I. Two Sides of One Notebook
Between August 1914 and January 1917 Ludwig Wittgenstein, a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army, kept notebooks in which each opening served two purposes. On the right-hand page he wrote, in ordinary German, the remarks on logic and language that would become the Tractatus. On the left-hand page he wrote, in a simple cipher that reversed the alphabet so that a stood for z, a record of his days (Gomes 2022; Mattix 2022). On 19 September 1914 the right-hand page observes that a sentence such as “dieser Sessel ist braun” would have to become “endlos lang” (endlessly long) if it were to be stated without any ambiguity (Wittgenstein 1969: 19 September 1914). On the facing page, as summarized by John Preston’s Wittgenstein Day-by-Day, he records working on his searchlight until eleven at night on a patrol boat on the Vistula, a night so cold that the men slept in their boots, poor sleep, and four days without changing his clothes (Asher 2014). The next day the right-hand page breaks off its analysis of functions with an instruction to himself: “Nur sich nicht von Fragen überhäufen lassen; nur es sich bequem machen!” (Only don’t let oneself be swamped by questions; just make oneself comfortable!) (Wittgenstein 1969: 20 September 1914). On 21 September the coded page records exhaustion, depressing news, and then philosophical work that lifted his mood (Asher 2014), while the philosophical page begins: “Es scheint mir jetzt plötzlich in irgend einem Sinne klar” (It now suddenly seems clear to me in some sense) (Wittgenstein 1969: 21 September 1914).
When the notebooks were first published, in 1961, their editors printed the right-hand pages and left out the left, which Wittgenstein’s literary executors judged too personal (Mattix 2022). The result appeared in German as Tagebücher 1914–1916, a set of diaries in which nobody sleeps, eats, washes, desires, or falls ill. The coded pages appeared as a German book only in 1991 (Wittgenstein 1991) and in English only in 2022 (Wittgenstein 2022).
The division of that notebook is an emblem of a wider problem. The processes through which a life keeps itself going (eating, sleeping, desiring, washing, taking medicines, exercising, resting, praying, finding company, changing what one is doing) have been divided among disciplines, each of which studies one of them as though it were a self-contained object. The one kind of document that tends to keep them together, the private diary written without thought of publication, has frequently been divided in its turn by editors who separate what is presentable from what is personal.
This article makes three arguments. The first introduces metabolic remediation as a concept that brings these processes together as a single object of inquiry, and explains why they belong together. The second argues that personal diaries not meant for publication are among the best archives for studying metabolic remediation, and specifies why. The third demonstrates both claims with Wittgenstein’s notebooks of 1914 to 1916, read across the opening of each page.
II. Metabolic Remediation: The Concept
Definition
Metabolic remediation is the continuous coordination through which living beings maintain, recover, redistribute, or transform their capacities for further living. The term “metabolic” marks the stake: what is at issue is whether living can go on, from one hour, night, or season to the next. The term “remediation” marks the activity: capacities are never simply possessed, and must be worked on, by the living being and by others, through whatever means the situation makes available.
The definition has four verbs because remediation takes four forms. Capacities can be maintained, as when regular meals and regular sleep keep an ordinary working life running. They can be recovered, as when rest after an illness restores the ability to work. They can be redistributed, as when one person’s labour sustains another’s leisure, or when energy withdrawn from one activity becomes available for another. And they can be transformed, as when a changed living arrangement makes possible activities that were not possible before. Remediation is therefore never only a return to a previous state, and it is always conducted under conditions that are themselves changing.
