There may be no royal road to geometry, but for a perceptive philosopher there exists a shortcut entry to Wittgenstein's philosophy, both to its early and to its later version. This freeway is opened to us by Wittgenstein's notebooks from the year 1929, listed in von Wright's catalogue as MSS 105–107. What makes this year 1929 crucial is that it was then that Wittgenstein took the decisive step away from the philosophy of the Tractatus towards his later position. The notebooks provide a vivid, sometimes dramatic, account of Wittgenstein's intensive struggle to fight his way to a point where he was ready to take this step. What this step is will be explained below. It represents a major failure on the part of the philosophical community in general, and of Wittgenstein's editors in particular, that these notebooks have not been translated, edited, or apparently even transcribed, in spite of the fact that these unique documents offer us a rare glimpse of the ways of thinking of a great philosopher.¹Admittedly, Wittgenstein used much of the material from these notebooks for the book which he put together and which has been published under the title Philosophical Remarks. However, this book cannot serve the same purpose as the notebooks, because most of the traces of his earlier position and most of the traces of the painful struggle which was needed for him to overcome his earlier philosophical self have been removed from the more or less finished text of the book.