Notebooks 1914-1916

Only some of Wittgenstein's wartime notebooks survive, and the published text is an edited selection. The edition was prepared by G. H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, with Anscombe providing the English translation printed opposite the German. Von Wright's account of the manuscripts indicates that Wittgenstein deliberately destroyed earlier notebooks, so what remains is incomplete and may not represent the full development of his thought. The editors also made decisions about arrangement and about which personal material to include. Readers building arguments about the order in which ideas arose should therefore treat the surviving record as partial and consult the editors' notes.

The entries record Wittgenstein working toward the idea that a proposition represents a state of affairs by sharing logical form with it. He is said to have been struck by a report of a model used in a Paris court to represent an accident, which led him to treat propositions as pictures. The notebooks show the idea developing in stages, with false starts, qualifications, and revisions of earlier formulations. This makes them valuable for understanding why the Tractatus states the theory as it does, though scholars differ on how much weight to give any single entry.

Many remarks in the notebooks appear, revised and condensed, as numbered propositions in the Tractatus, so the notebooks serve as a kind of workshop for the finished book. Comparing the two reveals what Wittgenstein kept, compressed, or dropped, including discussions of simple objects and of the status of logical constants. The notebooks are less polished and more tentative, and they sometimes raise doubts the Tractatus leaves unstated. Scholars use them to test interpretations of the Tractatus, though a reading supported only by a notebook passage should be treated cautiously.

The notebooks interleave technical remarks about logic with reflections on God, the will, happiness, and the meaning of life. In the published edition the personal and religious entries are largely kept in a distinct section, but they share the same pages and period. Interpreters disagree about how closely the two strands connect. Some see the ethical remarks as foreshadowing the Tractatus claim that ethics lies beyond what can be said, while others warn against reading the book as a single unified project, since the connections are suggestive rather than demonstrated.

Wittgenstein's early thinking engages directly with the logic of Frege and of Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica, and the notebooks record his objections to parts of that framework. He questions the status of logical constants and the need for Russell's theory of types, proposing that the structure of language shows what the theory tried to state. These entries help explain the Tractatus doctrine that logic is not a body of truths but shows itself in the symbolism. Specialists debate how far Wittgenstein's criticisms of Russell were already formed by the time of the notebooks.

A common mistake is to treat them as a transparent window onto Wittgenstein's settled views, as though each entry were a considered thesis. They are working notes, with questions, abandoned attempts, and passages written under the conditions of military service. Another mistake is to read them as a prior version that the Tractatus simply tidied. In some respects the finished book departs from them, and the differences are part of what makes them worth studying. Reading them alongside the Tractatus and the editors' commentary guards against both errors.