No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation keeps them productive. They can cultivate the odd quirk—elbow patches or, naughtily, a cigar habit—but more outlandish idiosyncrasies are ruled out by the institutions that discipline them into tameness.
Of course, the archetypal Western philosopher, Socrates, lived before there was an academy to tame him. And he was seen, even in his time, to be—using the word advisedly—queer. Undoubtedly, that was the case in the modern, pejorative-not-pejorative sense: he was attracted to men. But he was also queer in ways that are harder to define.
The Greek word often applied to him was atopos, literally, “out of place.” His out-of-placeness consisted in what the scholar Martha Nussbaum has called a “deeper impenetrability of spirit.” Socrates simply could not be counted on to say what one expected him to say.
He was also queer in how he managed to combine rationality with the most abject unreasonableness. No one can really desire what’s bad, he said. It is worse to do wrong than to be wronged. The just man is happier than the unjust man, even when he is being tortured on the rack. What was it like to be in the presence of someone who believed such things?
There is only one canonical philosopher of the twentieth century with anything resembling these traits: Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was one of the founders of a tradition—the “analytic”—that has come to dominate academic philosophy in much of the world. But he has not been afforded the cloak of impersonality that shrouds most analytic philosophers.
Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi, in that seemingly everybody who met him felt moved to record the encounter. How many people in the history of philosophy are the subject of a two-volume tome of anecdotes? What explains the fascination with the ephemera of one man’s life, including among people who claim that the work was the thing?
Even for those who know the facts of that life well, “the difficulty has been to discern in them an intelligible human being,” as a reviewer of Ray Monk’s definitive biography, “Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius,” from 1990, wrote. A young man from a fabulously wealthy and cultivated Viennese family arrives in Cambridge, in 1911, to study with Bertrand Russell, the preëminent logician of his age. He is evidently a tormented soul, and he makes little effort to be liked. He is rude and a bit arrogant but in another way without vanity. He hates the social world of Cambridge, with its gossipy gays and sardonic dons. He quickly shows talent enough to convince Russell that he is no charlatan, and charisma enough to convince Russell that, even if he were, acquaintance might be worth the bother.
On the verge of a radical breakthrough, he decides to live alone in rural Norway, to think about logic in absolute solitude. But that plan is interrupted by the First World War. He enlists in the Army of the Austro-Hungarian Empire despite being eligible for a medical exemption, and serves as an ordinary soldier even though someone of his class could have joined as an officer. The war and soldiering evidently mean something to him, but nothing about his decision is obvious. Neither before nor after the war does he show much interest in workaday politics.
In his free moments as a soldier, he scribbles in notebooks that are divided between remarks destined for an ambitious philosophical manuscript and personal remarks on religion, masturbation, and the quotidian business of being at war. He repeatedly volunteers for the most dangerous posting available to him. Along the way, his manuscript on logic is transformed almost beyond recognition.
The original project seems to have been one that Russell initiated—to show that behind the messy outward “clothing” of language lies a lean body of thought, austere and simple. That aim, to reveal the order behind the disorder, survives the war. But there is now something new. The meaningful use of language, Wittgenstein says, gives us a picture of the world: there’s a tree by your house; there’s an apple on that tree. These are ways that the world is or could be. But he admits that his account of language and thought, by design, leaves out the aesthetic and the ethical: the tree is beautiful; stealing that apple would be wrong. Such propositions do not state facts; they are, in his view, nonsensical, even mystical. He is equally forthright about admitting that his strictures apply to his own words: propositions about the nature of propositions don’t specify states of the world, either; they, too, lack sense.
After the war, the manuscript is published on Russell’s recommendation, although Russell is dubious about its contents. Meanwhile, Wittgenstein surprises everyone by forswearing philosophy (whose central problems he thinks he has now solved) and going off to rural Austria to teach schoolchildren; he clouts one student on the head so hard that the boy collapses to the ground. Under scrutiny for his disciplinary methods, and lately convinced that he hasn’t, in fact, solved all the problems of philosophy, he returns to Cambridge, slowly making his way to a new, and equally radical, philosophical outlook.
