From a couple of reviews of a new book out about Wittgenstein (a translation of some of his "diary" entries made during WW1). First, in the Guardian:
The Tractatus is written as a series of numbered propositions, closer in
form to modernist poetry than philosophical treatise. Its central ideas
can be traced back to the notebooks Wittgenstein kept during the early
years of the conflict. The right-hand side of each spread was used to
set out his evolving thoughts on logic and language. The left-hand side
was saved for his personal notes, written in a simple code in which the
letters of the alphabet were reversed (Z = A, and so on).
It is these private remarks that are published in English here for the
first time, edited and translated by Marjorie Perloff. They range
from complaints about the other soldiers – “a bunch of swine! No
enthusiasm for anything, unbelievable crudity, stupidity & malice!” –
to the number of times he masturbates (“Yesterday, for the first time
in 3 weeks”). He recounts his depression – “like a stone it presses on
my chest. Every duty turns into an unbearable burden” – and his living
conditions. These are accompanied by constant updates on how his work is
going. And by “work”, he always means philosophy. “Remember how great
the blessing of work is!” he writes. This work is the focus; the war, a
backdrop....
...in the material on the left-hand pages Wittgenstein first begins to
reflect on the inner self, on God’s presence in the world, on what is
required for life to make sense. It can sometimes seem irrelevant to the
discussion of logic taking place on the right-hand side. “Have thought a
great deal about all sorts of things,” he writes, “but curiously enough
cannot establish their connection to my mathematical train of thought.”
And then in 1916, facing death on the frontline, the connection is forged. Paradox in logic arises when you try to say those things that can only be shown.
But that applies equally to God, the self and meaning. As he writes on a
left-hand page, “What cannot be said, cannot be said”. The purview of
ethics, like the purview of logic, lies outside the realm of what can be
stated in language. And thus we get to the seventh and final statement
of the Tractatus: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
An odd thing to say about a philosopher here:
Even the masturbation is hard to separate from the philosophy: it
happens when work is going well. For Wittgenstein, it seems,
masturbation and philosophy are both expressions of living in the face
of death.
And in The New Yorker, the bit about Carmen Miranda makes me laugh:
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.
Anyway, as to the question in the title of the post:
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.
And:
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.
Finally:
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.
PS: I've left out the other bits about his sexuality (primarily homosexuality, but it seems he was uncomfortable with sexuality generally speaking.) This bit was dryly funny:
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.)
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