The Exquisite Corpse of Ludwig Wittgenstein

At the outset of the First World War, philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein volunteered for the Austrian-Hungarian Army even though he was eligible for medical exemption, and during his service he carried out some of the most dangerous duties that could be assigned. During the war and in the midst of savage fighting, he wrote the renowned Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his radical and philosophically revolutionary text on what can and what cannot be expressed through language. What I find so compelling about the book are the poetics of its language, which reach beyond the book’s ostensible subject matter toward those things (love, death, wonder, etc.) that, according to Wittgenstein, fall outside language’s logical limitations. In other words, while he demonstrates what language can’t say, he simultaneously indicates through poetic constructs what language can show. The unstated implication being that it is through showing, not logical discourse, that the things that matter most to us can be revealed. What is so amazing is that he did much of this brilliant thinking and writing during the First World War while hunkered down in the muddy trenches along the Russian front.—Doug Hall