From what one hears, Brian McGuinness, currently professor of philosophy at the University of Siena, is at work on the second volume of his biography of Wittgenstein. The first volume, Wittgenstein: A Life—Young Ludwig 1889–1921 was published in 1988 (London: Duckworth), when McGuinness was still in Oxford, was itself the product of some twenty years of research. It is much to be hoped that the second volume will appear in due course. Admirable as is Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape 1990), it should not be regarded as rendering McGuinness’s second volume redundant. McGuinness never refers to Monk.

Here, in twenty four chapters, Professor McGuinness collects all his papers on Wittgenstein. One dates from 1956, an introductory discussion of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, originally in Archivo di Filosofia, following on the Italian translation of the Tractatus by McGuinness’s friend the Italian Jesuit Gian Carlo Colombo. The book includes three famous papers on the Tractatus: ‘Mysticism’ (1966); ‘The Grundgedanke of the Tractatus’ (1974); and ‘The so-called realism of the Tractatus’ (1981).

Most of the other papers are of biographical and text-historical interest, rather than of purely philosophical interest. The first five chapters describe the extraordinary person that Wittgenstein was. The most important topics are Wittgenstein’s ambivalent Jewishness, his sympathies with Leftwing politics, and his detestation of the Hitler regime. He spoke Russian well. Something attracted him about Stalinism in the early thirties: ‘a total destruction of early twentieth-century social forms was required (he thought) if there was to be any improvement’ (page 45). He took a decisive part in purchasing the appropriate racial status which permitted his sisters to remain in Austria throughout the War.

Chapters 22–24 deal with philological matters: the ‘Notes on Logic’ of 1913 (perhaps the beginnings of an attempt to gain the Cambridge BA); the history of notes leading to the Tractatus; and the pre-history of Philosophical Investigations (anger at Friedrich Waismann’s appropriation of his ideas, as he thought, Wittgenstein began in 1938 to consider publication).

Chapters 16–21 deal with Wittgenstein’s relations with the Vienna Circle. They missed the point of the Tractatus: the ‘very difficult and paradoxical’ position that philosophy must be ‘a way of working through, of seeing through, a number of illusions induced by the very nature of language and thought, so that in the end we see the world properly’ (page 217). For McGuinness, if Wittgenstein actually came to believe the Tractatus was itself a metaphysical construction (as many others suppose), then he was wrong. It seemed a knock-down method of dealing at one stroke with the language-generated illusions that afflict our thought: that the work of demystification was never done is implicit in the Tractatus; but it is in the later work that Wittgenstein sees that description is not the central function of language, and that we are endlessly fertile in throwing up illusions of a philosophical kind.

That is a fairly standard interpretation of Wittgenstein’s development. Philosophers who believe that Wittgenstein produced ‘a philosophy of language’ (whether they like it or not) should consult McGuinness’s rejection of any such idea, in an excellent paper first published in German in 1987 (Chapter 19).

In a fairly cautious paper on ‘Freud and Wittgenstein’ (Chapter 20) McGuinness establishes Wittgenstein’s early and continuing interest in Freud, rejects the post War fashion to refer to Wittgenstein’s work as ‘therapeutic positivism’ (B. Farrell, M. Lazerowitz), but maintains that, for all his ambivalence about the comparison, Wittgenstein did compare his work on analogy with psycho-analysis. Philosophical work is not a contribution to general knowledge but work on the individual’s own self; it is more a matter of changing one’s will than one’s beliefs; it is achieved only very slowly; above all, it is achieved, if at all, in the course of discussion.

Just as he thought that Western culture was exhausted (and had been since about 1850), so that the supposedly new beginning in Stalinist Russia could be regarded so temptingly, Wittgenstein believed that an analogous rupture was necessary in Western thought: ‘an heroic effort was required if metaphysics was to be given up’ (page 234). He regarded himself as writing for people who would think in a totally different way—McGuinness notes Wittgenstein’s kinship in this respect with Nietzsche (page 234).

Chapter 21, the other important paper of the six in this group, is a continuation of Georg von Wright’s reflections on Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, insisting on the great importance of the notion of ‘pre-knowledge’, Vor-Wissen. There are certainties (that I have two hands and suchlike), which it is tempting but surely incorrect to regard as a third class of propositions alongside the a priori and the a posteriori. It is not that they have a special logical character, McGuinness interprets Wittgenstein as saying; rather, they have a special relationship to us, ‘which Wittgenstein often describes in terms of the way of life, the fundamental decisions, the faith of a community’ (page 238).

