The World as I Found It

by Bruce Duffy

  So we are necessarily delving beneath the surface of the ostensible meaning of a word, brushing off the dust and accretions of the years — the full burden of memory and association — to reveal its grammar. By grammar, incidentally, I mean the way a word is used in a particular context. And consider all the different ways we use words. Play acting. Telling a story. Guessing a riddle. Describing a pain. There are countless ways in which we use language. These activities — the speaking of a language — I call forms of life. But within those forms, there is almost limitless variety and shades of distinction.

  Ah! said Moore. Then you do, in your way, still find yourself looking for the essences that you say you rejected. Universals, of a kind.

  Wittgenstein wrinkled his nose, then replied, The essences within the ordinary, if you like. Or essences beneath the surfaces of our ordinary language. But again the point is that these essences are always shifting beneath our feet. And you see, even as philosophers, I believe, we are mostly unconscious of these nuances. Using language is like riding a bicycle: we don’t think about how we do it, we simply do it. At the same time, language is so natural that much escapes us, and it leads us, as philosophers, into a great many confusions. This, then, was part of the slow change in my thinking. And it was this, I think, that made it so difficult for me to respond to Ramsey’s questions …

  Despite his effort to give the impression of deep and serious attention to the Viva, Russell was finding himself distracted by what was happening outside, especially when Lily walked past the window.

  The little tease was doing it on purpose! thought Russell. She must have known he was inside, watching her as she looked up at Max. But that was all Russell saw. One peep and the show closed: Lily walked out of sight. And the maddening thing was, Russell could sense her there, the minx. Standing by the side of the house, she was clearly tormenting Max, who was now staring down at her from the ladder. God, will you look at him, Russell thought. Just like one of Pavlov’s dogs — the salivary chime.

  At the same time, Russell sensed the rising annoyance of his colleagues, who, though facing away from the window, were well aware of his distraction. Trying to rouse himself and forget the girl, Russell then took the offensive, saying to Wittgenstein:

  Well, being a philosopher who prefers simplicity, I must say, Mr. Wittgenstein, that your new work creates countless problems in its sheer, and I might say undisciplined, variety. Enormous problems, in fact. What can we apprehend when each sentence — each word and expression — must be identified and explained? That’s not philosophy, that’s a laborious taxonomy.

  Wittgenstein immediately felt Russell’s pressing the attack. He pressed back, saying, My aim is not to seek ease or neatness. And, again, I think you’re dazzled by that search for a mathematical essence — for the tics and conventions of formal elegance. As I say, language will not be tied up in this neat, formal way. This was part of Ramsey’s problem … Here Wittgenstein visibly hesitated, then came out with it. Do not misunderstand me, I greatly respected Ramsey. Ramsey was tremendously useful in helping me to clarify my thinking. But if you’ll pardon me for saying so, I would describe Ramsey as a bourgeois thinker.

  Moore slapped his knee, incensed at this slight of his brilliant protégé, dead the year before at the age of twenty-six. Russell was insulted on general principle, knowing, in effect, that Wittgenstein was saying the same of them.

  I beg your pardon, remonstrated Moore. But I take deep offense at your remark about Ramsey. In fact, I find your statement extraordinarily patronizing and insulting. Especially when I think of the pains that Ramsey took to clarify your work.

  Now wait, protested Wittgenstein. Just now I said as much. Digging his grave deeper, the candidate then explained, By bourgeois I mean that Ramsey wanted to tidy up the affairs of a particular philosophical and intellectual community. He didn’t want to reflect for long on the essence of a problem, or its manifold difficulties. What Ramsey really wanted was for these problems to go away — to be declared trivial and laid to one side. But, you see, I do not think the philosopher should belong to any community.

  Oh, come on! scoffed Moore, losing all patience. And what, pray, will you be, Wittgenstein, when you ally yourself with the Cambridge academic community? And what makes you so sure there is such tremendous regulated orthodoxy in our thinking? This is incredible! Moore dropped his arms and looked at Russell. You act as if we’re an intellectual church order or something! As if we all subscribe to the same creed!

  Oh, no, said Russell with a blazing look. What the candidate means, is that we don’t subscribe to his creed — whatever that is.

