"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 12

In December 1929 Wittgenstein began to think about an autobiography, a plan which was in the end abandoned. Such an autobiography would likely have drawn much from Augustine's Confessions, which he approvingly considered likely 'the most serious book ever written'. Characteristically, a favourite passages of his from this work was: "Yet woe betide those who are silent about You! For even those who are most gifted with speech cannot find the words to describe You." Wittgenstein recast this passage rather freely, at one time stating it as: "And woe to those who say nothing concerning Thee just because the chatterboxes talk a lot of nonsense", or even: "What, you swine, you want not to talk nonsense! Go ahead and talk nonsense, it does not matter!" According to the biographer, the meaning of Wittgenstein's rendering is that one should silence "chatterboxes" but not necessarily stop talking "nonsense" (i.e. talk about ethics, God-talk) oneself: it all depends on the spirit in which the act is done. It is equally important to stop people's blabbering about ethics and to see that the inclination to talk nonsense pointed to something of significance. He was particularly sympathetic with the existentialists, e.g. Heidegger's language in lines such as "That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such" and Kierkegaard's in speaking of "this unknown something with which the Reason collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion".

[Blogger's note: this kind of notion in Kierkegaard reflects an anti-rationalist tradition in German thought which draws strongly from Luther and seems to me always to have been an element of Lutheranism. Luther sometimes goes to the extent of denouncing Reason altogether in his hyperbolic fashion. This tradition also crops up in Bach, in an aria the title of which the musicologist Taruskin translates as "Shut up, stumbling Reason".]

These are not thinkers that were favoured by the Vienna circle. Heidegger in particular was often referred to by the logical positivists as the an example of what they condemned. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein cooperated with the Vienna circle on a book of theirs which was to introduce the ideas of the Tractatus. But Wittgenstein began to introduce thinking which diverged from that of the Tractatus and eventually withdrew his cooperation. The book remained unpublished. Wittgenstein's somewhat ambiguous position in Austrian philosophical circles as a respected but shadowy figure led some to speculate that he was a kind of Bourbaki at this time.

Wittgenstein now started to investigate the more complex syntax which he believed to necessary since he had abandoned the idea that elementary propositions were independent and that all inference was based on tautological form. To do this he had to describe the role of the relationships between propositions. Wittgenstein's thinking changed by the week during this process. As an example of the "syntax of propositions", he imagined someone describing a "circle" that was 3cm long and 2cm wide. Such a "circle" is ruled out by the "syntax" of geometrical terminology, according to Wittgenstein. Similarly, the fact that blueness and redness cannot be predicated of the same point is ruled out by the "syntax" surrounding colour. There are different grammars that form systems of interconnected elementary propositions, and these allow for inferences that could not be made on the basis of the theory set forth in the Tractatus, which insisted that all inference was based on the concept of tautology. Wittgenstein insisted that he was not doing physics, mathematics or the like: he was not trying to establish what was true, but what could be meaningfully said and what was nonsense. He further commented:

Once I wrote, 'a proposition is laid against reality like a ruler....' I now prefer to say that a system of propositions is laid against reality like a ruler. What I mean [is:] If I lay a ruler against a spatial object, I lay all the graduating lines against it at the same time.

Schlick found this unpleasantly Kantian, especially since Wittgenstein used the term "structure of phenomenological states", one which described the structure of how the world appears without reference to objective physical relationships. He asked, "What answer can you give to a philosopher who believes that the statements of phenomenology are synthetic a priori judgements?" Wittgenstein's reply is obscure, but a remark not addressed to Schlick shows that he believed his view that certain grammatical rules are not replaceable by tautologies "explains... what Kant means when he insists that 7+5=12 is not an analytic proposition, but a synthetic proposition a priori". Wittgenstein thus claims that where Kant tries to say, he shows.

Schlick and the Vienna Circle were better pleased by "Wittgenstein's Princple of Verification": that for propositions, to be meaningful, we must have some understanding of what would be the case if they were true, and therefore we must have the means of establishing their truth-value. This was adopted by, and became closely identified with, logical positivism, for example in Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic. The principle became embodied in a slogan: "The sense of a proposition is its means of verification". Wittgenstein also said, "The verification is not one token of the truth, it is the sense of the proposition." Wittgenstein rejected the idea that there is meaningful propositions could only be verified to a limited extent or by approximation; a specific and completely adequate procedure of verification was needed, and if one could not be found, the proposition meant nothing.

Wittgenstein later stated that the question of how one could verify assertions is just one means of determining meaning (other means include asking how a child learns a word), that the "verification principle" was never meant to be the basis of a theory of meaning, and it was not a dogma. Wittgenstein's minimisation of his own former dogmatism about verification can be understood when one bears in mind that he wished it to be considered in a Kantian and not an empiricist context. Questioned later on verification, he told a parable about a kind of census in which people's employment is recorded. If it is discovered that a citizen does not work, this fact is also recorded because it is important. The biographer interprets this to mean that the discovery that a proposition cannot be verified is to understand something important about it, but not that there is nothing in the proposition to understand.

In 1930 Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge to find that Ramsey was ill. It soon became clear that he was dying. Wittgenstein is said to have been particularly kind and personally grieved under these circumstances. He gave his first lecture a day after Ramsey's death.

Wittgenstein's lectures were given without notes, and he appeared to be thinking aloud. Indeed, he would often stop altogether in order to think something out. The lecture might restart when a student asked a question and Wittgenstein responded by cursing his own stupidity. His hearers remarked that his approach to lectures on philosophy appeared to proceed on poetic rather than formal lines; and that this was deliberate is indicated by Wittgenstein's own remarks.

According to Wittgenstein, the practice of philosophy was founded on the aim of getting rid of the puzzlements of language. The features of the grammar of a language were to be pointed out, since grammar "fixes the degree of freedom" in language by defining what makes sense and what doesn't. Grammar concerns possibility and not truth and is a "mirror of reality". It should be grasped that Wittgenstein's notion of "grammar" was very wide; he defined geometry as a grammar.

The relations defined by grammar are internal to the grammar and contrasted it with a causal theory of meaning in which the relationship is external. Russell had claimed that words are correctly used when they make the images or sensations intended by the speaker appear to the hearer, but Wittgenstein saw the emphasis on cause and effect as misguided. He satirized Russell's view as follows: "If I wanted to eat an apple, and someone punched me in the stomach. taking away my appetite, then it was this punch in the stomach that I originally wanted."

At the end of the term, his money was running out, and Moore applied to Russell for a favourable assessment to secure him another grant. Russell was understandably not enthusiastic, the more so since he was desperately overworked, with a collapsing marriage. Wittgenstein, for his part, made an effort by producing his Philosophical Remarks, which is usually seen as a transitional work between the Tractatus and the Investigations. It is his most verificationist and phenomenological work, using the Vienna Circle's means, but opposed to their aims. Wittgenstein harshly criticized Russell's popular works concerning ethics.

Russell's rather tired attempt to give a reply to Moore was found to be sufficient when rewritten in 'grander language, which the Council will be able to understand.' Wittgenstein received another 100-pound grant. That summer, Goedel revealed his Incompleteness theorems, which are widely believed to have rendered Russell's aims in the Principia Mathematica unreachable.

