responsibility made it even harder for him to concentrate on philosophy. Apart from having to spend more time in the forge, his supervisory role imposed on him more trouble with his workmates. He was presumably chosen for this task because of his superior engineering skills, but even so it was difficult for him to assume the role of foreman. He reports many difficulties with the men whose work he was supervising, some of which led to great unpleasantness. On one occasion he came close to a duel with a young officer who, one supposes, disliked being told what to do by someone of inferior rank. The effort of trying to impose his will on an intransigent workforce, which neither respected his rank nor were willing to accept the authority of his superior knowledge, drained him of all his energy and strained his nerves almost to breaking point. After only a month of the job – a month in which he had written almost no philosophy at all – Wittgenstein was suicidal, despairing of ever being able to work again. ‘One cannot go on like this’, he wrote on 17 February. It was clear that something had to change: he had either to be promoted, or transferred to another post. He began to petition Gürth for a change in his situation, but, whether through inefficiency or neglect, nothing was done for a very long time. To add to the constant refrain of ‘Nicht gearbeitet’, a new phrase finds its way into the diary at this point: ‘Lage unverändert’ (‘Situation unchanged’). It must be this period that Hermine had in mind when, in speaking of Wittgenstein’s war experiences, she wrote of his repeated efforts to be sent to the Front, and of the ‘comical misunderstandings which resulted from the fact that the military authorities with which he had to deal always assumed that he was trying to obtain an easier posting for himself when in fact what he wanted was to be given a more dangerous one’.63 It is possible, I think, that Wittgenstein’s requests to join the infantry were not so much misunderstood as ignored, and that he was perceived to be of more use to the army as a skilled engineer in charge of a repair depot than as an ordinary foot-soldier. Throughout March, despite repeated entreaties to Gürth, his situation remained unchanged. (Location 2546)
• Whether inspired by Pinsent’s letter or not, it is remarkable that during his last few months at Kraków – at a time when he was desperately unhappy and intensely frustrated at not being able to obtain another position – Wittgenstein found himself able to work again with renewed vigour. Throughout the months of May and June he was prolific. A large part (approximately a third) of the remarks published as Notebooks: 1914–1916 were written during this period. (Location 2612)
• Wittgenstein, pleased with the results of his recent work on logic, was able to make a preliminary attempt to work it into a book. This, the first version of the Tractatus, has unfortunately not survived. We learn of its existence only in a letter to Russell dated 22 October 1915, in which he tells Russell that he is now in the process of writing the results of his work down in the form of a treatise. ‘Whatever happens’, he told Russell, ‘I won’t publish anything until you have seen it.’87 That, of course, could not happen until after the war:   But who knows whether I shall survive until then? If I don’t survive, get my people to send you all my manuscripts: among them you’ll find the final summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper. It will perhaps cost you some trouble to understand it all, but don’t let yourself be put off by that.   Russell’s reply is dated 25 November. ‘I am enormously pleased’, he wrote, ‘that you are writing a treatise which you want to publish.’88 He was impatient to see it, and told Wittgenstein that it was hardly necessary to wait until the end of the war. Wittgenstein could send it to America, to Ralph Perry at Harvard, who had, through Russell, already learnt of Wittgenstein’s earlier theories of logic. Perry could then send it on to Russell who would publish it. ‘How nice it will be when we finally see each other again!’ Russell ended. Frege, too, was told of Wittgenstein’s treatise. On 28 November he wrote, in similar vein to Russell: ‘I am pleased that you still have time and energy left for scientific work.’89 If Wittgenstein had followed Russell’s suggestion, the work that would have been published in 1916 would have been, in many ways, similar to the work we now know as the Tractatus. It would, that is, have contained the Picture Theory of meaning, the metaphysics of ‘logical atomism’, the analysis of logic in terms of the twin notions of tautology and contradiction, the distinction between saying and showing (invoked to make the Theory of Types superfluous), and the method of Truth-Tables (used to show a logical proposition to be either a tautology or a contradiction). In other words, it would have contained almost everything the Tractatus now contains – except the remarks at the end of the book on ethics, aesthetics, the soul, and the meaning of life. In a way, therefore, it would have been a completely different work. (Location 2710)
• The years during which the book underwent its final – and most important – transformation were years in which Wittgenstein and Russell were not in touch with one another. After the letter of 22 October 1915, Russell heard no more from Wittgenstein until February 1919, after Wittgenstein had been taken prisoner by the Italians. In his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, written during the final year of the war (while he himself was in prison, serving a sentence for having allegedly jeopardized Britain’s relations with the United States), Russell raises the question of how ‘tautology’ should be defined, and appends the following footnote:   The importance of ‘tautology’ for a definition of mathematics was pointed out to me by my former pupil Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was working on the problem.90 I do not know whether he has solved it, or even whether he is alive or dead. (Location 2731)
• Wittgenstein did not attempt to teach Bieler, as he had earlier attempted to teach Pinsent, the results of his work. They talked instead of Tolstoy’s Gospel and of Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The latter Wittgenstein read so often he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zossima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man who could ‘see directly into the souls of other people’. (Location 2757)
• One of the few personal possessions Wittgenstein packed was a copy of The Brothers Karamazov. (Location 2774)
• If he thought that he would not return from the Front alive, he knew with certainty that he could not return unchanged. In this sense the war really began for him in March 1916. (Location 2775)
• Undoubtedly, it is the knowledge of death, and therewith the consideration of the suffering and misery of life, that give the strongest impulse to philosophical reflection and metaphysical explanations of the world. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation   IF WITTGENSTEIN HAD spent the entire war behind the lines, the Tractatus would have remained what it almost certainly was in its first inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in precisely the ‘impulse to philosophical reflection’ that Schopenhauer describes, an impulse that has as its stimulus a knowledge of death, suffering and misery. (Location 2793)
• Once at the front line he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places, the observation post. This guaranteed that he would be the target of enemy fire. ‘Was shot at’, he recorded on 29 April.5 ‘Thought of God. Thy will be done. God be with me.’ The experience, he thought, brought him nearer to enlightenment. On 4 May he was told that he was to go on night-duty at the observation post. As shelling was heaviest at night, this was the most dangerous posting he could have been given. ‘Only then’, he wrote, ‘will the war really begin for me’:6   And – maybe – even life. Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm, but through God I become a man. God be with me. Amen (Location 2813)
• The struggle to stop himself from hating these people was, like the struggle against fear in the face of death, a test of his faith: ‘The heart of a true believer understands everything.’
  So, he urged himself: ‘Whenever you feel like hating them, try instead to understand them.’
  He tried, but it was obviously an effort: ‘The people around me are not so much mean as appallingly limited. This makes it almost impossible to work with them, because they forever misunderstand. These people are not stupid, but limited. Within their circle they are clever enough. But they lack character and thereby breadth.’
  Finally, he decided that he did not hate them – but they disgusted him all the same. (Location 2835)
• to write a little on logic. He continued with his theme of the nature of functions and propositions and the need to postulate the existence of simple objects. But he added this isolated and interesting remark about the ‘modern conception of the world’, which found its way unchanged into the Tractatus (6.371 and 6.372):   The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.14   Thus people today stop at the laws of (Location 2844)
• On 11 June his reflections on the foundations of logic are interrupted with the question: ‘What do I know about God and the purpose of life?’ He answers with a list:16   I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it. That life is the world. That my will penetrates the world. That my will is good or evil. Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless. I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings. (Location 2862)
• At the beginning of the war, after he had received news that his brother Paul had been seriously wounded and assumed that he had lost his profession as a concert pianist, he wrote: ‘How terrible! What philosophy will ever assist one to overcome a fact of this sort?’ Now, it seems, having experienced the full horrors of the war for himself, he needed, not only a religious faith, but also a philosophy.18 That is to say, he needed not only to believe in God – to pray to Him for strength and for enlightenment; he needed to understand what it was that he was believing in. When he prayed to God, what was he doing? To whom was he addressing his prayers? Himself? The world? Fate? His answer seems to be: all three:   To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life.19 To believe in God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in God means to see that life has a meaning. The world is given me, i.e. my will enters the world completely from the outside as into something that is already there. (As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.) However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God. In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will. I can make myself independent of fate. There are two godheads: the world and my independent I. … When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world? Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God. (Location 2882)
• Whether Wittgenstein was rereading Schopenhauer in 1916, or whether he was remembering the passages that had impressed him in his youth, there is no doubt that the remarks he wrote in that year have a distinctly Schopenhauerian feel. He even adopts Schopenhauer’s jargon of Wille (‘will’) and Vorstellung (‘representation’ or, sometimes, ‘idea’), as in:   As my idea is the world, in the same way my will is the world-will. (Location 2938)
• What distinguishes Wittgenstein’s statement of the doctrine from Schopenhauer’s is that in Wittgenstein’s case it is accompanied by the proviso that, when put into words, the doctrine is, strictly speaking, nonsense: ‘what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest’.32 He had, he thought, reached a point where Schopenhauerian solipsism and Fregean realism were combined in the same point of view:   This is the way I have travelled: Idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and at last I see that I too belong with the rest of the world, and so on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as unique, the world.33 In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out. (Location 2952)
• Wittgenstein arrived in Olmütz some time in October 1916, and stayed there until shortly before Christmas. He wanted at first to lodge in the tower of Olmütz Town Hall, but upon being told by the watchman that it was not to let, he settled for a room in a tenement block on the outskirts of town. Shortly after moving in, he fell ill with enteritis, and was nursed back to health by Engelmann, with the help of Engelmann’s mother, who cooked Wittgenstein light meals, which Engelmann would then deliver to the invalid. On the first occasion that he performed this act of kindness Engelmann spilt some soup on his way up to Wittgenstein’s room. On his entering, Wittgenstein exclaimed: ‘My dear friend, you are showering me with kindness’, to which Engelmann, his coat bespattered, replied: ‘I am afraid I have been showering myself.’45 It was exactly the sort of simple kindness and simple humour that Wittgenstein appreciated, and the scene stayed in his mind. When he was back at the Front he wrote to Engelmann: ‘I often think of you … and of the time you brought me some soup. But that was your mother’s fault as well as yours! And I shall never forget her either.’ (Location 3019)
• Engelmann was the closest friend Wittgenstein had had since leaving England. The friendship owed much to the fact that the two met each other at a time when both were experiencing a religious awakening which they each interpreted and analysed in a similar way. Engelmann puts it well when he says that it was his own spiritual predicament that:   … enabled me to understand, from within as it were, his utterances that mystified everyone else.47 And it was this understanding on my part that made me indispensable to him at that time.   Wittgenstein himself used to say: ‘If I can’t manage to bring forth a proposition, along comes Engelmann with his forceps and pulls it out of me.’48 The image brings to mind Russell’s remark about dragging Wittgenstein’s thoughts out of him with pincers. And, indeed, it is hard to resist comparing Engelmann and Russell with respect to the roles they played in Wittgenstein’s life during the development of the Tractatus. Engelmann himself seems to have had the comparison in mind when he wrote that:   In me Wittgenstein unexpectedly met a person, who, like many members of the younger generation, suffered acutely under the discrepancy between the world as it is and as it ought to be according to his lights, but who tended also to seek the source of that discrepancy within, rather than outside himself.49 This was an attitude which he had not encountered elsewhere and which, at the same time, was vital for any true understanding or meaningful discussion of his spiritual condition. (Location 3035)
• And of Russell’s introduction to the book, he says:
  [It] may be considered one of the main reasons why the book, though recognized to this day as an event of decisive importance in the field of logic, has failed to make itself understood as a philosophical work in the wider sense.
  Wittgenstein must have been deeply hurt to see that even such outstanding men, who were also helpful friends of his, were incapable of understanding his purpose in writing the Tractatus.
  To a certain extent, this is anachronistic. It shows, too, little awareness of the fact that the Wittgenstein Engelmann met in 1916 was not the same as the Wittgenstein Russell had met in 1911. Nor was his purpose in writing the Tractatus the same. Russell was not in touch with Wittgenstein at a time when his work ‘broadened out from the foundations of logic to the essence of the world’; so far as Russell knew, his purpose in writing the book was to shed light on the nature of logic. Engelmann, one might say, would have been little use to Wittgenstein’s development as a philosopher in 1911, when his preoccupations centred on the issues raised by Russell’s Paradox. (Location 3050)
• During these six months of effectively non-combatant service, he seems to have begun the work of arranging his philosophical remarks into something like the form they finally took in the Tractatus. The manuscript of an early version of the book (published as Prototractatus) appears to date from this time, and we have it from Engelmann that a typed copy of the book existed before Wittgenstein left for Italy. This cannot have been the final version, but it is clear that during the winter of 1917–18 the work was beginning to take its final shape. (Location 3103)
• By the time of the Austrian offensive of 15 June Wittgenstein was fit enough to take part, and was employed as an observer with the artillery attacking French, British and Italian troops in the Trentino mountains. Once again he was cited for his bravery. ‘His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism’, ran the report, ‘won the total admiration of the troops.’60 He was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, but was awarded instead the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords, it being decided that his action, though brave, had been insufficiently consequential to merit the top honour. The attack, which was to be the last in which Wittgenstein took part, and indeed the last of which the Austrian army was capable, was quickly beaten back. In July, after the retreat, he was given a long period of leave that lasted until the end of September. (Location 3145)
• It was not in Vienna, but at Wittgenstein’s Uncle Paul’s house in Hallein, near Salzburg, that what we now know as Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus received its final form. One day in the summer of 1918 Paul Wittgenstein came across his nephew unexpectedly at a railway station. He found him desperately unhappy and intent on committing suicide, but managed to persuade him to come to Hallein. There Wittgenstein finished his book. (Location 3152)
• The most likely cause of this suicidal wish is a letter from Mrs Ellen Pinsent, dated 6 July, written to inform Wittgenstein of the death of her son, David, who had been killed in an aeroplane accident on 8 May. He had been engaged in research on aerodynamics, and had died investigating the cause of a previous accident. ‘I want to tell you’, she wrote, ‘how much he loved you and valued your friendship up to the last.’61 It was to David’s memory that Wittgenstein dedicated the completed book. David was, he wrote to Mrs Pinsent, ‘my first and my only friend’: (Location 3155)
• He chose as a motto for the book a quotation from Kürnberger: ‘… and anything a man knows, anything he has not merely heard rumbling and roaring, can be said in three words’. The quotation had been used before by Karl Kraus, and it is possible that Wittgenstein took it from Kraus, but it is equally likely he got it straight from Kürnberger (books by Kürnberger were among those sent by Wittgenstein to Engelmann). In any case, it is extremely apt. The whole meaning of his book, he says in the preface, ‘can be summed up as follows: What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent.’ (Location 3177)
• In its final form, the book is a formidably compressed distillation of the work Wittgenstein had written since he first came to Cambridge in 1911. The remarks in it, selected from a series of perhaps seven manuscript volumes, are numbered to establish a hierarchy in which, say, remark 2.151 is an elaboration of 2.15, which in turn elaborates the point made in remark 2.1, and so on. Very few of the remarks are justified with an argument; each proposition is put forward, as Russell once put it, ‘as if it were a Czar’s ukase’.63 The Theory of Logic worked out in Norway before the war, the Picture Theory of Propositions developed during the first few months of the war, and the quasi-Schopenhauerian mysticism embraced during the second half of the war, are all allotted a place within the crystalline structure, and are each stated with the kind of finality that suggests they are all part of the same incontrovertible truth. (Location 3182)
• In January 1919 Wittgenstein (together with Hänsel and Drobil) was transferred to another camp, in Cassino. There they were to remain, as bargaining material for the Italians, until August. It was while he was held at Cassino that Wittgenstein made the decision that, on return to Vienna, he would train as an elementary school teacher. According to the writer Franz Parak, however, with whom Wittgenstein enjoyed a brief friendship at the prisoner-of-war camp, Wittgenstein would most have liked to have become a priest ‘and to have read the Bible with the children’ (Location 3235)
• He had campaigned tirelessly against conscription and published numerous political essays, one of which brought against him the charge of prejudicing relations between Britain and the United States. For this he was imprisoned for six months. To the public he was now better known as a political campaigner than as a philosopher/mathematician. (Location 3249)
  • Note: Russell. Circa 42 years old.
