“Radigal Humanism” in “Radical Humanism”
On Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Culture and Values
A proof that God exists should really be something by means of which one can convince oneself of God’s existence. But I imagine that the believers who provide such proofs wanted to analyze and substantiate their “beliefs” through reasoning, although they themselves would have never arrived at belief as a result of such proofs. Perhaps it would be possible to convince someone of “God’s existence” through a kind of upbringing, by forming that person’s life in a particular way. Life can educate a person to belief in God. And experiences likewise accomplish this. It is not visions or other sensory experiences that show us the “existence of this being,” but rather, for example, various kinds of suffering. And they do not show us God as a sensory impression shows us an object, nor do they permit us to surmise his existence. Experiences, thoughts, life can force this concept upon us. Then it resembles somewhat the concept “object”.
WHO WROTE THAT? Who can be speaking here of the doctrine of suffering that enables us to experience God? Who is desperately attempting to lend him concrete form through suffering? A modern theologian? Naturally. Well, that is what one would “naturally” expect, but unfortunately it is not so. This voice belongs to none other than Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was once the bible of the neopositivists, a man who wished to convince an entire generation that a language purified by logic is the mirror of the logical construction of the world; a man who knew enough about mathematics to recognize its metaphysical background; a perspicacious theoretician of knowledge who wished to “treat” philosophy the way one treats “an illness” and who exorcized from the debate (as if they were evil spirits) all those pronouncements that he viewed as “senseless”; a man who advanced the enormous claim that for every true question an answer could be found, and that there is no such thing as a riddle.
Certainly, no one familiar with this philosopher, who despised the philosophy of his day and preferred reading American detective novels to professional journals, this Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was an Austrian, Jew, and Catholic and who had already assumed a different position when his Tractatus gained world renown, will be astonished by such a theological excursus. In the Philosophical Investigations, his second, less-known major work, Wittgenstein retracted most of the theses of the Tractatus, liberated himself entirely from the empiristic element of positivism and, as it were, locked humankind in language, or what he called the “language games.”1 In his latter years, the thinker, architect, and amateur musician, who was born in Vienna in 1889, approached what already in the Tractatus he called in sibylline allusion the “mystical.” Russell’s pronouncement that “logic’s hell” (which should not be translated with such thoughtless literality as was unfortunately done in German with “Die Logik ist die Hölle”) became a reality in Wittgenstein’s person. His perspicacity reached its limits. Beyond them lay the realm of the mystical-religious, but also the realm of madness.
If in life we are surrounded by death, so too are we surrounded by madness although our reason still be sound. . . . Is it perhaps an unfulfilled longing that drives a person mad? . . . One does not have to regard madness as a sickness. Why not as a sudden—a more or less sudden—change of character? . . . I often fear madness. Do I have any reason to assume that this fear does not originate in an optical illusion, so to speak; do I take something to be a near abyss that is really not one at all? The only experience I know of that tells me for certain that it is no illusion is the case of Lenau. In his Faust there are thoughts of a kind that I am also familiar with. Lenau has Faust think them, but they are surely his own about himself. What Faust says about his loneliness or solitude is important.
This is what we find in the posthumous Culture and Values,2 a collection of notes or observations assembled by Wittgenstein’s disciple Georg Henrik von Wright with considerable effort but probably not intended for publication by the author. They extend from 1929 to 1951 and are indispensable parerga and parilipomena for experts on Wittgenstein’s work, but their readership should by no means be limited to the experts. The book contains notes on music, architecture, Judaism, ethics, and, of course, philosophy, and will also interest people who do not know Wittgenstein’s work or know it only from hearsay. It is a bit like with Schopenhauer: one need not necessarily have studied The World as Will and Representation in order to gain insight from The Wisdom of Life. 3 It is only natural, however, that someone who really knows Wittgenstein will derive more from these random notes, which the editor often deciphered only with difficulty, than the lay Wittgenstein reader or someone reading him for the first time—particularly things that supplement his inner and outer biography. For this reason I will very briefly sketch the biographical information needed for understanding Wittgenstein’s posthumous writings.
