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After all, for years before becoming Russell’s pupil, he had suffered deeply from the conflict of duty and impulse engendered by the fact that philosophy was his strongest impulse. He indeed believed that one should be – as his father had been, and as his brother Hans had been, and as all geniuses are – a creature of impulse.
Russell’s encouragement had been necessary precisely because it enabled him to overcome these doubts, and to follow his strongest impulse happily.
But this happiness was caused not simply by his being allowed to follow his impulses, but also by the conviction that – as he had an unusual talent for philosophy – he had the right to do so.
Wittgenstein asked him how he and Whitehead were going to end Principia. Russell replied that they would have no conclusion; the book would just end ‘with whatever formula happened to come last’: He seemed surprised at first, and then saw that was right.38 It seems to me the beauty of the book would be spoilt if it contained a single word that could possibly be spared.
Philosophy is a reluctant mistress – one can only reach her heart with the cold steel in the hand of passion. ‘Cold steel in the hand of passion’ – the phrase conjures up perfectly Wittgenstein’s own combination of a rigorously logical mind and an impulsive and obsessional nature. He was the very personification of Russell’s philosophical ideal.
Russell told Ottoline, clutching at straws, ‘because of disagreement, not because of its being badly done’.
For the rest of his life he continued to regard the feeling of being ‘absolutely safe’ as paradigmatic of religious experience.
‘since good taste is genuine taste and therefore is fostered by whatever makes people think truthfully’.
When Russell told him he ought not simply to state what he thought, but should also provide arguments for it, he replied that arguments would spoil its beauty. He would feel as if he were dirtying a flower with muddy hands: I told him I hadn’t the heart to say anything against that, and that he had better acquire a slave to state the arguments.
He gave me a lecture on how furniture should be made – he dislikes all ornamentation that is not part of the construction,
Wittgenstein yesterday that he thinks too much about himself, and if he begins again I shall refuse to listen unless I think he is quite desperate.
Philosophy was defined as all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences.
In his anxiety, this feeling that he might die soon became an unchangeable conviction that he was bound to do so. Everything he said or did became based on this assumption. He was not afraid to die, he told Pinsent – ‘but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted’:
He was prevented from giving up only by his resolute determination to ‘drag W’s thoughts out of him with pincers, however he may scream with the pain’.
The thought – here in an embryonic form – is that what the Theory of Types
says cannot be said, and must be shown by the symbolism (by our seeing that ‘A’ is the same letter as ‘A’, the same type of letter as ‘B’, and a different type from ‘x’, ‘y’ and ‘z’).
In philosophy there are no deductions: it is purely descriptive.3 Philosophy gives no pictures of reality. Philosophy can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigation. Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis. Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology. Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophizing.
Nevertheless, he did make an effort to clarify the point. It hinged on his conviction that, given the correct method of displaying the truth possibilities of a proposition, a logical proposition can be shown to be either true or false without knowing the truth or falsity of its constituent parts. Thus: ‘It is either raining or not raining’ will be true whether ‘It is raining’ is true or false. Similarly, we need know nothing about the weather to know that the statement: ‘It is both raining and not raining’ is certainly false. Such statements are logical propositions: the first is a tautology
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The week before he left, he wrote: ‘My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being
depressed’:
Logical so-called propositions show the logical properties of language and therefore of the Universe, but say nothing.21 The notes outline how this distinction allows us to achieve what he had earlier told Russell must be achieved: a Theory of Symbolism which shows the Theory of Types to be superfluous. That there are different types of things (objects, facts, relations etc.) cannot be said, but is shown by there being different types of symbols, the difference being one which can immediately be seen.
To the intellectuals of Jung Wien, the abhorrence of unnecessary ornamentation was at the centre of a more general revolt against what they saw as the empty posturing that characterized the decaying culture of the Habsburg Empire.
the sense of perpetual seething, and the hope that ‘things will come to an eruption once and for all’. Hence the scenes of joy and celebration that greeted the declaration of war in each of the belligerent nations. The whole world, it seems, shared Wittgenstein’s madness of 1914. In his autobiography, Russell describes how, walking through the cheering crowds in Trafalgar Square, he was amazed to discover that ‘average men and women were delighted at the prospect of war’.