What the concept brings together
The concept gathers into one object of inquiry a set of processes that have been studied as separate domains. Eating and drinking belong to nutrition science, dietetics, and the anthropology of food (Douglas 1972). Sleep belongs to sleep medicine and, more recently, to a sociology of sleep (Williams 2005; Wolf-Meyer 2012). Sexual desire belongs to sexology and to psychoanalysis, whose most influential account treats libido as a quantity of energy to be discharged, dammed, displaced, or sublimated (Freud 1953 [1905]). Washing, bathing, dressing, and grooming belong to the history of hygiene and to nursing theory, which has a developed concept of self-care (Orem 1971). Taking medication belongs to pharmacology, to clinical research on adherence, and to the anthropology of pharmaceuticals, which follows medicines through their production, prescription, distribution, and consumption (van der Geest, Whyte, and Hardon 1996). Exercise belongs to physiology and sports science. Fatigue and recovery at work belong to occupational health. Prayer, meditation, and the reading of consoling texts belong to the study of religion. Company and care belong to the study of kinship, friendship, and social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017).
Each of these fields defines its process by its own instrument and its own institution. A sleep clinic sees sleep, a pharmacy sees doses, a confessor sees desire as sin, a sports scientist sees exercise as performance. None of these perspectives is wrong, and each has produced indispensable knowledge. What none of them can see is how, in the life of a single living being, these processes stand in for one another, interfere with one another, compete for the same time and the same body, and succeed or fail together.
Why the processes were separated
The division of these processes has several sources, and naming them helps to explain why a unifying concept has been so long in coming. The first is institutional specialization. Each process acquired its own experts, instruments, and sites: the dietitian and the kitchen, the sleep laboratory and the bed, the pharmacy and the prescription, the gymnasium and the stopwatch, the confessional and the sermon. Knowledge followed the institutions, and each institution saw its own process. The second is a moral sorting of the body. Eating is public and sociable; sleep is private but speakable; sexual activity, excretion, and the use of intoxicants are hidden. Research followed the same lines of decency, so that the processes most hidden in everyday life have been studied most separately and most often as pathology. The third is the inherited split between body and mind, which assigned food, sleep, and exercise to physiology and prayer, reading, and consolation to psychology or religion, as though a person who cannot sleep and therefore prays were engaged in two unrelated activities. The fourth is the orientation of research towards breakdown. Each process has been studied mainly where it fails: insomnia, eating disorders, sexual dysfunction, non-adherence to medication, burnout. Failure isolates a process and makes it visible, while ordinary success, in which the processes run together and no one notices, remains unstudied.
An ordinary evening shows what these divisions hide. Someone returns from a long day, too tired to cook, and eats something quick; takes a painkiller for a headache; cannot settle, so has a glass of wine; showers, which helps more than the wine; calls a friend, which helps more again; lies awake, reads, and finally sleeps. A nutritionist, a pharmacologist, an alcohol researcher, a hygienist, a sociologist of friendship, and a sleep scientist could each describe one step. Only a concept that treats the whole sequence as one coordination can ask why the shower helped more than the wine, or why the call came after both.
Why these processes belong together
Five features justify treating them as one phenomenon.
The first is a common stake. Eating, sleeping, desiring, washing, taking medicines, exercising, and praying differ in almost every respect, but each bears on whether further living, and further activity of the kind that matters to a particular living being, remains possible. That shared stake is what the term “metabolic” names.
The second is substitution. A person who cannot sleep may eat, drink, take a tablet, masturbate, pray, read, walk, or work. A person who cannot work may sleep, wash, exercise, or seek company. Which of these responses is reached for depends on what the situation offers and on what the person has learned, but the responses are alternatives within a single field. No study of any one of them in isolation can explain why it was chosen over the others.
The third is interference. The processes act on one another. Coffee that keeps one working disturbs one’s sleep; a medication that lifts mood may suppress appetite or libido; exercise may improve sleep on one night and prevent it on another; a heavy meal that consoles may make concentration impossible. Remediation through one channel regularly produces new remedial demands in another.
The fourth is shared limits. All these processes draw on the same body, the same hours, and the same attention. Time spent washing cannot be spent sleeping; energy spent resisting desire is not available for concentration. The processes therefore compete as well as cooperate, and the competition is often where the most consequential choices are made.
