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.
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