***************************************************************** * * Titel: Paul Ernst und Ludwig Wittgenstein Autor: Wolfgang Künne (University of Hamburg)* Dateiname: 18-1-96.TXT Dateilänge: 40 KB Erschienen in: Wittgenstein Studies 1/96, Datei: 18-1-96.TXT; hrsg. von K.-O. Apel, N. Garver, B. McGuinness, P. Hacker, R. Haller, W. Lütterfelds, G. Meggle, C. Nyíri, K. Puhl, R. Raatzsch, T. Rentsch, J.G.F. Rothhaupt, J. Schulte, U. Steinvorth, P. Stekeler-Weithofer, W. 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Those articles and excerpts from * * articles which the subscriber wishes to use for his own * * private academic purposes are excluded from this * * restrictions. * * * ***************************************************************** 1. "SIGNIFICANT ADVANCEMENT THANKS TO A SINGLE PERCEPTIVE WORD" is the title of a revealing self-meditation by Goethe.(*1*) In the following paper I will attempt to analyse the significant advancement made by a great philosopher thanks to the perceptive word of a writer. Ludwig Wittgenstein made three epoch-making contributions to the philosophy of the twentieth century. The first contribution was in 1918, when Bertrand Russell developed his philosophy of LOGICAL ATOMISM as a result partly of the stimulus of conversations with the young Austrian, who was first his student and later became his friend. His second contribution was at the end of the twenties, when members of the Vienna Circle around Moritz Schlick established contact with the now-famous author of the TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS who had long since turned his back on philosophy and had since worked as a gardener, as a primary school teacher in Lower Austria and as an architect in Vienna. In intensive discussions with certain members of the Circle, Wittgenstein became a source of inspiration behind LOGICAL EMPIRICISM. His third contribution came as a result of his teaching at Cambridge in the thirties and forties and the enormous impact of his posthumous PHILOSOPHISCHE UNTERSUCHUNGEN, which was one of the founding texts of the PHLOSOPHY OF ORDINARY LANGUAGE in the Anglo- Saxon world. Wittgenstein never met the son of a miner from the Harz region whom we are gathered here to honour. But he did read at least one work, an essay, by Paul Ernst, and in the middle of the First World War in Moravia he met admirers of Ernst's work who made no secret of their admiration. 2. One of the books that Wittgenstein had with him when he was reflecting with Russell in Cambridge before the First World War on the principles of logic (*2*) was a three-volume edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales published in 1910 by the Georg Müller Verlag, Munich and Leipzig. This edition contained an "AFTERWORD, supplemented by excerpts from the notes and edited by Paul Ernst." (*3*) Wittgenstein was later to refer to one of these fairy tales, that of the "Gold Children" (*4*) in his 1921 Logical- Philosophical Treatise with the Spinozan-sounding title of TRACTATUS LOGICO-PHILOSOPHICUS. In this passage, Wittgenstein elucidates his notion of structural isomorphism by the example of the relationship between the musical idea, the fixing of that idea in musical notation, the sound waves produced when it is acoustically realised and the gramophone record on which the music is stored: "To all of them the logical structure is common. (Like the two youths their two horses and their lilies in the fairy tale. They are all in a certain sense one.)" (*5*) The lilies in the garden blossom or they wither, depending on how the youth fares... Many years later, the author of the TRACTATUS acknowledges how important Paul Ernst's essay was for him. He notes on 20.6.1931, in a manuscript which has not yet been published: "If my book is ever published, tribute must be paid in the preface to Paul Ernst's preface to Grimm's Fairy Tales, which I already should have mentioned in the Log. Phil. Treatise as the source of the expression "misunderstanding of THE LOGIC OF OUR LANGUAGE."