The fifth is distribution across persons. Metabolic remediation is rarely achieved alone. Meals are cooked, beds are made, medicines are prescribed and dispensed, the sick are nursed, the lonely visited. The capacity to remediate is therefore unevenly distributed, and one person’s ease regularly depends on another’s expenditure.
How the processes are coordinated
The five mediations explain why no single process can be understood on its own terms. Taking medication is a sufficient illustration. It involves multisensorial embodiment, in the swallowing, absorbing, and feeling of a drug’s effects. It involves multispecies being-with, in the prescriber, the pharmacist, the family member who reminds, and the friend who advises stopping. It involves multiversal dwelling, in the climate that spoils tablets, the daylight that times a dose, the heat that makes a drug intolerable. It involves multimateriality, in the tablet, the blister pack, the bottle, the bedside table where the medicine is kept. And it involves multisymbolization, in the diagnosis, the label, the dosing schedule, and the person’s own account of why the medicine is or is not working. The same analysis can be carried through for eating, sleeping, desiring, or washing. In each case the process is a coordination across all five mediations, and in each case the coordination is continually changing.
Medication also shows most clearly how the separation of these processes has been built into practice. A drug is designed to act on one process: to bring sleep, lift mood, suppress appetite, relieve pain, or restore sexual function. Its effects on the other processes are then classified as “side effects”, a term that records a disciplinary decision rather than a pharmacological fact. The sleeping tablet that dulls the next morning’s concentration, the antidepressant that diminishes libido, and the painkiller that disturbs digestion are acting on the same living coordination as the effect for which they were prescribed. From the perspective of metabolic remediation there are no side effects, only effects distributed across processes that the prescription had treated as separate. People who take medicines know this, which is why so much of what is recorded as non-adherence is better described as remediation conducted across a wider field than the prescriber had in view.
The five recursivity levels explain why metabolic remediation is so rarely visible. Most of it proceeds at L1, in the unremarked flow of meals, rest, and activity. At L2 something becomes felt: hunger, fatigue, arousal, pain, relief. At L3 the felt change is articulated, perhaps only as a line in a diary. At L4 articulations are stabilized into regimens: diets, schedules of sleep, dosing instructions, rules of chastity, programmes of exercise. At L5 those regimens are themselves questioned and reorganized. Greater reflexivity does not guarantee better remediation, and a regimen can become one more demand on the capacities it was meant to protect.
The three types of recursive counterpart explain why remediation takes such different forms. A nonrecursive counterpart, such as a meal, a tablet, a bed, or a bathtub, does not respond to the one who uses it. A selfrecursive counterpart is one’s own living organization, altering in relation to its own ongoing state, as when a body grows tired, recovers, or becomes aroused. An interrecursive counterpart is another living being whose responses respond to one’s own: a lover, a nurse, a comrade, a correspondent. Remediation through a tablet, through one’s own sleep, and through another person’s affection are different kinds of coordination, and a single day may require all three.
Remediation, restoration, and sustainability
Two distinctions follow. Remediation is not restoration: a person may remain ill while recovering the ability to write, or remain physically sound while losing the ability to sustain a valued activity. And immediate coordination differs from sustainable coordination: working through exhaustion, or suppressing appetite or desire, may keep the present going while consuming the capacities the future will need. Metabolic remediation is the ongoing achievement of viable continuation through changing conditions.
Neighbouring concepts
Several existing concepts address parts of this phenomenon. Mauss’s techniques of the body (1973 [1935]) showed that walking, swimming, sleeping, and eating are learned and socially variable, but treated them as a catalogue of techniques rather than as a single coordination with a stake. Foucault’s care of the self (1986) reconstructed ancient regimens of diet, exercise, and sexual conduct as practices of self-formation, but read them chiefly as forms of ethical subjectivation, at L4 and L5, and so passed over the unarticulated remediation that underlies any regimen. Nursing theory’s concept of self-care (Orem 1971) names the activities individuals perform to maintain life and health, but locates them in the individual and organizes them around deficits that require professional intervention. Canguilhem’s account of health as normative capacity (1989), allostatic models of stability achieved through change (Sterling and Eyer 1988; McEwen 1998), and social reproduction theory’s insistence that the capacity to labour must be regenerated daily (Bhattacharya 2017) each illuminate part of the problem. Freud’s economics of libido treats desire as one quantity among the body’s energies, but as a quantity rather than as a coordination. None of these concepts, so far as I can find, treats eating, sleeping, desiring, washing, medicating, exercising, praying, and seeking company as interchangeable, interfering, competing, and unequally distributed responses to a single stake. That is what metabolic remediation is designed to do.
