In the preface to his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein says: “I should like to have produced a good book. This has not come about.” Which goes to show that false modesty can unwittingly reveal the truth. He mounted a similar display of ostentatious humility in a letter to Bertrand Russell accompanying a typescript of the remarks that were eventually published as The Blue Book: “If you don’t read them it doesn’t matter at all.” I hope that Russell rolled his eyes, and not from the mesmeric effect Wittgenstein had induced in him early in their acquaintance, a quarter of a century earlier.
When he first met Wittgenstein, Russell called him “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius,” despite or perhaps because he couldn’t understand what young Ludwig was saying. Writing to his lover Ottoline Morrell in 1913 about Wittgenstein’s attack on one of his logical doctrines, Russell confessed: “I couldn’t understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I felt in my bones that he must be right.” He added: “I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy.”
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