  But Wittgenstein wasn’t budging. Nodding fiercely, he put both his examiners on notice then:

  There is community. There is community, and there are many shared values and assumptions. True, I share many of these essential values, but you both know me well enough to realize that, even if you should admit me to the company of philosophical doctors, much less to Trinity … Moving his arms in his agitation, Wittgenstein seemed, for a moment, to hover in the air, whirling like a dervish before he continued. Even if you should do this, I will never be a part of your community, nor of anybody’s community. Not that I won’t bear your community my most sincere goodwill. But Cambridge will never own me, nor will philosophy, nor the church, nor the country, nor the various charities. Oh, I might, I suppose, have dedicated my life to the glory of God. And of course I have tried as much — fruitlessly. But to say that this was my intent would be chicanery — I mean it would be misunderstood. And so you might say, Russell, that what I am doing is not doing philosophy at all. So, you might say, humanly speaking, that I am completely outside the fold. I do not entirely deny it. Clearly, I do not understand the values and aspirations of this age, insofar as it has any that I can discern, with its fatuous science and pathetic delusions of progress. But then I freely admit I am narrow. But understand this — if I should do your community any good, however unlikely that seems, it will be as an outsider. That much is clear.

  It was as if the entire room were suddenly covered with broken glass: Moore and Russell sat there mutely, not knowing which way to move to avoid the shards. But even now Russell was torn in his attention: Lily was at the foot of the ladder, talking to Max. And then there came a knock — Mrs. Bride was waiting outside with their lunch.

  When Russell next looked outside, Lily was gone and Max was coming down off the ladder. Then Max started around the side of the house.

  Oh, my, said Russell, pulling out his watch. I see it’s already one-thirty. Why don’t we break here for lunch? If you’ll excuse me a few minutes, I’d like to place a call. Shall we resume around two, then?

  And before they could even give their assent, Russell was out the door. There was uneasiness then when Russell left them. In silence, they began eating. Several minutes passed, then Wittgenstein said to Moore, I hope you at least understand my point about Ramsey.

  I will respect your opinion, said Moore measuredly, pausing in midstream over his soup. That is not to say I agree with it.

  Silence and sandwiches, a desultory chewing. Wittgenstein went to stand by the window. Max was gone, but Wittgenstein had caught a glimpse of him and the girl — enough to see what was in store. He found it oddly distancing to stand there helpless before this feeling that was developing in him, in the midst of this other colloquy. Granted, Wittgenstein was not comfortable with what would certainly happen next, with the sex part. But this was nothing new. For Max, there had been other women — other “falls,” and still more painful falls for the women he contemptuously discarded once soiled. Even this, Wittgenstein could accept. What he absolutely could not accept was Max’s hypocrisy in stormily disavowing any interest in the girl — the idea that he could so baldly lie about it.

  How was it possible, wondered Wittgenstein, that a basically good and sincere man could act without any apparent consistency, saying one thing and blithely doing another? Wittgenstein stared out the window with
wonderment and a feeling of dislocation. Did words deserve the primacy we gave them? Were words “moral” in the same sense that actions were? We say, thought Wittgenstein, that Max had not “meant” to sin, saying this in the way we might say that Max had not meant to lie. But of course this revealed problems hidden in the grammar of the word “meant.” There was, for instance, the question of whether Max was using “meant” to designate an intended action — what he had meant to do — in the same sense that he might have said that this, after all, was what he had meant to say. Worse, we would likely be using “meant” once or twice removed, using it to cover Max’s first lie by successively re-explaining what he had really meant. Ethics was such a misery, thought Wittgenstein. Words were so slippery, and metaphors were all the more so, being instructive in almost equal measure to their power to distort. And in the end, words only evaded: our words could not justify, and further words and actions only muddied our questionable original intentions like a picture that has been too often erased and revised. No, thought Wittgenstein, good or evil (if those were quite the words) were not to be broken down like salt in a crucible to get at the truth — it was a hollow nugget that clinked into the alchemist’s dish. Somewhere in the process, the spirit escaped.

  Say it, thought Wittgenstein. Max was in pain. That was the “meaning” this “sin” expressed, and though this sin no doubt had a root somewhere, it had no “reason.” It was simply pain, disfiguring scribbles over a once pure page.

  If the conscience is not an ethical organ, thought Wittgenstein, might it at least furbish the mind with a decent recollection? Looking out across the hills, he felt an impulse to sleep for weariness. The truth was, Wittgenstein vividly wished to die at that moment. But then he realized that even death was just another metaphor for something else.

  Heirs

  MOORE HAD GOOD REASON to be offended by the epic ingratitude of Wittgenstein’s remark about Ramsey. But patronizing or not, Wittgenstein’s feelings about Ramsey were more than just a lack of gratitude. Ramsey was an unpleasant reminder of other things.