III. Why Private Diaries Are the Best Archive
What an archive of metabolic remediation must contain
If metabolic remediation is a continuous coordination across many processes, an archive adequate to it must meet five requirements. It must have a fine temporal grain, recording days rather than years, since remediation happens between one meal and the next and one night and the next. It must keep the processes together, so that eating, sleeping, desire, washing, medicines, work, and company appear on the same page and in the same sequence. It must record felt quality and attempt as well as behaviour: not only that someone slept, but that they slept badly, tried to sleep, and what they did instead. It must be candid about processes that are stigmatized or embarrassing, above all sexual activity, bodily functions, and drug use. And it must preserve sequence, so that the analyst can see what followed a given attempt at remediation.
The alternatives
Most sources fail at least one of these requirements. Clinical records have a fine grain but keep only one domain and record what matters to the institution. Interviews and life histories are retrospective and presentational, organized by what the narrator has come to think significant. Time-use diaries, the instrument social science designed for daily activity, impose fixed categories and rarely record felt quality (Gershuny 2000). Self-tracking devices record sleep, steps, and heart rate with great precision but no symbolization at all, so that the person’s own understanding of what they were doing is absent. Published memoirs and published diaries have been selected and shaped for readers. Ethnographic fieldnotes record the observer’s view of others’ remediation and only incidentally the observer’s own.
What the private diary offers
A personal diary not intended for publication meets all five requirements more often than any other source. It is dated, usually daily. It records whatever the writer found worth noting that day, so that a meal, a bad night, a letter, a dose, a bath, and a thought appear side by side. It records attempts and failures as well as successes, often with a vocabulary of feeling. Because its intended reader is the writer, it is more candid than any document addressed to others, and the stigmatized processes that disappear from almost every other source appear in it. And it preserves sequence: what was tried on Monday and what happened on Tuesday. The value of such “documents of life” for social research has been argued for decades (Allport 1942; Plummer 2001), and the diary has been studied as a form in its own right (Lejeune 2009). What has not been recognized is that the private diary is uniquely suited to one particular object, the coordination through which a life keeps itself going.
Many private diaries are also instruments of remediation in their own right. Writers keep them to regulate their conduct, to record resolutions, to count and restrain, to console themselves, or to unburden what cannot be said to anyone else. Wittgenstein himself later wrote that it was strange what relief it gave him to write about some things in a secret script (MS 106: 4, quoted in Somavilla 2021). A diary of this kind is both a record of remediation and one of the means by which it is attempted. Diaries written in code, or locked, or hidden, are the extreme case: their writers have taken material precautions against any reader but themselves, and the precaution is itself evidence of how much was at stake in what they recorded.
The limits of the archive
The private diary has limits that must be built into any method that uses it. It is a selective symbolization, and the processes that go well are the ones least likely to be recorded: a good night’s sleep leaves no entry, a bad one may leave a paragraph. It is frequently edited before it reaches a reader, and the parts removed are disproportionately the metabolic ones, since they are the most personal. It may survive only in translation. And it raises an ethical question that cannot be dissolved: the writer did not intend it to be read. The appropriate response is to read such diaries for what they show about the conditions of living, which is a general human concern, and to resist both prurience and the temptation to treat their contents as revelations of a hidden essence of the person.
