Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Private Notebooks 1914–1916. Edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022). xiv + 217 pages. $24.95.

Three notebooks survive of the six that Ludwig Wittgenstein kept during his time as an infantryman in the Great War. He enlisted, immediately and improbably, on August 7, 1914, leaving England to serve with the Austrian army on the war’s Eastern Front, operating a searchlight on a patrol ship, laboring in an artillery workshop, directing fire from an observation tower, and, later, seeing battle in Russia and Italy. All the while, he was writing in notebooks.

The recto pages of the three surviving notebooks, containing material that became the stuff of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, were published in German with English translation as Notebooks 1914–1916 (1961), with no indication that anything was omitted. The verso pages, written in a simple code (a = z ), were long unavailable in German or in translation, likely because of executors’ unease about Wittgenstein’s occasional references to masturbation, unnamed “sins,” and his love of David Pinsent, the Cambridge student who was the first of Wittgenstein’s three significant attachments. The verso pages — the private pages — appear in this volume in German and, for the first time, in English translation.

The title Private Notebooks promises much in the way of personal revelation. Wittgenstein writes (briefly) of his brother Paul, a pianist, losing his right arm in battle; of David Pinsent’s brother, killed in action; of joy in receiving letters from Pinsent (he kisses one). He writes repeatedly about his fellow soldiers as rowdies, ruffians, boorish “swine” who tease him unmercifully. He writes at greater length about his service as “a test of fire” and about his fear of death, wondering how he’ll behave when he’s fired upon, even as he acknowledges that he’s “intoxicated” by gunfire. He sees the fact of death as redemptive: “Only death gives life meaning”; “Perhaps the proximity of death will bring me the light of life!” But he desperately wants to live. He carries with him Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, calling it a talisman. He repeats to himself words from Tolstoy: “Man is helpless in the flesh but free in the spirit!” In a letter, he was to say that Tolstoy’s book kept him alive.

All through his military service, Wittgenstein is doing or trying to do what he calls his “work” — the work of philosophy. In quiet times, his duties become the setting for that work:

15.9.14.
I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.

Thus a paring knife, like a pen or pencil, becomes a tool of thinking.

Many of the entries are terse notations:

29.11.14.
Worked pretty hard.—.

3.12.14.
Didn’t work but experienced a great deal, but I’m too tired to write about it right now.—

25.12.14.
Ate dinner in the officers’ mess. Worked a little.

And there are long dry spells, with entry after entry beginning “Did no work,” as Wittgenstein seeks “the redeeming thought” that would pull his efforts together.

Marjorie Perloff, a major critic of modern and postmodern poetry, sees a breakthrough in the merging of recto and verso in the final surviving notebook:

As I was editing the notebooks, it occurred to me that the short Notebook 3 would make much more sense if I included some of the most striking and beautiful passages from the philosophical side (the recto); indeed, as I argue throughout, verso and recto, at first quite disconnected, gradually come together so that, by the end, they often correspond. This does not mean neat pairing of any sort, but a close and uncanny chronological correspondence between the left-hand and right-hand pages.

Perloff begins juxtaposing passages with Notebook 2. Here is one instance, with a recto passage (in italics) added between verso entries:

22.5.15.
Lovely letter from Russell!

23.5.15
The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

24.5.15.
Made the acquaintance today of the old logician Dziewicki, whom Russell mentioned in his letter. A nice old man.

Perloff has chosen to interpolate a striking sentence that would find its way into the Tractatus (as 5.6), but I’m hard pressed to see a connection to the verso passages that frame it here.

Another example. The numbers in brackets refer to sections of the Tractatus:

24.7.16.
We’re being shelled. And at every shot my soul contracts. I would like so much to keep on living!

24.7.16.
The world and life are one. [5.621]

The physiological life is naturally not “life.” And neither is the psychological life. Life is the world.

Ethics does not deal with the world. Ethics must be a condition of the world, like logic.

Ethics and aesthetics are one. [See 6.421]

Here, too, it’s difficult to see anything “close and uncanny” between verso and recto. If anything, the two seem markedly distinct: a passionate plea to stay alive on one page, a series of abstract pronouncements on the other. I can imagine someone speaking these italicized passages and being met with a rejoinder: Hey! We’re being shelled!

But sometimes entries do jibe:

11.8.16.
I am living in sin, hence unhappy. I’m morose, joyless. I’m at strife with my entire company.

11.8.16
I can objectively confront every object. But not the “I.”

So there really is an art and method by which philosophy can and must come to terms with the “I” in a non-psychological sense. [Cf. 5.641]

Now that’s a provocative pairing.

And recto excerpts that prefigure the enigmatic final sections of the Tractatus seem to have baffled Wittgenstein himself:

6.7.16.
Colossal exertions this last month. Have thought a great deal about all sorts of things, but curiously enough cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.

The humanity on view in the Private Notebooks makes them worth reading, but if you haven’t read Wittgenstein, there are better places to start: The Blue and Brown Books and Philosophical Investigations. I’d liken the Notebooks to a multiple-CD set with a recording session’s every false start, breakdown, and alternate take: for completists only.

Related reading
All OCA Wittgenstein posts (Pinboard)

[It’s not clear what Wittgenstein’s dashes signify. Perloff cites without further explanation a hypothesis that they represent forms of prayer. Russell: Bertrand Russell. Dziewicki: M.H. Dziewicki, a logician.]