Notebooks 1914-1916

The Notebooks 1914-1916 are the philosophical diaries Wittgenstein kept as a soldier in the First World War, while he was working out the ideas that became the Tractatus. They are not a finished book but a workshop: dated entries, false starts, questions he could not yet answer, and the first appearance of almost every famous thought in his early philosophy.

What the Notebooks are and how they came about

In August 1914 Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army. He served on a patrol boat on the Vistula, in an artillery workshop and later at the Russian front. Through all of it he kept writing. On the right-hand pages of his notebooks he wrote philosophy. On the left-hand pages, in a simple reversed-alphabet code, he wrote about himself: fear, prayer, disgust with his comrades, the wish to become a better person.

Three of these notebooks survive, running from August 1914 to January 1917. They are catalogued as MS 101 to MS 103 in the Bergen edition of his papers, which you can consult through Wittgenstein Source. Most of his other early notebooks were destroyed on his instructions. After his death G.H. von Wright and G.E.M. Anscombe edited the philosophical entries. The German text appeared in 1960, and the bilingual edition with Anscombe's English translation followed in 1961 (Blackwell, second edition 1979). The volume adds three appendices: the Notes on Logic of 1913, the notes he dictated to G.E. Moore in Norway in 1914, and extracts from his letters to Russell.

What the Notebooks say

The early entries are about logic. The very first philosophical note already contains a slogan that returns in the Tractatus: logic must take care of itself. Wittgenstein wants to know how a proposition can be about the world at all, and what has to be true of language and reality for that to work.

In late September 1914 he found his answer in a newspaper report. A Paris court had reconstructed a traffic accident with toy cars and dolls. A proposition, he realised, works like that model: its parts stand for things, and the way they are arranged shows how things are supposed to be. This is the seed of the picture theory of meaning.

For the next eighteen months the notebooks circle around the problems that theory raises. Are there simple objects? Must analysis come to an end? How do negation and generality work?

Then, in the summer of 1916, the tone changes. Wittgenstein was now at the front during the Brusilov offensive, under heavy fire. His entries turn to God, the will, happiness, death and the meaning of life.

Was weiß ich über Gott und den Zweck des Lebens? Ich weiß, daß diese Welt ist.

What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists.

Notebooks 1914-1916, 11.6.16

These pages explain something the Tractatus only states in a few dense lines at the end: that ethics, the self and the mystical lie at the limit of the world, where language can no longer describe but only show.

How to read the Notebooks

Do not read them first. The Notebooks make most sense once you know the Tractatus, because then you can recognise remarks that later ended up in the book, sometimes word for word, and see the reasoning that the Tractatus leaves out. The logical entries are demanding and assume some familiarity with Frege and Russell. The entries from June 1916 onwards are much easier and are the best place to start if your interest is ethics or religion.

The standard edition is the German-English volume edited by von Wright and Anscombe. French readers have the Carnets 1914-1916 (Gallimard, 1971). The coded personal entries are published separately: in German as Geheime Tagebücher (1991) and in English as Private Notebooks 1914-1916, translated by Marjorie Perloff (2022).

Why the Notebooks matter

For scholars the Notebooks are the main evidence for what the Tractatus means. When a remark in the finished book seems impossibly compressed, the Notebooks often show the problem it was meant to solve. They also matter for the debate between traditional and resolute readings of the Tractatus, since both sides appeal to the way Wittgenstein worked his way to the text, as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy explains.

For everyone else they offer something rarer: a great philosopher thinking out loud, with dates attached.

Verdict

Read this if you have read the Tractatus and want to know where it came from, or if the closing pages on ethics and the meaning of life moved you and you want more. Skip it as a first introduction: without the finished book next to it, much of the logic will feel like overhearing half a conversation.