(*6*) 3. Before looking at the context of this expression in Paul Ernst's essay (which is the AFTERWORD, not, as Wittgenstein here and elsewhere erroneously remarks, the foreword to the collection of fairy tales) and before examining its context in Wittgenstein's TRACTATUS, I would like to return once again to the period preceding the publication of the Tractatus. In 1913 Wittgenstein's father - the Krupp of the Austrian monarchy - had died (*7*), and his son Ludwig had inherited a huge fortune. Wittgenstein then transferred the sum of 100,000 crowns to the editor of the literary review DER BRENNER, with a request that this money should be distributed among impecunious Austrian artists. Among the beneficiaries of this donation were Georg Trakl (who was not to benefit for very long), Rainer-Maria Rilke, Else Lasker-Schüler, Oskar Kokoschka and Adolf Loos, who to the horror of the majority of the Viennese had in his buildings combatted the precedence of form over function. Wittgenstein soon made the acquaintance of the great architect and when Wittgenstein in 1916 was sent to the officers' training school in Olomouc in Moravia, Loos asked him to give his regards to a student of his who was on sick leave in the town. This student was Paul Engelmann, with whom Wittgenstein built the house for his sister in Vienna ten years later. Wittgenstein was soon received into the small circle of Engelmann's friends, which met every evening. The circle included the law student Heinrich Groag (who would have liked to be an actor and who later achieved great success as a lawyer), the music student Fritz Zweig (who in the twenties became First Kapellmeister in Berlin, together with Klemperer at the Kroll Opera and Kleiber at the opera Unter den Linden) and his cousin Max, who had been at the same school as Engelmann, was reluctantly studying law in Vienna and was serving at the epidemic hospital in Olomouc at the time. Max Zweig had sent Paul Ernst one of his short stories a few years before and had received "an encouraging reply".(*8*) Paul Engelmann recalls in his fine memoir entitled LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN. BRIEFE UND BEGEGNUNGEN :(*9*) "The manner in which Max Zweig absolutely singlemindedly and disregarding all other considerations devoted himself persistently to his artistic profession, renouncing a career and material advantages that would have been available to him, impressed even Wittgenstein, who was very critical in this point." Between 1917 and 1924 Max Zweig was working on his first play and twice in this period, seeking help and finding it, he visited Paul Ernst, who at that time had a farm in a small village in Upper Bavaria. Max Zweig recalls these visits in his autobiography, which was published when he was 95:(*10*): "[Paul Ernst was doing at that time], albeit for different motives and for different purposes, what Tolstoy wanted to do for decades but did not do: he was living from the work of his hands in order to write in freedom and far from all literary cliques and currents what his mind dictated to him... the noble handsomeness of his features, the strength and dignity emanating from him in his peasant's smock, the human warmth with which he took the little novice seriously without a trace of condescension or false bonhomie, won me over completely... I had the feeling that I was in the company of a great man." Let us return to Olomouc in 1916, to Paul Engelmann's circle. They performed A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and LE MALADE IMAGINAIRE. Fritz Zweig occasionally played Bach to his friends on the organ of the synagogue. The chapter on this period by Max Zweig is entitled "Light in Darkness":(*11*) "[At that time] I got to know the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein... All I recall of him is his nobly handsome, thoroughly intellectual features and his strange way of talking. He began to talk slowly and falteringly, then broke into a fast, hurried, almost precipitate tempo and then suddenly relapsed into his initial inhibited tempo. I was once present when he was conversing with Fritz about the affinities and differences between the music of Schubert and Brahms; however this conversation presupposed such profound musical knowledge that I could not follow it." Did they talk about Paul Ernst? I asked Max Zweig this question in a letter in 1977, after Heinrich Steinmeyer had given me the playwright's address. Zweig had emigrated to Palestine in 1938, a few years after his friend Paul Engelmann. In Tel Aviv they lived together for a quarter of a century in a small attic flat "far from our ancestral culture, in impoverished circumstances and painful isolation."(*12*). The architect spent days and nights copying out an anthology of German poetry from the Baroque onwards in a meticulous calligraphic hand. Like his manuscripts on problems of town planning, it was never published.