Who was he? He was the son of one of Austria’s richest steel industrialists. He was a Jew according to the racial notions of the Third Reich, a Catholic by religious upbringing and, later, by virtue of his spiritual development. He gave the gigantic fortune that he inherited to his sisters and saw to it that he died as poor as a beggar. The loneliness or solitude of which he wrote and in which he saw implicitly the work of madness, was not a fate imposed from without but—in the existential sense!—his own free choice. He did not pursue a profession in keeping with his family background and his connections; rather he lived a life of monastic asceticism. For a time he was a grade-school teacher in a small Lower Austrian community, a hermit in Scandinavia, even a gardener in a monastery. When Bertrand Russell discovered him through the Tractatus as a great logician and prepared the way for his activity as a university lecturer in England, he accepted reluctantly. Had not Hitler’s annexation of Austria in 1938, when he was already living in England, taken him by surprise, he probably would never have become a British citizen. For he did not love the country that helped him to world fame. To the end, he remained an Austrian, infected by the morbus austriacus. Should one note that three of his brothers committed suicide? One hesitates; for this observation would place the existential freedom of his decision to live in solitude in question, and explain his fear of madness as a genetically determined fate. But was his fear not already madness? And on the other hand, what is madness? One may certainly note that another of his brothers was the one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who could afford to commission a piano concerto for the left hand from Maurice Ravel. Ludwig Wittgenstein himself lived in more intimate association with music than philosophy, and in his notes we find an example of musical notation. Music, too, which he tried to capture in metaphorical speech, belonged to the realm of the “mystical,” of which one was not supposed to talk, but of which he spoke nonetheless. For as he writes in the Tractatus: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world.” And since music was his world, he extended the limits of his language beyond it—impermissibly, in fact. Here are a few examples that show his earnest striving and at the same time his helplessness, his vulnerability:
Understanding and explaining a musical phrase. The simplest explanation sometimes is a gesture; another might be a dance step, or words that describe a dance. But is not understanding the phrase an experience while we are hearing it? And of what use is the explanation? Are we to think of it as we are listening to the music? Are we supposed to picture the dance, or whatever, while listening? And if we were to do it, why should that be called listening to music with understanding?
Here it is still the logician Wittgenstein who is speaking, the logician who no longer trusts language, including language cleansed by logic, and who refers us to direct physical experiences. It is the same Wittgenstein who despaired of all possibility of explanation. Elsewhere he dispensed entirely with discursive-analytic speech and merely hinted metaphorically at what he had personally experienced:
What is missing in Mendelssohn’s music? A “courageous melody.”
One could call Wagner’s motifs musical prose sentences. And just as there is “rhymed prose,” one can join these motifs together in melodic form, but they won’t produce one melody.
Such pronouncements naturally say nothing about Wagner or Mendelssohn, or Brahms, whom he esteemed highly, or Beethoven, whom he revered. But they say a great deal about Wittgenstein. Above all, we must note his constantly recurring remarks on Mendelssohn. Because Mendelssohn was a Jew. Precisely on account of this, Wittgenstein credited him with as little genuine and independent creative power as he did himself, and for the very same reason.
That Wittgenstein grappled with the problem of Jewish identity so intensively and in so personal a way, or better really, let it engulf him, was new to me, and because of that all the more gripping. He was strongly influenced by the now-forgotten philosopher Otto Weininger, a self-hating Jew who, if not a genius, was certainly touched by genius. Weininger could not bear his origins and with supreme logic shot himself as a young man. Wittgenstein, raised as a Catholic, very Austrian in his view of himself, feeling more affinity to Lenau than to Sigmund Freud, to whose ideas he had, so to speak, a respectful aversion, did not go so far as the unhappy author of the once so sensational work Sex and Character. He did not kill himself like his brothers, though it is possible that the cancer of which he died merely intervened before he could take his own life. However that may be, it emerges clearly from his notes that he suffered from being Jewish. More than that: it becomes clear that one can properly understand him as a person only when one attempts to place him within the context of Austrian Jewry. How did he see the Jew and thus himself? Not exactly as a parasite, which the very primitive antisemitic propaganda of his time claimed the Jew to be, and also not as evil incarnate, as did the mentally disturbed Weininger. But he did see him as someone who is “different,” as a reproductive spirit at best. Genius was something that he denied Jews: the Jew Mendelssohn, the Jew Freud, himself. “The only Jewish ‘genius’ is a saint. The greatest Jewish thinker is only a talent. (I, for example.) I believe that there is truth to the idea that my thinking is really only reproductive.”
He saw himself wrongly; he was belittling himself. For, as Sartre put it much later, he had allowed the enemy to determine his self-image. Was not he the original thinker? Did he not inspire the “Aryan” Bertrand Russell, even though Russell regarded the work of his latter years with the same skepticism as the author of this essay? Was it not he, with his Tractatus, who had stimulated the thinking of the official head of the Vienna Circle, the “Aryan” Moritz Schlick, who remained more loyal to him than he did to himself? And was it not Schlick from whom all those impulses came that for decades dominated Anglo-Saxon and, above all, American philosophy, with a virtual claim to exclusivity? At this point I will dare to speculate rather boldly and ask myself: Would not Wittgenstein perhaps have stood by the basic thoughts of the Tractatus to the end if he had not felt stigmatized by the blemish of being a Jew, which robbed him of his ultimate, that is, his biological self-confidence?
