,14=/,15=#,23=%,24==> 4Cambridge 1911{-12 I~N ~T~H~E autumn of 1911 Wittgenstein took a step which was to prove decisive. Instead of returning to Manchester according to plan, he went to Cambridge to attend Russell's lectures. No previous arrangements had been made with Russell, nor with the university or any college, and Wittgenstein was not in fact matriculated until February 1912. His coming there had all the marks of an impulsive decision and of an experiment. Various accounts have been given of the events that led up to it. Von Wright, repeating what he was told by Wittgenstein, says that an interest in the construction of flying machines led to one in engine construction, then to one in the design of a propeller, and hence to a preoccupation with the mathematical treatment of this problem and finally to a concern with the foundations of mathematics. Eccles's account, we have seen, supports this; so does Russell's in his Autobiography1 and in various memoirs which appeared after Wittgen- stein's death: Wittgenstein had intended to become an engineer, and for that purpose had gone to Manchester. Through reading mathematics he became interested in the principles of mathematics, and asked at Manchester who there was who worked at this subject. Somebody mentioned my name, and he took up his residence at Trinity. Russell could, of course, easily have been mentioned by someone at Manchester_by Littlewood, for example, though Littlewood himself does not recollect such a conversation. But Wittgenstein's own account of the matter, given to von Wright,2 was that, resolved to study the philosophy of mathematics, he went first to Jena to discuss his plans with Frege and that it was Frege who advised him to go to Cambridge to study with Russell. Wittgenstein must have said this to von Wright in the 1940s: at about the same time his sister was writing her account of him in Austria. Speaking of the Charlottenburg period she says: At this period or a little later he was suddenly gripped by philosophy_that is to say by reflection on philosophical problems_so violently and so 1.Volume 2, pp.98ff. This part of the autobiography was published in 1968 but evidently substantially written in 1933. 2.Biographical Sketch, p. 5, in Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir by Norman Malcolm. As will appear, there are grounds for thinking that Wittgenstein, when he went to Jena and to Cambridge, had already decided to give up his studies in engineering, as von Wright states. 74 Wittgenstein: A Life much against his will that he suffered severely from the twofold and conflicting inner vocation and seemed to himself to be torn in two. One of the many transformations which he was to go through in his life had come over him and shook him to the depths of his being. He was engaged in writing a philosophical work and finally made up his mind to show the plan of this work to a Professor Frege in Jena, who had discussed similar questions. Ludwig in these days was constantly in a state of indescribable, almost pathological excitement, and I was very much afraid that Frege_whom I knew to be an old man_would not be able to muster the patience and understanding needed to go into the matter in a way commensurate to its seriousness. Consequently I was very worried and anxious during Ludwig's journey to Frege. It went off however much better than I had expected. Frege encouraged Ludwig in his philosophical quest and advised him to go to Cambridge as a pupil of Professor Russell's, which Ludwig indeed did. This is the account of one who was a party to Wittgenstein's deliberations at the time and is thus independent of his own later account. It would seem probable that the visit to Jena was made from Vienna and in the summer of 1911, though presumably the philosophical writing had begun some time earlier. Both this account and Wittgen- stein's own conflict with Russell's impression (recorded in 1951) that Wittgenstein "at this time'_i.e., presumably, when he came to Cambridge _did not know Frege personally. Such contemporary records as exist_it is the common experience of biographers_do not agree completely with any of these recollections: they are perhaps different fragments of the mosaic. When Wittgenstein first called on Russell in October 1911, he told him_and Russell recorded it in a letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell on the same day, 18 October 1911_that he "had learnt engineering at Charlottenburg, but during his course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics, and has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me'. A fairly early date for the interest in the philosophy of mathematics is also implied by another shred of evidence: P.E.B. Jourdain kept a correspondence book3 in which he recorded a conversation that he had with Russell on 20 April 1909: Russell said that the views I gave in a reply to Wittgenstein (who had "solved' Russell's contradiction) agree with his own. These views (which revolve round abstaining from assuming that there are any such things as classes at all) do not fall for examination here, but it is clear that already in his first year in Manchester Wittgenstein had 3.Now in the Institut Mittag-Leffler, Djursholm, Sweden. I am very grateful to the Institute for providing me with a copy of the entry and to Dr I. Grattan-Guinness for telling me of its existence. 75 4Cambridge 1911{-12 read enough to propose a contribution of his own, and it is probable that he had read some Russell before he met Frege. His later enthusiasm for both books leads one to suppose that he had read both Frege's Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and Russell's Principles of Mathematics. The latter and the second volume of the former were both published in 1903, and each author has an appendix mentioning the other. There is a certain tradition among Wittgenstein's pupils that he was in fact led to Frege by the appendix in Russell's book, but one pupil's account of Wittgenstein's memories suggests a source from which he might have learnt of Frege independently. The professor of philosophy in Manchester_it was thought surprising there should be any students of it in that businesslike town_was Samuel Alexander, an eccentric charac- ter held in much affection. After combining Darwin and Hegel in a book on ethics he had lapsed into a long silence and seemed spent as a writer. But in the years from 1908 to 1912 he poured forth a stream of articles which were thought, so his obituarist says, to reveal a "surrender to Moore'.4 He was, in those years, a propagandist against idealism and for the view that the object we perceive or image or ideate is entirely distinct from us and that consciousness is only another thing along with it. He certainly knew the work of Frege and Russell and their definition of number. It is entirely plausible that it should have been he (as R.L. Goodstein relates) that told the young Wittgenstein of Frege, though we have no other evidence than Goodstein's of Wittgenstein's story that Alexander called Frege "the greatest living philosopher'.5 This advice of Alexander's may have occurred at any point between Wittgenstein's arrival in Manchester and his visit to Frege_though it presumably left time for him to become familiar with and formulate some views of his own on Frege's work (see p. 83 below). Of Wittgenstein's attitude to Alexander we know little. Drury6 recollects Wittgenstein's admiration for the title of Alexander's main work Space, Time and Deity (1929)_ "That is where the great problems of philosophy lie'_but it is unlikely that its content, with its assimilation of philosophy to natural science, pleased him, if he knew it at all. Some of Alexander's interests in experimental psychology are echoed, perhaps by chance, in Wittgen- stein's own avocations. Wittgenstein's correspondence with Frege no longer exists, and the notes made by Scholz (before this part of Frege's papers was destroyed in the war)7 begin with a request for a meeting in October 1913, which was 4.J. Laird in Proceedings of the British Academy 24 (1938) 386. 5.Goodstein's account is given in Ambrose and Lazerowitz: Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophy and Language (1972), pp. 271{-2. One or two points in the story as Goodstein heard it are hard to reconcile with the remainder of the evidence but, fallible though memory is and colourful though anecdotes tend to be, it can hardly be doubted that there was some consultation with Alexander. 6.Personal communication. 7.See G. Frege: Briefwechsel (1976), pp.264{-8. 76 Wittgenstein: A Life quite certainly not their first meeting, since Wittgenstein writes to Russell about a visit in the winter of 1912. Besides which we have Hermine Wittgenstein's circumstantial account, which is quite incom- patible with a first visit to Frege later than the summer of 1912: whatever else she may have misremembered, she could not have been so anxious about Wittgenstein's visit to Frege after hearing Russell say (as she did in that summer), "We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.' The rough pattern, then, is a growing interest in the philosophy of mathematics, caused by coming across Russell's or Frege's book in Charlottenburg (1906{-8), encouragement from Alexander in Manchester (1908{-11), an attempt to solve the main problem then outstanding, leading to a correspondence in 1909 with Jourdain_perhaps occasioned by Jourdain's own articles on this subject in the Philosophical Magazine for 1905,8 followed by a period during which, as an avocation, he planned a philosophical work: finally the visit to Frege, the advice to study under Russell_very reasonable, since Frege himself, though confident that a solution could be found, did not himself work on one or even mention in his lectures what the possibilities were.9 "He acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics' _this remark, if true, and it is a report of Wittgenstein's own account of the matter, seems to defy expansion. We can assume that he had no mentor_and it is indeed difficult to trace a probable one at Charlotten- burg or Manchester. We can point to the books he knew well and the passages he later quoted. But what it was that first caught his eye seems to be a matter of fruitless conjecture. Yet there is a certain puzzle to be resolved_and one that ran through Wittgenstein's philosophical life, namely the puzzle of the connexion between his passion for the philosophy of mathematics and his other interests, or indeed passions. He was never a mathematician. For him as an engineer, mathematics was a tool. His mathematical education and sophistication barely qualified him to discuss the foundations of mathematics in the way he did. So it was not by difficulties or obscurities in his everyday work that he was led to these problems. Yet perhaps half of all that he wrote was concerned with mathematics. And on two occasions, this one of his coming to Cambridge, and the later one of his resuming passionate philosophical discussion after long silence in 1928, it was a problem in the foundations of mathematics that excited him (here Frege and Russell's difficulties with the paradoxes, there Brouwer's exposition of intuitionism). These problems were not only unconnected with his technical concerns as an 8.Vol. 6, pp. 42ff and 61ff. If it is necessary to explain how Wittgenstein came across this, Dame M.L. Cartwright has pointed out to me an article in the same number by Horace Lamb, one of Wittgenstein's professors, that he might well have consulted. 9.Not as far as R. Carnap, who heard his lectures at this time, could remember. See The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (ed. Schilpp), pp. 4{-5. 77 4Cambridge 1911{-12 engineer; at first sight they also seem to be quite different from his other preoccupations. He was a musician. He read passionately works of literature that "said something to him'_something, that is, about human life. He brooded over his own defects and difficulties. He was a fierce critic of failings, especially those of honesty, in others. He came to write a book whose main point (he said himself) was an ethical one. What had the foundations of mathematics in common with propensities like these? The question is the expression of a confused feeling that not quite everything fits. An answer can be attempted on various levels. The first is this: why should Wittgenstein be an engineer rather than a philosopher of mathematics? We may of course try to say what particularly interested him about it, but there will come a point at which no explanation can be given of why he was interested in this or that. He himself did not try to justify his own interest. Russell wrote to Lady Ottoline in March 1912: What he disliked about my last chapter [of Problems of Philosophy] was saying philosophy has value; he says people who like philosophy will pursue it, and others won't, and there is an end of it. His strongest impulse is philosophy. On another level, Wittgenstein seems to have thought that what was wrong was saying that philosophy had value. It was a craft, a discipline_he said in his notebooks for 9 November 1914 that he had a strong scholastic feeling about it_and its value consisted in its being well done. So one should do it well and not preach about it: in his slightly later terminology, showing not saying was important. Like all crafts, its exercise at its highest produces beauty, a beauty which it requires an intellectual effort to grasp: He is the ideal pupil [said Russell in the same letter]_he gives passionate admiration with vehement and intelligent dissent. He spoke with intense feeling about the beauty of the big book [probably Principles of Mathematics rather than Principia Mathematica], saying he found it like music. That is how I feel about it, but few others seem to. It is true that Wittgenstein came to think, at the time of completing the Tractatus, that as well as possessing intrinsic beauty his logic could throw light on the possibility of metaphysics, the nature of ethics, and, in however oblique a manner, the meaning of life; but it is not clear that these implications were obvious to him from the start. For various reasons, to be discussed later, Russell was shocked to find Wittgenstein a mystic after the war; but one reason appears in the letter already quoted twice. Wittgenstein had been horrified to learn that a man he liked was a monk. 78 Wittgenstein: A Life He abominates ethics and morals generally; he is deliberately a creature of impulse and thinks one should be. (There follows the passage first quoted, with its reference to Wittgen- stein's strongest impulse.) "I wouldn't answer for his technical morals,' Russell concludes. However this form of abominating ethics is perhaps not so far from the Tractatus: it is a dislike of preaching, and hence of preachers. More significant of a change of mind is Wittgenstein's own remark in his notebooks (2 August 1916): Yes, my work has broadened out from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world. The notebook in which this is written is the first (of those that have survived) to show a clear realization that the logical inquiries he had been engaged in have implications for all the areas I have just mentioned. All the same, it seems that there was from the start a connexion between the interest he acquired in the philosophy of mathematics and the first gropings of his thought about the philosophy of life. Von Wright recalls Wittgenstein's saying that it was Frege's conceptual realism which made him abandon his earlier idealistic views derived from his reading of Schopenhauer.10 The theme is a complicated one, because Wittgenstein not only began with a sympathy for idealism and indeed solipsism, but retained that sympathy throughout the period of writing the Tractatus and (it can be argued)11 well beyond it: we shall see that the insights which that sympathy gave him were incorporated in the Tractatus. In his notebook for 15 October 1916, among many passages deeply influenced by Schopenhauer, he described his own development thus: The way I have travelled is this: idealism singles men out from the world as unique, solipsism singles me alone out, and finally I see that I too belong to the rest of the world; so that on the one side nothing is left over, and on the other side, as something unique, the world. In this way idealism, strictly thought out, leads to realism. (The passage is echoed in Tractatus 5.64.) Our concern here is with the starting-point of this progress: Wittgenstein gave Schopenhauer's ideal- ism a solipsistic twist which its author (feebly enough, as Hacker argues) always disclaimed: 10.Biographical Sketch, p. 5, in Wittgenstein: A Memoir by Norman Malcolm. 11.This point is elaborated by P.M.S. Hacker in Insight and Illusion. 79 4Cambridge 1911{-12 The whole of nature outside the knowing subject, and so all remaining individuals, exist only in his representation. He is conscious of them always only as his representation, and so merely indirectly, and as something dependent on his own inner being and existence.12 It was not in fact against so radical an idealism (let alone against solipsism if that is implicit in it) that Frege was arguing. He was attacking it, in the first place, because of its inadequacy to account for the truths of mathematics, the common picture of the world as consisting on the one side of physical objects and on the other of our ideas. There was also a third realm which housed concepts, propositions (thoughts, as Frege called them), numbers, and countless other categories of object. These were not the products but the objects of our thinking and what he hoped to do was to recognize the eternal relations subsisting between them. One example of his way of looking at them is given in a famous passage in that introduction to the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik that Wittgenstein knew nearly by heart: The point can be put yet more generally: I recognize a realm of what is objective though not actual, whereas the psychological logicians im- mediately assume that anything not actual is subjective. Yet it is by no means apparent why something that has existence independent of the judging subject must be actual, which, after all, presumably means that it must be capable of directly or indirectly affecting the senses. No such conceptual connexion can be detected. Indeed examples can be produced that show the contrary. Thus the number one will scarcely be thought to be actual, save by followers of J.S. Mill, and on the other hand we cannot attribute a private one to each individual, since then there would have to be a preliminary investigation of how far these ones agreed in their properties and, if someone said, "Once one is one', and someone else, "Once one is two', we should be reduced to registering the difference and saying, "Your one has the former property, mine the latter.'13 The recognition of objects from this third realm was essential, according to Frege, for a correct view of many philosophical problems; thus it was essential if we were to be able to say, as common sense would demand, that a thought (in the sense of what can be judged, thought, or entertained not in that of the judging, thinking or entertaining of it), if true, is so quite independently of whether anyone ever judges it to be true. But the recognition of those objects was especially necessary if we were to understand the nature of the universality and validity of the so-called laws of thought_the laws of logic or of truth itself: 12.Quoted by Hacker: op.cit., p. 71 from Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. 13.Grundgesetze der Arithmetik vol. ~I (1893), p. xviii. 80 Wittgenstein: A Life By logical laws I do not mean psychological laws of taking something to be true but laws of truth itself. If it is true that I am writing this in my study on 13 July 1893, while the wind howls outside, then it is true even should all men later hold it to be false. And if being true is in this way independent of being recognized to be true, then too the laws of truth are not psychological laws but boundary stones set in an eternal soil: our thinking can indeed submerge, but it cannot displace them.14 What was true of logic was true also, in Frege's view, of arithmetic, and, in Russell's, of all of pure mathematics: they gave an account of eternal relations holding between objects which did not affect the senses. The existence of these objects and the holding of these relations could not be thought of as depending on the representations of the knowing subject. Not, of course, that Schopenhauer, or Kant before him, had thought of exactly this dependence. They had held that logic was a priori inasmuch as it contained the form of thought and its laws were to be discovered simply by reflection on the exercise of the understanding. It was not at all apparent to sceptical critics why these laws of thought were valid or what force they had as laws. Boltzmann, in a scornful attack on Schopenhauer, urges changes in the laws of thought whenever (as he thought to be the case with the infinite divisibility of matter) they lead to absurd consequences: These laws of thought can be called a priori because many thousands of years of experience by the species have made them innate in the individual. But it seems to be nothing but a logical howler of Kant's when he proceeds to infer that they are infallible in all cases.15 Against such views Frege and Russell seemed to oppose a picture of a world_a crystalline world, Wittgenstein was later to say16_of eternal objects eternally possessing those properties and relations that the truths of logic and mathematics ascribed to them. It was not the form of thought that was embodied in them but the form of reality itself. It was the discovery amid the uncertainties and the relative character of human thinking of something whose existence and nature was absolute, and it seemed to Wittgenstein, though we do not know precisely how early, to have implications going beyond logic and mathematics and extending to the problems of ethics and of the meaning of the world. His first concern then, true to what had attracted him to these authors, was with the fundamental logical concepts_the logical cons- 14.ibid., p. xvi. 15.Theoretical Physics and Philosophical Problems, p.195 (from an attack on Schopenhauer given as an address to the Philosophical Society of Vienna in 1905). 16.e.g. Philosophical Investigations I {S97. 