Resonances with Ludwig Wittgenstein

Here are some quotes from Wittgenstein, the Duty of Genius. They particularly resonate with me because from our views on life to our effect on others to the details of our emotional states, we're almost exactly the same. In fact,

Here's a brief outline of my similarities with Wittgenstein:

The intensity with which we try to live every single day. (perhaps a consequence of the extreme sense of urgency which seemed to grip us both regarding the brevity of life)
Our passionate dedication to continually transform ourselves into better people through the fire of trials.
Our dedication toward presenting ourselves exactly as we are.
Our tendency to find meaning for our lives in our daily struggles -- and perhaps consequently our dislike for the insulated life away from the daily fray and life on the road
Our deep need for both love and religion...and a seeming inability to participate in either of the above spheres (perhaps due to the very high level of emotion we demand from both)... therefore, our similar ideals about true love only being possible at a distance.
Our unwillingness to ever compromise in the pursuit of our ideals and spite for any form of sentimentalism.
Our tendency to find people who are exceptionally sensitive, kind, vulnerable, and soothing extremely attractive.
Our tendency toward self-absorption and extreme forms of anxiety...and a consequent need for huge amounts of emotional support.

I think our similarities are best summarized by the following quote, which could almost equally be said of me:

Wittgenstein's ideal of 'primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open' -- even though he rarely felt himself to live up to it -- is a key to understanding both the purpose of his work and the direction of his life. In so far as he felt himself to be too theoretical, 'too wise,' he felt deadened. The need for passion, for religion, was not just something he saw in the world around him; it was something he felt in himself. He felt himself to share exactly the faults characteristic of our age, and to need the same remedy: faith and love. And just as our age finds belief in God impossible, so too found that he could not pray: 'it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution, should I become soft.'
In love, too, though he felt a deep need for it, he often felt himself incapable, frightened. And, of course, frightened of its being taken away from him, all too conscious of its possible impermanence and of its uncertainty. In 1946 -- and it probably came as some relief to find that he was, after all, still capable of loving someone

The real turning point, however, came when Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in January 1912 with a manuscript he had written during the vacation. On reading it, Russell's attitude towards him changed immediately. It was, he told Ottoline, 'very good, much better than my English pupils do,' adding: 'I shall certainly encourage him. Perhaps he will do great things.' Wittgenstein later told David Pinsent that Russell's encouragement had proved his salvation, and had ended 9 years of loneliness and suffering, during which he had continually thought of suicide. It enabled him finally to give up engineering, and to brush aside 'a hint that he was de trop (an excess) in this world' -- a hint that had previously made him feel ashamed he had not killed himself. The implication is that, in encouraging him to pursue philosophy and in justifying his inclination to abandon engineering, Russell had, quite literally, saved Wittgenstein's life.

Wittgenstein's feeling that he might die before being able to publish his work intensified during his last week in Norway, and prompted him to write to Russell asking if Russell would be prepared to meet him 'as soon as possible and give me time enough to give you a survey of the whole field of what I have done up to now and if possible to let me make notes for you in your presence.' It is to this that we owe the existence of _Notes on Logic_, the earliest surviving exposition of Wittgenstein's thought.

In his anxiety, this feeling that he might die soon became an unchangeable conviction that he was bound to do so. Everything he said or did became based on this assumption. He was not afraid to die, he told Pinsent -- 'but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted':

It all hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon -- there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can't help -- for he is mad.

Another, related, anxiety was that his work on logic might perhaps, after all, be of no real use: 'and then his nervous temperament caused him a life of misery and others considerable inconvenience -- all for nothing.'

Pinsent seems to have done a marvelous job of keeping Wittgenstein's spirits up throughout these attacks of crippling anxiety -- encouraging him, reassuring him, playing dominoes with him, taking him out sailing and, above all, perhaps, playing music with him. During the holiday they put together a repertoire of some forty Schubert songs, Wittgenstein whistling the air and Pinsent playing the accompaniment.

It is perhaps not surprising to find that their perceptions of the holiday differed sharply. Wittgenstein said he had never enjoyed a holiday so much. Pinsent was less enthusiastic: 'I am enjoying myself pretty fairly... But living with Ludwig alone in his present neurotic state is trying at times.' On his return, on 2 October, he swore that he would never go away with Wittgenstein again.

Although a patriot, Wittgenstein's motives for enlisting in the army were more complicated than a desire to defend his country. His sister Hermine thought it had to do with: 'an intense desire to take something difficult upon himself and to do something other than purely intellectual work'. It was linked to the desire he had felt so intensely since January, to 'turn into a different person.'

We should not imagine Wittgenstein greeting the news of war against Russia with unfettered delight, or succumbing to the hysterical xenophobia that gripped the European nations at the time. None the less, that he in some sense welcomed the war seems indisputable, even though this was primarily for personal rather than nationalistic reasons. Like many of his generation, Wittgenstein felt that the experience of facing death would, in some way or other, improve him. He went to war, one could say, not for the sake of his country, but for the sake of himself.

