Wittgensteins Existentialismus Avant La Lettre

Ulrich Arnswald (University of Innsbruck, University of Innsbruck)

To place Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy in the context of the First World War is absolutely decisive for understanding his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Wittgenstein tried to clarify the question of the meaning of life for himself in the middle of the raging war. These thoughts changed the nature of his treatise from an originally purely logical work to an ethical, religious, and mystical one, as the Private Notebooks 1914–1916 (only recently translated into English for the first time) show us in parallel with the creation of the Tractatus. The abysses of war, the mystical, ethical, religious, and logical insights recognized in it, and the self-knowledge gained in war allowed his treatise to mature through the existential intensification caused by war. Perhaps the most surprising closeness of Wittgenstein’s thought in World War I is that which was associated decades later with the keyword existentialism in philosophy. Almost all existentialist characteristics are found in Wittgenstein’s thinking in the final stages of the development of the Tractatus.