Trechos de Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty Of Genius (1991), de Ray Monk.
He [Ludwig Wittgenstein] joined the Austrian army as a volunteer, the rupture he had suffered the previous year having exempted him from compulsory service. "I think it is magnificent of him to have enlisted", wrote [David] Pinsent in his diary, "but, extremely sad and tragic."
Although a patriot, Wittgenstein's motives for enlisting in the army were more complicated than a desire to defend his country. His sister Hermine thought it had to do with: "an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work".
- - -
Wittgenstein felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. He went to war, one could say, not for the sake of his country, but for the sake of himself.
- - -
In the diaries Wittgenstein kept during the war (the personal parts of which are written in a very simple code) there are signs that he wished for precisely this kind of consecration. "Perhaps", he wrote, "the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me." What Wittgenstein wanted from the war, then, was a transformation of his whole personality, a "variety of religious experience" that would change his life irrevocably. In this sense, the war came for him just at the right time, at the moment when his desire to "turn into a different person" was stronger even than his desire to solve the fundamental problems of logic.
- - -
He enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war against Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front.
- - -
Wittgenstein spent most of this campaign on board a ship on the Vistula river - the Goplana, captured from the Russians during the initial advance. If he saw any active fighting during these first few months, there is no record of it in his diary. We read instead of great battles heard but not seen, and of rumours that "the Russians are at our heels."
- - -
[...] as soon as he met his crew mates he pronounced them "a bunch of delinquents": "No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious."
- - -
His job on the ship was to man the searchlight at night. The loneliness of the task made it much easier to achieve the independence from people he considered necessary to endure the conditions on the boat.
- - -
Coincident with his renewed ability to work on logic, was a revitalized sensuality. The almost jubilant remark quoted above is followed by: "I feel more sensual than before. Today I masturbated again."
- - -
There are no coded remarks in Wittgenstein's notebooks for the second half of September, the time of the Austrian retreat. It was during this time, however, that he made the great discovery he had felt was imminent. This consisted of what is now known as the "Picture Theory of language" - the idea that propositions are a picture of the reality they describe.
- - -
But while he himself was on the offensive, the Austrian army was in chaotic and disorderly retreat. The Goplana was making its way back towards Kraków, deep inside Austrian territory, where the army was to be quartered for the winter. Before they reached Kraków, Wittgenstein received a note from the poet Georg Trakl, who was at the military hospital there as a psychiatric patient.
[...] For as Wittgenstein found out the next morning when he rushed to the hospital, it was indeed too late: Trakl had killed himself with an overdose of cocaine on 3 November 1914, just two days before Wittgenstein's arrival. Wittgenstein was devastated.
- - -
He had wanted to join a balloon section, but when it was discovered that he had a mathematical training he was offered instead a job with an artillery workshop.
Actually, the task Wittgenstein was given at the workshop was mundane clerical work, requiring no mathematical expertise and consisting of compiling a list of all the vehicles in the barracks.
- - -
It is possible, I think, that Wittgenstein's requests to join the infantry were not so much misunderstood as ignored, and that he was perceived to be of more use to the army as a skilled engineer in charge of a repair depot than as an ordinary foot-soldier.
- - -
If Wittgenstein took any pleasure in the Gorlice-Tarnów break-through, there is no indication of it in his diary. Throughout the advance he remained at the workshop in Kraków, growing increasingly resentful of the fact.
- - -
During the autumn of 1915 and throughout the following winter, when almost everything was in short supply and conditions at the Front were extremely harsh, the friendship between Bieler and Wittgenstein was of enormous comfort to them both. They had long and animated conversations on philosophical and metaphysical subjects.
- - -
Militarily it was a quiet time, with the Russians having to regroup after the disaster of the previous summer, and the Central Powers content to hold their position while they concentrated on the Western Front. It was, evidently, a quiet time too for the repair unit. Wittgenstein, pleased with the results of his recent work on logic, was able to make a preliminary attempt to work it into a book. This, the first version of the Tractatus, has unfortunately not survived. [...]
"If I don't survive, get my people to send you all my manuscripts: among them you'll find the final summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper."
- - -
If Wittgenstein had spent the entire war behind the lines, the Tractatus would have remained what it almost certainly was in its first inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in precisely the "impulse to philosophical reflection" that Schopenhauer describes, an impulse that has as its stimulus a knowledge of death, suffering and misery.
Towards the end of March 1916 Wittgenstein was posted, as he had long wished, to a fighting unit on the Russian Front. He was assigned to an artillery regiment attached to the Austrian Seventh Army, stationed at the southernmost point of the Eastern Front, near the Romanian border.
- - -
When the long-awaited moment came, however, he fell ill and was told by his commanding officer that he may have to be left behind. "If that happens", he wrote, "I will kill myself."