The spiritual value of facing death heroically is touched upon by William James in _Varieties of Religious Experience_, a book which, as he told Russell in 1912, Wittgenstein thought might improve him in a way in which he very much wanted to improve. 'No matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be,' writes James, 'if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever.' In the diaries Wittgenstein kept during the war, there are signs that he wished for precisely this kind of consecration. 'Now I have the chance to be a decent human being,' he wrote on the occasion of his first glimpse of the enemy, 'for I'm standing eye to eye with death.'

Once at the front line he asked to be assigned to that most dangerous of places, the observation post. This guaranteed that he would be the target of enemy fire.

His family were dismayed by the changes they saw in him. They could not understand why he wanted to train to become a teacher in elementary schools. Hadn't Bertrand Russell himself acknowledged his philosophical genius, and stated that the next big step in philosophy would come from him? Why did he now want to waste that genius on the uneducated poor? It was, his sister Hermine remarked, like somebody wanting to use a precision instrument to open crates. To this, Wittgenstein replied:

You remind me of somebody who is looking out through a closed window and cannot explain to himself the strange movements of a passer-by. He cannot tell what sort of storm is raging out there and that this person might only be managing to stay on his feet.

Of course, it might be thought that the most natural step for the person in Wittgenstein's analogy to take would be to come out in out of the storm. But this Wittgenstein could not do. The hardship suffered during the war was not experienced by him as something from which he sought refuge, but as the very thing which gave his life meaning. To shelter from the storm in the comfort and security which his family's wealth and his own education could provide would be to sacrifice everything he had gained from struggling with adversity. It would be to give up climbing mountains in order to live on a plateau.

It was essential to Wittgenstein, not only that he should not use the privileges of his inherited wealth, but that he could not do so. On his arrival home from the war he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, owing to his father's financial astuteness in transferring the family's wealth, before the war, into American bonds. But within a month of returning, he had disposed of his entire estate. To the concern of his family, and the astonishment of the family accountant, he insisted that his entire inheritance should be made over to his sisters, already too wealthy to be included.) Other members of the family, among them his Uncle Paul Wittgenstein, could not understand how they could have accepted the money. Couldn't they at least have secretly put some of it aside in case he should later come to regret his decision? These people, writes Hermine, could not know that it was precisely this possibility that troubled him:

A hundred times he wanted to assure himself that there was no possibility that any money still belonging to him in any shape or form. To the despair of the notary carrying out the transfer, he returned to this point again and again.

Eventually the notary was persuaded to execute Wittgenstein's wishes to the letter. 'So,' he sighed, 'you want to commit financial suicide!'

His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer. When he started to formulate his view on some specific philosophical problem, we often felt the internal struggle that occurred in him at that very moment, a struggle by which he tried to penetrate from darkness to light under an intense and painful strain, which was even visible on his most expressive face. When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answer came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation. Not that he asserted his view dogmatically...but the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through a divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.

There is no doubt that, though he regarded ethics as a realm in which nothing was sayable, Wittgenstein did indeed think and say a great deal about moral problems. In fact, his life might be said to have been dominated by a moral struggle -- the struggle to be anstaendig (decent), which for him meant, above all, overcoming the temptations presented by his pride and vanity to be dishonest.

It is not true, as some of his friends have insisted, that Wittgenstein was so honest that he was incapable of telling a lie. Nor is it true that he had no trace of the vanity of which he was always accusing himself. Of course, to say this is not to claim that he was, by ordinary standards, either dishonest or vain. He most certainly was not. But there were, equally certainly, occasions on which his concern to impress people overcame his concern to speak the strict truth. In his diary, he says of himself:

What others think of me always occupies me to an extraordinary extent. I am often concerned to make a good impression, i.e. I very frequently think about the impression I make on others and it is pleasant if I think that is good and unpleasant if not.

And though, in stating this, he is only remarking on something that is platitudinously true of all of us, yet he is also drawing attention to what he felt to be the biggest barrier between himself and anstaendigkeit (decency) -- namely, his vanity.

Ramsey's wife, Lettice, soon became a close friend and confidante -- a woman who 'at last has succeeded in soothing the fierceness of the savage hunter' as Keynes put it. She had the kind of robust sense of humour and earthy honesty that could make him relax, and gain his trust. With her alone, he felt able to discuss his love for Marguerite.

What is is surprising here is, not that he could not speak lightly of marriage, but that he could not speak of it at all. He was at this time writing regularly and frequently, sometimes daily, to Marguerite, but it was not until about two years later that she realized he intended to make her his wife, and when she did, she beat a hasty retreat. Though flattered by his attention, and overawed by the strength of his personality, Marguerite did not see in Wittgenstein the qualities she wished for in a husband. He was too austere, too demanding. Besides, when he made clear his intentions, he also made clear that he had a Platonic, childless marriage in mind -- and that was not for her.