• He could not write on logic, as he was allowed only two cards a week, but he explained the essential point: ‘I’ve written a book which will be published as soon as I get home. I think I have solved our problems finally.’ (Location 3264)
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• A few days later he was able, after all, to expand on this, when, thanks to a student who was on his way back to Austria, he had the opportunity to post a full-length letter. ‘I’ve written a book called “Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung” containing all my work of the last six years’, he explained:
  I believe I’ve solved our problems finally. This may sound arrogant but I can’t help believing it. I finished the book in August 1918 and two months after was made Prigioniere. I’ve got the manuscript here with me. I wish I could copy it out for you; but it’s pretty long and I would have no safe way of sending it to you. In fact you would not understand it without a previous explanation as it’s written in quite short remarks. (This of course means that nobody will understand it; although I believe, it’s all as clear as crystal. But it upsets all our theory of truth, of classes, of numbers and all the rest.) I will publish it as soon as I get home. (Location 3266)
• In fact, it was impossible for Russell to visit him at Cassino, although, as it turned out, Wittgenstein himself was given an opportunity to leave the camp. Through a relative with connections in the Vatican, strings were pulled to get him released by the Italians. He was to be examined by a doctor and declared medically unfit to stand prolonged confinement. Wittgenstein, however, rejected such privileged treatment, and at the examination insisted vehemently that he was in perfect health. (Location 3278)
• LIKE MANY WAR veterans before and since, Wittgenstein found it almost insuperably difficult to adjust to peace-time conditions. He had been a soldier for five years, and the experience had left an indelible stamp upon his personality. He continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war, as though it had become a part of his identity, an essential part, without which he would be lost. It was also perhaps a symbol of his feeling – which persisted for the rest of his life – that he belonged to a past age. For it was the uniform of a force that no longer existed. Austria-Hungary was no more, and the country he returned to in the summer of 1919 was itself undergoing a painful process of adjustment. Vienna, once the imperial centre of a dynasty controlling the lives of fifty million subjects of mixed race, was now the capital of a small, impoverished and insignificant Alpine republic of little more than six million, mostly German, inhabitants. (Location 3417)
• Wittgenstein had entered the war hoping it would change him, and this it had. He had undergone four years of active service and a year of incarceration; he had faced death, experienced a religious awakening, taken responsibility for the lives of others, and endured long periods of close confinement in the company of the sort of people he would not previously have shared a railway carriage with. All this had made him a different person – had given him a new identity. In a sense, he was not returning to anything in 1919: everything had changed, and he could no more slip back into the life he had left in 1914 than he could revert to being the ‘little Wittgenstein’ that the Jolles had known in Berlin. He was faced with the task of re-creating himself – of finding a new role for the person that had been forged by the experiences of the last five years. (Location 3432)
• Eventually the notary was persuaded to execute Wittgenstein’s wishes to the letter. ‘So’, he sighed, ‘you want to commit financial suicide!’ (Location 3460)
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• In September 1919, after ridding himself of his wealth and having enrolled at the Lehrerbildungsanhalt in the Kundmanngasse, Wittgenstein took another step towards independence from his privileged background, moving out of the family home in the Neuwaldeggergasse and taking lodgings in Untere Viaduktgasse, a street in Vienna’s Third District within easy walking distance of the college.fn1 This period was one of great suffering for Wittgenstein, and on more than one occasion during these months he contemplated taking his own life. He was exhausted and disorientated. ‘I’m not quite normal yet’,4 he wrote to Russell soon after his return; and to Engelmann: ‘I am not very well (i. e. as far as my state of mind is concerned).’5 He asked both Russell and Engelmann to come and see him as soon as they could, but neither could manage the trip. (Location 3462)
• Besides, there was a real possibility that Russell would not be given permission to leave the country – ‘for as you may know’, he wrote to Wittgenstein, ‘I have fallen out with the Government’.6 He nevertheless suggested that they try to meet at The Hague at Christmas: ‘I could manage a week, if the government will let me go.’ (Location 3471)
• Nor was he – a thirty-year-old war veteran – likely to make many friends among the teenagers with whom he attended lectures at the teacher training college. ‘I can no longer behave like a grammar-school boy’, he wrote to Engelmann, ‘and – funny as it sounds – the humiliation is so great for me that often I think I can hardly bear it!’ He complained in similar spirit to Russell:8   The benches are full of boys of 17 and 18 and I’ve reached 30.9 That leads to some very funny situations – and many very unpleasant ones too. I often feel miserable! (Location 3483)
• After receiving Russell’s testimonial, Braumüller offered to publish the book on condition that Wittgenstein himself paid for the printing and paper. By the time the offer was made he had no money to pay such costs, but even if he had he would still have refused. ‘I consider it indecent’, he said, ‘to force a work upon the world – to which the publisher belongs – in this way.14 The writing was my affair; but the world must accept it in the normal manner.’ (Location 3512)
• Responding to Frege’s remarks about the identical meanings of his propositions, ‘The world is everything that is the case’, and ‘The world is the totality of facts’, Wittgenstein wrote: ‘The sense of both propositions is one and the same, but not the ideas that I associated with them when I wrote them.’16 Here Frege was (or thought he was) on home ground, and agreed wholeheartedly with Wittgenstein’s point, the more so because it touched on a thought that was dear to him at this time. In order to make Wittgenstein’s point, he argued, it was necessary to distinguish a proposition from its sense, thus opening up the possibility that two propositions could have the same sense and yet differ in the ideas associated with them. ‘The actual sense of a proposition’, he wrote to Wittgenstein, ‘is the same for everybody; but the ideas which a person associates with the proposition belong to him alone … No one can have another’s ideas.’ (Location 3530)
• He then told Ficker of the unsatisfactory responses he had so far had from the publishers of, respectively, Kraus, Weininger and Frege. Finally, he got to the point: ‘it occurred to me whether you might be inclined to take the poor thing into your protection’. If Ficker thought its publication in Der Brenner conceivable, Wittgenstein would send him the manuscript. ‘Until then I should only like to say this about it’:   The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary, but there is no babbling in it. (Location 3580)
• Wittgenstein was sufficiently encouraged by this to send Ficker the manuscript. ‘I am pinning my hopes on you’, he wrote in the accompanying letter, which also provides one of the most direct statements we have of how he wished his book to be understood.23 He needed to say something about it, he told Ficker: ‘For you won’t – I really believe – get too much out of reading it. Because you won’t understand it; the content will be strange to you’:   In reality, it isn’t strange to you, for the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that 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; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. Therefore the book will, unless I’m quite wrong, have much to say which you want to say yourself, but perhaps you won’t notice that it is said in it. For the time being, I’d recommend that you read the foreword and the conclusion since these express the point most directly. (Location 3593)
• If this was intended to convince Ficker that the message of the Tractatus was, despite appearances, consonant with the aims of Der Brenner, it was misjudged. Wittgenstein was asking Ficker to accept that what he wanted to say about ethics had best be said by remaining silent – and, by implication, that much of what Ficker published in Der Brenner was mere ‘babbling’. His letter was hardly calculated, either, to reassure Ficker’s financial worries. A book in which the most important part has been left out could not be expected to be a very attractive proposition to a publisher with a concerned eye to his own solvency. Ficker’s response was cool. He could not give a definite answer, he wrote on 18 November, but there was a possibility that he would not be able to publish Wittgenstein’s work. It was, at that moment, in the hands of his friend and colleague, who, as he had explained in the previous letter, was responsible for the financial affairs of the publishing house. The opinion of this colleague was that the work was too specialized to appear in Der Brenner – although that was not necessarily his last word on the subject. Nevertheless, Ficker had approached Rilke for advice on where an alternative publisher might be found. Finally, could he show the book to a philosophy professor? He knew someone at Innsbruck University who was familiar with the work of Russell and who was interested to read what Wittgenstein had written. Who knows, he might even be able to help find a publisher for it. The letter threw Wittgenstein into a state of despondency. ‘Do you remember’, he wrote to Russell, ‘how you were always pressing me to publish something? And now when I should like to, it can’t be managed.24 The devil take it!’ To Ficker he replied: ‘Your letter, naturally, wasn’t pleasant for me, although I wasn’t really surprised by your answer.25 I don’t know where I can get my work accepted either. If I were only somewhere else than in this lousy world!’ Yes, Ficker could show the book to a professor if he liked, but showing a philosophical work to a professor of philosophy would be like casting pearls before swine – ‘At any rate he won’t understand a word of it’:   And now, only one more request: Make it short and sweet with me. Tell me ‘no’ quickly, rather then too slowly; that is Austrian delicacy which my nerves are not strong enough to withstand, at the moment.   Alarmed by this note of despair, Ficker wired a telegram: ‘Don’t worry. Treatise will appear whatever the circumstances. Letter follows.’26 Much relieved, Wittgenstein replied that he would rather Ficker accepted the book because he considered it worth publishing than because he wanted to do a favour. He nevertheless seemed inclined to accept the offer: ‘I think I can say that if you print Dallago, Haecker, etc., then you can also print my book.’27 The next letter he received, however, reinforced any doubts he may still have had. Ficker wrote that he was still hoping something would come of Rilke’s attempt to find a publisher.28 But if not, so moved was he by the bitterness and distress evident in Wittgenstein’s previous letter, he had decided – even if it meant risking everything he had – to see to the publication of Wittgenstein’s work himself. Rather that than disappoint the trust Wittgenstein had placed in him. (By the way, he added, if it did come to that was it absolutely necessary to include the decimal numbers?) This, obviously, would not do. ‘I couldn’t accept the responsibility’, Wittgenstein wrote to him, ‘of a person’s (whoever’s) livelihood being placed in jeopardy by publishing my book.’29 Ficker hadn’t betrayed his trust:   … for my trust, or rather, simply my hope, was only directed to your perspicacity that the treatise is not junk – unless I am deceiving myself – but not to the fact that you would accept it, without thinking something of it, just out of kindness toward me and against your interests.30   And, yes, the decimals were absolutely necessary: ‘because they alone give the book lucidity and clarity and it would be an incomprehensible jumble without them’. The book had to be published as it was, and for the reason that it was perceived to be worth publishing. Nothing else would do. If Rilke could somehow arrange that, he would be very pleased, but: ‘if that isn’t possible, we can just forget about it’. It is difficult to know how much trouble Rilke went to on Wittgenstein’s behalf. In a letter from Berne, dated 12 November 1919, he asks Ficker whether his own publisher, Insel-Verlag, might be suitable, and further suggests Otto Reichl, the publisher of Count Keyserling. Nothing came of either suggestion, and no further correspondence on the subject survives. (Location 3605)
• By this time Wittgenstein was sick to death of the whole business. ‘Is there a Krampus who fetches evil publishers?’ he asked Ficker; and on 16 November he wrote to Engelmann:31   Just how far I have gone downhill you can see from the fact that I have on several occasions contemplated taking my own life.32 Not from my despair about my own badness but for purely external reasons. (Location 3646)
• ‘It is terrible to think of your having to earn a living’, Russell wrote to him, after hearing that he had given all his money away, ‘but I am not surprised by your action. I am much poorer too. They say Holland is very expensive but I suppose we can endure a week of it without going bankrupt.’34 To pay Wittgenstein’s expenses, Russell bought some furniture and books that Wittgenstein had left behind in a dealer’s shop in Cambridge before his trip to Norway. It included the furniture he had chosen so painstakingly in the autumn of 1912. Russell paid £100; it was, he says in his autobiography, the best bargain he ever made. (Location 3667)
• For Russell and Wittgenstein, the week was taken up with intense discussion of Wittgenstein’s book. Wittgenstein was, Russell wrote to Colette on 12 December, ‘so full of logic that I can hardly get him to talk about anything personal’.37 Wittgenstein didn’t want to waste a moment of their time together. He would rise early and hammer at Russell’s door until he woke, and then discuss logic without interruption for hours on end. They went through the book line by line. The discussions were fruitful: Russell came to think even more highly of the book than he had before, while Wittgenstein had the euphoric feeling that, at last, somebody understood it. (Location 3677)
• Related to this was Russell’s refusal to accept what Wittgenstein had earlier told him was the ‘main contention’ of the book: the doctrine that what cannot be said by propositions can be shown. To Russell this remained an unappealingly mystical notion. He was surprised, he wrote to Ottoline, to find that Wittgenstein had become a complete mystic. ‘He has penetrated deep into mystical ways of thought and feeling, but I think (though he wouldn’t agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking.’ (Location 3690)
• He was nonetheless sufficiently impressed by the Theory of Logic in the book to offer to write an introduction, based on their conversation at The Hague, which would attempt to explain the most difficult parts of the book. With an introduction by Russell, now a best-selling author, the publication of the book was almost guaranteed. Wittgenstein returned to Vienna in jubilant mood. ‘I enjoyed our time together very much’, he wrote to Russell on 8 January 1920, ‘and I have the feeling (haven’t you too?) that we did a great deal of real work during that week.’40 To Ficker, he wrote: ‘The book is now a much smaller risk for a publisher, or perhaps even none at all, since Russell’s name is very well known and ensures a quite special group of readers for the book’:41   By this I naturally don’t mean that it will thus come into the right hands; but at any rate, favourable circumstances are less excluded. (Location 3694)
• Russell was at this time visiting Soviet Russia with a Labour Party delegation, and did not see Wittgenstein’s letter until his return in June. He reacted with remarkable generosity. ‘I don’t care twopence about the introduction, but I shall be really sorry if your book isn’t printed.45 May I try, in that case, to have it printed in England?’ Yes, Wittgenstein replied, ‘you can do what you like with it’.46 He himself had given up trying: ‘But if you feel like getting it printed, it is entirely at your disposal.’   The comforting argument he had earlier offered Russell did not prevent Wittgenstein from sinking into a deep depression after Reclam’s rejection. At the end of May he wrote to Engelmann: ‘I have continually thought of taking my own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to the lowest point.47 May you never be in that position! Shall I ever be able to raise myself up again? Well, we shall see.’ (Location 3722)
• Wittgenstein’s letters to Russell, and especially to Engelmann, during this period, show him to be desperately, suicidally, depressed. The severity of self-accusation contained in them is extreme even for Wittgenstein, who was always harsh on himself. He attributes his miserableness to his own ‘baseness and rottenness’, and talks of being afraid that: ‘the devil will come and take me one day’. (Location 3735)
• For both Wittgenstein and Engelmann, religion was inseparable from an awareness of one’s own failings. Indeed, for Engelmann, such awareness was central to the religious outlook:   If I am unhappy and know that my unhappiness reflects a gross discrepancy between myself and life as it is, I solved nothing; I shall be on the wrong track and I shall never find a way out of the chaos of my emotions and thoughts so long as I have not achieved the supreme and crucial insight that that discrepancy is not the fault of life as it is, but of myself as I am …49 The person who has achieved this insight and holds on to it, and who will try again and again to live up to it, is religious.   On this view, to be unhappy is to find fault with oneself: one’s misery can only be the consequence of one’s own ‘baseness and rottenness’; to be religious is to recognize one’s own unworthiness and to take responsibility for correcting it. This was a theme that dominated the conversations and the correspondence between Wittgenstein and Engelmann, as, for example, in the set of remarks on religion that Engelmann sent Wittgenstein in January:   Before Christ, people experienced God (or Gods) as something outside themselves.50 Since Christ, people (not all, but those who have learnt to see through him) see God as something in themselves. So that one can say that, through Christ, God has been drawn into mankind … … Through Christ God has become man. Lucifer wanted to become God and was not. Christ became God without wanting to. So the wicked thing is to want pleasure without deserving it. If, however, one does right, without wanting pleasure, so joy comes of its own accord.   When Wittgenstein came to comment on these remarks, he did not dispute the truth of them, but only the adequacy of their expression. ‘They are still not clear enough’, he wrote.51 ‘It must be possible, I believe, to say all these things much more adequately. (Or, not at all, which is even more likely).’ Even if their most perfect expression should turn out to be silence, then, they are nonetheless true. Wittgenstein regarded Engelmann as ‘someone who understands man’. When, after the attempt to be published by Reclam had come to nothing, he was feeling emotionally and spiritually demoralized, he felt an urgent need to talk with him. And when, at the end of May, he reached his ‘lowest point’ and continually thought of suicide, it was to Engelmann he turned for support. He received it in the form of a long letter about Engelmann’s own experience. Engelmann wrote that he had recently been worried about his motives for his own work – whether they were decent and honest motives. He had taken some time off to be alone in the countryside, to think about it. The first few days were unsatisfactory:   But then I did something about which I can tell you, because you know me well enough not to regard it as a piece of stupidity.52 That is, I took down a kind of ‘confession’, in which I tried to recall the series of events in my life, in as much detail as is possible in the space of an hour. With each event I tried to make clear to myself how I should have behaved. By means of such a general over-view [Übersicht] the confused picture was much simplified. The next day, on the basis of this newly-gained insight, I revised my plans and intentions for the future.   ‘I don’t know at all’, he wrote, ‘whether something similar would be good or necessary for you now; but perhaps my telling you this would help you now to find something.’ ‘Concerning what you write about thoughts of suicide,’ Engelmann added, ‘my thoughts are as follows’:   Behind such thoughts, just as in others, there can probably lie something of a noble motive. But that this motive shows itself in this way, that it takes the form of a contemplation of suicide, is certainly wrong. Suicide is certainly a mistake. So long as a person lives, he is never completely lost. What drives a man to suicide is, however, the fear that he is completely lost. This fear is, in view of what has already been said, ungrounded. In this fear a person does the worst thing he can do, he deprives himself of the time in which it would be possible for him to escape being lost.   ‘You undoubtedly know all this better than I’, wrote Engelmann, excusing himself for appearing to have something to teach Wittgenstein, ‘but one sometimes forgets what one knows.’ Wittgenstein himself was later to use, more than once, the technique of preparing a confession in order to clarify his own life. On this occasion, however, it was not the advice that did him good, but simply reading about Engelmann’s own efforts. ‘Many thanks for your kind letter’, he wrote on 21 June, ‘which has given me much pleasure and thereby perhaps helped me a little, although as far as the merits of my case are concerned I am beyond any outside help’:53   In fact I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact. It is a pitiable state, I know. But there is only one remedy that I can see, and that is of course to come to terms with that fact. But this is just like what happens when a man who can’t swim has fallen into the water and flails about with his hands and feet and feels that he cannot keep his head above water. That is the position I am in now. I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defences. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise. Of course it all boils down to the fact that I have no faith!   Unfortunately, there is no possible way of knowing what fact he is here talking about. Certainly, it is some fact about himself, and something for which he felt the only remedy to be religious faith. Without such faith, his life was unendurable. He was in the position of wishing himself dead, but unable to bring himself to suicide. As he put it to Russell: ‘The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again.’54 ‘But perhaps there is something better left for me’, he added parenthetically. The letter was written on 7 July, the day he received his teaching certificate: perhaps in teaching, it is implied, he would find something worth living for. (Location 3739)
• It is a view that gives a philosophical underpinning to the religious individualism adopted by Wittgenstein and Engelmann. I am my world, so if I am unhappy about the world, the only way in which I can do anything decisive about it is to change myself. ‘The world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man.’ (Location 3852)
  • Note: Citerat ur kontext.
• To Engelmann, a month later, he was even more enthusiastic. He described Trattenbach as ‘a beautiful and tiny place’ and reported himself to be ‘happy in my work at school’.3 But, he added darkly, ‘I do need it badly, or else all the devils in hell break loose inside me.’ (Location 3908)
• Berger omitted to use the word, but it was certainly as an eccentric aristocrat that Wittgenstein was regarded. ‘Fremd’ (strange) was the word most often used by the villagers to describe him. Why, they asked, should a man of such wealth and culture choose to live among the poor, especially when he showed such little sympathy for their way of life and clearly preferred the company of his refined Viennese friends? Why should he live such a meagre existence? (Location 3919)
• At first Wittgenstein had lodged in a small room in the local guest-house, ‘Zum braunen Hirschen’, but he quickly found the noise of the dance music coming from below too much for him, and left. He then made a bed for himself in the school kitchen. There, according to Berger (who was, one suspects, one of the chief sources of the stories told by the villagers about Wittgenstein), he would sit for hours by the kitchen window, watching the stars. (Location 3923)
• His teaching methods shared some of the basic principles of the Reform Movement, the most important of which was that a child should not be taught simply to repeat what it has been told, but should instead be encouraged to think through problems for itself. Thus practical exercises played a large part in his teaching. The children were taught anatomy by assembling the skeleton of a cat, astronomy by gazing at the sky at night, botany by identifying plants on walks in the countryside, architecture by identifying building styles during an excursion to Vienna. And so on. With everything he taught, Wittgenstein attempted to arouse in the children the same curiosity and questioning spirit that he himself brought to everything in which he took an interest. (Location 3936)
• However, to those children who were not gifted, or whose interest failed to be aroused by his enthusiasm, he became not a figure of fatherly kindness, but a tyrant. The emphasis he placed on the teaching of mathematics led him to devote the first two hours of each morning to the subject. He believed that it was never too early to begin algebra, and taught mathematics at a far higher level than was expected of his age group. For some of his pupils, the girls especially, the first two hours of the day were remembered with horror for years afterwards. One of them, Anna Brenner, recalls:   During the arithmetic lesson we that had algebra had to sit in the first row.6 My friend Anna Völkerer and I one day decided not to give any answers. Wittgenstein asked: ‘What do you have?’ To the question what is three times six Anna said: ‘I don’t know.’ He asked me how many metres there were in a kilometre. I said nothing and received a box on my ears. Later Wittgenstein said: ‘If you don’t know I’ll take a child from the youngest class in the school who will know.’ After the lesson Wittgenstein took me into the office and asked: ‘Is it that you don’t want to [do arithmetic] or is it that you can’t?’ I said ‘Yes, I want to.’ Wittgenstein said to me: ‘You are a good student, but as for arithmetic … Or are you ill? Do you have a headache?’ Then I lied, ‘Yes!’ ‘Then’, said Wittgenstein, ‘please, please Brenner, can you forgive me?’ While he said this he held up his hands in prayer. I immediately felt my lie to be a great disgrace. (Location 3944)
• The villagers (including some of his own colleagues) were, in any case, disposed to take a dislike to this aristocratic and eccentric stranger, whose odd behaviour sometimes amused and sometimes alarmed them. Anecdotes about his Fremdheit were told and retold, until he became a kind of village legend. There is the story, for example, of how he once got together with two of his colleagues to play a Mozart trio – himself on clarinet, Georg Berger playing the viola part on a violin and the headmaster, Rupert Köllner, playing the piano part. Berger recalls:   Again and again we had to start from the beginning, Wittgenstein not tiring at all.7 Finally we were given a break! The headmaster, Rupert Köllner, and I were then so unintentionally inconsiderate as to play by heart some dance tune. Wittgenstein reacted angrily: ‘Krautsalat! Krautsalat!’ he cried. He then packed up and went.   Another story concerns the time he attended a catechism at the local Catholic Church. He listened carefully to the questions put to the children by the priest, with the Dean in attendance, and then said suddenly, and very audibly: ‘Nonsense!’ But the greatest wonder – and the story for which he was most remembered by the village – concerns the time he repaired the steam engine in the local factory, using an apparently miraculous method. The story is told here by Frau Bichlmayer, the wife of one of Wittgenstein’s colleagues, who herself worked at the factory:   I was in the office when the engine went dead and the factory had to stand idle.8 In those days we were dependent on steam. And then a lot of engineers came, who couldn’t get it to go. Back at home I told my husband what had happened and my husband then told the story in the school office and the teacher Wittgenstein said to him: ‘Could I see it, could you obtain permission for me to take a look at it?’ Then my husband spoke to the director who said yes, he could come straight away … so then he came with my husband and went straight down into the engine room and walked around, saying nothing, just looking around. And then he said: ‘Can I have four men?’ The director said: yes, and four came, two locksmiths and two others. Each had to take a hammer and then Wittgenstein gave each of the men a number and a different place. As I called they had to hammer their particular spot in sequence: one, four, three, two … In this way they cured the machine of its fault.   For this ‘miracle’ Wittgenstein was rewarded with some linen, which he at first refused, and then accepted on behalf of the poorer children in his school. (Location 3964)
• Apart from this encouraging news, the one bright spot in Wittgenstein’s life during the summer term of 1921 was his relationship with one of his pupils, a boy from one of the poorest families in the village, called Karl Gruber. Gruber was a gifted boy who responded well to Wittgenstein’s methods. Like many of Wittgenstein’s pupils, he initially found algebra difficult. ‘I could not grasp’, he recalled later, ‘how one could calculate using letters of the alphabet.’22 However, after receiving from Wittgenstein a box on the ears, he began to knuckle down: ‘Soon I was the best at algebra in the class.’ At the end of the summer term, he was due to leave the school and start work at the local factory. Wittgenstein was determined to do all he could to continue the boy’s education. On 5 July he wrote to Hänsel explaining Gruber’s position and asking for advice. Given that his parents could not afford to send him to a boarding school, what could be done? Might a free or a cheap place be found for him in one of the middle schools in Vienna? ‘It would in my opinion’, he wrote, ‘be a great pity for the lad if he could not develop himself further.’23 Hänsel replied suggesting the possibility of the Calasanzverein, a Catholic establishment in Vienna which took on poor students. In the meantime, however, it was decided that Wittgenstein himself should continue to give the boy lessons, even after he had left the school, and that Hänsel should act as his occasional examiner, testing him to see that he reached the standard required to enter one of the Gymnasiums in Vienna. (Location 4053)
• The task of correcting the translation was therefore long and difficult, but by 23 April Wittgenstein had completed a detailed list of comments and suggestions, which he sent to Ogden. In the main his suggestions were motivated by a desire to make the English as natural as possible, and to relax the literalness of Ramsey’s translation. Not only was he forced to define particular German words and phrases; he also had to explain what he had meant by them and then find an English expression that captured the same meaning and tone. Thus, to a certain extent, the English version is not simply a translation from the German, but a reformulation of Wittgenstein’s ideas. (Location 4130)
• The first question Ogden had raised concerned the title. Ostwald had published it under Wittgenstein’s German title, Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, which, when translated literally, produces the rather awkward. ‘Logico-Philosophical Treatise’. Russell had suggested ‘Philosophical Logic’ as an alternative, while Moore – in a conscious echo of Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus – had put forward ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ as ‘obvious and ideal’. It was not, of course, a title that would reassure the public of the book’s accessibility, and Ogden felt slightly uneasy about it. ‘As a selling title, he told Russell, ‘Philosophical Logic is better, if it conveys the right impression.’31 The matter was settled by Wittgenstein. ‘I think the Latin one is better than the present title’, he told Ogden:32   For although ‘Tractatus logico-philosophicus’ isn’t ideal still it has something like the right meaning, whereas ‘Philosophic logic’ is wrong. In fact I don’t know what it means! There is no such thing as philosophic logic. (Unless one says that as the whole book is nonsense the title might as well be nonsense too.) (Location 4135)
• The suggestions and comments made by Wittgenstein were given careful consideration by Ogden (who, in his correspondence with Wittgenstein, emerges as the most scrupulous and accommodating editor an author could wish for), and the text was altered in the light of them. By May, work on the English text was more or less complete. (Location 4146)
• In his reply, Wittgenstein explained about the supplements and provided Ogden with a translation of the one he had intended to include in the book. This raised in Ogden’s mind the intriguing possibility that there might be more supplements to elucidate and expand what was, after all, a rather difficult – and short – book. Wittgenstein refused to send any more. ‘There can be no thought of printing them’, he told Ogden.34 ‘The supplements are exactly what must not be printed. Besides THEY REALLY CONTAIN NO ELUCIDATIONS AT ALL, but are still less clear than the rest of my props’:   As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what can I do? If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me. To let you print the Ergänzungen would be no remedy. It would be just as if you had gone to a joiner and ordered a table and he had made the table too short and now would sell you the shavings and sawdust and other rubbish along with the table to make up for its shortness. (Rather than print the Ergänzungen to make the book fatter leave a dozen white sheets for the reader to swear into when he has purchased the book and can’t understand it.) (Location 4155)
• The proofs were ready in July, and Wittgenstein returned them, duly corrected, in the first week of August. The publishers seem to have wanted to print some details of Wittgenstein’s biography and the peculiar circumstances in which the book was written, mentioning the prison camp at Monte Cassino, and so on. To this Wittgenstein responded with scathing contempt. ‘As to your note about the Italian monastery etc. etc.’, he wrote to Ogden on 4 August, ‘do as you please’:36   … only I can’t for my life see the point of it. Why should the general reviewer know my age? Is it as much as to say: You can’t expect more of a young chap especially when he writes a book in such a noise as must have been on the Austrian front? If I knew that the general reviewer believed in astrology I would suggest to print the date and hour of my birth in front of the book that he might set the horoscope for me. (26/IV 1889, 6 p.m.) (Location 4173)
• Wittgenstein asked affectionately after Russell’s wife and baby (‘The little boy is lovely’, Russell replied.42 ‘At first he looked exactly like Kant, but now he looks more like a baby.’) (Location 4217)
• In November he started at a primary school in Puchberg, a pleasant village in the Schneeberg mountains, now a popular skiing resort. Again, he found it difficult to discern any humanity in the people around him; in fact, he told Russell, they were not really people at all, but one-quarter animal and three-quarters human.