81 4Cambridge 1911{-12 tants, which Russell at this time thought of as eternal objects like Frege's numbers: The discussion of indefinables_which forms the chief part of philosophical logic_is the endeavour to see clearly, and to make others see clearly, the entities concerned, in order that the mind may have that kind of acquaintance with them which it has with redness or the taste of a pineapple. Where, as in the present case, the indefinables are obtained primarily as the necessary residue in a process of analysis, it is often easier to know that there must be such entities than actually to perceive them; there is a process analogous to that which resulted in the discovery of Neptune, with the difference that the final stage_the search with a mental telescope for the entity which has been inferred_is often the most difficult part of the undertaking. In the case of classes, I must confess, I have failed to perceive any concept fulfilling the conditions requisite for the notion of class. And the contradiction discussed in Chapter X. proves that something is amiss, but what this is I have hitherto failed to discover.17 It is probable that already in 1909, when he proposed a solution of Russell's paradox, Wittgenstein too faced the question whether the notion of class was one of the logical constants; it is certain that he very soon began to question not only which logical constants had to be retained but also what ontological status should be assigned to them. The first written philosophical remark of his that has been preserved is in a letter to Russell of 22 June 1912: Logic is still in the melting pot, but one thing gets more and more obvious to me: The propositions of logic contain only apparent variables and whatever may turn out to be the proper explanation of apparent variables, its consequence must be that there are no logical constants. Logic must turn out to be a totally different kind than any other science. This was vehement dissent indeed_and from the very features of the doctrines of Russell and Frege that had first, so it seems, attracted him. But it was entirely in their spirit_or at any rate in Frege's_to see logic as totally different from all other sciences. The general path that Wittgenstein followed in his use of logic to reveal, or to point to, the transcendental features of the world, while denying it the status of a substantive science of one category of objects, will be traced in another chapter. Not only does it not lend itself to an exact chronological account interspersed with other biographical matters, but we lack the continuous documentation necessary to show the precise order in which various ideas occurred to him. 17.From the Preface to the first edition (1902) of Principles of Mathematics, pp. xv{-xvi of the second edition. 82 Wittgenstein: A Life Of the three logicians with whom Wittgenstein first came into contact, Frege was the one for whom he exercised that organ of reverence which was so strongly developed in him, though it found so few objects. This can be seen in the references in his Tractatus_the acknowledgement of the stimulation that he owed to "Frege's great works and to the writings of my friend, Mr. Bertrand Russell', the note of incredulity in some of the criticisms: "It is remarkable that a thinker as rigorous as Frege appealed to the degree of self-evidence as the criterion of a logical proposition.' Russell is mentioned rather oftener (29 times against 18) but with less ceremony. Respect for him is implicit_I think that Wittgenstein nowhere discusses an author he does not respect_but Frege was a special case. It was by a rare and fortunate perspicacity that Wittgenstein saw in Frege a figure to be mentioned in the same tone of voice as he would mention Kant. A neglected and passed-over professor_an Ordinarius but only an honorary one_at Jena, he had reached the age of 63 without either the recognition he deserved or the success in his logical enterprise that he had hoped for. Small, shy and extremely introverted, he regarded most acknowledged authorities on the foundations of mathematics with the contempt but not the tolerance that they would have felt for the superstitions of a charcoal-burner. For perhaps twelve years he had known that a school of logicians, led by Peano, had adopted ideas akin to his own (which were earlier), but even here he seems to have been more aware of their errors than of their support. In Jena itself a handful of students attended his lectures out of curiosity: Carnap records that in the summer semester of 1913 he and a friend and a retired major pursuing a hobby formed the entire audience.18 To have inspired both Carnap and Wittgenstein is already some measure of Frege's genius, but he counts for more. First, he was the founder of modern logic, chiefly because of his account of the logic of statements involving multiple generality, an account and an insight summed up in the device of quantification. Before this discovery the logical analysis of many parts of human language remained in the stage of scattered insights without system, rather like the tips given in Aristotle's Topics, some acute and some misconceived, as compared with the palmary treatment of the syllogism in the Prior Analytics.19 Naturally not all parts of human language were covered or even touched by Frege's work, but even the discussion of tenses and modalities, to take examples from areas he on the whole ignored, follows a pattern set by him. Second, he was able, partly because of his newly-won knowledge of the potentialities of logic, to open 18.The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (ed. Schilpp), p. 5. 19.This account of Frege's importance follows that of Michael Dummett: Frege: Philosophy of Language, pp. xiiff. 83 4Cambridge 1911{-12 up new fields also for philosophical logic, to such an extent that discussions in this subject are still carried on in his terms. Dummett points out that since the time of Descartes epistemology had been the basic part of philosophy: The whole subject had to start from the question, "What do we know and how?, ...Descartes's perspective continued to be that which dominated philosophy until this century, when it was overthrown by Wittgenstein, who in the Tractatus reinstated philosophical logic as the foundation of philosophy, and relegated epistemology to a peripheral position.20 It is clear that this change in philosophy is confined to the "analytical', Anglo-American tradition; and even there it is by no means universally recognized. Russell, who came to philosophy before the change signal- ized by Dummett, perhaps never realized that it had taken place. Despite all his own discoveries in logic and philosophical logic, he tended to think that the Cartesian question was the one with which philosophy began, and the large number of his admirers, together with their conviction that today the main questions in philosophy are somehow not being answered, is an indication that this attitude (on which it is not our immediate purpose to pass judgement) is still alive. There is no doubt that, while Frege made no profession of the greater importance for philosophy of philosophical logic over epistemology, the example that he gave by avoiding any epistemological prolegomena in his own philosophical discussion of logic and language had a very great effect on Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein's own account of his visits to Frege is given by Peter Geach:21 I wrote to Frege putting forward some objections to his theories, and waited anxiously for a reply. To my great pleasure, Frege wrote and asked me to come and see him. When I arrived I saw a row of boys' school caps and heard a noise of boys playing in the garden. Frege, I learned later, had had a sad married life_his children had died young, and then his wife; he had an adopted son, to whom I believe he was a kind and good father. I was shown into Frege's study. Frege was a small neat man with a pointed beard, who bounced around the room as he talked. He absolutely wiped the floor with me, and I felt very depressed; but at the end he said "You must come again', so I cheered up. 20.op.cit., p. xv (2nd edn., p. xxxiii). 21.In Three Philosophers by G.E.M. Anscombe and P.T. Geach. The account given to R.L. Goodstein echoed the phrase about Frege's wiping the floor with Wittgenstein but mentioned only the discouragement, not the cheering effect of the invitation to come again. See above. Hermine Wittgenstein's account and the objective effect of the visit agree better with the account given to Geach as a whole than with that given to Goodstein. 84 Wittgenstein: A Life I had several discussions with him after that. Frege would never talk about anything but logic and mathematics; if I started on some other subject, he would say something polite and then plunge back into logic and mathematics. He once showed me an obituary of a colleague, who, it was said, never used a word without knowing what it meant; he expressed astonishment that a man should be praised for this! The last time I saw Frege, as we were waiting at the station for my train, I said to him "Don't you ever find any difficulty in your theory that numbers are objects?' He replied "Sometimes I seem to see a difficulty_but then again I don't see it.' So far as these things can already be judged, Frege was a deeper though a narrower philosopher than Russell and has accordingly had a greater effect on philosophy: but it was Russell who had the greater immediate impact on Wittgenstein. This is at least consistent with the list Wittgenstein gave in 1931 of the influences on his work (each represent- ing a step onward): There is truth in my idea that really in my thinking I am only reproductive. I believe that I have never invented a new line of thought: that has always been given me by someone else. I have only seized on it immediately with a passionate urge for the work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann, Hertz, Schopenhauer, Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, and Sraffa influenced me.22 The passage comes from a section where he is thinking of the Jewish elements in his own nature_he says on the same page: It is typical of the Jewish mind to understand the work of another better than the other himself understands it. Jewishness apart, this was the impression Russell himself soon had of the disciple who combined passionate admiration with vehement dissent, and he began to feel he could leave his own work to Wittgenstein, in whose early writings the voice is perhaps the voice of Frege but the problems are the problems of Russell. Hertz and Boltzmann gave him the idea of a mental picture or correlate of reality in which all that was esssential was the logical structure of (in their case) the scientific theory involved. Russell, however, provided the tools for the extension of such analysis to the whole of our language. With the help of these tools Wittgenstein thought we could see what had to exist or be the case and what might (and might as well) be one way or the other. No matter that his conception of logic and language finally differed from Russell's: it arose from Russell's question what logic could show us about the nature 22.Culture and Value, p.19 (my own translation). 85 4Cambridge 1911{-12 of language and it was the Archimedean point in his book, the logical insight that solved the problems of philosophy. The attitude to the world that resulted, the conception of the tasks that might still be performed, was perhaps the contribution of Kraus. In October 1911 Russell was beginning his second year as a lecturer at Trinity. The appointment had been a considerable honour. It met no obvious college or university need and did not fit into the then normal pattern of elections. Like his election to the Royal Society two years earlier, it was owed principally to his work on the foundations of mathematics and to his association with Whitehead. It came at an opportune time. The stipend was certainly useful_in those days #200 per annum was not a small sum; but more important than that was the circumstance that the concentrated and private work_Russell himself called it the mechanical work_of writing out the three volumes of Principia Mathematica had just been completed. "My intellect never quite recovered from the strain,' Russell said.23 "I have been ever since definitely less capable of dealing with difficult abstractions than I was before.' The transition to less abstract forms of philosophy was made in these years at Cambridge and was influenced by his contacts there, not least that with Wittgenstein. Some relaxation from the severe and limited task of Principia had already begun before Wittgenstein came: Russell during 1911 composed what he called his "shilling shocker', The Problems of Philosophy, a book still widely read as an introduction to the subject: the proofs were arriving during Wittgenstein's first term in Cambridge and the book came out in January 1912. It is written with great elegance and betrays in many passages the possession of a logical apparatus much greater than that common in philosophical works of that or any time. Its approach, however, is exclusively epistemological, for it conceives philosophy as the criticism of knowledge. Within this sphere it fails to deal with the complete sceptic: Against this absolute scepticism, no logical argument can be advanced. But it is not difficult to see that scepticism of this kind is unreasonable.24 Thus philosophy cannot succeed in doubting the indubitable_the existence of sense-data, for example_but may lead us to reject some beliefs at first sight obvious_such as that physical objects exactly resemble our sense-data. Its aim in short is to diminish the risk of human error and in some instances it does indeed render the risk so small as to be practically negligible. The answer is a little feeble, since from a practical point of view, no one would do philosophy at all. On the other hand, all attempts to provide knowledge concerning the universe as a 23.Autobiography, vol. ~I, p. 153. 24.The Problems of Philosophy (OPUS), p. 87. 86 Wittgenstein: A Life whole, to prove that in virtue of the laws of logic such and such things must exist and such and such others cannot, are rejected. The chief tool used for this purpose is the distinction between knowledge of things and knowledge of truths. It cannot be claimed as the Hegelians (and Russell himself in youth) believed, that the nature of each thing involved all of its relations with other things, and hence that the universe formed a single harmonious system. For a thing may be known (and hence, in normal parlance, its nature may be known) even when very few propositions (theoretically even when none) are known about it. "Theoretically'_the word suggests some uneasiness. What would such knowledge by bare acquaintance amount to? It seems to be not so much a phenomenon everyone is familiar with as a consequence deduced from an antecedent picture of the world, seen as consisting of independent objects which may stand or fail to stand in any one of a number of independent relations with one another. And is not such a picture itself (useful though it is if the logic of relations is to be applicable to the world) a piece of knowledge about the universe as a whole? Russell could hardly answer such questions in a shilling shocker, and in fact he had, or developed, answers to them as satisfactory as those of most eminent philosophers. But there was an air of something not completely worked out about The Problems of Philosophy and it was to a completer and rounder view of epistemology that Russell next devoted his thoughts. Russell's private life, at the time of which we speak, underwent a change and a diffusion somewhat similar to those in his thinking: the parallelism is hinted at but hardly stressed in his Autobiography. The years from 1902 to 1910 had, intellectually, been ones of painful work, first searching for a solution to the paradox that had seemed to frustrate the purpose of Principles of Mathematics to show that all mathematical statements were deducible from a small number of fundamental logical principles; then working out the consequences of his own insights and Whitehead's. Which was harder_to stare at a blank sheet all day, or to work on comparative minutiae for ten or twelve hours a day_Russell does not say. But these were also the years between his discovery that he no longer loved his first wife (Alys) and his breaking with her. The break actually came at Easter 1911 and was precipitated by his relationship with Lady Ottoline Morrell, whose lover he had just become. We were both earnest and unconventional, (Russell wrote), both aristo- cratic by tradition but deliberately not so in our present environment, both hating the cruelty, the caste insolence, and the narrow-mindedness of aristocrats and yet both a little alien in the world in which we chose to live, which regarded us with suspicion and lack of understanding because we were alien. All the complicated feelings resulting from this situation we shared. There was a deep sympathy between us which never ceased as 87 4Cambridge 1911{-12 long as she lived. Although we ceased to be lovers in 1916, we remained always close friends. Ottoline had a great influence on me, which was almost wholly beneficial. She laughed at me when I behaved like a don or a prig, and when I was dictatorial in conversation. She gradually cured me of the belief that I was seething with appalling wickedness, which could only be kept under by an iron self-control. She made me less self-centred, and less self-righteous. Her sense of humour was very great, and I became aware of the danger of rousing it unintentionally. She made me much less of a Puritan, and much less censorious than I had been. And of course the mere fact of happy love after the empty years made everything easier. Many men are afraid of being influenced by women, but as far as my experience goes, this is a foolish fear.25 Always amative, Russell had in fact keenly enjoyed friendships with women before this_notably with Lucy Martin Donnelly, with whom he kept up a lively correspondence, but Lady Ottoline was the first, apart from Alys, with whom he had (in his own phrase) full relations. The new freedom did not confine him to Lady Ottoline and in the years that followed he was to have casual relations with a number of ladies, the occasion being some internal or external difficulty in his relations with Lady Ottoline, some frustration in his philosophical work, sometimes perhaps just the impulse of the moment. The change was not total: Russell had before been deliberately provocative, unconventional, and involved in public work. But it was essentially in these years that he became the Russell of legend, serious and censorious about public issues, but with less of a need than before for profundity, more of a tendency towards superficiality and easy victories both in his personal and in his intellectual life, became in fact the Mr. Apollinax who visited the United States.26 Russell himself compared the change between 1910 and 1914 with the life of Faust before and after he met Mephistopheles, a change produced in his case by Lady Ottoline and the war. There is no evidence that Wittgenstein felt objections directly to Russell's "technical morality', and the cleverness and quickness attracted him enormously_"Russell 25.Autobiography vol. ~I, p. 205. 26. When Mr. Apollinax visited the United States His laughter tinkled among the teacups. I thought of Fragilion, that shy figure among the birch trees, And of Priapus in the shrubbery Gaping at the lady in the swing. ... I heard the beat of centaur's hoofs over the hard turf As his dry and passionate talk devoured the afternoon "He is a charming man'_"But after all what did he mean?'_ "His pointed ears... He must be unbalanced,'_ ... T.S. Eliot was a pupil of Russell's during the latter's visit to Harvard in 1914, though his later association with him is better known. 88 Wittgenstein: A Life was terribly bright then', he used to say. But he detected very early that Russell was past the age of his best discoveries. More serious for their relations was Wittgenstein's awareness of the new complex of attitudes in Russell. They led perhaps to a way of life that suited Russell, but they were to prove the exact converse of his own, for his tendency was to look for the difficult thing to do in private life and in intellectual work, while, where public affairs were concerned, he became fiercely convinced that there was nothing worthwhile to be done beyond the most obvious duties of a citizen. Russell's circumstances in autumn 1911, then, were these: he had left his wife and he lived in rooms in Nevile's Court of Trinity. Alys would not divorce him; Lady Ottoline did not wish for a divorce for herself. There was no question of living with her, or even of spending a night with her. He kept a flat in London and would go down to see her, returning to give his lectures and spend the evenings in Cambridge. In his College rooms he was an easy mark for callers; that apart, he often held "squashes' or "evenings'_the few survivors remember them as a place first of all to hear Russell talk and then to meet the interesting newcomers or visitors to Cambridge. As well as this, Russell made time to write each day to Lady Ottoline, going over the events of the day, naturally with a desire to be amusing and no attempt not to be outrageous, but still giving us, as it gave her, his immediate reactions.27 Busier in more varied ways than before and also happier, Russell was open to influences: a change was preparing in him when Wittgenstein, who was in part to provoke the change, first called on him, shy but unannounced: this raised a lot of complicated problems, which we were in the middle of when an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. [There follows the passage about becoming interested in the philosophy of mathematics at Charlottenburg.]28 He came back the next day, after Russell's lecture, and argued till dinner time: obstinate and perverse, but I think not stupid. It was to be the common pattern: Wittgenstein would call on Russell at 4 or 5 and stay until Hall, talking even while Russell dressed. As time went on, 27.I owe my knowledge of the correspondence (like much else) to Mr Kenneth Blackwell. The Russell side of it is held in the Library of the University of Texas in Austin, Lady Ottoline's side in McMaster University Library as part of the Russell Archive. 28.Letter 225 to Lady Ottoline Morrell (18 October 1911). Subsequent letters are identified by date in the text. The shyness (typical of Wittgenstein on first acquaintance) is here inferred from the untypical imperfection of his English. Wittgenstein was always slow to accept that his English friends could understand German, no doubt rightly. 