by Bruce Duffy
By the time Wittgenstein decided to leave aeronautics for philosophy ten years later, his relationship with his father was even more tense and tangled. During that period, Karl Wittgenstein had changed as a father, loosening the reins while growing ever more cautious and shrewd. Now an indefatigable man of sixty-five, he had no need of edicts or ultimatums. Diplomacy has other, more subtle means, and so it continued, with the father and son conducting their affairs like two rival heads of state, albeit a big state over a little one.
What had never changed in those ten years were his father’s expectations, which were heavier for being unspoken. Contrary to Karl Wittgenstein’s accusations, his son had not failed to consider his father’s feelings in his latest decision, nor was this course as illogical and precipitous as the old man wanted to believe. Wittgenstein had already given three years of study to Bertrand Russell’s Principles of Mathematics. More recently, he had been poring over the first volume of the book’s successor, Principia Mathematica, a mountainous three-volume work on the logical foundations of mathematics that Russell and Alfred North Whitehead were completing after nearly a decade of labor. Besides studying Russell, Wittgenstein had been reading Russell’s most immediate predecessor, the virtual inventor of modern symbolic logic, Gottlob Frege. Earlier that summer, in fact, Wittgenstein had traveled to Jena, a medieval university town in central Germany where Frege was a professor, to consult the old logician about his future.
Before their meeting, Wittgenstein sent Frege a courtly letter praising his work and declaring his interest in logic. Frege, in turn, sent Wittgenstein a brief reply, thanking him for his letter and saying that he would be pleased to meet him if he cared to come to Jena. Literalist that he was, Wittgenstein took Herr Professor Frege at his word: a month or so later, Frege’s housekeeper answered the door only to find a young man dressed in a dark and expensively tailored suit and carrying under his arm a box of cigars. The housekeeper looked askance when he asked for the professor and curtly presented his card: he looked young for a card, especially for so expensive a card, slender and embossed and edged with gold.
As someone who had been raised with servants, the young man knew how to handle the housekeeper; it was clear from his subdued and correct manner that he was not to be trifled with. At the same time, the housekeeper had her station. She did not keep house for just anybody, she kept the house for a famous university professor who received many important visitors, and she was apt to take her sweet time, or even to tell the person to call later if she didn’t like his manner or looks. But few visitors were so refined, or so finely dressed, as this young man. And fewer still came with their own cards, much less bearing expensive cigars. She fetched Herr Professor Frege.
Coming around the staircase several minutes later, still putting on his rumpled little suit jacket with his stubby hands, Frege was a trifle dismayed to see the owner of the card standing so darkly and fiercely correct, with his springy hair standing on end like a waxwing’s crest. Frege knew at a glance what the housekeeper knew: the young man sprang from wealth and social position.
As for Wittgenstein, he could hardly hide his dismay when he realized the author of the great Begriffsschrift was this pudgy, elfin old man with a grizzled beard and white hair. At least, thought Wittgenstein, Frege might have kept his suit coat brushed and his cravat in better repair. In this respect Wittgenstein was still his father’s son, still the haute Viennese. Such things still mattered to him then.
Wittgenstein made a slight bow and presented Frege with the cigars. These were princely cigars, choice Havanas wrapped in tissue paper and rollers of shaved cedar. Frege was delighted, though he protested that such a lavish gift was entirely unnecessary — and yet the warm tropical fumes as he opened the well-fitted humidor on its brass hinges. Glorious! he groaned, sticking his blunt nose into the box. If Frege did not expect cigars, neither did Wittgenstein expect the great logician to luxuriantly sniff the length of one as if it were a rind of ripe cheese.
Sensing the young man’s hauteur — and nervousness — Frege then took him down a peg, saying, Well, you’re certainly punctual, Herr Wittgenstein — though I can’t say by whose clock. But, please, sir, come into my study.
The interview began stiffly, but Wittgenstein soon showed the logician his mettle. Within minutes, Wittgenstein was pacing the floor, declaiming.
