“Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Marjorie Perloff)

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.”

“Lectures and Conversations: On Aesthetics, Psychology, and Religious Belief” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (edited by Cyril Barrett)

These were notes of lectures, primarily taken by Yorick Smythies, given by Wittgenstein to a small group of students in his private rooms at Cambridge, during the summer of 1938. Wittgenstein began by trying to clarify that language should be looked at in regards to its use and not to its form. “I have often compared language to a tool chest, containing a hammer, chisel, matches, nails, screws, glue. It is not a chance that all these things have been put together—but there are important differences between the different tools—they are used in a family of ways.” Pertaining to aesthetics proper, he begins on the importance of a system of rules. “If I hadn’t learnt the rules, I wouldn’t be able to make the aesthetic judgment. In learning the rules you get a more and more refined judgement. Learning the rules actually changes your judgment.” Aesthetics is not purely personal. It is not simply a matter of taste. “To describe a set of aesthetic rules fully means really to describe the culture of a period.” Aesthetics also involves tradition and conventions. “In order to get clear about aesthetic words you have to describe ways of living.” However, there is also a subjective component. It is by no means scientific. “The sort of explanation one is looking for when one is puzzled by an aesthetic impression is not a causal explanation, not one corroborated by experience or by statistics as to how people react…. You cannot arrive at the explanation by means of psychological experiment…. The puzzles which arise in aesthetics, which are puzzles arising from the effects the arts have, are not puzzles about how these things are caused.”

The notes on Freud were taken by Rush Rhees after conversations with Wittgenstein between 1942 and 1946. Wittgenstein thought Freud always had “something to say,” even when he was completely wrong. Freud was one of the few people in any field whom Wittgenstein deigned to read, in fact. On Freud’s theory of anxiety, Wittgenstein states that it has a similar usefulness to it as did ancient myths. “Take Freud’s view that anxiety is always a repetition in some way of the anxiety we felt at birth. He does not establish this by reference to evidence—for he could not do so. But it is an idea which has a marked attraction. It has the attraction which mythological explanations have, explanations which say that this is all a repetition of something that has happened before.” For Wittgenstein, the genius of Freud was in the prism with which his theories allowed you to reimagine the world. The process was a new presentation of established facts. “It makes certain ways of behaving and thinking natural for them [his patients]. They have given up one way of thinking and adopted another.” However, Wittgenstein felt that Freud pushed his theories too much to the extreme. “It seems muddled to say that all dreams are hallucinated wish fulfillments…. It is probable that there are many different sorts of dreams, and that there is no single line of explanation for all of them…. [Freud] wanted to find some one explanation which would show what dreaming is. He wanted to find the essence of dreaming. And he would have rejected any suggestion that he might be partly right but not altogether so.”

Wittgenstein begins his lectures on religion by stating the different ways in which the term belief may be used. “There are instances where you have a faith—where you say “I believe”—and on the other hand this belief does not rest on the fact on which our ordinary everyday beliefs normally do rest. How should we compare beliefs with each other? What would it mean to compare them?” He goes on to question those who believe in the Last Judgment. “Am I to say they are unreasonable? I wouldn’t call them unreasonable. I would say, they are certainly not reasonable, that’s obvious. ‘Unreasonable’ implies, with everyone, rebuke. I want to say: they don’t treat this as a matter of reasonability. Anyone who reads the Epistles will find it said: not only that it is not reasonable, but that it is folly. Not only is it not reasonable, but it doesn’t pretend to be.” Finally on God, “If the question arises as to the existence of a god or God, it plays an entirely different role to that of the existence of any person or object I ever heard of…. One talks of believing and at the same time one doesn’t use ‘believe’ as one does ordinarily.”

“Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein (translated by Frank P. Ramsey)

This short book of logic was the only work of Wittgenstein’s published in his lifetime. He warns in the preface, “this book will perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it.” Despite this dire warning, the book, nonetheless, does prove useful, even to those not so immersed in formal logic and philosophical conjecture. He states that the aim of his book is to “draw a limit to thinking, or rather- not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think on both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought). The limit can, therefore, only be drawn in language, and what lies on the other side will simply be nonsense.” A main theme of Wittgenstein’s is to parse out the purpose and limits of language. “Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said can be said clearly.” Furthermore, he delineates, “colloquial language is a part of the human organism and is not less complicated than it. From it it is humanly impossible to gather immediately the logic of language.” On formal logic, specifically, he states, “a logical entity cannot merely be possible. Logic treats of every possibility, and all possibilities are its facts.” Later he clarifies, “logic is not a theory but a reflexion of the world.” On theoretical reasoning, he comments, “an a priori true thought would be one whose possibility guaranteed its truth. Only if we could know a priori that a thought is true if its truth was to be recognized from the thought itself (without an object of comparison).”

