Ludwig and Franz

Notes on Wittgenstein's notes

Photo by Moriz Nähr

I recently read Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, which is the somewhat arbitrary title given to the English translation of Vermischte Bemerkungen ("Miscellaneous Remarks"), selections from his notebooks. I've been fascinated by Wittgenstein ever since I saw this BBC documentary on him during the pandemic. It's a wonderful film, in which the philosopher appears as a kind of World's Most Interesting Man: a genius, from a family of geniuses that was also one of the richest in Austria, who would have to be called an eccentric if he weren't so deadly serious and highly accomplished. He completed his great philosophical work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, while a soldier in World War I, after which he gave away his fortune and became a schoolteacher in a remote Austrian village for almost 10 years. (His record as a teacher was a little uneven.) Later he decided to help his sister build a house, took over the job from the architect and designed it himself, down to the doorknobs and window latches (an episode I assume is the inspiration for Thomas Bernhard's feverish Correction). Eventually he went back to philosophy and wrote another book, Philosophical Investigations, which threw into question everything he'd written in his first.

He lived, in other words, exactly as a genius should. There is a satisfying, even frightening sense of extremes about his life and character. Against this background of profound seriousness, droll anecdotes stand out very brightly, the way they do in Kafka's life. The fact that he liked to watch dopey American films after a long day of philosophizing, for instance, which the philosopher Norman Malcolm writes about in his memoir of Wittgenstein:

Wittgenstein was always exhausted by his lectures. He was also revolted by them. He felt disgusted with what he had said and with himself. Often he would rush off to a cinema immediately after the class ended. As the members of the class began to move their chairs out of the room he might look imploringly at a friend and say in a low tone, 'Could you go to a flick?' On the way to the cinema Wittgenstein would buy a bun or cold pork pie and munch it while he watched the film. He insisted on sitting in the very first row of seats, so that the screen would occupy his entire field of vision, and his mind would be turned away from the thoughts of the lecture and his feelings of revulsion.

Or these lines, written to his teacher Bertrand Russell while he was living in Norway and working on what would become the Tractatus: "My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed." Lines that could have described the days of so many of us during the pandemic, except that, according to Wikipedia, Wittgenstein had perfect pitch and "was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages." Like Kafka, he was photogenic and the subject of cultlike admiration, and like him he stands out as a kind of character, a sui generis and unassimilable figure of the 20th century. He went to junior high, for one year, with Adolph Hitler. They were exactly the same age but two grades apart, since Ludwig skipped a grade and Adolph was held back. There is a book, The Jew of Linz, in which the author, Kimberley Cornish, argues seriously that being bullied by the young Wittgenstein (who was Jewish, though assimilated), was the source of Hitler's antisemitism. The philosopher and his life are so unusual that this conspiracy theory almost makes sense.

I’m just asking questions.

I have no background in philosophy and have never read the Tractatus, which I've been told is like math. But I've been making my way through Philosophical Investigations, which is highly readable.

When I say: "My broom is in the corner",—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush? Well, it could at any rate be replaced by a statement giving the position of the stick and the position of the brush. And this statement is surely a further analysed form of the first one.—But why do I call it "further analysed"?— Well, if the broom is there, that surely means that the stick and brush must be there, and in a particular relation to one another; and this was as it were hidden in the sense of the first sentence, and is expressed in the analysed sentence. Then does someone who says that the broom is in the corner really mean: the broomstick is there, and so is the brush, and the broomstick is fixed in the brush?—If we were to ask anyone if he meant this he would probably say that he had not thought specially of the broomstick or specially of the brush at all. And that would be the right answer, for he meant to speak neither of the stick nor of the brush in particular. Suppose that, instead of saying "Bring me the broom", you said "Bring me the broomstick and the brush which is fitted on to it."!—Isn't the answer: "Do you want the broom? Why do you put it so oddly?"

I love this writing. It's like a one-man play. If I had to audition for a part as an actor, I might choose a passage from Philosophical Investigations as my monologue. Despite its freshness and energy, I find it has to be read slowly. I feel like I'm using my brain the way I do when I learn an entirely new skill – drawing freehand, say, or tying a knot used in sailing – even though it's just reading. It's also not clear to me whether Wittgenstein has a Big Idea that all this will eventually prove, besides maybe the impossibility of understanding anything. This, I think, is the Cliffs Notes version of him: something about the impossibility of making statements about the world. I can't comment on that, but the impression I get from Wittgenstein's writing is indeed of someone so aware of the difficulty of knowing anything that he writes as clearly as any human being has ever done.