Once, he had hoped to X-ray language and expose the concealed solidities of meaning and logic; now he’s after the significance of surfaces—he wants to explore how ordinary language is used in ordinary settings. The results of his inquiries don’t lend themselves to a slim volume, and he does not manage to finish another book in his lifetime. He dies in 1951, at the age of sixty-two, of prostate cancer, leaving behind dozens of reverent students and many thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Those, at any rate, are the basic facts of Wittgenstein’s life. For a sense of what he was like, one must turn to the anecdotes. These provide a sense of the man’s presence, with his flannel shirts, leather jackets, and tweed caps, his ringing tenor voice. They also provide a sense of the surrounds—the spartan rooms with their canvas chairs and iron stove—where he put on his terrifying performances of thought.
The American philosopher Norman Malcolm, who was a student of Wittgenstein’s, writes of the “frequent and prolonged periods of silence” in his classes, of how sometimes, “when he was trying to draw a thought out of himself, he would prohibit, with a peremptory motion of the hand, any questions or remarks.” Malcolm goes on, “His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect. . . . Wittgenstein was a frightening person at these classes. He was very impatient and easily angered.”
Many things angered him: someone failing to tend to one of his houseplants, a student unable to formulate a thought. (“I might as well talk to this stove!”) But he could sustain the intensity for only so long. A couple of hours of that, and he would be ready for an excursion to the “flicks.”
He loathed British films and generally insisted on American ones, being a particular fan of Carmen Miranda. (He was also a devotee of the pulpy murder mysteries served up in the magazine Detective Story.) He would sit in the front row so that he could see nothing but the screen—perhaps fearing memories of the draining lecture. Woe betide any companion who tried to talk to him. There was only the movie on the screen, and Wittgenstein, rapt in his seat, munching on a cold pork pie.
Of the students who still turn up every year for introductory courses on Wittgenstein, some of them are there for the genius logician, the inspiration behind both something called “logical positivism” and something opposed to it, called “ordinary-language philosophy.” But other students are there for Wittgenstein the sage, the magus, the riddler—the man who left Russell bewildered by a turn to mysticism at the end of a book that was supposed to be about logic.
The book in question, the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,” carries the impress of both Wittgensteins. The work was composed during a period of military leave in the summer of 1918, out of those notebooks. It was published in 1921 in German, and in English the following year. Whether anyone at the time or since has understood it fully remains an open question.
One of the few things it’s safe to say about the “Tractatus” is that it is concerned with the line between the effable and the ineffable. What, if anything, lies beyond language? Some of Wittgenstein’s early readers—the so-called logical positivists of interwar Vienna—saw in him a kindred spirit, someone drawing the “limits of sense,” as they did, around the propositions of natural science. Almost everybody rejects that interpretation of the “Tractatus” now, but without agreeing on another.
It’s hard to know what to make of a book that begins with “The world is everything that is the case” and ends with “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” The numbering of propositions (from 1 to 7, with innumerable nested propositions—5.251 and so forth), the use of symbols and of a special idiolect, all suggest the kind of work one must be a mathematician to understand. But then we come up against lines—allusive, enigmatic—that would not be out of place in a piece of modernist poetry. A queer book, then, by a queer man.
The queerest thing of all about the “Tractatus” is its notorious proposition 6.54, near the end of the text, which states, of his propositions, “he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless.” The reader must “surmount these propositions; then he sees the world rightly.” The lines have inspired a lively debate on how Wittgenstein wanted his book to be read, and on how seriously this remark itself is to be taken. But it has been recognized as significant that Wittgenstein referred to “understanding me,” rather than to “understanding my propositions.”
Clever students can eventually make sense of the logic and turn out elegant little essays about the “picture theory of meaning,” “logical atomism,” and “the saying/showing distinction.” But cleverness seems the wrong virtue to employ for understanding a man who tells us, mysteriously, that the “world of the happy man is quite another than that of the unhappy man” (6.43). Or that “he lives eternally who lives in the present” (6.4311). Taken out of context, the seeming mysticism comes perilously close to kitsch. Some clever people (starting with Russell) have concluded that we’d do well not to bother with it.