The same summer, Wittgenstein also worked on further clarifications on the Tractatus that include statements on verification:

If I say 'My friend is angry' and establish this in virtue of his displaying a certain perceptible behaviour, I only mean that he displays that behaviour. And if I mean more by it, I cannot say what that extra consists in.

Wittgenstein quickly grew dissatisfied with these statement, however, believing that they partook of the mistaken dogmatism in the Tractatus.

In a double irony, the turn he now took was presaged in the Tractatus - which had not however conformed to its own statements in the matter. This turn was one towards not stating any doctrines at all. Instead, a technique of achieving clarity should be demonstrated. In the Tractatus this idea is stated in saying that the only strictly correct method in philosophy would be to make only non-philosophical statements of natural science and to respond to all statements of metaphysics by a demonstration that certain signs in those statements had not been properly invested with meaning.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 11

Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, intending to stay permanently. Keynes tried to get Wittgenstein back into the Cambridge Apostles, but Wittgenstein's manner, especially his argumentativeness and his conservative reticence when in the company of women, was at odds with the libertine but refined company he found himself in. (This was the heyday of the Bloomsbury group which included Virginia and Leonard Wolf, Keynes, Strachey and others.) Wittgenstein's perceived brutality and arrogance in argument was satirized in verse by Julian Bell. It was mainly Ramsey's presence which prevented Wittgenstein from completely renouncing the Apostles.

Wittgenstein was now speaking of marriage to Marguerite, but Marguerite was to back out when she realized this two years afterward. Wittgenstein apparently wanted a childless and Platonic marriage, and Marguerite's temperament was very different from his.

Officially, Wittgenstein was supposed to be working on a doctorate at Cambridge, with Ramsey as his supervisor. At the time, Wittgenstein thought Ramsey's criticisms "shallow", but he was later to write that he had helped him realize the mistakes he had made in the Tractatus. He also dealt with the economist Piero Sraffa, to whom he believed himself even more indebted for his later work in the Philosophical Investigations. Sraffa, unlike Ramsey, was able to get Wittgenstein to revise his whole perspective rather than only particular points. In one case, Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same logical form (the "Picture Theory" of the Tractatus). Sraffa brushed his chin with his fingertips in an Italian gesture, saying, "What is the logical form of that?" While this was clearly not enough in itself to make Wittgenstein abandon the Picture Theory, it does illustrate the way in which Sraffa brought a fresh approach to problems, one that Wittgenstein later called an "anthropological" perspective. In the Investigations this approach would show itself in the claim that "language games" and consequently utterances could not be described or said to have meaning without references to the human activities and circumstances that gave rise to them, which distinguished the work from the Tractatus, in which the context of language is not considered.

Wittgenstein and Keynes interacted, but did not become close. By contrast, he did resume his friendship with Moore, without respecting his philosophical work: "He shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatever", said Wittgenstein. A friendship also developed between him and the logician Johnson, but again this was more personal than professional; Johnson thought his return disastrous for the university. He also socialized with a certain Pattison, mostly indulging in nonsense and watching films without intellectual or artistic pretensions. The biographer describes their exchanges in some detail, including some of the "astonishingly feeble" jokes that Wittgenstein liked. Apparently he never tired of using the word "bloody" in correspondence and thought it hilarious.

Wittgenstein became active in the intellectual life and clubs of the university, and his appearance and manner was such that he was often mistaken for an undergraduate, though he was approaching the age of forty. His personal influence sometimes had a chilling effect on discussion, with some participants becoming disciples and others leaving because of the way he tended to dominate conversations. In some cases his disciples made major life decisions on his advice, notably a man called Drury. This advice seems often to have taken the form of turning them away from academic pursuits to practical tasks among "ordinary people".

These changes did not imply that Wittgenstein was now free from his neuroses, however. He resumed his keeping of notebook entries as an outlet and appeared to attribute many misunderstandings to the fact that he was forced to interact entirely in English. He began to be anxious that he had appeared to be financially motivated in responding to Keynes and invented confirmations of this fear. Keynes, however, managed to resolve matters.

However, money was in fact a problem. Keynes suggested an application for a research grant, which was supported by Ramsey. Wittgenstein's attitude was that the grant should be made only to the extent that the intellectual goods he produced were judged of value. Maybe partly in order to support the application, he was hastily given a doctorate for the Tractatus, already an old work of considerable influence. To this end he was examined by Moore and a reluctant Russell, who found the proceedings something of a farce. The examination ended with Wittgenstein clapping them both on the shoulder with the words: "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Wittgenstein was awarded a 100-pound grant on the following day.

Wittgenstein briefly befriended the critic Leavis, but advised him to give up literary criticism. He was at this time suffering from overwork and a lack of sleep, claiming that he always feared he would die and leave a piece of work unfinished whenever he got into it.

At this time, Wittgenstein produced a partial response to Ramsey's criticisms of the Tractatus, the arguments in which it is widely believed that Wittgenstein later turned away from (although some interpreters will dispute this point).

Wittgenstein had stated that only logical necessities and possibilities are in a strict sense possibilities and necessities. He had applied this to colour, saying that the "logical structure of colour" meant that it was impossible to see two colours at the same point in the visual field. The problem is that the statement: "This is red" is therefore not an atomic proposition, since Wittgenstein had characterized atomic propositions as being independent from one another and the statement is clearly not independent from the statement: "This is blue", since the one contradicts the other. Ascriptions of colour are therefore complex statements. Wittgenstein had therefore "simplified" colour statements into propositions about particle velocities, e.g. "a particle cannot have two velocities at the same time".

According to Ramsey, however, the problem remains at this level of analysis, only reducing it to the necessities imposed by time, space etc. The proposition therefore remains one of physics and not logic, contradicting Wittgenstein's view that all "true" necessities and possibilities are logical ones.

Rather than trying to show that space, time and matter were logical necessities, Wittgenstein responded by creating an alternative account of colour-exclusion, abandoning his claim that atomic propositions are independent. But this implies a flaw in the Tractatus' analysis of the rules of logical form, which only allows that paired propositions can be rejected if they can be analysed as "p" and "not-p" in truth tables. In his paper responding to Ramsey, Wittgenstein dismisses this problem as a shortcoming in the notation system.

However, Wittgenstein's attempts to improve the structure of the Tractatus did not yield results, and he abandoned the claim that language and the world necessarily had the same structure.

Although impatient with Ramsey's continued attempts to use the Tractatus as the basis for a philosophy of mathematics, Wittgenstein did reaffirm his view that attempts to speak about the subject-matter of ethics must lead to nonsense. At the same time, he did not approach ethics from a anti-metaphysical, positivist perspective. Rather, he believed that it was a question of hopelessly "running against the boundaries [elsewhere "walls"] of language": speaking on ethics might not add anything to knowledge, but it "is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply". Wittgenstein refers to certain experiences of awe and a sense of invulnerability which seem to have an absolute value, but to speak of which would be a misuse of language. He also recorded the maxim: "What is good is also divine... [T]hat sums up my ethics."

