,14=/,15=#,23=%,24==> 5Cambridge 1912{-13 W~I~T~T~G~E~N~S~T~E~I~N took up residence in his new rooms on about 12 October 1912, Pinsent helping him to move in his furniture, and began his first complete year of residence in the Cambridge in which he was already a legend. Naomi Bentwich, a pupil of Johnson's, recalled1 that he was generally supposed to live the life of a rich man, going up to London for all the good concerts and decorating his rooms in his own individual style (he was said to have painted the walls black). Some truth there was in this, we have seen already that he had his furniture specially made; and Pinsent's diary recounts one expedition to London on which he accompanied Wittgenstein to a concert conducted by Steinbach and stayed the night at the Grand Hotel. Already well-known in psychological circles, and in musical ones (for he attended nearly every concert in Cambridge), Wittgenstein was sought out now by further members of that intellectual aristocracy that was centred in the Society.2 Russell introduced him both to McTaggart, an elder statesman of the Society, and to Keynes, who (as in so many matters) was probably the most active and managing of the Angels: I had him to meet Keynes yesterday, but it was a failure. Wittgenstein was too ill to argue properly. It is funny how one person's presence will throw a new light on another person's; Keynes seemed to me soft and woolly, not nearly as able as I have always thought him. This was not from anything Wittgenstein said, for he hardly talked_it was the mere effect of his being there. Keynes, like most people, will accept a view without accepting its consequences, which is what makes me call him soft. _I also took Wittgenstein to see McTaggart, and that was more successful, though Wittgenstein found it hard to understand how McTaggart could believe such fantastic things. (BR to OM 31.10.12) The meeting with McTaggart was a mere incident in Wittgenstein's life, but that with Keynes was much more important. It seems that both men were a little shy at that first meeting, or rather: Wittgenstein may have been shy, but it was in Keynes's style to be rather gentle and attentive, to mask his brilliance and quickness with a new acquaintance whom he wished to get to know properly. Russell, who was a little under Wittgenstein's spell at this time, probably misinterpreted the woolliness. 1.Personal communication. 2.See above, p. 118. 139 5Cambridge 1912{-13 At any rate Wittgenstein and Keynes soon recognized one another. Keynes had at first given his friend Duncan Grant some less flattering account but shortly afterwards wrote: Wittgenstein is a most wonderful character_what I said about him when I saw you last is quite untrue_and extraordinarily nice, I like enormously to be with him. (JMK to Duncan Grant 12.11.12) Satirical, brilliant, often malicious, Keynes could also be sympathetic and perceptive and open to new ideas and influences. Of all Wittgen- stein's friends he had perhaps the widest palette. Philosopher, economist, writer and advocate of rare persuasiveness and elegance and economy of style, he was also an administrator and businessman of great energy and resource. In all the areas in which he interested himself he had an instinct for the best, the habit of a connoisseur_this appeared in his book-collecting, in his patronage (when he became rich and important) of music and art (in this area, to be sure, friends from Bloomsbury thought it was more intellectual conviction than heartfelt enthusiasm that inspired him). Nowhere more than in his choice of friends: if Wittgenstein was a "collector of good human beings' Keynes had more of love for the unusual and the exciting. It was "the student of character in all its forms',3 his first biographer tells us, that was fascinated by the newly-met Wittgenstein. Friends, once made, were assisted and pro- moted by Keynes, both by his interest in their work and ideas and in practical ways_he would anticipate their needs or arrange what they wanted. So it was with Wittgenstein, when each had overcome some initial hesitation. They could have long talks about the ideals of that Cambridge which Keynes embodied and to which Wittgenstein only half belonged. The love of paradox, the outrageous exaggeration, the frequent irreverence, the impatience with the slow-witted, the prejudices, even, that sometimes alarmed Keynes's colleagues and impeded (though far from completely) his successes in the larger world outside the Society, will not have shocked Wittgenstein. The practical side was important too: to Wittgenstein Keynes soon came to represent official Cambridge, partly because his father was Registrary at that time, chiefly because he was fitted for the role. He was a kind of manager in Wittgenstein's life_he organized communication with him in the prison-camp, his hand was behind Ramsey's visits to the villages in the 1920s, he made possible a visit to England in 1925, he brought Wittgenstein back to Cambridge in 1929, he was an intermediary with the Russians in 1935, he advised on the question of Wittgenstein's nationality in 1938, and in 1939 he was the most active member of the electoral syndicate that made 3.R.F. Harrod: Life of J.M. Keynes, p. 161. For an admirable summary of Keynes's gifts see pp. 646{-50 of that book. 140 Wittgenstein: A Life Wittgenstein professor. By that time, indeed, the long discussions of ideas and ideals had ceased and Keynes's role was something like that of one of the family advisers in Vienna_the director, say, of the Kanzlei Wittgen- stein, the family secretariat. Wittgenstein both liked and needed to involve friends in managing his affairs: we find him employing Pinsent ("often', we are told) to draft the right reply to a lost invitation or the like, and later he made Gilbert Patisson his accountant and almoner. A certain unpracticality and the habit of dependence lay behind this; also some shyness_he felt safer with an intermediary: A could explain his reasons or doubts to B better than he could himself, even when he knew B quite well; finally, it was part of friendship and an important part of life to work out decisions and procedure, important or trivial, with a companion. It is interesting that his role could continue even when there was, for whatever reason, some break in intimacy. Wittgenstein would never hesitate to help or to ask help from one who had once been a friend. He might indeed hesitate over whether the friendship was still a live one. In this connexion observe his letters to Keynes of June and July 1913. He asks for help with the benefaction for Johnson described above (p. 99). Keynes in reply evidently expressed some regret that they had not met often in the Easter Term; to which Wittgenstein replied: My reason for not seeing you oftener last term was, that I did not wish our intercourse to continue without any sign that you wished to continue it. (LW to JMK 16.7.13) An echo, perhaps, of some misunderstanding over the Society. The idea was current in 1912 among members of the Society, including the former members who came down from Bloomsbury, that Russell tried to make his friendship with Wittgenstein exclusive of the rest of Cambridge. Michael Holroyd reports this as the view of Moore and Desmond McCarthy (though it should be noted that the latter's acquaintance with Wittgenstein was slight).4 According to them, it was only Keynes's intervention that brought Wittgenstein into contact with the Society. Lytton Strachey certainly held this view: [Russell] kept Wittgenstein to himself until Keynes insisted on meeting him and saw at once that he was a genius ... [Russell thought] the Society so degraded that Wittgenstein would certainly refuse to belong to it. (LS to Sydney Saxon-Turner 20.10.12) All the same, the idea was fanciful: it is not surprising that Russell had no recollection of feeling mortified by the affair when Holroyd consulted him. Wittgenstein had all sorts of contacts in Cambridge and was in no 4.Michael Holroyd: Lytton Strachey, vol. 2, p. 71. 141 5Cambridge 1912{-13 sense under Russell's control. What is true, and known to us indepen- dently of Russell's later recollections, is that Russell believed at the time that it was a mistake to think of electing Wittgenstein_he would be bored by the Society or refuse to have anything to do with it, and this would lead to some undefined trouble. It will be seen shortly that in this Russell was right up to a point. But of the jealousy that their too keen eyes saw there is no trace in his letters to Lady Ottoline. It is particularly surprising if Moore thought Russell possessive where Wittgenstein was concerned, since just at this time his own association with Wittgenstein became a much closer one. It began in a way that for nearly any other pair would have been highly inauspicious. Wittgenstein began to attend, as in the previous year, Moore's lectures on psychology, but found in them faults similar to those that had disgusted him in Principia Ethica in the summer.5 Now he told Russell that Moore had not only this trick of repeating himself ad nauseam but also an inclination to spend his time on unimportant questions. "He loves Moore,' Russell told Lady Ottoline (15.10.12), "but doesn't admire him as much as the others do.' Wittgenstein did in fact go to Moore after his lecture on 18 October in order to tell him to pull himself together_this from the comparative beginner in philosophy to a man 15 years his senior. He was met with great mildness: Moore promised to mend if possible and (so he told Desmond McCarthy) still respected Wittgenstein enormously.6 He came [Moore himself noted in a set of diary extracts about Wittgenstein] to one or two lectures but expostulated violently against my spending so much time in trying to find the meaning of and refute Ward's view that psychology differs from physics not in subject-matter but only in point of view. He said that what I ought to do was to give my own views not attack other people's. After that he ceased to attend my lectures but was quite friendly, coming to see me in my rooms and inviting me to his. Moore's contemporary diaries bear this out:7 the meetings become 5.See above p. 109. 6.Information derived from Russell's letter to Lady Ottoline of 24.10.12. 7.These, like the set of extracts mentioned above, were shown me by Mr Paul Levy with the kind permission of Mrs Dorothy Moore. They cover these pre-war years. Moore seems to have destroyed the later volumes of his diary covering his married life, but before doing so extracted all, or presumably all, entries concerning Wittgenstein. The above remark is an introduction to these extracts, and presumably incorporates his memories. The actual diary entry for 18 October 1912 reads: W comes up after lecture and tells me my lectures have become very bad. Then we get on to definition and he stays till 3. The view of Ward's mentioned occurs in his article "Psychology' in Encyclopaedia Britannica^1^1, vol. 22, p. 548. In his "Autobiography' Moore mentions this as one of the texts on which he lectured. He also says, in general, that the main stimulus to philosophizing in his case had been the things other philosophers had said about the world or the sciences (The Philosophy of G.E. Moore [ed. Schilpp], pp. 13 and 29). 142 Wittgenstein: A Life frequent_perhaps twice a week, by appointment (this was a rare feature for Moore in his meetings with friends). There were also undesigned meetings at a concert, in Russell's rooms, or at a dinner-party. Wittgenstein would come at tea-time or after dinner, and "try to explain' about Russell's theory of classes, or what Russell and he now thought about the assertion-sign, or the sense and reference of propositional symbols, or his objection to Russell's theory of identity. But it was unusual for the whole time to be spent on philosophy:8 by a sort of economy in their friendship they would begin by, or turn to, discussing music, or German lyric poetry, or Russell, Johnson, or some other friend. Music and poetry were two of the great loves of Moore's life. He was the brother of the poet Thomas Sturge Moore, and of his own two sons one became a poet and the other a musician. He tells in his autobiography of his enthusiasm for music at school and particularly for the songs of Schubert.9 He had a pleasant tenor voice and would sing at length to Wittgenstein_"many songs' from the Winterreise on one occasion, Brahms's Mein Ma$3del and Vier ernste Gesa$3nge on another. No mere interlude in either case. Or they would perform chamber-music together, Wittgenstein, as usual, whistling one part. Moore was diffident: he was prepared to believe that Wittgenstein must be right even when he did not understand him_though it is impossible to imagine Moore writing down or agreeing with something unless he thought he understood it fully. He was diffident too, as his diaries show, in social relations: appreciative when people "talked well', made uneasy by moments of silence and his own failure to draw out, say, a neighbour at High Table. It was in fact part of his charm: his insights and his perceptive reactions were all the more appreciated because he was in no sense, as Keynes and Russell surely were, a performer. And before the First War he was most of all diffident in his personal relations with Wittgenstein: "Music Club, behind W.,' he would note in his diary; "fancy he is disgusted at me' (24 May 1913): another passage throws some light too on the sort of social occasion Wittgenstein took part in: Supper at Robertson's: go there with Hardy, W., and Miss T. Jones. Hardy opens about hypnotism, which I have just told him [about?] and W. talks well about that during dinner. Then Hill and Vivisection. After I sing and am afraid W. doesn't like it. Then we talk of morals and W. seems disturbed. I wait to [word indecipherable: meaning "leave'?] till 8.Thus it is probably because it was an exception that Moore notes on 31.1.13: "to tea with W by invitation 4{2{-7{3 he discusses probability all the time'. The length of this tea-time visit is not exceptional however. 