- - -
Once at the front line he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places, the observation post. This guaranteed that he would be the target of enemy fire. "Was shot at", he recorded on 29 April. "Thought of God. Thy will be done. God be with me." The experience, he thought, brought him nearer to enlightenment. On 4 May he was told that he was to go on night-duty at the observation post. As shelling was heaviest at night, this was the most dangerous posting he could have been given.
- - -
Throughout these first few months at the Front, from March to May, Wittgenstein was able to write a little on logic. He continued with his theme of the nature of functions and propositions and the need to postulate the existence of simple objects. But he added this isolated and interesting remark about the "modern conception of the world", which found its way unchanged into the Tractatus (6.371 and 6.372).
- - -
At the beginning of the war, after he had received news that his brother Paul had been seriously wounded and assumed that he had lost his profession as a concert pianist, he wrote: "How terrible! What philosophy will ever assist one to overcome a fact of this sort?"
- - -
By this time the Austrian forces had been driven back into the Carpathian mountains, pursued by the victorious Russians. The conditions were harsh - "icy cold, rain and fog", Wittgenstein records.
- - -
Despite these self-admonitions, he in fact showed remarkable courage throughout the campaign. During the first few days of the Brusilov Offensive he was recommended for a decoration in recognition of his bravery in keeping to his post, despite several times being told to take cover. "By this distinctive behaviour", the report states, "he exercised a very calming effect on his comrades." He was quickly promoted, first to Vormeister (a non-commissioned artillery rank similar to the British Lance-Bombardier) and then to Korporal. Finally, towards the end of August, when the Russian advance had ground to a halt, he was sent away to the regiment's headquarters in Olmütz (Olomouc), Moravia, to be trained as an officer.
- - -
Wittgenstein was awarded the Silver Medal for Valour for his part in the stand made by the Austro-Hungarian forces in defence of their positions at Ldziany. In the counter-offensive that followed he took part in the advance along the line of the river Pruth which led, in August, to the capture of the city of Czernowitz (Chernovtsy) in the Ukraine.
- - -
The Russian war effort had by this time completely collapsed, and with it the Kerensky government. The war in the East had been won by the Central Powers.
- - -
On 1 February 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted Leutnant, and on 10 March he transferred to a mountain artillery regiment fighting on the Italian Front.
- - -
By the time of the Austrian offensive of 15 June Wittgenstein was fit enough to take part, and was employed as an observer with the artillery attacking French, British and Italian troops in the Trentino mountains. Once again he was cited for his bravery. "His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism", ran the report, "won the total admiration of the troops." He was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, but was awarded instead the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords, it being decided that his action, though brave, had been insufficiently consequential to merit the top honour. The attack, which was to be the last in which Wittgenstein took part, and indeed the last of which the Austrian army was capable, was quickly beaten back. In July, after the retreat, he was given a long period of leave that lasted until the end of September.
- - -
What the Theory of Types attempts to say can be shown only by a correct symbolism, and what one wants to say about ethics can be shown only by contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. Thus: "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."
- - -
By the time Wittgenstein returned to Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to break up. After the final Allied breakthrough of 30 October, before any armistice had been signed, large numbers of the men formed themselves into groups of compatriots and simply turned their back on the war, making their way home instead to help found their new nations. One casualty of this situation was Wittgenstein's brother, Kurt, who in October or November shot himself when the men under him refused to obey his orders.
The Austrians could do nothing but sue for peace. [...] the Italians had taken about 7,000 guns and about 500,000 prisoners - Wittgenstein among them.
Upon capture, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Como.
He was released on 21 August 1919.
- - -
Like many war veterans before and since, Wittgenstein found it almost insuperably difficult to adjust to peace-time conditions. He had been a soldier for five years, and the experience had left an indelible stamp upon his personality. He continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war, as though it had become a part of his identity, an essential part, without which he would be lost. It was also perhaps a symbol of his feeling - which persisted for the rest of his life - that he belonged to a past age. For it was the uniform of a force that no longer existed. Austria-Hungary was no more, and the country he returned to in the summer of 1919 was itself undergoing a painful process of adjustment. Vienna, once the imperial centre of a dynasty controlling the lives of fifty million subjects of mixed race, was now the capital of a small, impoverished and insignificant Alpine republic of little more than six million, mostly German, inhabitants.
The parts of the empire in which Wittgenstein himself had fought to defend what had been his homeland were now absorbed into foreign states.
- - -
Wittgenstein had entered the war hoping it would change him, and this it had. [...] He was faced with the task of re-creating himself - of finding a new role for the person that had been forged by the experiences of the last five years.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIc2w2SXhmMktjZjg
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/wittgenstein-and-hitler-same-school-in-austria.html
Although a patriot, Wittgenstein's motives for enlisting in the army were more complicated than a desire to defend his country. His sister Hermine thought it had to do with: "an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work".
