Music, War, and Philosophy, part 1

These are going to be heterodox and rambly posts as they just notice some interesting relationships. I'm looking at Europe in the first half of the 20th century. There was a huge ferment that forever altered many aspects of culture. Two crucial figures were Ludwig Wittgenstein and Olivier Messiaen. Both were intellectually and creatively brilliant and both were deeply affected by war. There are facts about their lives that strain belief. The Wittgensteins were of Jewish descent though practicing Catholics. Ludwig's father, Karl, was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, head of the Austrian steel cartel. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire only the Rothschilds were richer. Karl and his wife Poldi had nine children, four girls and five boys. Of the five boys three committed suicide and of the remaining two, Paul was a concert pianist who lost his right arm in WWI but continued his career by commissioning concertos for the left hand alone by Ravel, Prokofiev and others. The remaining son was Ludwig who wrote a very short book that revolutionized (and is still revolutionizing) philosophy while a front-line officer in a regiment of Austrian artillery (for which he received several decorations) during the First World War.

Ludwig was a student of Bertrand Russell's at Cambridge from 1911 to 1913. Out of depression and frustration he moved to a tiny village in Norway. In January of 1913 his father died and Ludwig inherited enough money to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He used some of it to support art and culture and in 1919 he gave away the rest of it to his surviving siblings. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he immediately volunteered for the Austrian army. He completed his book of philosophy, known in English as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in August 1918. The two people who were most likely to understand it were Gottlob Frege, a philosopher of logic who was an important influence on Wittgenstein, and Russell. Frege said it was incomprehensible and Russell misunderstood much of it. It rather boggles the mind that a book that has been called the most important work in philosophy of the 20th century could be written that, at first, simply no-one could understand.

The book is highly unusual, only 80 pages long and with only one footnote to the very first sentence. It is laid out as a series of numbered propositions consisting of seven basic claims with sub-propositions elaborating on them. Here is the first of these:

1 The world is everything that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by these being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case.

1.13 The facts in logical space are the world.

1.2 The world divides into facts.

1.21 Any fact can either be the case or not be the case, and everything else remain the same.

[The translation is by C. K. Ogden except for the second word in 1.21 where I have replaced "one" with "fact" from a different translation for the sake of clarity.]

Now all that would seem both trivial and perplexing--what could he possibly mean? The best guide to this I have so far found to be a 38 minute YouTube clip by Dutch philosopher Victor Gijsbers:

I'm going to stop right there for today. The next post will bring in Olivier Messiaen and musical aspects of the story.