9.The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (ed. Schilpp), pp. 6ff. 143 5Cambridge 1912{-13 Hardy has finished talking, after 11. W. walks on ahead of us, which makes me afraid I am disapproved. (Diary for 21.5.13)10 Wittgenstein's criticisms of Moore's lectures by no means indicated loss of confidence in him. In fact at just this time, Wittgenstein set on foot a scheme by which Moore (as Moore put it on first hearing of it) should "act as a kind of dictator at the Moral Sciences Club'. Wittgenstein always liked to attend this Club (though much later, when he was teaching in Cambridge, there were periods when it seemed better that he should absent himself). The comments of his from this period that have come down to us (mostly in Russell's letters) are naturally enough chiefly of a negative character. Wittgenstein was more likely to expostulate to Russell about his dislike of talking for effect, of subterfuges and refusal to face questions, and of preaching, than to enthuse about what he thought worthwhile in the meetings. His criticism of two or three members who happened to be clergymen was particularly severe, and Russell thought that he was there inclined to take confusion for dishonesty. Still, Wittgenstein believed that something could be made of the meetings, particularly if they were used primarily for the purpose of discussion and not for delivering and listening to a long paper. His plan, then, was, and the Club adopted it on 15 November, that a Chairman should be elected to guide the discussion and that papers should be limited to seven minutes. It was also arranged that there should be supplementary meetings not open to those of M.A. standing. This provision was re-introduced from time to time in the Club's history, and of course later served to exclude Wittgenstein himself. It was no part of Wittgenstein's plan in 1912, and he vehemently opposed it, misled (Russell thought) by hatred of "the parson' who had proposed it. Russell thought the parson's point_that the young did not dare to talk when Moore and Russell were present_was a good one, but Wittgenstein undoubtedly regarded the two senior men as a protection against precisely such people as the proposer. Moore was duly elected Chairman of the ordinary meetings. A supplementary meeting at which W. Tye spoke was held on 22 November, but the first ordinary meeting under the new dispensation was held in Wittgenstein's rooms on 29 November, Moore being in the chair. The minutes, in the handwriting of Wittgenstein's friend Dorward, are of some interest: Mr. Wittgenstein read a paper entitled "What is Philosophy?' The paper lasted only about 4 minutes, thus cutting the previous record established 10.Robertson was Donald Robertson, later Professor of Greek, recently married, and a close friend of G.H. Hardy's. Miss Jones was the Principal of Girton, whose academic interest was in philosophy. On hypnotism see below. 144 Wittgenstein: A Life by Mr. Tye by nearly two minutes. Philosophy was defined as all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences. This definition was much discussed, but there was no general disposition to adopt it. The discussion kept very well to the point, and the Chairman did not find it necessary to intervene much.11 Perhaps the most significant thing here is the implicit identification of "philosophy' with logic. Wittgenstein seems to have been drawing his first conclusions from the insight, already mentioned, that all the problems of logic could be traced back to the nature of the atomic proposition. Logic was thus not the science of any special set of objects_not a science that came into operation with the introduction of, say, generality or implication, but was the science of what was presupposed by saying anything whatsoever. As such it would be an equal part of every science.12 The idea that the principles of logic are included in those of every science is quite a traditional one. Only the reasons for it and the view that nothing outside logic is assumed without proof in the sciences will be new (if indeed our account of Wittgenstein is correct in both these respects). But the idea is not one that in itself suggests any account of why the truths of logic are true. In his attempts to give such an account, Wittgenstein was soon to come to see that the propositions of logic differed from all others_"Philosophy gives no pictures of reality' is how he put it in the summer of 1913; and in the Tractatus, having said that the totality of those propositions that correctly represent the existence and non-existence of states of affairs constitutes natural science, he goes on to distinguish philosophy from science: Philosophy is not one of the natural sciences. (The word "philosophy' must mean something whose place is above or below the natural sciences, not beside them.) (TLP 4.11) Philosophy was not only not a special science but not a part or the common part of the other sciences. Moore did not think well of Wittgenstein's performance and Russell (who had been prevented from coming at the beginning of the meeting) found Wittgenstein perhaps depressed by it: Then I went on to the tail end of the discussion on Wittgenstein's paper, and after the rest were gone I got into talking about his faults_he is worried by his unpopularity and asked me why it was. It was a long and difficult and passionate (on his side) conversation lasting till 1.30, so I am rather short of sleep. He is a great task but quite worth it. He is a little too 11.I am grateful to Prof. D.H. Mellor, when Librarian of the Faculty of Philosophy in Cambridge, for supplying me with information about and xeroxes from the minute books of the Moral Sciences Club. 12.The view reported is of course capable of other interpretations_philosophy might be supposed to consist of or to include the different principles assumed a priori by the several sciences. But this is the interpretation nearest to the other views of Wittgenstein's reported from about this time. 145 5Cambridge 1912{-13 simple, yet I am afraid of spoiling some fine quality if I say too much to make him less so. (BR to OM 30.11.12) There was indeed simplicity, even naivete$0, in Wittgenstein's way of judging and treating people at this time, in the intolerance which led him to think that a clergyman who tried to wriggle out of questions was "the most stupid, the most wicked, the most utterly worthless creature that ever lived' (so that Russell had the unaccustomed task of urging the importance of not misjudging those whose thoughts were vague); but still more in Wittgenstein's unawareness that only someone of Moore's childlike simplicity would be likely to profit from his radical criticism. Pinsent recorded the scene of Wittgenstein's trying to induce the undergraduate monk, F., to read some good book on some exact science:13 Which would obviously be very good for F._as indeed for anyone_: but Wittgenstein was very overbearing and let F. know exactly what he thought of him, and altogether talked as if he was his Director of Studies! F. took it very well_obviously convinced that Wittgenstein is a lunatic. (Diary November 1912) Wittgenstein's criticisms of this same F. led to a quarrel (so Russell termed it) between Wittgenstein and North Whitehead. Naturally enough, therefore, Pinsent used more than finesse to shake off C, "a mindless ass', whom he was sure Wittgenstein would not like. In this situation there was room for unpopularity. All the same, with many chance acquaintances Wittgenstein managed to have lively conver- sations, sometimes to Pinsent's surprise. When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge at the age of 40, he learnt or resolved within a year or two to restrict his acquaintance to those with whom he was likely to get on well. This is how he became the withdrawn Wittgenstein of legend, a surprise, very often, to those whom he took the trouble to get to know. But before the First World War, when he had some of the optimism of youth_this was the simplicity Russell noticed_probable and improbable friends were alike exposed to his vigour in argument and his frankness. His eccentricity, his outspokenness, his wider experience, his apparent seriousness (we have seen that even with Pinsent, the simple sense of humour characteristic of his later friendships seems not to have appeared)_all these qualities marked him out from the run of clever undergraduates. Yet we have no evidence of real unpopularity: North Whitehead seems to have disliked him, and the elder Whiteheads had to be won over, but it seems that for the most part, as Pinsent implies, his oddities were taken as part of the madness easily ascribed to any 13.See above p. 111. 146 Wittgenstein: A Life foreigner. At all events, he was clearly accepted as a lively guest and (at clubs and societies) as a manful contributor to discussions. It was in this same month of November that Wittgenstein was elected to the Society. The project had occurred to Lytton Strachey and others in May,14 but was now taken over and brought to a conclusion by Keynes. Technically the election was made by the "active members', the undergraduates of the Society, but it is clear that the influence of the Angels or former members who still attended meetings was decisive. And so many of these were friends, even admirers, of Wittgenstein: Russell, Moore, Hardy, Keynes himself. Whitehead, McTaggart, Sheppard, Shove, and Lytton Strachey had all looked him over. Strachey was now inclined to think him "a fearful bore': "Poor Pozzo! will he never learn?' he exclaimed later when things went wrong about the election.15 The view of the younger members can be judged perhaps from James Strachey's letter to his brother (3.11.12): Rupert [Brooke], Keynes, and Gerald [Shove] wanted him "though they all thought he would be too awful for words'.16 The Society was not looking for simple agreeable men: for distinction and independence it was worth tolerating a little grit. In a similar exaggerated vein Lytton Strachey wrote to Keynes after the election: The hopeful aspect of affairs for the future was particularly exhilarating. Our brothers B. and Wittgenstein are so nasty and our brother Be$0ka$0ssy is so nice that the Society ought to rush forward now into the most progressive waters. I looked in on B. on Sunday night and he seemed quite as nasty as Rupert [Brooke] ever was. It was indeed cheering! (LS to JMK 20.11.12) First, however, Wittgenstein himself had to be persuaded that the Society was worthwhile. Its nature and history were no doubt explained to him by Russell. It was a small society_one or two people from each year on the average. It has existed since 1820, and has had as members most of the people of any intellectual eminence who have been at Cambridge since then.17 They met every Saturday night, to hear a paper by one of their number, after which everyone present was expected to contribute to the discussion. 14.See above pp. 118f.. 15.Letter to James Strachey, November 1912: I am indebted to Mr Paul Levy, who showed me these letters, as also those between Keynes and Duncan Grant, Keynes and Lytton Strachey, Moore and Lytton Strachey, and James Strachey and Rupert Brooke. "Pozzo', after Pozzo di Borgo, was Lytton's nickname for Keynes. 16.Rupert Brooke had in fact not yet met Wittgenstein. 17.Russell, Autobiography, vol. 1, pp. 68{-70. 