Given this attitude, Wittgenstein naturally said very little about moral problems in his public pronouncements on ethics. He did. however, express privately a personal view on morality, which revolved around "decency" and his personal temptations to be dishonest out of vanity. In particular, he felt that he was allowing people to think that he was from an aristocratic family (there was a noble Wittgenstein family in Austria to which he did not belong), whereas he thought of himself as a Jew. Wittgenstein's expressed anxieties on his Jewishness, in fact, are at times briefly reminiscent of Nazi slogans according to the biographer.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 10

In anguish at his perceived moral failure as a teacher, Wittgenstein inquired at a monastery about being accepted into the order. The Father Superior warned him that his expectations were wrong and that the monastery would not welcome his motives for joining, so instead he found a group of monk-hospitallers outside Vienna and worked there as a gardener, living in the tool-shed for three months. During this period his mother died. Afterwards he returned to Vienna and appeared much more at ease with the idea of dealing with his family.

His sister Gretl and Engelmann now wanted him to work on the design and construction of Gretl's house. Engelmann had already done some renovation work for the Wittgensteins on a previous occasion, and Wittgenstein was to work with him. Wittgenstein designed doors, windows and radiators for this purpose and was subsequently listed in the Vienna city directory as an architect for years.

Wittgenstein's obsessive attention to detail had the engineer working on glass doors according to his requirements in tears, and the radiators took a year to deliver because no one in Vienna could produce them according to his standards. Gretls finally occupied the house at the end of 1928. However, her approval was moderated by the austere mathematical quality of Wittgenstein's design. He had eschewed any external decorations and even strictly rejected carpets and curtains. The rooms used undecorated light bulbs, the floors were of dark stone and the walls a light ochre throughout, and door handles, radiators and window frames were left unpainted.

The house was to become a barracks and stable for Russian forces in 1945, left empty after 1958 and slated for demolition in 1971, finally becoming a Bulgarian embassy building after a campaign to save it. Subsequent decorators have added wood paneling and other elements Wittgenstein would have disapproved of.

Wittgenstein started going out with a certain Marguerite whom he had met in Cambridge. Marguerite was not especially serious or intellectual and did not get on with Wittgenstein's circle. This was especially the case with Paul Engelmann, about whom she made comments with respect to his Jewish origins. Gretl, however, encouraged the relationship. Wittgenstein used her as a model for a bust he sculpted, which he gave to Gretl. Wittgenstein saw this relationship as a preliminary to marriage, though he was much older than Marguerite.

Wittgenstein also returned to philosophy during his stint as an architect, meeting with a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna, Moritz Schlick. Schlick had previously attempted to deal with Wittgenstein without results. Schlick and his circle eventually had regular meetings with Wittgenstein, but were surprised to find him hostile to positivism and with an unscientific attitude. Schlick wrote that Wittgenstein delivered precepts as if by divine inspiration, not tolerating argument of a kind based on Enlightenment rationality.

One of the topics was Ramsey's attempts to correct the errors in Russell's philosophy of mathematics, using Wittgenstein's ideas. At the same time, Ramsey was defending Russell's general approach of seeing mathematics as reducible to axioms of logic, opposing the "Bolshevik menace" of Brouwer, who used an approach in which a fundamentally different conception of logic and mathematics was needed to reconstruct mathematics entirely, which would lead to the casting aside of many well-established theorems which were not provable within his system.

Ramsey wanted to show that mathematics consists of Wittgensteinian tautologies (using a logical function Q(x,y) that corresponds to x=y) and that mathematical propositions are thus logical propositions. Wittgenstein, however, distinguishes between the 'equations' of mathematics and the 'tautologies' of logic. Having read Ramsey's paper, Wittgenstein attacked his claim that all expressions of identity are either tautologies or contradictions: "The way out of all these troubles is to see that neither 'Q(x,y)', though it is a very interesting function, nor any propositional function whatever, can be substituted for 'x=y'". In short, Wittgenstein thought the attempt to base mathematics on axioms of logic futile. But whereas Wittgenstein saw Ramsey's endeavour as philosophically misguided, Ramsey saw his function Q(x, y) as merely a (so to speak) "semantic" tool defined so as to accomplish the practical function of identity statements within his theory. Wittgenstein saw Ramsey as a "bourgeouis" thinker because Ramsey was considering the possible organization of one particular 'state ' (the 'community of ideas' espoused by Russell and others) and not considering its essence, whereas according to Wittgenstein a philosopher as such is not a citizen of any community of ideas.

Wittgenstein was also corresponding with Keynes, commenting positively on Keynes' survey of the Soviet Union. Curiously. what Keynes and Wittgenstein liked about Soviet Marxism was not its economics, which they thought wrong, but its character as a religious attitude comparable to Christianity. Keynes did however contrast Marxism and Christianity, seeing the former as pointing the way to a non-supernaturalist religion of the future. Russell had also written about the Soviet state and compared it to Christianity, but despised both, and particularly what he saw as their common elements. Wittgenstein was to retain the idea of living in the Soviet Union until the political conditions prevailing from 1937 made it unworkable.

In 1928 Wittgenstein attended some lecturers by the mathematical "Bolshevik" Brouwer. Although he did not "convert" to Brouwer's school, Brouwer's thought was to prove a powerful stimulus to Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein would have nothing to do with Brouwer's Kantian idea of a "basic mathematical intuition" on which his philosophy of mathematics was founded. However, his philosophical attitude and Wittgenstein's were similar, and opposed to that of Ramsey and Russell. Their thinking was closer to that of Schopenhauer than that of the rationalist Vienna circle. They also agreed on rejecting the following ideas:

• the notion of an infinite series in extension.
• the possibility or need to found mathematics on formal logic.
• the need for consistency proofs in a mathematical system.
• the mind-independent reality of mathematics, elements of which can then be 'discovered' rather than 'created'.

According to the biographer, Brouwer's work probably pointed Wittgenstein in the direction that his later philosophical work would go.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 9

Wittgenstein's conception of poor rural elementary schools was a rather romantic and Tolstoyan one. He tried to improve his pupils "internally", in accordance with his ethical theory, rather than better their conditions. Their minds and souls were to be developed through mathematics, the German classics and the Bible. They were to value intellectual life for its own sake, not to be taken from their poverty. In short: seriousness, intellectual refinement, honest toil.

He was first sent, contrary to his intentions, to a relatively prosperous town and centre of pilgrimage, Maria Schultz am Semmering. On arriving, he carefully explained to the headmaster that he could not work there: it had a park with a fountain and hence was not rural enough. At the suggestion of the headmaster, he set off to a nearby village, Trattenbach. This he did at once, hiking.

He was enchanted with Trattenbach: the villagers worked as poor farmers or in a textile factory, if they were employed. He sent for reading books, such as the Grimms' tales or Tolstoy, from Haensel, who also visited regularly. These doings unfortunately set him apart from the villagers and led to rumours and speculations about him. They regarded him as an eccentric aristocrat and could not understand why he was there.

He quickly became known for his ability to hold his pupil's attention and his energy in teaching, taking particular care to develop problem-solving rather than simply lecturing. This emphasis on practical exercises was something he had in common with the Reform Movement. He gave extra tuition to his favourite pupils. Those who were less intelligent or which he could not interest, however, found him tyrannical. He taught mathematics at a far higher level than was customary for the given age group, for two hours at a stretch first thing in the morning. One girl recalled how she had rebelled and been boxed on the ears. Taken aside and asked whether she was ill, she lied and said yes. Wittgenstein apologized abjectly, holding up his hands in prayer. She was one among many girls who found Wittgenstein's classes intolerable.

