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6 From Formula Games to the Universal Machine The Double-Entry Bookkeeping of Reconnaissance Officer Wittgenstein On April 6, 1916, the only war diary entry reads: “Life is a . . .” Under the date of the subsequent day, it goes on: “torture, from which one is only temporarily relieved so that one remains receptive for further agonies.”1 What one cannot speak about, one must pass over in silence. “An exhausting march, a night of coughing, a society of drunks, a society of mean and stupid people.”2 The gunner Ludwig Wittgenstein, declared “completely unfit”3 for service by the Austro-Hungarian Army, left behind his privileged life in the familial circle of friends, in which representatives of Viennese high finance met as well as artists. He left behind Cambridge’s elite mathematicians and finally his Norwegian hut, the refuge of his philosophical and homoerotic existence. Yet he never quite arrived in the war. First Wittgenstein stands at the searchlight of a captured Russian patrol boat and helps secure the Vistula on the Russian border. A first lieutenant who happens to hear of his mathematical and technical engineering education entrusts him initially with organizational tasks, then with the acting supervision of the artillery workshop of the Krakow fortress. For Wittgenstein that means “office work,”4 often extending into the night. But the implementation of the manifested expertise founders on the lacking power of command. Wittgenstein’s men refuse time and again to follow his orders. His superior then puts him in the uniform of a Landsturm engineer5 until the war ministry intervenes, classifies the request for promotion as a presumption , and rejects it. After a transfer to the balloon section is also turned down,6 Wittgenstein requests to be sent to the front with the 4th battery of the 5th Field Howitzer Regiment. The men, however, “with few exceptions,” still hate him, the “volunteer.”7 Someone who, though he is 104 Chapter 6 exempt from service, nonetheless chooses war and not merely a military officer career—and who now gives orders, without having been ordered to serve in the war—appears suspect to his comrades. Wittgenstein has himself transferred again: “Tomorrow perhaps, at my request, I’ll get out to the scouts. Only then will the war begin for me. And maybe – life too! Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life.”8 Only now has Wittgenstein arrived in the war, at the front line. The constant complaining about his comrades, who make him think of demands for duels,9 now comes to an end in his diary. Instead, from that point on, only quick prayers are to be found. He is at a forward “observation post.”10 The consolidation of light field artillery and heavy howitzer battery under a central command, tactically integrated balloon sections and forward reconnaissance officers are all inventions of the First World War. In its initial stages, its artillery still resembled that of Napoleon, before it ultimately found its way to forms and standards that still prevail in Western armies today.11 The European powers used the years of peace before the First World War to increase the quantity of their ordnance and its penetrating power. The tactics of the artillery nonetheless remained at the level of the previous battles still in memory. No one could imagine that the infantry would advance on the battlefield without, together with its own artillery , having its eye on the enemy. But when the massive firepower was revealed in the first battles, all that remained was the withdrawal of the batteries from the adversaries’ field of vision. The increased penetrating power of the shells promptly underwent a reevaluation: what now counted was the distance that the projectiles overcame. At 9,000 meters, it turned out to be considerably farther than ballistics experts had foreseen in their tables.12 War now proves not to be the father of all things but the bastion of unforeseen and unrealized facts. Of all places, Wittgenstein’s first operational area as a reconnaissance officer, north of the Carpathians, becomes a center of this bastion—that is, a tactical field of experimentation.13 What Wittgenstein’s war diary records from that point on can be read as the “double-entry bookkeeping . . .”14 of two experiments; one is the foray into a logic that “takes care of itself”15 and thereby breaks with Russell’s type theory, which must dodge onto a meta-mathematical level for its foundation, and the other is the record...

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