ABSTRACT
There are certain passages where a thinker-often under the pressure of constraints or of external threats-succeeds in compressing a fundamental intuition into a few questions or propositions. In respect of ethics, two short texts immediately spring to mind. The first was written in the trenches of the First World War, part of it on the Carpathian Front. It was recorded (dated 5.7.16) in the war-time diaries of Ludwig Wittgenstein, then attached to a garrison artillery regiment of the Austrian army:
What do I know about God and the purpose of life? I know that this world exists. That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field. That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
