Finding a Form (21 page)

Initially an eccentric, “unknown German,” Wittgenstein eventually made known to Russell, and then to Moore and Keynes, to Lytton Strachey and other members of the rather notorious Cambridge society called “The Apostles” who endeavored with mitigated success to recruit him, a presence that was a furious jostle of warring qualities—of emotional highs and succeeding lows, of course, ranging from intense excitement to despondency, yet an active, elbowing crowd of all kinds of other contraries as well. He was shy but quick to correct his superiors. He had a poor opinion of himself, but he repeatedly required special treatment, and he
regularly expected, for himself, an ungrudging suspension of the rules, since as low as he often felt he’d sunk, most of mankind still lay beneath him. If others understood their true condition, they would feel terrible, too. His misery, however, wanted no competition.

Wittgenstein’s manners were formally aristocratic and coolly correct, except when he was excoriating someone’s errors, because his pursuit of truth was often an excuse to be rude. He would feel bad about his behavior and apologize, but not without reminding his victim of the nearly sufficient reason that had provoked him. He believed that menial tasks were humbling and generally good for you, except when menials did them, and then they became demeaning. His taste was for an elegantly simple life, with the simplest part of it, of course, an absence of the demands others might make of him. He approached people as warily as an animal from the wild, one whose recurrent and natural impulse is to run away. Although he seemed unusually self-absorbed, driven in upon himself as one in pain, he sought in his studies the solution to problems of apparently the most impersonal and objective sort. He prized solitude, especially for his work, and was instantly furious when any course of thought was interrupted, yet he dropped round to Russell’s rooms nearly every midnight to bounce ideas off those patient walls, or to recount his weaknesses and consider suicide. As Russell writes in 1912:

Stubborn, arrogant, critical, demanding, prickly, solipsistic: was it only his intellect that saved him from being principally a pain in the ass? Russell initially found him “obstinate and perverse.” Very soon, however, he was referring to Wittgenstein, with affection though understandable condescension, as “my German.” “My German friend threatens to be an affliction.” Was he only a crank or really a genius? “My German, who seems to be rather good, was very argumentative.” “My German engineer, I think, is a fool.”

Consulting my own brief memory of the man, I am inclined to think it was not Wittgenstein’s brilliance by itself that impressed Moore, Russell, Keynes, and the others, but the fact that he did indeed burn with a bright, gemlike flame; that his commitment was not merely quirky but intensely real; that he brought to his investigations the desperate energy and concentration of one whose mind has drawn a noose around its body; because if his reasoning failed to reach the necessary degree of clarity and insight, if it showed itself to be more than momentarily incompetent, then Wittgenstein might not decide upon another day of life, but choose suicide instead—hanging his head in order to throttle some sinfully inadequate thought.

The Wittgenstein of the
Tractatus
might be characterized philosophically as a romantic rationalist. He is a “rationalist” because he believed in grounds and foundations; because he thought that these were to be found in the fundamental principles of logic; because these principles, in themselves, were easy enough to understand and could probably be grasped in a single mental intuition, so that what difficulties there were would have to be ascribed to the shortcomings of the thinker, not to an inherent darkness or complexity in the proper objects of his thought; because one could make the move from logic to the world without damaging or mislaying all the latter’s furniture. He is a “romantic” because he believed
that thinking clearly, correctly, sincerely, completely, was the central human obligation and a moral struggle; that one made oneself, consequently, into a soul that could see, and then saw—then plumbed and discovered—just as Rilke, for example, felt he had to become a poet first in order to write his poems, rather than become talented, wise, or strong, by trial and error, effort and exercise.

In the realm of morals and manners, Wittgenstein disdained principles and programs, justifications and excuses. Talk was a screen for who knew what weakness. He made most of his decisions in secret, because (although he would pace up and down through his miseries with Russell) most talk disguised motives and entangled the mind; it led others to think that they had a say and some authority over your soul; it encouraged “saws”; it proceeded from partial truths to arrive at falsehoods like a late train. One’s acts ought to spring spontaneously from the sort of person one was: calculation suggested subterfuge; obedience suggested servility. Hence his frequently brutal frankness, his lack of social concealment, his mysterious reversals of course and changes of heart.

Character was something that simply showed itself in the way one thought, in the way one lived. Style and idea were inseparable, so he rarely troubled to hide the fact that what was most important to him was the course and quality of his own mind. It was, after all, his art. His impatience with what he took to be lackadaisical reasoning, philosophical obfuscation, or any weakening of intellectual resolve was severe and immediate, and based upon the identification of knowledge with virtue, and of the right to exist with the claim of creative accomplishment. It was always all or nothing with him.

I do not believe that Bertrand Russell had wings, so he can’t have taken the young Austrian under one, but he did gradually grow fonder of this intense intelligence. Russell’s treatment of his friend does him great credit, I think. A hint of jealousy (or perhaps envy) shows up later, but this is only a speck on what is otherwise an unblemished record of magnanimous behavior on the part of
the older, more established, and more esteemed philosopher. Russell was a man, furthermore, of quite different cut and character from Wittgenstein’s: sensual, worldly, keenly observant, calculating but capable of real devotion, and able on occasion to achieve the impulsive life that Wittgenstein longed for and, paradoxically, planned, yet could never achieve because his personality was far from free and easy, because it was, instead, neurotically impacted and impaired.

