“To fulfill the purpose of existence”: Wittgenstein’s Notebooks and the Search for Meaning

This chapter tries to account for a specific aspect of Wittgenstein’s philosophical and inescapably personal quest for the meaning of life by looking closely to central entries of both the Notebooks 1914–1916 and the Private Notebooks—mainly around the year of 1916—in view of a reading of Wittgenstein’s early notions on ethics as mainly informed by a sui generis stoical attitude to life. This attitude reverberates in Wittgenstein’s works as late as in the Lecture on Ethics and constitutes the core of what we find in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, with Wittgenstein’s conception of ethics intrinsically connected to his conception of philosophy and its task of appeasing our life and death mind disturbances, tranquility that is synonymous with fulfilling the purpose of existence.