147 5Cambridge 1912{-13 It was a principle in discussion that there were to be no taboos, no limitations, nothing considered shocking, no barriers to absolute freedom of speculation. We discussed all manner of things, no doubt with a certain immaturity, but with a detachment and interest scarcely possible in later life. (id.ibid.) Numerous accounts of the Society now exist: Harrod, in his Life of Keynes gives one by Dean Merivale (a contemporary of Tennyson's), another by Henry Sidgwick, and adds his own description as an outsider. Russell's we have drawn on here. The account most bathed in golden light is that of E.M. Forster in his memoir of Lowes Dickinson: Shortly before becoming a fellow he had been elected to one of those discussion societies which still flourish at Cambridge and play an appreciable part in its mental life. The characteristics of such societies vary but little. The members are drawn from the older undergraduates and the younger dons, they meet of an evening in one another's rooms, a paper is read, lots are drawn to determine the order of the speeches, the order is observed or ignored, there are developments and digressions, and finally the reader replies to his critics, handing round as he does so some such refreshment as anchovies on toast or walnut cake. Some of the discussions are logical in their tendency, others informative or whimsical, but in all cases formality is avoided, presidents and secretaries are reduced to their minimum, and there is no attempt to be forensic or even parliamentary. The young men seek truth rather than victory, they are willing to abjure an opinion when it is proved untenable, they do not try to score off one another, they do not feel diffidence too high a price to pay for integrity; and according to some observers that is why Cambridge has played, comparatively, so small a part in the control of world affairs. Certainly these societies represent the very antithesis of the rotarian spirit. No one who has once felt their power will ever be a good mixer or a yes-man. Their influence, when it goes wrong, leads to self-consciousness and superciliousness; when it goes right, the mind is sharpened, the judgement is strengthened, and the heart becomes less selfish. There is nothing specially academic about them, they exist in other places where intelligent youths are allowed to gather together unregimented, but in Cambridge they seem to generate a peculiar clean white light of their own which can remain serviceable right on into middle age.18 That was the ideal_a mite precious, perhaps, a little laboured in its fantasies, its rituals, and its private language drawn impartially from German metaphysics and half-remembered Christian heresies_embryos, 18.E.M. Forster: Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1934), p. 65. He does not overestimate the effect of the Society on his subject: see Lowes Dickinson's Autobiography (1973), p. 68: "When young men are growing in mind and soul, when speculation is a passion, when discussion is made profound by love, there happens something incredible to any but those who breathe that magic air.' 148 Wittgenstein: A Life birth-pangs, apostles exempt from time and space, who in due course take wings and become angels (for so they described the cessation of active membership). But still it was something to follow in the footsteps of Clerk-Maxwell and to draw lots to speak with the cleverest young men of the day. And, looking ahead, membership gave a man contact in each generation with the best and brightest of the young: its own reproduction is always one of the chief preoccupations of such a society. To belong to an elite would certainly not distress Wittgenstein, provided it really were an elite; and the unworldliness, the sense of intellectual and moral standards other than success though not incompatible with it, that pervaded the Society will even have attracted him. It had, of course, the airlessness of Cambridge, of which he later spoke, but that was preferable to the atmosphere at Oxford where the aims of Jowett's Balliol still prevailed and the best of the young men looked forward to ruling their own or some other country. Oxford always evoked an horresco referens in the letters of members of the Society: when Russell heard that journalism was taught at Harvard he commented, "I thought that was only done at Oxford'. In many respects Wittgenstein always remained a Cambridge man. We have seen why Russell thought that the Society had declined since his own day: Keynes, in his account,19 confirms that in their ideals the members of the Soceity departed to some extent from those of Moore: We accepted Moore's religion, so to speak, and discarded his morals. Indeed, in our opinion, one of the greatest advantages of his religion was that it made morals unnecessary_meaning by "religion' one's attitude towards oneself and the ultimate and by "morals' one's attitude towards the outside world and the intermediate... Nothing mattered except states of mind, our own and other people's, of course, but chiefly our own. These states of mind were not associated with the action or achievement or with consequences. They consisted in timeless, passionate states of contem- plation and communion, largely unattached to "before' and "after'... The appropriate subjects of passionate contemplation and communion were a beloved person, beauty and truth, and one's prime objects in life were love, the creation and enjoyment of aesthetic experience and the pursuit of knowledge. They repudiated, Keynes says, not only Moore's view of the obligation to produce the most probable maximum of eventual good for the whole of the future, but also his account of the individual's duty to obey general rules. For our purposes it is of no account whether, as Harrod argues,20 these are half-hearted and unconvincing parts of Principia Ethica, or 19.For Russell see above p. 118: for Keynes, "My Early Beliefs' in Collected Writings, vol. 10, pp. 433ff.; also in Two Memoirs (1949). 20.Life of Keynes, p. 78. 149 5Cambridge 1912{-13 whether, as Russell suggests, Moore's principle of organic unity (pre- cisely one of the features they admired) would have entailed these consequences. Wittgenstein too was not far from rejecting both of these features of Moore's thought. Where he was not at one with the Society, as Keynes himself notes, was in the view of human nature on which their repudiation of these things was based: We repudiated all versions of the doctrine of original sin, of there being insane and irrational springs of wickedness in most men. We were not aware that civilization was a thin and precarious crust erected by the personality and the will of a very few, and only maintained by rules and conventions skilfully put across and guilefully preserved. We had no respect for traditional wisdom or the restraints of custom. We lacked reverence, as Lawrence observed and as Ludwig with justice also used to say_for everything and everyone.21 It will be seen that even in retrospect Keynes gives a grudging and external acknowledgement of the importance of reverence. It would be good if such and such beliefs, though groundless, where held. A difference of attitude on these points was not enough to determine Wittgenstein to have nothing to do with the Society. He could, after all, talk by the hour with Russell, Moore, and Keynes, from all of whom he differed profoundly. He was prepared to shock the contentious dinner- parties of progressive Cambridge by actually opposing women's suffrage. He thought order could be introduced into the discussions of the Moral Sciences Club. Why not try to pull the Society itself together? This aim (Russell puts it in so many words) did in fact lead Wittgenstein, despite doubts, to accept election. The doubts, his own and Russell's, arose from another source. Besides his own friends, were the young men, the active members, serious discussion-partners? Was the atmosphere of the Society the right one? Keynes confirms, up to a point, Russell's retrospective condemnation quoted earlier: As the years wore on towards 1914, the thinness and superficiality, as well as the falsity, of our view of man's heart became, as it now seems to me, more obvious; and there was, too, some falling away from the purity of the original doctrine. Concentration on moments of communion between a pair of lovers got thoroughly mixed up with the, once rejected, pleasure. The pattern of life would sometimes become no better than a succession of short sharp superficial "intrigues', as we called them. Our comments on life 21.Coll.Writ. 10.447. This paper, written in 1938, was occasioned by some reminiscences voiced at the same club of D.H. Lawrence's reactions (in 1914 or 1915) to the circle that Wittgenstein knew so well. The Nietzschean in Wittgenstein often recalled Lawrence. 150 Wittgenstein: A Life and affairs were bright and amusing but brittle ... because there was no solid diagnosis of human nature underlying them.22 Moore and Russell were essentially untouched by the personal com- plications to which this atmosphere gave rise; and though Keynes, with his zest for all forms of life, took an amused part in them, they were strictly a small compartment of his activities. But, for some of the younger men, they seemed for the time being to be all-important, and would Wittgenstein, with his hatred of superficiality and half- heartedness, be able to tolerate them or the discussions of them? Some doubts of this kind Russell put to the meeting of the Society on 9 November. He left some members with the impression that he thought the Society too degraded for Wittgenstein. In any case his doubts were brushed aside, partly ascribed, as we have seen, to jealousy. Was not Wittgenstein one of them already? He came, indeed, to breakfast the next morning in Keynes's rooms with many of them and with the other embryo, B. Russell was overborne and undertook to persuade Wittgen- stein to accept election. All the difficulties I anticipated have arisen with Wittgenstein. I persuaded him at last to come to the first meeting and see how he could stand it. Obviously from his point of view the Society is a mere waste of time. But perhaps from a philanthropic point of view he might be made to feel it worth going on with. (BR to JMK 11.11.12)23 From this letter Keynes emerges as the promoter of Wittgenstein, as indeed from his own to Lytton Strachey: Have you heard ... how our new brother's only objection to the Society is that it doesn't happen to be apostolic? and what an amazing character he is? I believe it might be a very good thing if you were to come to the Society this week, or if not, then the week after... Our new brother vastly prefers angels. He says to see active brothers is to see those who have not yet made their toilets. And the process though necessary is indecent. At any rate he couldn't say that you've not made your toilet, could he? (JMK to LS 13.11.12) But Wittgenstein was already 22.Coll.Writ. 10.449. On the point of brittleness, Keynes includes Russell in this judgement. Russell's own remarks about the "intrigues' are given above p. 118. The correspondence of various members of the circle, though clearly not free of wilful exaggeration, bears out Keynes's and even Russell's description. An important negative point is that these sharp tongues impute no intrigues to Wittgenstein. At most they dwell on the supposed jealousy of Russell (obviously not in this sense an intriguer) at Wittgenstein's election. 23.Letter among the Keynes Papers in King's College Library. 151 5Cambridge 1912{-13 horribly bored by the Society, and wishing to get out of it. B. [the other embryo] is a great obstacle_he can't stand him. I told him there was nothing for him to get out of the Society but that in former days it had been good, and might become so again if he stuck to it. He promised to wait a week before deciding. The discussion was very difficult. (BR to OM 10.11.12) Wittgenstein did indeed go to the Society the next Saturday, from which day his membership is dated. This was the meeting at which Moore read "On Conversion' and Wittgenstein reported that for him this consisted in getting rid of worry.24 But by the beginning of December "The Witter-Gitter man,' James Strachey wrote to his brother, "is trembling on the verge of resignation.' Resignation! It was hardly a concept for them. One man had resigned_or sent word he was too busy to come to meetings_far back in the nineteenth century, and his memory was_ perhaps still is_held up to comic execration in their rites. Lytton put the word itself in inverted commas when he wrote in alarm to Moore and to Keynes and offered to come up and see what he could do. Keynes, Moore, Gerald Shove, all availed nothing. B. was intolerable, discussions with B. and with Be$0ka$0ssy were not worth while. Be$0ka$0ssy, an Hungarian grandee who lived in splendour near Budapest, had been educated at a progressive school in England. (He was killed in Bukovina in 1915 and Keynes saw to the posthumous publication of his poems.) Inherited prejudice may have stood between him and Wittgenstein but he was in any case much attached to B. He later told Hungarian friends that he had voted against, and even had excluded, Wittgenstein. So on 8 December Moore wrote to Strachey to say that Wittgenstein had resigned.25 This was not quite the end of the matter. Strachey came down and had an intercessorial tea with Wittgenstein. Moore's diaries are full of the repercussions: 9.12.12 Lytton comes in about 12{1 [midnight] and stays till 1{3 talking about W. 10.12.12 At Feast I talk to Lytton about his tea with W., what W. thought of me ... Talk to Norton about W. 2.1.13 Find it hard to talk to Desmond MacCarthy about W. 1.2.13 James [Strachey] comes 6{3{-7{1 about W. To Society at 10{1, Norton, James, Keynes, Brooke, Shove, etc. about W., lasts till 1{3.26 24.See above p. 114. 25.So also Russell_"Wittgenstein has left the Society'_in a letter to Lady Ottoline of 6 or 13 December. 26.Russell was drawn in too: "a$1 propos of Wittgenstein, I shocked him [Sanger] by saying I thought the present Society a feeble lot' (BR to OM 2.2.13). 152 Wittgenstein: A Life A compromise was reached: no resignation was recorded, Wittgenstein was not expected to attend meetings_he certainly never read them a paper_but he continued to take an interest in their affairs_discussing them with Moore (19.3.13) and asking in a letter from Norway whether a candidate of Hardy's had been elected.27 As a final token of his continued membership, he underwent the formality of "taking wings' when he returned to Cambridge in January 1929. No one who has been a member of a small self-selected body, who has observed a College election or a candidacy for an Academy, will be altogether surprised by the triviality of the events we have described or by the importance attached to them. Yet there is something peculiar to Cambridge, to the circle and the atmosphere that Wittgenstein adopted as his own, in the fact that on this occasion all the effort was expended to retain association with a young man, of considerable charm, certainly, but obviously a mauvais coucheur from the Society's point of view. Keynes's circle had the merits as well as the limitations of an elite. Real excellence would be furthered in despite of rules and precedents. They wanted the best man, let him be as unclubbable as he might. It was the same with the benevolent oligarchy that ruled Wittgenstein's College, the high Trinity society described by C.P. Snow.28 They, who found ways to support Ramanujan and Kapitsa, made a special case of Wittgenstein too, even though he was at times not on speaking terms with some of them. (Trinity's depriving Russell of his lectureship during the First World War was, and was soon felt to be, an aberration, due largely to absences at the Front.) But what of Wittgenstein's side of this affair? Did he, was he ever prepared to, see himself as an apostle, especially tied to his brothers, older or younger, a little remote from the rest of the world, sharing, pursuing, and analysing an incommunicable ideal? We come here, in a minor example, both upon contradictions in his nature and upon development in his character. Wittgenstein, we are forced to suppose, wanted to belong to a society, a group, a profession, even; to have the tasks, the conventions, the status associated with it. Far from feeling any false modesty, he knew that any group he could properly belong to would be under some aspect the highest. His search for a calling was in part a search for a role. For the moment he had tried to be an aeronaut, even briefly a psychologist; now it seemed he was becoming a philosopher. He was to make two or three other attempts later. Each time he came without quite the usual formation, each time he looked for, often he found, a quite new way of approaching the task. He sometimes doubted whether he possessed true originality, but he never questioned that everything he did was marked with his own individuality. The style 27.Moore's diary of 19.3.13 and LW to GEM 18.2.14. 