This picture is also from Wikipedia. Wittgenstein has a way of never seeming to break character. He looks like an austerely minded genius even as a child.

Culture and Value is collected from private notebooks spanning about 20 years. With a legendary personality like Wittgenstein, notes like these are probably going to be a little disappointing – as these are. They're not Kafka's diaries, neither as annoying nor as beautiful. There are no tortured passages about his personal life, no charming observations about cowboy movies. The writing, however, is just the same as Philosophical Investigations, with the same perfect clarity and lack of bluster or ornament. I was going to write that it reminds me of instructions for assembling or operating some machine. But actual instructions are always awkward (since they are, you could say, translations from diagrams) and Wittgenstein's aphorisms and experiments are perfectly conversational and natural, like tools made to fit the hand (even though I'm not always sure what these tools are for).

"Philosophers often behave like little children who scribble some marks on a piece of paper at random and then ask the grown-up "What's that?" - It happened like this: the grown-up had drawn pictures for the child several times and said: "this is a man", "this is a house" , etc. And then the child makes some marks too and asks: what's this then?"

Like Kafka (like all real writers), Wittgenstein brings his full authorial voice to his diaries. He doesn't go into another, informal register when he writes these notes to himself but sets the entire writing machinery into gear to set down a remark of two or three lines.

The problems of life are insoluble on the surface and can only be solved in depth. They are insoluble in surface dimensions.

He writes about music, philosophy, himself (in the abstract). Quite a bit about Judaism, surprisingly. For example, "Rousseau's character has something Jewish about it." (Which seems right.) About Shakespeare, whom he was never able to like or feel he understood, despite much effort. Possibly for this reason, he has insightful things to say about him, observations that strike me as awkward and almost rude but which I can't disagree with.

"Beethoven's great heart" - nobody could speak of "Shakespeare's great heart". 'The supple hand that created new natural linguistic forms' would seem to me nearer the mark.

and

I am deeply suspicious of most of Shakespeare's admirers. The misfortune is, I believe, that he stands by himself, at least in the culture of the west, so that one can only place him by placing him wrongly.

Probably more than any other subject, Wittgenstein writes about Christianity.

I believe that one of the things Christianity says is that sound doctrines are all useless. That you have to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)

It says that wisdom is all cold; and that you can no more use it for setting your life to rights than you can forge iron when it is cold.

I'm not a Christian, but I think there's something to this metaphor, which seems to sweep aside all the ordinary well-intentioned good advice out there in a single motion. Of course, Wittgenstein didn't believe. He writes about faith as an outsider looking in. In his personal life, he seems to have been in the same position, writing about human relationships from the point of view of someone for whom these were extremely difficult. I think he was essentially solitary. "The linings of my heart keep sticking together and to open it I should each time have to tear them apart," he writes in one entry. The line could come right out of Kafka's diaries, and despite the two men having little in common, I found myself thinking of Kafka as I read these notes. There's the same intelligent self-hatred, the same moral seriousness, the same sense of having lived a long time, with some dignity, in deep distress. "I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment," Wittgenstein wrote in 1939.

Despite being a little dry, occasionally over my head (as in his subtle descriptions of Mendelsohnn's music), containing no gossip and never coming to any big conclusions, the book is surprisingly hard to put down. Each of the entries is so lucid, so commanding, that even though none of them is quite the quotable or transcendent one I wanted it to be, I kept on expecting that the next one would be and somehow was not disappointed when it wasn't. The effect of these vermischte Bemerkungen is a deep and somewhat shaming seriousness. As with Kafka, one gets the sense – foolish, maybe, but hard to dismiss – of a really different kind of human being, possibly some sort of pure soul, who can’t help standing apart from the world. In Wittgenstein’s case, there seems something painful about his own great intelligence. "Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness," he wrote in 1948. He exhorts himself several times to do this in the notebooks, but there is no silliness in them, not a word.