In this patriarchal rural culture, girls were not expected to understand mathematics at all, let alone be punished for failing to. But Wittgenstein regularly boxed their ears and pulled their hair, and corporal punishment, though common for boys, was not the norm for girls. His taste for elite art (he played a part in a Mozart trio once) and his contempt for popular entertainment did not endear him to the villagers either.

His unconventional, but extremely serious, religious attitude was just as strange to them. Attending he catechism at the local church once, he listened to the questions put to the children by the priest. Suddenly he exclaimed, "Nonsense!".

Wittgenstein did earn their trust by repairing the steam engine at a local factory, apparently simply by observing the machine and then stationing four men with hammers at different points and having them knock at it in sequence. This was thought something of a miracle.

His family were not allowed to assists him in any way. Food parcels were returned unopened and letters were not answered. His sister did, however, manage to keep tabs on him through Haensel. Wittgenstein remained cheerful and active for a while. However, in early 1921 he wrote to Engelmann of his 'failure' (not being clear in what it consisted, but Monk suggests that it involved a sense that he had been called to the priesthood) and of being 'morally dead', and began to be disenchanted with Trattenbach. The children's parents were resisting Wittgenstein's efforts to raise the standards they were expected to fulfill. Russell, then in China, wrote to Wittgenstein praising his chosen vocation and his sincerity. Informed of Wittgenstein's growing dislike of the villagers, he reasonably suggested that flaws in human nature were to be found everywhere and that Wittgenstein should take what is called a "philosophical attitude" to it. Wittgenstein wrote back: "No, here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere". On being pressed, he confessed that humanity was probably no worse in Trattenbach than elsewhere, but maintained that post-war Austria, and in particular thus "particularly insignificant place in it" and been brought low.

In the summer holidays, Wittgenstein returned to Norway, working at making crates in 'a kind of carpentry workshop' since he was short of money. On his return, Russell informed him that the Tractatus was to be published at last in England, while another contact of his had managed to get it printed in a periodical. It was also translated into English in the years 1921-22 by an undergraduate at King's College. It was also at this time that the work received its title (suggested by Moore); previously, Wittgenstein had called it by its German name: the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung.

Various problems had emerged in the publication and translation. The original edition had been published using typewriter substitutions for Russell's logical symbols, the publisher having made no attempt to alter the text. One of the propositions reads only "see Supplement No. 72". This refers to a note which had been intended to be inserted at proposition 4.0141. These supplementary notes had attempted to describe certain of the propositions in the book, but Wittgenstein had not included it in the final version. The publisher, on learning of the supplementary notes, had hoped that Wittgenstein would allow more extensive explanations of what the book meant, but Wittgenstein refused to allow them to be published:

As to the shortness of the book... If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me. To let you print the [supplementary notes] 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 notes] to make the book fatter leave a dozen sheets for the reader to swear into when he has purchased the book and can't understand it.)

He responded with contempt to the publisher's attempt to add biographical details about him to the work, but did not forbid it.
According to the contract he was sent, he was to receive no royalties for the book.

Wittgenstein decided that he would leave Trattenbach after that year. Apart from his general disgust with the villagers, he had had a particular disappointment. He had made great efforts to get Karl Gruber, a boy in his class, to be sent to study at a Gymnasium in Vienna to advance his studies, but the boy's parents insisted that he was needed on the farm. Karl finally discontinued lessons amidst pressure from his parents, the factory work he was doing, and the additional 3,5 hours of additional study Wittgenstein put him through every day.

Wittgenstein looked forward to a visit from Russell in the summer, but in the event this too proved a disappointment. It was to be the last time they met as friends. Dora Russell refers to the state of Austria at the time and the stresses it placed on Wittgenstein, but Russell himself claims that Wittgenstein's religiosity was the cause, later suggesting that Wittgenstein's belief that Russell was wicked caused him to give up the association. Monk disagrees with this interpretation:"Russell enjoyed being though wicked... Wittgenstein did indeed, disapprove of his sexual mores... But it is not true that Wittgenstein avoided all contact [after this meeting]... The indications are that it was Russell who broke off communication". Instead, he surmises that Russell was then at his most aggressively atheist and unable to tolerate Wittgenstein's mysticism. Russell had also become less introspective and individualistic even as Wittgenstein had grown more so. Socialism was now of greater concern to him than personal morality. Engelmann wrote of the following incident, which Monk believes occurred at this meeting:

[When] Russell wanted to establish, or join, a 'World Organization for Peace and Freedom" or something similar, Wittgenstein rebuked him so severely that Russell said to him: "Well, I suppose you would rather establish a World Organization for War and Slavery", to which Wittgenstein passionately assented: "Yes, rather that, rather that!"

While Wittgenstein apparently contemplated leaving for England or Russia, he started working for a secondary school in the vicinity of Trattenbach the following year. This time he stayed only a month, calling the inhabitants 'not human at all but loathsome worms.' In November he started at another primary school, where he found it equally difficult to like anyone. He did at least meet two people with whom he performed classical works (clarinet and piano).

Here he received finished copies of the Tractatus. After its publication it gradually gained the attention of the academic community, with seminars being given and expositions being printed. Wittgenstein loathed a book-length exposition of it by his editor, and to his further shock Russell not only didn't reply to a letter in which Wittgenstein criticized it, but wrote a favourable review. The fact that he wrote it to help the editor increase sales disgusted Wittgenstein even further; he saw it as evidence of a lack of seriousness. Feeling increasingly isolated, Wittgenstein wrote to Keynes and Frank Ramsey. Keynes took a year to reply, whereas Ramsey was to prove of more value to Wittgenstein in the following months. Ramsey had reviewed the Tractatus with considerable insight, pointing out misunderstandings in Russell's introduction. Ramsey visited Wittgenstein and they proceeded to work through the Tractatus again in detail, at 'about a page an hour'.

Ramsey wanted to make the book the basis for a theory of higher mathematics and push Wittgenstein to develop it further. Wittgenstein, however, considered himself 'no longer flexible' and too burnt out to do further philosophy. He did, however, allow himself to be convinced that something needed to replace Russell's Principa Mathematica. Russell was at that time revising the work, a fact which irritated Wittgenstein because he thought he had shown the work to be superfluous. Ramsey wrote that Wittgenstein was very poor and ate coarse bread, butter and cocoa for dinner.

When Ramsey had returned, Keynes began to work through Ramsey to persuade Wittgenstein to return to England, offering 50 Pounds to cover expenses. This campaign had not yet succeeded by February 1924, when Ramsey returned to Vienna, not only to see Wittgenstein but to undergo psychoanalysis. Ramsey had got hold of the revisions Russell was planning to introduce to the Principa Mathematica, and had been consulted by Russell on it. But to Wittgenstein, he was as scathing about it as he could have wished. Indeed, it was not widely lauded; Whitehead considered it too much influenced by Wittgenstein, whereas Ramsey thought that it had not gone nearly far enough.

