Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Wittgenstein would not have blogged

John Preston's Wittgenstein chronology, which is about to get into his trip to Iceland, suggests that the early Wittgenstein would not have made a happy blogger:
Wednesday 4th September, 1912: LW arrives back in London from Austria, to do further furniture shopping for his new rooms in Cambridge, and stays at Russell’s room in Bury Street, near Piccadilly (McGuinness, pp.133-5; Monk, p.57). Russell writes to Ottoline that he and LW plunged into a discussion of logic, and that LW ‘has a very great power of seeing what are really important problems’. He recalls urging LW not to put off writing until he has solved all the problems that concerned him, since that time would never come. LW responded wildly, with what Russell calls ‘the artist’s feeling that he will produce the perfect thing or nothing’. Russell also mentions that he himself feels delightfully lazy because he can now leave a whole department of difficult thought, which used to depend on him alone, to LW (McGuinness, pp.104, 135). 
Emphasis added.

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