Quote:
Originally Posted by Wamy Einehouse
How big an effect do you think the war and his service had on him and his later work?
With regard to the
Tractatus, the impact was substantial. Significant portions of Wittgenstein's notebooks from the period of his service as a soldier appear either verbatim or slightly modified in the
Tractatus. In particular, Remark 6 to Remark 7 all show a heavy influence from the war. While a soldier, Wittgenstein became increasingly religious, and religious sentiment surfaced periodically throughout his later life. Indeed, Wittgenstein at one point attempted to become a monk, but was rejected on the grounds that he was too psychologically troubled to join a monastery. This religiosity surfaces in the portions of the
Tractatus that remark on "the mystical," which are regarded by many critics of the book as a strange, out-of-place turn for an otherwise aggressively rigorous logical work. I can only guess that the religiousness was Wittgenstein's response to the horrors of war - his psychological means of coping with the trauma he experienced daily in the trenches. During this period, Wittgenstein's journals show that each time his unit ended up avoiding combat, he felt disappointment. He seemed to believe that service to his country demanded that he see action on the front lines.
The war seems all but absent from
Philosophical Investigations, however, in that there are almost no mentions of religious topics, and Wittgenstein's allegiance to any concept of "the mystical" seems to have vanished. Presumably, events as dramatic as war have a lasting impact on one's psyche, but it is difficult to predict what the
Philosophical Investigations would have been without WWI - or whether a book recognizable as that work would have existed. Counterfactuals aside, in general there are no clear signs of the thematic concerns that are easiest to link biographically with wartime experience in the
Investigations, though it is possible there are subtle connections I am failing to see.