In Vienna Ramsey visited the Wittgenstein family and learned of their wealth. He now realized that Wittgenstein could probably not be persuaded to stop 'wasting' his talents. Talks to Wittgenstein about mathematics did not go well; he thought that Wittgenstein seemed 'tired' and unable to listen. On returning to England, Ramsey reported to Keynes that the deterioration of Wittgenstein's relationships with Russell and Moore were an impediment to their project of getting him to come to Cambridge. Ramsey believed that Keynes would have to take him in and that Wittgenstein needed a change of environment, but warned him about how tiring and difficult he could be. Nothing came of it; Wittgenstein very much wanted to see Keynes again but absolutely refused to take up philosophy.

In September 1924, Wittgenstein made a last attempt at a new school. Wittgenstein knew and got on fairly well with the head, Putre, though there were of course differences: Putre was a secularist who discouraged praying in schools, but Wittgenstein prayed with the children every day. Putre said he thought lip-service to Catholicism meaningless. Wittgenstein answered, "People kiss each other; that too is done with the lips."

Within a month Wittgenstein knew that it was not going well; all the same problems were cropping up. However, in his time at this school, he made his main contribution to education in Austria: he produced a dictionary to help children spell. At his previous school, Wittgenstein had made the children write out their own vocabulary books. The authorities saw a need for a spelling dictionary, but the only two such works that were available at the time were deficient; one was too expensive, the other badly put together, with an awkward selection of words. Wittgenstein's dictionary also contained items relating to Austrian dialect. He found this work relatively easy to get published.

Engelmann was increasingly identifying himself with Zionism at this time, nostalgically characterizing pre-war Vienna as "Austrian-Jewish". This corresponded to a rise in antisemitism throughout Europe. Engelmann announced to Wittgenstein his intention to settle in Israel, which he finally did in 1934, after the Nazis had gained power in Germany. Another old acquaintance, Eccles, wrote to Wittgenstein shortly afterwards to get him to visit Manchester. Having consulted Keynes, Wittgenstein finally made up his mind to visit England again.

In England, Wittgenstein quarreled with Ramsey, resulting in a two-year break. However, the trip was largely a success.

In April 1926 Wittgenstein finally gave up teaching. He had struck a sickly 11-year old boy a few times on the head, causing him to collapse (the child would die of leukaemia three years later). Panicking, Wittgenstein sent his class home and carried the boy to the headmaster's office. On his way out, a different parent with a grudge against Wittgenstein confronted him and marched off to the police station, but no one was available, and by the following day, Wittgenstein had left. The district inspector wanted him to stay on, but Wittgenstein insisted on resigning. Eventually there was a hearing for misconduct in which Wittgenstein was cleared.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 8

Wittgenstein found it difficult to readjust to civilian life after the war, and wore his uniform for years afterward. Austria was now reduced to 1/8th of its original population through territorial loss. Engelmann was now a citizen of the new state of Czechoslovakia, and the areas of Austria-Hungary that Wittgenstein had defended now belonged to a recreated Poland. In this situation most Austrians preferred unification with Germany, but the heavy penalties laid on them by the Allies prevented this.

Wittgenstein also had a new identity, as he had hoped for. But his family was dismayed and could not understand why he wanted to become a primary school teacher. His sister remarked that it was like using a precision instrument to open crates. For Wittgenstein, on the other hand, his hardships had given his life meaning, which he would not give up by returning to complete security.

His father had shrewdly invested in American bonds before the war, and he was now one of the richest men in Europe. But within a month, he disposed of his whole estate, insisting on making over his inheritance to his siblings. Indeed, he insisted repeatedly on ensuring that there was no possibility of his retaining anything. He also moved away from his parents' property. However, he continued to be disoriented and was often suicidal. He wanted Engelmann or Russell to visit as soon as possible, but the former was struggling to obtain a Czechoslovakian passport, and the latter was lecturing. Furthermore, Russell's political stance presented the possibility that he would not be allowed to leave the country. Pinsent, of course, was dead. He looked up Loos, but was horrified that he had been 'infected with the most virulent bogus intellectualism.' In his teacher's training classes he, at the age of thirty, was surrounded by teenagers. He was also discomfited by the effects his reputation as a member of the rich Wittgenstein family had on him.

The reception of the Tractatus also troubled him. Taking it to a new publisher, he applied to Russell for a recommendation, feeling sure that the publishers would not be able to understand it. The publisher accepted on condition that Wittgenstein would pay for the printing, but Wittgenstein had no money at this time and in any case would have refused, wishing the book to go out in the normal way and on its own merits.

Frege continued to question the terminology of the Tractatus, and also raised concerns about its purpose. Some remarks by Wittgenstein in the preface, as well as his own experience of the book, gave him the impression that it could be properly understood only by those who had already thought in the same way. Hence, it seemed to him more of an artistic achievement, one attained by the particular form the thoughts were couched in, rather than a scientific one which revealed new thoughts to people. Frege was somewhat appeased in one way: he had complained that in Wittgenstein's terminology "The world is everything that is the case" and "The world is the totality of facts" were identical propositions. Now, however, Wittgenstein, while conceding that the propositions were similar in meaning, claimed that they were distinct in that he had associated different ideas with them. Frege had been thinking along similar lines and concurred that propositions with identical meanings could be meaningfully put side by side.

Wittgenstein asked Frege to recommend the Tractatus to a journal publisher, but Frege, while willing to make some efforts, wrote back that he thought them unlikely to succeed, and moreover refused to recommend the work specifically apart from commending Wittgenstein in general on the grounds that he did not understand enough of it. He suggested that the work be supplemented with a motivation in the form of a problem to be solved and published in sections rather than as a whole. Wittgenstein refused.

He next applied to Ficker to publish it in Der Brenner, a literary journal. The response was positive enough for him to send Ficker the manuscript and add some explanation of the meaning in a letter:

...the point of the book is ethical.... [M]y work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely the 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.

Ficker was less than pleased with this, and, concerned with financial viability, he gave no definite answer but warned that he might not be able to print it. He wrote that he had applied to colleagues about it and had asked Rilke to find a publisher. He also wished to consult a professor of philosophy. This threw Wittgenstein into despair; he would permit Ficker to show it to a professor if he liked, but thought that it would be casting pearls before swine, and believed it would not be published. Alarmed, Ficker assured Wittgenstein (to whom he owed a favour in any case) that he would see it printed, but after further wrangling and Wittgenstein's refusing to have it published at financial risk to Ficker, nothing came of it.

Wittgenstein's despair was alleviated somewhat when he moved in with the Sjoegrens, a family that were friends of the Wittgensteins. Wittgenstein was to serve the role of the 'man of the house', the household being headed by a widow who was trying to raise three sons. This arrangement was to an extent successful, and Wittgenstein had a lasting influence on the children. One took up the career of a mechanic on his advice instead of studying at a university. Wittgenstein was later to encourage "honest trades" in place of the privileged positions the elites were traditionally expected to occupy, having some influence in this direction in the 1930s and 1940s.