Ontologically Grounded Theory supplies the procedure. It reads diaries in dated sequences rather than collecting every mention of a theme; reconstructs for each sequence the activity being continued, the change in its conditions, the mediations involved, the response, and what followed; and keeps apart observed actions, reported feelings, the writer’s explanations, editorial interventions, and the analyst’s reconstruction. It also treats silence as data: a gap in the record means neither that remediation was absent nor that it succeeded.
IV. Wittgenstein’s Notebooks, 1914–1916
The documents and their conditions
The notebooks considered here are the three manuscripts Wittgenstein kept from August 1914 to January 1917, now catalogued as MS 101 to 103. The philosophical right-hand pages are cited here from the German text of the edition by von Wright and Anscombe (Wittgenstein 1969), in my own translations. The coded left-hand pages are cited from Marjorie Perloff’s English translation (Wittgenstein 2022), in most cases as quoted in reviews of that edition. Reviewers have identified errors in Perloff’s translation (Von der Ruhr 2025), and the German text edited by Wilhelm Baum (Wittgenstein 1991) remains the reference for the coded entries. The public edition has no entries between 22 June 1915 and 15 April 1916, and the record as a whole has gaps.
The conditions are well documented (Monk 1990). Wittgenstein volunteered at the outbreak of war, although he had been exempted on health grounds. In the autumn of 1914 he served on a patrol boat on the Vistula, the Goplana, operating a searchlight at night. From late 1914 he worked in an artillery workshop in Kraków. In the spring of 1916 he was posted to an artillery regiment on the Eastern Front, where he asked to be sent to an observation post, came under fire, and served through the Russian offensive that began in June. Early in the war he bought a copy of Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief in a Galician bookshop and carried it with him. He came from one of the richest families in Austria and served among men with whom he had almost nothing in common.
Sleep, cold, food, and illness
The coded pages record the ordinary hardships that every soldier faced, and they record them in the dated detail no retrospective account would preserve. In September 1914 the men on the Goplana had no money to buy food, and Wittgenstein resolves to keep thinking about how he can maintain himself (Asher 2014). He sleeps in his boots, sleeps badly, and goes days without changing his clothes. Later entries, summarized by one reviewer, record bedbugs, heat, inedible food, dysentery, thirty hours without rest, and wearing the same clothes for days (Von der Ruhr 2025). After being sent half-dressed onto the bridge in freezing rain he writes, “I was sure that now I would die” (Wittgenstein 2022: 37).
These are the conditions under which the right-hand pages were written. The philosophical entry of 19 September 1914, on the endless length of an unambiguous sentence, was written by a man who had slept badly in the cold in clothes he had worn for four days. Nothing in the published edition allows a reader to know this.
Washing and small comforts
In Kraków, during the winter of 1914 to 1915, the coded pages record visits to a bath, “In the evening, to the bath” and “Bathed”, about five of them between late November and mid-January (Von der Ruhr 2025). Perloff reads these visits as coded allusions to homosexual encounters; Von der Ruhr rejects the reading, arguing that the entries mean what they say and that a visit roughly every fortnight is not remarkable (Von der Ruhr 2025). For the present argument the dispute does not need to be settled. A bath in wartime Kraków was remediation of a body that had gone days unwashed, and it may also have been remediation of desire; the diary records the act and leaves its meanings open. The same pages record the relief of a Kraków café with a “respectable atmosphere” (Wittgenstein 2022: 95), the pleasure of letters, and on one occasion, “A letter from David!! I kissed it. Answered right away” (quoted in Gomes 2022), referring to his friend David Pinsent.
Libido
The coded pages record Wittgenstein’s sexual life with a frankness that no other document of his allows. “Yesterday for the first time in 3 weeks, masturbated. I am almost entirely free of sexual desire” (quoted in Stern 2022). At the end of May 1916: “I have only masturbated 3 times in the last two months” (quoted in Setiya 2022). On another occasion he finds the temptations of the flesh odd, “because now I am getting more than a little exercise” (Wittgenstein 2022: 129, quoted in Von der Ruhr 2025), and he writes that “it cannot go on like this” (Wittgenstein 2022: 133).