Wittgenstein makes immense demands upon Russell’s time, his patience, his energy, his ego. In the name of philosophical truth, the student is mercilessly, sometimes scornfully, critical of his teacher’s labors. Russell takes the criticisms to heart, however, only to find the easy flow of his work slowed, its course altered, its publication consequently postponed. Although Russell sometimes allows himself an impatient rejoinder, his appreciation of Wittgenstein’s genius never weakens, and he welcomes his surly friend’s regained warmth and return to friendship whenever it occurs. Russell reports to Lady Ottoline Morrell:

Russell became aware of Wittgenstein’s mystical tendencies very early. Still, his ardent young pupil’s love of logic can hardly have prepared the positively inclined Russell for Ludwig’s later romance with informality, or his repeated religious temptations. He did not immediately realize that Wittgenstein, in removing reason from the realm of religion, was really protecting faith from certain destruction. An urgent need for salvation pursued Wittgenstein always, and it intensified immediately following the First World War
(during the time the
Tractatus
was being translated, titled, prefaced, and published by his English friends) when—among his choices for the future—suicide, teaching school, and a somewhat monastic withdrawal from society were the favored alternatives.

Wittgenstein distinguished himself as a soldier; and despite the hardships of many campaigns, the crassness of the common soldier, the repeated bollixes of a decrepit bureaucracy, the cultural limbo of military life—conditions that he patiently endured—the war perversely supplied him with something he desperately needed: an objective hell that could replace his private one, and an equally dangerous outside enemy. In the army there were not only orders of several sorts, aims of various kinds, discipline and routines; there were hands other than his own hand raised against him; there was death as it might come to a comrade as well as to himself, a death unwilled, even unexpected. Thus Wittgenstein performed under fire with that coolness that comes when a world gone mad asks for sanity from the asylumed, and through hardship and valor he recovered the ordinariness in himself, felt as his fellows felt, and had his small sins swallowed by more substantial woes.

Wittgenstein tells us that when he was about twenty-one, at a performance in Vienna of a mediocre play, the necessary word was nevertheless said (as if a random note had completed a chord in his heart), so that the possibility of a religious life, stripped of the theology that had previously rendered it unacceptable, became suddenly attractive and real. The revelation, if that is what it was, lay in the assertion by one of the characters that he was, in effect, “beyond the fell clutch of circumstances,” that nothing bad could happen to him. Wittgenstein gave this bit of bragging a semi-Stoical interpretation, and it reappears later as one of the consequences of the
Tractatus
. The world is an ensemble of facts. Nowhere among these facts are there any values to be found, nor are any values connected to them by whatever devious means a philosopher may imagine. To all the chief questions of culture “it” is totally deaf; it neither promotes nor prohibits; it neither disdains nor cares. It’s it, and that’s that.

No manner of prestidigitation can transform a value into a fact (although existentialists pretend this is possible), but I am certainly free to affirm the world, as Nietzsche exhorts us, or to deny it, as Schopenhauer inclines. However, if that liberty were as real as Stoics (for example) think, why would I be tempted to view existence despondently when joy, instead, were happily at hand? In a suicidal mood, Wittgenstein writes to his friend Englemann:

I think it is reasonable to suppose that anyone concerned to give an account of Wittgenstein’s life would be determinedly interested in what—precisely—that fact was: its nature, its etiology, its consequences. For decades following Wittgenstein’s death his followers (and he was a philosopher with followers in more than the usual sense) kept silent about what I presume they knew: the master’s homosexuality. Would it have embarrassed them, even with the precedent of Socrates to stand on? They were certainly embarrassed by the mysticism in Wittgenstein, as well as by his intense moral concerns. My teachers made him out to be the same sort of hard-boiled positivist they were. He was the spiritual center of the Vienna Circle. His name could be joined with Russell’s, of course, and with Frege’s too, but with few others, certainly not with Schopenhauer’s or Spinoza’s.

While the frequency of homosexuality among philosophers is probably no more than average, it should be borne in mind that philosophy is a bachelor’s occupation. Most philosophers are unmarried males whose consequently less care-laden lives encourage longevity.

The first volume of Brian McGuinness’s projected two-volume biography,
Wittgenstein: A Life
, continues the pretense. Reluctant as McGuinness’s pages are even to turn, they nevertheless present
us with the picture of a pathologically driven personality whose prickly petulance and swings of mood we are forced unpleasantly to place alongside his philosophical achievements; whose passionate presence we can only intermittently glimpse in the letters of others, or in some lines of his own, but rarely in the biographer’s pale, pussyfooting prose, through which little that is powerful pushes, not even the harmless letter
p
like a daffodil or a daisy—a letter that might stand for the point of it all.

All that McGuinness says about Wittgenstein’s homosexuality is contained in two footnotes, which, if they could have been pushed a bit farther away, would have found themselves entirely off the page. The first, which refers to the philosopher’s sexual preferences for the first time, we must wait until page 196 to receive. Then we are slipped the information in an astonishing “by the way.” “This is perhaps the place …” McGuinness blandly begins. The question that elicits this “revelation” is whether Russell disapproved of Wittgenstein’s homosexuality, whether it played any part in the cooling of their relationship. Probably not, is McGuinness’s reasonable conclusion. There were so many others besides Keynes and Strachey, in all walks, in every way, since homosexuality in Britain is as common as schoolboy caning. Then why, we have to wonder, were Russell’s letters to Lady Ottoline Morrell on that subject not quoted when so many others were? Why wasn’t the issue raised when it was central to the story being told, rather than long after the uneasy fact, as is done in Ray Monk’s far franker and more adequate account? Why did we have to learn at this time that “intrigue” is the biographer’s code word (borrowed from Keynes) for homosexual flirtation, since it might have helped us understand his earlier account of Wittgenstein’s election to the Apostles? And why did we have to pass through two-thirds of the book under the impression that our subject had a lively soul but no body?