Wittgenstein, Tolstoy and the meaning of life

Philosophical Investigations

Volumn 20, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 96-116

  Thompson, Caleb ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY AT BUFFALO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 38849198054     PISSN: 01900536     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-9205.00033     Document Type: Article

References (19)

1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, 'Letters to Ludwig von Ficker', trans. B. Gillette, ed. A. Janik, Wittgenstein: Sources and Perspectives, ed. C. G. Luckhardt (Sussex, England: Harvester Press, 1979) 90.
2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore, ed. G. H. von Wright assisted by B. F. McGuiness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1974) 82.
3. Engelmann, Letters from Wittgenstein with a Memoir, trans. L. Furtmüller. Ed. B. F. McGuinness (New York: Horizon, 1968) 79-80.
4. Philip Shields, Logic and Sin in the Writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993) 7.
5. Walter Kaufmann, Religion from Tolstoy to Camus (New York: Harper and Row, 1964) 7.
6. Isaiah Berlin, 'Tolstoy and Enlightenment', Russian Thinkers (New York: Viking Press, 1978) 241.
7. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981) §6.52.
8. The evidence that Wittgenstein read Tolstoy's A Confession is circumstantial, though nonetheless compelling. Given the importance that The Gospel in Brief had for him it is hard to imagine that he would not have read A Confession. Furthermore, Wittgenstein would have been familiar with A Confession from William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience which he read with enthusiasm before the war. James quotes from Tolstoy's work at length in the chapters entitled 'The Sick Soul' and 'The Divided Self.' It may even be (despite Russell's colourful story) that Wittgenstein was led by A Confession to The Gospel in Brief.
9. G. E. M. Anscombe, An Introduction to Wittgenstein's Tractatus (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971) 170.
10. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) 97.
11. Tolstoy, A Confession, The Gospel in Brief and What I Believe, trans. Aylmer Maude (London: Oxford University Press, 1940) 14-15.
12. Antony Flew, 'Tolstoi and the Meaning of Life', Ethics Vol 73 (1963) 111.
13. Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Louise and Aylmer Maude (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1942) 1078-9. This passage is particularly striking because it indicates a kinship not just between Tolstoy and the early Wittgenstein but between Tolstoy and the later Wittgenstein. It anticipates Wittgenstein's concern in the Philosophical Investigations with the place of language in human activity and brings out the ethical dimension of Wittgenstein's remarks in the Investigations, a dimension which readers often feel but cannot necessarily characterise.
14. I take the idea that 'What can be shown cannot be said' to originate with Kraus. (See Wittgenstein's remarks to Engelmann on the Uhland poem 'Count Eberhard's Hawthorn' and Engelmann's comments in Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein, pp. 82-85.) On the one hand, Tolstoy was extremely skilled at showing - at bringing out the strengths and weaknesses of a person's character. On the other hand, he was prone to moralising, to try to say (and failing on Wittgenstein's view) what he was so good at showing.
15. The idea that Wittgenstein means for us to take quite seriously his characterisation of his sentences as nonsense and his instructions to throw them away has been persuasively defended by Cora Diamond in 'Throwing Away the Ladder: How to Read the Tractatus' (The Realistic Spirit (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991)),
16. by Thomas Ricketts in 'Facts, Logic and the Criticism of Metaphysics in the Tractatus' (unpublished)
17. by James Conant in 'Must We Show What We Cannot Say?' (The Senses of Stanley Cavell (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1989)).
18. I have argued for the analogy between the structure of the Tractatus so described and the confessional form as seen, for example, in Tolstoy's A Confession in 'The Confessional Narrative of Wittgenstein's Tractatus' (delivered as the third of the 1995 Hourani Lectures at the State University of New York at Buffalo (unpublished)).
19. Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. Peter Winch, ed. G. H. von Wright (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980) 4.