89 4Cambridge 1911{-12 it became his custom to go away during dinner and come back for more talk afterwards, staying in the room while callers came and went. Naturally Russell's judgement and his patience fluctuated: My German friend threatens to be an infliction. (19 October) My German, who seems to be rather good, was very argumentative. (25 October) My German was very argumentative and tiresome. He wouldn't admit that it was certain that there was not a rhinoceros in the room. [This apparently during a lecture, because afterwards he "came back and argued all the time I was dressing'.] (1 November) My German engineer, I think, is a fool. He thinks nothing empirical is knowable_I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he wouldn't. (2 November) This is the incident, surely, of which Russell made an anecdote: Quite at first I was in doubt as to whether he was a man of genius or a crank, but I very soon decided in favour of the former alternative. Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the propositon: "There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced.29 The dispute seems to be connected with a thesis held by Wittgenstein at the time, and mentioned in the next two letters (7 and 13 November), namely that there is nothing in the world except asserted propositions. The exact point at issue can hardly be recovered, but it is clear that Wittgenstein was harking back to earlier views of Russell's and G.E. Moore's. The sense of assertion involved is not the social or psychological sense in which true and false propositions alike can be affirmed or credited, but that described in The Principles of Mathematics (p. 49), where being asserted is said to be the extra quality that true propositions possess to differentiate them from false propositions. A proposition also is nothing psychological, but is a complex of concepts in the sense described by Moore in his article "The Nature of Judgment' (Mind 1899). Concepts on this view are the objects of thought (not modes of it) and, as such, are the only things that exist. The truth of a proposition (its being asserted in the above sense) will consist not in a correspondence or other relation between a complex of concepts and something else, but in a certain property of the complex itself. 29.From Mind 60 (no. 239) 1951. 90 Wittgenstein: A Life The view described will best be understood if it is seen as a reaction (rather in the spirit of Frege) against any confusion between what is judged and the judging of it. If we call what is judged a proposition, and if there is nothing mental about it, then the proposition cannot stop short of actual things involved in the judgement, and, if it is a true proposition, it will be identical with a fact.30 Thus (Moore thought) contemporary accounts of truth as consisting in correspondence between a proposition and a fact arose from a failure to distinguish between a mental act and its objects. To say that asserted propositions exist will, therefore, be to say that facts exist, though the reasons for saying it in this way are of considerable philosophic interest. Some further reason is needed for saying that only asserted propositions exist. A man would have such a reason if he held the second of two views described by Russell in an early discussion of Meinong: Among objects ["objects' here are the same as what Moore called "concepts'] there are two kinds, the simple and the complex. The latter are characterized by a certain kind of unity, apparently not capable of definition, and not a constituent of the complexes in which it occurs. On one view, a complex is the same thing as a proposition, and is always either true or false, but has being equally in either case; on the other view, the only complexes are true propositions, and falsehood is a property of such judgements as have no Objectives.31 Russell himself held the former view; that was what led him to make the remark criticized in the Tractatus (6.111) that some propositions are true and some false, just as some roses are red and some white. What is truth, and what falsehood, we must merely apprehend, for both seem incapable of analysis.32 On the other view (taken, so it seems, by Wittgenstein) a general difficulty about negative propositions, mentioned but dismissed by Russell, becomes apparently more acute: 30.For present purposes logical truths will be disregarded. 31."Meinong's Theory of Complexes and Assumptions', Mind 1904, reprinted in B. Russell: Essays in Analysis, this passage p. 62. "Objective' is Meinong's term and here means, essentially, what Russell and Moore meant by "proposition'. Readers will notice in this passage more pre-echoes of Wittgenstein's early writings than it is necessary to go into at this point. 32.Essays in Analysis, p. 76: similarly Moore says (Mind 1899, p. 180). What kind of relation [between its constituent concepts] makes a proposition true, what false, cannot be further defined, but must be immediately recognized. 91 4Cambridge 1911{-12 It is hard to regard A's non-existence, when true, as a fact in quite the same sense in which A's existence would be a fact if it were true.33 It must be remembered that in the present discussion a fact is a true or asserted proposition, that is to say a complex concept, which on the first view possesses a certain property and on the second view (that ascribed to Wittgenstein) simply exists. Now: what complex can reasonably be supposed to exist in virtue of there not being a rhinoceros in the room? There are two levels of difficulty here. First, there is the question whether there exist any complexes having "not' or negation as a constituent_this shortly became the question whether there are negative facts. Second, there is the question whether there exist any complexes having existence as a constituent_whether there are existential facts. Both difficulties were felt about this time: in his Notes on Logic (autumn 1913) Wittgenstein said that there were both positive and negative facts; in a letter to Russell (apparently from November 1913) he feared that "(%E x). x = L.W.' would turn out to be meaningless.34 It is, of course, paradoxical to say that only facts (or asserted propositions) exist and also that there are no existential facts among them. What is meant is that we can speak of existence only when we are referring to the truth of some proposition not itself existential. Waiving the special point about existential propositions, the claim that only asserted propositions exist is clearly intended as a correction of Moore's position in his 1899 article according to which (p. 182) the world is formed of concepts. On Moore's view the furniture of the world could consist of all objects of thought and thus would include all constituents of propositions and all complexes of such constituents (and thus all propositions whether false or true). Wittgenstein's correction consisted in denying existence in this sense to everything except asserted propositions or facts. Thus he had already reached the position expressed in the first propositions of the Tractatus that the world consists of facts. "The world is the totality of facts, not of things' (TLP 1.1.) i.e. things, objects, or what Moore called simple concepts do not go to make up the world; nor obviously do states of affairs (combinations of objects) that do not exist (these are what Moore called propositions or complexes of concepts possessing the property of falsity). Much later Wittgenstein was to tell Drury, "My fundamental ideas came to me very early.' Again and again (as will appear) we have the impression that he was comparatively 33.id.ibid. 34.Notebooks 1914{-16, p. 94, and Letters to Russell, Keynes, and Moore, p. 34. The position of the Tractatus on both issues is rather complicated: certainly negative and existential propositions can be used to give true partial descriptions of the world, but they owe their truth to the states of affairs or atomic facts that exist and to those being all the atomic facts. The "existence' of an atomic fact is affirmed by an elementary proposition, which is not general, contains no quantifiers, and is thus not an existential proposition in the sense here in question. 92 Wittgenstein: A Life little affected by new discoveries or advances made by others; and that, important though discussion and reflection were to him, their function was to enable him to articulate and clarify some initial insight, some inspiration or Einfall that had come to him in his earliest reading on a subject_in the present case in the reading of works that Russell and Moore thought they had left behind. Exactly what conclusions about our knowledge Wittgenstein drew from the earlier form of his view about the contents of the world admits of conjecture too wide to be profitable. It may have seemed to him that we could know the truth of a proposition only by being acquainted with the asserted proposition, that is with the actual connexion of concepts or constituents; and that this was possible only when the connexion between them was necessary. But it is hard to state such a view without falling into a confusion with different and more usual assumptions about the nature of propositions. Moore, to be sure, thought that all combinations of concepts into judgements were necessary, but for very different reasons. And the difficulty in the Tractatus of supposing that there is any knowledge of empirical propositions arises chiefly from its adherence to the correspondence theory of truth (here implicitly rejected) and the obscurity of how a comparison with reality could be instituted by any mind. Intimations, then, of later views which, even if false, many were to find compelling had already appeared in Wittgenstein's first month of work with Russell. They were no doubt obscurely formulated and not recommended by arguments that Russell could recognize_"My German ... is armour-plated against all assaults of reasoning_it is really rather a waste of time talking with him,' he once exclaimed. On 27 November, Wittgenstein made (apparently) his first personal appeal to Russell: My German is hesitating between philosophy and aviation; he asked me today whether I thought he was utterly hopeless at philosophy, I told him I didn't know but I thought not. I asked him to bring me something written to help me judge. He has money, and is quite passionately interested in philosophy, but feels he ought not to give his life to it unless he is some good. I feel the responsibility rather, as I really don't know what to think of his ability.35 Meanwhile the two got better acquainted: Wittgenstein got tickets for Lady Ottoline, Russell called on Wittgenstein, discovered that he was 35.Russell told this story several times (e.g. Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 99; Portraits from Memory, p. 23) usually in a livelier form: "Will you please tell me whether I am a complete idiot or not?'_"My dear fellow, I don't know. Why are you asking me?'_"Because, if I am a complete idiot, I shall become an aeronaut; but, if not, I shall become a philosopher.' The written work was to be done (and indeed was done) in the vacation. 93 4Cambridge 1911{-12 really an Austrian, that he was literary, unusually pleasant-mannered, and (he began to think) really intelligent. Thus ended Wittgenstein's first and unofficial and altogether pro- visional term in Cambridge. He was not yet intimate with Russell, he had ideas but had written nothing or nothing presentable, he had not yet got the measure of Cambridge society: indeed he seems to have met no one but Russell and to have been altogether preoccupied by philosophy and the question whether he should devote his life to it. What personal complications surrounded this uncertainty, we do not exactly know. His father was now in his last illness. He had still two years to live but the vigour and the sarcastic newspaper articles had stopped since about the time Ludwig left Austria and Karl now lived for his family. To be sure he did not insist upon Ludwig's becoming an engineer, but Ludwig well knew (and told Russell before March 1912) that Karl had been disappointed in all his other sons and was very anxious this one should do something respectable like engineering and not waste his time over such nonsense as philosophy. Karl's condition could only make this problem more severe. Also, for this and other reasons, Ludwig was still plagued by evil spirits and his own nature still rankled with him. It was apparently about this time, perhaps even in Vienna and over the Christmas vacation that now followed, that he found some solution for these problems. The next June he talked about it with his new friend, David Pinsent: He was very communicative and told me lots about himself: that for nine years, till last Xmas, he suffered from terrific loneliness (mental_not physical): that he continually thought of suicide then, and felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself: he put it that he had had a "hint that he was de trop in this world', but that he had meanly disregarded it. He had been brought up to engineering, for which he had neither taste nor talent. And only recently he had tried philosophy and come up here to study under Russell. Which had proved his salvation: for Russell had given him encouragement.36 Certainly it was after this vacation that he began to be effective, that his powers_in work and over people_began to appear. Probably the change was more gradual than the account he gave to Pinsent suggests, and even after that vacation it was interrupted by periods of self-doubt. Still, some change of heart over Christmas seems to have occurred. One possibility is that he found it possible to write, always for him the first index of spiritual well-being. It is tempting to place at this period also an incident related to Malcolm in connexion with religion: 36.From Pinsent's diary for 1.6.12. 94 Wittgenstein: A Life He told me that in his youth he had been contemptuous of it, but that at about the age of twenty-one something had caused a change in him. In Vienna he saw a play that was mediocre drama, but in it one of the characters expressed the thought that no matter what happened in the world, nothing bad could happen to him_he was independent of fate and circumstance. Wittgenstein was struck by this stoic thought; for the first time he saw the possibility of religion.37 The play was Ludwig Anzengruber's Die Kreuzelschreiber.38 Undoub- tedly Wittgenstein's religious awakening will have been associated with the scene in which one character describes the "special revelation' or "afflatus' (extraige Offenbarung, Eingebung) that he has had: previously his life had been one of unalleviated misery but one day when he had thrown himself, at the point of death as he thought, into the long grass in the sunshine, he came to himself again in the evening to find that his pain had gone, to be visited with unreasoning happiness as if the earlier sunshine had entered into his body, and to feel as if he were being spoken to: "Nothing can happen to you! The worst sufferings count for nothing once they're over. Whether you're six feet under the grass or know that you've got to face it all thousands of times more_nothing can happen to you!_you're part of everything, and everything's part of you.39 Nothing can happen to you!' Es kann dir nix g'schehn! the phrase was almost proverbial in Vienna,40 and Wittgenstein was to return to it again.41 Wittgenstein went back to Cambridge in January, "very vigorous', it seemed to Russell, bringing "some MS he had written in the Vacation, very good, much better than my English pupils do. I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things. On the other hand I think it very likely he will get tired of philosophy.' (This from a letter of 23 January.) A week later he brought more manuscript, and clearly it had been decided that it was worth while his going on with philosophy, for on 1 February he was admitted a member of Trinity College, with Dr J.W.L. Glaisher as his tutor.42 37.In Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, p. 70. Marcus Aurelius (ad se ipsum 10.6) has a striking parallel to the passage referred to, but the thought is too general in its occurrence to be called Stoic. 38.See Erich Heller: "Ludwig Wittgenstein, Unphilosophical Notes', Encounter 72 (1959), 423. The passage in the play that I refer to occurs in Act III, Scene I: Professor P. von Morstein long ago helped me to locate it. 39."Du g'horst zu dem all'n und do$3s all g'hort zu dir'_a typical expression of the nature mysticism that I have sought to identify in the Tractatus (Philosophical Review 1966, pp. 305{-28). 40.Cf. S. Zweig: Die Welt von Gestern (1955), p.366. 41."Lecture on Ethics', Philosophical Review (1965), pp. 6ff. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle (1979), p. 68. 42.Information from Trinity College records, kindly communicated to me by Professor von Wright. J.W.L.Glaisher was a distinguished mathematician. No record of communications between him and Wittgenstein survives. By the summer Wittgenstein had W.M. Fletcher as his tutor. A tutor at Trinity was and is responsible for the administrative relations between a student and the college and not directly for teaching or research. 95 4Cambridge 1911{-12 The Cambridge and the Trinity that Wittgenstein joined_that is to say the circles in which he moved_were tiny institutions by modern standards. Three or four undergraduates a year would sit the Moral Sciences Tripos (this covered philosophy and experimental psychology, but no longer economics). There were two professors, Sorley and Ward, with whom Wittgenstein had no contact that we know of. W.E.Johnson, the philosophical logician, was a lecturer, so was G.E.Moore. Wittgen- stein became friends with both, though he scouted Johnson as a philosopher. Russell and McTaggart and Keynes also sat on the Moral Sciences Board. So did C.S.Myers, the experimental psychologist, whom Wittgenstein was to work with. There were eighteen undergraduate members (apart from six women) of the Moral Sciences Club in 1911{-12 and thirty-four (apart from nine women) in 1912{-13. They included Whitehead's son North; future philosophers such as A.D.Ritchie and A.J.Dorward; psychologists such as B.Muscio (with whom Wittgenstein worked), C.A.Mace, and F.C.Bartlett; and the future translator and editor C.K.Ogden. I.A.Richards, who was to write The Meaning of Meaning with Ogden, was not yet a member of the club, but was one of the ten or so who attended Moore's lectures along with Wittgenstein. Dorward and Muscio were friends: we have no record of contacts with the others. It was to be the same at Trinity. We find no record of his meeting Whitehead until 1913, by which time Whitehead was teaching in London. Littlewood was already known to him from Manchester and Littlewood's close colleague G.H.Hardy was also a Fellow: both of these were friends, as was the classicist Donald Robertson, and H.A.Hollond got to know Wittgenstein at one of Russell's "squashes' but it seems doubtful whether Wittgenstein knew well any other Fellows apart from necessary contact with his two Tutors. G.H.S.Pinsent, J.R.M.Butler, E.D.Adrian, J.Burnaby, and K.W.M.Pickthorn were among the Senior Scholars, of an age and status similar to his own. He was later to know them (though in varying degrees) fairly well and to think highly of them: before the First War they made no impression. David Pinsent (a cousin of G.H.S.Pinsent) alone became a friend: again following on a meeting in Russell's rooms. Slightly later Wittgenstein got to know Keynes, and, as we shall see, the small and select group that formed the Cambridge Conversazione Society, secret but known from numerous memoirs and biographies as the Society or the Apostles. Like them, his whole circle was small but of high distinction and not unconscious of the fact. Keynes has told us how Principia Ethica and Principia Mathematica were regarded as fundamental works, ushering in a new era in their respective subjects. Keynes, not yet of course a world authority, had made his name in Whitehall by his work on the Indian Currency Commission, was an influential lecturer for the infant Economics Tripos, as well as the chief source of informal instruction by means of his Political 96 Wittgenstein: A Life Economy Club. At the same time he was completing the first draft of his Treatise on Probability, written under the influence of the two Principias already mentioned; it appeared after the war, in 1921, not, like some of his works, a book to amaze the world but probably till today (as Harrod forecast in 1951)43 unmatched in scope and erudition. Hardy and Littlewood had already begun the collaboration that made them (as Hardy_modestly enough_says of himself) for a while among the five or six best analysts in the world. Through these contacts Wittgenstein found himself at Trinity, more even than in Manchester, at the centre of the most fundamental scientific work then in progress in England. Gowland Hopkins, one of the junior fellows, was doing the work that entitled him to be called one of the discoverers of vitamins; they would hear at high table that J.J. Thompson (the discoverer of the electron) had found a new element of atomic weight 3;44 or Hardy and Littlewood would tell them of some remarkable result they had received from a self-taught Indian (this was Ramanujan). Russell's philosophical work on the foundations of mathe- matics and his attempts during these years to introduce scientific method into philosophy45 were regarded as integral parts of science; and, by the autumn of 1913, they would at that same table discuss Wittgenstein's theories of logic, evidently with equal respect.46 Russell, Moore, Keynes, Hardy, Littlewood, perhaps Whitehead_this gives us some impression of the group of whom Russell said to Hermine Wittgenstein, "We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.' Towards this circle and this eminence among them he made a first step by enrolling himself at Trinity. No room in College was found for him at first, nor would it have been usual in a by-term. He lived a couple of hundred yards from its great gate at No. 4 in Rose Crescent, a curved passage running from Trinity St. to the Market Place, full then of lodging houses, tobacconists, and tailors, now of health food stores, coffee houses and steak bars, though Calverley might still find his cigars in Bacon's corner shop. Formally speaking Wittgenstein became an Advanced Student (in 1913 these were renamed Research Students) under the Moral Sciences Board. He would have a supervisor, and after two years' residence and on submission of a dissertation embodying the results of his research 43.See R.F. Harrod: A Life of J.M. Keynes, pp. 150{-1. 44.It turned out to be a form of hydrogen. Reports of High Table Conversation at Trinity are taken from G.E. Moore's manuscript diary (now in Cambridge University Library). 