(*13*). Max Zweig wrote plays, over twenty in the course of his long life, in which German theatres showed as little interest as in those of Paul Ernst. When I wrote to Max Zweig, the architect was long since dead and Zweig was living in Jerusalem. His reply to my question, in extremely neat, microscopic handwriting, came soon afterwards:(*14*) "...I cannot recall having spoken to him [Wittgenstein] about Paul Ernst. It is over sixty years ago now. Engelmann probably had a conversation with Wittgenstein about Ernst. The only way in which I can perhaps help you is to give you an address to which to write. Prof. Brian McGuinness (Oxford, The Queen's College) has been working for many years on a comprehensive biography of Wittgenstein and is probably one of the leading experts on the subject; a long time ago I introduced him to my now deceased friend Dr. Heinrich Groag at Brno who is also mentioned in Engelmann's book and had intensive contacts with Wittgenstein in 1916. Groag had an exceptionally good memory and Prof. McGuinness had several long conversations with him in which Paul Ernst may have been mentioned. If anyone, he could provide the information you seek. I am sorry to have to disappoint you..." The first part of the Wittgenstein biography by unquestionably the leading expert on the subject did not appear until 1988 and the required information is contained in a footnote: Groag recalls that there was a lot of talk about Ernst at Olomouc at the time.(*15*) Wittgenstein's interest in Paul Ernst was aroused at the latest by then. But we only know with certainty of one text by Ernst that Wittgenstein read. 4. Paul Ernst's comprehensive AFTERWORD to the Collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales is - as Paul Hübscher, taking up hints by Karl August Kutzbach, has shown in his detailed Berne dissertation (*16*) - a somewhat hastily put-together collage of three older essays, which in addition suffered from carelessness on the printer's part: (1) "The Development of a Motif", written in 1904 and reprinted in the collection DER WEG ZUR FORM, (2) "How a Fairy Tale Motif originates", which is included in the second volume of EIN CREDO in 1912 and finally (3) "Motifs and Writers", which is reprinted in the first volume of EIN CREDO. Paul Ernst himself summed up these three essays or the AFTERWORD in the (most capricious) essay in DER WEG ZUR FORM :(*17*) "The number of motifs on which the narrative and dramatic literature of the world is based is very limited; and scholarly research has shown that these motifs are equally distributed over the entire world. There are therefore two possibilities: either the motif originates in a certain place and is disseminated orally or in writing to other peoples, or... the same motif originates spontaneously in several places... Now there are starting points which must necessarily come into being spontaneously among all peoples. I have studied two motifs from such starting points: one is the original animistic interpretation of nature and the other is the vivid and forceful presentation of moral prescriptions. In each case the result was as follows: an event is presented as having really happened, although as such it can be believed only in barbaric ages or in moments of intense spiritual tension. Later, however, an explanation has to be found, and this is now instinctively sought. If a more or less happy explanation is found, a new motif is created, which can now be treated poetically." What fascinated the author of the TRACTATUS about Ernst's AFTERWORD is not this central thesis but a rather incidental remark which Ernst makes in two passages of the AFTERWORD. Here is the first of these passages:(*18*) "At a certain level of development human beings have the notion that even objects that today seem dead to us have a soul like they do; whether this notion arises from a MISUNDERSTOOD TENDENCY OF LANGUAGE or from the idea that the souls of deceased persons have entered these objects does not concern us here. Moreover we almost invariably find a close connection between these souls of external objects and the interests of human beings. The most important types of this connection are totemism and fetishism." Paul Ernst does not state explicitly how we are to imagine animistic ideas originating from a misunderstanding of a tendency of language, but it is not especially difficult to concretise his abstract suggestion. For example the everyday language we use about inanimate nature is full of metaphorical turns of phrase which, if wrongly understood - or taken literally - could lead to animism. "The storm is raging" (like Othello?), "the rock defies the surging waves" (like Roland defies the heathens?), "lightning strikes a man dead" (like Cain his brother Abel?), "the persistent rain is to blame for the poor harvest" (as is the speaker for the boredom of his audience?), "the shade of the trees invites us to linger" (like a landlord standing at the door of his pub?)