This consisted of what is now known as the ‘Picture Theory of language’ – the idea that propositions are a picture of the reality they describe.
It occurred to him that the model could represent the accident because of the correspondence between the parts of the model (the miniature houses, cars, people) and the real things (houses, cars, people). It further occurred to him that, on this analogy, one might say a proposition serves as a model, or picture, of a state of affairs, by virtue of a similar correspondence between its parts and the world.
That is to say, there is – and must be – a logical structure in common between a proposition (‘The grass is green’) and a state of affairs (the grass being green), and it is this commonality of structure which enables language to represent reality:
Instead of: this proposition has such and such a sense: this proposition represents such and such a situation.
It can only agree or disagree with reality by being a picture of a situation.
Wittgenstein had bought in Kraków the eighth volume of Nietzsche’s collected works, the one that includes The Anti-Christ,
but what if someone spurned this happiness? Might it not be better to perish unhappily in the hopeless struggle against the external world? But such a life is senseless. But why not lead a senseless life? Is it unworthy?
He is content to discuss the issue in Nietzsche’s psychological terms; he does not see it as a question of whether Christianity is true, but of whether it offers some help in dealing with an otherwise unbearable and meaningless existence. In William James’s terms, the question is whether it helps to heal the ‘sick soul’.
Not a belief but a doing, above all a not-doing of many things, a different being…
To reduce being a Christian, Christianness, to a holding of something to be true, to a mere phenomenality of consciousness, means to negate Christianness.
To bear life in the workshop, it seems, required no divine assistance.
The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?
心不相應行法
the world, as he had insisted to Russell, consists of facts, not of things – that is, it consists of things (objects) standing in certain relations to one another. These facts – the relations that exist between objects – are mirrored, pictured, by the relations between the symbols of a proposition.
物不自生
then it looks as though there must be atomic facts corresponding to those atomic propositions. And just as atomic propositions are those that are incapable of being analysed any further, atomic facts are relations between simple rather than complex objects.
獨立的實法
Wittgenstein could produce no examples of either an atomic proposition or an atomic fact, nor could he say what a ‘simple object’ was, but he felt that the very possibility of analysis demanded that there be such things, providing the structure of both language and the world, which allowed the one to mirror the other.
有實法，語言才會有客觀內容可以對照
We can be indefinite and uncertain, but surely the world cannot be: ‘The world has a fixed structure.’ And this allows the possibility of language having a definite meaning: ‘The demand for simple things is the demand for definiteness of sense.’
Postmodernism. Appealing to an objective world and false consciousness.
He continued with his theme of the nature of functions and propositions and the need to postulate the existence of simple objects.
Believed because of their consequence, not of their reductive content.
On 11 June his reflections on the foundations of logic are interrupted with the question: ‘What do I know about God and the purpose of life?’ He answers with a list:16 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 and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we
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The connection between Wittgenstein’s thought on logic and his reflections on the meaning of life was to be found in the distinction he had made earlier between saying and showing. Logical form, he had said, cannot be expressed within language, for it is the form of language itself; it makes itself manifest in language – it has to be shown.
The solution to the problem of life is to be seen in the disappearance of the problem.
The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis.27 This is the connection between art and ethics.
As shown, not said.
Mens aeterna est quatenus res sub specie aeternitatis [‘The mind is eternal in so far as it conceives things from the standpoint of eternity’].
When this state of mind is made the basis of a philosophy it becomes solipsism, the view that the world and my world are one and the same thing.
‘what the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest’.
This is the way I have travelled: 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.33 In this way idealism leads to realism if it is strictly thought out.
This is precisely what ‘sin’ is, the unreasoning life, a false view of life.