45.The slogan of Our Knowledge of the External World and Scientific Method in Philosophy (Herbert Spencer Lecture), both published in 1914, but the aim is apparent also in "On the Notion of Cause' (Mysticism and Logic (1918), chapter 8), which had been the presidential address to the Aristotelian Society in November 1912. 46."Hall opposite Russell and Hardy, hear them talking about Wittgenstein's logical theories, but have to attend to Glaisher.' (From Moore's diary, 18 October 1913: there are other similar entries not all involving Russell.) 97 4Cambridge 1911{-12 would be given a B.A. degree. An M.A. would follow after the usual lapse of time and on payment of the appropriate dues. (The degree of Ph.D. was not introduced at Cambridge until after the war.) Wittgen- stein took this seriously and wished to obtain the degree. His motive was not, or not at first, that the degree might enable him to obtain an academic position. He had no clear aims of that sort; Russell understood that he would at some time "finish his work in engineering' (that is to say, presumably, obtain some engineering qualification as well) but mean- while do some philosophy. Wittgenstein's academic status was not formalized until June, and at that time Russell was appointed his supervisor, but originally Russell advised Wittgenstein to "coach with' Johnson. Johnson was then 53, a widower, rather withdrawn from the public life of college and University, oppressed by poor health and a small income_for in those days the combined stipend of a University Lecturer and a Fellow of King's was small enough, and he was in constant danger of not being renewed in the latter post because of his failure to publish.47 Yet he was, apart from Russell, the only considerable logician (today he would count as a philosophical logician) then working in Cambridge. He had contributed suggestions when Keynes's father was writing his Formal Logic, still one of the best and most technical expositions of syllogistic logic; he had written on "The Logical Calculus' in Mind in 1892, and had sent a paper to the International Congress of 1900 where Peano's contribution to the discussion opened Russell's eyes to the importance of new logical methods (essentially those of Frege) for the philosophy of mathematics. Now for some time Johnson had been working on a review of Principles of Mathematics, which, Broad says, would have filled several numbers of Mind if it had reached publication. His lectures, though idiosyncratic and divagatory, were highly valued. Much of their substance appeared after the war in an ordered form when, with the assistance of pupils, he brought out the three volumes of his Logic. This was the work in which an Oxford critic claimed to distinguish twenty different senses of the term "proposition'; but Broad's defence of the richness and depth of the thought of the book is confirmed by the long survival of distinctions and terminology drawn from it. Johnson suffered the common fate of those who do their thinking away from the philosophical market-place and who crystallize it in later life. Individual insights may impose themselves (in Johnson's case they certainly did) but the system as a whole is too remote and eccentric to win admirers among those who, while the writer lingered, have moved on to new pastures. It is not given to every solitary thinker to be, like Frege, ahead of his time. 47.On Johnson see the Obituary Notice by C.D. Broad in the Proceedings of the British Academy ~X~V~I~I (1931). Harrod (The Life of J.M. Keynes (1959), p. 162) records that in 1912 the dividend for a Fellow of King's was #120 a year. 98 Wittgenstein: A Life The arrangements for coaching or supervision proved a failure, as Russell told Lady Ottoline on 2 March: While I was preparing my speech Wittgenstein appeared in a great state of mind because Johnson (with whom I advised him to coach) wrote and said he wouldn't take him any more, practically saying he argued too much instead of learning his lesson like a good boy. He came to me to know what truth there was in Johnson's feeling. Now he is terribly persistent, hardly lets one get a word in, and is generally considered a bore. As I really like him very much, I was able to hint these things to him without offending him... Wittgenstein says Johnson's own ideas seem to him muddled, but his comments on W's ideas seemed excellent; evidently however J. resented W. not taking his word as law... It was a delicate matter talking to Wittgenstein. Moore's recollections48 were to much the same effect_it was Johnson, not Wittgenstein, who put an end to the arrangement. Probably there was not much to choose between the two as partners in a discussion, for Johnson, to judge by Broad's account of his lecturing and examining, was apt on any one occasion to neglect what was essential in order to get absolutely right some particular point that attracted his attention. Wittgenstein, for his part, was hardly more flexible: then as always some fundamental intellectual sympathy was needed before he could be stimulated even to disagreement_Russell, Schlick, and Moore (in his views on belief and certainty) are instances. No less typical of Johnson and Wittgenstein is the fact that this failure did not affect their good relations. One important bond was music: Johnson's house was by family legend supposed to have been built round his grand piano, and at the tea-parties that were his main form of social life, serious conversation was followed by his playing himself or getting his guests to play. They made music_the phrase is almost affected in English, but for Wittgenstein das Musizieren, especially in a patriarchal atmosphere, was as natural as the air he breathed. Much later, on his return to Cambridge, in the short interval before Johnson's final illness, he was to revisit Ramsey House on at least one such occasion and to have a brief clash with F.R. Leavis that led to an uneasy friendship.49 Wittgenstein retained a great fondness for Johnson, as he told von Wright,50 which indeed appears in the messages in his letters to Keynes during and after the war. "Please give my love to Johnson whom I appreciate more and more the longer I haven't seen him' (4 January 48.Given to Hayek in a letter. 49.F.R. Leavis in Recollections of Wittgenstein (ed. R. Rhees), 1984, pp.51ff. 50.Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. Von Wright, editor's note on K.14. Von Wright adds: "Johnson seems patiently to have endured the demolishing attacks on his logic which Wittgenstein launched in their conversations before the war', but as will be apparent this was not quite the impression of Russell and Moore. 99 4Cambridge 1911{-12 1915) is a typical passage. Johnson's feelings appear in a note written to Keynes when there was a prospect of a visit from Wittgenstein (24 August 1925): Tell Wittgenstein that I shall be very pleased to see him once more; but I must bargain that we don't talk on the foundations of Logic, as I am no longer equal to having my roots dug up. Keynes had since childhood known Johnson, and was besides a Fellow of King's. He was Wittgenstein's avenue to Johnson for another purpose too. In the first half of 1913 Wittgenstein mentioned to Keynes a wish to give some money to any research fund King's might have to assist Johnson in his work by freeing him from some of his financial difficulties. By June he had decided on the form of the gift_it was to be #200 a year. Whether and in what way an instalment was paid before the war, we do not know, but Keynes and Wittgenstein corresponded again about the matter in 1914{-15_at least this is the obvious meaning of "The money will be sent to the registry as soon as the war will be over', in the letter from Wittgenstein last quoted. No doubt the routing of the money was designed to conceal the donor's identity. The proposed donation matches a number made in Austria at the beginning of the war, to be described later. It seemed entirely natural to Wittgenstein to give money for such a purpose, as later to accept it himself, whether from Trinity or from friends. Such gifts were in the tradition of his family and appropriate to his time, when it could by no means be expected that a serious thinker would support himself adequately by teaching and publication. Johnson's dependence on his academic earnings attracted comment because it was so common to have access to other sources of income: Petavel and Moore were more typical than, say, Whitehead, who had great difficulties in supporting family life on an academic income. This gives added significance to the decision made by Russell and, as we shall see, by Wittgenstein, to live on their earnings_it meant giving up the normal way in which an independent thinker lived. Thus Wittgenstein continued to derive the main intellectual stimulus that he found in Cambridge from Russell. Russell gave a number of anecdotal accounts of their relationship. In these he inevitably tended to dwell on Wittgenstein's eccentricities, for which he had an aristocrat's fondness. He was not sparing, either, of tributes to the great influence the association had on him: Getting to know Wittgenstein [he said in an obituary notice] was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life. In later years there 100 Wittgenstein: A Life was a lack of intellectual sympathy between us, but in early years I was as willing to learn from him as he from me.51 He was perhaps [said Russell in his Autobiography, a passage probably writen in the early 30s] the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G.E. Moore.52 But what his later accounts do not always bring out is the strength of the intellectual attraction between the two men, which made Wittgenstein exclaim that the happiest hours of his life had been spent in Russell's room (a spontaneous outburst like that to Eccles already mentioned), and which made Russell in letters to Lady Ottoline refer to him as "a dear man' and say "Wittgenstein makes me feel it is worth while I should exist.' I like Wittgenstein more and more. He has the theoretical passion very strongly_it is a rare passion and one is glad to find it. He doesn't want to prove this or that, but to find out how things really are. (BR to OM 8.3.12) W. is very excitable: he has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs. He has the pure intellectual passion in the highest degree; it makes me love him. His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair_he has just the sort of rage when he can't understand things that I have. (id. eid. 16.3.12) He even has the same similes as I have_a wall parting him from the truth, which he must pull down somehow. After our last discussion, he said "Well, there's a bit of wall pulled down.' (id. eid. late March 1912.) These were Russell's reactions to the frequent discussions when Wittgen- stein brought him some written work, or continued a discussion begun at his lecture, or (as it soon became their practice) came before the lecture to read it in advance, or simply brought a "suggestion' on a point of mathematical logic_Russell on one occasion mentions an account of logical form as opposed to logical matter, but usually he spared Lady Ottoline the technical details. Through the next two terms they met more and more often. Wittgenstein was the most constant auditor at Russell's lectures_indeed the only auditor once they were overtaken by the Tripos examinations, the days on the river, and the balls that mark the deliquescence of a 51.Mind 60 (1951), reprinted in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Man and his Philosophy, ed. K.T. Fann, p. 31. 52.Autobiography, vol. 2, pp. 98{-99. 101 4Cambridge 1911{-12 Cambridge year. He would also often come back after the lecture, sometimes with the rather Continental present of roses or lilies of the valley. He would have lunch with Russell and then a long walk. He himself loved the water meadows that surround Cambridge: no town could have been better situated from the point of view of one who much preferred the flat Praterauen to the hills of lower Austria. But Russell took him further afield: they lay in fields listening to larks and cuckoos and trespassed in the woods round Madingley: To my great surprise [said Russell] he climbed a tree. When he had got a long way up a gamekeeper with a gun turned up and protested about the trespass. I called up to Wittgenstein and said the man had promised not to shoot if Wittgenstein got down within a minute. He believed me and did so.53 Harmless eccentricities of behaviour and childlike jokes were always to remain Wittgenstein's form of relaxation and he shared with Russell an aristocratic attitude towards minor regulations. Twenty years later he proposed a similar trespass to Leavis and prompted a rebuke voicing a different and perhaps more centrally English tradition of property, and indeed propriety.54 On other occasions Russell and Wittgenstein would meet for tea. The hours from 5 to 7 were usually devoted to work, though sometimes Wittgenstein would call on Russell before Hall (this seems to have been usually at 7.45). We do not hear of Wittgenstein's dining at High Table with Russell, or indeed with any other of his friends (perhaps it would have been unusual to invite a Research Student) but the two men might dine together at the Union Society or go to a private dinner party. After dinner there might be a meeting of some Society and a paper discussion heard, followed perhaps by private discussion in more caustic terms, and a parting late enough to ensure no early start for the next day; or else one of Russell's evenings with a like sequel; or a concert. He would go back to Russell's room from some meeting and talk until midnight_not yet every night55 nor yet in despair. This programme of a day_though it is not suggested that Russell and Wittgenstein ever or often completed the whole of it together_is perhaps of some interest as exhibiting a way of life that survived in the ancient universities down to the 1950s. It was no quirk of these two men: Wittgenstein saw other friends (when he began to make them) in the interstices of the same framework and differed from them only in 53.Portraits from Memory, pp. 18{-19. 54.Memories of Wittgenstein, p. 57. 55.In Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 99 Russell says he came every evening at midnight. We shall see that something sufficient to make this a pardonable exaggeration began in October or November 1912. 102 Wittgenstein: A Life requiring rather longer stretches of a friend's company. Like the Jew in the joke, he was just the same as other people, only more so. From the frequency of meetings alone it will be clear that Russell had become fond of Wittgenstein and that the initial temptation to think of him simply as a bore had quite vanished. This first impression (Russell reports it as the general one, and occasional contemporary letters confirm this) had evidently two rather different sources. First, people were surprised by the contrast between Wittgenstein's exquisite manners, index of a higher degree of sensibility than was usual among the educated English, and the force and fire and persistence with which he talked when a subject gripped him. In argument he forgets about manners and simply says what he thinks. (BR to OM 8.3.12) But there was another side_occasions when manners were not enough and inspiration and brilliance (Einfall and Geistreichtum, to use Wittgen- stein's own terms) deserted him. Russell goes on to say: In spite of it all something about him makes him a bore. In his flat moments, he still talks, slowly, stammering, and saying dull things. But at his best he is splendid. (ibid.) "At his best he is splendid'_Russell exulted not only in Wittgenstein's penetration but also in his complete candour: No one could be more sincere than Wittgenstein or more destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth; but he lets his feelings and affections appear and it warms one's heart. (BR to OM 10.3.12) He is always absolutely frank. (id. eid. 16.3.12) He is not a flatterer but a man of transparent and absolute sincerity. (id. eid. 17.3.12) During these months, as we shall see, Russell could accept the criticism and the intensity did not make Wittgenstein tiresome to him. The summer of that year probably saw the peak of their intimacy. Wittgenstein was "a treasure': I think he is passionately devoted to me. Any difference of feeling causes him great pain. My feeling towards him is passionate, but of course my absorption in you makes it less important to me than his feeling is to him. (BR to OM 1.6.12) 103 4Cambridge 1911{-12 The affectionate phrases in Wittgenstein's summer letters to Russell,56 while not enough to prove a passionate attachment, are quite consistent with one. Russell is quite frank about his own feelings: I had a letter from Wittgenstein, a dear letter which I will show you. I love him as if he were my son. (BR to OM 22.8.12) Later he (5 September) mentions his strong protective feeling. There is no doubt that Russell meant exactly what he said. He was now forty and passionately wanted children but saw no prospects of having any. While Lady Ottoline supplied the part of a wife, as Alys had for long failed to, Wittgenstein to some extent made up for the children he had missed. Thus these two relationships were for the time being the most intense that he had and he constantly compared them with one another. Forty, and with an immense piece of technical work behind him in mathematics, precisely the area in which inventive power first develops and first decays, it is not surprising that Russell felt spent, so far as work of this kind was concerned. By the summer of 1912 others noticed this too and the Whiteheads advised him to let technical work be. During that summer he began to think of Wittgenstein as a successor as well as a son. He asked himself often whether his teaching a subject in which he could not make fresh discoveries was worthwhile. After a conversation with Wittgenstein in April he wrote: Yes, I think my daily round here is useful_Wittgenstein alone would have made it so. (BR to OM 23.4.12) And when, at Whitsuntide, it became clear that Wittgenstein wished to do philosophy in the regular way and perhaps to teach, Russell could say: Oddly enough, he makes me less anxious to live, because I feel he will do the work I should do, and do it better. He starts fresh at a point which I only reached when my intellectual spring was nearly exhausted. (BR to OM 1.6.12) It was, of course, a difficulty that Wittgenstein attached little importance to developing a systematic and reasoned presentation of his views and putting them in their right place in the philosophical controversies of the day. Partly this was a literary preference: Wittgenstein always looked for the striking, even the syncopated, expression of an insight_it should become dazzlingly obvious; and for refutation he relied on a rephrasing of views he disagreed with that made them seem absurd. But we shall see, 56.R.1{-6 in Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore: "I need not say that I miss you awfully' and the like. 104 Wittgenstein: A Life in connexion with the Tractatus, that the very novelty of Wittgenstein's standpoint demanded a different form of expression from conventional treatises. Russell was in two minds about this feature of Wittgenstein's philosophizing: I told him he ought not simply to state what he thinks true, but to give arguments for it, but he said arguments spoil its beauty, and that he would feel as if he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands. He does appeal to me_the artist in intellect is so very rare. 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. I am seriously afraid that no one will see the point of anything he writes, because he won't recommend it by arguments addressed to a different point of view. (BR to OM 28.5.12) But "that must take its chance', Russell thought. So must the fact that Wittgenstein only knew "a small proportion of what he ought to know'57 as Russell had noticed earlier. At the end of May 1912 Pinsent notes that Wittgenstein has only just started systematic reading [in philosophy] and he expresses the most naive surprise that all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes. The main point was that Wittgenstein could detect and remedy defects and mistakes that Russell himself no longer felt equal to deal with. Russell thought therefore of giving up his teaching at the end of his five years (this would have been in 1915) by which time Wittgenstein would be able to take his place: He gives me such a delightful lazy feeling that I can leave a whole department of difficult thought to him, which used to depend on me alone. It makes it much easier for me to give up technical work. (BR to OM 4.9.12) The technical work referred to does not seem to have been a continuation of Principia. The production of a fourth volume, on geometry,58 was entirely in the hands of Whitehead. Russell seems to have felt that what was needed was another and more fundamental account of the fundamentals of Principia itself, an explanation of the nature of logical truth, and a justification of apparently accidental axioms like the Axiom of Reducibility. And this was_all Russell's references imply_precisely what Wittgenstein worked on. It was to be the autumn of 1913 before he produced for Russell his "Notes on Logic', 57.BR to OM 15.3.12. 58.It never appeared, though Whitehead got rather further with it than Russell expected. 