  He had not been at Puchberg long before he at last received finished copies of the Tractatus. He wrote to Ogden on 15 November: ‘They really look nice. I wish their contents were half as good as their external appearance.’ (Location 4271)
• Later, they were joined in these musical sessions by a local coal-miner called Heinrich Postl, a member of the village choir. Postl, who became a good friend and a kind of protégé of Wittgenstein’s, was later employed as a porter and caretaker by the Wittgenstein family. Wittgenstein gave him copies of some of his favourite books – Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief and Hebel’s Schatzkästlein – and sought to impress upon him his own moral teaching. Thus, when Postl once remarked that he wished to improve the world, Wittgenstein replied: ‘Just improve yourself; that is the only thing you can do to better the world.’ (Location 4282)
• While Wittgenstein was struggling to teach primary school children, the Tractatus was becoming the subject of much attention within the academic community. At Vienna University the mathematician Hans Hahn gave a seminar on the book in 1922, and it later attracted the attention also of a group of philosophers led by Moritz Schlick – the group that evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of Logical Positivists. In Cambridge, too, the Tractatus became the centre of discussion for a small but influential group of dons and students. The first public discussion of the book in Cambridge was probably in January 1923, when Richard Braithwaite addressed the Moral Science Club on the subject of ‘Wittgenstein’s logic as expounded in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’. (Location 4289)
• In a letter to Russell of 7 April, he went further:   A short time ago I received ‘The Meaning of Meaning’.54 It has surely also been sent to you. Is it not a miserable book?! Philosophy is not as easy as that! From this one sees how easy it is to write a thick book. The worst thing is the introduction of Professor Postgate Litt.D.F.B.A. etc. etc. I have seldom read anything so foolish.   It was the second letter Wittgenstein had written to Russell since their ill-starred meeting at Innsbruck, and he was impatient for a reply. ‘Write to me sometime’, he pleaded, ‘how everything’s going with you and what your baby’s up to; whether he is already studying logic fluently.’ Russell appears not to have replied. Wittgenstein’s categoric dismissal of Ogden’s work possibly irritated him, since he himself saw little to criticize in the book. It was, in many ways, simply a restatement of what he himself had already said in The Analysis of Mind. Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein was shocked to read in The Nation a favourable review by Russell of the book, describing it as ‘undoubtedly important’. From Frank Ramsey he learnt that Russell ‘does not really think The Meaning of Meaning important, but he wants to help Ogden by encouraging the sale of it’ – an explanation certain to have increased Wittgenstein’s disapproval, and to have confirmed him in his growing belief that Russell was no longer serious.55 In the 1930s Wittgenstein once or twice attempted (unsuccessfully) to interest Russell in the philosophical work that he was then doing, but he never again addressed Russell warmly, as a friend. (Location 4300)
• Of the people at Cambridge who studied the Tractatus in its first year of publication, Ramsey was undoubtedly the most perceptive. Though still an undergraduate (in 1923 he was still just nineteen years old), he was commissioned to write a review of Wittgenstein’s work for the philosophical journal, Mind. The review remains to this day one of the most reliable expositions, and one of the most penetrating criticisms, of the work. It begins in Russellian vein:
  This is a most important book containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system, which whether or not it be, as the author claims, in essentials the final solution of the problems dealt with, is of extraordinary interest and deserves the attention of all philosophers.
  But Ramsey then goes on to take issue with some of the misunderstandings contained in Russell’s introduction – for example, Russell’s misconception that Wittgenstein was concerned with the possibility of a ‘logically perfect language’ – and to give a fuller and more reliable exposition of the main lines of the book. When Wittgenstein heard from Ogden that Ramsey intended to visit Vienna in the summer vacation of 1923, he wrote to Ramsey himself, inviting him to Puchberg. Ramsey gratefully accepted, and arrived on 17 September, not quite knowing what to expect. He stayed about two weeks, during which time Wittgenstein devoted about five hours a day – from when he finished school at two o’clock in the afternoon until seven in the evening – to going through the Tractatus line by line with him. ‘It is most illuminating’, Ramsey wrote to Ogden; ‘he seems to enjoy this and we get on about a page an hour’:
  He is very interested in it, although he says that his mind is no longer flexible and he can never write another book. He teaches in the village school from 8 to 12 or 1. He is very poor and seems to lead a dreary life having only one friend here, and being regarded by most of his colleagues as a little mad.
  In going through the book in such detail, Wittgenstein made some corrections and changes to the text which were incorporated in later editions. For both Wittgenstein and Ramsey, it was important that Ramsey should understand the book thoroughly, in every last detail. Wittgenstein was concerned lest Ramsey should forget everything when he returned to England – as Moore had appeared to have done when he came to Norway in 1914. ‘It’s terrible’, Ramsey wrote to his mother, ‘when he says “Is that clear” and I say “no” and he says “Damn it’s horrid to go through that again.”’ (Location 4328)
• He was, however, impressed by Wittgenstein’s youthful appearance and his athletic vigour. ‘In explaining his philosophy he is excited and makes vigorous gestures but relieves the tension by a charming laugh.’ He was inclined to think that Wittgenstein ‘exaggerates his own verbal inspiration’, but of his genius he had no doubt:   He is great. I used to think Moore a great man but beside W! (Location 4364)
• Having met the family, Ramsey had a better understanding of the completely self-inflicted nature of Wittgenstein’s situation. He wrote to Keynes to explain that it was probably no good ‘trying to get him to live any pleasanter life, or stop the ridiculous waste of his energy and brain’:70   I only see this clearly now because I have got to know one of his sisters and met the rest of the family. They are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid’s food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren’t on good terms but because he won’t have any money he hasn’t earned except for some very specific purpose like to come and see you again. I think he teaches to earn money and would only stop teaching if he had some other way of earning which was preferable. And it would have to be really earning, he wouldn’t accept any job which seemed in the least to be wangled for him. It is an awful pity. (Location 4429)
• It appears Wittgenstein had asked Ramsey to write to Keynes explaining his attitude to visiting England, convinced that he could not express the matter adequately in English, and that Keynes wouldn’t understand it if he wrote in German. Wittgenstein, Ramsey explained, had severe misgivings about coming to England to renew old acquaintances. He felt he could no longer talk to Russell, and the quarrel with Moore had remained unhealed; there remained only Keynes and Hardy. He wanted very much to get to know Keynes again, but only if he could renew their old intimacy; he did not want to come to England and see Keynes only occasionally and establish only a superficial acquaintanceship. He had changed so much since the war, he felt, that unless he spent a lot of time with Keynes, Keynes would never understand him. (Location 4452)
• For the time being, Keynes did not respond to the suggestion that he should invite Wittgenstein to spend the summer with him in the country; he possibly considered the demands involved too great. He had, however – on 29 March, apparently before seeing Ramsey’s letter – finally replied to Wittgenstein’s letter of the previous year. He explained the long delay as being caused by his desire to understand the Tractatus before he wrote: ‘yet my mind is now so far from fundamental questions that it is impossible for me to get clear about such matters’:74   I still do not know what to say about your book, except that I feel certain it is a work of extraordinary importance and genius. Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge since it was written. (Location 4465)
• On the other hand, he told Keynes, if he had any work to do in England, even sweeping the streets or cleaning boots, ‘I would come over with great pleasure’. Without such a job, the only thing that would make it worthwhile for him to come would be if Keynes were prepared to see him on something more than a casual basis. It would be nice, he said, to see Keynes again, but: ‘staying in rooms and having tea with you every other day or so would not be nice enough’. (Location 4481)
• It would be necessary, for the reasons that Ramsey had already outlined, for them to work hard at establishing an intimate relationship:   We haven’t met since 11 years. I don’t know if you have changed during that time, but I certainly have tremendously. I am sorry to say I am no better than I was, but I am different. And therefore if we shall meet you may find that the man who has come to see you isn’t really the one you meant to invite. There is no doubt that, even if we can make ourselves understood to one another, a chat or two will not be sufficient for the purpose, and that the result of our meeting will be disappointment and disgust on your side and disgust and despair on mine.   As it was, no such complications arose, because no such invitation was forthcoming. Wittgenstein spent the summer in Vienna. (Location 4484)
• In what was to be his last attempt to raise the sights of the children of rural Austria, and to withstand the hostility of their parents and of his fellow teachers, Wittgenstein, in September 1924, started at yet another village school, this time at Otterthal, a neighbouring village of Trattenbach. (Location 4509)
• It was while at Otterthal, however, that Wittgenstein produced what is arguably his most lasting contribution to educational reform in Austria – a contribution that is, furthermore, fully in line with the principles of Glöckel’s programme. That is his Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, a spelling dictionary for use in elementary schools. The origin of his desire to publish such a book seems to lie in his asking Hänsel to enquire into the cost of dictionaries for use in schools. In the letter to Hänsel quoted above, he says:
  I had never thought the dictionaries would be so frightfully expensive. I think, if I live long enough, I will produce a small dictionary for elementary schools. It appears to me to be an urgent need. (Location 4529)
• During German lessons and PE lessons when the weather prevented them from going outside, Wittgenstein wrote words on the blackboard and had the children copy them into their own vocabulary books. These vocabulary books were then sewn together and bound with cardboard covers to produce the finished dictionary. (Location 4540)
• In contrast to the Tractatus, the publication of the dictionary was achieved quickly and without any great problems. In November 1924, Wittgenstein contacted his former principal at the Lehrerbildungsanhalt, Dr Latzke, to inform him of the plan. Latzke contacted the Viennese publishing house of Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, who on 13 November wrote to Wittgenstein to say that they would be willing to publish the dictionary. The manuscript was delivered during the Christmas vacation of 1924, and Wittgenstein was sent the proofs the following February. (Location 4551)
• After Wittgenstein’s preface was omitted and the words which Buxbaum had mentioned were included, the book received its required official approval. In November, a contract between Wittgenstein and the publisher was drawn up, under the terms of which Wittgenstein received 10 per cent of the wholesale price for each copy sold and ten free copies. The book was published in 1926 and enjoyed a limited success. (It was not reprinted, however, until 1977, by which time its interest was confined to Wittgensteinian scholarship.) (Location 4577)
• As we have seen, soon after he arrived in Otterthal, Wittgenstein became convinced that he would not for very much longer be able to withstand the pressures of trying to teach in a hostile environment. In February 1925 he wrote to Engelmann:   I suffer much from the human, or rather inhuman, beings with whom I live – in short it is all as usual! (Location 4581)
• Again, the girls proved more resistant to Wittgenstein’s methods, and resented having their hair pulled and their ears boxed because they were unable or unwilling to meet Wittgenstein’s unrealistically high expectations, especially in mathematics. In short, indeed, it was all as usual. (Location 4591)
• When he went to Manchester, both Eccles and his wife were surprised at the great change in him. They went to the railway station to meet him, and found in the place of the immaculately dressed young man, the ‘favourite of the ladies’ they had known before the war, a rather shabby figure dressed in what appeared to them to be a Boy Scout uniform. The appearance of eccentricity was compounded by Wittgenstein’s giving Eccles the (false) impression that he had not yet seen a copy of the Tractatus. He asked Mrs Eccles to obtain a copy, and after she had tried in vain to buy one from the booksellers in Manchester, Eccles borrowed one from the university library. ‘It was during this period’, Eccles states confidently, but mistakenly, in his memoir, ‘that he obtained his first copy of the English edition of his Tractatus.’93 Evidently, Wittgenstein very much wanted Eccles to see the book, but was too embarrassed to admit that as the reason for their determined search. (Location 4635)
• Josef Haidbauer was an eleven-year-old pupil of Wittgenstein’s whose father had died and whose mother worked as a live-in maid for a local farmer named Piribauer. Haidbauer was a pale, sickly child who was to die of leukaemia at the age of fourteen. He was not the rebellious type, but possibly rather slow and reticent in giving answers in class. One day, Wittgenstein’s impatience got the better of him, and he struck Haidbauer two or three times on the head, causing the boy to collapse. On the question of whether Wittgenstein struck the boy with undue force – whether he ill-treated the child – a fellow pupil, August Riegler, has (with dubious logic) commented:   It cannot be said that Wittgenstein ill-treated the child.97 If Haidbauer’s punishment was ill-treatment, then 80 per cent of Wittgenstein’s punishments were ill-treatments.   On seeing the boy collapse, Wittgenstein panicked. He sent his class home, carried the boy to the headmaster’s room to await attention from the local doctor (who was based in nearby Kirchberg) and then hurriedly left the school. On his way out he had the misfortune to run into Herr Piribauer, who, it seems, had been sent for by one of the children. Piribauer is remembered in the village as a quarrelsome man who harboured a deep-seated grudge against Wittgenstein. His own daughter, Hermine, had often been on the wrong side of Wittgenstein’s temper, and had once been hit so hard that she bled behind the ears. Piribauer recalls that when he met Wittgenstein in the corridor, he had worked himself up into a fierce rage: ‘I called him all the names under the sun. I told him he wasn’t a teacher, he was an animal-trainer! And that I was going to fetch the police right away!’ Piribauer hurried to the police station to have Wittgenstein arrested, but was frustrated to find that the single officer who manned the station was away.98 The following day he renewed the attempt, but was informed by the headmaster that Wittgenstein had disappeared in the night. On 28 April 1926 Wittgenstein handed in his resignation to Wilhelm Kundt, one of the District School Inspectors. Kundt had, naturally, been told of the ‘Haidbauer Case’, but reassured Wittgenstein that nothing much would come of it. Kundt placed great value on Wittgenstein’s ability as a teacher, and did not want to lose him. He advised him to take a holiday to calm his nerves, and then to decide whether he really wished to give up teaching. Wittgenstein, however, was resolute. Nothing would persuade him to stay on. At the hearing which followed, he was, as Kundt had anticipated, cleared of misconduct. But he had, by then, despaired of accomplishing anything more as a teacher in the Austrian countryside. The Haidbauer incident was not, of course, the cause of this despair, but simply the event that finally triggered its inevitable culmination in Wittgenstein’s resignation. The despair itself had deeper roots. Shortly before the incident, Wittgenstein had met August Wolf, an applicant for the post of headmaster at Otterthal, and had told him:   I can only advise you to withdraw your application.99 The people here are so narrow-minded that nothing can be achieved. (Location 4663)
• THE MOST NATURAL thing for Wittgenstein to have done in 1926, after things had come to a head in Otterthal, might have been to avail himself of Keynes’s hospitality and return to England. In fact, it was over a year before he once more got in touch with Keynes. He had, he then explained, postponed writing until he had got over the great troubles he had experienced. Although he had expected to leave Otterthal, and to abandon his career as a teacher, the manner in which he did so left Wittgenstein completely devastated. The trial had been a great humiliation, the more so because, in defending himself against charges of brutality, he had felt the need to lie about the extent of corporal punishment he had administered in the classroom. The sense of moral failure this left him with haunted him for over a decade, and led eventually, as we shall see, to his taking drastic steps to purge himself of the burden of guilt. In this state he could not contemplate returning to England. Nor, for the moment, did he feel able to return to Vienna. He considered, instead, a complete retreat from worldly troubles. Shortly after his retirement from teaching, he called at a monastery to enquire about the possibility of his becoming a monk. It was an idea that occurred to him at various times in his life, often during periods of great despair. On this occasion he was told by an obviously perceptive Father Superior that he would not find what he expected, and that he was, in any case, led by motives which the order could not welcome. As an alternative, he found work as a gardener with the monk-hospitallers in Hütteldorf, just outside Vienna, camping for three months in the tool-shed of their garden. As it had six years earlier, gardening proved an effective therapy, and at the end of the summer he felt able to return to Vienna to face society. (Location 4722)
• On 3 June 1926, while he was still working as a gardener, his mother, who had been ill for some time, died at the family home in the Alleegasse, leaving Hermine as the acknowledged head of the family. Whether or not this made it easier for Wittgenstein to return to Vienna, or whether his mother’s death influenced him in any way, is impossible to say. But it is striking that from this time on there is a profound change in his attitude to his family. The family Christmas celebrations, which in 1914 had filled him with such dread and produced in him such confusion, were now looked forward to by him with delight. Every Christmas from now until the Anschluss of 1938 made it impossible for him to leave England, we find him taking part in the proceedings with enthusiasm – distributing gifts to his nieces and nephews, and joining in with the festive singing and dining with no hint that this compromised his integrity. (Location 4736)
• The early plans were drawn up by Engelmann during Wittgenstein’s last term of teaching, but after he had left Otterthal, it seemed natural to invite him to join him as a partner in the project. From then on, says Engelmann: ‘he and not I was the architect, and although the ground plans were ready before he joined the project, I consider the result to be his and not my achievement’.1 The final plan is dated 13 November 1926 and is stamped: ‘P. Engelmann & L. Wittgenstein Architects’. Though he never had any architectural training, and was involved only in this one architectural job, there are signs that Wittgenstein began to take this designation seriously, and to see in architecture a new vocation, a new way of re-creating himself. For years he was listed in the Vienna city directory as a professional architect, and his letters of the time are written on notepaper headed: ‘Paul Engelmann & Ludwig Wittgenstein Architects, Wien III. Parkgasse 18’. Perhaps, though, this is no more than another statement of his personal independence – an insistence on his status as a freelance professional and a denial that his architectural work for his sister was a mere sinecure. (Location 4753)
• His role in the design of the house was concerned chiefly with the design of the windows, doors, window-locks and radiators. This is not as marginal as it may at first appear, for it is precisely these details that lend what is otherwise a rather plain, even ugly, house its distinctive beauty. The complete lack of any external decoration gives a stark appearance, which is alleviated only by the graceful proportion and meticulous execution of the features designed by Wittgenstein. The details are thus everything, and Wittgenstein supervised their construction with an almost fanatical exactitude. When a locksmith asked: ‘Tell me, Herr Ingenieur, does a millimetre here or there really matter so much to you?’ Wittgenstein roared ‘Yes!’ before the man had finished speaking.2 During discussions with the engineering firm responsible for the high glass doors which Wittgenstein had designed, the engineer handling the negotiations broke down in tears, despairing of ever executing the commission in accordance with Wittgenstein’s standards. The apparently simple radiators took a year to deliver because no one in Austria could build the sort of thing Wittgenstein had in mind. Castings of individual parts were obtained from abroad, and even then whole batches were rejected as unusable. But, as Hermine Wittgenstein recalls:   Perhaps the most telling proof of Ludwig’s relentlessness when it came to getting the proportions exactly right is the fact that he had the ceiling of one of the rooms, which was almost big enough to be a hall, raised by three centimetres, just when it was almost time to start cleaning the complete house. (Location 4762)
• Less then a year after Gretl moved in, the Great Crash of 1929 (though it did not by any means leave her destitute) forced her to lay off many of the staff she needed to run the house as it had been intended to be run, and she took to entertaining, not in the hall, but in the kitchen. Nine years later, after the Anschluss, she fled from the Nazis to live in New York, leaving the house empty and in the care of the sole remaining servant. In 1945, after the Russians occupied Vienna, the house was used as a barracks for Russian soldiers and as a stable for their horses. Gretl moved back in 1947 and lived there until her death in 1958, when the house became the property of her son, Thomas Stonborough. Sharing Hermine’s reservations about its suitability as a home, Stonborough left it empty for many years before finally, in 1971, selling it to a developer for demolition. It was saved from this fate only by a campaign to have it declared a national monument by the Vienna Landmark Commission, and now survives as a home for the Cultural Department of the Bulgarian Embassy in Vienna, though its interior has been extensively altered to suit its new purpose. Were Wittgenstein to see it in its present state – room dividers removed to form L-shaped rooms, walls and radiators painted white, the hall carpeted and wood-panelled, and so on – it is quite possible he would have preferred it to have been demolished. (Location 4789)
