View on the Italian Front, where Wittgenstein has fought during the First World War
Once I wrote in a blog (dated March 10, 2014) that I
was surprised that Wittgenstein said nothing about his war experiences in his Notebooks 1914-1916, although he wrote
them during his service as a soldier in the First World War. It was not true: he
did write about it. As so many soldiers Wittgenstein kept a diary, which is now
known as the Secret Notebooks. What
is strange, however, is that in volume one of the collected works of
Wittgenstein published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Germany, so in the volume that
contains the Notebooks 1914-1916,
there is not any mention at all of the existence of these Secret Notebooks. This is also strange since these personal notes
have been written in the same notebooks that Wittgenstein used for his
philosophical notes, namely on the pages opposite to these philosophical notes.
Moreover, the personal notes clearly help understanding the development and
explanation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus
logico-philosophicus. Therefore it is a “must-read” not only for those
interested in Wittgenstein’s war experiences but also for those interested in
his Tractatus.
I “discovered” these secret notebooks on a website
with new publications in philosophy. They have been published (in German) by
Wilhelm Baum in a book on Wittgenstein in the First World War (see the reference
at the end of this blog). Baum presents there not only the Secret Notebooks but he
gives also much information about the history of the notebooks, about Wittgenstein’s
participation in World War One, his relations with other people in this period
of his life, the philosophical meaning of the notebooks, and so on. It’s a pity
that Baum could publish only a part of Wittgenstein’s notes, for most of them
have been lost.
For an interpretation of the Secret Notebooks I refer to the work by Baum. I want to make only
two comments. The first is that religion and a religious view on the world were
for Wittgenstein more important than many people know. Wittgenstein was a
religious person, as it turns out. My second comment is that this allows a
religious interpretation of a famous statement by Wittgenstein: “We feel that
even if all possible
scientific questions have been answered, our problems of life have still not
been touched at all.” (Tractatus
6.52). This is especially so, if one relates this statement to a remark by
Wittgenstein in a letter to Ludwig von Ficker: “The meaning of this book [the Tractatus] is an ethical one. ... [It]
exists of two parts: the one that you see here and everything that I haven’t
written. And just this second part is the most important part. For the ethical
is so to speak bounded from the inner side by the book...” (Baum, 120). It is
possible to give this passage a religious interpretation, as Baum does, in the
sense that in fact most important in the world are not the facts but our view
on the facts, and for Wittgenstein this view was religious. This reading by
Baum is possible and at first sight his argumentation is convincing, but a more
general ethical interpretation of this passage remains possible.
Since I am very interested in the First World War I
was curious to know Wittgenstein’s war experiences. As for that the value of
the notebooks is limited. They tell us a bit about what Wittgenstein did during
the war, his relations to other soldiers, how much he worked on the Tractatus, when he was under fire, and
so on, but the notes are short – often too short– and it is difficult to relive
Wittgenstein’s war on the basis of these notes. Many other war diaries and
novels written by soldiers give so much more insight in the personal
experiences and feelings of the authors (cf.
the diaries by Maurice Genevoix and Charles Delvert, to mention only two of
them). The notebooks have hardly any value for military history, but the more
important they are for understanding Wittgenstein as a person and for
understanding the Tractatus. Therefore
I wonder why it took so long before they have been published and why they
haven’t been published in Wittgenstein’s Collected
Works. They are essential for understanding a great work in philosophy and
a great philosopher.
I want to end with a quotation from the Secret Notebooks:
“When one feels that one gets bogged down in a
problem, one must not think about it any longer, for otherwise one stays stuck
to it” (November 26, 1914). It’s a lesson a lot of us should take to heart.
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