105 4Cambridge 1911{-12 originally entitled "Logic', but it seems likely that Wittgenstein was attempting to write just such an account of the nature of logic in the summer of 1912. Russell himself did not engage directly on such an enterprise until the autumn of 1912, with what success we shall see. The work was to be called "What is Logic?' and this was after all the question left open by Principia. Yet, as said, Russell himself was engaged in other directions. When Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge the second and third volumes of Principia were in the course of production_they appeared in 1912 and 1913 respectively. There were proofs to be read but, for Russell, no original work to be done, though Whitehead had had to introduce extensive revisions into the second volume.59 In April 1912 Russell wrote to Lady Ottoline: I have been thinking over the work I have done this last year_the shilling shocker, the article on religion, the Aristotelian paper, the paper on Bergson [the autobiography], and I shall have Matter done within the year. The Aristotelian paper was "On the relations of universals and particulars',60 written and delivered before Wittgenstein became in- timate with Russell. Its theme is the existence of an unanalysable relation of predication holding between a subject and a predicate and there is an echo of this in Tractatus 4.1274, where Wittgenstein says that the question "Are there unanalysable subject-predicate propositions?' cannot be asked. In this paper Russell also argues for the existence of particulars which are not, like the traditional substances of philosophy, indestruc- tible. Wittgenstein may well have this in mind when he insists in the Tractatus (2.02{-2.2072) that the substance of the world must be unalterable. But we have no contemporary discussions on the paper, and it is notorious that the Tractatus gives no clear indication whether its "objects' are universals or particulars_that whole way of thinking seems to be shunned.61 "Matter' was to occupy Russell for much longer than a year: this phase of his thought ended only with The Analysis of Matter in 1927. The Problems of Philosophy had treated the existence of matter as a reasonable but not an absolutely certain inference from our sense-data. Russell now began to question this inference, to doubt the force of the a priori 59.In particular the Prefatory Statement of Symbolic Conceptions, which ought properly to have come at the beginning of the whole work. This, and the knowledge of its authorship, is probably the source of Wittgenstein's reference to "Whitehead's {"Conventions{'' in his notebook of 22.6.15 (Notebooks, p. 70). I owe my knowledge of this detail of the production of Principia to Dr. I. Grattan-Guinness. 60.PAS 12 (1911{-12) 1{-24, reprinted in Logic and Knowledge, 103{-24. 61.It is arguable that the 1911 paper represents a temporary aberration in the development of Russell's thought. See R. Jager: The Development of Bertrand Russell's Philosophy, pp. 95{-6. 106 Wittgenstein: A Life principles invoked in it, and to incline with some changes of mind to the view that matter was instead a logical construction from sense-data. What must be assumed, if physical science has any validity, is that there are unsensed sense-data (Russell was later to call these "sensibilia') very like the sense-data we actually experience, and that the things of physics are collections of such (perceived and unperceived) sense-data. Russell did not think that the demand of physics for such entities was enough to prove them to exist. The only metaphysical argument he could produce for that was our instinctive belief in the independent reality of the qualities that we perceive. His general aim at this time was to find, either in immediate experience or with the help of self-evident general principles, grounds for rejecting solipsism and accepting the truth of science. Returning to Cambridge after Easter 1912, Wittgenstein was rather brisk and dismissive about this programme: I argued about Matter with him. He thinks it is a trivial problem. He admits that if there is no Matter then no one exists but himself, but he says that doesn't hurt, since physics and astronomy and all the other sciences could still be interpreted so as to be true. (BR to OM 23.4.12) Wittgenstein had a temperamental and a philosophical hankering after solipsism: it was somehow to be accommodated, not quite dismissed, in the Tractatus; and bulks ever larger in the last of the wartime notebooks.62 He also continued to think it obvious that the laws of physics employed all their logical apparatus in order to talk about the objects of the world, whatever these were (TLP 6.3431), so that no conclusions about what the world must be like could be drawn from them. In this latter point he was, perhaps, not so far from Russell as he supposed: for Russell was to devote a large part of his efforts to discovering the sort of interpretation of physics that would apply it to just those objects (the sense-data) that he thought we had good grounds for assuming. Wittgenstein's attitude towards matter seems to have pleased Russell by its radicalism. It was of a piece with something he observed about Wittgenstein a day or two later on the occasion of Wittgenstein's meeting Lytton Strachey at tea: He is the only man I have ever met with a real bias for philosophical scepticism; he is glad when it is proved that something can't be known. (BR to OM 2.5.12) 62.TLP 5.6{-5.641; Notebooks, pp. 73{-89; there is a useful collection of passages in P.M.S. Hacker: Insight and Illusion, pp. 67{-76. 107 4Cambridge 1911{-12 This is not precisely a feature of Wittgenstein's that we can observe in his preserved writings: the nearest approach to it is in his scrupulous avoidance of questions of the theory of knowledge_if this is thought of as the attempt to find a number of things that we certainly know. He could give a mark of all logical truth: he did not attempt to give a mark of all known truths. However, if he was a sceptic at this time it is not at all surprising that the opening of Russell's paper on matter delighted him when he actually read it: In what follows, I shall endeavour to maintain three theses: (1) That all arguments hitherto alleged by philosophers against matter are fallacious; (2) That all arguments hitherto alleged in favour of matter are fallacious; (3) That, even if we had reason to suppose that there is matter, we could have no means of finding out anything whatever as to its intrinsic nature.63 The close, which Wittgenstein also liked, recommends the hypothesis of the existence of actual and possible sense-data as the hypothesis most consonant with our instinctive beliefs, though there may be conclusive arguments against it and can be none in its favour. As far as these parts went, Wittgenstein thought the paper on matter was the best thing Russell had done, but he disagreed with the central section, the chief function of which is to sketch the ways in which science might be interpreted to dispense with the hypothesis of matter. (This section was in fact extensively revised by Russell later in October.) The shilling shocker, The Problems of Philosophy, we have already briefly described, and we have mentioned its reliance on the feature of self-evidence to account for the certainty of logic. This, which Russell himself felt to be inadequate, is the chief of the doctrines of the book to get reflected, in the form of criticism, in Wittgenstein's writings.64 Of talk that the two men may have had about the book, Russell records only Wittgenstein's disgust with the last chapter, which is devoted to the Value of Philosophy. This was one of the conversations which led Russell to say that Wittgenstein was absolutely frank. He thought it wrong to argue that philosophy had an end outside itself or has value (we have quoted him on this point above). As a fact, Russell at this period was given to perorations and even complete papers in which he returned to the theme of "A Free Man's Worship'_a paper first published in 1903: 63.Quoted from the as yet unpublished manuscript in the Russell Archive. The text is quoted as it was before correction, on the assumption that corrections to the April/May paper were inserted in October 1912. One feature of the corrections is that they make the paper less negative and provocative. 64.See for example Tractatus 5.1363 and 5.4731. 108 Wittgenstein: A Life To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things_this is emancipation, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged by the purifying fire of time.65 But whereas then he had concentrated on the proud defiance of a weary but unyielding Atlas, solaced only by the consciousness that he was aware of the good denied him by a hostile and evil world, now he saw reason to suppose that the disinterested use of the intellect in philosophy would have desirable effects for practical life too: The mind which has become accustomed to the freedom and impartiality of philosophic contemplation will preserve something of the same freedom and impartiality in the world of action and emotion... Contemplation makes us citizens of the universe, not only of one walled city at war with the rest.66 Moreover contemplation itself had become, in Russell's eyes, a means no longer to condemn but to accept the universe. This was perhaps connected with that loss of faith in the objectivity of good and evil to which he drew attention in his comments of 1917 on "A Free Man's Worship'.67 The "article on religion' Russell referred to in his letter of April 1912 was evidently "The Essence of Religion' published in the Hibbert Journal for October 1912. There he attempted to reject the dogmas of religion but to retain the good elements of worship, acquiescence and love. The animal part of man, he thought, finds it intolerable to suppose that the universe is unaware of the importance of its own desires but the divine part does not demand that the world shall conform to a pattern: it accepts the world, and finds in wisdom a union which demands nothing of the world... Every demand is a prison, and wisdom is only free when it asks nothing. Wittgenstein did not see this article until it appeared and we shall see that his mood when he returned to Cambridge in October was often fiercer and more critical than that exhibited during the academic year at present under consideration. His reaction then led to a number of painful talks with Russell. He detested the paper. 65.Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), pp. 55{-6. 66.The Problems of Philosophy (OPUS 1959, p. 93). 67.Preface of Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), p. v. 109 4Cambridge 1911{-12 He felt I had been a traitor to the doctrine of exactness and wantonly used words vaguely; also [he felt] that such things are too intimate for print. I minded very much, because I half agree with him. (BR to OM 11.10.12) Wittgenstein's criticisms disturbed me profoundly. He was so unhappy, so gentle, so wounded in his wish to think well of me. (id. eid. 13.10.12) Wittgenstein was always distrustful of the attempt to convey any moral teaching in print. Even for the private discussion of problems of life he thought conversation a much preferable medium to a letter. The moral significance a man attached to an activity or an action, the meaning he saw in an utterance, these were things that could usually and then only with difficulty be conveyed face to face and to one who knew him well. The aesthetic objection to putting something personal into a treatise or sermon is not really distinct from the intellectual and moral objections to attempting to distil the moral content or principle out of an activity or a life and to present it on its own. Thus Wittgenstein, as we shall see, liked Moore very much and the quality of Moore's life attracted him, but Moore's attempt to express his ideals in Principia Ethica seemed to him to fail: I have just been reading a part of Moore's Principia Ethica [he wrote to Russell in June 1912] (now please don't be shocked) I do not like it at all. (Mind you quite apart from disagreeing with most of it.) I don't believe_or rather I am sure_that it cannot dream of comparing with Frege's or your own works (except perhaps some of the Philosophical Essays.) ... Unclear statements don't get a bit clearer by being repeated!! What Moore had to say about ethics was bound to be unclear when he attempts to describe the nature of good itself and to say what things are good. In doing this he could be compared to Russell in "A Free Man's Worship' singing the praises of a certain attitude towards the world.68 The best that could be done in this direction was to involve the reader in some worthwhile activity without protesting too much that it was worthwhile. Thus Wittgenstein said he liked that sort of thing (a defence of the value of philosophy) when it had "something solid at the back of it', as in the peroration to Russell's discussion of the philosophy of Bergson.69 Here the praise of contemplation is an integral part of the argument against Bergson's preference of instinct to intellect: 68.Philosophical Essays (1910), the collection to which Wittgenstein referred, contained "The Elements of Ethics' (1908), "A Free Man's Worship' (1903), "The Study of Mathematics' (1907) and four essays on pragmatism and truth. 69.Read to the Heretics in Cambridge in March 1912, published in Monist July 1912 and in a pamphlet in 1914. 110 Wittgenstein: A Life Those to whom activity without purpose seems a sufficient good will find in Bergson's books a pleasing picture of the universe. But those to whom action, if it is to be of any value, must be inspired by some vision, by some imaginative foreshadowing of a world less painful, less unjust, less full of strife than the world of our everyday life, those, in a word, whose activity is built on contemplation, will find in this philosophy nothing of what they seek, and will not regret that there is no reason to think it true. Because this passage occurs as a conclusion (or more strictly a corollary) of a philosophical argument of Russell's usual kind, its very style is also characteristic of Russell, pointed, humorous, simplified and yet cogent, preferable (for most tastes) to the rather laboured elevation of "A Free Man's Worship' or "The Essence of Religion'. Print must be impersonal, Wittgenstein thought, it must not preach. A later anecdote records his condemnation of Tolstoy's Resurrection for this reason. Tolstoy is best, he said, when he "turns his back on the reader', as, no doubt, in Hadji Murad, which Wittgenstein read with such enthusiasm in the summer of 1912. We look over the author's shoulder, he describes a life, and we see, rather than are told of, the values it exhibits. Paul Engelmann offers a similar analysis of the effect of Uhland's poem "Graf Eberhard's Weissdorn' which he and Wittgenstein admired.70 The idea that higher things could only be indirectly communicated became a central one in Wittgenstein's Tractatus: in its words (6.522), they could be shown or they made themselves manifest. And of course the Tractatus was itself meant to show something, chiefly by what it did not say. It would communicate, Wittgenstein thought, only to one who thought through all its propositions and eventually recognized them as nonsensical (6.54). Now this at least means that communication regarding what is higher (which became the main point of the book in the author's eyes) is possible only for those who go through the thoughts of the book with the author and in the right spirit. That is the chief reason why in the preface Wittgenstein says that it will be understood, perhaps, only by one who has already had the thoughts expressed in it and that there may be only one such person. It is worth mentioning these later developments, though we cannot yet see them in their philosophical context, because the attitude involved is already present in his reactions to Russell. It is not that we find all his opinions fully-formed whenever he first expresses himself on a subject, but rather that there is generally a pattern of them present in his thinking from the start. Thus in tracing the course of his thoughts we are 70.Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, pp. 82{-5. For Hadji Murad see LW to BR [summer 1912], Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, Letter R.6. It is interesting that Wittgenstein himself turned his back on the audience when he read poems by Rabindranath Tagore to a handful of philosopher friends in 1927{-8. 111 4Cambridge 1911{-12 much more presented with a development or unfolding than with a convergence of influences. Parallels are perhaps easier to find. Janik and Toulmin71 have drawn one with Hofmannsthal's distrust of language first expressed in the Chandos Letter of 1901. It is questionable what sort of an explanation of Wittgenstein's views such a parallel gives: elected silence in the face of phrases all sullied by misuse is not the same as the belief that anything worth saying is in principle incapable of being directly communicated, unless of course the latter is a mistaken and exaggerated acknowledgement of the need for the former. It may be that Janik and Toulmin want to ascribe this mistake to Wittgenstein, holding, as they seem to, that no man can express more than his own historical situation. But, quite apart from general objection to their methodology (as, for example, that it must itself be the expression of a particular time), it is clear that Wittgenstein's belief in the inexpressibility of value is compatible with the recognition that its indirect expression is much easier in periods when culture is not fragmented. This recognition did indeed come to Wittgenstein but apparently at a later period than that of which we now speak. The criticism or the pain expressed by Wittgenstein when Russell wrote about matters too intimate for print itself illustrated that such matters were talked about by the two friends. Russell was not now as frequent or as simple-hearted a participant as G.E. Moore continued to be in discussions of the problems of life with clever young men, but in his relationship with Wittgenstein, he recaptured, for a while, the openness and flexibility of youth. This was another aspect of the reflowering we have already observed. It took time, of course, before Russell saw, or Wittgenstein was able to communicate, his attitude towards these matters. At first Russell noticed the vehemence and the apparent hostility to religion and morality: He is far more terrible with Xtians than I am. He had liked F., the undergraduate monk, and was horrified to learn that he is a monk. F. came to tea with him and W. at once attacked him_as I imagine, with absolute fury. Yesterday he returned to the charge, not arguing but only preaching honesty. I wonder what will have come of it. He abominates ethics and morals generally; he is deliberately a creature of impulse, and thinks one should be. (BR to OM 17.3.12) Six months later Wittgenstein was still exhorting F. "to read some good book on some exact science, and see what honest thought is',72 which F. seems to have taken in good part, assuming, no doubt, that his chief offence was to be a monk. Russell admired the intensity and the strong impulses: 71.A. Janik and S. Toulmin: Wittgenstein's Vienna. 72.Pinsent's diary for 9 November 1912. 112 Wittgenstein: A Life He lives in the same kind of tense excitement as I do, hardly able to sit still or read a book. He was talking about Beethoven_how a friend described going to Beethoven's door and hearing him "cursing and howling and singing' over his new fugue; after a whole hour Beethoven at last came to the door, looking as if he had been fighting the devil, and having eaten nothing for 36 hours because his cook and parlour-maid had been away from his rage. That's the sort of man to be. (BR to OM 23.4.12) Sure enough, in the summer we find Russell reading the lives of Mozart and Beethoven, and Wittgenstein expressing his pleasure at this_"These are the actual sons of God'73_and sending him immediately five volumes of Beethoven's letters. "That's the sort of man to be.' Wittgenstein was not merely overcome from time to time by a compulsive admiration for a life like Beethoven's but made the same absolute demands in his own and in Russell's, with none of the concessions to English life and practices that Russell allowed himself. Thus in November 1912 Russell wrote: I had a passionate afternoon, provided by North and Wittgenstein. I had arranged to walk with Wittgenstein, and felt bound to see North's race, so I took Wittgenstein to the river. North was beaten, not by much; he was rather done afterwards. The excitement and conventional importance of it was painful. North minded being beaten horribly, though he didn't show much. Wittgenstein was disgusted_said we might as well have looked on at a bull fight (I had that feeling myself), that all was of the devil, and so on. I was cross North had been beaten, so I explained the necessity of competition with patient lucidity. At last we got on to other topics, and I thought it was all right, but he suddenly stood still and explained that the way we had spent the afternoon was so vile that we ought not to live, or at least he ought not, that nothing is tolerable except producing great works or enjoying those of others, that he has accomplished nothing and never will, etc._all this with a force that nearly knocks one down. He makes me feel like a bleating lambkin. I soothed him down at last, and came home and soothed down North. You would think that I had never felt the slightest excitement over anything, but was a mere bundle of common sense.74 (BR to OM 9.11.12) 73.LW to BR 16.8.12. The reference is to die echten Go$3tterso$3hne in the Prologue in Heaven in Goethe's Faust: But ye, true sons of Heaven, it is your duty To take your joy in the living wealth of beauty. The changing Essence which ever works and lives Wall you around with love, serene, secure! And that which floats in flickering appearance Fix ye it firm in thoughts that must endure. (trsln. by Louis Macneice and E.L. Stahl) 74.T.N. Whitehead was the elder of Whitehead's sons. On 9 November he was honourably defeated in the first heats of the Colquhoun Sculls by the President of the C.U.B.C., who went on to win the competition. 113 4Cambridge 1911{-12 We shall see that at this time Wittgenstein was particularly severe in finding fault with his friends and himself and particularly energetic in trying to put things right. Russell was both touched and amused (two elements in many of his friendships) to find his own ideals and intolerance present in Wittgen- stein in a more uncompromising form. But, as regards Wittgenstein's hatred of parsons and monks and his abomination of ethics, Russell soon found that it was other than he had at first supposed and different also from his own attitudes. Wittgenstein surprised me the other day; he suddenly said how he admired the text "What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul' and then went on to say how few there are who don't lose their soul. I said it depended on having a large purpose that one is true to. He said he thought it depended more on suffering and the power to endure it. I was surprised_I hadn't expected that kind of thing from him. (BR to OM 30.5.12) Wittgenstein was usually pessimistic, Russell often so (hence the rhetoric about fate in "A Free Man's Worship'): but Russell inclined towards defiance and tended to see those who thought suffering itself valuable as subscribing to the religion of Moloch, the submission of slaves. Wittgen- stein could see suffering as an integral part of a decent life.75 On the next day: Wittgenstein began on Dickens, saying David Copperfield ought not to have quarrelled with Steerforth for running away with Little Emily. I said I should have done so; he was much pained, and refused to believe it; thought one could and should always be loyal to friends and go on loving them. We got on to Julie Lespinasse, and I asked him how he would feel if he were married to a woman and she ran away with another man. He said (and I believe him) that he would feel no rage or hate, only utter misery. His nature is good through and through; that is why he doesn't see the need of morals. I was utterly wrong at first; he might do all kinds of things in passion, but he would not practise any cold-blooded immorality. His outlook is very free; principles and such things seem to him nonsense, because his impulses are strong and never shameful... I told W. the story of Julie and then gave him one of her letters to read. He was much moved. I had represented Guibert as the cause of her misery. He said she was bound to be unhappy, since she could love like that. I had never talked with him before about things of that sort. (BR to OM 1.6.12) 75.A parallel with Aristotle in this respect has been drawn above (p. 33) and a further similarity now appears, in Wittgenstein's belief that all of a good man's impulses and feelings would be right. 