The most important papers. to my mind, are the ten which are directly related to the Tractatus (Chapters 6 to 15), particularly the three mentioned above, which are now recognized as classics in Wittgenstein interpretation. Six of the others first appeared in journals ranging from Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia to Miscellanea Bulgarica: all fairly introductory, they would be good places for newcomers to approach the Tractatus. These essays demonstrate McGuinness’s excellence at explaining, to readers outside the Anglo-American analytic-philosophical community, why the early Wittgenstein is important within that community.

It is, however, not always understood within the Anglo-American community just how important McGuinness’s essays are, particularly the three classics we have already mentioned.

These remarks, towards the end of the Tractatus, if they are not just ignored, remain difficult to fit in to the rest of the book. Controversially, is this talk of ‘the mystical’ merely incidental, or should it be allowed to dictate the reading of the whole book? What does Wittgenstein mean, anyway, by ‘the mystical’? Does this mean that he had what histories of spirituality refer to as mystical ‘experience’?

McGuinness, in ‘Mysticism’, advises us to read Bertrand Russell’s beautiful essay ‘Mysticism and Logic’. This appeared in Hibbert Journal for July 1914 and was reprinted in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (London 1917, a year earlier than McGuinness says): often reissued, this collection of ten papers, written between 1901 and 1914, offers by far the best evidence of Russell’s thinking at the time, and thus by far the best access to Wittgenstein’s interaction with Russell in the years 1911–13 when he studied at the University of Cambridge. Russell makes many remarks in these essays which seem at first sight much the same as what Wittgenstein says. In the essay ‘On Scientific Method in Philosophy’, for example, Russell recommends ‘patience and modesty’ in philosophical work, concluding that we have ‘to abandon the hope of solving many of the more ambitious and humanly interesting problems of traditional philosophy’, a remark that might seem close to Wittgenstein’s remark that ‘unsere Lebensprobleme’ are left ‘still not been touched at all’ (6.52)—the difference being, of course, that for Wittgenstein this is how we should feel even if every possible scientific question were answered, whereas for Russell it is precisely because we have adopted ‘scientific method’ in philosophy that we have this result. Many, perhaps most, philosophers in the analytic tradition (Carnap, Quine, Dennett et al.) agree with Russell that philosophy should be conducted according to ‘scientific method’; nothing is anathema to Wittgenstein more than the idea that philosophical work is any kind of ‘science’.

Wittgenstein visited Cambridge briefly in October 1913 but only to tell Russell that he was going to Norway for the winter. It was understood that he would return to complete his degree; Russell wanted the ‘Notes on Logic’ to facilitate this. In the event, of course, his vacation in Vienna in July 1914 ended by his enlisting in the Austro-Hungarian army. As McGuinness notes, there is no evidence that he ever read ‘Mysticism and Logic’. If Russell ever sent him an offprint, a likely enough possibility, it is even more likely, as war spread in central Europe, that it never reached Wittgenstein. On the other hand, Wittgenstein had so many intensive conversations with Russell during the two years in which he was an undergraduate in Cambridge that it is safe enough to assume that he was perfectly familiar with Russell’s views about this as about everything else.

In ‘Mysticism and Logic’ Russell contends that every great philosopher (including himself no doubt and certainly Wittgenstein) is torn between two incompatible impulses, towards science and towards mysticism. It is the attempt to harmonize these incompatible impulses which makes a great philosopher, like Heraclitus and Plato. In the end, Russell says that ‘of the reality or unreality of the mystic’s world’ he knows nothing—only ‘I have no wish to deny it, nor even to declare that the insight which reveals it is not a genuine insight’. He insists that the scientific attitude becomes ‘imperative’, because the mystical insight, ‘in spite of the fact that much of the most important truth is first suggested by its means’, requires to be tested and supported. He gives a remarkably favourable account of the ‘mystic insight’. The four beliefs which all mystics share, he says, are as follows: (1) belief in the possibility of a way of knowledge which may be called insight or intuition, as contrasted with reason and analysis; (2) belief in the unity of reality; (3) denial of the reality of time; and (4) belief that all evil is an illusion produced by the antinomies of analytic intellect. While ‘fully developed mysticism’ is ‘mistaken’, Russell holds, yet, ‘by sufficient restraint’, ‘there is an element of wisdom to be learned’ by considering all four of these beliefs. We can only benefit, philosophically, from considering the difference between reason and intuition, the question whether plurality is illusory, the question of the (un)reality of time, and the question of the kind of reality that belongs to good and evil. Russell will maintain that allowing these questions to resolve themselves into a ‘metaphysical creed about the world’ is a ‘mistaken outcome’; yet ‘even the cautious and patient investigation of truth by science…may be fostered and nourished by that very spirit of reverence in which mysticism lives and moves’. Indeed, ‘mysticism is to be commended as an attitude towards life, not as a creed about the world’.