- - -
Wittgenstein felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. He went to war, one could say, not for the sake of his country, but for the sake of himself.
- - -
In the diaries Wittgenstein kept during the war (the personal parts of which are written in a very simple code) there are signs that he wished for precisely this kind of consecration. "Perhaps", he wrote, "the nearness of death will bring light into life. God enlighten me." What Wittgenstein wanted from the war, then, was a transformation of his whole personality, a "variety of religious experience" that would change his life irrevocably. In this sense, the war came for him just at the right time, at the moment when his desire to "turn into a different person" was stronger even than his desire to solve the fundamental problems of logic.
- - -
He enlisted on 7 August, the day after the Austrian declaration of war against Russia, and was assigned to an artillery regiment serving at Kraków on the Eastern Front.
- - -
Wittgenstein spent most of this campaign on board a ship on the Vistula river - the Goplana, captured from the Russians during the initial advance. If he saw any active fighting during these first few months, there is no record of it in his diary. We read instead of great battles heard but not seen, and of rumours that "the Russians are at our heels."
- - -
[...] as soon as he met his crew mates he pronounced them "a bunch of delinquents": "No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievably crude, stupid and malicious."
- - -
His job on the ship was to man the searchlight at night. The loneliness of the task made it much easier to achieve the independence from people he considered necessary to endure the conditions on the boat.
- - -
Coincident with his renewed ability to work on logic, was a revitalized sensuality. The almost jubilant remark quoted above is followed by: "I feel more sensual than before. Today I masturbated again."
- - -
There are no coded remarks in Wittgenstein's notebooks for the second half of September, the time of the Austrian retreat. It was during this time, however, that he made the great discovery he had felt was imminent. This consisted of what is now known as the "Picture Theory of language" - the idea that propositions are a picture of the reality they describe.
- - -
But while he himself was on the offensive, the Austrian army was in chaotic and disorderly retreat. The Goplana was making its way back towards Kraków, deep inside Austrian territory, where the army was to be quartered for the winter. Before they reached Kraków, Wittgenstein received a note from the poet Georg Trakl, who was at the military hospital there as a psychiatric patient.
[...] For as Wittgenstein found out the next morning when he rushed to the hospital, it was indeed too late: Trakl had killed himself with an overdose of cocaine on 3 November 1914, just two days before Wittgenstein's arrival. Wittgenstein was devastated.
- - -
He had wanted to join a balloon section, but when it was discovered that he had a mathematical training he was offered instead a job with an artillery workshop.
Actually, the task Wittgenstein was given at the workshop was mundane clerical work, requiring no mathematical expertise and consisting of compiling a list of all the vehicles in the barracks.
- - -
It is possible, I think, that Wittgenstein's requests to join the infantry were not so much misunderstood as ignored, and that he was perceived to be of more use to the army as a skilled engineer in charge of a repair depot than as an ordinary foot-soldier.
- - -
If Wittgenstein took any pleasure in the Gorlice-Tarnów break-through, there is no indication of it in his diary. Throughout the advance he remained at the workshop in Kraków, growing increasingly resentful of the fact.
- - -
During the autumn of 1915 and throughout the following winter, when almost everything was in short supply and conditions at the Front were extremely harsh, the friendship between Bieler and Wittgenstein was of enormous comfort to them both. They had long and animated conversations on philosophical and metaphysical subjects.
- - -
Militarily it was a quiet time, with the Russians having to regroup after the disaster of the previous summer, and the Central Powers content to hold their position while they concentrated on the Western Front. It was, evidently, a quiet time too for the repair unit. Wittgenstein, pleased with the results of his recent work on logic, was able to make a preliminary attempt to work it into a book. This, the first version of the Tractatus, has unfortunately not survived. [...]
"If I don't survive, get my people to send you all my manuscripts: among them you'll find the final summary written in pencil on loose sheets of paper."
- - -
If Wittgenstein had spent the entire war behind the lines, the Tractatus would have remained what it almost certainly was in its first inception of 1915: a treatise on the nature of logic. The remarks in it about ethics, aesthetics, the soul and the meaning of life have their origin in precisely the "impulse to philosophical reflection" that Schopenhauer describes, an impulse that has as its stimulus a knowledge of death, suffering and misery.
Towards the end of March 1916 Wittgenstein was posted, as he had long wished, to a fighting unit on the Russian Front. He was assigned to an artillery regiment attached to the Austrian Seventh Army, stationed at the southernmost point of the Eastern Front, near the Romanian border.
- - -
When the long-awaited moment came, however, he fell ill and was told by his commanding officer that he may have to be left behind. "If that happens", he wrote, "I will kill myself."