114 Wittgenstein: A Life The idea that suffering is preferable to ease if it flows from the whole-hearted following of those generous impulses that make up one's individuality, so that the attractiveness of avoiding or lessening it is really the temptation to lose one's soul, is of a piece with Wittgenstein's admiration for Weininger. It was natural for him (as we indicated when considering Weininger) to clothe his thoughts in religious terms, but formal religion seemed to him to involve dishonesty, since it was an attempt to reduce something essentially private and spontaneous to the status of an institution and consequently to investigate and propound moral truths in impersonal terms and by the methods appropriate to other intellectual activities. It therefore involved a cheapening both of the object sought (in the present context, saving one's soul) and the means used. Hence on the one hand the overtones of moral disapproval and on the other the injunction to see what honest thought about an exact science is. Certainly Wittgenstein did at this time allow for a religious experience and he told the Apostles,76 when Moore read a paper on Conversion, that, as far as he knew, it consisted in getting rid of worry, having the courage that made one really not care what might happen. Here obviously he had in mind his "experience' of utter safety induced by Die Kreuzelschreiber,77 and, as he later pointed out, the expression of this did not literally make sense, did not pretend to belong to a science. This description of Wittgenstein's attitude towards religion is not meant to recommend it: much in it is banal and everything depends, obviously, on how it is applied. But it will be clear that he denied and altered much less in religion than Russell and that, while the two agreed on the importance of great works, Wittgenstein found the moral equivalent of religion more in personal life than in impersonal aims. Certainly later he was profoundly sceptical of political or social programmes or movements and particularly of Russell's involvement in them.78 There is no accounting for a friendship. Russell's extraordinary quickness_his "brightness' as Wittgenstein called it_was an important element. It was the first time Wittgenstein had prolonged an intimate contact with so powerful a mind. He never forgot it_just as he never forgot the contribution to his later thought of Ramsey and Sraffa, who were intellectually friends of the same sort. (Keynes probably cannot be 76.Russell recounted Wittgenstein's remarks to Lady Ottoline. We know independently that the date given (16 November 1912) was that of Wittgenstein's election as an Apostle; see below, p. 151. 77.See above, p. 94. 78.Two anecdotes will illustrate this. Paul Engelmann had a story about a League for Peace and Freedom projected or founded by Russell, the Women's League for Peace and Freedom, which Russell was on his way to address when he met Wittgenstein at Innsbruck in 1922. Russell told Wittgenstein, "I suppose you would prefer a League for War and Slavery' ("fu$3r Krieg und Knechtschaft'). "Better that! Better that!,' Wittgenstein replied with emphasis. ("Eher noch! Eher noch!') Wittgenstein told Drury that Russell's writings on logic and mathematics ought to be bound in blue, and everyone be made to read them, but his writings on ethics, marriage, and so on in red and no one be allowed to read them. 115 4Cambridge 1911{-12 put in this category: there was never the same frequency of meetings in his case.) But there was more to the intellectual sympathy Russell spoke of than this: it is likely that the friendship would not have prospered but for those features of Russell's life at the time which not only made him such a valuable combination, from Wittgenstein's point of view, of maturity with openness to new ideas but also contributed to his being concerned (outside his philosophy) more with personal than with public matters. The friendship thus favoured by time and chance was, particularly during this first year, a great source of happiness to both and gave a meaning to their lives. Their discussions of philosophy were their chief work: each was stimulated by the other and confirmed by the other's reaction in the feeling that some advance was being made. They shared too nearly everything else that they thought important. Russell began to go to many more concerts, first taken by Wittgenstein and then even when Wittgenstein was away. Anecdotes of the Alleegasse, talk about the greatness of Beethoven, the remark that hearing the Choral Symphony with Russell was one of the great moments of his life: small enough matters, but they led to Russell's hearing much of Beethoven and Brahms for the first time or with new ears. All the same, Russell felt that music alone did not do enough to civilize people: it is too apart, too passionate, and too remote from words. [Wittgenstein] has not a sufficiently wide curiosity or a sufficient wish for a broad survey of the world. It won't spoil his work on logic, but it will make him always a very narrow specialist, and rather too much the champion of a party_that is when judged by the highest standards. (BR to OM 6.3.13) So at this time (admittedly when their differences were becoming more apparent to the two men) he told Wittgenstein that it would do him good to read French prose, because he was in danger of being narrow and uncivilized. We have commented above on the narrowness79 that went with depth in Wittgenstein's reading. Paul Engelmann confirms that French literature was almost omitted. Partly perhaps it was accident, partly his not feeling at home in that language, though for him that is too temperamental a matter to be called an accident. Pascal impressed him_the Pense$0es at any rate, not the Lettres Provinc$;iales_it is hard to imagine him reading Rousseau. The French writer that he did turn to fairly often was Molie$1re,80 and it is possible to see why: Molie$1re's 79.p. 34. All these judgements are relative. By modern standards Wittgenstein was very well-read. Russell too (it should be remembered in what follows) had learnt and read French and German from earliest childhood. 80.See above p. 136 and Engelmann: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, pp. 4 and 68. Les Femmes savantes was the only French book among those he left at death. His favourite quotation from it was: "Un sot savant est sot, plus qu'un sot ignorant.' Engelmann's remark about French literature comes from a personal communication. 116 Wittgenstein: A Life epigrams emerge inevitably from the dramatic situation, in a favourite phrase of Wittgenstein's he "has the right' to make them. If we had only the quotations or if they were supported by analysis or theory, they would lose all their fittingness. While Russell was urging French prose, Wittgenstein tried to interest Russell in German poetry, "raving', as Russell put it, about Mo$3rike and leaving a volume in Russell's rooms (quite in the tradition of the Alleegasse). Russell eventually took to Mo$3rike when he heard some pieces read by Franziska von Hu$3gel, and Wittgenstein (a little surprised) then urged him to move on to Goethe, naturally not new to Russell but previously not appreciated by him. With more hope Wittgenstein found a copy of Lichtenberg's aphorisms (still in Russell's library) for his friend. It is hard for an English (and I suspect for a French) reader to understand the enthusiasm inspired by Lichtenberg. As with much German literature of the eighteenth century, the thought is sinewy enough but the starting-point is a little naive for one steeped, as Lord John Russell's grandson was, in literatures that became urbane rather earlier. The author seems to find it too much of a novelty that men, and especially learned men, can be fools, and his language seems to lack some resources of pointedness and irony so that the epigrams_aphorisms is in fact the better word_do not quite come off. With such exchanges of talismans, with the discussion of books, of men and women, of ideals and aspirations, each trying passionately to convince the other, Wittgenstein with more hope but less prospect, Russell with some parental tolerance, sitting back himself secure and enjoying the effect of Wittgenstein on his friends, they met each other's needs. Only gradually did Wittgenstein come to know Russell's friends and to make some of his own. His first term (Michaelmas 1911) was devoted, we have seen, to Russell and the philosophy of mathematics. During the next_his first official_term, he took a wider interest in philosophy and, apart from his coaching with Johnson, went to Moore's lectures on psychology. Wittgenstein's public appearances did not at first impress the young men: perhaps he was too inclined to raise fundamental objections (to a learner this can often seem like mere obstruction) and to recommend them by assertion rather than argument. Moore could be very fierce in discussion with any view which he saw, or thought he saw, to be nonsense but his opponents rarely took this (on reflection) as a personal affront. No doubt they sensed what his friends knew and his letters and diaries show, that he was the most modest of men, diffident about his own powers and the correctness of views he had been led to. Certainly he showed this feature of his character with Wittgenstein. He told Russell that he thought 117 4Cambridge 1911{-12 enormously highly of Wittgenstein's brains ... _says he always feels W. must be right when they disagree. He says during his lectures W. always looks frightfully puzzled, but nobody else does. (BR to OM 5.3.12) Not long afterwards Russell heard the other side: Wittgenstein ... said how much he loves Moore, how he likes and dislikes people for the way they think_Moore has one of the most beautiful smiles I know, and it had struck him. (BR to OM 16.3.12) Wittgenstein came often to Moore, usually after his lectures (which were on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 11), staying until "1{3' with a certain disregard for lunch. The lectures were discussed, Wittgenstein "discoursed' after Russell's lecture and brought Frege for Moore to read but Moore records,81 and his diaries of the time show, that their friendship became much closer in the next academic year, and it will be appropriate to give a fuller account of it under the events of that year. Some more or less external facts are however relevant here. At the beginning of 1912 Moore was 37, a year younger than Russell. After a classical education he turned to philosophy as an undergraduate at Trinity and stayed on as a Prize Fellow until 1904. These years saw his reaction against idealism, in which he influenced Russell and which we have described above principally in connexion with his article "On Judgment' of 1899. They were also the years of the composition of Principia Ethica (Moore was probably alone in preferring Ethics, which appeared in 1912). For seven years after this Moore, who had independent means, lived as a private scholar; during the first half of this time he was occupied, he tells us, in trying to understand Russell's Principles of Mathematics and in writing one or two papers. During the second half (immediately before the period of which we speak) he wrote the book on ethics already mentioned and a set of lectures now published as Some Main Problems of Philosophy. In 1911 he returned to Cambridge as University Lecturer in Moral Science and was thus in his second term of office when Wittgenstein attended his lectures. As a Past Fellow he was allowed to occupy rooms, though not a Fellow's rooms, in Trinity and he dined regularly in Hall. (Moore married in 1916 and became Professor, and a Fellow of Trinity again, in 1925.) Wittgenstein's letters to him suggest that he thought Moore in important ways more flexible and younger than Russell. Moore indeed always retained an unusual candour of speech and manner but in 1912 he was also young in appearance, stouter now, and rubicund, but still 81.In his "Autobiography' in The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (ed. P. Schilpp) 1942, reprinted in K.T. Fann: Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 39 and the Bibliography in the same volume. 118 Wittgenstein: A Life recalling the undergraduate who for some years fulfilled Russell's ideal of genius: He was in those days beautiful and slim, with a look almost of inspiration, and with an intellect as deeply passionate as Spinoza's. He had a kind of exquisite purity.82 Moore's influence on the young men and on the occasional revenant from those who had recently gone down was if anything stronger than Russell's. It is fair to assume that Moore's was the most powerful recommendation that led to Lytton Strachey (up from London) seeking Wittgenstein's acquaintance: through Russell naturally, for they re- garded him as Russell's prote$0ge$0: Then Lytton came to tea to meet Wittgenstein, which he wished to do. Everybody has just begun to discover Wittgenstein; they all now realize that he has genius. He was very good at tea. (BR to OM 2.5.12) This was the occasion when Wittgenstein's bias for philosophical scepticism struck Russell. Strachey's visit had a particular purpose: Somebody had been telling them [Lytton, Gerald Shove (later a well-known economist), and Sheppard (later Provost of King's)] about Wittgenstein and they wanted to hear what I thought of him. They were thinking of electing him to the Society. I told them I didn't think he would like the Society. I am quite sure he wouldn't really. It would seem to him stuffy, as indeed it has become, owing to their practice of being in love with each other, which didn't exist in my day_I think it is mainly due to Lytton. (BR to OM, further letter 2.5.12) Russell too had been a member of the Society, an Apostle, like Moore (and indeed Whitehead and MacTaggart) but it seemed to him to have changed for the worse since his undergraduate days, and not only in the respect mentioned: We were still Victorian; they were Edwardian. We believed in ordered progress by means of politics and free discussion. The more self-confident among us may have hoped to be leaders of the multitude, but none of us wished to be divorced from it. The generation of Keynes and Lytton did not seek to preserve any kinship with the Philistine. They aimed rather at a life of retirement among fine shades and nice feelings, and conceived of the good as consisting in the passionate mutual admirations of a clique of 82.Autobiography, vol. ~I, p. 64. It is interesting that it was Wittgenstein who replaced Moore as Russell's pattern of genius: "He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G.E. Moore' (ibid. vol. 2, pp. 98{-9). 119 4Cambridge 1911{-12 the elite. This doctrine, quite unfairly, they fathered upon G.E. Moore, whose disciples they professed to be.83 Wittgenstein was to hear more of the Society later. For the moment he was being looked over and drawn out by a figure legendary at Cambridge and in London already at the centre of the literary and artistic circle known as Bloomsbury. It says much for Strachey's tact that Wittgenstein, who was not easily impressed, did take the trouble to shine at that first tea-party. Strachey's first two comments provide an example of that fluctuation in Wittgenstein between brilliance and apparent dullness which Russell had already observed: Herr Sinckel-Winckel lunches with me, quiet little man. (LS to JMK 5.5.12). Keynes himself did not meet Wittgenstein until October. But another opportunity for philosophical conversation occurred on an evening in the rooms of Strachey's brother Oliver: Oliver and Herr Sinckel-Winckel hard at it on universals and particulars. The latter oh! so bright_but quelle souffrance! Oh God! God! "If A loves B'_"There may be a common quality'_"Not analysable in that way at all, but the complexes have certain qualities.' How shall I manage to slink off to bed? (LS to JMK 17.5.12)84 The second passage refers perhaps to the same occasion, certainly to the same day as that on which Wittgenstein held the floor at one of Russell's "evenings': Wittgenstein maintained the paradox that mathematics would improve people's taste because taste comes of thinking honestly_we were all against him. (BR to OM 17.5.12) We shall see that Wittgenstein much preferred the older members of the Society (angels as they were called) to the unlicked undergraduates, and Strachey was certainly one of the most active of these older members, but he could not join in the general admiration of Strachey's work_witness his comment on Landmarks in French Literature [Wittgenstein] had been reading Lytton's little book, which he didn't like_he said it made an impression of effort, like the gasps of an asthmatic person. I got out the book, but couldn't see what he meant. (BR to OM 23.4.13) 83.Autobiography, vol. ~I, pp. 70{-1. 84.Then an undergraduate. 120 Wittgenstein: A Life Wittgenstein was to be drawn more into the circles of the Society and Bloomsbury, but for the present he had made another friend from the fringes of that circle. David Hume Pinsent, a collateral descendant of the philosopher Hume, had been an embryo (a person considered for the Society) in 1911, but had in the event not been elected. He at first read mathematics but later studied law. He was the son of a musical and cultivated family in Birmingham. His mother, later well-known in her long widowhood as the social campaigner Dame Ellen Pinsent, was the daughter of a clergyman and had written a number of improving novels (one in fact is little more than a temperance tract), rather in the spirit of Fritz Reuter. Pinsent himself was an unaffected and likeable young man with what passed for a good education and rather more than the usual taste for music. He had a wide circle of friends and made himself welcome everywhere by a generous and lively enthusiasm for the interests of others, usually having something amusing but unsatirical to say. He kept an open and unself-conscious diary (to judge from the extracts concerning his unusual friend); the personality suggested by it is of a type familiar to all who have read letters and youthful productions from that more than decimated generation of English public schoolboys and undergraduates. We should perhaps read them with different eyes if the young men had grown old. As things are, Pinsent seems to us (no doubt he seemed to Wittgenstein, who had much wider experience and much keener nerves than he) young, enthusiastic, not conventional but still somehow proper, his aspirations and judgements unquestioned, and none the less genuine for that; in short, very English, as Englishness was then understood. This undoubtedly was part of what attracted Wittgen- stein, at that time an admirer of much in English patterns of behaviour and personal relations. It was only human nature that he occasionally saw in his adopted country and in his friend defects associated with those virtues, while it was his own individual almost morbid sensitivity that made him feel and express this distaste so strongly. Naturally, also, he was sometimes right and sometimes wrong in detecting traces of the unfeelingness or hypocrisy of a certain stereotype in this particular product of a cultivated and progressive upper-middle class family with its Low Church roots, a family with something of the atmosphere of the Schlegels of Howard's End. Three instances will perhaps illustrate the sort of conversation this gave rise to: Wittgenstein and I had an animated discussion on public schools_ eventually getting quite angry with each other until we found we had both misunderstood the other. He has an enormous horror of what he calls a "Philistine' attitude towards cruelty and suffering_any callous attitude_ and accuses Kipling of such: and he got the idea that I sympathized with it. (Diary 12.9.12) 121 4Cambridge 1911{-12 Wittgenstein has been talking a lot, at different times, about "Philistines' _a name he gives to all people he dislikes! I think some of the views I have expressed struck him as a bit philistine (views_that is_on practical things (not on philosophy)_for instance on the advantage of this age over past ages and so forth), and he is rather puzzled because he does not consider me really a Philistine_and I don't think he dislikes me! He satisfies himself by saying that I shall think differently as soon as I am a bit older! (Diary 19.9.12) We talked about Woman's suffrage: he is very much against it_for no particular reason except that "all the women he knows are such idiots'. He said that at Manchester University the girl students spend all their time flirting with the professors. Which disgusts him very much_as he dislikes half-measures of all sorts, and disapproves of anything not deadly in earnest. Yet in these days, when marriage is not possible till the age of about 30_no one is earning enough till then_and when illegitimate marriages are not approved of_what else is there to do but philander. (Diary 7.2.13)85 Pinsent's reaction to these occasional disagreements (which we can be sure were conducted with some vigour on Wittgenstein's side) gives a clue to his success in establishing a deep friendship with Wittgenstein. The quality that counted was not yieldingness and malleability (though it was important that Pinsent had an open mind and was prepared to learn about human beings and particularly about himself) but on the contrary the strength and the confidence that he showed inside the relationship. Much later Wittgenstein said in one of the code passages in his notebooks, "In love, what counts for most is courage.' This is what Pinsent had, that enabled him to accept the intensity that Wittgenstein brought to their friendship, observing