War Games by Philipp von Hilgers

Author:Philipp von Hilgers [von Hilgers, Philipp]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262300377
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2012-03-31T23:00:00+00:00

Figure 6.1

Wittgenstein’s schema from his Tractatus.

Source: Wittgenstein 2001, 69.

Likewise, it cannot be concluded from the camouflaged battlefield that observing eyes are everywhere directed at it. The subject converges with a piece of paper and with a retina, which has abandoned thinking in duels but points the way for whole batteries.

Wittgenstein began his war diary two weeks after he entered the Austro-Hungarian Army as a volunteer with the sentence that “logic must take care of itself,”74 so that “all we have to do is to look and see how it does it.”75 In the end, after the dissolution of the dual monarchy and with it the Austro-Hungarian Army, his work has “extended from the foundations of logic to the nature of the world.”76 If a problem is solved or a situation is managed, it loses its meaning. For Wittgenstein sentences are merely “ladders” that—as soon as they have proven their function— can be thrown away.77 Jünger comes to the same conclusion in his study about the activity of the worker, whose type has emerged from the world war:

All of these concepts (Gestalt, type, organic construction, total) are notabene there by way of comprehension. We are not concerned with them as such. They can be forgotten or set aside without further ado after they have been used as magnitudes of work for the grasping of a definite reality which exists in spite of and beyond every concept; the reader has to see through the description as through an optical system.78

In war, even the most decisive technologies and tactics ultimately betray their design to the enemy, however effective they initially were, and demand their own surpassing. For this logic of surpassing, the war of the twentieth century is not a last resort of political clarification. Rather, this logic delineates the insurmountable playing field of a war game that constantly creates new unspeakable and inconceivable facts.

War on Mars: Wittgenstein’s First Language Game

“What is the difference between language (M) [as mathematics] and a game? You might say: It ceases to be a game when things begin to become serious, and here seriousness means application.”79 Wittgenstein has returned to Vienna from Italian war captivity. He has again taken up his investigations of the foundation of mathematics—against the conclusion of his Tractatus, which declared the problem of logic solved once and for all and thereby showed how little that accomplished.80

In Wittgenstein’s inquiries into the foundation of mathematics, war is again present. Now it has taken on the form of the war game, which outlasts every war and never runs out of material:

Think of the game of chess. Today we call it a game. Suppose, however, a war were waged in such a way that the troops fought one another on a field in the form of a chess-board and that whoever was mated had lost the war. The officers would be bending over a chessboard just as they now do over an ordnance map. Then chess would not be a game any longer; it would be a serious business.

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