Ludwig Wittgenstein and the inward parts

TWO days before his death, aged 62, on 29 April, 1951, Ludwig Wittgenstein sent a farewell message to shut friends in England: “Tell them I’ve had a beautiful life.” In some ways, he had, despite the sporadic sadness that burdened his days.

Born in Vienna in 1889 to an Austrian family of Jewish descent which was wealthy and cultured, Wittgenstein — the youngest of eight children — grew up in a household by which patronage of the humanities was a joy and an obligation. Music was revered, especially the works of Mozart and Beethoven.

Although he had perfect pitch, Wittgenstein’s early path in life looked as if it would point in a special direction. In 1908, after studies in Berlin, he moved to the University of Manchester to pursue research in aeronautical engineering. After reading Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics, nonetheless, he became obsessive about philosophical questions. In 1912, he registered as a research student at Trinity College, Cambridge, and fairly quickly secured an interview with Russell himself. After reading only one sentence of a paper prepared by Wittgenstein, Russell recognised his brilliance and instructed him “. . . you have to not change into an aeronaut.”

After five terms in Cambridge, Wittgenstein went to Norway, where he lived in isolation and commenced to formulate the philosophy that might bring him fame. After war broke out, he served as a volunteer within the Austrian forces. Decorated for bravery, and infrequently in positions where he was exposed to enemy fire, he carried with him Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief. Taken prisoner by the Italian army in 1918, he later noted that Tolstoy’s attenuated text had “virtually kept me alive through the war”.

In the face of suffering and death, he managed to record his philosophical thoughts in notebooks carried in a rucksack. In 1950, lots of these were destroyed on his orders, but not before Wittgenstein had drawn on them for the one book (other than a dictionary for youngsters) published in his lifetime: the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, an unsettling and difficult text of barely 20,000 words comprising a series of sparse, numbered paragraphs, often little greater than a single sentence. The two most famous are the primary: “The world is all that’s the case”; and the last: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one have to be silent.”

First published in English in 1922, it stays one of the vital influential philosophical texts of the twentieth century, generating fierce debate concerning its ideas and implications for the world of philosophy and, more widely, the fields of ethics, theology, and the meaning of spiritual language.

The book has spawned 1000’s of commentaries and articles on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, undoubtedly aided by the fascination that his life holds for a wider readership untutored on the earth of ideas, but intrigued, and, in some instances, inspired, by his life, his strangeness, and his character.

Behind the book lies a conflicted individual who, before the war, had given away his vast inheritance to numerous writers and artists (including Rilke and Oskar Kokoschka), and later to his siblings. This was no grand philanthropic gesture, but simply a recognition on his part that acquisitiveness in all its forms represented a distraction from the more pressing query how he should live. From that time onwards, he selected frugality, working for a time as a teacher and a gardener; he also designed a townhouse in Vienna for one in every of his sisters, which he treated as a philosophical exercise.

In 1929, he returned to Cambridge, where he became a lecturer, and was subsequently elected to a chair in philosophy. During the Second World War, he struggled with the concept others were fighting while he was teaching philosophy, and so he turned to manual work, portering at Guy’s Hospital, in London, where staff weren’t informed that the brand new recruit was “one in every of the world’s most famous philosophers”.

IN HIS position as a professor at Cambridge, Wittgenstein was each baffling and compelling. Even famous and clever contemporaries corresponding to John Maynard Keynes and Lytton Strachey initially struggled to know him. A former student, recalling his time on the university in 1939, remembered a small and slender teacher whose eyes were deep and infrequently fierce of their expression, and an urgent voice reflecting “anger, impatience, and sometimes dismay at his own perceived ineptitude as a teacher of philosophy”.

Philosophy, for Wittgenstein, was a serious endeavour embracing life and death, strenuous ethical standards, and the pursuit of truth. After lectures, he would attempt to calm down on the local cinema, watching his favourite Hollywood Westerns as he ate a pork pie. American detective stories also provided a welcome diversion for him, preferably read in solitude.

Eccentricity was just one aspect of Wittgenstein’s complex disposition. He was self-absorbed and sort; demanding in personal relations, yet often detached; proud but self-effacing; able to be with “atypical people” while desperate for solitude; and troubled by his sexuality and the intimate liaisons that brought him no lasting happiness.

Bouts of depression enfeebled him and gave rise to thoughts of self-harm. The knowledge that three of his brothers had taken their very own lives rarely left him. Conscious of his failings, he judged himself harshly, and longed for the purity of heart enjoined by saints and mystics.

Although apparently indifferent to organised religion, and usually unobservant of the dogmas and rituals of the Roman Catholicism by which he had been raised, attending mass only rarely, Wittgenstein had a profoundly religious outlook. He prayed privately and asked others to wish for him.

IN THE preface to the Tractatus, he made clear that, removed from being an attack on religious discourse, as some readers thought, the book had an ethical concern with the correct limits of language. Its aim was, partly, to preserve the purity and coherence of language by exposing the confused thought that stemmed from its misuse: “What will be said in any respect will be said clearly.”

Wittgenstein commended a discipline of silence to safeguard language (religious or otherwise) from the results of attempting to articulate what can only be demonstrated. This difficult precept amounted to what he later described within the book as “the easy demand that we should always in any respect times and everywhere say not more than we actually know”.

Religion embedded in ethical motion required no further justification, or baseless propositions: it’s life itself “and sufferings of varied sorts that may educate one to a belief in God”.

IN HIS last months, already gravely ailing, Wittgenstein requested a gathering with a “non-philosophical” priest whose religion had made a practical difference. Fr Conrad, a Dominican priest, got here forth. He would return again in Wittgenstein’s final moments, to recite the Office for the Dying as his Roman Catholic friends knelt and prayed in his room.

Later, they arranged a Catholic funeral. Commenting on this last ritual, Wittgenstein’s biographer, Ray Monk, observed that this religious ceremony was fitting and appropriate for his or her friend, who, in a way that was of central importance but difficult to define, “had lived a devoutly religious life”.

Canon Rod Garner is an Anglican priest, author, and theologian.