On the right-hand (recto) pages he wrote - in ordinary, uncoded script - what would become the notes to a draft of the “Tractatus,” which would be published in 1921 on the left-hand (verso) pages he kept his secret, coded diary, which has now been translated into English for the first time by the poetry critic Marjorie Perloff. He had volunteered for the Austrian army, and in August 1914 began to keep his war notebooks, only three of which survived. Wittgenstein wrote this down for his private consumption, scribbling the declaration in the code he had used with his siblings when they were children. That Wittgenstein should turn from having plenty to say to having nothing to say was in keeping with his own “Tractatus,” in which he listed more than 500 numbered statements, delving into detailed logical formulations, before arriving at his terse conclusion: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” Or, as Wittgenstein put it in his notebook in July 1916, “What cannot be said, cannot be said!” Yet as Ray Monk observed in his biography, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius” (1990), memoirs even by those who barely knew him are “countless,” including recollections by “the lady who taught him Russian” and “the man who delivered peat to his cottage.” The economist Friedrich Hayek happened to be a cousin, and he wrote a remembrance that recalled the few times they met, when Wittgenstein toggled between eager conversation and sudden withdrawal, at one point sticking his nose in a detective novel, “apparently unwilling to talk.” Described by another philosopher as a “spellbinding and somewhat terrifying person,” he was intensely lonely, and he dedicated his “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” to David Pinsent, who died in a plane crash in 1918, calling him “my first and only friend.”
Before his death in 1951, Wittgenstein had published a total of one book, one article and one book review (the review was written when he was an undergraduate at Cambridge). It’s perhaps a measure of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s genius as well as his enigma that the volume of writing about him is almost comically disproportionate to the volume of writing by him.
PRIVATE NOTEBOOKS 1914-1916 By Ludwig Wittgenstein Edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff Illustrated.
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