28.Foreword to G.H. Hardy: A Mathematician's Apology, pp. 25ff. 153 5Cambridge 1912{-13 of his most casual letters is a clear instance of this. Though he often asked, in a material sense, very little, he demanded that this individual- ity should be recognized. Exception must be made for it, rules must be circumvented. The world must be remade to fit his gifts. It was the only way he could make use of them. The demand, we can now see, is triumphantly vindicated by his works. It was recommended to his friends when he was young by sincerity and force; when he was older, these took the form of authority. But we are not speaking here of friendships as such. Difficulties arose there because of the intensity with which Wittgenstein pursued them and were the inevitable counterpart of the rewards that he and his friends drew. The difficulties that concern us here are those that he found in being a member of a group. Recognition and acceptance he required: but to tolerate a bore, to suppress disapproval, to conform his own actions to the practices of a small society, were all abhorrent to him. Useless to ask whether the habits of privilege or the consciousness of genius voiced these claims: both determined his attitude towards the world. Every word and action_Russell knew him best and saw this_had to be spontaneously his own; and if he himself was satisfied, if he lived up to his own upbringing, no hint from outside need be regarded. Neither socially nor intellectually was he prepared to receive one. In his moral as in his intellectual life, there was a drive towards solipsism. Two beings alone were luminous for Cardinal Newman_God and his own soul: Wittgenstein too saw principally his own nature and his own world, and these two had to be grasped and structured aright and put in the right relation if he was to realize the standards he so passionately affirmed. And yet_he was young; he hankered after a wider companionship, a position not on the fringes of society. Later he generally found a different kind of group, more centred on himself, and perhaps for that reason more artificial and less satisfying. But in these early Cambridge years (of which the incident with the Society will serve as a type) he still thought it possible to belong. Russell was, being an observer, more clear-sighted and, by temperament, more consequential than Wittgenstein himself: he saw it would not do. Jealousy is not needed to explain this, but Lytton Strachey and the others perhaps better answered Wittgenstein's im- mediate needs when they found him a position of his own, of the Society but not in it, so to speak, and Michael Holroyd is to that extent right in saying that Strachey was instrumental in putting Wittgenstein in touch with "the other Cambridge'. Russell had more reason than the others knew to be apprehensive of any serious personal difficulties that might arise over the Society. Not only would his own loyalties be strained, but the effect on Wittgenstein might have been much worse. Throughout this Michaelmas Term, 154 Wittgenstein: A Life despite the activities we have described, Wittgenstein's health and spirits had preoccupied and even tortured both himself and Russell. His temperament was cyclical, and this was one of the longer depressed periods that we know of, alleviated by a couple of occasions when he felt he had made a significant advance in his work. At first he complained to Pinsent about rheumatism; later he told Russell that he had seen a doctor. Wittgenstein is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not far removed from suicide, feeling himself a miserable creature, full of sin. Whatever he says he apologizes for having said. He has fits of dizziness and can't work_the Dr. says it is all nerves. He wanted to be treated morally, but I persisted in treating him physically_I told him to ride, to have biscuits by his bedside to eat when he lies awake, to have better meals and so on. I suppose genius always goes with excitable nerves_it is a very uncomfort- able possession. He makes me terribly anxious, and I hate seeing his misery_it is so real, and I know it all so well. I can see it is almost beyond what any human being can be expected to bear. I don't know whether any outside misfortune has contributed to it or not. (BR to OM 31.10.12) It is unlikely that the rupture and the minor operation for it had left Wittgenstein in real discomfort_we shall see that he was capable of a fairly active life_but the serious situation of his father must have affected him. Pinsent tells us how depressed Wittgenstein was in November by the news of yet another operation. Russell came to think that the real cause was the nature of Wittgenstein's work: he strains his mind to the utmost constantly, at things which are discouraging by their difficulty, and nervous fatigue tells on him sooner or later. (BR to OM 5.11.12) Russell was remembering, no doubt, his own days spent sitting before a blank sheet of paper, the elusiveness of the subject-matter, the lack of a routine when no spark came, the new difficulties raised by each small step forward. Wittgenstein was determined to overcome all obstacles and prolonged concentration was his usual method. No wonder that he told Russell in a later phase of the same kind that logic was driving him into insanity. Both men agreed that "Logic was hell!'29 Physical remedies might alleviate Wittgenstein's condition, but no more. Lady Ottoline suggested cocoa, a remedy much valued by progressive thinkers of the period_and this, like riding, was urged upon the reluctant Wittgenstein. 29.BR to OM 2.5.13; Russell constantly used this phrase in their discussions, as Wittgenstein recalled on 29.9.37 (von Wright p.218); cf. also LW to BR November or December 1913, "I often think that I am going mad'. 155 5Cambridge 1912{-13 He accepted, though determined to think, as Russell puts it, that there was nothing the matter except "premature decay of his intellect'. So Wittgenstein went riding_with Littlewood, the most cheerful and companionable of Russell's friends, or else with Pinsent. They would hack out to nearby villages, Grantchester, Trumpington, Madingley, and back by another road, two or three hours in all. "A tame ride,' Pinsent comments on one occasion, "compared with the one I took with C_as there was no jumping etc._but quite pleasant.'30 Later in the academic year they played tennis together: Wittgenstein had to learn the game and was rather clumsy. Many family games at Neuwaldegg and on the Hochreith must have gone on without him, and his rupture hardly seems a sufficient explanation. Now, with Pinsent, though not especially adept at physical activities, he was enthusiastic. They even, more strenuously, went canoeing. In this, as in other ways, his friendship with Pinsent led him into a normal undergraduate life. Rather late, of course, but that was a common pattern in his life_his introduction to school, to philosophy, to military service, to training as a teacher, and subsequently to other occupations and positions, came later in life than that of most beginners_he approached them all as one who had his own habits already, not malleable, a critic, one who found it difficult to conform. Pinsent made this sort of thing much easier for him, and as for his health, the exercise was some antidote to the late night thoughts and mono- logues and the subsequent sleeplessness. Pinsent noticed that Wittgen- stein customarily revived and was cheerful after lunch, Russell that he was in better spirits when he had something to do as well as philosophy. Yet it was not of his father or of his health that he talked, but of his faults. This must have been the period of the agonizing night talks that Russell remembered so vividly.31 Russell used to say it was wearing him out (and his letters show that he often really feared that Wittgenstein would commit suicide): I told Wittgenstein yesterday [he went on] that he thinks too much about himself, and if he begins again I shall refuse to listen unless I think he is quite desperate. He has talked it out now as much as is good for him. (BR to OM 12.11.12) Thus we may date to this period one of Russell's most often repeated anecdotes: 30.Diary 8.11.12: C was the "mindless ass'. 31.See above p. 101 and Russell Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 99. "He used to come to see me every evening at midnight, and pace up and down my room like a wild beast in agitated silence.' Also in Portraits from Memory, p. 23. 156 Wittgenstein: A Life Once I said to him: "Are you thinking about logic or about your sins?' "Both', he replied, and continued his pacing. I did not like to suggest that it was time for bed, as it seemed probable both to him and me that on leaving me he would commit suicide. Logic and his sins_Russell often recalled only the absurd aspect of things that seemed menacing at the time. Wittgenstein evidently somehow saw a connection between the difficulty of his philosophical problems_the "decay of his intellect'_the objective grounds he had for depression and his own shortcomings. Perhaps a clearer, a more concentrated view_it is the final message of the Tractatus too_would enable him to see the world aright. At any rate, if there was no real prospect of this: if he could not reach this insight, and if he could not get rid of his troubles by reconciling himself to the world, then his life was pointless. We have tried to describe something of his attitude in reporting32 his adolescent thoughts of suicide and many of the themes there mentioned have recurred in our account. His whole background led him to see life as a task, to demand of himself some achievement. He was conscious of exceptional abilities, yet discontented with the work he was producing. On another side, he wanted to give and receive affection, which for him meant to have some positive and productive relation with others, and yet constantly found himself put off by them and constantly himself put them off. Resolved to accept the circumstances of his life, he daily rebelled against them. And so he felt that his life had no meaning, he was afflicted with the sense of futility, the Sorge,33 he mentioned to Russell in the previous summer. He could recognize his own condition in William James's chapter on "The Sick Soul'. Yet what we are describing here is no disease. As Tolstoy says: These questions are the simplest in the world. From the stupid child to the wisest old man, they are in the soul of every human being.34 Take a typical expression of Wittgenstein's discontent: I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky. Instead of which I remained stuck on earth and now I am gradually fading out.35 Everyone has this feeling at some time: no psychiatrist would regard it as a clinical indication of any importance. James suggests that those whom 32.p. 50. 33.p. 129. 34."A Confession', quoted by William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 155. (In the World's Classics edition of Tolstoy the passage occurs on p. 24.) 35.LW to PE 2.1.21: later we shall consider his whole spiritual state at that time. 157 5Cambridge 1912{-13 it oppresses to the degree that Tolstoy and Wittgenstein were oppressed have a lower "misery-threshold' than others. It does not matter here whether this linear model is adequate, whether we have to supplement it by allowing for fluctuations in the threshold_cyclothymia_or replace it by some account that allows the same nature, in some cases, to be the most easily depressed and the most easily elated. James's point is that these men feel more acutely something all men are aware of: "Let us then,' he says, at one stage in his exposition, "turn our backs on the healthy-minded': Let us rather see whether pity, pain, and fear, and the sentiment of human helplessness may not open a profounder view and put into our hands a more complicated key to the meaning of the situation.36 To Tolstoy it seemed for a while that manly suicide was the only answer: Wittgenstein, not in a mood of special depression, told Pinsent that in all his life there had hardly been a day when he had not at some time or another thought of this. Yet, to his problems, especially, suicide could not be the answer. If his trouble was his failure to reconcile himself to the world, he would above all be failing by committing suicide. Thus, some time later, he said: If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it, it is like investigating mercury vapour in order to comprehend the nature of vapours. (Notebooks 10.1.17)37 The argument is similar to Schopenhauer's: suicide is the supreme assertion of the will and at the opposite pole from the renunciation that could alone give release. For some reason like this, Wittgenstein, in these Cambridge years, would occasionally talk to Russell and Pinsent not directly of suicide but of his conviction that he had not long to live. Such premonitions are not uncommon and little attention is paid to them unless subsequently fulfilled. They usually express_in Wittgenstein's case they surely did_the strong conviction that life as it is cannot go on, a conviction which, like many of the results of reflection on life, is literally meaningless. 