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# On Wittgenstein
- URL: https://thedailyeudemon.com/33877/
- Published: 2014-09-11T06:17:36.000Z
- Updated: 2014-09-11T06:17:36.000Z
- Author: Eric Scheske
- Tags: Miscellaneous, #wpChunk

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/ea/fd/eafdb338-c9b6-4f87-8363-78ab94cc3a18/content/images/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Wittgenstein-300x239.jpg "Wittgenstein")

Ludwig Wittgenstein has interested me for quite awhile. He's interested me enough to download his *Tractatus* to my Kindle for 99 cents, which, of course, makes me an intellectual heavyweight, though I've read scarcely any of it and haven't understood what I have read.

In any event, this recent piece at *Philosophy Now* is pretty good: [Wittgenstein,Tolstoy and the Folly of Logical Positivism](https://philosophynow.org/issues/103/WittgensteinTolstoy%5Fand%5Fthe%5FFolly%5Fof%5FLogical%5FPositivism?ref=thedailyeudemon.com). This passage from the beginning is exceptionally interesting:

> In September 1914, Wittgenstein, off duty, visited the town of Tarnow, then in Austrian Galicia, now in southern Poland, where he went into a small shop that seemed to sell nothing but picture postcards. However, as Bertrand Russell later wrote in a letter, Wittgenstein “found that it contained just one book: \[of\] Tolstoy on the Gospels. He bought it merely because there was no other. He read it and re-read it, and thenceforth had it always with him, under fire and at all times.” No wonder, then, that Wittgenstein became known to his fellow soldiers as 'the one with the Gospels'. Tolstoy's book, however, is a single Gospel: hence its name: The Gospel in Brief. It is, as Tolstoy himself says in his Preface, “a fusion of the four Gospels into one.” Tolstoy had distilled the four biblical accounts of Christ's life and teaching into a compelling story. Wittgenstein was so profoundly moved by it that he doubted whether the actual Gospels could possibly be better than Tolstoy's synthesis. “If you are not acquainted with it,” he told his friend Ludwig von Ficker, “then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on a person.”

Tolstoy's Gospel has interested me enough to download it to my Kindle. Not interested me enough to read it, of course, but downloaded it I have.