... Here is the second passage in the AFTERWORD that aroused Wittgenstein's interest:(*19*) "The overwhelming majority by far of motifs and materials that can still be used today certainly does not originate in reality. It is often the extremely ancient legacy of peoples, occurring in enigmatic and still not adequately explained form among the most distant and different peoples, originating... from changes of language, when LATER AGES NO LONGER UNDERSTOOD THE LOGIC OF THE LANGUAGE OF THE PAST and interpreted it through fabrications; through changes in views about the connection of the world, about death, the soul, the afterlife, God etc., by rationalistically interpreting uncomprehended remnants of previous beliefs; through the migration of this material to other peoples, through its retelling in changed circumstances and through adaptation to the new. The process is essentially always this: a problem that is unsolvable by means of the experience of reality is solved by an invented, rationalised story." What fascinated Wittgenstein about this passage is Ernst's thesis that many stories are attempts to solve a problem that is based on a misunderstanding of a linguistic form. The author of the TRACTATUS is convinced that what Paul Ernst says here about stories also applies to many, if not to most, philosophical theories. Wittgenstein writes in the TRACTATUS : "The book deals with the problems of philosophy and shows, as I believe, that the formulation of these problems rests on a MISUNDERSTANDING OF THE LOGIC OF OUR LANGUAGE." (Preface to TLP, dated Vienna, 1918). "...Most questions and propositions of the philosophers result from the fact that WE DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE LOGIC OF OUR LANGUAGE..." (TLP 4.003). I will now attempt to demonstrate the critical potential of this thesis of Wittgenstein's by applying it to a piece of philosophical reasoning that was put forward some years later. In "Was ist Metaphysik?", (1929) his inaugural lecture at Freiburg University, Martin Heidegger attempts to elaborate a question that is not posed in science. "Precisely in the way in which the scientifically minded person secures that which is most authentically his own, he speaks of an other. The subject to be studied is only the existent (das Seiende) - and nothing else; the existent alone, and apart from this - nothing. How does it stand with this nothing?" (*20*) This has been described, not entirely without justification, as the rebirth of metaphysics from the spirit of the misunderstood negation. (*21*). Heidegger's reasoning no more constitutes a meaningful question than the following comparable question: "This lecture is attended only by experts on the work of Paul Ernst and by nobody else. How does it stand with this nobody?" The word "nothing" as well as the word "nobody" does not designate anything about which one could talk or with which it could stand in any way. The first word means as much as "it is not the case that something..." and the second means as much as "it is not the case that someone...". (By "...and nothing else" and by "...and nobody else" we are saying in those sentences the surface grammar of which is misleading: it is not the case that science studies something other than the existent; or it is not the case that this lecture is attended by someone who is not an expert on Paul Ernst.) I chose this example also because it refers back to the archetype of misinterpretation as a result of misunderstanding of the linguistic form of negation. Ulysses and his companions, Homer tells us, are in the power of the one-eyed Cyclops Polyphemus. Ulysses gets the monster drunk:(*22*) "When the wine had enveloped the senses of the Cyclops, I [Ulysses] addressed him with flattering words: "Cyclops! You ask about my famous name. Very well. I will tell you. But you must give me the guest's gift as you promised. NOBODY is my name, and NOBODY is what my father and mother and all my companions call me. " These were my words. Cyclops then replied with unmoved heart: "I will eat Nobody as the last of the companions, and the others before him; that will be your guest's gift!" As he spoke these words he leaned back and fell and lay on the ground with his fat neck to the side and he fell asleep, the all-conqueror. [Ulysses and his companions then set to work on the giant's eye with the pointed end of an olive tree which they had heated over a fire. I will spare you the details, but Polyphemus is rudely awakened.] And he began to scream terribly, and the cliffs reverberated with his screams, but we ran off in terror. ...He shouted to the Cyclopes who lived round about him on the windy hill-tops. They came to him and asked what troubled him: "What tremendous thing affects you that you shout so in the Ambrosian night, and keep us from