• At Cambridge he had met a Swiss girl by the name of Marguerite Respinger and had invited her to Vienna. With her, Wittgenstein began a relationship which he at least came to regard as a preliminary to marriage, and which was to last until 1931. She was, as far as anybody knows, the only woman with whom he fell in love.   Marguerite was a lively, artistic young lady from a wealthy background, with no interest in philosophy and little of the devout seriousness that Wittgenstein usually made a prerequisite for friendship. Her relationship with Wittgenstein was, presumably, encouraged by Gretl, although some of his other friends and relations were bemused and rather less than pleased by it. (Location 4801)
• Despite Sjögren’s disapproval, Wittgenstein and Marguerite began to see each other almost daily. While she was in Vienna, Marguerite attended the art school, and after her lessons would go to the Kundmanngasse building site to meet Wittgenstein. They would then go together to the cinema to see a Western, and eat together at a café a simple meal consisting of eggs, bread and butter and a glass of milk. It was not quite the style to which she was accustomed. And it required a certain degree of courage for a respectable and fashionable young lady like herself to be seen out with a man dressed, as Wittgenstein invariably was, in a jacket worn at the elbows, an open-neck shirt, baggy trousers and heavy boots. He was, moreover, nearly twice her age. She would on occasion prefer the company of younger, more fashionable, men like Thomas Stonborough and Talle Sjögren. This both puzzled and angered Wittgenstein. ‘Why’, he would demand, ‘do you want to go out with a young thing like Thomas Stonborough?’ (Location 4813)
• Despite Wittgenstein’s interest in, and sensitivity to, the other arts, it was only in philosophy that his creativity could really be awakened. Only then, as Russell had long ago noticed, does one see in him ‘wild life striving to erupt into the open’. (Location 4852)
• To persuade Wittgenstein to attend these meetings Schlick had to assure him that the discussion would not have to be philosophical; he could discuss whatever he liked. Sometimes, to the surprise of his audience, Wittgenstein would turn his back on them and read poetry. (Location 4899)
• Until his untimely death in 1930, at the age of twenty-six, it was Ramsey’s overriding and abiding aim to repair the theoretical holes in Russell’s Principia and thus to re-establish the dominance of the logicist school of thought and to nip in the bud the more radical alternative proposed by the increasingly influential intuitionist school led by the Dutch mathematician L. E. J. Brouwer. Broadly speaking, the difference is that, whereas Russell wanted to show that all mathematics could be reduced to logic and thus provide a rigorous logical foundation for all the theorems accepted by pure mathematicians, Brouwer – starting from a fundamentally different conception of both mathematics and logic – wanted to reconstruct mathematics in such a way that only those theorems provable from within his system were to be accepted. The rest, which included a good number of well-established theorems, would have to be abandoned as unproven. (Location 4930)
• Ramsey wanted to use the Tractatus theory of propositions to show that mathematics consists of tautologies (in Wittgenstein’s sense), and thus that the propositions of mathematics are simply logical propositions. This is not Wittgenstein’s own view. In the Tractatus he distinguishes between logical and mathematical propositions: only the former are tautologies; the latter are ‘equations’ (TLP 6.22). (Location 4936)
• Ramsey’s aim was thus to show that equations are tautologies. At the centre of this attempt was a Definition of Identity which, using a specially defined logical function Q(x, y) as a substitute for the expression x = y, tries, in effect, to assert that x = y is either a tautology (if x and y have the same value) or a contradiction (if x and y have different values). Upon this definition was built a Theory of Functions which Ramsey hoped to use to demonstrate the tautologous nature of mathematics. ‘Only so’, he thought, ‘can we preserve it [mathematics] from the Bolshevik menace of Brouwer and Weyl.’ (Location 4940)
• 11 THE SECOND COMING (Location 5059)
• WELL, GOD HAS arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.’1 Thus was Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge announced by Keynes in a letter to Lydia Lopokova, dated 18 January 1929. (Location 5060)
• Wittgenstein had been back in England just a few hours, and had already informed Keynes of his plan ‘to stay in Cambridge permanently’:   Meanwhile we have had tea and now I retire to my study to write to you. I see that the fatigue is going to be crushing. But I must not let him talk to me for more than two or three hours a day. (Location 5062)
• But there was little common ground between the peculiarly English, self-consciously ‘civilized’, aestheticism of Bloomsbury and the Apostles, and Wittgenstein’s rigorously ascetic sensibility and occasionally ruthless honesty. There was shock on both sides. Leonard Woolf recalls that he was once appalled by Wittgenstein’s ‘brutally rude’ treatment of Lydia Keynes at lunch.3 At another lunch, Wittgenstein walked out, shocked at the frank discussion of sex in the presence of ladies. Clearly, the atmosphere of Bloomsbury was not one in which he felt at home. Frances Partridge describes how, in contrast to the Bells, Stracheys and Stephens with whom she mixed, Wittgenstein seemed unable or unwilling to discuss serious matters with members of the opposite sex: ‘in mixed company his conversation was often trivial in the extreme, and larded with feeble jokes accompanied by a wintry smile’. (Location 5082)
• During his first two terms at Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s official status was that of an ‘Advanced Student’ reading for a Ph.D., with Ramsey, seventeen years his junior, as his supervisor. In practice, he and Ramsey met as equals working on similar, or related, problems, and looking to each other for criticism, guidance and inspiration. Several times a week they would meet for many hours at a time to discuss the foundations of mathematics and the nature of logic. These meetings were described by Wittgenstein in his diary as ‘delightful discussions’: ‘There is something playful about them and they are, I believe, pursued in a good spirit.’ There was, he wrote, something almost erotic about them:10   There is nothing more pleasant to me than when someone takes my thoughts out of my mouth, and then, so to speak, spreads them out in the open.   ‘I don’t like taking walks through the fields of science alone’, he added. (Location 5135)
• Despite their enormous respect for each other, there were great differences, intellectual and temperamental, between Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Ramsey was a mathematician, dissatisfied with the logical foundations of his subject, who wanted to reconstruct mathematics on sound principles. Wittgenstein was not interested in reconstructing mathematics; his interest lay in extracting the philosophical root from which confusion about mathematics grew. Thus, while Ramsey could look to Wittgenstein for inspiration and Wittgenstein in Ramsey for criticism, frustrations between the two were inevitable. Ramsey once told Wittgenstein bluntly: ‘I don’t like your method of arguing’, while Wittgenstein wrote of Ramsey, in a remark already quoted, that he was a ‘bourgeois thinker’ who was disturbed by real philosophical reflection ‘until he put its result (if it had one) to one side and declared it trivial’.12 A ‘non-bourgeois’ thinker whose profound influence on Wittgenstein’s development dates from this first year back at Cambridge was Piero Sraffa. Sraffa was a brilliant Italian economist (of a broadly Marxist persuasion), and a close friend of Antonio Gramsci, the imprisoned Italian Communist leader. After jeopardizing his career in his home country by publishing an attack on Mussolini’s policies, Sraffa was invited by Keynes to come to King’s to pursue his work, and a lectureship in economics at Cambridge was created specially for him. Upon being introduced by Keynes, he and Wittgenstein became close friends, and Wittgenstein would arrange to meet him at least once a week for discussions. These meetings he came to value even more than those with Ramsey. In the preface to the Investigations he says of Sraffa’s criticism: ‘I am indebted to this stimulus for the most consequential ideas of this book.’ This is a large claim, and – considering their widely differing intellectual preoccupations – a puzzling one. But it is precisely because Sraffa’s criticisms did not concern details (because, one might say, he was not a philosopher or a mathematician) that they could be so consequential. Unlike Ramsey, Sraffa had the power to force Wittgenstein to revise, not this or that point, but his whole perspective. One anecdote that illustrates this was told by Wittgenstein to both Malcolm and von Wright, and has since been retold many times. It concerns a conversation in which Wittgenstein insisted that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same ‘logical form’ (or ‘grammar’, depending on the version of the story). To this idea. Sraffa made a Neapolitan gesture of brushing his chin with his fingertips, asking: ‘What is the logical form of that?’ This, according to the story, broke the hold on Wittgenstein of the Tractarian idea that a proposition must be a ‘picture’ of the reality it describes.13 The importance of this anecdote is not that it explains why Wittgenstein abandoned the Picture Theory of meaning (for it does not), but that it is a good example of the way in which Sraffa could make Wittgenstein see things anew, from a fresh perpective. Wittgenstein told many of his friends that his discussions with Sraffa made him feel like a tree from which all branches had been cut. The metaphor is carefully chosen: cutting dead branches away allows new, more vigorous ones to grow (whereas Ramsey’s objections left the dead wood in place, forcing the tree to distort itself around it). Wittgenstein once remarked to Rush Rhees that the most important thing he gained from talking to Sraffa was an ‘anthropological’ way of looking at philosophical problems. This remark goes some way to explain why Sraffa is credited as having had such an important influence. One of the most striking ways in which Wittgenstein’s later work differs from the Tractatus is in its ‘anthropological’ approach. That is, whereas the Tractatus deals with language in isolation from the circumstances in which it is used, the Investigations repeatedly emphasizes the importance of the ‘stream of life’ which gives linguistic utterances their meaning: a ‘language-game’ cannot be described without mentioning their activities and the way of life of the ‘tribe’ that plays it. If this change of perspective derives from Sraffa, then his influence on the later work is indeed of the most fundamental importance. But in this case, it must have taken a few years for that influence to bear fruit, for this ‘anthropological’ feature of Wittgenstein’s philosophical method does not begin to emerge until about 1932. (Location 5152)
• intellectual and temperamental, between Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Ramsey was a mathematician, dissatisfied with the logical foundations of his subject, who wanted to reconstruct mathematics on sound principles. Wittgenstein was not interested in reconstructing mathematics; his interest lay in extracting the philosophical root from which confusion about mathematics grew. Thus, while Ramsey could look to Wittgenstein for inspiration and Wittgenstein in Ramsey for criticism, frustrations between the two were inevitable. Ramsey once told Wittgenstein bluntly: ‘I don’t like your method of arguing’, while Wittgenstein wrote of Ramsey, in a remark already quoted, that he was a ‘bourgeois thinker’ who was disturbed by real philosophical reflection ‘until he put its result (if it had one) to one side and declared it trivial’. (Location 5153)
• Though he admired Moore’s exactitude of expression, and would occasionally make use of it to find the precise word he wanted to make a particular point, Wittgenstein had little respect for him as an original philosopher. ‘Moore?’ – he once said – ‘he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatever.’ (Location 5193)
• Similarly with the, by now elderly, logician W. E. Johnson – another figure from his earlier Cambridge period – Wittgenstein maintained an affectionate friendship, despite the intellectual distance that existed between the two. Wittgenstein admired Johnson as a pianist more than as a logician, and would regularly attend his Sunday afternoon ‘at homes’ to listen to him play. For his part, though he liked and admired Wittgenstein, Johnson considered his return a ‘disaster for Cambridge’. Wittgenstein was, he said, ‘a man who is quite incapable of carrying on a discussion’. (Location 5196)
• Many who had heard of Wittgenstein as the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus imagined him to be an old and dignified German academic, and were unprepared for the youthfully aggressive and animated figure they encountered at meetings of the Moral Science Club. S. K. Bose, for example, who subsequently became one of the circle of Wittgenstein’s friends and admirers, recalls:   My first encounter with Wittgenstein was at a meeting of the Moral Science Club at which I read a paper on ‘The nature of moral judgement’.17 It was a rather largely attended meeting and some people were squatting on the carpet. Among them was a stranger to all of us (except, of course, Professor Moore and one other senior member possibly present). After I had read the paper, the stranger raised some questions and objections in that downright fashion (but never unkind way) which one learned later to associate with Wittgenstein. I have never been able to live down the shame I felt when I learnt, some time later, who my interlocutor had been, and realised how supercilious I had been in dealing with the questions and objections he raised. (Location 5210)
• After first meeting Wittgenstein in 1929, almost every major decision in Drury’s life was made under his influence. He had originally intended, upon leaving Cambridge, to be ordained as an Anglican priest. ‘Don’t think I ridicule this for one minute’, Wittgenstein remarked upon being told of the plan, ‘but I can’t approve; no, I can’t approve.18 I would be afraid that one day that collar would choke you.’ This was on the second, or possibly the third, occasion on which they had met. On the next, Wittgenstein returned to the theme: ‘Just think, Drury, what it would mean to have to preach a sermon every week; you couldn’t do it.’ After a year at theological college, Drury agreed, and, prompted by Wittgenstein, took a job instead among ‘ordinary people’. He worked on projects to help the unemployed, first in Newcastle and then in South Wales, after which, again prompted by Wittgenstein, he trained as a doctor. After the war he specialized in psychiatry (a branch of medicine suggested by Wittgenstein), and from 1947 until his death in 1976 worked at St Patrick’s Hospital, Dublin, first as Resident Psychiatrist and then as Senior Consultant Psychiatrist. His collection of essays on philosophical problems in psychiatry, The Danger of Words, was published in 1973 ; though much neglected, it is perhaps, in its tone and its concerns, the most truly Wittgensteinian work published by any of Wittgenstein’s students. ‘Why do I now bring these papers together?’ he asks in the preface, and answers:   For one reason only. The author of these writings was at one time a pupil of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Now it is well known that Wittgenstein encouraged his pupils (those at least whom he considered had no great originality in philosophical ability) to turn from academic philosophy to the active study and practice of some particular avocation. In my own case he urged me to turn to the study of medicine, not that I should make no use of what he had taught me, but rather that on no account should I ‘give up thinking’. I therefore hesitantly put these essays forward as an illustration of the influence that Wittgenstein had on the thought of one who was confronted by problems which had both an immediate practical difficulty to contend with, as well as a deeper philosophical perplexity to ponder over.   Similarly, shortly before his death, Drury published his notes of conversations with Wittgenstein to counteract the effect of ‘well-meaning commentators’, who ‘make it appear that his writings were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against’.19 These notes provide – perhaps more than any other secondary source – information on the spiritual and moral attitudes that informed Wittgenstein’s life and work. Drury is the first, but by no means the last, disciple to illustrate that there is an important aspect of Wittgenstein’s influence that is not, and cannot be, covered in the large body of academic literature which Wittgenstein’s work has inspired. The line of apostolic succession, one might say, extends far beyond the confines of academic philosophy. (Location 5228)
• Wittgenstein’s correspondence with Pattisson consists almost entirely of ‘nonsense’. In nearly every letter he makes some use of the English adjective ‘bloody’, which, for some reason, he found inexhaustibly funny. He would begin his letters ‘Dear Old Blood’ and end them ‘Yours bloodily’ or ‘Yours in bloodiness’. (Location 5272)
• Some of the jokes contained in Wittgenstein’s letters to Pattisson are, indeed, astonishingly feeble. Enclosing an address that ends ‘W.C.1’, he draws an arrow to the ‘W.C.’ and writes: ‘This doesn’t mean “Lavatory”.’ And on the back of a postcard of Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, he writes: ‘If I remember rightly this Cathedral was built, partly at least, by the Normans. Of course, it’s a long time ago & my memory isn’t what it was then.’ (Location 5288)
• Without some sort of financial assistance, Wittgenstein would not have been able to continue his philosophical work. By the end of his second term, whatever savings he had (presumably from his earnings as an architect) were insufficient to pay his college fees and leave anything for him to live on. Keynes’s suggestion that he apply for a research grant from Trinity was taken up, but there were, inevitably, complications. These arose from the fact that the college found it hard to understand why someone from as wealthy a background as Wittgenstein should need a grant of this kind. Did he have any other source of money? he was asked by Sir James Butler, the Tutor in Trinity. He answered, no. Didn’t he have any relations who could help? He answered, yes. ‘Now as it somehow appears as if I tried to conceal something’, he wrote to Moore after this interview, ‘will you please accept my written declaration that: not only I have a number of wealthy relations, but also they would give me money if I asked them to, BUT THAT I WILL NOT ASK THEM FOR A PENNY.’ (Location 5340)
• Perhaps in order to further convince the authorities, Wittgenstein was hurriedly awarded a Ph.D. for his ‘thesis’, the Tractatus, a work that had been in print for seven years and was already regarded by many as a philosophical classic. The examiners were Moore and Russell, the latter having to be somewhat reluctantly dragged up to Cambridge from his school in Sussex. He had had no contact with Wittgenstein since their meeting in Innsbruck in 1922, and was naturally apprehensive. ‘I think’, he wrote to Moore, ‘that unless Wittgenstein has changed his opinion of me, he will not much like to have me as an Examiner. (Location 5368)
• The Viva was set for 18 June 1929, and was conducted with an air of farcical ritual. As Russell walked into the examination room with Moore, he smiled and said: ‘I have never known anything so absurd in my life.’ The examination began with a chat between old friends.32 Then Russell, relishing the absurdity of the situation, said to Moore: ‘Go on, you’ve got to ask him some questions – you’re the professor.’33 There followed a short discussion in which Russell advanced his view that Wittgenstein was inconsistent in claiming to have expressed unassailable truths by means of meaningless propositions. He was, of course, unable to convince Wittgenstein, who brought the proceedings to an end by clapping each of his examiners on the shoulder and remarking consolingly: ‘Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.’ (Location 5376)
• In his examiner’s report, Moore stated: ‘It is my personal opinion that Mr Wittgenstein’s thesis is a work of genius; but, be that as it may, it is certainly well up to the standard required for the Cambridge degree of Doctor of Philosophy.’ The day after he received his Ph.D., Wittgenstein was awarded a grant of £100 by Trinity College – £50 for the summer, and £50 for the following Michaelmas term. (Location 5383)
• Wittgenstein was, Leavis recalls, working desperately hard at this time, and was chronically short of sleep. On one occasion, when they were out walking together until after midnight, Wittgenstein was so exhausted that on their way back to Malting House Lane he could hardly walk without the support of Leavis’s arm. When they finally reached Frostlake Cottage Leavis implored him to go to bed at once. ‘You don’t understand’, Wittgenstein replied.35 ‘When I’m engaged on a piece of work I’m always afraid I shall die before I’ve finished it. So I make a fair copy of the day’s work, and give it to Frank Ramsey for safe-keeping. I haven’t made today’s copy.’ (Location 5393)
• The Oxford philosopher, John Mabbott, recalls that when he arrived in Nottingham to attend the conference he met at the student hostel a youngish man with a rucksack, shorts and open-neck shirt. Never having seen Wittgenstein before, he assumed that this was a student on vacation who did not know his hostel had been given over to those attending the conference. ‘I’m afraid there is a gathering of philosophers going on in here’, he said kindly. Wittgenstein replied darkly: ‘I too.’ (Location 5447)
• There is no doubt that, though he regarded ethics as a realm in which nothing was sayable, Wittgenstein did indeed think and say a great deal about moral problems. In fact, his life might be said to have been dominated by a moral struggle – the struggle to be anständig (decent), which for him meant, above all, overcoming the temptations presented by his pride and vanity to be dishonest. (Location 5505)
• Any autobiography he might have written would almost certainly have had more in common with St Augustine’s Confessions than with, say, Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography. The writing of it would, that is, have been fundamentally a spiritual act. He considered Confessions to be possibly ‘the most serious book ever written’.4 He was particularly fond of quoting a passage from Book I, which reads: ‘Yet woe betide those who are silent about you! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find words to describe you’, but which Wittgenstein, in discussing it with Drury, preferred to render: ‘And woe to those who say nothing concerning thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense.’ (Location 5583)
• St Augustine, Heidegger, Kierkegaard – these are not names one expects to hear mentioned in conversations with the Vienna Circle – except as targets of abuse. Heidegger’s work, for example, was used frequently by logical positivists to provide examples of the sort of thing they meant by metaphysical nonsense – the sort of thing they intended to condemn to the philosophical scrapheap. (Location 5600)
• In describing the syntax of these systems of propositions, Wittgenstein was coming close to, as Ramsey had put it, outlining certain ‘necessary properties of space, time, and matter’. Was he, then, in some sense, doing physics? No, he replies, physics is concerned with determining the truth or falsity of states of affairs; he was concerned with distinguishing sense from nonsense. ‘This circle is 3 cm long and 2 cm wide’ is not false, but nonsensical. The properties of space, time and matter that he was concerned with were not the subject of a physical investigation, but, as he was inclined to put it at this time, a phenomenological analysis. ‘Physics’, he said, ‘does not yield a description of the structure of phenomenological states of affairs.12 In phenomenology it is always a matter of possibility, i.e. of sense, not of truth and falsity.’ (Location 5654)