Three features of these entries bear on remediation. The first is counting. Wittgenstein records sexual release as a frequency, measured in weeks and months, and implicitly as a deviation from a goal of abstinence. Counting is an L4 operation, a metric imposed on an L2 urge, and it turns desire into an object of management. The second is the hydraulic assumption visible in the remark about exercise. Wittgenstein finds it odd that desire persists while he is getting plenty of exercise, which presupposes that physical exertion should use up the energy that would otherwise become desire. The diary records that the assumption failed. The third is the moral frame supplied by Tolstoy. Wittgenstein repeats to himself Tolstoy’s saying that man is “helpless in the flesh but free in the spirit” (quoted in Mattix 2022). The binary of flesh and spirit is itself an L4 stabilization, and it reproduces in miniature the division of the notebook: the flesh on one side, its governance by spirit on the other.
The diary shows that the binary did not describe what was happening. Desire, exercise, sleep, mood, and work appear on the same coded pages and affect one another. Abstinence was pursued as a means of keeping the capacity for spiritual and intellectual work intact, and its failures were recorded as threats to that capacity. Libido here is one of the processes through which a living being’s capacity to go on is maintained, contested, and spent, and neither an isolated drive nor a symbol of something else.
Mood and the blessing of work
The coded pages record states of depression in bodily terms: “like a stone it presses on my chest. Every duty turns into an unbearable burden” (quoted in Gomes 2022); “Much anxiety! I was close to tears!!!!” (quoted in Setiya 2022). His comrades are a constant drain: “a bunch of swine! No enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!” (Wittgenstein 2022: 39). The situation is “a test of fire of one’s character”, “precisely because it takes so much strength not to lose one’s temper & one’s energy” (Wittgenstein 2022: 31). The last phrase states the metabolic stake explicitly: being among these men costs energy, and keeping one’s temper costs more.
Against this drain, the most frequent remedy in the coded pages is work. “Remember how great the blessing of work is!” (quoted in Gomes 2022). On 1 May 1915: “The blessing of work!” (quoted in Setiya 2022). Some weeks later: “Working very hard! Despite the most repugnant circumstances!” (quoted in Setiya 2022). The failures are recorded too: “At the office all day. Didn’t work” (quoted in Stern 2022). On 21 September 1914 the coded page records that, after exhaustion and depressing news, philosophical work lifted his mood (Asher 2014). The facing page, on the same day, records the sudden sense that something has become clear.
Here a central claim of the concept becomes visible in a single life. The logical work of the right-hand pages is, from the perspective of the left-hand pages, a means of remediation: it restores a capacity to endure conditions that otherwise press on his chest like a stone. The same work also depletes, since it requires concentration that cold, lice, sleeplessness, and the crew make difficult. The coded pages record both: work as the blessing that makes life bearable, and the days when work was impossible. The opposition between work as expenditure and rest as recovery does not hold here, as it does not hold in most lives.
Prayer and the Gospel
The coded pages are full of short prayers: “God be with me!”, “As God wills it!” (quoted in Stern 2022), “May God stand by me. Amen!” (quoted in Mattix 2022). These are L3 articulations addressed to a counterpart whose response cannot be verified, and they are among the most frequent remedial acts in the record. Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, carried with him, was a multimaterial object as well as a text: a book to be taken out and read in a cold boat or a workshop, much as a medicine is taken from a pocket. On 11 June 1916 the philosophical page defines prayer in its own way: “Das Gebet ist der Gedanke an den Sinn des Lebens” (Prayer is the thought of the meaning of life) (Wittgenstein 1969: 11 June 1916). What the coded pages record as a practice of getting through the day, the philosophical pages rearticulate as a thought.
