Few books can have had such a tortuous birth as the Tractatus. Wittgenstein had great difficulty finding a publisher, the first house he approached agreeing to take the book only if he paid for the printing and the paper himself.85 Other publishers were equally cautious and his book did not appear in English until 1922.86 But when it did appear, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus created a sensation. Many people did not understand it; others thought it ‘obviously defective’, ‘limited’ and that it stated the obvious. Frank Ramsay, in the philosophical journal Mind, said, ‘This is a most important book containing original ideas on a large range of topics, forming a coherent system …’87 Keynes wrote to Wittgenstein, ‘Right or wrong, it dominates all fundamental discussions at Cambridge since it was written.’88 In Vienna, it attracted the attention of the philosophers led by Moritz Schlick – a group that eventually evolved into the famous Vienna Circle of logical positivists.89 As Ray Monk, Wittgenstein’s biographer describes it, the book comprises a Theory of Logic, a Picture Theory of Propositions and a ‘quasi-Schopenhauerian mysticism.’ The argument of the book is that language corresponds to the world, as a picture or model corresponds to the world that it attempts to depict. The book was written in an uncompromising style. ‘The truth of the thoughts that are here communicated,’ so runs the preface, ‘seems to me unassailable and definitive.’ Wittgenstein added that he had found the solution to the problems of philosophy ‘on all essential points,’ and concluded the preface, ‘if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which the value of this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problems are solved.’ The sentences in the book are simple, and numbered, remark 2.151 a refinement of 2.15, which cannot be understood without reference to the remarks in 2.1. Few of these remarks are qualified; instead each is advanced, as Russell once put it, ‘as if it were a Czar’s ukase.’90 Frege, whose own work had inspired the Tractatus, died without ever understanding it.
It is perhaps easier to grasp what Wittgenstein was driving at in the Tractatus if we concentrate on the second half of his book. His major innovation was to realise that language has limitations, that there are certain things it cannot do and that these have logical and therefore philosophical consequences. For example, Wittgenstein argues that it is pointless to talk about value – simply because ‘value is not part of the world’. It therefore follows that all judgements about moral and aesthetic matters cannot – ever – be meaningful uses of language. The same is true of philosophical generalisations that we make about the world as a whole. They are meaningless if they cannot be broken down into elementary sentences ‘which really are pictures.’ Instead, we have to lower our sights, says Wittgenstein, if we are to make sense. The world can only be spoken about by careful description of the individual facts of which it is comprised. In essence, this is what science tries to do. Logic he thought was essentially tautologous – different ways of saying the same thing, conveying ‘no substantial information about the world.’
Wittgenstein has been unfairly criticised for starting a trend in philosophy – ‘an obsession with word games.’ He was in fact trying to make our use of language more precise, by emphasising what we can and cannot meaningfully talk about. The last words of the Tractatus have become famous: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’91 He meant that there is no point in talking about areas where words fad to correspond to reality. His career after this book was as remarkable as it had been during its compilation, for he fulfilled the sentiments of that last sentence in his own highly idiosyncratic way. He fell silent, becoming a schoolteacher in the Austrian countryside, and never published another book in his lifetime.92
During the war many artists and writers retreated to Zurich in neutral Switzerland. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses by the lake; Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind and Romain Rolland were also there. They met in the cafés of Zurich, which for a time paralleled in importance the coffeehouses of Vienna at the turn of the century. The Café Odèon was most well known. For many of those in exile in Zurich, the war seemed to mark the end of the civilisation that had spawned them. It came after a period in which art had become a proliferation of ‘isms,’ when science had discredited both the notion of an immutable reality and the concept of a wholly rational and self-conscious man. In such a world, the Dadaists felt they had to transform radically the whole concept of art and the artist. The war exploded the idea of progress, which in turn killed the ambition to make durable, classic works for posterity.93 One critic said the only option facing artists was silence or action.
Among the regulars at the Café Odèon were Franz Werfel, Aleksey Jawlensky, and Ernst Cassirer, the philosopher. There was also a then-unknown German writer, a Catholic and an anarchist at the same time, named Hugo Ball, and his girlfriend, Emmy Hennings. Hennings was a journalist but also performed as a cabaret actress, accompanied by Ball on the piano. In February 1916 they had the idea to open a review or cabaret with a literary bent. It was ironically called the Cabaret Voltaire (ironic because Dada eschewed the very reason for which Voltaire was celebrated)94 and opened on the Spiegelgasse, a steep and narrow alley where Lenin lived. Among the first to appear at Voltaire were two Romanians, the painter Marcel Janco and a young poet, Sami Rosenstock, who adopted the pen name of Tristan Tzara. The only Swiss among the early group was Sophie Taueber, Hans Arp’s wife (he was from Alsace). Others included Walter Serner from Austria, Marcel Slodki from Ukraine, and Richard Hülsenbeck and Hans Richter from Germany. For a review, in June 1916 Ball produced a programme, and it was in his introduction to the performance that the word Dada was first used. Ball’s own journal records the kinds of entertainment at Cabaret Voltaire: ‘rowdy provocateurs, primitivist dance, cacophony and Cubist theatricals.’95 Tzara always claimed to have found the word Dada in the Larousse dictionary, but whether the term ever had any intrinsic meaning, it soon acquired one, best summed up by Hans Richter.96 He said it ‘had some connection with the joyous Slavonic affirmative “Da, da,” … “yes, yes,” to life.’ In a time of war it lauded play as the most cherished human activity. ‘Repelled by the slaughterhouses of the world war, we turned to art,’ wrote Arp. ‘We searched for an elementary art that would, we thought, save mankind from the furious madness of those times … we wanted an anonymous and collective art.’97 Dada was designed to rescue the sick mind that had brought mankind to catastrophe, and restore its health.98 Dadaists questioned whether, in the light of scientific and political developments, art – in the broadest sense – was possible. They doubted whether reality could be represented, arguing that it was too elusive, according to science, and therefore dubious both morally and socially If Dada valued anything, it was the freedom to experiment.99
Dada, no less than other modern movements, harboured a paradox. For though they doubted the moral or social usefulness of art, the Dadaists had little choice but to remain artists; in their attempt to restore the mind to health, they still supported the avant-garde idea of the explanatory and redemptive powers of art. The only difference was that, rather than follow any of the ‘isms’ they derided, they turned instead to childhood and chance in an attempt to recapture innocence, cleanliness, clarity – above all, as a way to probe the unconscious.