Obviously, this needs much more discussion; but it is surely equally obvious that these themes weave in and out of the Tractatus and, once again, Wittgenstein’s language is almost indistinguishable from Russell’s, while he disagrees totally with the direction that Russell’s thought takes. When we have surmounted the propositions of the Tractatus then we ‘see the world rightly’ (6.54); and then ‘our problems of life’ dissolve (6.52): perhaps this distinction between ‘life’ and ‘world’ reflects Russell’s distinction, albeit denying it. Certainly, if the mystical attitude towards life is turned into a metaphysical creed about the world, thus generating metaphysics, we may say that Wittgenstein and Russell would have agreed about this being mistaken. We may even say, surely, that, when Wittgenstein attacks (and sometimes admires) ‘metaphysics’, this is what he has in mind.

McGuinness goes further. He contends that Wittgenstein actually had ‘a genuine mystical experience’. He hastens to rule out any ‘genuine theistic mystical experience’. The only relevant reference to God in the Tractatus (6.432) extrudes God from the world. Union with God is, therefore, ruled out, McGuinness argues. On the other hand, union with the world, or with Nature, seems a serious possibility: ‘I am my world—the world and life are one’ (see the remarks dating May to July 1916, in Notebooks 1914–1916). We know that Wittgenstein was reading William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience in 1912, with great enthusiasm. McGuinness appeals to Robert C. Zaehner’s work, Mysticism, Sacred and Profane (1957), to mount an impressive defence of the view that Wittgenstein indeed had an experience of wonder at the naked existence of the world, ‘a common enough mystical state which has little to do with religion, as that term is nornmally understood’ (page 157). As McGuinness says, in support of his thesis, the ‘Lecture on Ethics’ (delivered in 1929) discusses experiences which seem to count as mystical, at least on one definition. He also reminds us of the ‘religious awakening’ which Wittgenstein apparently experienced, probably in the Christmas vacation of 1912, during a performance of the totally unmemorable play, Die Kreuzelschreiber, by Ludwig Anzengruber: one of the characters is so miserable that he flings himself down to die but wakes up in broad sunshine, thinking he has heard someone say: ‘Nothing can happen to you!… you’re part of everything and everything’s part of you. Es kann dir nix g’schehn’. Wittgenstein often cited this; whether this can really be the occurrence of a mystical experience seems very disputable. Perhaps we may conclude that even a quite trivial event can generate the most profound sense of cosmic wonder.

Whether or not we need ascribe such a personal mystical experience to Wittgenstein, as McGuinness suggests, we should certainly follow up McGuinness’s recommendation to re-read the remarks in the Tractatus about the mystical in the light of Russell’s essay ‘Mysticism and Logic’. Wittgenstein does not often quote other philosophers, but it is often the case that he is debating with Russell, passionately rejecting his views no doubt, but the passion reveals the commitment to the issues.

In ‘The Grundgedanke of the Tractatus’ McGuinness is of course taking up Wittgenstein’s remark that the ‘fundamental idea’ in the Tractatus is that the logical constants are not proxies (4.0312). Other words stand for or go proxy for objects; words such as ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’ etc., the so called ‘logical constants’ do not. The term was coined by Russell, who extended it to cover the basic concepts of logic, including ‘relation’, ‘set’ and ‘truth’. Basically, for Russell, logic depicts the most general aspects of reality. He regarded the signs used in logic as representing objects or entities, as Frege regarded his functions. Thus, the ‘fundamental thought’ of the Tractatus is that Frege and Russell are both completely mistaken: the propositions of logic do not say anything about entities, whether universal features of the empirical world or of some Platonic realm; they are tautologies, which give the rules for combining signs but themselves remain vacuous.