But others see in those remarks a call to a virtue rarer than cleverness. A virtue that could be described as depth. Wittgenstein, Malcolm recalled, likened philosophical thinking to swimming: “Just as one’s body has a natural tendency towards the surface and one has to make an exertion to get to the bottom—so it is with thinking.” Whatever depth is, Wittgenstein is one of a small number of philosophers of the twentieth-century canon to have some claim to it. That is the real basis for his place in the canon, and it manifests itself in the voice of the “Tractatus,” which can lurch without warning from the technical to the confessional. That unprecedented mixing of registers is another aspect of the text’s queerness. The challenge of understanding the “Tractatus” is not, then, easily severable from the challenge of understanding the man who wrote it.
The interpretative industry around Wittgenstein has not been short of material. The bootlegs (samizdat copies of lecture notes, coded notebooks, correspondence) would fill the shelves of a small library. Even now, after his hold over his discipline has loosened—few people walk around calling themselves Wittgensteinians—his life and personality continue to provide fertile ground for speculation.
Yet the surfeit of material makes the task, if anything, harder. Wittgenstein appears to have written, and lived, in a manner booby-trapped against interpreters. Elizabeth Anscombe, a translator of much of his later work and the most brilliant of his devoted followers, maintained that what made Wittgenstein’s thought so hard to interpret was that “he was constantly enquiring.” His philosophy was never “a finished thing.”
The formidable challenge of making sense of the things that Wittgenstein said has not been made any easier by the periodic announcement of the discovery of yet another trove of previously little-known materials. The newest volume, from what seems like a growing Nachlass, is an edition of Wittgenstein’s surviving notebooks from the first half of the First World War, “Private Notebooks: 1914-1916” (Liveright). The pages on the right (recto) contained remarks that are clearly an embryonic form of the “Tractatus.” Those pages have been widely available, with Anscombe’s English translation, since 1961, and scholars of the “Tractatus” have made extensive use of them. The pages on the left (verso) were written in a cipher.
Committed Wittgensteinians have had access to the full notebooks for some time now. German readers have known them under the somewhat tendentious title “Geheime Tagebücher” (“Secret Diaries”), since the embattled publication of that volume, in 1991. Marjorie Perloff, the editor and translator of this new edition, the first to contain a facing-page English translation, points out that the verso text was not especially secret. After all, the cipher that Wittgenstein employed was both basic and known to his siblings, who used it as children (z is a, y is b, etc.).
Why has it taken so long for there to be a widely available edition? Answering this question involves delving into the motivations of a large and colorful cast of characters, and Perloff’s afterword provides a helpfully succinct summary of the deliberations. The “Tractatus” and one short paper were just about all that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime. But he wrote copiously, and he shared his thinking, from the early nineteen-thirties onward, in lectures or discussion groups with select gatherings of awed students. At his death, there were some twenty thousand pages of manuscript and typescript left to his executors (Anscombe, Rush Rhees, and Georg Henrik von Wright); the material was, his will stated, theirs to “dispose of as they think best.”
The executors, despite their reverence for the man, were cavalier with the manuscripts. Some pages may have been burned, some were lost at a railway station, and some were almost eaten by a dog. When it came time to do something about the war notebooks, the executors decided to publish only the recto pages, which they judged to be, as Perloff puts it, “philosophically relevant.” Anscombe was especially vehement in refusing permission to anyone who showed an unseemly interest in Wittgenstein’s personal life: “If by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern themselves with his personal life, I should have pressed the button.”
Rhees worried that the publication of the verso pages, especially on their own, would make “what was a minor and occasional undertone to Wittgenstein’s life and thinking . . . appear as a dominant obsession.” What undertone was that? Perloff concludes that the executors had in mind “Wittgenstein’s expressions of sexual (specifically, homosexual) desire.” Their discomfort with these expressions set the tenor for much future academic discussion of Wittgenstein.
