The Making of the Tractatus: Russell, Wittgenstein and the "Logic" of War

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is not usually read as a war book. Unlike the countless novels, poems, plays, and memoirs that constitute what is known as the "literature of World War I," Wittgenstein's treatise on logic, begun in the prewar years, would seem to lead a life quite independent of the specific political events of its day. Yet, as I hope to show here, it was primarily Wittgenstein's war experience that transformed the Tractatus from logical, scientific treatise to something quite different—a book closer to the avant-garde poetic fictions of the teens and twenties than to the philosophical work that first brought Wittgenstein to the Cambridge of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, the monumental Principia Mathematica, produced by Russell, together with Alfred North Whitehead, between 1903 and 1910.

In Portraits from Memory (1956), Russell recalls his decision in August 1914 to protest, in any and all forms possible, the participation of England in the First World War:

Love of England is very nearly the strongest emotion I possess, and in appearing to set it aside at such a moment, I was making a very difficult renunciation. Nevertheless, I never had a moment's hesitation as to what I must do. I have been cynical, at times indifferent, but when war came I felt as if I heard the voice of God. I knew it was my business to protest, however futile protest might be. My whole nature was involved.

And in a letter to the Nation on 15 August, he declared: "All this madness, all this rage, all this flaming death of our civilization and our hopes, has been brought about because a set of official gentlemen, living luxurious lives, mostly stupid, and all without imagination or heart, have chosen that it should occur rather than that any one of them should suffer some infinitesimal rebuff to his country's pride." Within less than a year Russell was writing to Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My real ambition has quite deserted philosophy and gone into writing about war and peace" (CPBR xxxii).

Or was it the other way around? Did Russell turn to "writing about war and peace" perhaps because philosophy, in its more demanding forms, had deserted him? On 4 March 1916, he writes to Lady Ottoline:

... what wanted doing in logic was too difficult for me. So there was no real vital satisfaction of my philosophical impulse in that work, and philosophy lost its hold on me. That was due to Wittgenstein more than to the War. What the war has done is to give me a new and less difficult ambition, which seems to me quite as good as the old one.

Ironically, the very month that Russell confessed that Wittgenstein and the war were drawing him away from philosophy, Wittgenstein himself was serving as an engineer on a workshop train near Lwów on the eastern front. Having enlisted as a volunteer in the Austrian army as soon as war broke out, Wittgenstein never had the slightest doubt that it was his duty to fight. Not that he had any rational argument for war or for German "rights": on the contrary, just a few months into the war, he wrote in his diary: "I feel ... more than ever the tragedy of our—the German race's—situation! For that we cannot defeat England seems to me as good as certain. The English—the best race in the world—cannot lose! We, however, can lose and will lose, if not this year then the next! The thought that our race will be defeated depresses me terribly because I am German through and through!"

This racial self-identification may seem ironic, the then twenty-five-year-old-Wittgenstein having spent the previous five years avoiding his native Vienna as much as possible, and having formed what was his most serious personal relationship to date with his young Cambridge colleague David Pinsent. Feeling "German through and through," moreover, had nothing to do, in Wittgenstein's case, with any kind of fellow-feeling for his countrymen: repeatedly he complained, both in letters and in his diary, about the "bunch of delinquents" (Gaunerpack ) with whom he had to serve, the all-but-subhuman crew mates on the Goplana, whose "stupidity, rudeness, and malice ... know no bounds."

Wittgenstein's identification with what he calls "the tragedy of our—the German race's—situation" was, as I shall suggest later, less a question of politics than of a particular view of culture. He had faith neither in the official British position that the war was being fought to "save" civilization, nor in the antithetical conviction, animating Russell's wartime writings, that the war would spell the "flaming death of our civilization"—a conviction that was a central article of faith of British intellectual thought throughout the war and its aftermath. The saving of civilization, the conservation of values, the nobility of tradition —these were concepts alien to Wittgenstein's thinking. Even as Russell was producing pamphlet after pamphlet analyzing the causes of war, the likely results of this particular war, and the steps that might have been taken to prevent it, on the assumption that an enlightened Europe should and would eventually rise above individual and national self-interest, Wittgenstein longed, not for national or cultural "improvement"—an improvement he regarded cynically as, in any case, absurd and impossible—but for his own improvement, both mental and spiritual. His hope was that war might, as he put it, "turn [him] into a different person." The war, he told a nephew many years later, "saved my life; I don't know what I'd have done without it" (BMG 204).

The paradox is that, whereas Russell felt a need to renounce philosophy because of the war, a war he studied from the sidelines, Wittgenstein's actual war experience became one of the mainsprings of his philosophy. In March 1916 he realized his long-expressed wish to be posted to the front as an ordinary soldier and was assigned to an artillery regiment stationed in Galicia near the Romanian border. It was here, in the midst of heavy fighting, that, unbeknownst to Russell, the Tractatus was transformed from a treatise on the logic of propositions into something quite different. As Ray Monk puts it:

If Wittgenstein had spent the entire war behind the lines, the Tractatus would have remained what it almost certainly was from its first inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in ... an impulse that...