• In the new year of 1930 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge to find that Frank Ramsey was seriously ill. He had suffered a spell of severe jaundice and had been admitted to Guy’s Hospital for an operation to discover the cause. After the operation his condition became critical, and it became apparent that he was dying. Frances Partridge, a close friend of the Ramseys, has described how, the evening before Frank Ramsey’s death, she visited his ward and was surprised to find Wittgenstein sitting in a small room that opened off the ward a few feet from Frank’s bed:   Wittgenstein’s kindness, and also his personal grief, were somehow apparent beneath a light, almost jocose tone which I myself found off-putting.18 Frank had had another operation from which he had not yet come round properly, and Lettice had had no supper, so the three of us set off to search for some, and eventually found sausage rolls and sherry in the station buffet. Then Wittgenstein went off and Lettice and I returned to our furnace.   Ramsey died at three o’clock the following morning, on 19 January. He was twenty-six years old. (Location 5710)
• His lecture style has often been described, and seems to have been quite different from that of any other university lecturer: he lectured without notes, and often appeared to be simply standing in front of his audience, thinking aloud. Occasionally he would stop, saying, ‘Just a minute, let me think!’ and sit down for a few minutes, staring at his upturned hand. Sometimes the lecture would restart in response to a question from a particularly brave member of the class. Often he would curse his own stupidity, saying: ‘What a damn fool I am!’ or exclaim vehemently: ‘This is as difficult as hell!’ Attending the lectures were about fifteen people, mostly undergraduates but including also a few dons, most notably G. E. Moore, who sat in the only armchair available (the others sat on deckchairs) smoking his pipe and taking copious notes. (Location 5728)
• The following weekend Wittgenstein visited Russell at Beacon Hill School and tried to explain the work that he had been doing. ‘Of course we couldn’t get very far in two days’, he wrote to Moore, ‘but he seemed to understand a little bit of it.’27 He arranged to see Russell again after the Easter vacation, in order to give him a synopsis of the work that he had done since returning to Cambridge. Thus Wittgenstein’s Easter vacation in Vienna was taken up with the task of dictating selected remarks from his manuscripts to a typist. ‘It is a terrible bit of work and I feel wretched doing it’, he complained to Moore. The result of this work was the typescript that has now been published as Philosophical Remarks. It is usually referred to as a ‘transitional’ work – transitional, that is, between the Tractatus and Philosophical Investigations – and it is perhaps the only work that can be so-called without confusion. It does indeed represent a very transitory phase in Wittgenstein’s philosophical development, a phase in which he sought to replace the Theory of Meaning in the Tractatus with the pseudo-Kantian project of ‘phenomenological analysis’ outlined in his discussions with Schlick and Waismann. This project, as we shall see, was soon abandoned – and with it the insistence on the Verification Principle as the criterion for meaningfulness. As it stands, Philosophical Remarks is the most verificationist, and at the same time the most phenomenological, of all his writings. It uses the tools adopted by the Vienna Circle for a task diametrically opposed to their own. (Location 5789)
• Given the litany of Russell’s troubles at this time, it is surprising that he coped as well as he did with the rigours of examining Wittgenstein’s work. For his part, Wittgenstein was a harsh critic of Russell’s predicament. He loathed Russell’s popular works: The Conquest of Happiness was a ‘vomative’; What I Believe was ‘absolutely not a “harmless thing”’. And when, during a discussion at Cambridge, someone was inclined to defend Russell’s views on marriage, sex and ‘free love’ (expressed in Marriage and Morals), Wittgenstein replied:   If a person tells me he has been to the worst places I have no right to judge him, but if he tells me it was his superior wisdom that enabled him to go there, then I know he is a fraud.30   On his arrival back in Cambridge on 25 April, Wittgenstein had reported in his diary the state of progress in his own, more restrained, love life:   Arrived back in Cambridge after the Easter vacation. In Vienna often with Marguerite. Easter Sunday with her in Neuwaldegg.31 For three hours we kissed each other a great deal and it was very nice. (Location 5824)
• This remark, like much else that Wittgenstein said and wrote at this time, shows the influence of Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918; English edition 1926). Spengler believed that a civilization was an atrophied culture. When a culture declines, what was a living organism rigidifies into a dead, mechanical, structure. Thus a period in which the arts flourish is overtaken by one in which physics, mathematics and mechanics dominate. This general view, especially as applied to the decline of Western European culture during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, chimed perfectly with Wittgenstein’s own cultural pessimism. One day, arriving at Drury’s rooms looking terribly distressed, he explained that he had seen what amounts to a pictorial representation of Spengler’s theory:   I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop, and in the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein.4 A little further on, in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over the human spirit in the course of only a hundred years. (Location 5919)
• Again and again in his lectures Wittgenstein tried to explain that he was not offering any philosophical theory; he was offering only the means to escape any need of such a theory. The syntax, the grammar, of our thought could not be, as he had earlier thought, delineated or revealed by analysis – phenomenological or otherwise. ‘Philosophical analysis’, he said, ‘does not tell us anything new about thought (and if it did it would not interest us).’8 The rules of grammar could not be justified, nor even described, by philosophy. Philosophy could not consist, for example, of a list of ‘fundamental’ rules of the sort that determine the ‘depth-grammar’ (to use Chomsky’s term) of our language:   We never arrive at fundamental propositions in the course of our investigation; we get to the boundary of language which stops us from asking further questions.9 We don’t get to the bottom of things, but reach a point where we can go no further, where we cannot ask further questions. (Location 5961)
• Explicit statements of what Wittgenstein is trying to accomplish in his philosophical work are rare, and it is perhaps not surprising that, as Drury has put it, ‘well-meaning commentators’ have made it appear that Wittgenstein’s writings ‘were now easily assimilable into the very intellectual milieu they were largely a warning against’. But, after all, when we see somebody tidying a room, we do not usually hear them keeping up a commentary all the while explaining what they are doing and why they are doing it – they simply get on with the job. And it was, on the whole, with this strictly ‘business-like’ attitude that Wittgenstein pursued his own work. (Location 6017)
• Certainly in his autobiographical notes there is nothing to suggest that he considered his ‘unheroic’, ‘ugly’ nature to be attributable to any supposed feminine traits. There are, however, several remarks that indicate that he was inclined to accept a Weiningerian conception of Jewishness, and that he considered at least some of his less heroic characteristics to have something to do with his Jewish ancestry. Like Weininger, Wittgenstein was prepared to extend the concept of Jewishness beyond the confines of such ancestry. Rousseau’s character, for example, he thought ‘has something Jewish about it’. And, like Weininger, he saw some affinity between the characteristics of a Jew and those of an Englishman.9 Thus: ‘Mendelssohn is not a peak, but a plateau.10 His Englishness’; ‘Tragedy is something un-Jewish. Mendelssohn is, I suppose, the most untragic of composers.’11 But – and in this he is also following Weininger – it is clear that for most of the time when he talks of ‘Jews’ he is thinking of a particular racial group. Indeed, what is most shocking about Wittgenstein’s remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language – indeed, the slogans – of racial anti-Semitism. The echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf. Many of Hitler’s most outrageous suggestions – his characterization of the Jew as a parasite ‘who like a noxious bacillus keeps spreading as soon as a favourable medium invites him’,12 his claim that the Jews’ contribution to culture has been entirely derivative, that ‘the Jew lacks those qualities which distinguish the races that are creative and hence culturally blessed’,13 and, furthermore, that this contribution has been restricted to an intellectual refinement of another’s culture (‘since the Jew … was never in possession of a culture of his own, the foundations of his intellectual work were always provided by others’) – this whole litany of lamentable nonsense finds a parallel in Wittgenstein’s remarks of 1931.14 Were they not written by Wittgenstein, many of his pronouncements on the nature of Jews would be understood as nothing more than the rantings of a fascist anti-Semite. ‘It has sometimes been said’, begins one such remark, ‘that the Jews’ secretive and cunning nature is a result of their long persecution’:15   That is certainly untrue; on the other hand it is certain that they continue to exist despite this persecution only because they have an inclination towards such secretiveness. As we may say that this or that animal has escaped extinction only because of its capacity or ability to conceal itself. Of course I do not mean this as a reason for commending such a capacity, not by any means.   ‘They’ escape extinction only because they avoid detection? And therefore they are, of necessity, secretive and cunning? This is anti-Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form – the fear of, and distaste for, the devious ‘Jew in our midst’. So is Wittgenstein’s adoption of the metaphor of illness. ‘Look on this tumour as a perfectly normal part of your body!’ he imagines somebody suggesting, and counters with the question: ‘Can one do that, to order? Do I have the power to decide at will to have, or not to have, an ideal conception of my body?’ He goes on to relate this Hitlerian metaphor to the position of European Jews: 16   Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, and anomaly, and no one wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life [and no one wants to speak of a disease as if it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones)]. We may say: people can only regard this tumour as a natural part of their body if their whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes). Otherwise the best they can do is put up with it. You can expect an individual man to display this sort of tolerance, or else to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation, because it is precisely not disregarding such things that makes it a nation. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone both to retain his former aesthetic feeling for the body and also to make the tumour welcome.   Those who seek to drive out the ‘noxious bacillus’ in their midst, he comes close to suggesting, are right to do so. Or, at least, one cannot expect them – as a nation – to do otherwise. It goes without saying that this metaphor makes no sense without a racial notion of Jewishness. The Jew, however ‘assimilated’, will never be a German or an Austrian, because he is not of the same ‘body’: he is experienced by that body as a growth, a disease. The metaphor is particularly apt to describe the fears of Austrian anti-Semites, because it implies that the more assimilated the Jews become, the more dangerous becomes the disease they represent to the otherwise healthy Aryan nation. Thus it is quite wrong to equate the anti-Semitism implied by Wittgenstein’s remarks with the ‘Jewish self-hatred’ of Karl Kraus. The traits which Kraus disliked, and which he took to be Jewish (acquisitiveness etc.), he attributed not to any racial inheritance but to the social and religious isolation of the Jews. What he attacked primarily was the ‘ghetto-mentality’ of the Jews; far from wanting to keep Jew and non-Jew separate, and regarding the Jew as a ‘tumour’ on the body of the German people, he campaigned tirelessly for the complete assimilation of Jews: ‘Through dissolution to salvation!’ From this perspective Kraus was far better placed than Wittgenstein to understand the horror of Nazi propaganda – and, one might add, more perceptive in recognizing its intellectual precedents. Wittgenstein, of course, could see that the Nazis were a barbarous ‘set of gangsters’, as he once described them to Drury, but at the time he was recommending Spengler’s Decline of the West to Drury as a book that might teach him something about the age in which they were living, Kraus was drawing attention to the affinities between Spengler and the Nazis, commenting that Spengler understood the Untergangsters of the West – and that they understood him. (Location 6204)
• Though alarming, Wittgenstein’s use of the slogans of racist anti-Semitism does not, of course, establish any affinity between himself and the Nazis. His remarks on Jewishness were fundamentally introspective. They represent a turning inwards of the sense of cultural decay and the desire for a New Order (which is the path that leads from Spengler to Hitler) to his own internal state. It is as though, for a brief time (after 1931 there are, thankfully, no more remarks about Jewishness in his notebooks), he was attracted to using the then current language of anti-Semitism as a kind of metaphor for himself (just as, in the dream of Vertsagt, the image of the Jew that was propagated by the Nazis – an image of a cunning and deceptive scoundrel who hides behind a cloak of respectability while committing the most dreadful crimes – found a ready response in his fears about his own ‘real’ nature). And just as many Europeans, particularly Germans, felt a need for a New Order to replace their ‘rotten culture’, so Wittgenstein strived for a new beginning in his life. His autobiographical notes were essentially confessional, and ‘a confession’, he wrote in 1931, ‘has to be a part of your new life’. Before he could begin anew, he had to take stock of the old.18 What is perhaps most ironic is that, just as Wittgenstein was beginning to develop an entirely new method for tackling philosophical problems – a method that has no precedent in the entire tradition of Western philosophy (unless one finds a place for Goethe and Spengler in that tradition) – he should be inclined to assess his own philosophical contribution within the framework of the absurd charge that the Jew was incapable of original thought. ‘It is typical for a Jewish mind’, he wrote, ‘to understand someone else’s work better than [that person] understands it himself.’19 His own work, for example, was essentially a clarification of other people’s ideas:   Amongst Jews ‘genius’ is found only in the holy man. Even the greatest of Jewish thinkers is no more than talented.20 (Myself for instance.) I think there is some truth in my idea that I really only think reproductively. I don’t believe I have ever invented a line of thinking. I have always taken one over from someone else. I have simply straightaway seized on it with enthusiasm for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. Can one take the case of Breuer and Freud as an example of Jewish reproductiveness? – What I invent are new similes.   This belittling of his own achievement may have been a way of guarding himself from his own pride – from believing that he really was, as he once lightheartedly described himself in a letter to Pattisson, ‘the greatest philosopher that ever lived’. He was acutely aware of the dangers of false pride. ‘Often, when I have had a picture well framed or have hung it in the right surroundings’, he wrote, ‘I have caught myself feeling as proud as if I had painted it myself.’21 And it was against the background of such pride that he felt forced to remind himself of his limitations, of his ‘Jewishness’:   The Jew must see to it that, in a literal sense, ‘all things are as nothing to him’. But this is particularly hard for him, since in a sense he has nothing that is particularly his.22 It is much harder to accept poverty willingly when you have to be poor than when you might also be rich. It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind does not have the power to produce even the tiniest flower or blade of grass that has grown in the soil of another’s mind and to put it into a comprehensive picture. We aren’t pointing to a fault when we say this and everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. It is only when the nature of a Jewish work is confused with that of a non-Jewish work that there is any danger, especially when the author of the Jewish work falls into the confusion himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn’t he look as proud as though he had produced the milk himself?)   So long as he lived, Wittgenstein never ceased to struggle against his own pride, and to express doubts about his philosophical achievement and his own moral decency. After 1931, however, he dropped the language of anti-Semitism as a means of expressing those doubts. (Location 6257)
• It was expected – indeed, regarded as inevitable – that Francis would pursue an academic career. Had it not been for Wittgenstein’s intervention, he would almost certainly have done so. So complete was Skinner’s absorption in Wittgenstein during his final year as an undergraduate that when, in the summer of 1933, he graduated with a first-class degree in mathematics and was awarded a postgraduate scholarship, his family had the impression that this was to allow him to continue working with Wittgenstein. In fact, the award was given by Trinity with the intention that he should use it to pursue mathematical research. (Location 6586)
• Wittgenstein’s advice to his friends and students to leave academia was based on his conviction that its atmosphere was too rarefied to sustain proper life. There is no oxygen in Cambridge, he told Drury. It didn’t matter for him – he manufactured his own. But for people dependent on the air around them, it was important to get away, into a healthier environment. His ideal was a job in the medical profession. He had already nudged Marguerite in this direction, and she was at this time training to become a nurse in Berne, a project in which Wittgenstein took a great personal interest. Their relationship had lost any trace of romantic involvement, and Marguerite had fallen in love with Talle Sjögren, but Wittgenstein would still occasionally travel to Berne to see how Marguerite was getting on in her training. Now, in the summer of 1933, after the completion of his project working with unemployed miners in South Wales, Drury decided he, too, wanted to train as a nurse. He was told, however, that with his education he would be more useful if he trained as a doctor. Upon being told of this, Wittgenstein immediately took the matter into his own hands. He arranged for Keynes and Gilbert Pattisson to lend Drury the necessary funds, and sent a telegram to Drury urging him: ‘Come to Cambridge at once.’ Drury was hardly out of the train before Wittgenstein announced: ‘Now there is to be no more argument about this: it has all been settled already, you are to start work as a medical student at once.’11 He was later to say that, of all his students, it was in his influence on Drury’s career that he could take most pride and satisfaction. (Location 6606)
• a fortiori (Location 6630)
• During the Christmas vacation of 1933 Skinner wrote to Wittgenstein every few days, telling him how much he missed him, how often he thought about him and how much he was longing to see him again. Every last moment he had spent with Wittgenstein was recalled with fond affection:   After I stopped waving my handkerchief to you I walked through Folkestone and took the train at 8.28 back to London.5 I thought about you and how wonderful it had been when we said goodbye … I loved very much seeing you off. I miss you a great deal and think about you a lot.   With love, Francis (Location 6684)
• At the family Christmas at the Alleegasse, Marguerite (who continued to spend Christmas in Vienna as the guest of Gretl) caused something of a sensation by announcing her engagement to Talle Sjögren. Encouraged by Gretl, but in the face of disapproval from her father, Marguerite decided on an extremely short engagement, and she and Talle were married on New Year’s Eve. Her father, at least, was a safe distance away in Switzerland. Wittgenstein was not. Recalling her wedding day, she writes:   My despair reached its zenith when Ludwig came to see me on the Sunday morning, an hour before my wedding.6 ‘You are taking a boat, the sea will be rough, remain always attached to me so that you don’t capsize’, he said to me. Until that moment I hadn’t realised his deep attachment nor perhaps his great deception. For years I had been like soft putty in his hands which he had worked to shape into a better being. He had been like a Samaritan who gives new life to someone who is failing. (Location 6691)
• It is hard to believe that she had not appreciated until that day how deep was Wittgenstein’s attachment to her. It is characteristic, however, of many of his friendships that she should have felt his involvement in her life to have had a fundamentally ethical purpose. ‘He conjured up a vision of a better you’, as Fania Pascal has put it. It was, after all, partly because she did not want to live with this kind of moral pressure that Marguerite had chosen to marry someone else. (Location 6700)
• During the year 1934–5 Wittgenstein dictated what is now known as the Brown Book. This, unlike the Blue Book, was not a substitute for a series of lectures, but rather an attempt by Wittgenstein to formulate the results of his own work for his own sake. It was dictated to Skinner and Alice Ambrose, who sat with Wittgenstein for between two and four hours a day for four days a week. The Brown Book is divided into two parts, corresponding, roughly, to the method and its application. Part I, introducing the method of language-games, reads almost like a textbook. After an introductory paragraph describing St Augustine’s account of ‘How, as a boy, he learned to talk’, it consists of seventy-two numbered ‘exercises’, many of which invite the reader to, for example:   Imagine a people in whose language there is no such form of sentence as ‘the book is in the drawer’ or ‘water is in the glass’, but wherever we should use these forms they say, ‘The book can be taken out of the drawer’, ‘The water can be taken out of the glass’.16 [see here]   Imagine a tribe in whose language there is an expression corresponding to our ‘He has done so and so’, and another expression corresponding to our ‘He can do so and so’, this latter expression, however, being used only where its use is justified by the same fact which would also justify the former expression.17 [see here]   Imagine that human beings or animals were used as reading machines; assume that in order to become reading machines they need a particular training.18 [see here]   The book is difficult to read because the point of imagining these various situations is very rarely spelt out. Wittgenstein simply leads the reader through a series of progressively more complicated language-games, occasionally pausing to remark on various features of the games he is describing. When he does make the point of these remarks explicit, he claims it is to ward off thoughts that may give rise to philosophical puzzlement. It is as though the book was intended to serve as a text in a course designed to nip in the bud any latent philosophizing. Thus we are first introduced to a language which contains just four nouns – ‘cube’, ‘brick’, ‘slab’ and ‘column’ – and which is used in a building ‘game’ (one builder shouts, ‘Brick!’ and another brings him a brick). In subsequent games this proto-language is supplemented by the addition first of numerals, and then of proper nouns, the words ‘this’ and ‘there’, questions and answers, and finally colour words. So far, no philosophical moral has been drawn other than that, in understanding how these various languages are used, it is not necessary to postulate the existence of mental images; all the games could be played with or without such images. The unspoken point of this is to loosen the hold of the idea that mental images are an essential concomitant to any meaningful use of language. (Location 6790)
• The summer of 1935 was the time when Marxism became, for the undergraduates at Cambridge, the most important intellectual force in the university, and when many students and dons visited the Soviet Union in the spirit of pilgrimage. (Location 6862)