Francis Skinner had come up to Cambridge from St Paul's in 1930, and was recognized as one of the most promising mathematicians of his year. By his second year at Cambridge, however, his mathematical work had begun to take second place to his interest in Wittgenstein. He became utterly, uncritically, and almost obsessively devoted to Wittgenstein. What it was about him that attracted Wittgenstein, we can only guess. He is remembered by all who knew him as shy, unassuming, good-looking, and, above all, extraordinarily gentle. But attracted Wittgenstein certainly was. As with Pinsent and Marguerite, Skinner's mere presence seemed to provide Wittgenstein with the peace he needed to conduct his work.

Soon after he moved in with Mrs Mann he entered into a correspondence with Rowland Hutt which illustrates something of what Fania Pascal may have had in mind when she wrote, if you had committed a murder, or if you were about to change your faith, Wittgenstein would be the best man to consult, but that for more ordinary anxieties and fears he could be dangerous: 'his remedies would be all too drastic, surgical. He would treat you for original sin.'

The belief in God which he acknowledged to Morgan did not take the form of subscribing to the truth of any particular doctrine, but rather that of adopting a religious attitude to life. As he once put it to Drury: 'I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.'

Wittgenstein, however, continued in his belief that Moore was being forced by his wife to cut short his conversations with him. Two years later he told Malcolm that he considered it unseemly that Moore,'with his great love for truth,' should be forced to break off a discussion before it had reached its proper end. He should discuss as long as he liked, and if he became excited or tired and had a stroke and died -- well, that would be a decent way to die: 'with his boots on.'

Wittgenstein's ideal of 'primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open' -- even though he rarely felt himself to live up to it -- is a key to understanding both the purpose of his work and the direction of his life. In so far as he felt himself to be too theoretical, 'too wise,' he felt deadened. The need for passion, for religion, was not just something he saw in the world around him; it was something he felt in himself. He felt himself to share exactly the faults characteristic of our age, and to need the same remedy: faith and love. And just as our age finds belief in God impossible, so too found that he could not pray: 'it's as though my knees were stiff. I am afraid of dissolution, should I become soft.'

In love, too, though he felt a deep need for it, he often felt himself incapable, frightened. And, of course, frightened of its being taken away from him, all too conscious of its possible impermanence and of its uncertainty. In 1946 -- and it probably came as some relief to find that he was, after all, still capable of loving someone -- he fell in love with Ben Richard, an undergraduate student of medicine at Cambridge. Richard had what one by now perceives as the qualities which warmed Wittgenstein's heart: he was extraordinarily gentle, a limit timid, perhaps even docile, but extremely kind, considerate, and sensitive.

Wittgenstein's advice to his friends and students to leave academia was based on his conviction that its atmosphere was too rarefied to sustain proper life. There is no oxygen in Cambridge, he told Drury. It didn't matter for him -- he manufactured his own. But for people dependent on the air around them, it was important to get away, into a healthier environment.

Francis did not have a Weiningerian conception of love; he did not believe that love needed a separation, a certain distance, to preserve it. Wittgenstein, on the other, probably shared Weininger's view. While in Norway he recorded in his diary that he realized how unique Francis was -- that he really appreciated him -- only when he was away from him. And thus it was, perhaps, precisely to get away from him that he decided to go to Norway.

For both Rowland Hutt and Fania Pascal, listening to the confession was an uncomfortable experience. In Hutt's case, the discomfort was simply embarrassment at having to sit in a Lyons cafe while opposite him sat Wittgenstein reciting his sins in a loud and clear voice. Fania Pascal, on the other hand, was exasperated by the whole thing. Wittgenstein had phoned at an inconvenient moment to ask whether he could come and see her. When she asked if it was urgent she was told firmly that it was, and could not wait. 'If ever a thing could wait,' she thought, facing him across the table, 'it is a confession of this kind and made in this manner.' The stiff and remote way in which he delivered his confession made it impossible for her to react with sympathy. At one point she cried out: 'What is it? You want to be perfect?' 'Of course, I want to be perfect,' he thundered.

One can imagine how humiliating this must have been for Wittgenstein. And it might almost seem that the point of humbling himself in this way was precisely that: to punish himself. But this, I think, would be to misunderstand the purpose of his confessions and apologies. The point was not to hurt his pride, as a form of punishment; it was to dismantle it -- to remove a barrier, as it were, that stood in the way of honest and decent thought. If he felt he had wronged the children of Otterthal, then he ought to apologize to them. The thought might have occurred to anyone, but most people would entertain the idea and then dismiss it for various reasons: it happened a long time ago; the villagers would not understand such an apology, and would think it very strange; the journey to Otterthal is difficult in winter; it would be painful and humiliating to offer such an apology and, given the other reasons, not worth the trouble; and so on. But to find these reasons compelling, as, I think, most of us would, is in the end to submit to cowardice. And this, above all else, is what Wittgenstein was steadfastly determined not to do. He did not, that is, go to Otterthal to seek pain and humiliation, but rather with the determination to go through with his apology despite it.