These notebooks were written by Wittgenstein while he was serving in the Austro-Hungarian army, fighting on the Russian front in WWI. He wrote the private parts on the left-hand pages of his notebooks, in a code, which he had used as a child with his siblings, essentially transposing As into Zs, Bs into Ys, etc… Thus it was not meant to be impenetrable, but simply to stymy nosy eyes in the tight quarters of a boat patrolling the Vistula River. As Perloff relates, “The left-hand, or “secret,” pages have never been published in English, and there is not even an authoritative text in German.”
Wittgenstein mainly recounts the mundanities of his day to day army life, which primarily consists of manning the ship’s spotlight, reading and rereading Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, peeling potatoes, complaining about the baseness of his fellow soldiers, working on the logical puzzles that would eventually form the basis of the Tractatus, masturbating, and sleeping. But, in between, he coins witty aphorisms and thinks much about God, ethics, the purpose of life, death, and spirituality. On the crudeness of his fellow soldiers, he notes, “So it turns out not to be true that a great common cause inevitably ennobles people.” During his whole tour of duty, Wittgenstein felt himself very much alone, whether in the company of officers or his fellow enlisted infantrymen, “No choice but to carry out one’s work in all humility and for God’s sake not to lose oneself!!!! For the easiest way to lose oneself is to want to give oneself to other people…. Only one thing is necessary: to maintain one’s distance from everything that happens; to collect oneself! God help me!”
Wittgenstein ponders deeply on all things spiritual, “Over and over again I say to myself the words of Tolstoy, “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the Spirit.”” He also contemplates his duty, “I am afraid, not of being killed but not of fulfilling my duty properly before that moment…. If this is the end for me, may I die a good death, worthy of my best self. May I never lose my self.” He is often questioning and reprimanding himself, “It is infinitely hard not to resist evil. It is difficult to serve the spirit on an empty stomach and without sleep.” Given the setting, he is appropriately fixated with issues of life and death, “One must live for the good and the beautiful until life ends of its own accord.” He also considers the inner life, “The grace I’ve been given to think & work now is indescribable. I must acquire indifference to the hardships of the external life.” He is moved often, fluctuating from extreme depression to resigned contentment, “I am all spirit & therefore I am free.” At other times, the depression gets the better of him, “Pull yourself together! And don’t work just to pass the time but devoutly so as to live!” He works on his logic in spurts, castigating himself for days of inactivity followed by bursts of output, “I am thinking a great deal about my life and that is also a reason why I cannot work. Or is it the other way around?” He often talks directly to God, “God give me sanity and strength!!!” Sometimes the darkness is almost too much, “Contemplating suicide…. Am morally blank…. My soul is worn out, so to speak…. The entire external life in all its infamy is bursting in upon me…. God is love.”
Wittgenstein returns again and again to his deep loneliness, “Be satisfied with yourself. For others will not give you support or only for a short time! (Then you will become a burden to them.)” But he continually strives to make himself a better person by his sheer will. “It is difficult to live the good life! But the good life is beautiful.” He falls back time and again to his faith, “Man needs only God…. Perhaps the proximity to death will bring me the light of life! May God enlighten me! I am a worm but through God I can become a man…. Only death gives life its meaning.”
In Notebook 2 and, particularly, in Notebook 3, Perloff starts to intersperse the right-hand side of Wittgenstein’s notebooks, his work on the Tractatus, as his ideas from both sides begin to merge. “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein was gradually sensing that his book would contain an ethics and worldview beyond just pure logic, “The Ancients were actually clearer, in that they acknowledged a clear-cut limit, while with the new [modern] system, it is supposed to look as if everything can be explained.” God begins to seep into his formal philosophical work, “What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like an 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. That therefore good and evil are somehow connected with the world. The meaning of life, i.e., the meaning of the world, we can call God. And to that meaning we can connect the image of God as a Father. To pray is to think about the meaning of life. I cannot bend the happenings in 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 events.” He later continues, “The world is independent of my will. Even if everything that we wish for were to happen, this would only be, so to speak, a gift of fate.” A few months later, Wittgenstein is still circling the same theme, “To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life. To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter. To believe in a God means to see that life has a meaning…. 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…. Only he who lives, not in time but in the present, is happy…. Then one can say that he lives eternally who lives in the present.”
Finally, Wittgenstein contemplates the possible unification of the ethical and happy lives, “It is clear that ethics has nothing to do with punishment or reward…. How can a man be happy anyway since he cannot ward off the misery of this world? Precisely through the life of understanding. A good conscience is the happiness that the life of understanding preserves. The life of understanding is the life that is happy despite the misery of the world. The only life that is happy is the life that can renounce the conveniences of the world. To it, the conveniences of the world are only so many gifts of fate.” Wittgenstein contemplates the nature of suicide again, but this time at some remove, “If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin.”
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