sleep? ... Nobody is striking you dead?" Then strong Polyphemus replied from his cave: "Friends! Nobody is striking me dead!" They replied, speaking the familiar words. "If nobody is doing violence to you and you are alone - well, an affliction sent by the great Zeus cannot be escaped. Then pray to your father, the Lord Poseidon." Saying this they left. But I laughed in my heart at the way they had mistaken my name and at the excellent idea." As we see, Ulysses rightly assumed that the other Cyclopes would understand the logical form of sentences with the word "nobody" and that they therefore would not ask Heidegger's question: How does it stand with this nobody? Polyphemus and Heidegger are both to a more or less fatal degree victims of a misunderstanding of the logic of language. POLYPHEMUS, however, has an excuse: the resourceful Ulysses provoked the misunderstanding. The idea in Paul Ernst's AFTERWORD that struck Wittgenstein so forcibly when he was working on the TRACTATUS is also found in other works by Ernst. In 1924, Paul Ernst wrote an essay entitled "History of a Word" which was included in the collection DER WEG ZUR FORM. The essay deals with the history of our word "conscience": from the original Greek verb "synoida" (" I know it as a witness") via the Hellenistic noun "syneidesis" to the Latin noun "conscientia". Paul Ernst writes of this "noun formation":(*23*) "SOMETHING IS TREATED AS A THING ; and we can already see that one day philosophers could come and say: this thing does not exist. And it does not exist; PEOPLE FOLLOWED A GENERAL DIRECTION OF LANGUAGE." Paul Ernst is here in effect following in the tracks of Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein would emphatically have agreed with him. Thus we read in a text which he dictated to his students at Cambridge in 1933/34:(*24*) "The questions "What is length?", "What is meaning?" "What is the number one?" etc., produce in us a mental cramp. We feel that we can't point to anything in reply to them and yet ought to point to something. (We are up against one of the great sources of philosophical bewilderment: a substantive makes us look for a thing that corresponds to it.)" 5. The history of the advancement of the philosopher thanks to an essay by the writer Paul Ernst does not end with the TRACTATUS. Wittgenstein must have reread Ernst's AFTERWORD at the beginning of the thirties. At the beginning of this lecture I mentioned a note in which Wittgenstein resolves to include a mention of Ernst in the preface to the book on which he is working and not to omit again what he omitted a decade before in the preface to the TRACTATUS : this time he will acknowledge the AFTERWORD.(*25*). The first entry in which Paul Ernst is mentioned is dated 8.11.1930:(*26*) "The scapegoat on which sins are laid which is then sent out into the desert is a false image - like all false images of philosophy. One could say that philosophy cleanses thought of a misleading mythology. (Paul Ernst's Preface [sic] to Grimms' Fairy Tales.)" What exactly is so bad about the image of the scapegoat, which is widespread in the history of religion and still present in everyday language?. (Wittgenstein here quotes the third book of the Pentateuch (16, 20-22). Probably the reified conception of personal guilt as something from which one can be freed by a standardised procedure. Is it again in this case a logical form that has been misunderstood?. Here it is more likely to be a manner of speaking (and not a grammatical surface structure) which could suggest the wrong image: even today it is common to talk of someone taking on the burden of guilt or of trying to shift it on to others. On the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Wittgenstein's birth in 1989 a chapter from Wittgenstein's so-called "Big Typescript", probably written in 1933, was published for the first time in the REVUE INTERNATIONALE DE PHILOSOPHIE (Vol. 43). The chapter is entitled "Philosophie", which in itself is enough to guarantee it the special attention of Wittgenstein researchers. Of particular interest for the subject of this lecture is the final section of this chapter, which is headed:(*27*) "DIE MYTHOLOGIE IN DEN FORMEN UNSERER SPRACHE ((PAUL ERNST))" The reflection on the word "scapegoat" which I introduced above returns here. And here we can clearly identify the work which was bound to remind Wittgenstein of Paul Ernst's AFTERWORD. Wittgenstein's entries under the headword just quoted contain a critical study of that classic of Victorian ethnology, Sir James Frazer's monumental major work THE GOLDEN BOUGH, A STUDY IN MAGIC AND RELIGION.