This needs to be studied together with McGuinness’s paper, here renamed ‘The Supposed Realism of the Tractatus’. In eleven pages, following a hint by Rush Rhees, the philosopher with whom Wittgenstein held more frequent and sustained discussions than with anyone else, from 1936 onwards and especially from 1943 until his death, McGuinness demolishes the quite plausible, tempting and certainly widely accepted view according to which, in the Tractatus, we are offered a metaphysics founded on or extrapolated from logic or the nature of our language. Wittgenstein is not saying that there is something foundational or transcendental by which the grammar of our language is determined. He was not trying to infer features of the world from our language. Admittedly, he argues that propositions with sense are possible only because some (if you like) more primitive operations are possible, such as the logical constants, the correlation of names with objects, etc.

It may look as if he thinks that these primitive operations (conjunction, negation, etc.) are possibly only because the world has certain properties which can now be uncovered and downloaded to deliver deep metaphysical insight or a metaphysical system.

Of course, as McGuinness says, Wittgenstein is very nearly doing something like this. It is not stupid to attribute some such enterprise to him. He is maintaining that philosophy is not a science alongside the other sciences; philosophy is an activity over or beneath all the sciences. Here again, it is best to read Wittgenstein against Russell. It is always a good question to ask of a philosopher what he is afraid of, Iris Murdoch says somewhere. Wittgenstein, at this period in his life utterly obsessed with the ideas of Frege and perhaps especially Russell, the great issue is to show that logic (and philosophy just is logic, in all their views) has nothing to do with a special realm of objects but rather with the necessary features of language, and that means anything we should regard as language. Propositions which are either true or false are the easiest place to open the discussion. In the end, McGuinness argues, Wittgenstein holds the view that Michael Dummett ascribes to Frege (effectively this paper is a defence of Wittgenstein against a remark by Dummett): namely, that ‘the thoughts we express are true or false objectively, in virtue of how things stand in the real world – the realm of reference – and independently of whether we know them to be true or false (of whether we exist or can think at all)’. Clearly, by Dummett’s now classical redefinition of realism as the doctrine that we take certain propositions to be true or false even if we have no way of verifying them. What is misleading, however, so McGuinness contends, is this reference to ‘the realm of reference’. Certainly our propositions are not about the workings or contents of our own minds: Wittgenstein rejects that kind of representationalism. In Dummett’s words, as McGuinness cites them, ‘we do actually succeed in speaking about the actual objects, in the real world, which are the referents of the names we use, and not about any intermediate surrogates for or representations of them’. This ‘realm of reference’ is, McGuinness argues, a ‘misnomer’, indeed a ‘myth’. What Wittgenstein is trying to do, in the Tractatus, is to get us to see that what our propositions are about is not in the world any more than it is in thought or language. Our ‘contact’ with objects (McGuinness uses Aristotle’s metaphor) ‘is not an experience or knowledge of something over against which we stand’ (page 94). Objects are ‘beyond being’ (this time deliberately using Plato’s phrase: epekeina tes ousias), in other words, our relationship with them is ‘not properly experience or knowledge at all’.

McGuinness concludes, then, that it is a mistake to regard the Tractatus as offering some doctrine of semantic realism. Rather, as Wittgenstein tells us, his position is one from which realism, idealism and solipsism coincide or collapse into one another (cf 5.64).

This deserves further discussion, McGuinness observes. Indeed these last remarks require a great deal of thought. But, in one of his most recent papers, ‘Solipsism’, first appearing in 2001, only nine pages long, he fulfils his promise. Here again McGuinness brings history to bear. It is usually assumed that, by solipsism, the young Wittgenstein means the ‘egocentric predicament’ (Russell’s phrase), the view that I find myself in the supposedly Cartesian situation of not knowing whether there is anything outside my own consciousness, in particular whether there is an ‘external world’ (Kant) or ‘other minds’ (the version of the problem favoured in Anglo-American philosophy, e.g. John Wisdom). This was not how solipsism was understood when Wittgenstein came into philosophy, so McGuinness insists. He quotes letters to Russell, in particular one dating from January 1913, in which Wittgenstein writes that he is ‘very interested’ in Russell’s views on matter (see again essays in Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays: ‘The Ultimate Constituents of Matter’, and ‘The Relation of Sense-data to Physics’, 1915 and 1914 respectively, but no doubt reflecting views with which Wittgenstein was familiar). But ‘I cannot imagine your way of moving from sense data forward’. In other words, he did not share Russell’s view that the way to escape solipsism, to overcome the ‘egocentric predicament’, would be to find, in immediate (unmediated, ‘raw’) experience, or in self-evident principles, secure grounds for a belief in something outside one’s consciousness. This version of epistemological or methodological solipsism remains of great current interest. Wittgenstein, as he himself tells us, owed a great deal to Mach, Boltzmann and Herz. He found the world self-evident, the mystery for him was the self: just the reverse of Russell’s position. We need not recount McGuinness’s very interesting detailed reconstruction of the influences on Wittgenstein’s formulation of his own position. He directs us to Plato’s saying that thought is the dialogue of the soul with itself, ‘a constant theme of Wittgenstein’s writings’ (as Rush Rhees also often insisted). In effect, as McGuinness puts it, for Wittgenstein in the Tractatus, every one envisages the world only in so far as he or she is a speaker of language, in which the world can be described. There is only one language; all natural languages are assumed to be realizations of the one language system. The uniqueness or singularity of language implies that there is one and only one set of possibilities for the world; so the speaker of language is unique and singular also, in the sense that ‘language is essentially the world, the totality of possibilities, as seen from a point of view’ (page 136). This point of view, for Wittgenstein, is of course ‘entirely impersonal’. ‘There is… really a sense in which in philosophy we can talk of a non-psychological I… The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world’ (5.641).