Wittgenstein has quite a lot to say about the true nature of philosophy. “Most propositions and questions, that have been written about philosophical matters, are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness…. Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word “philosophy” must mean something which stands above or below, but not beside the natural sciences)…. Philosophy aims at the logical clarification of thoughts. Philosophy is not a body of doctrine but an activity. A philosophical work consists essentially of elucidations. Philosophy does not result in ‘philosophical propositions’, but rather in the clarification of propositions. Without philosophy, thoughts are, as it were, cloudy and indistinct: its task is to make them clear and to give them sharp boundaries.” As was Wittgenstein’s nature, he later complicates his own thoughts, “philosophy is the discipline that deals with all those propositions that are assumed to be true without proof by the various sciences…. The inexpressible is contained- unexpressed- in the expressed…. There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.” Wittgenstein’s riddles often leave quite a handful to ponder. He ends his book with another warning, “my propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.) He must surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” Finally, Wittgenstein cautions, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

“Philosophical Investigations” by Ludwig von Wittgenstein

This is a puzzling book on the face of it. Ostensibly, it is a collection of aphorisms, published posthumously. However, the aphorisms have a coherence to them. Wittgenstein is still concerned with language, the meanings of words, and how individuals use language to communicate between one another. The book also gets at what Wittgenstein really believes philosophy is all about in the first place. One doesn’t always know when Wittgenstein is making a profound statement and when he is not being entirely serious with the reader. Each aphorism requires time and meditation and one still cannot help but feel that one has not come away with all that there is to offer. Wittgenstein asks himself rhetorically, “What is your aim in philosophy? - To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” But he makes this no easy task. The reader is asked to go on a journey with him that is not straight and, in fact, may contain numerous dead ends or, at least, side trips. In fact, Wittgenstein admits early on, “I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

The book’s aphorisms are about what Wittgenstein does not say as much as it is about what he does. He questions the nature of our shared reality- our space, our language, our feelings, our thoughts, our customs, our culture. Much of Wittgenstein’s time is spent on language and the meaning of words. “Our language can be regarded as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, of houses with extensions from various periods, and all this surrounded by a multitude of new suburbs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses.” And later, “the speaking of language is part of an activity, or of a form of life.” He spends much time on language as a tool for communication as well as language as a tool for thought. Both uses of language play into the meanings that we ascribe to words and to the ideas that they generate. “We may indeed imagine naming to be some remarkable mental act, as it were the baptism of an object.” He goes on about the power of naming, ““what the names in language signify must be indestructible, for it must be possible to describe the state of affairs in which everything destructible is destroyed. And this description will contain words; and what corresponds to these cannot in that case be destroyed, for otherwise the words would have no meaning.” I must not saw off the branch in which I am sitting.” Wittgenstein is leading us, without telling us. This method leads the mind to wander, but often into fertile territory of one’s own.

Wittgenstein is often concerned with the rules: rules of language, rules of philosophy, and, even, the rules of life. “Thought, language, now appear to us as the unique correlate, picture, of the world. These concepts: proposition, language, thought, world, stand in line one behind the other, each equivalent to each.” He is always dancing around the nature of philosophy. “Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. - Since everything lies open to view, there is nothing to explain. For whatever may be hidden is no interest to us. The name “philosophy” might also be given to what is possible before all new discoveries and inventions.” It is hard to tell whether Wittgenstein is describing the challenges of philosophy or its underlying simplicity when done correctly. “When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.” He seems to view the doing of philosophy, in many ways, as a uniquely private affair. At best, one can seek some guidance, but the heavy lifting must be one’s own. True philosophical thinking is methodical and painstakingly precise. “Philosophy only states what everyone concedes to it.” Wittgenstein’s aphorisms often take the form of riddles. “Does everything that we do not find conspicuous make an impression of inconspicuousness? Does what is ordinary always make the impression of ordinariness?” One cannot simply read each aphorism and breeze along. His statements must be wrestled with and chewed over. This is a book from which two readers are bound to come away with two very different impressions, because the reader is forced to do so much of the work himself.