In a real sense, the Jew can trust in nothing. But this is most difficult for him because he has nothing, as it were. It is much harder willingly to be poor when one must be poor than when one could be rich. The reason that the history of the Jews is not treated as extensively within the history of the peoples of Europe as the Jews’ intrusion into European affairs would merit, is that they are felt to be a sickness and anomaly within this history and no one likes to speak of a sickness as though it were equal in value to the body’s healthy (even painful) processes. . . . From the individual one can . . . expect tolerance, or that he disregard such things; but not from the nation, which owes its existence as a nation to the very fact that it does not disregard such things. That is to say: It is a contradiction to expect someone to retain his former esthetic feeling for his body and at the same time to welcome a boil on it.
What does this mean? It surely means that in his quality as a Jew Wittgenstein viewed himself as a boil on the body of the Austrian nation; furthermore, that for this reason he could muster no more than tolerance for himself and that he did not rest secure in a spiritual-esthetic consciousness of existence. Here we have a key to understanding the man and thinker Wittgenstein (and I cannot but wonder at the blissful unawareness of international criticism, which has not examined this phenomenon). It may be the key, and I could cite more to substantiate my thesis than is possible here. But we must go on to other, more objective factors, although I insist that Wittgenstein, above all, is one of those spirits who cannot properly be dealt with unless one examines their biography. The most significant quality in which Wittgenstein “differs” is probably his attitude toward science, as we see it in his posthumous notes. To start with, I call to mind one of the basic theses of the Tractatus. It begins with a sentence that has been quoted to a surfeit: “The world is everything that is the case.” Already with this pronouncement, which is mathematically numbered and further developed in the work with the greatest logical stringency, Wittgenstein rejects every kind of metaphysical speculation, banishes all ontology as nonsense. Whatever “is the case” can be expressed and examined in the manner of the exact sciences. The rest is what he cryptically calls the “mystical,” about which one cannot speak.
Striking is his faith in the seemingly unlimited possibilities of the natural sciences, in which Wittgenstein’s pupils, the neopositivists, and among them especially Schlick (who was also a physicist) and Otto von Neurath, had believed as though it were the ultima ratio. Their and Rudolf Carnap’s stimulation gave rise to the world view of “physicalism,” with its principle that all meaningful statements on reality had to be reducible to statements on physical reality expressed in mathematical language. For logical reasons, as he said (or because of ontological errancy, as I suspect), already in the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein had greatly distanced himself not only from true physicalistic neopositivism but also from the thinking, based on the writings of Popper, that later became critical rationalism.
Wittgenstein’s notes pertinent to this discussion make all the more clear to what degree he exchanged the logically founded scientific world view he had previously advocated for what he once called the “mystical,” i.e., something not to be spoken about. Now he talks, or stutters, questioningly about the inexpressible. His rejection of science is amazing; it assumes such proportions as we know only from the case of Heidegger, who uttered the monstrous words: “Science does not think”—as though Einstein, Planck, Heisenberg, and, more recently, Jacques Monod or Ilya Prigogine had arrived at their scientific insights somewhere beyond thinking!
It is . . . not absurd to believe that the scientific and technical age is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion, just as it is a delusion that man will ultimately know truth; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, by striving for it, is running into a trap.
Now then, this is no less, but also no more, than that long since familiar pessimism about the future of civilization that has lately returned to fashion. Here, however, unlike the contemporary version, its arguments are not even sociocritical or political. Wittgenstein was personally too introverted to be able to examine critically the fate imposed on all of us by society. It is most conspicuous in this regard that he does not mention the name Karl Marx a single time—he, the Austrian, who solely by virtue of the Austrian intellectual climate between the two World Wars certainly should have been familiar with “Austro-Marxism,” which accomplished so tremendously much for the social restructuring and, not least, social planning of his native city, Vienna. But Marx happened to be concerned with history and society, and so he was apparently of no concern to Wittgenstein, i.e., to the individual with his private property (as Stirner would have it). On the other hand, the name Freud turns up repeatedly: “The prose style of (the logician and mathematician) Frege is sometimes great; Freud writes excellently and it is a pleasure to read him, but he is never great in his writing.”
Well, that is, of course, nonsense. Every literary historian and critic of style agrees that, quite apart from the content of his writing, Freud was, after Schopenhauer, the greatest philosophical writer in the German language. But for Wittgenstein he could not be great, since greatness is a dimension that no Jew is permitted to achieve.