(*28*) The third part of this work is entitled "The Scapegoat". Whereas Frazer sees gulfs separating us - with the magnificent achievements of our natural sciences and technology - from the "savages" (of whom incidentally he had never seen one), Wittgenstein - like Paul Ernst - stresses "our affinity with those savages":(*29*) "When I read Frazer, I constantly find myself wanting to say: all these processes, these changes of meaning, still exist in our language. [Wittgenstein is alluding to the belief in the cornwolf (Kornwolf) which was widespread in Mecklenburg when he writes:] If that which is hidden in the last sheaf is called the 'cornwolf' and this name is also given to the sheaf itself and to the man who binds it then we can recognise in this a familiar linguistic process." This becomes clearer if we look at the semantic phenomenon of the systematic multiplicity of meaning, which was known already to Aristotle. (*30*) His favourite example was our use of the predicate "healthy". What we classify as healthy is categorially at least as heterogeneous as an animal, a sheaf of corn and a farmworker. The word "healthy" can be applied to a person, a complexion and to a walk. However - in contrast to the word "bank", which can be applied to the side of the river and to a financial institution - there is a systematic connection between the various meanings: a complexion is healthy because this is a symptom of a healthy person; and a walk is healthy because it is good for a person's health... Let me now introduce and interpret a particularly rich reflexion which Wittgenstein puts forward in the section of the "Big Typescript" that refers to Paul Ernst:(*31*) "[Death is] depicted as a skeleton, as itself in a certain sense dead ... 'Nothing is as dead as death; nothing is as beautiful as beauty itself!' The image by which we think reality here is that beauty, death, etc. are pure (concentrated) substances, whereas in a beautiful object [or in a corpse, W.K.] they are present as an additional ingredient. - And do I not recognise here my own reflections on 'object' and 'complex'? (Plato)." Here in one breath Wittgenstein uses Paul Ernst's reference to the myth-creating potential in the forms of our language (1) against his own position in the TRACTATUS and (2) against Plato's doctrine of Forms. (1) According to Wittgenstein's self-interpretation, he argued in the TRACTATUS that a red circle, for example, is a complex the ingredients of which are redness and circularity.(*32*) Now Wittgenstein considers it a "primitive, too simple idea of the structure of language" to assume that "wherever we make a predicative statement we state that the subject has a certain ingredient (as we really do in the case, 'Beer is alcoholic')."(*33*) And how is (2) the reference to Plato to be understood? Recent research on Plato has shown how important the role of the so- called self-predication assumption is in Plato's doctrine of Forms. This becomes clearly visible, for example, when Plato characterises the Form of beauty as something that is itself beautiful - only far, far more beautiful than even the beautiful Helen. And do we not often talk like this ourselves? For example when we say that justice is impartial. Or when St.Paul writes to the Corinthians: "Love is long- suffering and kind,... it hopes for everything, it suffers everything."(*34*) Are we when using that phrase really saying that a virtue is impartial (in the way that a judge is impartial)? In his hymn to love is the apostle really saying that a virtue is long- suffering and patient (like Prince Myshkin in Dostoyevsky's novel)? To assume this is to misunderstand the logic of our language. We can after all paraphrase these sentences in such a way as to avoid creating this impression: whoever is truly just is impartial; whoever truly loves is long-suffering and kind. The 'Platonist' misunderstanding can be a source of inspiration for a medieval sculptor working on a statue of justice or of Caritas for a cathedral. But it can also be a source of bad metaphysics. This perception constitutes the significant advancement of our philosopher thanks to a single perceptive word of our author. 