ABSTRACT
It is not certain that Wittgenstein had read Russell’s essay, ‘Mysticism and Logic’, when he composed the Tractatus. That essay was published in July 1914,1 and Wittgenstein’s last visit to England before the war seems to have been in October 1913. If he did read it in 1914, he seems to have put it out of his mind for a good while, since ‘mystical’ themes hardly appear in his Notebooks until 6 May 1916, when propositions 6.371-6.372 of the Tractatus are first propounded.2 The particular notebook in which they occur was begun in mid-April after a silence – perhaps explicable by his work on the first version of his Abhandlung3 – covering ten months. It contains only a handful of entries prior to the ‘mystical’ ones, and once they have appeared they dominate the notebook. Thus, as far as our information goes, the latest in date of the pre-Tractatus passages which foreshadow the Tractatus are those which foreshadow its mystical sections – though, of course, there are large parts of the Tractatus for which no pre-Tractatus parallels have been preserved, notably the 6.1’s and 6.2’s (except in later sections of the Prototractatus, as later discovered and now described in Chapter 22 of the present collection). When mystical themes are discussed in the Notebooks, not much use is made of the term ‘mystical’ itself and, on the other hand, there is a good deal of terminology drawn from Schopenhauer and a number of fairly obvious allusions to him. Thus, both negatively and positively, the style of the mystical passages differs from Russell’s.