36.The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 136. (The quotation in the body of the text is slightly rephrased.) 37.Wittgenstein there adds: "Or isn't suicide too, in itself, neither good nor evil?' ("Oder ist nicht auch der Selbstmord an sich weder gut noch bo$3se!'), but what we here want to bring out is the argument against suicide as he saw it. For another argument, see the letter to Engelmann of 20.6.20. 158 Wittgenstein: A Life Not to be sorry for death_eine Bejahung des Todes_was one of Wittgenstein's most fundamental attitudes. All his Cambridge friends heard of it: it was, for example, one of the Wittgenstein enigmas that Moore and Hardy tried to puzzle out. One thing worked in the contrary direction; his need to have achieved something. He is morbidly afraid he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the science of Logic. He has written a lot already_and Russell has promised to publish his work if he were to die_but he is sure that what he has already written is not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of thought etc:- which of course are of more value than his definite results. He is always saying that he is certain he will die within four years_but today it was two months. (Pinsent's Diary 17.9.13) He talked again tonight about his death_that he was not really afraid to die_but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all hangs on his absolutely morbid conviction that he is going to die soon_there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can't help_for he is mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business_he is clearly having a miserable time of it. This evening too he was worried horribly that perhaps after all his work on Logic was no real use: and then his nervous temperament had caused him a life of misery and others considerable inconvenience_all for nothing. (Pinsent's Diary 20.9.13) He expected death because he had no right to live: he feared it only because he needed to produce some great work to give some meaning to the life he had already led_to make up for or to justify the irritation he had caused others and the contempt he had felt for them. These thoughts and this motivation remained with him up to the time of the composition and publication of the Tractatus. Not only his attitude towards that work but his remarks in it bear witness to these preoccupations. But we shall see that there is an advance in his intellectual attitude towards them, evident in his remarks there about the sense of the world, about ethics and the mystical. Some way out was at least visible. Only glimmerings of such a prospect appeared before the war in his remarks on conversion and his conversation with Moore (of which we have only the barest report) on saintliness.38 Thus Russell thought it a considerable change (for the worse) that religious and mystical themes played so large a part in Wittgenstein's thinking after the war. 38.On "conversion' see above p. 114. "Conversion' and "Saintliness' are the titles of two main sections of The Varieties of Religious Experience after the account of the sick soul. 159 5Cambridge 1912{-13 The discussions of Wittgenstein's spiritual and moral state throughout this Michaelmas Term 1912 continued alongside, indeed they partly arose from, discussions of philosophy. Russell read to the Aristotelian Society in London his paper "On the notion of cause'39 and to the Moral Sciences Club in Cambridge his revised paper "On matter'. Wittgenstein did not attend the former, but at the latter he was, according to Russell, the only one who understood it. The members of the Club were on the whole interested in the validity of the instinctive belief in the existence of unperceived perceptible qualities which Russell eventually had recourse to. Wittgenstein, we saw when discussing the April version of the paper,40 was more interested in Russell's attempt to show from how little the whole of physics might validly be inferred. Russell was not yet bold enough to assert that only my own sense-data need be supposed actually to exist_this was the view he first published in "The relation of sense-data to physics' written in January 1914,41 and then only as a programme for the future, something he believed but could not fully establish. But he did provide, particularly in his revisions to the April paper, many ingenious suggestions of how principles of physics could be understood in terms of differences in our sense-data. This contained, if it did not fulfil, the promise of a "construction' of the world of physics on a basis of sense-data. It is clear that Wittgenstein discussed these problems with Russell_his early reading of Boltzmann and perhaps Hertz must be remembered and his acquaintance with Mach's work. In January 1914 he was to send Russell the suggestion (followed by a suitable argument): Isn't what the "principle of sufficient reason' (law of causality) says simply that space and time are relative? The suggestion echoes a revision inserted in the 1912 paper where Russell says (with a rather different argument): The real purpose of such rather vague principles as "same cause same effect' or the "uniformity of nature' seems to be that absolute time must not appear in any scientific law. Derivation or influence is not an important point here: we are drawing attention to the fact that the two philosophers were concerned with the same problems. Similarly there is a parallel between Russell's destructive criticism of the notion of causality in "On the notion of cause' and Wittgenstein's dismissal of belief in causality as superstition in the 39.Printed in PAS 1912{-13 and in Mysticism and Logic. The paper was delivered on 4 November. 40.p. 106 above. 41.But perhaps he announced it to Wittgenstein in a letter to Vienna at Christmas, for Wittgenstein replied (LW to BR January 1913), "I cannot imagine your way of working from sense-data forward.' 160 Wittgenstein: A Life Tractatus (5.1363). Certainly Wittgenstein was the fiercer proponent of the view that there was no necessity outside logic and certainly his account of the nature of logical truth (which left no room in the realm of the a priori for "principles' like those of induction or causality) had great influence on Russell. But it was on a Russell who was already attempting on his own account to clarify and purify the rather too miscellaneous collection of a priori truths assumed by The Problems of Philosophy. Discussion of the problem of matter and of the nature of logic proceeded pari passu. We even find a most interesting set of logical jottings by Wittgenstein (with one "p' in Russell's hand) on the back of a paper of Russell's entitled "Matter_the problem stated'. The paper appears to date from shortly after the paper read to the Moral Sciences Club. Not all the jottings are easily intelligible_there may be logical devices implicit which were not expoited later, there may also be mistakes or false starts, but the following four ideas which are important for the presentation of logic in the Tractatus can be traced. (1) The idea of representing the truth-possibilities of a pair of propositions in a tabular form, thus: pq WW WFFW FFWW FFWFFW (cf. TLP 4.31). (2) The idea of correlating with such a table of truth-possibilities a further column indicating which (if any) of the truth-possibilities are allowed and which (if any) excluded. This will yield what was later called a "truth-table' giving the truth-conditions (TLP 4.431) of a proposition which is a truth-function (TLP 5) of the original pair of propositions. Assuming a conventional order of truth- possibilities, it is possible to write this column alone down as a row and still indicate a particular truth-function (TLP 4.442). Thus either ppWq WWFFW WFFWW or F W W W (p,q) FFWWW FFWFFWW will express the proposition that Russell wrote as pq (say "p only if not q'). This step towards the third idea is clearly implicit in the jottings.) (3) There are 16 different ways of filling in this third column, 16 different rows that can be written down representing all the possible truth- 161 5Cambridge 1912{-13 functions of a pair of propositions. Wittgenstein does this in full at TLP 5.101 and sketches a way or perhaps two ways of doing so in these jottings, thus: WWWW WWWFFW WWFFWW WFFWWW FFWWWW FFWFFWFFWFFW FFW..W..W..W < sp1> (4) Wittgenstein was particularly interested in the fifth of these truth-functions, which he writes as p ))( q and equates with p v q (it is also equivalent, as can be seen above, to p q). The natural explanation of this interest is as follows. Each of these truth-functions is equivalent to certain applications of the propositional connectives of Principia (v, , etc.) to a pair of propositions; and each application of these connectives to a pair of propositions is equivalent to one of these truth-functions. But the various connectives are also definable in terms of one another. Thus Whitehead and Russell defined all the others in terms of and v (thus for example p q = Df p v q). Now, if we employ a single sign for the connective represented by the fifth row (p ))( q in Wittgenstein's new symbolism), we shall have a connective with the property that all the other connectives can be defined in terms of it alone (for example p = Dfp ))( p and p v q = Df p ))( p. ))( .q ))( q).42 The use of a striking and ingenious method of presentation to make a philosophical point is very characteristic of Wittgenstein, but it seems that he did not at first see his way to using these ideas to present or recommend his views on the nature of logic. They do not appear in the Notes on Logic of 1913 or the Notes dictated to Moore of 1914, where other devices are used. Yet the jottings are certainly earlier than both, since 42.Two changes introduced by the Tractatus should be noted. Wittgenstein there adopts a different, now slightly unusual, order for tables of truth-possibilities: pq WW FFWW WFFW FFWFFW He wished to consider truth-functions of an arbitrary number of propositions and probably considered that this order made the construction of truth-tables easier and certain generalizations more intuitive. The other change is that the fundamental operation there (TLP 5.5, cf. 5.474, 5.1311) is joint negation, corresponding to the connective "neither ... nor ...' or the truth-function WWWF(p,q) in the above account. This is the only other connective possessing the property described above. 162 Wittgenstein: A Life Wittgenstein did not see Russell between the composition of Notes on Logic and the end of the war. These jottings are a valuable reminder of how little we know about the genesis of the Tractatus and how misleading the fragmentary preliminary work we have can be. Without this accidental find it might easily have been supposed that the devices of truth-tables and the fundamental logical operation occurred to Wittgenstein after the reflections recorded in the wartime Notebooks, whereas it now seems as if he recurred, at the time of composing the Tractatus, to an old device (recorded perhaps in one of the lost or destroyed notebooks).43 We have already stressed how early Wittgenstein's fundamental ideas came to him: another way of looking at the matter is that the Tractatus was an attempt to make use of everything of value that had occurred to him. Wittgenstein himself laid no claim to novelty in detail: the idea of the tables was Frege's; Wittgenstein's innovation was to use this sort of schema as a symbol for the proposition not as an explanation of it.44 The discovery of the two single connectives in terms of either of which all others could be defined was made by Sheffer. The idea of acknowledging this seems to have been discussed, but perhaps it was thought too obvious. For his part Russell hoped to make significant advances in logic. We have a first sketch of a paper "What is logic?' "which I think may be really important with luck' (BR to OM, 13.10.12). There is little doubt that it represents fairly accurately the position that Russell and Wittgenstein had reached at this time, and it outlines "the complex-problem' which was to exercise Wittgenstein during the Christmas vacation. Logic, on the view taken, was the study of the forms of complexes. It did not deal with judgements (which are a matter for psychology) nor with propositions (which can be false and hence cannot be anything objective but must be mere forms of words). Complexes will be recognized as identical with the true or asserted propositions of earlier discussions.45 We might say (as before) that complexes were facts, except that there are complexes whose existence is logically necessary, and it is natural to be reluctant, as Russell was, to speak of necessary or logical facts. In a complex [Russell writes], there must be something which we may call the form, which is not a constituent, but the way the constituents are put together... 