• Despite the fact that Wittgenstein was never at any time a Marxist, he was perceived as a sympathetic figure by the students who formed the core of the Cambridge Communist Party, many of whom (Hayden-Guest, Cornford, Maurice Cornforth etc.) attended his lectures. But Wittgenstein’s reasons for wanting to visit Russia were very different. His perception of the decline of the countries of Western Europe was always more Spenglerian than Marxian, and, as we have remarked earlier, it is likely that he was extremely attracted to the portrait of life in the Soviet Union drawn by Keynes in his Short View of Russia – a portrait which, while deprecating Marxism as an economic theory, applauded its practice in Russia as a new religion, in which there were no supernatural beliefs but, rather, deeply held religious attitudes. (Location 6866)
• At Moscow he met Sophia Janovskaya, the professor of mathematical logic, with whom he struck up a friendship that lasted through correspondence long after he had returned to England. He was attracted to her by the forthrightness of her speech. Upon meeting him for the first time, she exclaimed: ‘What, not the great Wittgenstein?’ and during a conversation on philosophy she told him quite simply: ‘You ought to read more Hegel.’ From their discussions of philosophy, Professor Janovskaya received the (surely false) impression that Wittgenstein was interested in dialectical materialism and the development of Soviet philosophic thought. It was apparently through Janovskaya that Wittgenstein was offered first a chair in philosophy at Kazan University, and then a teaching post in philosophy at the University of Moscow. (Location 6925)
• Nevertheless, even after the show trials of 1936, the worsening of relations between Russia and the West and the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, Wittgenstein continued to express his sympathy with the Soviet régime – so much so that he was taken by some of his students at Cambridge to be a ‘Stalinist’. This label is, of course, nonsense. But at a time when most people saw only the tyranny of Stalin’s rule, Wittgenstein emphasized the problems with which Stalin had to deal and the scale of his achievement in dealing with them. On the eve of the Second World War he asserted to Drury that England and France between them would not be able to defeat Hitler’s Germany; they would need the support of Russia. He told Drury: ‘People have accused Stalin of having betrayed the Russian Revolution.18 But they have no idea of the problems that Stalin had to deal with; and the dangers he saw threatening Russia.’ He immediately added, as though it were somehow relevant: ‘I was looking at a picture of the British Cabinet and I thought to myself, “a lot of wealthy old men”.’ This remark recalls Keynes’s characterization of Russia as ‘the beautiful and foolish youngest son of the European family, with hair on his head, nearer to both the earth and to heaven than his bald brothers in the West’. Wittgenstein’s reasons for wanting to live in Russia, both the ‘bad and even childish’ reasons and the ‘deep and even good’ ones, had much to do, I think, with his desire to dissociate himself from the old men of the West, and from the disintegrating and decaying culture of Western Europe. (Location 6983)
• When, in the autumn of 1935, Wittgenstein began the final year of his fellowship at Trinity, he still had little idea of what he would do after it had expired. Perhaps he would go to Russia – perhaps, like Rowland Hutt, get a job among ‘ordinary people’; or perhaps, as Skinner had wanted, he would concentrate on preparing the Brown Book for publication. One thing seemed sure: he would not continue to lecture at Cambridge. His lectures during this last year centred on the theme of ‘Sense Data and Private Experience’. In these lectures he tried to combat the philosopher’s temptation to think that, when we experience something (when we see something, feel pain etc.), there is some thing, a sense datum, that is the primary content of our experience. He took his examples, however, not from philosophers but from ordinary speech. And when he quoted from literature, it was not from the great philosophical works, nor from the philosophical journal Mind, but from Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine. He began one lecture by reading a passage from Street & Smith in which the narrator, a detective, is alone on the deck of a ship in the middle of the night, with no sound except the ticking of the ship’s clock. The detective muses to himself: ‘A clock is a bewildering instrument at best: measuring a fragment of infinity: measuring something which does not exist perhaps.’ Wittgenstein told his class that it is much more revealing and important when you find this sort of confusion in something said ‘in a silly detective story’ than it is when you find it in something said ‘by a silly philosopher’: (Location 6998)
• Here you might say ‘obviously a clock is not a bewildering instrument at all’. – If in some situation it strikes you as a bewildering instrument, and you can then bring yourself round to saying that of course it is not bewildering – then this is the way to solve a philosophical problem. The clock becomes a bewildering instrument here because he says about it ‘it measures a fragment of infinity, measuring something which does not exist perhaps’. What makes the clock bewildering is that he introduces a sort of entity which he then can’t see, and it seems like a ghost. The connection between this and what we were saying about sense data: What is bewildering is the introduction of something we might call ‘intangible’. It seems as though there is nothing intangible about the chair or the table, but there is about the fleeting personal experience. (Location 7011)
• WITTGENSTEIN’S LEAVING FOR Norway in August 1936 is strongly reminiscent of his earlier departure in October 1913. In both cases he was leaving for an indefinite period to accomplish a definite task – the preparation of a final formulation of his philosophical remarks. In both cases, too, he was leaving behind someone he loved. The difference is that in 1913 Pinsent had had no wish to accompany him. It is doubtful whether Pinsent ever realized how much Wittgenstein was in love with him, and almost certain that he did not return that love. He was ‘thankful’ for his ‘acquaintance’ with Wittgenstein, but not in any way dependent upon it. In October 1913 Pinsent’s training as a lawyer figured much larger in his concerns than his friendship with Wittgenstein, a break from whom possibly came to him as something of a relief. For Francis, however, his relationship with Wittgenstein was the very centre of his life: if asked, he would have dropped everything to go and live with him in Norway. ‘When I got your letter’, he wrote just a few weeks after they were separated, ‘I wished I could come and help you clean your room.’1 His life in Cambridge without Wittgenstein was lonely and dreary. He no longer got on well with his family, he could no longer participate in Wittgenstein’s work, and, though he persevered with it for Wittgenstein’s sake, he disliked his job at the factory. (Location 7116)
• Fania Pascal remembers two of the ‘sins’ confessed to by Wittgenstein. As well as these, there were a number of more minor sins, which elude her memory. Some of these have been remembered by Rowland Hutt. One concerned the death of an American acquaintance of Wittgenstein’s.22 Upon being told by a mutual friend of this death, Wittgenstein reacted in a way that was appropriate to hearing sorrowful news. This was disingenuous of him, because, in fact, it was not news to him at all; he had already heard of the death. Another concerned an incident in the First World War. Wittgenstein had been told by his commanding officer to carry some bombs across an unsteady plank which bridged a stream. He had, at first, been too afraid to do it. He eventually overcame his fear, but his initial cowardice had haunted him ever since. Yet another concerned the fact that, although most people would have taken him to be a virgin, he was not so: as a young man he had had sexual relations with a woman. Wittgenstein did not use the words ‘virgin’ or ‘sexual relations’, but Hutt is in no doubt this is what he meant. The actual words used by Wittgenstein have eluded his memory. They were, he thinks, something like: ‘Most people would think that I have had no relationship with women, but I have.’ (Location 7270)
• The first of the ‘sins’ that Fania Pascal does remember was that Wittgenstein had allowed most people who knew him to believe that he was three-quarters Aryan and one-quarter Jewish, whereas, in fact, the reverse was the case. That is to say, of Wittgenstein’s grandparents, three were of Jewish descent. Under the Nuremberg Laws, this made Wittgenstein himself a Jew, and Pascal is surely right in linking this confession with the existence of Nazi Germany. What Wittgenstein did not tell her, but what she subsequently discovered, was that not one of his ‘Jewish’ grandparents was actually a Jew. Two were baptized as Protestants, and the third as a Roman Catholic. ‘Some Jew’, she remarks. So far, all these ‘crimes’ are sins of omission: they concern only cases in which Wittgenstein failed to do something, or declined to correct a misleading impression. The final, and most painful, sin concerns an actual untruth told by Wittgenstein. At this stage in the confession, Pascal recalls, ‘he had to keep a firmer control on himself, telling in a clipped way of the cowardly and shameful manner in which he had behaved’. (Location 7280)
• Wittgenstein regarded his confessions as a kind of surgery, an operation to remove cowardice. Characteristically, he regarded the infection as malignant and in need of continued treatment. It was characteristic, too, for him to regard a mere physical injury as trivial by comparison. Soon after he returned to Norway in the New Year of 1937 he suffered an accident and broke one of his ribs. Whereas his moral condition had been a matter of urgency, this was simply brushed aside with a joke. He told Pattisson: ‘I thought of having it removed & of having a wife made of it, but they tell me that the art of making women out of ribs has been lost.’ (Location 7331)
• Wittgenstein’s horror of uncleanliness impelled him to adopt a particularly rigorous method of cleaning his floor: he would throw wet tea-leaves over it, to soak up the dirt, and then sweep them up. He performed this task frequently wherever he stayed, and resolutely refused to have a carpet in any room that he lived in for any length of time. (Location 7450)
• [I] just took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time.60 I had to cut half off many of them and throw it away. Afterwards when I was copying out a sentence I had written, the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. (Location 7487)
• In the first week of January he confined himself to bed, suffering from gallbladder trouble, although scarcely believing that that was really why he felt so tired and weak. In bed he reflected on his sensuality and dwelt on his feelings for Francis. It was often the case, he wrote, that when he was unwell he was open to sensual thoughts and susceptible to sensual desires. He thought of Francis with sensual desires, ‘and that is bad, but that’s what it’s like now’.6 He worried that it had been so long since he had heard from Francis, and, as always, was inclined to think the worst – to consider, for example, the possibility that Francis had died: ‘Thought: it would be good and right if he had died, and thereby taken my “folly” away.’7 This dark, solipsistic, thought is immediately retracted, although only in part: ‘Although, there again, I only half mean that.’ (Location 7624)
• This qualification is, if anything, still more shocking. After giving the matter a second thought, was he really still even half-way inclined to think that the death of Francis would be a good thing? (Location 7631)
• During the following few weeks Wittgenstein kept a close watch on developments. Every evening he asked Drury: ‘Any news?’, to which, presumably, Drury responded by telling Wittgenstein what had been reported that day. Reading Drury’s recollections, however, one wonders which newspapers he read. His account of the days leading up to the Anschluss is, to say the least, somewhat strange. He writes that on the evening of 10 March he told Wittgenstein that all the papers reported that Hitler was poised to invade Austria. Wittgenstein replied, with quite breath-taking naïvety: ‘That is a ridiculous rumour. Hitler doesn’t want Austria. Austria would be no use to him at all.’17 The next evening, according to Drury, he had to tell him that Hitler had indeed taken over Austria. He asked Wittgenstein if his sisters would be in any danger. Again Wittgenstein replied with quite extraordinary insouciance: ‘They are too much respected, no one would dare to touch them.’ (Location 7684)
• Of great concern to Wittgenstein throughout the long wait for his British passport was the situation of his family. It was difficult for him to know how much danger they were in, and he was not reassured when, soon after the Anschluss, he received this note (written in English):   My dear Ludwig,25 Not a day passes but that Mining and I talk about you; our loving thoughts are always with you. Please do not worry about us, we are quite well really and in best spirits and ever so happy to be here. To see you again will be our greatest joy. Lovingly yours, Helene   In his diary Wittgenstein dismissed this (no doubt correctly) as: ‘reassuring sounding news from Vienna.26 Obviously written for the censor.’ In fact, both Helene and Hermine were slow to appreciate the danger they were in, and when realization finally came they panicked. Hermine recalls how, one morning soon after the Anschluss, Paul announced, with terror in his voice: ‘We count as Jews!’ (Location 7800)
• By this time, however, it was no longer possible for German Jews to enter Switzerland, and some other plan had to be devised. Upon Gretl’s suggestion, Hermine agreed to buy Yugoslav passports for herself and Helene from a Jewish lawyer in Vienna. She apparently believed that this was the way in which the Yugoslav government conferred nationality, for she says she had no idea that what they were buying were false passports until Arvid Sjögren, who travelled to Yugoslavia on their behalf to collect them, reported that they had been produced in a workshop specializing in forged documents. (Location 7842)
• Another example he might have given was The King of the Dark Chamber by the Indian poet, Rabindranath Tagore. Wittgenstein had first read this play, in a German translation (it was originally written in Bengali), in 1921, when Tagore was at the height of his fame and enormously popular in Europe, particularly in Germany and Austria. He had then written to Engelmann that, despite its great wisdom, the play had failed to make a deep impression on him. He was not moved:   It seems to me as if all that wisdom has come out of the ice box; I should not be surprised to learn that he got it all second-hand by reading and listening (exactly as so many among us acquire their knowledge of Christian wisdom) rather than from his own genuine feeling.12 Perhaps I don’t understand his tone; to me it does not ring like the tone of a man possessed by the truth. (Like for instance Ibsen’s tone.) It is possible, however, that here the translation leaves a chasm which I cannot bridge. I read with interest throughout, but without being gripped. That does not seem to be a good sign. For this is a subject that could have gripped me – or have I become so deadened that nothing will touch me any longer? A possibility, no doubt. – Again, I do not feel for a single moment that here is a drama taking place. I merely understand the allegory in an abstract way.   Just a few months after this, he wrote to Hänsel saying that he had been rereading Tagore, ‘and this time with much more pleasure’. ‘I now believe’, he told Hänsel, ‘that there is indeed something grand here.’13 The King of the Dark Chamber subsequently became one of his favourite books, one of those he habitually gave or lent to his friends.14 And at about the time of his lectures on aesthetics he reread the play together with Yorick Smythies, this time in an English translation made by Tagore himself. Again, it seems, the translation left a chasm, and in order to overcome this – in order to, as it were, defrost the text – Smythies and Wittgenstein prepared their own translation. Among Smythies’s papers was found a typed copy of their version of Act II of the play, headed:   THE KING OF THE DARK CHAMBER, by Rabindranath Tagor [sic] translated from the English of Rabindranath Tagor into English used by L. Wittgenstein and Yorick Smythies, by L. Wittgenstein and Yorick Smythies.   Almost all the changes introduced by Smythies and Wittgenstein involve substituting modern, idiomatic words and phrases for Tagore’s old-fashioned ‘poetic’ diction. Thus, where Tagore has ‘chamber’, they have ‘room’ (except in the title), and where Tagore wrote: ‘He has no dearth of rooms’, they write: ‘He’s not short of rooms’, and so on. (Location 8022)
• He had by then decided to apply for the post of Professor of Philosophy, which had become vacant on G. E. Moore’s resignation, and he wanted to submit the translated portion of his book in support of his application. He was, in any case, convinced that he would not be elected, partly because one of the other applicants was John Wisdom, whom he felt sure would get it, and partly because one of the electors was R. G. Collingwood of Oxford, a man who was sure to disapprove of Wittgenstein’s work. More than compensating for these two disadvantages, however, was the fact that also among the electors was John Maynard Keynes. Wittgenstein hurriedly attempted to improve on Rhees’s translation in time for Keynes to read through the English version. ‘I needn’t say the whole thing is absurd’, he wrote to Moore, ‘as he couldn’t make head or tail of it if it were translated very well.’20 Wittgenstein would probably have been awarded the chair with or without Keynes’s support, and regardless of the quality of the translation. By 1939 he was recognized as the foremost philosophical genius of his time. ‘To refuse the chair to Wittgenstein’, said C. D. Broad, ‘would be like refusing Einstein a chair of physics.’21 Broad himself was no great admirer of Wittgenstein’s work; he was simply stating a fact. (Location 8152)
• On 11 February Wittgenstein was duly elected professor. It was, inevitably, an occasion for both expressing pride and condemning it. ‘Having got the professorship is very flattering & all that’, he wrote to Eccles, ‘but it might have been very much better for me to have got a job opening and closing crossing gates.22 I don’t get any kick out of my position (except what my vanity & stupidity sometimes gets).’ This in turn helped with his application for British citizenship, and on 2 June 1939 he received his British passport. No matter how illiberal their policy on the admission of Austrian Jews, the British government could hardly refuse citizenship to the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. (Location 8162)
• This series of lectures was remarkable in having among its audience a man who was one of the ablest exponents of the view that Wittgenstein was attacking, and also one of the greatest mathematicians of the century: Alan Turing. During the Easter term of 1939, Turing too gave classes under the title, ‘Foundations of Mathematics’. They could not have been more different from Wittgenstein’s. Turing’s course was an introduction to the discipline of mathematical logic, in which he took his students through the technique of proving mathematical theorems from within a strictly axiomatic system of logic. Lest it be thought that his lectures had anything to do with the ‘foundations of mathematics’ in this sense, Wittgenstein announced:   Another idea might be that I was going to lecture on a particular branch of mathematics called ‘the foundations of mathematics’.28 There is such a branch, dealt with in Principia Mathematica, etc. I am not going to lecture on this. I know nothing about it – I practically only know the first volume of Principia Mathematica.   That it was at one time thought (by both himself and Russell) that he would be responsible for rewriting sections of the Principia, he does not mention. His present series of lectures was relevant to that branch of mathematics only in the sense of trying to undermine the rationale for its existence – of trying to show that: ‘The mathematical problems of what is called foundations are no more the foundations of mathematics for us than the painted rock is the support of the painted tower.’29 The lectures often developed into a dialogue between Wittgenstein and Turing, with the former attacking and the latter defending the importance of mathematical logic. Indeed, the presence of Turing became so essential to the theme of the discussion that when he announced he would not be attending a certain lecture, Wittgenstein told the class that, therefore, that lecture would have to be ‘somewhat parenthetical’. (Location 8209)
• It was important to Wittgenstein’s conception of his philosophical method that there could be no disagreements of opinion between himself and Turing. In his philosophy he was not advancing any theses, so how could there possibly be anything to disagree with? When Turing once used the phrase: ‘I see your point’, Wittgenstein reacted forcefully: ‘I have no point.’33 If Turing was inclined to object to what Wittgenstein was saying, it could only be because he was using words in a different way to Wittgenstein – it could only be a question of giving meanings to words. Or, rather, it could only be a question of Turing’s not understanding Wittgenstein’s use of certain words. For example, Turing was inclined to say that there could be experiments in mathematics – that is, that we could pursue a mathematical investigation in the same spirit in which we might conduct an experiment in physics: ‘We don’t know how this might turn out, but let’s see …’ To Wittgenstein, this was quite impossible; the whole analogy between mathematics and physics was completely mistaken, and one of the most important sources of the confusions he was trying to unravel. But how was he to make this clear without opposing Turing’s view with a view of his own? He had to: (a) get Turing to admit that they were both using the word ‘experiment’ in the same sense; and (b) get him to see that, in that sense, mathematicians do not make experiments.   Turing thinks that he and I are using the word ‘experiment’ in two different ways.34 But I want to show that this is wrong. That is to say, I think that if I could make myself clear, then Turing would give up saying that in mathematics we make experiments. If I could arrange in their proper order certain well-known facts, then it would become clear that Turing and I are not using the word ‘experiment’ differently. You might say: ‘How is it possible that there should be a misunderstanding so very hard to remove?’ It can be explained partly by a difference of education. (Location 8243)
• ‘You seem to be saying’, suggested Turing, ‘that if one uses a little common sense, one will not get into trouble.’40 ‘No’, thundered Wittgenstein, ‘that is NOT what I mean at all.’ His point was rather that a contradiction cannot lead one astray because it leads nowhere at all. One cannot calculate wrongly with a contradiction, because one simply cannot use it to calculate. One can do nothing with contradictions, except waste time puzzling over them. After two more lectures Turing stopped attending, convinced, no doubt, that if Wittgenstein would not admit a contradiction to be a fatal flaw in a system of mathematics, then there could be no common ground between them. It must indeed have taken a certain amount of courage to attend the classes as the single representative of all that Wittgenstein was attacking, surrounded by Wittgenstein’s acolytes and having to discuss the issues in a way that was unfamiliar to him. Andrew Hodges, in his excellent biography of Turing, expresses surprise at what he sees as Turing’s diffidence in these discussions, and gives as an example the fact that, despite long discussions about the nature of a ‘rule’ in mathematics, Turing never offered a definition in terms of Turing machines.41 But, surely, Turing realized that Wittgenstein would have dismissed such a definition as irrelevant; the discussion was conducted at a more fundamental level. Wittgenstein was attacking, not this or that definition, but the very motivation for providing such definitions. (Location 8298)
  • Note: Motivation