without resentment the cycles in the mood of his difficult friend, not managing him but reacting frankly, not necessarily calmly but without ill-will or jealousy, remembering the good qualities and agreeable aspects when they were least apparent. We had a long discussion about plans for tomorrow: I wanted to go straight back to Reykjavik and he to stay a day here and go on Wednesday: at first I gave in to him and said we would stay here two nights: but he got very worried about my concession (eventually we hit upon the compromise we actually carried out: he is morbidly afraid of my giving in just "to get a little peace' and so forth: of course that was not my motive: I did so as a favour to him and in order not to be selfish: I think I persuaded him so in the end. (Diary 23.9.12) On the train we had to change our seats at the last moment because he insisted on being alone from other tourists. Then a very genial Englishman came along and talked to me and finally insisted on our coming into his 85.Passages from the diary are quoted by kind permission of the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge. 122 Wittgenstein: A Life carriage to smoke_as ours was a non-smoker. Witt. refused to move, and of course I had to go for a short time at least_it would have been violently rude to refuse. I came back as soon as I could and found him in an awful state. I made some remark about the Englishman being a weird person_whereat he turned and said "I could travel the whole way with him if I pleased'. And then I had it all out with him and finally brought him round to a normal and genial frame of mind. I had been meaning to have it out all the morning_I can always reconcile things with him when I get a chance of being frank and open_but one trivial circumstance after another had made it impossible. When I did get the opportunity, we made it up in ten minutes. He is a chaotic person. (Diary 2.9.13) These are examples of what Pinsent, with a rare discrimination, was able to treat as unimportant. Of course such scenes might derive from a feeling of Wittgenstein's that the friendship was more important to himself than to Pinsent_the latter of the two certainly originated in one of Wittgenstein's outbursts ("we had got on splendidly so far, hadn't we?') to which Pinsent, though he had been thinking exactly the same thing, was too shy to give more than a flippant answer. Behind the shyness were youth and Englishness, not any doubt about his true feelings, so that his explanations to Wittgenstein of what caused tension when they were together for long_his own occasional irritability or Wittgenstein's occasional fussiness_had a weight and sincerity and hence an effect that no conventional smoothing-over of difficulties could have had. Moreover he was sorry for his friend, not irritated with him, when some mood that Wittgenstein himself would regret took him out of what Pinsent recognized or regarded as his normal frame of mind. "These sulky fits of his, I am afraid, distress him very much.' Naturally he found Wittgenstein different from his other friends ("he is if anything a little mad'), but this did not encroach on his awareness of the charm, the cleverness, the affection, the concern that Wittgenstein showed him. It is worth dwelling on these difficulties of adjustment because they reappear in the majority of Wittgenstein's close friendships and figure perhaps excessively in the impression of his personality that has become general. Certainly he demanded much of a friendship. Everything must come from the heart, difficulties must not be swept under the carpet, differences of opinion and of taste must be explored_like nuances of conduct towards third persons they might reveal important divergences in value judgements. In any case they were the stuff of life, they were what a friendship would have to be about. The ideal is not uncommon. Everyone would want to agree with St. Augustine that "a friend is one with whom one may dare to share the counsels of one's heart'.86 But many things stand in the way of attempting to put it into practice_the desire for comfort, a disinclination to reveal parts of oneself that one is 86.Peter Brown, Augustine, p. 10: perhaps de div. qq. 83. 71. 6. 123 4Cambridge 1911{-12 ashamed of, above all a lack of that courage we have spoken of. Wittgenstein himself faced not less of these difficulties than usual but more, being exceptionally sensitive to unworthy impulses in himself and others and at the same time persuaded that only a spontaneous life was worth living. There were bound to be outbursts on his side which required both robustness and understanding from his friends: Pinsent showed these qualities, Keynes too when Wittgenstein misinterpreted a slight tension betwen them.87 Russell and Moore, we shall see, differed, Russell proving able to deal with the first outburst but later moving away from Wittgenstein, Moore being shattered by the first serious rift but later overcoming many differences. High though the demands thus were, it is important to see that they were an essential part of what made friendship with him worthwhile. The sort of completely sincere discussion of one's own and others' life that seemed to open his friends' eyes to new aspects of life, or perhaps more accurately seemed to bring them back into touch with a reality they had almost forgotten, could not be lightly engaged in or lightly dropped. (Much later he was to say to Malcolm not only that trying to think honestly about your own and other people's lives was often both nasty and important but also that the attempt to do so in the frame of a friendship was likely to lead to clashes.)88 It would be absurd to think of Wittgenstein as a saint (though his sister Mining did so for a while) but his friends could see that he had the idea of perfection in every area, in the serious matters of everyday life, in his work, or in the choice of a handkerchief for a present. Especially he wanted it in his friendships, and nearly all his friends reacted to this as to a kind of revelation, even if (perhaps for good reasons) they did not continue to live in this way and even if they had at times to suffer from his impatience at his own or their inability whether to be perfect or to have the right attitude (as he conceived it) towards one's own imperfection. Usually they felt as Pinsent did that their ideas on all sorts of subjects had been reconstructed. The two first met at one of Russell's "crushes'. They fell in with one another again at a concert "including a very fine piano trio of Schubert's' on 4 May. Schubert was in fact the chief of their shared tastes. Pinsent would play arrangements on the piano_on one occasion an arrange- ment for four hands with his sister. The two friends would borrow music from the Musical Union and take it to Pinsent's rooms. Eventually they developed a method of performing Schubert songs, Pinsent playing and Wittgenstein whistling (the truth and expressiveness of his whistling were often commented on). In this way, on holiday, they learnt 40 or 50 songs. 87.See LW to JMK of May 1929 and Keynes's reply, JMK to LW 26.5.29, under K.21 in Letters to Russell etc. 88.Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, pp. 39{-40. 124 Wittgenstein: A Life Of all musical tastes that for Schubert requires least explanation. We have scattered comments of Wittgenstein: in one he draws attention (with his fondness for physiognomy) in accounts of music to the particular way in which Schubert was an Austrian: Bruckner's music has no trace of the long and narrow (nordic?) face of Nestroy, Grillparzer, Haydn etc but has quite simply a full, rounded (alpine?) face of a yet purer type than Schubert's.89 He spoke too of a feature that made Schubert particularly suitable for this sort of performance: One can say of Schubert's melodies that they are full of turns of thought, which one cannot say of Mozart's. Schubert is baroque. One can indicate certain places in a Schubert melody and say "You see, that is the point of his melody, that is where the idea reaches its apex.'90 An example of one of these pointes or turns occurs in the last two bars of the theme of "Death and the maiden': One is liable to think at first that this figure is conventional, commonplace _until one understands what it more profoundly expresses; i.e. until one understands that here the commonplace is filled with significance.91 The commonplace filled with significance_it might alone express Wittgenstein's ideal, but Schubert attracted him also for another reason, in which the ethical and the aesthetic were intertwined: the contrast of the misery of his life and the absence of all trace of it in his music, the absence of all bitterness. Schubert was an old love of Pinsent's; and Beethoven, of course. Brahms_it seems strange today_was comparatively unknown to him: a concert the friends went to in London was the first time he had heard the First Symphony. Another time, in Birmingham with Pinsent's family, the two heard a festival concert conducted by Henry Wood_Brahms's Requiem. Wittgenstein had heard it often but never enjoyed it more. Then, after lunch: The second half of the concert began with two selections from Strauss's Salome: Wittgenstein refused to go in for them, and stayed outside till the Beethoven, which followed. He went out after that and went back to Lordswood by himself. 89.1931, Culture and Value, p. 22 (my translation). 90.10 August 1946, Culture and Value, p. 47 (my translation). 91.24 September 1946, Culture and Value, p. 52 (my translation). 125 4Cambridge 1911{-12 The Salome was rot, but very clever and amusing in consequence. (Diary 4.10.12) Wittgenstein was, of course, the more fastidious of the two: hardly older, he already knew what he could tolerate. As for leaving early (before the Bach!), it was like him, who listened so intensely, to avoid too rich a musical feast. In Cambridge the two went often together or separately (for both had other friends) to concerts of the Musical Club or Union, usually classical chamber music performed by semi-professionals. Through Pinsent Wittgenstein met "musical undergraduates' who would defend "modern music'_heaven knows what they meant, perhaps an amalgam of Richard Strauss and Mahler and Rutland Boughton, certainly not the atonal music already burgeoning in Vienna. At any rate Wittgenstein and Pinsent opposed it vigorously. The only modern music we hear of Wittgenstein favouring at this time was the chamber music, closely based on classical models, of Josef Labor, the blind organist, a prote$0ge$0 of his family. In Vienna they arranged a concert for the old man in the Musikverein and saw to it that seats were filled and applause swelled by friends and even gardeners. Now in Cambridge Wittgenstein tried to arrange for Labor's string quintet to be played. Numerous discussions were held and possible performers expressed some interest, but in the end the project ran into the sand. If Wittgenstein had stayed in Cambridge longer ... but perhaps it is better regarded as one of several plans taken up and abandoned by him during these years, which were, after all, those of his youth. Another interest of Wittgenstein's that brought him and Pinsent together was his work at the time in psychology: Pinsent, perhaps because he was musical, was enlisted practically on first meeting as a subject for Wittgenstein's experiments. These were golden years for experimental psychology in Cambridge. F.C. Bartlett, Miss E. Smith (later Lady Bartlett), and C.A. Mace were among the young researchers. C.S. Myers had moved the department from cottage rooms to a building of its own, and now, in 1912, a new laboratory was being built. (It is typical of the social and economic conditions of the time that Myers could and did contribute as well as collect money for its building_ perhaps also that Myers was Jewish.) Moreover, the researchers, and Myers in particular, were free, in the infancy of their subject and the ample atmosphere of those days, to pursue questions of theoretical or human interest with very little concern for practical applications or even for the likelihood of quick results. The war was to scatter them and to concern them with shell shock and industrial psychology and intelligence tests. But for the moment not Myers alone but Pear (in Manchester) and Valentine and Muscio devoted much time to the psychology of music, whether to the study of its development in what were then called 126 Wittgenstein: A Life primitive societies or to the analysis of musical appreciation among the inhabitants of Cambridge or Wu$3rzburg. The youthful British Journal of Psychology abounds with articles on the localization of sound, on the perception of tone differences, on synaesthesia, on individual differences in musical appreciation, and so on. Myers himself contributed studies of primitive music to the Journal and to a number of expedition reports and anthropological collections. Here two interests conspired: he had been intensely musical from early youth and after his training as a physiologist he had at first devoted himself to physical anthropology. His study of the special senses among primitive peoples revealed, after much care, little difference from what could be found in laboratories in Europe and America_though his successor and obituarist F.C. Bartlett believed that a subtler statistical analysis would have revealed interesting divergences.92 Such differences in musical discrimination as he found seem to be fairly easily explicable: where differences in tone are the important element, absolute pitch seems to be much more widespread than in our society; where rhythm predominates, the primitives show a remarkable ability "to regard many successively different intervals of time as a co-ordinated whole_as a phrase'. The change in direction of Myers's interests after the war prevented him from bringing this work to a conclusion, had it even been possible, but the general view of the development of music that emerged from his researches and perhaps in some measure from his preconceptions was the attractive one that none of the existing unitary explanations of its origin was exhaustive. There was a parallel with language, but probably it was better to think that both language and music developed out of a more primitive system of communication. Besides, in its rhythmical aspect, music was connected with bodily movements and activities, though this connexion too was inadequate to explain the whole of it. The same considerations applied to the sexual explanation of music. All this was before ethnomusicology and the heightened awareness of the different social role of music_and of different kinds of music_in different societies. The main application that Myers could make of the study of primitive music was the isolation of the various factors in music appreciation as we know it, chief among them the perception of pitch and pitch-difference, of rhythm, and of Musikgestaltqualita$3t_the property of being musically meaningful, of constituting a phrase or tune. This last distinguishes music from mere noise and Myers describes interesting cases of loss of the sense for it_sometimes by highly musical people, who could still distinguish all the differences in what they heard but were unable to hear it as music.93 92.ONFRS 5 (1945{-8) 772. 93.See, for example, Myers's "The Beginnings of Music' in Essays Presented to W.M. Ridgeway (Cambridge, 1913) and the chapter on music in his In the Realm of Mind (Cambridge, 1937). 127 4Cambridge 1911{-12 Wittgenstein's acquaintance with Myers and his interest in all this is easily explained. He would meet Myers in the musical world of Cambridge or in the Moral Sciences Club: perhaps he heard in early February the talk Myers gave on Primitive Music, in the course of which Myers sang some of the pieces he had brought back. And the subject was one that always exercised Wittgenstein, particularly the analogy to be found between music and language, or more exactly between a musical theme or idea (in German Gedanke, or thought) and a proposition or sentence: Musical themes are in a certain sense propositions. And so the recognition of the essence of logic will lead to the recognition of the essence of music. (Notebooks 7.2.15) A melody is a sort of tautology, it is self-contained, it satisfies itself. (Notebooks 4.3.15) and in the Tractatus: A proposition is not a medley of words. _(Just as a theme in music is not a medley of notes.) A proposition is articulated. (TLP 3.141) The parallel with language, the appeal to logic or grammar, remained one (though only one) of his most constant ways of talking about music. It was a way of thinking particularly characteristic, for example, of Labor_Wittgenstein tells us that when Labor played, people used to say, "He is speaking!' and that Labor himself would talk of musical thoughts as being crumpled and not fit for use any more. Wittgenstein came to think the analogy less important and applicable only to some music, not to all (he mentioned that it applied to Bach more than to Beethoven or Mozart), but at this time_perhaps because he was then, even more than later, dominated by the thought of the single musical tradition to which he belonged_it is the aspect of music most often referred to in his writings. It is only a speculation, though a probable one, that the questions of aesthetics that lay behind his psychological experiments were connected with this. Muscio, who collaborated with him, died young, and Myers's detailed work on music, in the framework of which his experiments were conceived, never reached the point of publication. Those experiments were on rhythm and the sort of result achieved was a determination of conditions under which subjects heard or read into a sequence of beats a rhythm which was not in fact there. The phenomenon of subjective accentuation occurs very obviously when a regularly functioning metro- nome is heard as striking groups of beats. The conditions may be varied 128 Wittgenstein: A Life by placing the metronome in a box, raising the lid unobserved by the subject, and comparing the beats thus stressed with those heard as stressed by the subject.94 Pinsent records many hours of experiments and mentions conversations too in which rhythm was discussed. The project was a cement for their friendship. As for what it revealed about the grammar or logic of music, it seems to have been, like Myers's own work, suggestive and promising but not easily capable of a rigorous develop- ment. Perhaps that is what psychology ought to be like. At any rate it ranked as professional work and, when the British Psychological Society met at Cambridge in July 1912, Wittgenstein gave what he described to Russell as "a most absurd paper on rhythms'.95 He also gave a demonstration "of an apparatus for psychological investigation of rhythm' at the ceremonial opening of the new laboratory for experimen- tal psychology in May 1913.96 So he retained some interest in the project in that academic year although Pinsent mentions no more experiments. Pinsent, the keen photographer, thought it unwise of Wittgenstein to have no hobbies, but in fact psychology was his hobby. He did not think of it as having any connexion with his work, which he called logic (at this time "philosophical' was almost a word of abuse in his mouth). He seems to have attempted to explain this point to Myers: I had a discussion with Myers about the relations between Logic and Psychology. I was very candid and I am sure he thinks that I am the most arrogant devil who ever lived. Poor Mrs. Myers who was also present got_I think_quite wild about me. However, I think he was a bit less confused after the discussion than before. (LW to BR 22.6.12) Other hobbies_or other pastimes_were to come later. For the moment (Easter term 1912) Pinsent and Wittgenstein met in the context of the experiments, of concerts, of tea taken together, and the like. Wittgenstein, with this friend, moved in the direction of a normal undergraduate's life. He was prepared (a tribute to his friend) to go to Chapel when Pinsent read the lesson, and we later hear of his attending a Union Society Debate in his company. Pinsent may have been wrong about Wittgenstein's lack of interests outside his work but he was right about the loneliness which he supposed to result from it. Wittgenstein still needed a friend, someone with whom he could spend a long time together. Russell did not satisfy this need; his 94.This technique is described in C.S. Myers. Another method he described is that of tightening the elastic with which hammers are held so as to produce tones louder. Wittgenstein was very interested in the mechanics of experiments like these: one may instance his considerable ingenuity as a laboratory technician in the Second World War. 95.LW to BR 1.7.12. The British Journal of Psychology records it as "Experiment on Rhythm (Demonstration), L. Wittgenstein and B. Muscio (Introduced by C.S. Myers)'. 96.BR to OM, 15.7.13. There is also a message to Muscio (presumably still in connexion with the project) in a letter to Moore of 1914. 