Russell and Wittgenstein now arranged to meet in The Hague, not without difficulty. To fund Wittgenstein for this purpose, Russell bought some furniture and books Wittgenstein had left in Cambridge. When the meeting eventually took place, a week of intense discussion followed. Russell refused to accept Wittgenstein's claim that any assertion about the world as a whole was meaningless. Russell retorted that it was meaningful and true to say that "there are at least three things in the world". He made three ink blobs on a piece of paper and exhorted Wittgenstein to accept the statement, but Wittgenstein refused; though he admitted that there were three blobs on the page, he would not confess that the assertion could be transferred to the world as a whole.

Russell was also set against the "mystical" doctrine that it was possible to show what cannot be said. In this regard he remarked, "... I think (although he wouldn't agree) that what he likes best in mysticism is its power to make him stop thinking." Russell was impressed enough to write an introduction to the book, however, and Russell's reputation would almost guarantee the publication of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein was disappointed by the criticisms and clarifications Russell made in the introduction, however, as well as by what was lost in the introduction's translation into German. He informed the publisher he was trying to convince at that time that Russell's introduction was not to be included in the publication and was only to frame the publisher's perspective. Wittgenstein had guessed that this would result in its rejection, and so it turned out. His attitude was that he didn't care if it were published far in the future as long as it was "a work of the highest rank"; otherwise, he didn't care to see it published. Russell was unfazed by Wittgenstein's handling of the introduction, offering to have the book published in England.

In April he left the Sjoegrens'; it was believed at the time that the widow had fallen in love with him and that this had caused him to leave. Another bout of self-recrimination and depression ensued. His correspondence with Engelmann shows that both considered a keen awareness of one's own failings an essential aspect of a 'religious attitude' and a decent life. Their ethical standard required that one recognize that the cause of unhappiness, namely discrepancies between oneself and 'life as it is' , sprang from one's own failings. Furthermore, their ethic was a Kantian, deontological one, radically unconcerned with what 'works'. Engelmann now recommended to Wittgenstein that he write out a 'confession', with an account of how he should have behaved in specific instances. This, Engelmann thought, would clear Wittgenstein's mind. He also wrote that suicide is always a mistake because by it one forgoes any possibilities of self-correction. Wittgenstein thanked Engelmann, more for his description of his own efforts than for the advice. He was to put this method into action in later years, however.

Wittgenstein completed his teacher training without incident and with considerable merit, although not without internal wrangling about his poor social skills. His training had proceeded according to the socialist and republican principles which were in favour among Austrian intellectuals in the post-war period. This School Reform Movement, as it was known, did not resonate particularly with Wittgenstein, not for that matter with Haensel, his fellow prisoner of war in Italy who was still active in education and with whom Wittgenstein still dealt regularly. Wittgenstein disapproved of secularism and faith in political and social reform, but he was not greatly in favour of the Catholic establishment with which Haensel identified either.

Frege continued to ask for clarification of the Tractatus and for reasons why Wittgenstein had seen grounds for linking idealism with Frege's realism. There is no indication that he had properly understood it by the time he died four years later. Monk asserts that the question of idealism and realism in the Tractatus is closely linked to the ethical position of Engelmann and Wittgenstein: "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."

Despite the fact that Russell, Frege, and the publishers he had applied to found the Tractatus confused, and the problems resulting from Wittgenstein's own insistence that the verbal expression of these metaphysics can only result in nonsense, he continued to consider it irrefutable. He continued to consider the external events which put pressure on him - such as Pinsent's death - irrelevant to solving his problems, wishing more to 'settle accounts with himself'. To this end he worked as a gardener at a monastery in the interim before he got a teaching post.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 7

Monk argues that Wittgenstein's additions to the Tractatus that speak of matters beyond logic, such as ethics, would not have existed if he had not been at the front during the war. Preparing himself for his longed-for encounter with death, he wrote: 'God enlighten me. God enlighten me. God enlighten my soul", "Do your best. You cannot do more: and be cheerful", and other entries of the kind.

On approaching the front, however, he became ill. Told that he might have to be left behind, he wrote that he would kill himself if he could not fight. When he at last arrived, he volunteered for the observation post, which guaranteed that he would be fired at. Shot at on 29 April, he thought he was closer to enlightenment. On 4 May he was assigned to observation at night (when shelling was heaviest). He wrote:

Only then will the war really begin for me... 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.

He was constantly expecting to die, and expressed contempt for his own fear, believing that only by facing death could he be sure he was living decently. He preferred a solitary position, disliking having to face the soldiers on his own side ('a company of drunkards, a company of vile and stupid people', 'malicious and heartless') about as much as facing the enemy. He thought they hated him because he was a volunteer.

At other times he tried to understand them as

".. not so much mean as appallingly limited... Within their circle they are clever enough. But they lack character and thereby breadth."

In his work on what was to become the Tractatus he added this remark, which found its way into the final version:

The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that te so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages.
And in fact both are right and both wrong: though the view of the ancients is clearer in so far as they have a clear and acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.

In June he began to write a series of propositions which he seemed to see as continuous with his philosophical work. His existential and mystical religious sensibility now required him to understand in his own way what the object of his prayers was and how it related to his perceptions about the nature of the world. Asking the question, "What do I know about God and the purpose of life?", he writes:

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 or 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.
... To believe in a God means to understand the meaning of life.
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.

Later he identifies God with "how things stand". This phrase refers both to the state of affairs in the world and in the self, since the self is a microcosm of the world, as in Weininger and Schopenhauer. The connection between these thoughts and his work on logic arose from his distinction between 'saying' and 'showing'. Since logical form is the form of language itself and cannot be expressed within language, it must be 'shown'. Ethical and religious truth are also inexpressible but are manifested in life; those to whom the meaning of life had been revealed could nevertheless not state what it consisted in. They are the mystics. Also, "ethics does not treat of the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, just like logic." Understanding ethics entails seeing the world as a whole (as understanding logic form requires one to see language as a whole), but speaking from such a point of view inevitably results in nonsense.

Hence, in Spinoza's phrase, ethics (and also aesthetics) concerns things that are seen sub specie aeternitatis (under the form of eternity):

The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connection between art and ethics.
The usual way of looking at things sees objects as it were from the midst of them, the view sub specie aeternitatis from outside.
In such a way that they have the whole world as background.

These remarks show the influence of Schopenhauer's comments on Spinoza's phrase. In Schopenhauer's view we "lose ourselves in the object" when we contemplate something sub specie aeternitatis; this is the meaning of Spinoza's dictum that "The mind is eternal in so far as it conceives things from the standpoint of eternity".

Monk sees Schopenhauer's dichotomy between the inner self (the noumenal 'world as will') and the realm of space and time (the phenomenal 'world as idea') in Wittgenstein, and regards it as that to which Nietzsche objected to as a flight from reality inward to the self. Monk sees the state of mind on which this philosophy is built as leading to solipsism when logically worked out, as in Wittgenstein's statements: "It is true: Man is the microcosm: I am my world." However, Wittgenstein safeguards himself by adding that the doctrine is nonsense when stated, but that the solipsist means something true: again, it must be manifested, but cannot be (strictly correctly) said.

Monk sees the following statement by Wittgenstein as combining Frege's and Schopenhauer's ontologies:

This is the way I have traveled: 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. In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.

Though Frege and Wittgenstein corresponded at this time, the former learned nothing about the merging of idealism with his own realism.

