Ludwig Wittgenstein: Norway
Background • The Early Years • Cambridge • Norway • First World War • Tractatus and Teaching • Architect • Return to Cambridge • In Russia and Norway etc. • Professor of Philosophy • Final Years
1913
On 20 January his father died, leaving Wittgenstein a huge fortune. Back at Trinity College, he took over Moore’s rooms in Whewells Court. On 6 March Wittgenstein’s first publication appeared, a review of a book on scientific method, The Science of Logic by P. Coffey, in The Cambridge Review - A Journal of University Life and Thought.
With Philip Jourdain, a mathematician and friend of Russell’s, he worked on the first translation of parts of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Jourdain published these between 1915 and 1917 under his name in the philosophical journal The Monist, of which he was the English editor. In September Wittgenstein traveled with David Pinsent to Norway. Between 2 and 9 October, in London, on the way to Vienna, he gave Russell an account of the work he had done on logic up to the present. Russell had a shorthand typist record Wittgenstein’s exposition. The typescript thus prepared, with detailed handwritten alterations by Wittgenstein and comments by Russell, is now to be found in the Russell Archive of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada. It was the first work of Wittgenstein’s to have been preserved, having the work number TS 201 published under the title Notes on Logic, as Appendix 1 in Notebooks, 1914-1916, Oxford 1961.
In mid-October, following the summer holidays, Wittgenstein set preparations in motion for settling in Norway. He wanted to escape what in his eyes was the atmosphere of superficial intellectualising in Cambridge. At the end of October he took a room in a guest-house in Skjolden, a small remote place northeast of Bergen, where he intended to spend the winter in lonely contemplation of questions of logic. This stay was broken only by a short Christmas visit to the family in Vienna.
Postcard to Eccles. 1931
1914
On 26 March, at the request of his Cambridge friends, G. E. Moore came to Skjolden for two weeks for a progress report on Wittgenstein’s work. Wittgenstein dictated to him some results of his work on Logic: TS 301, published as Notes dictated to G. E. Moore in Norway Appendix II in Notebooks, 1914-1916.
Other manuscripts by Wittgenstein from this period, of which he speaks for example in his letters to Russell, cannot be found, such as the paper entitled Logic, intended as a dissertation for his B.A. degree. These were presumably destroyed by Wittgenstein himself, as it is known a large part of his other manuscripts were, which he did not regard as substantial parts of his work. It is in this respect that the Wittgenstein papers differ from others, with their usual drafts, sketches and preliminary work. The literary papers that Ludwig Wittgenstein left constitute his complete works, albeit with the fragmentary structure reflecting its organic growth, which causes considerable problems for any editor.
In the spring he started building a wooden house in the mountains near Skjolden, where he hoped to find the quiet he needed for his work. Only at the end of June did he leave Norway and the place where, before reaching his 25th year, he had achieved important discoveries in logic – among other things developing his new symbolic system for so-called truth functions, which allows the explanation of logical truths as tautologies (Propositions 4.3 et seq in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus).
Many years later, in 1931, Wittgenstein remarked of the time in Norway: ... it seems to me that I had given birth to new movements of thought within me.
(MS 154)
In summer he went to Vienna for his holidays and then to the Hochreith. Following his father’s death, Wittgenstein took on, along with his inheritance, his father’s commitments as a benefactor of the arts. He sent the editor of Der Brenner, Ludwig von Ficker, a contribution of 100,000 crowns with the request, to distribute it to Austrian artists without means. Wittgenstein himself merely recommended an amount of 10,000 crowns for Der Brenner; the rest being distributed by Ficker as follows:
Georg Trakl 20,000 crowns, Rainer Maria Rilke 20,000, Carl Dallago 20,000, Oskar Kokoschka 5,000, Else Lasker-Schüler 4,000, Adolf Loos 2,000, Borromäus Heinrich 1,000, Hermann Wagner 1,000, Georg Oberkofler 1,000, Theodor Haecker 2,000, Theodor Däubler 2,000, Ludwig Erik Tesar 2,000, Richard Weiss 2,000, Karl Hauer 5,000, Franz Kranewitter 2,000 and Hugo Neugebauer 1,000.
Wittgenstein’s House in Norway