43.Similarly we know that Wittgenstein inserted in manuscript in the typescript of the Tractatus the method of representing truth-combinations by means of brackets used at 6.1203 to show that a certain expression was a tautology. Here too he was not recording a new idea but reviving an old one, already expounded in LW to BR November{-December 1913 and implicit in Notes on Logic. 44.Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathematics (ed. Diamond), p.177. 45.p. 90 above. 163 5Cambridge 1912{-13 Logic deals with those forms which yield complexes however the variables are determined. Russell finds it necessary to assume "forms' as a primitive idea. A symbol composed entirely of variables symbolizes a form but is not itself a form. This leads, however, to a number of questions. What is a part of a form? Are there simple and complex forms?... In every proposition of logic, some expression containing only variables is said to be always true or sometimes true. The question "what is logic?' is the question what is meant by such propositions. The question is a most fundamental one_and typically philosophical. If an answer to it could be given, it would not carry us a step further in logic. For that reason many a "bourgeois thinker' (Wittgenstein's term later for Ramsey) would hurry over this part of the inquiry, anxious to make advances in the subject. But Wittgenstein's aim_and Russell's here_was that of clarification and they delayed the man who would press on, with frustrating questions: What were complexes? How were they composed? What was their form? What were statements about forms of complexes, that is to say statements composed of apparent variables, really about? These were the questions Wittgenstein variously referred to in 1912 as "the Complex problem' and "the apparent variables business' and their profundity can be gauged by considering the difficulty of answering the question with which Russell's fragment ends: Consider (x): hum.(x). ))( .mort(x). [in words: whatever x may be, if x is human x is mortal]. This seems to require that "Soc is hum. ))( .Soc. is mortal' should have a form with respect to Socrates, and that this form should be necessary. Then we state that, if x is any other entity, there is a complex having [the] same relation to x as [the] above has to Socrates. But this is again a general statement, and can't be the meaning of the original statement, or else we get an endless regress. There may be errors in this: it may involve a confusion of necessity with general validity, but it is much to Russell's credit that he acknowledged here his own failure to account for the necessity of logic. Russell's hopes fluctuated_"It is difficult but I feel I must have another go at it' on the 13th October and "Can't get on with {"What is logic{'_I feel very much inclined to leave it to Wittgenstein' on the 14th.46 Throughout the term Wittgenstein kept coming in with new ideas on logic, his health and spirits varying directly with his skill in 46.Both quotations are from letters to Lady Ottoline. 164 Wittgenstein: A Life hitting on them. For the vacation Wittgenstein returned to Vienna by way of Jena, where I had a long discussion with Frege about our Theory of Symbolism of which, I think, he roughly understood the general outline. He said he would think the matter over. The complex problem is now clearer to me and I hope very much that I may solve it. (LW to BR 26.12.12) It seems very probable that it was on this occasion that Frege put to Wittgenstein a general objection to Russell's talk about complexes, to which Wittgenstein reverted many times in conversation and alluded also in his notebooks. Frege asked him whether, if an object is part of a fact about it, the fact will be bigger than the object. At the time he thought the remark silly, but later he came to see the point of it. It was in fact an attack on the whole notion of explaining the meaning of propositions by saying that there were complexes corresponding to them_a way of speaking that Wittgenstein did in fact abandon in the course of 1913. Partly the difficulty lay in the confusion made by Russell and at this time Wittgenstein between a complex and a fact. As Wittgenstein said much later in "Complex and Fact': ... a complex is a spatial object consisting of spatial objects. (The concept "spatial' admitting of a certain extension.)... To say that a red circle consists of redness and circularity, or is a complex with these constituents, is a misuse of these words and is misleading. [Frege was aware of this and said it to me.]... The part smaller than whole_applied to fact and constituent, this would lead to an absurdity.47 Facts were, therefore, quite different from complexes and must be talked about in a quite different way. Russell had always betrayed an uneasy consciousness of this, but had failed to resolve the difficulty. It was to be a major difference between him and Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus begins with the notion of fact (Am Anfang war die Tatsache, so to speak). Even then many problems remained common to them: whether there were negative facts corresponding to true negative propositions; and how false propositions could have meaning, since it seems that there were by definition no facts or complexes corresponding to them and so on. Conversations with Frege thus sowed the seed of one of Wittgenstein's most important ideas. Another, as he told Russell, came to him independently: 47."Complex and Fact' (June 1931), Philosophical Remarks p.302 and Philosophical Grammar p.20. 165 5Cambridge 1912{-13 There cannot be different types of things! In other words whatever can be symbolized by a simple proper name must belong to one type. And further: every theory of types must be rendered superfluous by a proper theory of symbolism. (LW to BR January 1913) If "Socrates is mortal' is analysed into "Socrates', "mortality' (both proper names), and the copula, we need a theory of types to tell us that "Mortality is Socrates' is nonsensical. But if instead we analyse it into "Socrates' (a proper name) and "(%E x).x is mortal' (a symbol for a quality which is at the same time a copula) we should find it impossible to produce the nonsensical pseudo-sentence referred to. The suggested analysis may not be the best possible: what is certain, Wittgenstein thought, is the fact that all theory of types must be done away with by a theory of symbolism showing that what seem to be different kinds of things are symbolized by different kinds of symbols which cannot possibly be substituted in one another's places. (id. ibid.) This was in many ways a puzzling idea: it seemed to deal in a very cavalier fashion with one of Russell's most laborious achievements, and it did so in a way that led to much misunderstanding_Was Wittgenstein recommending the construction of an ideal symbolism which would prevent the formulation of nonsensical or paradoxical statements "a logically perfect language', as Russell put it in the introduction to the Tractatus? If so, must one not already have some theory of what the conditions to be fulfilled by a logically perfect language would be? Or did he mean that ordinary language, if the rules for its correct use were understood, already prevented such formulations? If so, what sort of study or inquiry would reveal the rules for the correct use of ordinary language, since our first inclinations are obviously an inadequate guide? It would be interesting to know when his best thoughts came to Wittgenstein. Those reported in letters naturally tend to come from times at which he was away from his normal discussion-partners. But his later notebooks, and his habit of bursting in on Russell, say, with the new ideas of the vacation, suggest that a new way of looking at things usually occurred to him somewhere in comparative isolation, and that discussion was important for him first to provide the fodder for his reflections and later to enable him to find the exact expression for their results. It is remarkable that Wittgenstein managed to strike a good vein of thought on the occasion of this particular Christmas visit to Vienna. He found his father very ill, there was no hope of recovery, he told Russell, 166 Wittgenstein: A Life his thoughts were lamed, he felt out of his mind, he needed48 (what he did not get quickly enough for his comfort) a letter from Russell. (Two kind letters from Russell did soon arrive.) We have essentially only Ludwig's own account of the last days of his father. His sister Hermine tells us in general terms of the trials of the long illness, of the self-sacrifice of the mother, of her total devotion to the father, of her long-pretended ignorance of the fatal nature of the disease, and of how, at the end, she simply let this mask fall. The illness grew rapidly: Ludwig was in doubt whether he ought to wait for the end or return for term. He has not yet any pains, but feels on the whole very bad having constant high fever. This makes him so apathetic that one cannot do him any good by sitting at his bed etc. And as this was the only thing that I could ever do for him, I am now perfectly useless here. So the time of my staying here depends entirely on whether the illness will take so rapid a course that I could not risk to leave Vienna; or not. (LW to BR January 1919)49 Then on the 21 January a letter to Russell that ought to be quoted in full: Dear Russell, My dear father died yesterday in the afternoon. He had the most beautiful death that I can imagine; without the slightest pains and falling asleep like a child! I did not feel sad for a moment during all the last hours, but most joyful and I think that this death was worth a whole life. I will leave Vienna on the 25th and will be in Cambridge either on Sunday night or Monday morning. I long very much to see you again. Yours ever Ludwig Wittgenstein Pause and note the importance attached to the manner of death. Ludwig too was to die in his sixties, of cancer, after a period of illness, and a longer period of premature retirement. He was to die_this surprised some_content with his life as well as with his death: it seems to have been so with his father too. We have seen that Ludwig, in 1913, had thought often and was to think constantly of death_until perhaps some climacteric in his middle years. Some things he feared_death might come too soon, his life or his work might not be in order, he might be tempted to take his own life, he might (this was the war) not have 48.LW to BR 26.12.13, 6.1.13: "von allen guten Geistern verlassen' in the latter means "out of my mind'. 49.Probably about 11 or 12 January, because it mentions a letter already written to Wittgenstein's tutor, whose actual date is 10 January. The English is understandably shaky: perhaps "not yet' means "no longer'. 167 5Cambridge 1912{-13 behaved decently. A good life should issue in a death one could welcome: perhaps, even, a good life was one that led to a good death. Such, so it seemed to Ludwig, was the death of Karl Wittgenstein, the energetic and tempestuous, in an atmosphere of calm and order. Respectful obituaries appeared in the Neue Freie Presse and even in The Times_"The Carnegie of Austria' he was called: Russell and the others had not known how important a man he had been in the world. He was buried in the Zentralfriedhof of Vienna in the grave destined for many of his family. The business of dividing up his large fortune into a widow's portion and equal shares for the five surviving children slowly began. Ludwig was to feel the effects of this later; also, perhaps, the loss of a central ordering force in his life, to whose wishes all his plans had to be referred; but for the moment the natural course of things seemed to be to return to his required residence at Cambridge, to his work, and to his friends_ Russell, Pinsent, and perhaps Moore_his chief support at this time. The Wittgenstein family, that elaborate organism which owed so much to Hermann Christian and the Geschwister Wittgenstein, but was set up chiefly by his father would continue to function: it was a background for him but did not at the moment require anything of him. Russell was impressed by the new ideas Wittgenstein brought back from Vienna. He played more and more with the idea of leaving work to him: once he had got Wittgenstein to the point at which he could teach mathematical logic (this would involve some degree or qualification, for form's sake) he himself would leave Cambridge. The letters from Vienna alone were enough to make him think that Wittgenstein would soon be ready to take his place. He talked less and less of finishing "What is logic?'