Far from having to bridge the supposed gap between my consciousness and the external world or other minds, beginning from my ‘impressions’, ‘sense-data’, ‘raw feels’ or whatever, Wittgenstein takes it for granted that the world is self-evident, ‘the world and life are one’ (5.621), there is ‘no such thing’ as ‘the thinking, repesenting subject’ (5.631)—rather, ‘I am my world’ (5.63), with a parenthetical allusion to the ancient topos of the microcosm.

What we have to consider, McGuinness concludes, is how we are to understand the celebrated, much controverted remark (5.62): ‘That the world is my world, shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world’.

This is the Ogden translation, ‘very carefully revised’ by Wittgenstein. Here we know that Wittgenstein asked Frank Ramsey to ensure that ‘the’ should be emphasized. The limits of language, thus the limits of what is sayable, hence the limits of the world, must be the limits of the very language that I myself understand. Again we stand on a knife edge of getting it exactly the wrong way round. Wittgenstein does not imagine us each with our own ‘private’ language, thus with endlessly many worlds to which I have no access (solipsism indeed, exactly as Russell feared). On the contrary, for Wittgenstein, to quote McGuinness’s summary, ‘there are no possibilities other than those guaranteed as such, permitted to be such, by language, and since anyone can envisage everything language allows (and cannot envisage anything else), everyone has the same relation to the whole world’ (page 138).

Here, in this very fine essay, McGuinness emphasizes the allusion to the microcosm, that is to say, to the ancient theme of the human being as measure of the world (‘limit of the world’). In the Notebooks, glossing the remark that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’, in a page dated 23 May 1915, Wittgenstein immediately says this: ‘There really is only one world soul, Weltseele, which I for preference call my soul and as which alone I conceive what I call the souls of others’. Then he goes on: ‘The above remark gives the key for deciding the way in which solipsism is a truth’.

Far from being a doctrine which leaves me separated from everyone else, solipsism thus understood brings us all together from the outset: we all participate in the world soul and should indeed do so, overcoming our subjectivity and dissipating the fog that occludes what is the case.

All of this, of course, goes with Wittgenstein’s asceticism. It also fits with his mysticism, as interpreted by McGuinness. ‘Mensch, werde wesentlich!’, Wittgenstein liked to quote from Angelus Silesius: human beings should realize their true nature. ‘By going into the soul we find the true nature of the world and by retreating into the soul (making ourselves independent of fate) we attain the purpose of life, though the actual self vanishes in both cases’, so McGuinness sums up. That is why, citing Wittgenstein (Notebooks 1 August 1916), ‘consciousness of the uniqueness of my life is the origin of religion, science and art’.

This move can of course become indifference to science on the one hand and quietist fatalism on the other. Wittgenstein has been accused of these deviations. As McGuinness observes, however, though he preferred the engineer’s practice over the physicist’s theorizings, and (we may add) deplored scientism, it is ridiculous to regard him as hostile to science. As regards the second temptation, to a certain fatalism, this ‘was almost imposed on an Austrian officer’ in the War years.

That is perhaps not a sufficient response. McGuinness allows that the problem of privacy with which Wittgenstein was to be concerned after 1929 may take him in somewhat different directions. Here, however, McGuinness breaks off: with these considerations of the mysticism, der Grundgedanke, the so-called realism, and the solipsism, in the Tractatus, he offers us, somewhat enigmatically, fragmentarily and tentatively, a wonderful way into the study of that remarkable text.