- - -
Once at the front line he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places, the observation post. This guaranteed that he would be the target of enemy fire. "Was shot at", he recorded on 29 April. "Thought of God. Thy will be done. God be with me." The experience, he thought, brought him nearer to enlightenment. On 4 May he was told that he was to go on night-duty at the observation post. As shelling was heaviest at night, this was the most dangerous posting he could have been given.
- - -
Throughout these first few months at the Front, from March to May, Wittgenstein was able to write a little on logic. He continued with his theme of the nature of functions and propositions and the need to postulate the existence of simple objects. But he added this isolated and interesting remark about the "modern conception of the world", which found its way unchanged into the Tractatus (6.371 and 6.372).
- - -
At the beginning of the war, after he had received news that his brother Paul had been seriously wounded and assumed that he had lost his profession as a concert pianist, he wrote: "How terrible! What philosophy will ever assist one to overcome a fact of this sort?"
- - -
By this time the Austrian forces had been driven back into the Carpathian mountains, pursued by the victorious Russians. The conditions were harsh - "icy cold, rain and fog", Wittgenstein records.
- - -
Despite these self-admonitions, he in fact showed remarkable courage throughout the campaign. During the first few days of the Brusilov Offensive he was recommended for a decoration in recognition of his bravery in keeping to his post, despite several times being told to take cover. "By this distinctive behaviour", the report states, "he exercised a very calming effect on his comrades." He was quickly promoted, first to Vormeister (a non-commissioned artillery rank similar to the British Lance-Bombardier) and then to Korporal. Finally, towards the end of August, when the Russian advance had ground to a halt, he was sent away to the regiment's headquarters in Olmütz (Olomouc), Moravia, to be trained as an officer.
- - -
Wittgenstein was awarded the Silver Medal for Valour for his part in the stand made by the Austro-Hungarian forces in defence of their positions at Ldziany. In the counter-offensive that followed he took part in the advance along the line of the river Pruth which led, in August, to the capture of the city of Czernowitz (Chernovtsy) in the Ukraine.
- - -
The Russian war effort had by this time completely collapsed, and with it the Kerensky government. The war in the East had been won by the Central Powers.
- - -
On 1 February 1918 Wittgenstein was promoted Leutnant, and on 10 March he transferred to a mountain artillery regiment fighting on the Italian Front.
- - -
By the time of the Austrian offensive of 15 June Wittgenstein was fit enough to take part, and was employed as an observer with the artillery attacking French, British and Italian troops in the Trentino mountains. Once again he was cited for his bravery. "His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism", ran the report, "won the total admiration of the troops." He was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, the Austrian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, but was awarded instead the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords, it being decided that his action, though brave, had been insufficiently consequential to merit the top honour. The attack, which was to be the last in which Wittgenstein took part, and indeed the last of which the Austrian army was capable, was quickly beaten back. In July, after the retreat, he was given a long period of leave that lasted until the end of September.
- - -
What the Theory of Types attempts to say can be shown only by a correct symbolism, and what one wants to say about ethics can be shown only by contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. Thus: "There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself; it is the mystical."
- - -
By the time Wittgenstein returned to Italy, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was beginning to break up. After the final Allied breakthrough of 30 October, before any armistice had been signed, large numbers of the men formed themselves into groups of compatriots and simply turned their back on the war, making their way home instead to help found their new nations. One casualty of this situation was Wittgenstein's brother, Kurt, who in October or November shot himself when the men under him refused to obey his orders.
The Austrians could do nothing but sue for peace. [...] the Italians had taken about 7,000 guns and about 500,000 prisoners - Wittgenstein among them.
Upon capture, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Como.
He was released on 21 August 1919.
- - -
Like many war veterans before and since, Wittgenstein found it almost insuperably difficult to adjust to peace-time conditions. He had been a soldier for five years, and the experience had left an indelible stamp upon his personality. He continued to wear his uniform for many years after the war, as though it had become a part of his identity, an essential part, without which he would be lost. It was also perhaps a symbol of his feeling - which persisted for the rest of his life - that he belonged to a past age. For it was the uniform of a force that no longer existed. Austria-Hungary was no more, and the country he returned to in the summer of 1919 was itself undergoing a painful process of adjustment. Vienna, once the imperial centre of a dynasty controlling the lives of fifty million subjects of mixed race, was now the capital of a small, impoverished and insignificant Alpine republic of little more than six million, mostly German, inhabitants.
The parts of the empire in which Wittgenstein himself had fought to defend what had been his homeland were now absorbed into foreign states.
- - -
Wittgenstein had entered the war hoping it would change him, and this it had. [...] He was faced with the task of re-creating himself - of finding a new role for the person that had been forged by the experiences of the last five years.
Mais:
http://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxwrrqPyqsnIc2w2SXhmMktjZjg
http://www.openculture.com/2014/12/wittgenstein-and-hitler-same-school-in-austria.html
