Somehow Ludwig Wittgenstein managed to compose his Tractatus during the calamity of the first World War. He spent the final months of the war in a prisoner of war camp in Italy. From there he wrote notes to Russell and Frege. He hoped that they could read his book and understand it. He’d written a book which (he thought) solved the problems of philosophy. Finding a publisher for the book wasn’t so easy.Ray Monk wrote about the difficulties that Wittgenstein encountered as he attempted to publish the book. Most who read it thought it an odd book. The numbered propositions which came across as pronouncements from on high produced a strange effect on the reader. Wittgenstein insisted on the numbering scheme which he said was the only element that gave the book structure and sense. Without the order imposed by the numbers, the statements would be an incomprehensible jumble. Even with the numbers, readers of the book struggled to understand it.
On the surface, Tractatus appears to be a philosophical work, a “scientific” exposition of logic, but more than that, it is a literary work. What is clear from Wittgenstein’s own preface is that the book is not to be taken as a textbook. He wrote that the book’s “object would be attained if there were one person who read it with understanding and to whom it afforded pleasure.” The pleasure derived would be of the sort that a solitary person wandering in the desert or the jungle gains when they see another person wandering in the same desert or jungle. The two are kindred spirits. They will hail each other and perhaps pass an evening together talking around an improvised campfire. It doesn’t matter what they talk about or how they describe their world, their thoughts, their discoveries, because both will speak the same language, that of a shared experience (denizens of the wilderness), of an intelligence of a common understanding. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is a human attempt to connect with a kindred spirit and as such it is a literary work.
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