Reputable biographies of Wittgenstein either gloss over his sexuality (Brian McGuinness’s “Young Ludwig,” a lovingly detailed account of the period up to the publication of the “Tractatus”) or minimize the part it played in his life (Monk’s “The Duty of Genius”). That is despite the fact that they made use of the wartime notebooks, verso and recto. Monk sought to put the point in more general terms. The coded remarks, he said, showed Wittgenstein to be “uneasy, not about homosexuality, but about sexuality itself.” Although he treasured love, he saw it as separate from sex. Sexual arousal of whatever sort was, in Monk’s view, “incompatible with the sort of person he wanted to be.” Moreover, Monk held that much of “Wittgenstein’s love life and his sexual life went on only in his imagination.”
A luridly speculative biography, from 1973, by the American philosopher William Warren Bartley III, did claim to have unearthed testimony of Wittgenstein’s taste for “rough trade” in a Viennese park; it elicited from Anscombe a coldly furious missive to the Times Literary Supplement. Anscombe was, it should be said, a Catholic convert who once wrote to condemn “the rewardless trouble of spirit associated with the sort of sexual activity which from its type is guaranteed sterile: the solitary or again the homosexual sort.”
Perloff is unsatisfied by the standard account. To say that Wittgenstein was not really homosexual comes up against the fact that nearly all the people he loved were male and conformed to a distinct type—young, English, intelligent, and entirely ingenuous. There was David Pinsent (who died during the war), then Francis Skinner (“Lay with him two or three times. Always at first with the feeling that there was nothing wrong in it, then with shame”), and Ben Richards, a medical student.
Briefly, there was talk of marriage to a Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, a relationship that appears to have involved a considerable amount of kissing. But he made it clear, during a prenuptial vacation that he decided should be dedicated to solitary Bible study, that the marriage was to be chaste and childless. (She demurred.) Monk, Perloff concludes, “cannot reconcile himself to his subject’s queerness.”
Perloff is, of course, talking here about queerness in the sexual sense. The Wittgenstein of these notebooks hints at an earthier sexuality. At the crudest level, they painstakingly record the occasions on which Wittgenstein masturbates: “Feeling more erotic than before. Masturbated again today.” “Today I fought for a long time against depression, then for the first time in ages masturbated.” “At night masturbated again (while half asleep). This is happening because I am getting so little, almost no exercise.” There is no indication of how he feels about the activity, or of the fantasies, if any, that might have fed it.
Every now and then, Wittgenstein notes that he has just heard from his beloved David Pinsent, who was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, when they met, in 1912: “Wrote to David. Already longing for a letter from him so as not to lose the feeling of contact with my previous life.” “Also, wrote a card to dear David. May heaven protect him and maintain our friendship!” “A letter from David!! I kissed it.” Even in code, Pinsent remains a “friend,” albeit a friend whose letters one kisses.
Sometimes Wittgenstein mentions his reading. Tolstoy’s “Gospel in Brief”: “A wonderful book.” He notes when he has been productive: “The Russians are at our heels. . . . I’m in a good mood, worked again. I can think best right now when I am peeling potatoes. Always volunteer for it. It is for me what grinding lenses was for Spinoza.” Often he expresses his contempt for his boorish fellow-soldiers, many of them (as Perloff helpfully points out) “from the distant Serb, Croat, and Hungarian provinces of the empire,” who speak little German and reciprocate his disdain. Whatever must they have made of the prissy, sissy creature they were thrown in with?
Sometimes there are philosophical remarks that are familiar from “Culture and Value,” a volume of miscellaneous observations which drew from the verso pages of these notebooks. “When we hear a Chinese man talking, we are inclined to take his speech as so much inarticulate gurgling,” he writes. “But someone who knows Chinese will be able to recognize the language inside the sound. Just so, I often cannot recognize the human being inside the human being.” As is the case with many of Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, it is a real question whether the observation is profound or banal.
