Appendix A - Supplements

Summary

[Trattenbach,] 5.5.1922

Dear Ogden,

I am very sorry indeed I cannot send you the supplements. There can be no thought of printing them. What they contain is this: When I had finished the book roughly there remained certain propositions – about a hundred – about which I was doubtful whether I should take them in or not. These propositions were – partly – different versions of those now contained in the book; for it had often happened that I had written down a proposition in many different forms, when some thought had occurred to me in different ways during the long time I worked at that business. Another part of the supplements are merely sketches of propositions which I thought I might some day take up again if their thoughts should ever revive in me. That means: The supplements are exactly what must not be printed. Besides they really contain no elucidation at all, but are still less clear than the rest of my propositions. As to the shortness of the book I am awfully sorry for it; but what I can do?! If you were to squeeze me out like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me. To let you print the Ergänzungen [supplements] would be no remedy. It would be just as if you had gone to a joiner and ordered a table and he had made the table too short and now would sell you the shavings and sawdust and other rubbish along with the table to make up for its shortness. (Rather than print the Ergänzungen to make the book fatter, leave a dozen white sheets for the reader to swear into when he has purchased the book and can't understand it.) […] – So don't be angry that I cannot make my book bigger. I would if I could.

Yours sincerely

L. Wittgenstein

[…] [maybe a couple of quotations from the pre-war notebook]

3 The agreement of two complexes is obviously internal and for that reason cannot be expressed but can only be shown.

[6.10.14]