Cocoa with Lady Ottoline was not enough
David Pears
WITTGENSTEIN: A LIFE, YOUNG LUDWIG (1889-1921) by Brian McGuinness
Duckworth, £15.95, pp. 336
There is a cool approach to philosophy, typically Anglo-Saxon, which keeps a dis- tance between the thought and the think- er's life. That was not Wittgenstein's way. The achievement of perfect understanding in philosophy, exactly expressed, was, for him, an ethical ideal and his investigations of the foundations of logic showed the same tormented sensibility as his examina- tions of the state of his own soul. His works run to many volumes, most of them post- humous, and the sources for his biography are copious. Brian McGuinness has ex- tracted from this material a wonderfully perceptive account of his youth and early maturity which deserves to become a clas- sic. (His second volume will carry it on to Wittgenstein's death in 1951.) Yet there are aspects of this part of his life and his work that remain mysterious.
Perhaps this is as it should be. Beyond the edge of what has been mapped there is always much left in obscurity both in the ideas of a genius like Wittgenstein and in his life, especially when it is a life sha- dowed by extreme mental instability. Three of his brothers committed suicide and he himself was often on the verge of it.
He went to Cambridge in 1912 to study the philosophy of mathematics with Bert- rand Russell. Ottoline Morrell suggested that drinking cocoa might be the solution to his psychological problems, but Russell saw that they went deeper. He saw too that Wittgenstein took the investigation of the foundations of logic and mathematics further than he himself had succeeded in taking it, but he was baffled by his method, or, as Wittgenstein would have put it, by the style of his thought. So little argument, he complained, and such intense concen- tration on isolated points, as if philo- sophers had to see through problems to what lay beyond them rather than put them in their place in an acceptable system and solve them!
McGuinness describes Wittgenstein's impact on Cambridge with ironical sym- pathy for both sides. Of course, he came from another world in which the life of the intellect was less sterilised. But there was something else which increased his isola- tion: he never took over an idea until he made it his own. He hated the academic cultivation of philosophy, its pretensions to system and its didacticism. If an idea struck him as having something in it, he would concentrate on it with ferocious intensity until he had forced from it what it really had to say to him. McGuinness observes that his attitude to music was the same: if a piece struck him, he would listen to it again and again until he had extracted the utmost from it. The same idea shaped his conception of philosophical writing as a work of art.
The inevitable contretemps at Cam- bridge hardly mattered: it was merely absurd that the Society, to which he had been elected after careful scrutiny of his suitability, had no way of coming to terms with his subsequent refusal to attend their meetings. What did matter was his inability to sustain the impossibly idealised friendships that his nature demanded, or on a lower level to conduct the ordinary relationships that are part of the life of anyone who is not a hermit.
At this point there may seem to be an unnecessary obscurity. McGuinness men- tions the erotic character of Wittgenstein's feelings in some of the friendships from which he hoped for so much. He also quotes from the diaries of David Pinsent, who was befriended by Wittgenstein in Cambridge and whose death in 1918 very nearly made him commit suicide. The diary entries show that he was often more than half perplexed. Why must Wittgenstein submit his friend's opinions and attitudes to the same fierce tests of authenticity as his own? And why does he seem so oppressed by the idea that his own feelings are stronger? Perhaps there was no need to elaborate. Certainly, the effects of Witt- genstein's homosexual impulses are more important than the question of how exclu- sive they were or how far he indulged them.
Depressives often create in their writings a perfect world, more harmonious and, above all, safer. This may explain why Wittgenstein was always so fascinated by the solipsist's claim that only he and whatever he experienced existed. Or perhaps the source of his interest was his own determination to establish the authen- tic identity of any close friend in a way that was really bound to undermine it. What is certain is that he regarded the feeling of absolute safety in a world where nothing could touch one as the paradigm of reli- gious feeling.
It is here that it becomes hard to understand his inner life, not for lack of information this time, but because of a real difficulty of interpretation. He did not practise the Catholicism in which he had been brought up, but the 1914 war, in which he fought courageously, changed him in several ways. He had absorbed by repeated reading Tolstoy's The Gospels in Brief, he no longer contemplated suicide as a real possibility and he retreated from the kind of contact with other people for which he was so ill-suited, taking the post of gardener in a monastery.
So much is clear. But is McGuinness right in his claim that there was an inner change amounting to conversion? This is not the place to review the evidence. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein's view of the world and his place in it always was one that would have been, in another person, the natural ground for growth of religious belief. In that sense he was religious. However, this is another point at which it is necessary to observe the difference be- tween the rejection of one world and the acceptance of another. Is the mysticism of his first great book, the Tractatus, its centre, as McGuinness maintains not with- out some reason? Or does it merely mark the limit of what can be perfectly under- stood and expressed in language — as it were, the frame of the picture adding nothing to its content? We should never underestimate his irony, not, of course, about the importance of authenticity or duty but about treating them objectively and institutionalising them.
David Pears has been Professor of Philoso- phy at Oxford University since 1985 and is the author of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
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