In July the Austrians were driven back by Russian forces. For the first time Wittgenstein experienced the will to live as a state in which the animal instinct for survival renders ethics and reason irrelevant. About his fear of death, he writes: "This is precisely what 'sin' is, the unreasoning life, a false view of life... I am then at the mercy of my appetites and aversions. Then an authentic life is unthinkable." For three weeks he reproaches himself with his "sin" - despite being quickly promoted and recommended for decorations for his bravery.

Soon afterwards, Wittgenstein met Paul Engelmann. Engelmann served to stimulate him to further work on the Tractatus; moreover, the two had undergone a religious awakening of a similar nature at about the same time. Engelmann also nursed Wittgenstein while he had enteritis. Engelmann wrote that Wittgenstein and he were kindred spirits in being unsettled by the discrepancy between the world as it existed and the ideal, and seeking the source of this discrepancy within themselves. Wittgenstein's connection of logic and mysticism by reference to an unutterable truth that makes itself manifest was natural to Engelmann.

By 1917 the Russians were retreating, and in the same year the Russian Revolution occurred. Wittgenstein was awarded a Silver Medal for Valour for his part in the defence of a position. During a period of inactivity in the Ukraine, he seems to have produced a surviving manuscript of an early version of the Tractactus. He was transferred to the Italian front in 1918. Though he fell sick soon after his arrival, he recovered enough to do observation again in June. He was recommended for the top Austrian military honour, but did not receive it because it was decided that his action, though meritorious, did not have momentous consequences. He therefore received a lesser decoration.

During a long period of leave, he heard of the death of Pinsent in an aeroplane accident. This was the probable cause of another round of suicidal thoughts, in which state Paul Wittgenstein found him at a railway station, dissuading him from a serious intention to kill himself. This having been done, Wittgenstein was able to complete the Tractatus and to declare that the problems of philosophy had thereby been solved; adding, however, that very little was achieved in doing this. In the preface he writes that the meaning of the whole work can be stated in saying that "[w]hat can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent". This sentence is meant to apply both to the logical and the ethical aspects of Wittgenstein's thought. The distinction between 'saying' and 'showing' remained central: "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical." Wittgenstein evidently considered attempts to 'say' the inexpressible a misuse of language, and as such as ethically corrupt as logically nonsensical.

There is very little argument in the book; each proposition is stated as though it were undeniable and final.

In September Wittgenstein returned to the Italian front, having sent the Tractatus to a publisher, but in October he was told that it could not be published "for technical reasons".

By this time the Austro-Hungarian Empire was collapsing. Large numbers of Slavic soldiers simply no longer responded to their German-speaking superior officers. When Kurt, Wittgenstein's brother, was faced with such a situation, he shot himself. As for Wittgenstein, he was captured by the Italians with about 500 000 others. As a prisoner of war, he met two officers, Michael Drobil and Ludwig Haensel. The latter was giving classes on logic to those prisoners who hoped to become teachers after the war, and the two began to read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Wittgenstein too decided he would become a teacher during his internment.

In early 1919, still in the camp, Wittgenstein could at last communicate with Russell. Russell had campaigned against the war from a pacifist stance and been imprisoned for his pains, though he was in no danger of being conscripted. He was better known in his capacity as a political campaigner than as a philosopher. He was pleased to hear from Wittgenstein, and though regulations restricted their communication to less than was compatible with discussion on logic, Wittgenstein did inform Russell that he had written a book which had finally solved all their problems. He added that Russell would not understand it without additional explanation (and therefore nobody would).

Wittgenstein nearly managed to get out of the camp as medically unfit for long confinement by means of of a relative with connections to the Vatican. However, Wittgenstein rejected this plan and insisted that his health was perfect. Russell, for his part, managed to expand Wittgenstein's correspondence privileges through Keynes, who was attending the Peace Conference. Russell's newest work, however, did not please Wittgenstein, who thought that it contained errors that Russell would have seen through if he had understood the notes Wittgenstein had dictated to Moore.

Frege had received a manuscript copy of the Tractatus, but his response was lukewarm. He was evidently concerned about ambiguities and the terminology at the beginning of the book and had not got much further. Frege could not understand the Theory of Symbolism and its implications at all. Wittgenstein got a better response from Russell, who at least understood Wittgenstein's contentions about logic - though he was mistaken in that he thought the main point was that logical propositions are tautologies and not true in the same way substantial propositions are. Wittgenstein answered that it was more a question of what could be expressed in propositions using language (again referring to the distinction between 'saying' and 'showing'). Russell thought this distinction obscure and needless, later calling it 'a curious kind of logical mysticism' and claiming that a 'meta-language' could render it unnecessary. Russell also thought that Wittgenstein's dismissal of the theory of types was mistaken. Even worse was Wittgenstein's dismissal of set theory in mathematics as 'completely superfluous'. Russell was naturally concerned, much of his own work having been in set theory, but Wittgenstein only answered that a long explanation would be necessary, and 'you know how difficult it is for me to write on logic.' Russell was silent one the mystical remarks about ethics, aesthetics, the soul etc. and only said that he could not find a reason for disagreeing with Wittgenstein on causality and induction. He also said that 'in places it is obscure through brevity'.

Wittgenstein was released in August 1919.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 6b

During the Austrian retreat, Wittgenstein developed the "Picture Theory of language", in which propositions are a model of states of affairs in the world because their parts correspond to elements of reality. The structure of a proposition thus represents a possible state of affairs. He had had this idea on learning of a court case in which a traffic accident had been represented by a model. The subsequent "Theory of Logical Portrayal" states that the common logical structure between reality and propositions is what enables us to relate the proposition and the state of affairs through language. Wittgenstein saw this as a major breakthrough.

As the army was retreating, Wittgenstein had an opportunity to see Trakl, one of the poets he had funded, in Krakow, where he was a psychiatric patient. Both Ficker and Trakl himself had written asking Wittgenstein to visit him. Wittgenstein decided it was too late to see Trakl on the day he arrived, only to learn that Trakl had killed himself with an overdose of cocaine two days before.

Robbed of this opportunity, he wrote to Pinsent. In his reply, Pinsent told Wittgenstein that he had volunteered for the British army (a decision Wittgenstein thought "splendid") but had been deemed "too thin".

Much to his relief, Wittgenstein managed to obtain a room of his own. He also got a job with an artillery workshop because of his mathematical training - though all he did was to compile lists of vehicles. At this time he was reading Emerson and Nietzsche. Nietzsche's description of Christianity as the outcome of a morbid sensitivity and fear of the external world that leads to a retreat to an inner world ('the Kingdom of God is within you') made a great impression on him, though he did not accept it. Wittgenstein was more interested in the existential value (or lack thereof) of Christianity than its factuality: the question of whether the struggle with the external world it represented to him was meaningful and hopeful, or, if not, at least preferable to compromise. Christianity as a practice was correspondingly more important to him than Christianity as a belief system, and curiously, Nietzsche here offers a kind of tribute to Christianity, believing that Christian practice is an eternal possibility, a state of being not reducible to mere assent to certain facts, and for some even a necessity.