A good deal has been said about the phenomenon of Jewish “self-hate.” The concept applies perfectly to Karl Kraus, whom Wittgenstein repeatedly mentions with respect in his posthumous notes. It can be applied to Wittgenstein himself only with reservations. Being Jewish distressed him; not least for this reason he constantly doubted himself and his significance. But it would be false to say that he hated himself for that reason, as did a Weininger, or a Kraus, who projected his self-hate outwardly on a grand scale and directed it against the Jewish liberal newspaper Neue Freie Presse. Wittgenstein was no hater at all, not a “good” one in the Nietzschean sense; even less was he a bad, perfidious one. He was an unhappy man. And he was unhappy because, above all, he not only did not believe in science, but he also did not believe in philosophy, which he practiced and taught.
“For the philosopher there grows more grass in the valleys of slow wit than on the bare heights of cleverness.” What a terribly strange and yet most revealing sentence! How is one to interpret it? It seems to me that Wittgenstein scorned “cleverness” (i.e., analytic, discursive thinking) in his late years because he had tried, if you will, all the possibilities of ratio, or he had strayed from it, as can be argued just as well. What he was searching for, after he had explored the “bare heights of cleverness,” was something on the order of the “good and sound” life that does not brood about itself. He believed it could be found in the valleys of a “slow wit” that he should rather have designated as “simplemindedness.” But he should have known better after he had already searched in vain for the healthy simplicity of the heart in his young days as a village schoolteacher. His posthumous writing teaches us that this philosopher of the most extremely consistent logical exactitude was the precise opposite of what his friend Bertrand Russell, who was certainly ironic but still dwelt deeply within himself, embodied in his own person. Even in his radicalism Bertrand Russell was at bottom a man of moderation, of restraint, and above all: he was rooted externally and internally. Wittgenstein was a restless wanderer—of the spirit and in the world. Perhaps no other pronouncement expresses his state of being better than the following, which in regard to its content and diction could be by Franz Kafka: “It seems as if I had gotten lost and asked someone the way home. He says that he will guide me and walks with me along a lovely, smooth path. Suddenly it comes to an end. And now my friend says: ‘All you have to do now is to find your way home from here.’ ”
I already know, no one has to tell me: This can be interpreted in strictly philosophical terms. Thus, the path would be the thought process, which proceeds in a series of purely logical operations, and the sudden isolation, symbolized by the statement of the friend, would be the point at which logical-tautological speech closes the circle within itself and we are given the task of going home as an approximation to the ultimate, the transcendental things, which lie beyond language and the possibility of precise thought. There may be something to this; but as far as I am concerned, I rather tend to see an autobiographical-existential parable in this note from the year 1945. The empirical Ludwig Wittgenstein no longer has a “home”—in contrast to Lord Russell, who was not faced with the problem of home because he possessed one, no matter if he loved it or not. Wittgenstein’s homeland, Austria, no longer existed. Had it ever existed? (Try asking Robert Musil: For him his “Kakanien” was only an ironic figure of thought; he, too, did not know where he belonged.) But beyond the empirical Wittgenstein, who was homeless, there was the “transcendental” Wittgenstein, as it were, who for his part, of course, gave expression to his metaphysical troubles (which cannot be comprehended in strictly philosophical terms). To describe this Wittgenstein one must take recourse, as he himself did, to metaphorical speech. I mean the spiritual wanderer Wittgenstein, who, like the surveyor in Kafka’s Castle, never reaches his goal, perhaps because it actually does not even exist. Both of them, the empirical and the transcendental Wittgenstein, remained on a path—is it perhaps Heidegger’s “wrong track”?—that runs into a dead end; and from such a non-path there is no way to get “home.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein did not return from his journey: neither to the newly arisen Austria that today looks so pretty and flirtatious but in its depths and abysses is the way Thomas Bernhard described it in his novel Die Korrektur (in which he etched the features of the man Wittgenstein into the figure of the mathematician Roithammer); nor did he find a path back to the logic that mirrors the structure of the world and that the Tractatus proposed as the outermost reference point of all thought and investigation. Basically, he had never truly and wholeheartedly believed in this logic and its sovereignty as did his friend Lord Bertrand Russell—with whose thinking he no longer agreed. If he had, he would never have recorded words like the following—already in 1933!—with which our deliberations will conclude, leaving a great many question marks behind the final sentences:
If someone believes he has found the solution to the problem of life and wished to tell himself that now all is simple, he can convince himself that it isn’t so merely by recalling that there was a time when this solution hadn’t been found; but also at that time, too, he had to be able to live, and looking back on it the discovered solution appears to be accidental. . . . If there were a “solution” to the problems of logic (philosophy), we would have to remind ourselves that at an earlier time they weren’t solved (and at that time, too, one had to be able to live and think).
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“An den Grenzen des Scharfsinns: Zu den Vermischten Bemerkungen Ludwig Wittgensteins,” Neue Rundschau XC, i (1979): 86-95.
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