Unwrapping one of the Havanas, Frege licked it with a practiced twirl, then set it to match, saying with a smile, You didn’t say I was going to have to work for this nosegay, Herr Wittgenstein.
The young man’s ideas were half-baked, and Frege duly gave him a theoretical bruising. But what Wittgenstein said wasn’t so important; it was how he fought Frege’s mind, how he fought for the primacy of his own understanding — this was what seized Frege’s attention. Manners fell by the wayside; there wasn’t time. The young Viennese was stubborn and argumentative. Worse, he had a bad habit of interrupting. No! protested Wittgenstein, and then he stopped himself. It cannot be … I just — I don’t know! he snapped, and then he turned away, the blood blurting up into his face, blinded by the shame of not seeing, at once forty steps ahead and forty behind. But even more, Frege saw how the young man would not let go, saw his tremendous, irascible impatience to get at it — at what he could not quite see but vividly intuited.
The pungent cigar was faintly narcotic. Sitting slumped in his heavy, overstuffed chair, the cigar raised like an exclamation point, Frege inwardly flagged then. Now a man over sixty, he felt a vague melancholy sifting over him, saddened, in the face of this rampant youth, to realize his own diminished energies. He simply didn’t have the strength, not for this one. This one, he saw, needed a younger man to take him in tow. Frege puffed out his cheeks with smoke, then exhaled, saying in a low, rasping voice, Rus-sell.
Wittgenstein looked up quizzically. Watery eyed with the smoke, Frege said, Work with Russell at Cambridge. He’s the one doing the new work now. Write to him. You may use my name.
Frege roused himself from the chair and cleared his throat. Wittgenstein was still staring when the old logician looked back in good-natured dismay and said, On second thought, I will send Russell a note myself. Not to recommend you, you understand, but to warn him. That’s all. Just a friendly note of warning.
Wittgenstein took Frege’s advice: he wrote to Russell. Russell replied favorably, and by early September Wittgenstein was officially enrolled at Cambridge. Karl Wittgenstein, meanwhile, was fulminating over his son’s latest letter formally notifying him of his intentions. Wittgenstein was in England finishing up his aeronautical work when he received his father’s reply — a warning shot across the bow:
5. September 1912
My Son,
Your latest letter, like our last interview, was unsatisfactory. As usual, there was your own natural — I want to say willful — difficulty and reticence and my own inclination to want to seize a certain pass and plow through various recurrent objections, which, as I see it, are just that — stubborn objections. To philosophy you bring a certain irritating skepticism and the uncanny ability to make others feel self-conscious. But can these truly be called gifts?
You would say, “I cannot have my gifts guaranteed in advance.” Quite true. No man could do anything if he first had to vouch for his priority. God, I told the Royal Guild, grants no charters; one takes that out for oneself. But to fish one requires at least a stout boat; it is not enough to express mere inclination to fish or eat fish. If this were the case, every young man of quality in Vienna who did not have to shift for a living would be an artist; the rest would be rich idlers. The world has already too many artists with their kits and claims, their astounding pretensions. I do not mistake the rightful place of philosophy. Philosophy is an art but has an even more tenuous claim to truth than does Art itself, which at least claims to be nothing more than it is. No philosophical system has ever proven anything. All a philosophy shows are the presumptions and proclivities of the philosopher, who simply cuts the coat t
o fit the cloth. Do not speak to me of Absolute Truth. At best the effect is only beautiful or evanescently satisfying in the way of myth. Goethe is more believable and a thousand times more honorable than any philosopher. Forget your beloved Schopenhauer, that latter-day Ecclesiastes. Schopenhauer can open his wrists and call it literature because he did not have to toil for a living or offer the world anything but vain groanings. We need men who bring STEAM to the world; we need, if anything, another Goethe, and you — need I say it? — are no Goethe.