For a time after this, Wittgenstein appears to have been content in his labours and little taken up with existential issues. After a visit to his family, about which he showed no particular enthusiasm, his remarks became once more fatalistic and he became impatient to hear from Pinsent again (Pinsent eventually did write). He was also promoted to foreman at the forge, and accordingly had more conflicts with colleagues, once almost to the point of a duel. His requests to be transferred to the infantry were ignored and his suicidal ideation returned.

He was doing no philosophical work at this time (early 1915) and felt unwilling to deal with new ideas. In this state he waited for God or fate to change affairs. When he eventually began to feel more fit to work, he had Pinsent try to appease Moore (to no avail) and was put in charge of the workshop. Pinsent had written about his own dabblings in philosophy. Wittgenstein, for his part, now concerned himself with the manner in which his Picture theory operated. He asked: "Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?" He concluded that it did have such an order: the world consisted of facts, which are the relationships between objects, and the symbols of language have similar relations. Since there are atomic, irreducible propositions (according to his earlier work), there must also be atomic facts. Wittgenstein could not give examples of what these might be, but believed that the fact that analysis is possible necessitated such a situation. Furthermore, this suggests that though we might be uncertain about what the elements or facts of the world are, these facts are definite and the world has a fixed structure. In this way language also expresses definite meanings: "The demand for simple things [i.e. atomic facts] is the demand for definiteness of sense."

Russell, who had read the notes dictated to Moore, now wrote to Wittgenstein for an explanation, but Wittgenstein, while admitting that they were troublesome, said he "regarded them as definitive", that his new and more important work was likely to be even more incomprehensible, and that if he should not make it through the war Russell should have his notes printed regardless of whether they could be understood.

In May a combined German-Austrian effort drove the Russians back by 300+ miles. Wittgenstein, however, remained at the workshop, with increasing resentment. Ficker, now also in the Austrian army, wrote to him with a dire report of the conditions he was living in. Wittgenstein took the opportunity to recommend The Gospel in Brief, claiming that it "virtually kept [him] alive". He was writing from the hospital, where he was recovering from light injuries caused by an explosion at the workshop. Surprisingly, Ficker took his advice to heart.

In Autumn 1915, Wittgenstein was working his notes into a version of the Tractatus that has not survived. However, it seems that most of the work on logic that made it into the final version was present. What was missing was the remarks on ethics, aesthetics and the soul that the end of the work now contains. He wrote to Russell that he would not publish it until Russell had seen it.

During the final two years of the war, Wittgenstein could not communicate with Russell or Pinsent. A period of relative comfort had ensued, but in March 1916 he finally went to the front, bringing with him a copy of The Brothers Karamazov, another work from which he could later recall extensive quotations.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 6a

Shortly after he had led Norway, a certain Eccles wrote to him asking his opinion on a suite of bedroom furniture Eccles wished to manufacture. Though of little philosophical interest, Monk mentions the simplicity and functionality of the designs as embodying an aesthetic, even an ethic, that Wittgenstein adhered to and fundamentally at odds with the fading glories of Hapsburg ornamented style. This new sensibility was not unique to Wittgenstein, but was adopted by reformers who concerned themselves with the politics of Austria-Hungary.

At this time Wittgenstein also offered the sum of 100 000 crowns to a certain Ficker, for the purpose of helping Austrian artists in need. Wittgenstein had become aware of Ficker through the journal Die Fackel, the mouthpiece of the intellectual Karl Kraus. Having made these funds available, however, Wittgenstein reacted mainly with disdain to the letters of thanks he received through Ficker. He was mainly hostile to or ignorant of the new currents in art that were emerging at the time, and admired only three of the beneficiaries of his work: Trakl, Loos and Rilke (the latter is considered a major poet of modern German). Even so, he later thought Loos a charlatan, Rilke's later poetry bad and Trakl incomprehensible, though he professed to admire the tone of Trakl's work.

When the First World War broke out, Wittgenstein tried to leave Austria. Informed that it was impossible, he volunteered to join the army. At first there was widespread enthusiasm for the war, even among intellectuals. While not sharing the ecstatic hysteria of the populace, Wittgenstein apparently saw the war as an opportunity for self-improvement. He believed that facing death heroically somehow "consecrates" one and wrote that it would give him the chance to "be a decent human being". This idea is also present in William James'Varieties of Religious Experience, a book which Wittgenstein took very seriously.

Wittgenstein was placed in an artillery regiment which was to face the Russians in a campaign which was notable for its incompetence on both sides. Having wrongly predicted the Russian strategy, the Austrians advanced without much opposition into what is now Poland, only to realize that the Russians had occupied a major Austrian city behind them and endangered their supply lines. Consequently they were forced to retreat to well within the Austrian border. More than a third of the men (some 350 000) in the Austrian First Army were killed.

Wittgenstein's pessimism had him believing most rumours of defeat and denying any rumours of success. In a curious example of misguided ethnocentric fatalism, he writes:

... I feel the terrible sadness of our - the German race's - situation. The English - the best race in the world - cannot lose... The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me tremendously, because I am German through and through.

What makes these statements even stranger is that the Austrian army was the most ethnically mixed in Europe. On the other hand, though most of the officers were Austrian or Hungarian - and regarded as kind by Wittgenstein - the rank and file were mostly Slavonic and "incredibly crude, stupid and malicious", barely human, in fact.

Wittgenstein took the stupidities of army life badly; he felt himself to be isolated as he had been at school and missed hearing from Pinsent and Russell. Frege did send him some patriotic encouragement.

The biographer believes that Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief was what saved him. This he bought in Galicia, and eventually knew whole passages by heart. The work transformed him into something of an evangelist, and the transformation was eventually to infuse his philosophical work with a kind of mysticism. Wittgenstein also grew increasingly to believe that his physical fate should be irrelevant to him. He also linked the ideas of this work to his earlier idea that the important thing was to maintain an undisturbed "inner being". The soul and the external world (including the body) must belong to different realms.

"Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius": Chapter 5b

As the Wittgenstein's relationship with Russell deteriorated, he tried to draw Moore into working with him more. At length Moore visited him in Bergen, but with reluctance. The result was a series of "discussions" that consisted of Moore being talked at by Wittgenstein and eventually taking down notes on logic. The opening statement, and main point, of these notes concerned the distinction between saying and showing that Wittgenstein had concerned himself with:

Logical so-called propositions show the logical properties of language and therefore of the Universe, but say nothing

This was to point the way to a theory of Symbolism which could supersede the Theory of Types. The fact that there are different types of things in the world (e.g. objects and facts) could be immediately understood by their being represented (shown) by different symbols, but could not be said.

Wittgenstein thought this a great advance in his work and urged Russell to read these notes. For his part, Moore acted on Wittgenstein's behalf in by making inquiries about the possibility of using Logik as a BA thesis. Wittgenstein was livid on learning that he would have to fulfill the usual formal requirements regarding citations, a preface and the like, writing to Moore in this vein:

If I am not worth your making an exception for me even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to HELL directly; and if I am worth it and you don't then - by God - you might go there.

Moore was shocked at this unjust letter and it caused a lasting break. Moore refused to deal with Wittgenstein again until 1929, and Wittgenstein remained without a Cambridge degree.

Wittgenstein was temporarily tired of logic and content with the work he had done.He spent the remainder of his stay in Norway in building a small house, which, however, he did not complete until he later returned.