_instead, when Wittgenstein convinced him that the early proofs of Principia were very inexact, he consoled himself with the thought: fortunately it is his business to put them right, not mine (BR to OM 23.2.13) "Ten years ago', he said in the same letter, "I could have written a book with the store of ideas I have already, but now I have a higher standard of exactness.' Thus, even though he returned in May to the project of an introduction to logic in order to make references in his general work on epistemology intelligible, he seems to have had little confidence in it. Moore's diary mentions a tea-time conversation with Wittgenstein on 19 May about "whether R's textbook of logic would be good'. (Not until 1918_in prison and in a different frame of mind_did Russell actually write his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.) Pinsent records, for example, how Russell called on him one day when Wittgenstein was already there: 168 Wittgenstein: A Life He and Wittgenstein got talking_the latter explaining one of his latest discoveries in the Fundamentals of Logic_a discovery which, I gather, only ocurred to him this morning, and which appears to be quite important and was very interesting. Russell acquiesced in what he said without a murmur. (Diary 4.2.13) Wittgenstein was thus acknowledged as an equal. He was taken to see the Whiteheads and Jourdain, with differing success. The Whiteheads were in poor health and he in bad humour: they formed an unfavourable impression of him, which, despite Russell's attempts to show them sympathetic or touching letters from Wittgenstein, is still reflected in Whitehead's later anecdotes about Wittgenstein. The meeting with Jourdain (evidently the first meeting, despite the 1909 correspondence we have referred to above) was more successful. It led to further discussions and a measure of collaboration. Jourdain, in this a bit like Keynes, was a connoisseur of the rare and brilliant. He was a devoted admirer of Frege, whose work he had summarized in some articles which are still of interest, and indeed had persuaded Frege to provide some comments of his own.50 Now he wrote to Frege as if reporting the opinion of a valued colleague: In your last letter to me you spoke about working at the theory of irrational numbers. Do you mean that you are writing a third volume of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik? Wittgenstein and I were rather disturbed to think that you might be doing so, because the theory of irrational numbers_unless you have got a quite new theory of them_would seem to require that the contradiction has been previously avoided; and the part dealing with irrational numbers on the new basis has been splendidly worked out by Russell and Whitehead in their Principia Mathematica. I say that we were disturbed, because we felt that you could not possibly, at this time, now that the theories you were the first to develop have been worked out by others, write a third volume that would be anywhere near your first and second in originality and brilliance. You must forgive me for speaking like this; it is only because I feel that your work on the foundations of logic is so wonderfully fine that I should regret to see its continuation into a domain that has already been cultivated by others. (PEBJ to GF 29.3.13) Some time later Wittgenstein undertook to revise Jourdain's translation of part of Frege's Grundgesetze, but owing to Wittgenstein's absence, prolonged by the war, this office was in fact performed by J. Stachelroth.51 50.Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 43 (1912) 237{-269 reprinted in Frege: Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence (1980). 51.Jourdain's translation of most of the Preface, the Introduction, and seven sections of the text appeared in the Monist 25{-27 (1915{-17). 169 5Cambridge 1912{-13 One sign of Wittgenstein's professional status is that he was able, and was asked, to write a review of a conventional textbook of traditional logic. Pinsent helped him to translate his review out of German: He has written the Review in German and gave me a rough translation. But it was very difficult_the construction of the sentences is so different, I suppose, in German to what it is in English. And he insisted on the translation being fairly literal. (Diary 11.2.13) The review (which bears no traces of these difficulties) is perhaps worth printing here: Wittgenstein's first known publication, confident and trenchant in style, a proof of his competence at the sort of task he later shunned, an example also of his preference for the epigrammatic and dismissive:52 In no branch of learning can an author disregard the results of honest research with so much impunity as he can in Philosophy and Logic. To this circumstance we owe the publication of such a book as Mr Coffey's "Science of Logic': and only as a typical example of the work of many logicians of to-day does this book deserve consideration. The author's Logic is that of the scholastic philosophers, and he makes all their mistakes_of course with the usual references to Aristotle. (Aristotle, whose name is so much taken in vain by our logicians, would turn in his grave if he knew that so many Logicians know no more about Logic to-day than he did 2,000 years ago.) The author has not taken the slightest notice of the great work of the modern mathematical logicians_work which has brought about an advance in Logic comparable only to that which made Astronomy out of Astrology, and Chemistry out of Alchemy. Mr Coffey, like many logicians, draws a great advantage from an unclear way of expressing himself; for if you cannot tell whether he means to say "Yes' or "No,' it is difficult to argue against him. However, even through his foggy expression, many grave mistakes can be recognised clearly enough; and I propose to give a list of some of the most striking ones, and would advise the student of Logic to trace those mistakes and their consequences in other books on Logic also. (The numbers in brackets indicate the pages of Mr Coffey's book_volume 1_where a mistake occurs for the first time; the illustrative examples are my own). 1. [36] The author believes that all propositions are of the subject-predicate form. 2. [31] He believes that reality is changed by becoming an object of our thoughts. 52.The work reviewed was P. Coffey: The Science of Logic (London, 1912). Coffey, a professor at Maynooth, did indeed propound scholastic philosophy in the form then current in theological colleges. The review was printed in The Cambridge Review 34 (1912{-13) 351, a periodical which printed serious book-reviews (notably some by Jourdain and Russell) alongside the news and controversies of the university. Professor Coffey is unlikely to have had sight of it. It has been reprinted in The Cambridge Mind. 170 Wittgenstein: A Life 3. [6] He confounds the copula "is' with the word "is' expressing identity. (The word "is' has obviously different meanings in the propositions_ "Twice two is four' and"Socrates is mortal'.) 4. [44] He confounds things with the classes to which they belong. (A man is obviously something quite different from mankind). 5. [48] He confounds classes and complexes. (Mankind is a class whose elements are men; but a library is not a class whose elements are books, because books become parts of a library only by standing in certain spatial relations to one another_ while classes are independent of the relations between their members). 6. [47] He confounds complexes and sums. (Two plus two is four, but four is not a complex of two and itself). This list of mistakes could be extended a good deal. The worst of such books as this is that they prejudice sensible people against the study of Logic. Note also the absolute confidence in the superiority of the new logic, together with the implication that logic was a subject in which advances ought to be made. All the signs were that Wittgenstein would, as it were, put his shoulder to the wheel and pass through all the stages then normal in the career of a young philosopher. Just as Moore delivered a course of lectures at Morley College in 1910,53 so Wittgenstein, it was planned, should lecture at the Working Men's College, also in London. There, in the birthplace of workers' education, where F.D. Maurice originally, and the author of Tom Brown's Schooldays more recently, had taught the manliness of Christianity and the christianity of socialism, Wittgenstein too was to perform his own part in that atonement by means of education that the rich then felt obliged to make. Ten years later he would have scoffed at the idea of assisting the working man by any kind of academic training, let alone by philosophy, but for the moment he evidently felt (in the words of his advice to F._p. 111 above) that an introduction to philosophy would help them to see what honest thought was. When October 1913 came he was out of England for a number of reasons and the lectures were not given. Meanwhile, throughout the Lent and Easter terms of 1913 Wittgen- stein continued to come to Russell with fresh and good ideas on the foundations of logic. To Moore too, on his good days, he would explain probability, or Russell's theory of classes, or the analysis of a proposition. 53.Now published as Some Main Problems of Philosophy. 171 5Cambridge 1912{-13 As in Michaelmas Term, there were periods of depression, though shorter ones. He came to Russell in May to say that logic was driving him into insanity: I think there is a danger of it, so I urged him to let it alone for a bit and do other work_I think he will. He is in a shocking state_always gloomy, pacing up and down, waking out of a dream when one speaks to him. (BR to OM 2.5.13) And from Vienna he wrote to Russell: I am as perfectly sterile as I never was, and I doubt whether I shall ever again get ideas. Whenever I try to think about Logic, my thoughts are so vague that nothing ever can crystallize out. What I feel is the curse of all those who have only half a talent; it is like a man who leads you along a dark corridor with a light and just when you are in the middle of it the light goes out and you are left alone. (LW to BR 25.3.13)54 It is an awful curse [Russell commented on this letter] to have the creative impulse, unless you have a talent that can always be relied on, like Shakespeare's or Mozart's. (BR to OM 29.3.13) Wittgenstein's difficulty seems to have been especially acute: it is as if he wanted to grasp or comprehend the whole of a difficult subject in a single act of insight_to find, as he puts it in his Notebooks (20.1.15), the word that will break the spell. It happened there was at that time a wave of interest in hypnotism in Cambridge. A number of dons were submitting themselves to it. Pinsent tells us: Wittgenstein has been having himself mesmerized_by Dr Rogers here. The idea is this. It is, I believe, true that people are capable of special muscular effort while under hypnotic trance: then why not also special mental effort? So when he (Wittgenstein) is under trance, Rogers is to ask him certain questions about points of Logic, about which Wittgenstein is not yet clear, (_certain uncertainties which no one has yet succeeded in clearing up): and Witt: hopes he will then be able to see clearly. It sounds a wild scheme! Witt: has been twice to be hypnotized_but not until the end of the second interview did Rogers succeed in sending him to sleep: when he did, however, he did it so thoroughly that it took {2 hour to wake him up again completely. Witt: says he was conscious all the time_could hear Rogers talk_but absolutely without will or strength: could not comprehend what was said to him_could exert no muscular effort_felt exactly as if he were under anaesthetic. He felt very drowsy for an hour after he left Rogers. It is altogether a wonderful business. There can be no 54.This was the letter that Russell showed to the Whiteheads to make them think better of Wittgenstein. 172 Wittgenstein: A Life "Auto-suggestion' about it_as Wittgenstein once found himself getting drowsy etc:, when he didn't think Rogers was trying to mesmerize him at all:_just after an attempt had failed, and when he (Witt:) thought the se$0ance was over and was preparing to go away_just talking about other things for a moment before leaving. (Diary 15.5.13) His sister Gretl told Ludwig a similar story about her own experiments with a hypnotist. It is tempting to think that both brother and sister were exceptionally strong personalities_that they lived, as it were, at a degree of tension not easily relaxed but once relaxed not easily restored. The dilettante's interest in the powers of one's own mind is also characteristic of both brother and sister: at one time they used to exchange dream-reports. Characteristic too is the perversity, the resistance to the hypnotism when it was officially being applied, though it was their own idea to undergo it. In so far as Wittgenstein's experiment was serious it throws some light on his conception of the nature of his task: it was something to be discharged not by patient and cumulative removal of partial problems but by some great insight achieved as a result of effort. One feature of Wittgenstein's method of work was his need to involve another person_Pinsent and Jourdain are examples, but Russell was of course the chief sufferer or beneficiary. It was to affect Russell's work severely for another ten years_indeed the association with Wittgenstein may be put alongside that with Lady Ottoline and the new pre- occupations of the First World War as one of the chief influences on Russell's career. It was an influence that he almost sought to avoid. He began to feel that Wittgenstein was narrow and uncivilized, rather too much the champion of a party_that is when judged by the highest standards (BR to OM 6.3.12)55 He found himself no longer talking about his own work but only about Wittgenstein's: When there are no clear arguments but only inconclusive considerations to be balanced, or unsatisfactory points of view to be set against each other, he is no good; and he treats infant theories with a ferocity which they can only endure when they are grown up. (BR to OM 23.4.13) For this reason apparently he did not at first tell Wittgenstein of the direction of his own researches. He began to think, in May 1913, both that the subject of theory of knowledge would be the best for some lectures he was to give next year in America and that he ought in any 55.The background for this criticism is explained on p. 115 above. 