Would it surprise you if I said I, too, had wanted at one time to be a philosopher? True to say, in my published writings I have touched, shall we say, on a civil philosophy of an obdurate variety that puts steel in the foundation and ensures a certain code of civil workmanship, with the finest of materials and work that goes according to some foreseeable SCHEDULE. But I realized much earlier than you — now, I might add, in your twenty-third year — that it was not in my veins to be a philosopher, not at least as Kant is a philosopher, or Goethe a poet-philosopher. What of your case? You are abundantly talented. But to think of you as a philosopher … I am skeptical because I know what thinking went into the formation of your character. You did not just fall into the world; it was with long and exacting deliberation that I planned the education of you and your siblings, and why, indeed, I concluded that my children could be educated only under my roof with hand-picked tutors.
It DISTRESSES me, dear son, to see you, a man of enviable intellect and talent, flounder in this way. I wish I could be more sanguine in this, yet you see, I did not found a family not to know that family, and if I should raise an eyebrow at your latest fancy, please understand that it is in the interests of a resolute efficiency. I, too, have traveled this path, and I do not believe the way of the Wittgensteins goes there.
I trust you will give my words some CONSIDERATION.
Your concerned Father
This little pensée, as his father was wont to call these thunderbolts, fell on Wittgenstein’s chest with the weight of ten atmospheres. With anybody else, Wittgenstein’s rebuttal would have been quick and sure, but this was not to be thrown off so quickly. He suffered three days and five drafts before he replied.
13.9.12.
Dear Father,
First, you vastly exaggerate my love of Schopenhauer and degrade my love of Goethe. You make other erroneous assumptions. Halley’s Comet appeared two years ago. It is probable that it will return in 74 years, but it is not a matter of logic to assume so; it is only an expression of statistical belief.
I make this point in reference to your comments on Goethe. Do not wait for him, nor Schiller nor Beethoven. If Goethe were to return with the comet, we would not recognize him because we expect him in the guise of the last coming. In fact, as with all artists or thinkers, he comes — if he comes at all — as a wolf in wolf’s clothing, obstinate and himself, different than expected, wrong. Please do not put words in my mouth. I do not look, as you suggest, for Absolute Truth. No truth is absolute, not even a star in the sky like our Goethe.
I see I already regret this letter. Please, can we avoid turning this into one of those feuds one finds waged across editorial pages? If I must, if only for now, follow this path, you might at least humor me so the journey might be easier. Do you believe one’s life is entirely a matter of conscious choice? Is the mule merely stubborn? — or does he instead find his hooves stuck in the mud of unyielding necessity?
Your respectful son
After this letter, Wittgenstein returned to his kites, but the sick feeling persisted and with it a certain floating anxiety. And so he buried himself in his work, looking out into the phenomenological world to keep the worsening weather of his boiling inner world contrite and contained.
These were big, aerodynamically curved kites he was flying, wide wings in need of galloping winds. For such winds, the University of Manchester had established the Upper Atmosphere Kite-Flying Station near Absdell, a cottage standing on a point where the headlands shear off into the Irish Sea.
For two days Wittgenstein had been there. For two days this feeling had been building. The kite, a ten-foot-tall red dihedral of laminated spruce and doped silk, had taken him four weeks to build, and in the twenty-knot wind it took right up, the stretched silk rattling like a jib sheet as it tore line from a winch wound with four thousand feet of 150-pound piano wire.
The sky was wreathed with cirrus. The wind was blowing out to sea. Behind him the brass cups of an anemometer whirled. He had a barometer and stopwatch, inclinometer and notebook, science and its methods — all forgotten now as he watched the kite sweep away.
Air desires. Water encircles and engulfs. The scourging waves recurred and pulled, seamlessly merging like stairs, without human meaning, without ever ending. As he looked down from that bluff, the waves seemed as meaningless and futile as the generations, no sooner surging than they were wiped clean of what they had just brought, falling back into an oceanic blackness, with a slow explosion of all that had passed before. Ocean or air — it was either the engulfment of will or the steady pull of desire that destroyed him. As a boy, and even now, he had suffered periodic bouts of agoraphobia, a fear not of height but of space. This fear came in different guises. At times he felt he would actually dissolve, perishing like an open flask of ether into the world’s greater volume. Then at other times he saw it was not space he feared but the queasy feeling of not knowing what he would do, imagining that, like an unstable substance, he would somehow explode if ever fully exposed to the concupiscent air.