129 4Cambridge 1911{-12 attention and affections were too divided, his character was perhaps too firmly set: for all his capacity for enthusiasm he was not, in the end, a person whose life and values Wittgenstein could take part in shaping. Pinsent was a quite different case and Wittgenstein recognized it immediately: He suddenly asked what I was doing during the vac: and proposed that I should come with him to Iceland. After my first surprise I asked what he estimated the cost would be: upon which he said_"Oh, that doesn't matter: I have no money and you have no money_at least, if you have, it doesn't matter. But my father has a lot'_upon which he proposed that his father should pay for us both! ... I have known Wittgenstein only for three weeks or so_but we seem to get on well together... (Pinsent's diary for 31 May 1912) Pinsent's inclination was to go, and his parents sensibly supported it, so the trip was fixed for the coming September. Wittgenstein stayed on in Cambridge, after term, until the middle of July. Russell was away from Cambridge for the month of June and we owe to this fact the first three of Wittgenstein's letters to him. Distracted though he was by his paper on rhythms, Wittgenstein was working on the foundations of logic. It is likely that the comparative isolation of these few weeks (for Pinsent too was away for most of June) made them particularly fruitful for Wittgenstein. What remains from them in writing is the pregnant discussion we have already quoted (p. 81 above) which leads to the remark that there are no logical constants_the fundamental idea of the Tractatus; and a suggestion that general propositions have meaning only in the context of inferences leading to propositions about individuals. In time he came to see or think that the problems of logic were not those of dealing with a special subject-matter, say connectives between propositions or the notions of generality, but were present already in the simplest proposition. But his thoughts, that June, were also on other matters: Whenever I have time I now read James's "Varieties of religious experience'. This book does me a lot of good. I don't mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much: namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge (in the sense in which Goethe used the word in the Second Part of Faust). (LW to BR 22.6.12) Apart from the psychological meeting on the 13th of July there were two further external events that affected Wittgenstein before his departure. The first was a visit from his sister Hermine. "Would you 130 Wittgenstein: A Life mind me introducing her to you?' he wrote to Russell. "She ought to see everything worth seeing!' They came to lunch and stayed to tea. She is not at all fatal [Russell wrote_alluding no doubt to what he had anticipated]_older than he is, and very plain, pleasant but not exciting. It was rather uphill work at times_I think she was rather shy. At last he and I fell to arguing as if she were not there. She says he is quite different since he came to Cambridge_so much happier; she feels it is the right place for him. (BR to OM 10.7.12) She was, in fact, deeply impressed: she had great loyalty and respect for those who had helped her brother and Russell always seemed to her one who had come along at the right time for Luki. Ludwig and I were invited to tea in Russell's beautiful College room. I can still see it in my mind's eye, with its huge bookcases covering all the walls and its tall, old-fashioned windows with their finely proportioned stone cross-work. Suddenly Russell said to me "We expect the next big step in philosophy to be taken by your brother.' Hearing that was something so extraordinary and incredible for me, that for a moment I became literally dizzy. Ludwig was fifteen years younger than me and, despite his being twenty-three, I still thought of him as simply a young man, a learner. Small wonder that I never forgot that moment.97 It was from this time, it seems, that his family's belief in his distinction dates: his powers they knew already_how he could dissect and criticize unerringly. His earliest surviving letter (1908 or before, to judge from the hand) contained absolutely confident instructions to this very sister on how to draw. They knew too how quickly he could grasp the principles of some new subject-matter. What had been lacking was concentration, an interest that would absorb all his powers, and an indication that he would produce something of his own. They now had some asssurance of all of this, and it followed naturally that Ludwig was happier. In his diaries and letters it is usually by ability or inability to work that Wittgenstein measures happiness and unhappiness. In this he was very obviously his father's son, only for him (imaginatively if not theoretical- ly) logical concepts and operations had the same reality as furnaces and girders and engines, and a day's work was done by reshaping or rearranging these in his mind or in his pocket-notebook. He was like his father too in finding his way through a number of occupations and interests, completing none in the regular way, but taking from each what he needed, and starting the career of his maturity at the age of 23. (Karl was in fact a year older when he went to Ternitz.) 97.Familienerinnerungen, p. 108. The phrase about the next step in philosophy also occurs in a wartime letter from Russell to Wittgenstein's mother. 131 4Cambridge 1911{-12 Russell's tribute at such an age was perhaps even more surprising than Hermine Wittgenstein thought. To be accepted so young not as a promising young man but as a guide, to have written a major work before the age of 30, these have been the lot of few philosophers. Descartes's dream, to be sure, occurred when he was 24, but it was suppressed for at least nine years. Even the prodigies, Leibniz and Mill, produced their philosophical work mostly late in life. Of early beginners Hume and Schopenhauer, perhaps even Berkeley, received less recog- nition at first than Wittgenstein. The second event of these weeks was Wittgenstein's choice of a room for the following year. He could now move into college and, for some reason now obscure, Moore wished to or was prepared to move from the rooms (not Fellow's rooms) given him on his return to Cambridge.98 The transfer was arranged early in July. K.10 in Whewell's Court_they were situated at the top of a Victorian gothic tower at the furthest end from the main college of a complex of buildings (two narrow quadrangles, they seem, connected lengthwise) across Trinity Street from the main college. Here at the quiet limit of the college, in it but not completely of it, Wittgenstein could live privately and impersonally looking out away from the college over the streets of small shops and lodging houses towards the river landscape. Later, when he became a Fellow, still more when he returned as a Professor, he could have obtained rooms like those of Russell that impressed his sister, rooms where Newton may have lived, near the glory of the Wren Library, but each time he preferred to return to this less than prepossessing dark tower, to climb all the steps, and to live in these comparatively narrow rooms without the comforts_the bathroom, for example_that his age and health would have demanded. Some of this taste for the Spartan and uncomfortable was a later development, but the liking for small, narrow, and manageable quarters seems always to have been his and, as for life in a tower, we find him attempting to do the same thing at Olmu$3tz in 1916, acting out, perhaps, his impulses towards withdrawal and isolation. At all events these Cambridge rooms were the nearest thing to a home that he had for many years. He left at his death a few mementoes, and of the very few relating not to his friends but to himself, one was a little snapshot of this tower. The room arranged, he went out with Pinsent (now back in Cambridge) to view furniture at various shops. The expedition was amusing but not altogether fruitful, since Wittgenstein exclaimed "No! Beastly!' at ninety percent of what the shopman showed them. It was the same when he resumed his shopping in London in September: the first day he bought nothing at all. He disliked all ornamentation that was not 98.Curiously enough Moore moved back into these same rooms when Wittgenstein vacated them a year later. 132 Wittgenstein: A Life part of the construction and could find nothing simple enough. Eventually he had most of the furniture specially made for him_"rather quaint but not bad,' Pinsent thought. The best materials were used and numerous modifications were carried out_in March 1913 he was replacing the white marble top of a sideboard with one in black marble, specially cut and polished in London. Simplicity has in modern times become an expensive luxury. It does not seem that the subordination of design to function, in the sense of intended use, would be an accurate description of Wittgenstein's tastes. These were connected, very typically for him, with his views on the value of abstract education. He used to say that mathematics would promote good taste, "since good taste is genuine taste and therefore is furthered by whatever makes people think truthfully'.99 Speaking to Russell he emphasized construction as the decisive feature. A thing must be fully the thing it was: and life must go on around it in the way appropriate to that. Thus Eccles's bed, as we have already seen,100 was not to have rollers_it was to be a thing around which people moved, and this would have to include whoever did the cleaning. Similar features appear later in his architectural work_for example the centrally or symmetrically placed light-bulbs giving an even illumination, impersonal, not carefully adapted to some special need or preference of the user.101 For his Cambridge rooms, he chose porcelain beakers bought from a medical supplier or laboratory outfitter in London instead of cups, "because they look so much nicer_but they are less convenient!' said Pinsent. His room had at least one Prunkstu$3ck, a large, almost square dining table, seating eight. It was made of peculiarly dark sombre mahogany with ornate carved Victorian legs. This later became Russell's possession, when he bought the books and furniture Wittgenstein had left in England. Conrad Russell recalls that it was used only on state occasions_so that his parents would discuss whether to dine on "Wittgenstein'.102 Wittgenstein left for Vienna on 15 July. In April he had been to the Austrian Embassy in London to be examined for military service: a rupture had been discovered (he had had it before) and it was decided that an operation was necessary. He planned to have it now immediately on his arrival in Vienna, though the circumstances were far from favourable: He tells me his other sister (not the one I saw) [Gretl is the sister meant] has been very ill with a baby, his father has had cancer for 2 years and has 99.BR to OM, 17.5.12. "A very fine theory,' Russell said, "but facts don't bear it out.' 100.p. 67. 101.See Bernard Leitner: The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 99{-101. 102.I am indebted to Mr Conrad Russell for this description of the table. Russell's letters mention that the table was so big that during a move it had to be brought in through the window. Lady Katharine Tait tells me that Wittgenstein's bed has turned up in the attic of her mother, Dora Russell's house. 133 4Cambridge 1911{-12 been operated seven times and suffers intolerably; his mother, who feels everything very intensely, hardly knows where to be or what to do; she doesn't know he [Ludwig] is to be operated and he dreads the moment of her being told; he says she never thinks a moment about herself or has any pleasure except through others_except music, but she never goes to hear music. (BR to OM 15.7.12) In the event, the case was even worse. Wittgenstein's father was just about to have another operation, and Ludwig felt he could not give his family the worry of an operation on him too. It would have been impossible to have the proper operation performed secretly, so instead he had a minor, temporary operation performed secretly. Ludwig divided the summer between his father's estate, the Hochreith, and the house of his uncle Paul Wittgenstein at Hallein near Salzburg. It was, despite the circumstances, a happy time. He was quite well again, "philosophizing for all he was worth,' he told Russell. The weather was excellent and he could do most of his thinking in the open air: There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the true problems of Philosophy.103 He was often to find these familiar surroundings and the absence of strangers and acquaintances whose personalities might grate on him a help to work. It was also noticeable throughout his life that while discussion helped him and was indeed essential for him, its results really appeared and he made most progress when he had a prolonged period for solitary reflection. Such reflection might well take place out of doors, for his habit was to make notes, to formulate his ideas in epigrammatic sentences or questions in a pocket-notebook or on slips of paper and to transfer them later into a larger notebook. His work now concentrated on the logical constants, the fundamental concepts which form the subject-matter of logic. For the moment he was concerned with what he called apparent variables, that is to say with the notion of generality, and with propositional connectives such as "v', ".' and "' (roughly equivalent to "or', "and', and "only if' in ordinary language). Together with negation and identity, these constitute the primitive ideas of Whitehead and Russell's logic and that logic may be regarded as the science that consists of all and only the propositions that are true in virtue of the character of these primitive ideas.104 The question is, however, what is the "logical' truth that these propositions possess? What 103.Letter 4 in Briefe (1980). 104.It is assumed here that the notion of existence (the fulfilment of a propositional function by some arguments) can be defined in terms of generality (fulfilment of a propositional function by all arguments) together with negation. If not all men are mortal, then a mortal man exists. 134 Wittgenstein: A Life makes these primitive ideas a unified and not an arbitrary collection? What is their character, in virtue of which the propositions of logic are true? Wittgenstein was trying to find some theory of symbolism which would answer these questions. His letters to Russell mention one or two false starts (as they later proved), but his general conclusion was one that turned out to be extremely fruitful. I believe that our problems can be traced down to the atomic propositions. This you will see if you try to explain precisely in what way the Copula in such a proposition has meaning. I cannot explain it and I think that as soon as an exact answer to this question is given the problems of "v' and of the apparent variable will be brought very near their solution if not solved. I therefore now think about "Socrates is human.' (Good old Socrates!)105 "Their problems' were those of discovering the nature of logical truth_or, as they would have put it at the time, of defining what sort of complexes corresponded to logical propositions. We have seen (pp. 81 and 129 above) that Wittgenstein felt that their peculiarity was not that they contained some special constituents, the logical constants, but something else. Various candidates presented themselves, and Russell and Wittgen- stein spent much time discussing whether the notion of logical form would provide the necessary explanation. In these summer letters from Austria Wittgenstein first suggests that the answer may lie not in some special feature of the complexes corresponding to logical propositions but in the nature of any propositional complex. The tone of his letters is so positive and his pleasure in the progress of his work so evident that it seems necessary to read the postscript to that of 16 August, "I feel like mad', as an expression of the feverish intensity of his intellectual work rather than as evincing any real distress. He seems to have been free for the time being from that feeling of the worthlessness of all his endeavours, the pointlessness of life, the Sorge he wrote about from Cambridge, and it was at this period that he reported to Russell the strong effect exercised upon him by Hadji Murat, which we have already commented on.106 The letter in which Wittgenstein did so was written from Hallein, where Wittgenstein was staying with his uncle Paul. Paul Wittgenstein was the eldest son of Hermann Christian. He had given up his legal studies to manage estates for his father and had in fact continued his father's career. This he did efficiently, but without enthusiasm. That he reserved for his own painting and for the works of the Sezession, of which he was a notable patron. Tasteful, well-dressed, and (in his youth) 105.LW to BR [summer 1912], letter 7 in Briefe (1980). (This letter is evidently the one received by Russell on 2 September.) 106.Letter 7 again. On Hadji Murat see p. 33 above. 135 4Cambridge 1911{-12 handsome, he was a quick-tempered but warm-hearted man, much freer in his life and easier and more approachable in his manner than most of his brothers and sisters. He was a particular support to Karl's family in the distressing years of Karl's last illness and probably took steps to remove Ludwig for a while from the tense atmosphere, as it was then bound to be, of the Hochreith. There are other instances of his keeping a fatherly eye on his nephew and of his being alive to inner difficulties which had escaped the eyes of other members of the family, who accepted a quite high level of tension as normal. Besides, Ludwig's devotion to philosophy had caught his rather romantic fancy and he wished to encourage him in every way. From Austria Wittgenstein returned to England for a few days in early September, to do further shopping for his Cambridge rooms before setting out on his holiday. He stayed in Russell's flat in Bury St., the first house-guest. Russell was impressed anew by Wittgenstein's powers: He is a great contrast to the Stephens and Stracheys and such would-be geniuses. We very soon plunged into logic and have had great arguments. He has a very great power of seeing what are really important problems. (BR to OM 4.9.12) Russell urged him not to put off writing until he had solved all the problems, because that time would never come: This produced a wild outburst_he has the artist's feeling that he will produce the perfect thing or nothing_I explained how he wouldn't get a degree or be able to teach unless he learnt to write imperfect things_this all made him more and more furious_at last he solemnly begged me not to give him up even if he disappointed me. (BR to OM 5.9.12) Only Wittgenstein's health seemed to Russell precarious: he gave one the feeling that his life was very insecure. And Russell thought (there was surely no physiological basis for this) that Wittgenstein was going deaf. Iceland, though a strange choice, might at any rate be wholesome. And so indeed it proved: though Wittgenstein, who was a nervous traveller, nearly gave up the whole scheme on hearing from his brother that it was exceptionally cold there that year. Pinsent persuaded him out of this hesitation and they left in considerable style. Each was supplied with #145 in notes, theoretically by Wittgenstein's father, and Wittgen- stein carried letters of credit for another #200. They travelled every- where first class (it seems to have been Wittgenstein's practice at this time) and stayed at the best hotels. On the boat (Wittgenstein was disgusted it was so small) each would have a two-berth cabin. Wittgenstein brought three boxes and was shocked at Pinsent's having 136 Wittgenstein: A Life only one, persuading him indeed to buy various further items in Edinburgh. Their tips were lavish, their ponies in Iceland a cavalcade in the eyes of hardier travellers. A special occasion would be celebrated with whatever kind of champagne was available. In short none of those harmless luxuries were scanted with which the rich were then accus- tomed to infuse a measure of comfort into a holiday chosen for its simplicity. The holiday itself (recounted in detail by Pinsent) was like every other such holiday: the deck-quoits and the simple card-games on the boat, the occasional piano and the chance to play Schubert, the talkative and sometimes obtrusive fellow-travellers, the well-informed guide, the sure-footed ponies, the strange and treeless landscape, the aurora borealis, the big geyser that would not erupt though they waited several days, the varying fare and the sometimes inadequate beds, the photo- graphs developed at night. Both would get annoyed or nervous if things seemed to go wrong, both were very soon restored to good temper. Wittgenstein was not a very robust traveller: on the boat, if not actually sea-sick, he kept to his cabin rather a lot; his stomach would not always stand the unaccustomed food on land; rock-climbing made him ex- tremely nervous and he would beg Pinsent not to risk his life. Wittgenstein in later life sometimes seemed to embrace hardship but it was certainly not his natural element. The two friends managed their time carefully, allowing for occasions when each would go off without the other. None the less, there were endless talks_about people they knew, or met, about "Philistinism', and so on.107 Perhaps one sign of "Philistinism' in Pinsent was his too easy tolerance. On one occasion when they had to share a table, Pinsent was amused by "a very splendid bounder' with whom he talked. Wittgenstein however took a violent dislike to the man and the two had to give orders for their meals to be served separately from the table d'ho$2te.108 "A thing not so absurd as might be thought,' Pinsent goodnaturedly says, "as table d'ho$2te hours are all ridiculously late': none the less it led to some awkwardness. Finally they talked about Wittgenstein's work. It is a striking fact that Wittgenstein was extremely good at exposition of those parts of a subject that are in their nature capable of being grasped thoroughly. There are instances later of his teaching elementary arithmetic to friends' children, and explaining to a complete amateur the difference between deduction and induction; and of course he later chose the vocation of a schoolmaster. Like many of his family he had a strong pedagogic drive. It was not, therefore, either incapacity or disinclination 107.Two such conversations are reported on pp. 120{-1 above. 108.Russell tells a rather similar story about a walk he took with Moore: "We fell in by accident with a husky fellow, who began talking about Petronius with intense relish for his indecencies. I rather encouraged the man, who amused me as a type. Moore remained completely silent until the man was gone, and then turned upon me, saying: {"That man was horrible{'' (Autobiography ~I.64). 137 4Cambridge 1911{-12 that made his own philosophical work, whether in lectures or in writing, much harder to follow or to see the point of. There he was always trying to convey new insights that usually went against the grain of his listeners' or readers', and indeed his own, prejudices; there he was not simplifying or training pupils in a technique. In Aristotelian terms, his method was bound to be dialectic rather than apodictic. But the apodictic method suited very well his explanation to Pinsent of the elements of Whitehead's and Russell's logic and their definition of number, as it did his account of how the engines of the ship functioned, and Pinsent found him an excellent teacher. The two returned to England at the beginning of October, reaching Birmingham on the 4th. Wittgenstein stayed the night with Pinsent's family. They found a large party there and attended the last concert of the Musical Festival, already described. Wittgenstein, rather shy at first, was put at his ease and Pinsent enjoyed showing him off to his parents_he could explain logic to Father and discuss the education of young children with the future Dame Ellen. Thus ends the most glorious holiday I have ever spent! The novelty of the country_of being free of all considerations about economizing_the excitement and everything_all combine to make it the most wonderful experience I have ever had. (Diary 5.10.12)