The spring and summer of 1916
The clearest demonstration of the relation between the two pages comes from the spring and summer of 1916. On 4 May, learning that he may be sent to an observation post, Wittgenstein writes in code: “Perhaps the proximity to death will bring me the light of life!” (Wittgenstein 2022: 171). A little over three weeks later: “Yesterday, I was fired at. I fell apart! I was afraid of death! I now have such a strong wish to live!” (Wittgenstein 2022: 185). The public edition, meanwhile, has entries on 6 and 11 May, and then nothing until 11 June. When it resumes, its first sentence is: “Was weiß ich über Gott und den Zweck des Lebens?” (What do I know about God and the purpose of life?) (Wittgenstein 1969: 11 June 1916). The same entry continues: “Ich kann die Geschehnisse der Welt nicht nach meinem Willen lenken, sondern bin vollkommen machtlos” (I cannot steer the events of the world according to my will, but am completely powerless).
Over the following weeks the right-hand pages develop an ethics of fearlessness:
Wer glücklich ist, der darf keine Furcht haben. Auch nicht vor dem Tode. (Whoever is happy must have no fear. Not even of death.)
Die Furcht vor dem Tode ist das beste Zeichen eines falschen, d. h. schlechten Lebens. (Fear of death is the best sign of a false, that is, a bad life.)
Lebe glücklich! (Live happily!)
These entries are dated 8 July 1916 (Wittgenstein 1969). Read alone, they are remarks in ethics. Read across the opening, they are a response to the fear recorded on the left: the man who “fell apart” and was “afraid of death” now writes that fear of death is the sign of a bad life, and gives himself an imperative. In the terms of the concept, the philosophical page is remedial symbolization at L4 and L5, a reorganization of the meaning of life undertaken in order to make continued living under fire possible.
Two further entries show how far this symbolization was shaped by the split it was trying to overcome. On 24 July 1916 the philosophical page states: “Das physiologische Leben ist natürlich nicht ‘das Leben’. Und auch nicht das psychologische. Das Leben ist die Welt” (Physiological life is of course not “life”. Nor is psychological life. Life is the world) (Wittgenstein 1969: 24 July 1916). And on 13 August: “Nur das Leben ist glücklich, welches auf die Annehmlichkeiten der Welt verzichten kann” (Only the life is happy that can renounce the comforts of the world) (Wittgenstein 1969: 13 August 1916). The philosophical page excludes from “life” exactly what the coded page records: the physiological life of sleep, food, desire, and fear, and the comforts of baths, cafés, and letters. The editorial division of 1961 had been anticipated by the writer himself.
And yet the same weeks produce a remark that states the criterion of successful remediation with great precision. On 6 July 1916: “Die Lösung des Problems des Lebens merkt man am Verschwinden dieses Problems” (One notices the solution of the problem of life by the disappearance of this problem) (Wittgenstein 1969: 6 July 1916). Remedial symbolization succeeds when it is no longer needed, when living returns to the unremarked coordination of L1 and the problem that called for articulation has gone. That is also why success leaves so little trace in diaries. The coded pages are densest when things go badly; they say least when living, for a while, simply goes on.
The body on the philosophical page
The right-hand pages are not entirely free of the body; they admit it as a problem for the theory of the will. On 23 May 1915 Wittgenstein proposes that a book called “Die Welt, welche ich vorfand” (The world as I found it) would have to report on “meinen Leib” (my body) and say “welche Glieder meinem Willen unterstehen” (which limbs are subject to my will), as a method of isolating the subject, or rather of showing that in an important sense there is no subject (Wittgenstein 1969: 23 May 1915). On 21 July 1916 he imagines a man who could use none of his limbs and therefore could not exercise his will in the ordinary sense, yet could still think, wish, and communicate, and concludes that ethics would apply to him as well (Wittgenstein 1969: 21 July 1916). On 4 November 1916 he distinguishes wishing from willing by noting that his wish refers to the movement of a chair, his will to “ein Muskelgefühl” (a feeling in the muscles) (Wittgenstein 1969: 4 November 1916).