6. I have now reached the end of my lecture. However, I do not wish to give the impression that only the AFTERWORD to the Collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales is of interest for the philosophy of language in Paul Ernst's theoretical work. One example will have to suffice here to dispel this impression. No philosophy of language that deserves to be taken seriously can afford to ignore the difference between that which a speaker or writer literally says with an utterance and that which he wishes to convey indirectly. There are numerous telling examples of this. Here is one that forces us to sit up and listen to a highly interesting observation by our poet. When Pilate says to the high priests: "What I have written, I have written" this is, in the literal sense, a triviality in logical terms to which one can make no objection. But why should Pilate waste his breath on a tautology? After all he is not teaching a course in logic. In fact he is trying to convey to his readers what certainly was not a logical truism, namely that he is not prepared to change an iota of the inscription above the crucifix which so provoked the high priests. The literal meaning therefore obviously does not coincide with what the speaker is trying to intimate. In an essay written in 1918 entitled "The Power of Words" Paul Ernst makes this point with admirable clarity:(*35*) "When we say: the cobbler should stick to his last, we do not merely mean that the cobbler is only a cobbler to the extent that he works with a last; we mean that everyone in his work should stick to the field which God has assigned to him. Insofar as the sentence expresses a logical relation, it is of course always right; but as soon as it goes beyond this, it does not always have to express something true. One may for example put forward well- founded objections to the proposition that the cobbler should stick to his last... Among the means that rhetoric uses we also find ... phrases ... in which something that is logically undooubtedly correct is said but to which something else is insidiously added while the understanding is numbed, and this addition then turns out to be the true purport of the sentence for the speaker." Footnotes: * Lecture given at a symposium to mark the 125th anniversary of Paul Ernst's birth in the Goethehaus, Weimar in July 1991. *1* From the MORPHOLOGIE, 1823. *2* Cf. Brian McGuinness, WITTGENSTEIN : A LIFE. YOUNG LUDWIG 1898- 1921, London: Duckworth, 1988, p.251f. *3* 2nd and 3rd ed.1916 and 1923, Propyläen Verlag ,Berlin. *4* Nr. 85 in Vol.1 of the edition by Paul Ernst. *5* TLP 4.014. *6* Ms.110, p.184. See Register of manuscripts compiled by Georg Henrik von Wright in ibid. WITTGENSTEIN, Frankfurt/M, 1986. *7* "Er war ein Mann von Eisen und Stahl" to quote Karl Kraus's obituary; the misprint and pun were deliberate, but this did not prevent his son from reading Kraus's DIE FACKEL regularly. *8* Max Zweig, LEBENSERINNERUNGEN, Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1987, p.93. *9* Vienna-Munich, 1970, p.45. *10* Max Zweig, LEBENSERINNERUNGEN, p.93. Cf. on Paul Ernst also pp.61, 102f., 189, 222. *11* Max Zweig, loc.cit., p.78. *12* Max Zweig, in a letter to Karl August Kutzbach of 2o.9.1957 which is printed in DER WILLE ZUR FORM, First Part, No.9 (1963), p. 469f. *13* Engelmann's book on Wittgenstein was not published until after his death - cf. Max Zweig's LEBENSERINNERUNGEN, p.176 f. *14* From a letter by Max Zweig to the author (22.8.1977). *15* McGuinness, op.cit., p. 251f (This refutes Hübscher's thesis that 'there is no evidence that Wittgenstein knew that Ernst was a contemporary' , p.138 (cf. also footnote 16)). *16* Hübscher, DER EINFLUSS VON JOHANN WOLFGANG GOETHE UND PAUL ERNST AUF LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN, Frankfurt-Berne, 1985, p.74 ff. *17* "Die Zahl der Stoffe, welche der erzählenden und dramatischen Literatur der Welt zugrunde liegen, ist sehr begrenzt; und die Forschungen der Gelehrten haben gezeigt, daß diese Stoffe gleichmäßig über die ganze Welt verbreitet auftauchen. Es sind nun zwei Möglichkeiten: entweder entsteht ein Stoff an einer bestimmten Stelle und verbreitet sich mündlich oder schriftlich zu den anderen Völkern, oder... derselbe Stoff entsteht spontan an verschiedenen Orten... Nun gibt es gewisse Ausgangspunkte, die bei allen Völkern notwendig sich spontan bilden müssen. Ich habe zwei Stoffe aus solchen Ausgangspunkten verfolgt: der eine ist die urtümliche animistische Naturauffassung, und der zweite die anschauliche, eindringliche Fassung von Moralvorschriften. In beiden Fällen war das Ergebnis: ein Vorfall wird als wirklich geschehen erzählt, der als solcher nur in barbarischen Zeiten oder in Augenblicken seelischer Hochspannung geglaubt werden kann, später aber einer Begründung bedarf, die nun instinktiv gesucht wird. Wird eine mehr oder weniger glückliche Begründung gefunden, so ist ein neuer Stoff geschaffen, der nun dichterisch behandelt werden kann." From: "Ein Novellenstoff" (1914), in: DER WEG ZUR FORM, 3rd ed.1928, p.284 f. *18* "Auf einer gewissen Entwicklungsstufe haben die Menschen die Vorstellung, daß auch die uns heute tot erscheinenden Gegenstände eine Seele haben wie wir selber; ob diese