• With the certain exception of Alister Watson, and the possible exception of others, it is likely that many of those who attended these lectures did not fully grasp what was at stake in the arguments between Wittgenstein and Turing, nor fully understand how radically Wittgenstein’s views broke with anything that had previously been said or written on the philosophy of mathematics. They were, on the whole, more interested in Wittgenstein than in mathematics. Norman Malcolm, for one, has said that, though he was aware that ‘Wittgenstein was doing something important’, he ‘understood almost nothing of the lectures’ until he restudied his notes ten years later.42 Malcolm was then a doctoral student at Harvard, who had arrived in Cambridge in the Michaelmas term of 1938 to study with Moore, and quickly fell under the spell of Wittgenstein’s personality. It is in his memoir that that personality is most memorably and (in the opinion of many who knew Wittgenstein) accurately described. Wittgenstein warmed to Malcolm’s kindness and his human understanding, and during Malcolm’s brief time at Cambridge the two became close friends. Upon Malcolm’s return to the United States, he became, as well as a cherished correspondent, an invaluable supplier of Wittgenstein’s favourite journal, Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine, at a time when American magazines became unavailable in England. (Location 8310)
• In one respect, at least, the ethos of the hard-boiled detective coincides with Wittgenstein’s own: they both, in their different ways, decry the importance of the ‘science of logic’, exemplified in the one case by Principia Mathematica and in the other by Sherlock Holmes. ‘I am not the deducting, deducing book type of detective’, explains Race Williams in a typical Street & Smith story:43   I’m a hard working, plugging sort of guy who can recognize a break when I see it and act at the same minute, at the same second or even split second if guns are brought into it.   This fast-acting, fast-shooting, honest sort of a guy bears an obvious similarity to movie cowboys, and it is probably no coincidence that the Western was Wittgenstein’s favourite genre. By the late 1930s, however, his taste had broadened to include musicals. His favourite actresses, he told Malcolm, were Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton. Exhausted and disgusted by his lectures, he would invariably go to see a ‘flick’ after them, accompanied by Malcolm, Smythies or one of his other friends from the class. He would always sit at the front of the cinema, where he could be totally immersed in the picture. He described the experience to Malcolm as ‘like a shower bath’, washing away his thoughts of the lecture. (Location 8327)
• It was the custom at that time to play the national anthem at the end of the film, at which point the audience was expected to rise to their feet and stand respectfully still. This was a ceremony that Wittgenstein could not abide, and he would dash out of the cinema before it could begin. He also found the movie newsreels, which used to be shown between films, unbearable. As war with Germany approached, and the newsreels became more and more patriotic and jingoistic, Wittgenstein’s anger increased. Among his papers there is a draft of a letter addressed to their makers, accusing them of being ‘master pupils of Goebbels’. It was at this time that his friendship with Gilbert Pattisson, of ten years’ standing, came to an end, when he perceived in Pattisson’s attitude to the war something he took to be jingoism. His friendship with Norman Malcolm was threatened by a similar issue. Passing a newspaper vendor’s sign which announced the German government’s accusation that the British had attempted to assassinate Hitler, Wittgenstein commented that he would not be surprised if it were true. Malcolm demurred. Such an act was, he said, incompatible with the British ‘national character’, Wittgenstein reacted angrily to this ‘primitive’ remark:   … what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any … journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends.44   The rift healed before Malcolm’s return to the United States in February 1940, but for a time Wittgenstein ceased his habit of taking a walk with Malcolm before his lectures. (Location 8338)
• By the time war broke out, Skinner’s period as an apprentice at the Cambridge Instrument Company had come to an end, and he seems to have made an attempt to return to theoretical work. In a letter dated 11 October 1939, written from Leeds, he mentions collaborating on a book (one assumes a mathematics textbook) with his old mathematics tutor, Ursell. The project was presumably abandoned (at least, I have been able to find no trace of such a book being published). In the letter Skinner says how difficult he now finds this sort of work, and mentions that he may soon return to Cambridge to look for a job. He also alludes to some sort of break between himself and Wittgenstein, a problem in their relationship, for which, characteristically, he assumes full blame:   I feel very unhappy that I should have given you cause to write that you feel I’m away from you.49 It’s a terrible thing that I have acted in a way that might loosen what is between us. It would be a catastrophe for me if anything happened to our relation. Please forgive me for what I have done.   What he had done he does not say, and no doubt did not know; he knew only that he was losing Wittgenstein’s love. After his return to Cambridge, he and Wittgenstein lived separately – he in East Road, and Wittgenstein in his favoured set of rooms in Whewell’s Court. After Skinner’s death Wittgenstein repeatedly chastized himself for having been unfaithful to him in the last two years of his life. It is a reasonable conjecture that this guilt is connected with Wittgenstein’s feelings for a young working-class colleague of Skinner’s called Keith Kirk. In 1939, Kirk, who was then nineteen, worked as an apprentice alongside Skinner, and they became friends when he began to ask Skinner questions about the mathematics and mechanics of the instruments they were using. Skinner, who was too reticent to be an adequate teacher, introduced Kirk to Wittgenstein, and from then on Wittgenstein gave Kirk regular lessons on physics, mathematics and mechanics to help him with the City and Guilds professional examinations for which he was then preparing. (Location 8372)
• Throughout 1940 and the first half of 1941 Kirk came regularly to Wittgenstein’s rooms in Trinity for his unpaid lessons. Wittgenstein taught without a textbook; instead, he would ask Kirk a series of questions that forced him to think through the problems from first principles. Thus, a lesson might begin with Wittgenstein asking Kirk what happens when water boils – What are bubbles? Why do they rise to the surface? and so on. The amount that Kirk learnt from these lessons therefore depended to a large extent on his own ability to think, and, as in Wittgenstein’s philosophy classes, there would frequently be long silences. However, according to Kirk, what he learnt in these lessons has stayed with him ever since, and the style of thinking imparted to him by Wittgenstein has been of lasting benefit to him. (Location 8397)
  • Note: Teaching meThodS
• It was during one of these latter visits that Wittgenstein called on Kirk in an extremely distraught state to tell him that Francis had been taken seriously ill with polio and had been admitted into hospital. A few days later, on 11 October 1941, Francis died. Wittgenstein’s initial reaction was one of delicate restraint. In letters to friends telling them of Francis’s death, he managed a tone of quiet dignity. To Hutt, for example, he wrote:   My dear Ro[w]land,52 I have to give you very terrible news. Francis fell ill four days ago with poliomyelitis & died yesterday morning. He died without any pain or struggle entirely peacefully. I was with him. I think he has had one of the happiest lives I’ve known anyone to have, & also the most peaceful death. I wish you good and kind thoughts. As always, Ludwig   By the time of the funeral, however, his restraint had gone. He has been described by Skinner’s sister as behaving like a ‘frightened wild animal’ at the ceremony, and after it, she recalls, he refused to go to the house but was seen walking round Letchworth with Dr Burnaby, the tutor of Trinity, looking ‘quite wild’.53 He would not, in any case, have been unreservedly welcome at the Skinner home. Skinner’s family were always mistrustful of the influence he had exerted on their delicate boy, and his mother, who believed that his job at the Cambridge Instrument Company had hastened Francis’s death, refused to speak to Wittgenstein at the funeral. (Location 8409)
• But Wittgenstein’s guilt over Francis was entirely unconnected with the way in which he had influenced him. It had to do with more internal matters – with how Wittgenstein himself had felt towards Francis during the last few years of his life. On 28 December 1941, he wrote:   Think a lot about Francis, but always only with remorse over my lovelessness; not with gratitude.54 His life and death seem only to accuse me, for I was in the last 2 years of his life very often loveless and, in my heart, unfaithful to him. If he had not been so boundlessly gentle and true, I would have become totally loveless towards him. (Location 8424)
  • Note: Karleken
• Wittgenstein’s infatuation with Kirk – entirely unspoken, unacknowledged and unreciprocated as it was – exemplifies in its purest form a feature that had characterized his earlier loves for Pinsent and for Marguerite; namely, a certain indifference to the feelings of the other person. That neither Pinsent nor Marguerite – and certainly not Kirk – were in love with him seemed not to affect his love for them. Indeed, it perhaps made his love easier to give, for the relationship could be conducted safely, in the splendid isolation of his own feelings. The philosophical solipsism to which he had at one time been attracted, and against which much of his later work is addressed (he characterized his later work as an attempt to show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle), has its parallel in the emotional solipsism in which his romantic attachments were conducted. With Francis that isolation was threatened, and, in the face of that threat, Wittgenstein had withdrawn, like the porcupines of Schopenhauer’s fable, behind his spiky exterior. (Location 8434)
• IV 1941–51 (Location 8446)
• FOR THE FIRST two years of war, a recurrent theme of conversation with Wittgenstein was his frustration at not being able to find work outside academic life. He found it intolerable to be teaching philosophy while a war was being fought, and wanted more than anything else to be able to contribute to the war effort. (Location 8450)
• Wittgenstein clearly needed no undue persuasion, for a week or so after this letter was written he started work at Guy’s. Not, however, as an odd-job man but as a dispensary porter. (Location 8464)
• While he was at Guy’s, Wittgenstein lived and dined with the medical staff at Nuffield House. (This in itself would have been enough to distinguish him from the other porters in the hospital, because the non-medical staff usually lived outside the hospital grounds and dined separately from the doctors.) Shortly after his arrival at Nuffield House, he was enthusiastically greeted at dinner by the hospital haematologist, Dr R. L. Waterfield. Waterfield had been at Cambridge and had attended meetings of the Moral Science Club. Upon being recognized, Wittgenstein turned as white as a sheet and said: ‘Good God, don’t tell anybody who I am!’ But whether through Waterfield or some other source – and despite the fact that Guy’s Gazette never got hold of the story – many of the staff at Guy’s knew perfectly well who Wittgenstein was.2 Everyone there who knew him at all knew him as ‘Professor Wittgenstein’. (Location 8472)
• Wittgenstein’s job as a porter was to deliver medicines from the dispensary to the wards, where, according to John Ryle’s wife, Miriam, he advised the patients not to take them. His boss at the pharmacy was Mr S. F. Izzard. When asked later if he remembered Wittgenstein as a porter, Izzard replied: ‘Yes, very well. He came and worked here and after working here three weeks he came and explained how we should be running the place.3 You see, he was a man who was used to thinking.’ After a short while, he was switched to the job of pharmacy technician in the manufacturing laboratory, where one of his duties was to prepare Lassar’s ointment for the dermatological department. When Drury visited Wittgenstein at Guy’s, he was told by a member of staff that no one before had produced Lassar’s ointment of such high quality. (Location 8479)
• In fact, Kirk married in Bournemouth, made a successful career for himself in mechanical engineering and never saw Wittgenstein again. But for Kirk there had been nothing to ‘break’ from. It had never occurred to him that Wittgenstein might be, in any sense, homosexual, or that their relationship was anything other than that between a teacher and a pupil. As if acknowledging this, Wittgenstein wrote, in the same diary entry: ‘I have suffered much, but I am apparently incapable of learning from my life.27 I suffer still just as I did many years ago. I have not become any stronger or wiser.’   Some comfort – some relief from this desperate loneliness – came from a friendship with a young colleague of his in the dispensary at Guy’s, Roy Fouracre. It was, one gathers, principally Fouracre’s warmth and jovial good humour that endeared him to Wittgenstein. Sometimes, Wittgenstein told Drury, he would be rushed or agitated and Roy would say to him, ‘Steady, Prof.’ This he liked. (Location 8671)
• In many of his later letters to Fouracre, Wittgenstein mentions Guy’s with warmth and with some element, perhaps, of nostalgia:   I’m sorry to hear the atmosphere at Guy’s is getting worse.29 It’s difficult to imagine. [8.6.49]   I wonder what the job news are you write about.30 I suppose it isn’t that they are errecting a huge statue of me in front of Nuffield House. Or is it? Of course, no monument of stone could really show what a wonderful person I am. [15.12.50]   Fouracre obviously replied to the last suggestion telling Wittgenstein that all the statues to him at Guy’s had been pulled down. ‘I’m glad to hear [it]’, Wittgenstein wrote in his next letter, ‘as long as it wasn’t done in any disrespectful way!’ (Location 8699)
• Grant’s way of dealing with the problem of ‘shock’ has an obvious parallel with Heinrich Hertz’s way of dealing with the problems of ‘force’ in physics. In The Principles of Mechanics Hertz had proposed that, instead of giving a direct answer to the question: ‘What is force?’ the problem should be dealt with by restating Newtonian physics without using ‘force’ as a basic concept. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein regarded Hertz’s solution to the problem as a perfect model of how philosophical confusion should be dispelled, and frequently cited – as a statement of his own aim in philosophy – the following sentence from Hertz’s introduction to The Principles of Mechanics:   When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.   In a conscious echo of this sentence, Wittgenstein wrote:   In my way of doing philosophy, its whole aim is to give an expression such a form that certain disquietudes disappear.33 (Hertz). (Location 8734)
• That Wittgenstein went every evening to see a film is an indication of how hard he worked at Newcastle, and how seriously he took the work. It is reminiscent of his remark to Drury:   You think philosophy is difficult enough but I can tell you it is nothing to the difficulty of being a good architect.43 When I was building the house for my sister in Vienna I was so completely exhausted at the end of the day that all I could do was go to a ‘flick’ every night.   Another indication of this is that while at Newcastle he wrote no philosophy at all, whereas while he was at Guy’s he filled three notebooks with remarks on the philosophy of mathematics. (Location 8819)
• Drury’s visit to Newcastle also provides us with a revealing conversation, showing an interesting change in Wittgenstein’s attitude to sex. By 1943, it seems, far from accepting Weininger’s view that sex and spirituality were incompatible, Wittgenstein was sympathetic to a view of the sexual act which saw it as an object of religious reverence. Drury relates that while he was staying in Newcastle with Wittgenstein, the two of them caught a train to Durham and took a walk by the river there. As they walked Drury talked to Wittgenstein about his experiences in Egypt, and especially about seeing the temples at Luxor. He told Wittgenstein that, although seeing the temples was a wonderful experience, he had been surprised and shocked to find on the wall of one of the temples a bas-relief of the god Horus, with an erect phallus, in the act of ejaculation and collecting the semen in a bowl. Wittgenstein responded to this story with an encouraging rejection of Drury’s implied disapproval:   Why in the world shouldn’t they have regarded with awe and reverence that act by which the human race is perpetuated? Not every religion has to have St Augustine’s attitude to sex. (Location 8883)
• When Wittgenstein had first moved to Newcastle, he had responded with an even more dismissive frankness to another remark of Drury’s. Drury had written to him wishing him luck in his new work, and added that he hoped Wittgenstein would make lots of friends. Wittgenstein replied:   It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid.49 How could you imagine I would ever have ‘lots of friends’?   Though harshly expressed, this was doubtless true. Wittgenstein’s only friend at Newcastle seems to have been Basil Reeve. He got on well with Grant, and they shared an interest in music (Grant can remember Wittgenstein’s enthusiastic agreement when he once mentioned that he disliked the opening of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto), but there was little of the warmth of feeling – the simple human contact – that Wittgenstein had shared at Guy’s with Roy Fouracre. Grant was too absorbed in his own work for that. Wittgenstein had complained to Fouracre about the lack of human contact his philosophical work at Cambridge provided, but at Newcastle, as his letters to Norman Malcolm show, he began to miss his Cambridge friends:   I haven’t heard from Smythies for many months.50 I know he is in Oxford but he doesn’t write to me. – [Casimir] Lewy is still at Cambridge … Rhees is still lecturing at Swansea … I hope you’ll see Moore & find him in good health. [11.9.43]   I am feeling rather lonely here & may try to get to some place where I have someone to talk to. E.g. to Swansea where Rhees is a lecturer in philosophy.51 [7.12.43]   More important, perhaps, he began to miss the opportunity to pursue his own work. (Location 8894)
• Bywaters had been there only three weeks when he had to write to his head office asking for help in finding a new technician:   Professor Wittgenstein has been doing the histological work here for Dr Grant … He has now received a letter from Cambridge requesting him to spend the next three months or longer writing a treatise on his own subject (philosophy). (Location 8950)
• So, on 16 February 1944, Wittgenstein left Newcastle and returned to Cambridge. The reference in Bywaters’s letter to a treatise which has ‘been in the air for the last year or so’ but which ‘they now want on paper’ makes it plausible to assume that ‘they’ refers not to Cambridge University, but to Cambridge University Press. In September 1943 Wittgenstein had approached the Press with a suggestion that they publish his new book, Philosophical Investigations, alongside his old book, the Tractatus. This idea had occurred to him earlier in the year, when he and Nicholas Bachtin had been reading the Tractatus together. He also mentioned the idea to Reeve, saying that he liked the idea of publishing a refutation of ideas in the Tractatus alongside the Tractatus. Cambridge University Press confirmed their acceptance of this offer on 14 January 1944, which ties in with Bywaters’s first letter saying: ‘He has now received a letter from Cambridge …’ This plan, however, like the previous plan accepted by the University Press in 1938, was never carried out. (Location 8958)
• The Clements had two daughters, Joan, aged eleven, and Barbara, aged nine, and while he was staying there Wittgenstein was treated almost as part of the family. Finding the name ‘Wittgenstein’ something of a mouthful, they all called him ‘Vicky’, although it was made clear that they were the only people allowed to do so. (Location 9109)
• In conversation with Rhees Wittgenstein once remarked that he could feel really active only when he changed his philosophical position and went on to develop something new. He gave as an example of this something that he considered to be an important change in his philosophical logic, concerning his view of the relation between ‘grammatical’ and ‘material’ propositions. Previously, he said, he had regarded this distinction to be fixed. But now he thought that the boundary between the two was fluid and susceptible to change. In truth, this appears as a change of emphasis rather than of opinion, for even in the 1938 version of the Investigations he had not treated the distinction as fixed. But neither had he particularly emphasized its fluidity. And it is this emphasis that dictated the course of his work in the summer of 1944. (Location 9160)
• IN OCTOBER 1944 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, frustrated at not having finished his book and not at all enthusiastic at the prospect of resuming his lecturing responsibilities. Russell was also back in Cambridge, having spent the last six years living and working in America. There his life had become unbearable, owing to the hysteria and outrage whipped up against him by the more conservative elements in American society in response to his widely-publicized views on marriage, morals and religion, and he had gratefully accepted the invitation to a five-year lectureship in the quieter and calmer environment of Trinity College. He arrived, however, to find himself out of fashion with English academic philosophers, among whom Moore and Wittgenstein were now far more influential than Russell himself. He brought back with him the manuscript of his History of Western Philosophy, which, although it enjoyed a huge commercial success (it was for many years the main source of Russell’s income), did not improve his reputation as a philosopher. (Location 9214)
• Although he maintained his admiration for the keenness of Russell’s intellect, Wittgenstein detested the popular work that Russell had published since the 1920s. ‘Russell’s books should be bound in two colours’, he once said to Drury:1   … those dealing with mathematical logic in red – and all students of philosophy should read them; those dealing with ethics and politics in blue – and no one should be allowed to read them. (Location 9222)
• Not surprisingly, therefore, when the two remet in the autumn of 1944 (after a break of about fourteen years), there was little warmth between them. ‘I’ve seen Russell’, Wittgenstein wrote to Rhees after being back about a week; he ‘somehow gave me a bad impression’.4 And after that he had little or nothing to do with his former teacher. (Location 9236)
• Russell’s contempt for Wittgenstein’s later work was undoubtedly heightened by (but not entirely attributable to) his personal pique at being left philosophically isolated. The philosophical problems with which he was chiefly concerned were no longer regarded as fundamental. Partly under Wittgenstein’s influence, the Theory of Knowledge had been subordinated to the analysis of meaning. Thus, when Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits – a work which Russell conceived as a major statement of his philosophical position – was published in 1948, it was greeted with cool indifference. Russell’s greatest contempt, therefore, was reserved for Wittgenstein’s disciples:   It is not an altogether pleasant experience to find oneself regarded as antiquated after having been, for a time, in the fashion.5 It is difficult to accept this experience gracefully. When Leibniz, in old age, heard the praises of Berkeley, he remarked: ‘The young man in Ireland who disputes the reality of bodies seems neither to explain himself sufficiently nor to produce adequate arguments. I suspect him of wishing to be known for his paradoxes.’ I could not say quite the same of Wittgenstein, by whom I was superseded in the opinion of many British philosophers. It was not by paradoxes that he wished to be known, but by a suave evasion of paradoxes. He was a very singular man, and I doubt whether his disciples knew what manner of man he was. (Location 9239)
