“A Test of Fire of One’s Character”: Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Self-Examination by Means of War in World War I

Abstract: To place Ludwig Wittgenstein’s early philosophy specifically in the context of the Great War, which we now call the First World War, is absolutely decisive for understanding his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus . According to the motto “Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. bad, life” found in a July 1916 entry in Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks 1914–1916 , only recently translated into English for the first time, Wittgenstein tried to clarify the question of the meaning of life for himself in the middle of the raging war. These thoughts also changed the nature of his Tractatus from an originally purely logical work to an ethical, religious, and mystical one, as the Notebooks show us in parallel with the creation of the Tractatus . The abysses of war, the mystical, ethical, religious, and logical insights recognized in it, and the self-knowledge gained in war allowed his treatise to mature through the existential intensification caused by war.