Vorstellung aus der Deutung einer mißverstandenen Tendenz der Sprache entsteht, oder aus dem Gedanken, daß die Seelen der verstorbenen Menschen in diese Gegenstènde gezogen seien, kommt hier nicht in Betracht. Dazu finden wir fast immer eine enge Verbindung dieser Seelen der Außendinge mit den Interessen der Menschen. Die wichtigsten Arten dieser Verbindung sind der Totemismus und der Fetischismus." From: NACHWORT, p.273, from Essay (1). *19* "Der weitaus, weitaus überwiegende Teil der heute noch verwendbaren Motive und Sujets stammt ganz bestimmt nicht aus der Wirklichkeit. Es ist oft uraltes Gut der Völker, auf rätselhafte und immer noch nicht genŸgend erklèrte Weise bei den entferntesten und verschiedensten Völkern auftretend, entstanden ... durch Wandlungen der Sprache, indem EINE SPÄTERE ZEIT DIE SPRACHLOGIK DER VERGANGNEHEIT NICHT MEHR VERSTAND und durch Erfindungen deutete; durch Wandlungen der Anschauungen Über den Weltzusammenhang, über den Tod, die Seele, das Jenseits, Gott usw., indem man unverstandene Reste des früheren Glaubens rationalistisch deutete; durch Wandern der Stoffe zu anderen Völkern, durch Weitererzählen bei veränderten Zuständen des Volkes und mit Anpassen an das Neue. Der Prozeß ist im wesentlichen immer der: ein durch die Wirklichkeitserfahrung unlösbares Problem wird durch eine erfundene rationalisierende Geschichte gelöst." From: NACHWORT, p.308, from Essay (3). *20* Heidegger, op.cit. Frankfurt/Main, 8th ed. 1960, p.26. *21* Cf. Rudolf Carnap "Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache, in: ERKENNTNIS, Vol.2. (1931), p.219-241. *22* Homer, Odyssey, IX, 361 ff. Paul Ernst's most detailed discussion of the Homeric epics is found in the essay "Vom deutschen Epos"(1927), which is contained in the 1935 new edition of EIN CREDO. *23* "EIN DING WIRD UNTERGESCHOBEN ; und man kann schon sehen, daß einmal Denker kommen können, welche sagen: dieses Ding ist gar nicht vorhanden. Es ist auch nicht vorhanden; MAN IST EINER ALLGEMEINEN RICHTUNG DER SPRACHE GEFOLGT." From: Paul Ernst, DER WEG ZUR FORM, 1928, p.401. *24* Wittgenstein, THE BLUE & BROWN BOOKS, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964, p.1. *25* The Ernst formula that Wittgenstein used in the TRACTATUS also reappears in his texts of the nineteen thirties. For example in the "PHILOSOPHICAL GRAMMAR", Frankfurt/Main 1973 p.154 (from Ms.114): "We interpret the enigmatic as produced by a MISUNDERSTANDING OF OUR FORM OF THE LANGUAGE as the enigmatic of a process that is incomprehensible to us." *26* Ms.109, p.210 f. *27* Wittgenstein "Philosophie", p.202-203. *28* 1st ed. (2 vols) London, 1890. 4th ed. (12 vols), London 1907- 1915. The abridged German version appeared in Leipzig in 1928 with the title: DER GOLDENE ZWEIG, DAS GEHEIMNIS VON GLAUBEN UND SITTEN DER VÖLKER. Did Paul Ernst know this book? (At least one poet refers explicitly to Frazer's work: T.S. Eliot in "The Waste Land" (1922)...) *29* Wittgenstein "Philosophie", p.202. The former rulers of East Germany and East Europe have recently discovered that it was not only the so-called primitives of whom Frazer reports who occasionally burnt effigies of those who were absent. *30* Aristotle, METAPHYSICS, Book IV, 1002 b 32 ff. Thomas Aquinas speaks in such cases of an "analogia multorum ad unum": cf. Summa Contra Gentiles I,34. *31* Wittgenstein "Philosophie", p.203. Cf. Wittgenstein:"Bemerkungen über Frazers Golden Bough" in: ibid. VORTRAG ÜBER ETHIK UND ANDERE KLEINE SCHRIFTEN, Frankfurt/Main 1989, p.38. *32* Cf. Wittgenstein, PHILOSOPHISCHE GRAMMATIK, Frankfurt/Main 1973, p.200 (also from the "Big Typescript"). *33* Wittgenstein, THE BLUE & BROWN BOOKS, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1964, p.17, 144. *34*1 Cor. 13,4-7. *35* "Wenn man sagt: Der Schuster gehört zum Leisten, dann meint man nicht mehr bloß, daß der Schuster nur insofern Schuster ist, als er mit dem Leisten arbeitet; sondern man meint, es solle ein Jeder mit seinen Arbeiten in dem ihm von Gott zugewiesenen Lebenskreis bleiben. Insofern der Satz die logische Beziehung ausdrückt, ist er natürlich immer richtig; in allem aber, was über diese hinausgeht, braucht er nicht immer etwas Wahres auszudrücken. So kann man etwa gegen den Satz, daß der Schuster zu seinem Leisten gehÜrt, sehr begründete Einwendungen machen... Zu den Mitteln, welche die Redekunst verwendet, gehören ... auch solche Bildungen..., in denen etwas logisch unzweifelhaft Richtiges ausgesagt wird, unter dem man etwas Weiteres erschleicht, solange der Verstand betäubt wird, welches Erschlichene sich dann als der eigentliche Zweck des Satzes für den Redner herausstellt." From: Paul Ernst, TAGEBUCH EINES DICHTERS 1934, p.258 f.