from the challenge of understanding the
man who wrote it.
The interpretative industry around
Wittgenstein has not been short of ma-
terial. The bootlegs (samizdat copies of
lecture notes, coded notebooks, corre-
spondence) would fill the shelves of a
small library. Even now, after his hold
over his discipline has loosened—few
people walk around calling themselves
Wittgensteinians—his life and person-
ality continue to provide fertile ground
for speculation.
Yet the surfeit of material makes the
task, if anything, harder. Wittgenstein
appears to have written, and lived, in a
manner booby-trapped against interpret-
ers. Elizabeth Anscombe, a translator of
much of his later work and the most bril-
liant of his devoted followers, maintained
that what made Wittgenstein’s thought
so hard to interpret was that “he was
constantly enquiring.” His philosophy
was never “a finished thing.”
T
he formidable challenge of mak-
ing sense of the things that Witt-
genstein said has not been made any
easier by the periodic announcement of
the discovery of yet another trove of
previously little-known materials. The
newest volume, from what seems like a
growing Nachlass, is an edition of Witt-
genstein’s surviving notebooks from the
first half of the First World War, “Pri-
vate Notebooks: 1914-1916” (Liveright).
The pages on the right (recto) contained
remarks that are clearly an embryonic
form of the “Tractatus.” Those pages
have been widely available, with An-
scombe’s English translation, since 1961,
and scholars of the “Tractatus” have made
extensive use of them. The pages on the
left (verso) were written in a cipher.
Committed Wittgensteinians have
had access to the full notebooks for some
time now. German readers have known
them under the somewhat tendentious
title “Geheime Tagebücher” (“Secret Di-
aries”), since the embattled publication
of that volume, in 1991. Marjorie Perloff,
the editor and translator of this new edi-
tion, the first to contain a facing-page
English translation, points out that the
verso text was not especially secret. After
all, the cipher that Wittgenstein employed
was both basic and known to his siblings,
who used it as children (z is a, y is b, etc.).
Why has it taken so long for there to
be a widely available edition? Answering
this question involves delving into the
motivations of a large and colorful cast
of characters, and Perloff ’s afterword pro-
vides a helpfully succinct summary of the
deliberations. The “Tractatus” and one
short paper were just about all that Witt-
genstein published in his lifetime. But he
wrote copiously, and he shared his think-
ing, from the early nineteen-thirties on-
ward, in lectures or discussion groups
with select gatherings of awed students.
At his death, there were some twenty
thousand pages of manuscript and type-
script left to his executors (Anscombe,
Rush Rhees, and Georg Henrik von
Wright); the material was, his will stated,
theirs to “dispose of as they think best.”
The executors, despite their reverence
for the man, were cavalier with the man-
uscripts. Some pages may have been
burned, some were lost at a railway sta-
tion, and some were almost eaten by a
dog. When it came time to do something
about the war notebooks, the executors
decided to publish only the recto pages,
which they judged to be, as Perloff puts
it, “philosophically relevant.” Anscombe
was especially vehement in refusing per-
mission to anyone who showed an un-
seemly interest in Wittgenstein’s personal
life: “If by pressing a button it could have
been secured that people would not con-
cern themselves with his personal life, I
should have pressed the button.”
Rhees worried that the publication
of the verso pages, especially on theirown, would make “what was a minor
and occasional undertone to Wittgen-
stein’s life and thinking ... appear as a
dominant obsession.” What undertone
was that? Perloff concludes that the
executors had in mind “Wittgenstein’s
expressions of sexual (specifically,
homosexual) desire.” Their discomfort
with these expressions set the tenor for
much future academic discussion of
Wittgenstein.
Reputable biographies of Wittgen-
stein either gloss over his sexuality (Brian
McGuinness’s “Young Ludwig,” a lov-
ingly detailed account of the period up
to the publication of the “Tractatus”) or
minimize the part it played in his life
(Monk’s “The Duty of Genius”). That
is despite the fact that they made use of
the wartime notebooks, verso and recto.
Monk sought to put the point in more
general terms. The coded remarks, he
said, showed Wittgenstein to be “uneasy,
not about homosexuality, but about sex-
uality itself.” Although he treasured love,
he saw it as separate from sex. Sexual
arousal of whatever sort was, in Monk’s
view, “incompatible with the sort of per-
son he wanted to be.” Moreover, Monk
held that much of “Wittgenstein’s love
life and his sexual life went on only in
his imagination.”
A luridly speculative biography,
from 1973, by the American philosopher
William Warren Bartley III, did claim
to have unearthed testimony of Witt-
genstein’s taste for “rough trade” in a“I think I’m at the wrong bench.”