• The general outlines of his advice to Gollancz were repeated about a year later to Rush Rhees. Rhees had written an article in which he attacked Gilbert Ryle for the latter’s enthusiastic review of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, in which Popper tars Plato, Hegel and Marx with the same brush, accusing them all of being advocates of totalitarianism. Wittgenstein told Rhees he agreed with the tendency of his article, but criticized him for making too many gestures and not landing enough square blows:   Polemic, or the art of throwing eggs, is, as you well know, as highly skilled a job as, say, boxing … I’d love you to throw eggs at Ryle – but keep your face straight and throw them well! The difficulty is: not to make superfluous noises or gestures, which don’t harm the other man but only yourself. (Location 9434)
• He dreaded going back to Cambridge to resume his professorial duties, and implored Malcolm to come to England soon, ‘before I make up my mind to resign the absurd job of a prof. of philosophy. It is a kind of living death.’ (Location 9455)
• The final version of what is now Philosophical Investigations, Part I, was prepared during the Michaelmas and Lent terms of 1945–6. From the typescript he had dictated during the summer he selected about 400 remarks to add to the work he had done in Swansea in 1944, and, after some rearrangement and renumbering, this produced the 693 numbered paragraphs of which the work now consists. (Location 9457)
• This complicated patchwork is well described by Wittgenstein in his preface:   After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into a whole, I realised that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crippled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction. – The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of landscapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeyings. The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different directions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album. (Location 9462)
• Ironically, at a time when his interest in political affairs was at its strongest, and his sympathies with the Left at their peak, he lost the opportunity to have discussions with the Marxist intellectual for whom he had the greatest respect. In May 1946 Piero Sraffa decided he no longer wished to have conversations with Wittgenstein, saying that he could no longer give his time and attention to the matters Wittgenstein wished to discuss. This came as a great blow to Wittgenstein. He pleaded with Sraffa to continue their weekly conversations, even if it meant staying away from philosophical subjects. ‘I’ll talk about anything’, he told him. ‘Yes’, Sraffa replied, ‘but in your way.’ (Location 9531)
• Wisdom is passionless. But faith by contrast is what Kierkegaard calls a passion. (Location 9585)
• What Russell had long ago mistakenly identified with his own theoretical passion was, in fact, the very repudiation of it: Wittgenstein’s was a devoutly anti-theoretical passion. Russell’s later remark that Wittgenstein liked mysticism for its power to stop him thinking, and his jibe that Wittgenstein had adopted a doctrine to make serious thinking unnecessary, are in fact much nearer the mark, if we equate ‘serious thinking’ with the attempts to formulate a true theory. (Location 9587)
• His dominance of these meetings was noted with disapproval by other philosophers at Cambridge (Broad and Russell, in particular), and by many of the visiting lecturers. On 26 October a clash took place that has since become famous, when Karl Popper addressed the club on the question: ‘Are there Philosophical Problems?’ Popper’s chosen subject, and his manner of addressing it, was deliberately designed to provoke Wittgenstein (whom Popper thought denied the existence of philosophical problems). And provoke him it did, although exactly in what way has become lost in the mists of legend. Stories have been told that have Popper and Wittgenstein coming to blows with one another, each armed with a poker. In his autobiography Popper scotches this rumour, only to replace it with another tale, the details of which have in turn been challenged by some of those who were present at the time. According to Popper, he and Wittgenstein engaged in an animated exchange on the existence or otherwise of philosophical problems, and he gave as an example the question of the validity of moral rules. Wittgenstein, who had all the while been playing with a poker, then stood up, poker in hand, and demanded an example of a moral rule. ‘Not to threaten visiting lecturers with pokers’, Popper replied, whereupon Wittgenstein stormed out of the room.22 Russell was present at the meeting, and made it known that his sympathies were with Popper. An alternative account of the argument has Popper and Wittgenstein each accusing the other of confusing the issue, until Wittgenstein exasperatedly stormed out, with Russell calling after him: ‘Wittgenstein, it is you who are creating all the confusion.’ Whatever happened, it did nothing to affect the fervent allegiance to Wittgenstein that was given by most of the young Cambridge philosophers at this time. Gilbert Ryle writes that on his occasional visits to the Moral Science Club he was disturbed to find that: ‘veneration for Wittgenstein was so incontinent that mentions, for example, my mentions, of any other philosopher were greeted with jeers’:23   This contempt for thoughts other than Wittgenstein’s seemed to me pedagogically disastrous for the students and unhealthy for Wittgenstein himself. It made me resolve, not indeed to be a philosophical polyglot, but to avoid being a monoglot; and most of all to avoid being one monoglot’s echo, even though he was a genius and a friend. (Location 9675)
• Wittgenstein, Ryle thought, ‘not only properly distinguished philosophical from exegetic problems but also, less properly, gave the impressions:   … first that he himself was proud not to have studied other philosophers – which he had done, though not much – and second, that he thought that people who did study them were academic and therefore unauthentic philosophers.   To a certain extent Ryle is writing here as an Oxford man (his criticisms are given in the context of extolling the virtues of the Oxford tutorial system), but what he says about Wittgenstein’s attitude towards reading the great works of the past is perfectly true. ‘As little philosophy as I have read’, Wittgenstein wrote, ‘I have certainly not read too little, rather too much.24 I see that whenever I read a philosophical book: it doesn’t improve my thoughts at all, it makes them worse.’ This attitude would never have been tolerated at Oxford, where respect for things past is in general much stronger than at Cambridge, and where a training in philosophy is inseparable from a reading of the great works in the subject. It is almost inconceivable that a man who claimed proudly never to have read a word of Aristotle would have been given any tutorial responsibilities at all at Oxford, let alone be allowed to preside over the affairs of the department. From Wittgenstein’s point of view, Oxford was a ‘philosophical desert’. (Location 9694)
• The person indirectly responsible, as Wood’s intermediary, for bringing Wittgenstein to Oxford on this occasion was Elizabeth Anscombe. Anscombe had been an undergraduate at St Hugh’s, Oxford, and had come to Cambridge as a postgraduate student in 1942, when she began attending Wittgenstein’s lectures. When Wittgenstein resumed lecturing in 1944, she was one of his most enthusiastic students. For her, Wittgenstein’s therapeutic method was felt as a tremendous liberation, a ‘medicine’ that succeeded, where more theoretical methods had failed, in freeing her from philosophical confusion. ‘For years’, she writes, ‘I would spend time, in cafés, for example, staring at objects saying to myself: “I see a packet.26 But what do I really see? How can I say that I see here anything more than a yellow expanse?”’:   I always hated phenomenalism and felt trapped by it. I couldn’t see my way out of it but I didn’t believe it. It was no good pointing to difficulties about it, things which Russell found wrong with it, for example. The strength, the central nerve of it remained alive and raged achingly. It was only in Wittgenstein’s classes in 1944 that I saw the nerve being extracted, the central thought ‘I have got this, and I define “yellow” (say) as this’ being effectively attacked. (Location 9725)
• In 1946–7 she was again in Oxford, having taken up a research fellowship at Somerville College, but she continued to go to Cambridge once a week to attend tutorials with Wittgenstein in the company of another student, W. A. Hijab. These tutorials, at the request of both Hijab and Anscombe, dealt with issues in the philosophy of religion. By the end of the year she had become one of Wittgenstein’s closest friends and one of his most trusted students, an exception to his general dislike of academic women and especially of female philosophers. She became, in fact, an honorary male, addressed by him affectionately as ‘old man’. ‘Thank God we’ve got rid of the women!’ he once said to her at a lecture, on finding, to his delight, that no (other) female students were in attendance. (Location 9736)
• Although he referred to the typescript he had prepared the previous year as ‘my book’, he was deeply dissatisfied with it, particularly with the last third of it – the analysis of psychological concepts that had largely been drawn from earlier manuscripts. Nevertheless, one afternoon a week he met with Norman Malcolm (who was in Cambridge during Wittgenstein’s last year, on a Guggenheim Fellowship), to discuss the book. He lent Malcolm a copy of the typescript with the idea that they should read it through together, paragraph by paragraph. The procedure, as Malcolm recalls it, was this:   Starting at the beginning of the work, Wittgenstein first read a sentence aloud in German, then translated it into English, then made some remarks to me about the meaning of it.41 He then went on to the next sentence; and so on. At the following meeting he started at the place where we had last stopped.   ‘The reason I am doing this’, Wittgenstein explained, ‘is so there will be at least one person who will understand my book when it is published.’ (Location 9840)
• It is hard not to see, in his flight to Ireland and solitude, an attempt to escape, not only Cambridge, lecturing and the English people, but, even more painful, the torments of being close to his beloved. His ostensible reason for being alone was to finish his book, but though he wrote a good deal in the years that he spent in Ireland, it is difficult to see in this work a concerted effort to bring it to completion. In this work he was pursuing an entirely new line of thought, and the strongest impression one gets from it is of Wittgenstein ‘philosophising for all he is worth’ – of doing the ‘only work that really bucks me up’. (Location 10140)
• WITTGENSTEIN SPENT HIS first two weeks in Ireland living at Ross’s Hotel in Dublin. Whenever Drury was free from hospital duties he and Wittgenstein went together to look at possible lodgings in or around Dublin. None could offer the solitariness and peace that was required, but the problem was temporarily solved by a friend of Drury’s at St Patrick’s, Robert McCullough. McCullough had been in the habit of spending his holidays at a farmhouse at Red Cross, in County Wicklow, which belonged to Richard and Jenny Kingston, and they had told him they were prepared to take in a permanent guest. This information was passed on to Wittgenstein, who immediately set off from Dublin to ‘case the joint’ (by this time, his vocabulary contained a liberal sprinkling of phrases borrowed from American detective fiction). He was enchanted by Wicklow. ‘On my journey down in the bus’, he told Drury on his return, ‘I kept remarking to myself what a really beautiful country this is.’ (Location 10150)
• He took his notebook with him on his walks around Red Cross, and would often work outdoors. A neighbour of the Kingstons’, who often saw Wittgenstein out on his favourite walk, reports that he once passed him sitting in a ditch, writing furiously, oblivious of anything going on around him. This is presumably one of those occasions when, as he told Drury, his ideas came so quickly that he felt as if his pen were being guided. He was, however, cautious in attributing too much importance to these moods of inspiration:   In a letter (to Goethe I think) Schiller writes of a ‘poetic mood’. I think I know what he means, I believe I am familiar with it myself.7 It is a mood of receptivity to nature in which one’s thoughts seem as vivid as nature itself. But it is strange that Schiller did not produce anything better (or so it seems to me) and so I am not entirely convinced that what I produce in such a mood is really worth anything. It may be that what gives my thoughts their lustre on these occasions is a light shining on them from behind. That they do not themselves glow. (Location 10179)
  • Note: Pen guiding
• The nearest village was ten miles away, and the selection of books to be had there was so poor that, in the periods between his regular parcels of ‘mags’ from Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein was forced to resort to reading Dorothy Sayers. This, he told Malcolm, ‘was so bl … foul that it depressed me’. (Location 10312)
• The example of understanding music was important to him, not only because of the immense importance of music in his own life, but also because it is clear that the meaning of a piece of music cannot be described by naming anything that the music ‘stands for’. And in this way: ‘Understanding a sentence is much more akin to understanding a theme in music than one may think.’ (Location 10519)
• Soon after arriving back in Dublin, he went, on Drury’s advice, to see the Professor of Medicine at Trinity College for a diagnosis of the intestine trouble and the general feeling of exhaustion that had dogged him since the beginning of the year. It was suspected that he might have a growth in his stomach, but after being admitted to hospital for a full investigation he was told that no such growth showed up on the X-ray, and the only findings made were that he had an atypical and unexplained anaemia. He was put on a treatment of iron and liver extract, and although he still found himself unable to concentrate on philosophy, his condition gradually improved. (Location 10606)
• THE LAST TWO years of Wittgenstein’s life have about them something of the nature of an epilogue. The task of arranging his work for publication, though not complete, was now over – at least for him. He had by now accepted that his book – the work that had been the centre of his life for nearly twenty years – would not appear in his lifetime. The job of editing it and seeing to its posthumous publication was in the hands of others. And in other ways, too, he was dependent on other people in a way that he had not been since before the First World War. He had no income, no home of his own, and little taste for the solitariness and fierce independence that before he had craved. His last two years were spent living as a guest of his friends and disciples – with Malcolm in Ithaca, von Wright in Cambridge, and Elizabeth Anscombe in Oxford. But his motives for living with others were not primarily financial. Indeed, there was actually no financial need for him to do so: as he had earlier told Malcolm, he had enough money saved from his salary at Cambridge to last another two years. The need to live with others was partly emotional, partly physical (he was increasingly ill and in need of attention), and also partly intellectual. So long as he lived, he wanted to live as a philosopher, and though he now felt, for the most part, unable to live alone and write, he did feel able to discuss philosophy. Thus we find, to a much greater extent than hitherto, the stimulus for his philosophical thinking being provided by the thoughts and problems of others. The work he wrote in his last two years, though naturally in many ways of a piece with the Investigations, is in another respect quite distinct from it; it is much more directed to the solution of other people’s problems. It has the character that he himself had earlier attributed to all his work – that of clarifying the work of others – and it is written much more consciously than his other work with a view to being useful. It is as though he wished to reward the hospitality of his hosts by availing them of his most prized possession: his philosophical talent. (Location 10777)
• Soon after this meeting Wittgenstein fell ill and was admitted to hospital for an examination. He had already booked his return passage to England in October, and was extremely frightened that he would have to remain in the United States as a result of the operation. He feared that, like Mining, he would be found to have cancer, and would be bed-ridden for the rest of his life. On the day before he went into hospital he said to Malcolm in a frenzy:   I don’t want to die in America.18 I am a European – I want to die in Europe … What a fool I was to come. (Location 10927)
• The examination, however, did not find anything seriously wrong with him, and he recovered sufficiently well over the next two weeks to return to England as planned, arriving in London at the end of October. His original plan was to spend a few days in Cambridge with von Wright and then return to Ross’s Hotel in Dublin. Soon after arriving in London, however, he fell ill once more, and it was not until 9 November that he was able to go to Cambridge, still too ill to contemplate the journey to Dublin. (Location 10933)
• By January 1951, however, Wittgenstein’s health made all these plans impractical. He needed constant medical attention. As his condition worsened, he had to travel to Cambridge with increasing frequency to see Dr Bevan. In addition to the hormones he was taking, he was also given X-ray treatment at Addenbrooke’s Hospital. He had a deep horror of the idea of dying in an English hospital, but Bevan promised him that, if necessary, he could spend his last days being looked after at Bevan’s own home. At the beginning of February, Wittgenstein decided to accept his offer, and so moved to Cambridge, there to die in Bevan’s home: ‘Storeys End’. (Location 11259)
• The last remark of On Certainty was written on 27 April, the day before Wittgenstein finally lost consciousness. The day before that was his sixty-second birthday. He knew it would be his last. When Mrs Bevan presented him with an electric blanket, saying as she gave it to him: ‘Many happy returns’, he stared hard at her and replied: ‘There will be no returns.’ He was taken violently ill the next night, after he and Mrs Bevan had returned from their nightly stroll to the pub. When told by Dr Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’ Mrs Bevan stayed with him the night of the 28th, and told him that his close friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness he said to her: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’ The next day Ben, Anscombe, Smythies and Drury were gathered at the Bevans’ home to be with Wittgenstein at his death. Smythies had brought with him Father Conrad, but no one would decide whether Conrad should say the usual office for the dying and give conditional absolution, until Drury recollected Wittgenstein’s remark that he hoped his Catholic friends prayed for him. This decided the matter, and they all went up to Wittgenstein’s room and kneeled down while Conrad recited the proper prayers. Shortly after this, Dr Bevan pronounced him dead. The next morning he was given a Catholic burial at St Giles’s Church, Cambridge. The decision to do this was again prompted by a recollection of Drury’s. He told the others:   I remember that Wittgenstein once told me of an incident in Tolstoy’s life. When Tolstoy’s brother died, Tolstoy, who was then a stern critic of the Russian Orthodox Church, sent for the parish priest and had his brother interred according to the Orthodox rite.11 ‘Now’, said Wittgenstein, ‘that is exactly what I should have done in a similar case.’   When Drury mentioned this, everyone agreed that all the usual Roman Catholic prayers should be said by a priest at the graveside, although Drury admits: ‘I have been troubled ever since as to whether what we did then was right.’ Drury does not expand on this, but the trouble perhaps stems from doubt as to whether the story about Tolstoy quite fits the occasion. For the point of the story is that, although not himself an adherent of the Orthodox Church, Tolstoy had the sensitivity to respect his brother’s faith. But in Wittgenstein’s case the position is reversed: it was Anscombe and Smythies, and not he, who adhered to the Catholic faith. Wittgenstein was not a Catholic. He said on a number of occasions, both in conversation and in his writings, that he could not bring himself to believe the things that Catholics believe. Nor, more important, did he practise Catholicism. And yet there seems to be something appropriate in his funeral being attended by a religious ceremony. For, in a way that is centrally important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life. A few days before his death Wittgenstein was visited in Cambridge by Drury, and remarked to him: ‘Isn’t it curious that, although I know I have not long to live, I never find myself thinking about a “future life”.12 All my interest is still on this life and the writing I am still able to do.’ But if Wittgenstein did not think of a future life, he did think of how he might be judged. Shortly before his death he wrote:   God may say to me: ‘I am judging you out of your own mouth.13 Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.’   The reconciliation with God that Wittgenstein sought was not that of being accepted back into the arms of the Catholic Church; it was a state of ethical seriousness and integrity that would survive the scrutiny of even that most stern of judges, his own conscience: ‘the God who in my bosom dwells’. (Location 11333)
• It was initially feared that the project would founder for lack of co-operation from Wittgenstein’s literary heirs. I am happy to report that the exact opposite has been the case. Wittgenstein’s three literary executors, Professor Georg Henrik von Wright, Professor G. E. M. Anscombe and the late Mr Rush Rhees have all been exceptionally kind, co-operative and helpful. In addition to granting me permission to quote from Wittgenstein’s unpublished manuscripts, they have been assiduous in replying to my many questions and very generous in providing me with information that I would not otherwise have found out. (Location 11520)
• Sadly, a number of other friends of Wittgenstein’s died while I was researching this book. Roy Fouracre had been ill for a long time, but his wife was kind enough to see me and to supply me with copies of the letters from Wittgenstein to her husband. Similarly kind was Katherine Thomson, whose late husband, Professor George Thomson, expressed a wish to meet me shortly before he died, in order to discuss Wittgenstein’s visit to the Soviet Union. Mrs Thomson also showed me some letters and discussed with me her own memories of Wittgenstein. Dr Edward Bevan I met a year or so before his death. His recollections, and those of his widow, Joan Bevan, form the basis of Chapter 27. Tommy Mulkerrins, who provided Wittgenstein with indispensable help during his stay on the west coast of Ireland, was an invalided but exceptionally alert octogenarian when I met him in his cottage in the spring of 1986. His reminiscences have been incorporated into Chapter 25. He too, alas, is no longer with us. Other friends, happily, are alive and well. Mr Gilbert Pattisson, a close friend of Wittgenstein’s from 1929 to 1940, met with me a number of times and provided me with the letters quoted in Chapter 11. Mr Rowland Hutt, a friend of both Wittgenstein and Francis Skinner, took a lively and helpful interest in my work and provided me with the letters quoted in Chapter 23. I am grateful also to Mr William Barrington Pink, Sir Desmond Lee, Professor Basil Reeve, Dr Ben Richards, Dr Casimir Lewy, Mr Keith Kirk, Mrs A. Clement, Mrs Polly Smythies, Professor Wolfe Mays, Mrs Frances Partridge and Madame Marguerite de Chambrier, all of whom took the trouble to speak to me – in some cases over the course of several meetings – about their recollections of Wittgenstein. To Professor Georg Kreisel, Professor F. A. von Hayek, Mr John King, Professor Wasif A. Hijab, Professor John Wisdom, the late Professor Sir Alfred Ayer and Father Conrad Pepler, I am grateful for replies by letter to my enquiries. (Location 11534)
• Without the help of my agent, Mrs Gill Coleridge, I could not have survived the last four years. To Jenny, I owe my most heartfelt thanks for having survived them with me.   London December 1989 RAY MONK (Location 11598)