In each case the body enters philosophy as an instrument of the will or as a limit to it, and never as something that must be fed, rested, washed, and kept going in order for willing to be possible at all. The man who can use none of his limbs is imagined without hunger, thirst, cold, or desire. The coded pages, written by the same hand in the same weeks, are the record of exactly what the philosophical pages abstract from. The last entry of the public edition, on 10 January 1917, states that if suicide is permitted then everything is permitted, and calls suicide “die elementare Sünde” (the elementary sin) (Wittgenstein 1969: 10 January 1917). The coded pages had recorded, in the same years, despair, thoughts of death, and the “strong wish to live” that followed coming under fire. The ethical boundary drawn on the right-hand page marks the point at which remediation would have failed altogether.
What is missing
The list of processes that metabolic remediation brings together includes taking medication, and Wittgenstein’s notebooks record very little of it. Illness appears, in the reviewers’ summaries, mainly as dysentery. The absence is itself informative. For a front-line soldier in 1914 to 1916, the means of remediation were sleep when it could be had, food when it could be eaten, a bath when one was available, letters, work, prayer, and a book; pharmaceuticals played a small part. A comparison with a diarist whose remediation runs largely through medicines would show a different distribution across the same field. The concept is designed to make such comparisons possible.
The notebooks also leave others’ remediation almost entirely out of view. The men Wittgenstein calls swine had their own hunger, cold, desire, fear, and ways of getting through the war, and they appear in his record only as an obstacle to his own. A reconstruction faithful to the concept must register that absence and cannot fill it from his account.
V. What the Case Shows
Read across the opening of each page, Wittgenstein’s notebooks demonstrate the concept’s main claims.
They show integration. On the coded pages, sleep, cold, clothing, food, washing, desire, mood, work, company, letters, prayer, and fear of death appear together, in daily sequence, as parts of one continuous effort to remain capable of living and working. The disciplinary division of these processes, and the editorial division of the notebook, both separate what the writer kept together.
They show substitution and interference. Work remedies depression; desire threatens work; exercise is expected to remedy desire and fails to; prayer remedies fear; the company of the crew drains energy that letters and a café restore. No single process can be understood without the others.
They show the role of recursivity. Counting sexual release, the binary of flesh and spirit, and the imperative “Lebe glücklich!” are L4 and L5 attempts to govern L1 and L2 coordination. Sometimes they help; often they become additional demands. The philosophical pages of 1916 are the most ambitious remedial symbolization in the record, and their own criterion of success is the disappearance of the problem they address.
They show unequal conditions. Wittgenstein’s means of remediation, including baths, cafés, books, letters from friends abroad, and time for philosophical work, were not available to most of the men around him. His capacity to keep going depended partly on resources his comrades lacked.
And they show both the value and the fragility of the archive. The coded pages are among the best records of metabolic remediation in an intellectual life of the twentieth century precisely because they were not meant to be read. For nearly half a century readers knew only the half of the notebook that left them out.
VI. Conclusion
Metabolic remediation names the continuous coordination through which living beings maintain, recover, redistribute, or transform their capacities for further living. It brings together eating, sleeping, desiring, washing, taking medication, exercising, resting, praying, and seeking company, processes that have been divided among disciplines, and it explains why they belong together: they share a stake, stand in for one another, interfere with one another, compete for the same body and the same time, and are unequally distributed among persons. They are coordinated across five mediations, engaged at five recursivity levels, and conducted with three types of recursive counterpart.
The best archive for such a phenomenon is the private diary not meant for publication, because it keeps these processes on the same page, in daily sequence, with their felt quality and their failures, and with a candour no document addressed to others can match. Its limits, above all the silence of success and the editing of the personal, must be built into the method that reads it.
Wittgenstein’s notebooks of 1914 to 1916 show what such reading can recover. On the right-hand pages a logician writes that life is the world and that physiological life is not life. On the left-hand pages a soldier records cold nights, unchanged clothes, baths, masturbation, despair, prayer, the blessing of work, and the wish to live. The Tractatus was written across that opening. Metabolic remediation is the concept that allows both pages to be read as the record of one life.
Selected References
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