173 5Cambridge 1912{-13 case to write a work on that subject_to solve the problem, in particular, of dreams (i.e. of how we are to know that all our experience is not mere dreaming) before he could hope to tackle the subject of matter. It is not clear whether the lectures he had in mind were the Lowell Lectures he was due to give at Boston in 1914 or the lectures he would concurrently be giving at Harvard. In the event he gave as Lowell Lectures material written from September 1913 on, subsequently published as Our Knowledge of the External World, while he used his theory of knowledge material in Harvard. After only a few days of sketching his plan (no writer can read Russell's letters without envy!) he began to write on 7 May and saw no reason why he should not go straight to the end. It all flows out [he wrote next day]. There will be an introductory chapter, which I shall probably leave to the last_the first substantial chapter, which I have nearly finished, is called "Preliminary description of experience'... If I go on the scale on which I have begun it will be quite a big book_500 pages of print I should think. It is all in my head, ready to be written as fast as my pen will go. I feel as happy as a king. (BR to OM 8.5.13) He did indeed go ahead at the pace he had set himself_ten pages a day_or even faster. By 21 May he had already written six chapters.56 Wittgenstein was told of the project of a book on the theory of knowledge a week after the actual writing had begun. It shocked him, Russell says, he thinks it will be like the shilling shocker, which he hates. He is a tyrant, if you like. (BR to OM 13.5.13) Now, on the 20th, he had come to Russell with an objection to Russell's former theory of judgement He was right, but I think the correction required is not very serious. I shall have to make up my mind within a week, as I shall soon reach judgement. (BR to OM 21.5.13) He reached "the Day of Judgement' by the 24th and was full of confidence: I got a new way of dividing the subject_quite new and much more searching than the traditional divisions. ... any number of really important new ideas came to me. (BR to OM 23.5.13) 56.The six in fact that appeared as articles in The Monist January 1914{-April 1915. The work as a whole (or all that was written) has now been published under the title Theory of Knowledge as volume 7 of the Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell. 174 Wittgenstein: A Life By the 26th he had finished the crucial chapter_"On the understanding of propositions'_and was some way into the next when Wittgenstein came to see him. We were both cross from the heat_I showed him a crucial part of what I have been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the difficulties _that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn't work. I couldn't understand his objection_in fact he was very inarticulate_but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen something I have missed. If I could see it too I shouldn't mind, but as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my writing_I can only go on with what I see, and yet I feel it is probably all wrong, and that Wittgenstein will think me a dishonest scoundrel for going on with it. Well, well_it is the younger generation knocking at the door_I must make room for him when I can, or I shall become an incubus. But at the moment I was rather cross. (BR to OM 27.5.13) All the indications are that this was an objection raised by Wittgenstein to Russell's theory of judgement even in its new form, but it was connected with just those problems_the nature of propositions, their forms, what their truth consisted in_that Russell wanted to leave to Wittgenstein. When Wittgenstein wrote saying he could express his objection exactly, he put it as follows: I believe it is obvious that, from the proposition "A judges that (say) a is the Relation R to b', if correctly analysed, the proposition "aRb.v aRb' must follow directly without the use of any other premiss. This condition is not fulfilled by your theory. (LW to BR June 1913) Sometime that same summer he wrote down: Every right theory of judgement must make it impossible for me to judge that this table penholders the book. Russell's theory does not satisfy this requirement. or, as he said, more briefly in September The proper theory of judgement must make it impossible to judge nonsense.57 In the relevant chapter Russell explains that understanding is a relation which holds between a subject, the various constituents of a proposition, 57.Both remarks now occur in Notes on Logic, for the composition of which see below and my article in Revue internationale de Philosophie 26 (1972) 444. 175 5Cambridge 1912{-13 and the logical form of the proposition. It might be represented therefore by U(S,A,B, similarity, R(x,y))_a relation holding between a subject S, the object A, the object B, the relation similarity, and the logical form R(x,y). Believing or judging is another such relation. There are various specifications of what sort of relation understanding is: these would generally apply to believing also; their chief function is to show that the relation proceeds from the subject to each of the other terms and then arranges them in a certain way. The difficulty Wittgenstein alludes to arises because there is nothing in the specification of the relation U to show that the objects must be objects, the relation a relation, or the logical form one which it would be possible for the objects and relations (supposing them to be such) to figure in. Why is it_what is there in the specification given of the relation U (understanding) or B (believing) to make it the case_that the subject cannot take any arbitrary and ill-assorted set of objects of acquaintance and "understand' or "believe' them to be combined in any logical form that he chooses? What is it, in other words, about understanding or believing that makes only a proposition a possible object for them? It seems indeed easy to say that a relation is not called understanding or believing unless it is the relation of a subject to a proposition. But anyone who says this must already know what a proposition is. Russell's position in Theory of Knowledge was that the world contained complexes (corresponding to true beliefs) and true and false beliefs: it did not contain propositions, true and false: these had to be constructed out of, abstracted from, the complexes and states of mind already mentioned. If, however, as is surely the case, the notion of proposition is prior to that of the state of mind consisting in belief, this part of Russell's programme collapses. This is the only objection of Wittgenstein's to which we have an explicit contemporary allusion, but in Wittgenstein's own writings over the next years many of the themes discussed_many of the positions contested_were taken from the Theory of Knowledge manuscript.58 We must suppose that there were a number of discussions of its contents and that it provided a good part of the matter for Wittgenstein's reflections during the productive year to be described in our next chapter. After Wittgenstein's "attack' of 27 May Russell continued to write, no more slowly but with less heart. He felt that he had overcome Wittgenstein's difficulty, but only superficially. Besides he did not want to steal Wittgenstein's ideas_and even a difficulty was an important idea. If the difficulty were not solved, it made a large part of the book he meant to write impossible, perhaps for years to come. The result was something it was very difficult to be honest about: "the first time in my 58.Some instances are indicated in my "The Grundgedanke of the Tractatus' in G. Vesey (ed.): Understanding Wittgenstein (1974). 176 Wittgenstein: A Life life that I have failed in honesty over work. Yesterday I felt ready for suicide,' he wrote to Lady Ottoline on 20 June 1913. By this time he had paused in his writing, after 350 pages, meaning to leave Part III, on inference, until the autumn, but in fact he was to write no more of this book. He had already stopped indeed when he received Wittgenstein's "exact expression' of his objection_in an invitation to lunch received on 11 June. The objection, he told Wittgenstein, "paralysed' him.59 He spent, in all, an anxious summer_until he returned to England from holiday and began (on 1 September) writing his Lowell Lectures_his "popular lectures' as he called them in a letter to Lady Ottoline. Looking back on these events, in 1916, Russell told Lady Ottoline: Do you remember that at the time you were seeing Vittoz I wrote a lot of stuff about the Theory of Knowledge, which Wittgenstein criticized with the greatest severity? His criticism, though I don't think you realized it at the time, was an event of first-rate importance in my life and affected everything I have done since. I saw he was right and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy. My impulse was shattered like a wave dashed to pieces against a breakwater. I became filled with utter despair... "I soon got over this mood,' Russell said, much later, in a footnote about the letter,60 but the date of the letter itself proves that his despondent conviction that all fundamental work in philosophy was logical and he himself no longer fit to do it lasted from the summer of 1913 until at least 1916. These differences over the manuscript only accentuated the difficulties that Russell and Wittgenstein found in their friendship. Despite the criticisms Russell was convinced that his book was good "because it gives an example of scientific method where previous writing has been unscientific'. In the same letter he reflects ruefully on Wittgenstein's effect on him: He affects me just as I affect you_I get to know every turn and twist of the ways in which I irritate and depress you from watching how he irritates and depresses me; and at the same time I love and admire him. Also I affect him just as you affect me when you are cold. The parallelism is curiously close altogether. He differs from me just as I differ from you. He is clearer, more creative, more passionate; I am broader, more sympathetic, more sane. I have overstated the parallel for the sake of symmetry, but there is something in it. (BR to OM 1.6.13) And a few days later: 59.Wittgenstein answers some such remark in his letter LW to BR 22.7.13. 60.The letter is reprinted in Russell's Autobiography, vol. 2, p. 57. 177 5Cambridge 1912{-13 I had an awful time with Wittgenstein yesterday between tea and dinner. He came analysing all that goes wrong between him and me and I told him I thought it was only nerves on both sides and everything was all right at bottom. Then he said he never knew whether I was speaking the truth or being polite, so I got vexed and refused to say another word. He went on and on and on. I sat down at my table and took up my pen and began to look through a book, but still he went on. At last I said sharply "All you want is a little self-control'. Then at last he went away with an air of high tragedy. He had asked me to a concert in the evening, but he didn't come, so I began to fear suicide. However, I found him in his room late (I left the concert, but didn't find him at first), told him I was sorry I had been cross, and then talked quietly about how he could improve. His faults are exactly mine_always analysing, pulling feelings up by the roots, trying to get the exact truth of what one feels towards him. I see it is very tiring and very deadening to one's affections. I think it must be characteristic of logicians_he is the only other one I have known intimately. (BR to OM 5.6.13) There may be logicians' faults; but more probably it was a question of which person kissed and which turned the cheek. A few days later again, on 10 June, they went together to the Choral Symphony. This was when Wittgenstein told Russell that hearing that symphony with him was one of the great moments of his life. It is possible to picture the enthusiasm he felt: the gramophone was young, stereophonic reproduction had not been thought of, a performance of the Choral Symphony was an event. All the same, Wittgenstein was in an exceptionally receptive and enthusiastic state of mind_it was only three months since he had told Pinsent of a performance of it: It would seem almost as though the chorus of the 9th was symbolic of a real turning point in his life! That he had found consolation at last. (Diary 5.3.13) There is, or was, a certain pattern to the ending of the Cambridge year_the concert and the heightened personal relationships are part of it. So in 1913, there was a demonstration at the Psychology Laboratory in which Wittgenstein took part; there were visits from relations_ Pinsent's family came to Cambridge and Wittgenstein, a preoccupied host but otherwise in good form, gave them tea in chemical beakers; Wittgenstein's mother came to London and Russell and Moore went to lunch with her at the Savoy. We know nothing of what passed between them, but during the war Russell was able to write to her a letter of exactly the appropriate tone, inquiring about her son. Wittgenstein's own calendar (he always developed one) required a visit to Manchester to see his friend Eccles (whether this was the year in 178 Wittgenstein: A Life which he went across the water to Eccles's home in Coleraine is not clear). It was from Manchester that he wrote to Keynes about the benefaction designed for Johnson and described above, showing that he had already begun to think about some of the consequences of the fortune he had inherited. And so, in July, back to Austria and the Hochreith. After one of his most energetic years he was to start on one of his most retired; after one of his most eventful on one of his most productive.