On the vexed subject of his sexuality, the journal entries only deepen the mystery. Is the tantalizing declaration “In the evening, the baths” evidence of a sexual adventurousness that went beyond the imagination? What sin is he confessing when he announces, “My moral standing is now much lower than it was at Easter”? And what has happened to explain why his “relationship with one of the officers—Cadet Adam—is now very tense”? Is the tension sexual? Need it be? There is material here to feed speculation but not to replace it with certainty. As Perloff wisely declares, “The translator of the Private Notebooks, finally, has to respect Wittgenstein’s own silences.”
She does not, alas, always do so. “Were Wittgenstein alive today, he would be questioning such buzzwords as systemic and intersectionality,” she writes at one point, proceeding to give us what are indubitably her opinions on such subjects, rather than any that might be attributed to a resurrected Wittgenstein. Whether they represent a translator’s arrogance or a publisher’s demand for “relevance,” they fall afoul of what we might call Anscombe’s dictum. “Predictions of ‘what Wittgenstein would say’ about some question one thought of were never correct,” she insisted.
Anscombe was in a good position to know. Resistant to acknowledging the most obvious forms of Wittgenstein’s queerness, she was nevertheless onto something when she confessed, “I feel deeply suspicious of anyone’s claim to have understood Wittgenstein. That is perhaps because . . . I am very sure that I did not understand him.”
These notebooks help bring out some of the difficulty of understanding him. Here is a man who loves boys for their simplicity but hates his fellow-soldiers for their boorishness. “Probably we will be attacked,” he writes one day in September, 1914. “How will I behave when it comes to being shot at? I am afraid, not of being killed but of not fulfilling my duty properly before that moment. God give me strength. Amen. Amen. Amen.” And again: “The situation here 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.”
Here is a man with an ambiguous sense of patriotism who goes to war only because it might be a crucible in which he may show himself worthy by doing his duty. Worthy of what? Duty to whom? Only a draconian, unforgiving superego. Notoriously, when Wittgenstein decided to give away his money, it was not to the poor but to his siblings, who were perfectly well provided for already. The sacrifice was itself a good. He took the same attitude to much of life as he did to thinking: it had to hurt for it to count. In a discussion on religious views of existence, he once said, “Of this I am certain, that we are not here in order to have a good time.”
A man so demanding of himself was never going to be a tolerant soul. The novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, who met him twice, spoke of him as she might have done of a twentieth-century Socrates: “Both he and his setting were very unnerving. His extraordinary directness of approach and the absence of any sort of paraphernalia were the things that unnerved people.” With Wittgenstein, there were no polite formalities, but Murdoch failed to get much philosophy out of him. What good was a single philosophical conversation? he asked her. What good was a single piano lesson?
His tendency to turn every human encounter into a confrontation, a reckoning, sounds an awful lot like moralism. But he was not moralistic in the sense of imposing on people the demands of a received body of rules. Compulsory seriousness might be closer to the mark, although his seriousness was compatible with a deep strain of silliness: he was capable of writing campy letters, of joining his friends at the local fairground, of playing the demanding part of the moon in an impromptu reënactment of celestial movements. An intensely rational man—he had, after all, started off as a logician—he loathed mere reasonableness, a squalid ideal for squalid people. He rejected the idea that the world’s demands on the individual might have a natural limit in the reasonable.
His students at Cambridge, no less than the beleaguered children he taught in Austria, were victims of his appetite for enforcing standards at which any human—any human human—must surely quail. He rarely doubted his authority to tell people how to live. One student, Alice Ambrose, was excommunicated after she gave him “cheek.” Her offense, she later recalled, was telling him that “he used his power over people to extract worship.”
In this, he was unlike Socrates, who, for all his piety, took people as they were. His queerness was compatible with having a good time, with liking people and being liked by them in turn. Wittgenstein, lacking a mode between the deathly serious and the giddily silly, inspired more extreme reactions—alarm, fear, contempt, reverence. Ambrose once wrote, generously, that there was “a very great deal in him to love.” Love, yes. But it is hard to find anyone who liked him.
And yet this was a man who was charmed and moved by the phrase “It takes many sorts to make a world.” He commended the proposition—a byword for liberality, for reasonableness—as “a very beautiful and kindly saying.” He never said that he thought it was true. ♦