In the rising wind, spears of sharp sea grass were whirring like scissors. Clouds covered the sea and waves battered the rocks, spurting up in steamy plumes as the last birds beat back to shore. Across the sky, like a cornea filling with blood, came a fearful darkening. The piano wire was humming, and ever so faintly he was trembling, thinking what a thing it was to dread one’s own self — to see the self as enemy or other, not as companion, guide, sanctuary.
Why is the will so powerless to stop the thing that life has set in motion? he wondered. Did he suppose that if he were to find value, some gloss of value might rub off on him? In all the sea there is a single pearl. In all the world there is a single, mirroring form that binds and reflects all other things. Desire was his crime, he saw. His father was right: surely, it was vain and sinful to want this thing. Surely, for this presumption punishment awaited. The ocean need not be deep for one to drown, nor need the grapes be high to be just past reach and hence all the sweeter. The dream is incomparably stronger than the dreamer.
His stomach sank with the barometer. Sore from thinking, sore from wanting — to him it seemed that even sex was easier. In his head a hum, a rhythm was hovering. On his lips, a question was forming …
Where in the world is value to be found?
It was the question of his life. Using logic as his calculus, he thought he would work progressively out from what could be said intelligibly until he reached the limits of what could not be said. And once having drawn this arc or limit, he would be able to better behold the logical form, or structure, of the world, isolating it in much the way a sculptor chisels down a block of alabaster, seeking to reveal the form glowing within.
A vain presumption, he thought. He was no better than Archimedes boasting that he could lift the earth if only he had a lever long enough and a planet to serve as a fulcrum. But these self-reproaches did not make the dream desist, they only made it all the more powerful. He could see himself in his vision, which had dimension and depth like a body of water. His vision was so strong that he felt he could stand right out of it. Ascending a ladder of propositions, he would plant his shoes on the last possible rung. And looking down, he would peer, as if through sheer form, into another world darkly mirrored under the aspect of eternity.
Yet how was this undertaking to be practically achieved? Was it to be had in the human heart for desiring — in the will for willing? He saw all too well that will has no power over the world, or its own reck
less willing. The dissembling will only blames the hand, which blames the mind, which in turn blames the loins — dumb but no less turgid. And so the thirsting will turns on itself, curtailing itself from the misery of willing by deputizing the hand with its magnetic attraction to poison and sharp objects, to push and precipice and philandering air …
He closed his eyes, wishing his expanding will to be smaller, milder, more reasonable. But the will was not compliant; it would not be ordered about like some cringing subordinate. SAY, ventured the riddling will or mind. SAY, said the soul, which is as various and contrary as it is many. SAY this kite is your will, with this much line and this much scope under the general sky. And just as in an aeroplane there is thrust and drag, so the thrust of will must be factored over fear, chiefly the fear of rampant willing, that hell-bent runaway. And then, as Wittgenstein realized this, he pictured in his mind the following equation:
With: W being Will
F being Fear
S being Scope
It was the same old story. Here and no farther, God commanded the waves. Stand without and come no closer, said He to the barrier clouds, those lifebreakers that separate the earth from what lies beyond.
Wittgenstein could smell the squall, could taste it on his tongue, bitter as blood and rusted iron. Higher and higher rose the silver waves, heaving down and exploding up the beach as the clouds bumped with a fulminating green light. Facing the sky, Wittgenstein thought of the myth he had made up as a boy to explain his life. It was the story of how souls connect with bodies to become people. Before birth, the newly washed soul, then a snowy, sexless nothing, waits for a body. The soul has but one chance. If the soul moves one way, it becomes a male, if another, a female. But if the soul moves wrong or clumsily, the person takes on the impulses of both, so that he is never free or far from torment.