  When Ramsey had first met Wittgenstein in Trattenbach in 1923, he was not yet twenty, but in Cambridge he was already widely regarded as the most promising young man to have come down in a generation — meaning, since Wittgenstein. Moore took tremendous pride in his brilliant young protégé and fellow Apostle. It was Moore who introduced Ramsey to the Tractatus, and it was Moore who wrote the letter of introduction that Ramsey enclosed with his own letter to Wittgenstein, asking if he might come to Trattenbach to discuss the Tractatus with him.

  Wittgenstein was at a low ebb when he received Ramsey’s letter. His attempt to adopt Franz Kluck had just failed, and the witch-hunt that would eventually force him out of the village was just starting in earnest. Responding to Ramsey’s letter, Wittgenstein wrote, “I’m afraid that I have little to offer in my present state of mind. But you are certainly welcome to come, if you really think it will do any good.”

  An older, less enthusiastic man might well have been put off by Wittgenstein’s gloomy letter, but Ramsey immediately sent a wire providing the full details of his arrival. This pleased Wittgenstein. Depressed and lonely, he was curious about this young man whom Moore had spoken about so highly, and he knew the arrival of a cultivated foreigner would set the village buzzing. Wittgenstein thought it was sad, and certainly a sign of how low he had sunk, that he should feel the need for such ostentation, but he couldn’t help it. On the heels of his humiliation at the hand of Herr Kluck, Wittgenstein felt a positive hunger to remind himself and the Trattenbachers — as if they needed reminding — that he was a worldly, influential man with distinguished friends.

  Ramsey never did see why Wittgenstein chose to waste himself in Trattenbach. Even the children seemed scarcely enough to justify such loneliness. In a letter he sent to Moore shortly after his arrival, Ramsey wrote in part:

  He looks younger than he can possibly be; but he says he has bad eyes and a cold. Still, his general appearance is athletic. He’s clearly fond of the children, who, in turn, seem fond of him despite his strictness and the tremendous demands he places upon them. This is especially true of his cleverest boys, who are like a small tribe, but his tribe, with his intensity and even his mannerisms. The villagers stare at us. I don’t think Wittgenstein is at all conscious of the effect he has on people.

  Ramsey was especially struck by a class zoology project that had begun when Wittgenstein found a dead cat in the road. Wittgenstein plopped the cat in a burlap bag and carried it back to his room, where he skinned it, then boiled the carcass to bones in a big black pot. His excitable landlady was grievously upset when she learned that he was cooking cat in his room. Are you so poor? she wanted to know, and not without some cause. The smell — remarkably like venison — had permeated the grubby little grocery downstairs, where the teacher’s eccentricities were already a favorite subject of conversation.

  Wittgenstein could not be bothered with the landlady’s female squeamishness. The cat was duly cooked, and when Ramsey arrived, he found Wittgenstein and his boys restringing the skeleton by drilling tiny holes in the bones and fastening them together with fine brass wire. In another letter to Moore, Ramsey reported:

  I mention the cat because I feel as if Wittgenstein did the same in the Tractatus, leaving me endless bones to pick as I try to drape his elegant skeleton with flesh and skin. So far, we seem to average about an hour per page, or about five pages per day, before his clever boys come trooping in wearing boots and knickers and little black hats. They’re so very solemn and respectful, almost rapt when he talks. They call me Herr Doktor and are like greedy young birds with their questions about university and England. As for our cat, Ilse, she is a headless, tailless biped! But she’s coming along! I know there may be many ways to skin a cat; but have you any idea how many bones there are to one?

  But for all Ramsey’s enthusiasm, it was hard blowing life into cold coals. Wittgenstein said he was sorry for this, and he warned Ramsey, lest he wind up the same way, that there came a time when a man had to drop such thinking if he was not to be completely wrecked by it. Ramsey was no Pinsent. He never became Wittgenstein’s protégé, and, unlike Wittgenstein, he never lived long enough to quit philosophy. Still, as Wittgenstein sat there eating with Moore that afternoon, he was not sorry for what he had said about Ramsey, nor could he join with those like Moore who would wonder aloud at all Ramsey might have done had he lived. Wittgenstein had seen too many promising young men die in the war to indulge in what-ifs.

  Heartless or not, this was how it was and how it would be. Because as much as Ramsey helped Wittgenstein clear the ground for his new work, Ramsey was inevitably somewhat stunted as a thinker by the higher stories of Wittgenstein’s influence. And thanks in part to Ramsey, Wittgenstein could now roam on, unbothered by bourgeois questions of influence or gratitude, drifting over the landscape like a grazing cow called History, which had broken down the fence and wandered off, not even bothering to look back over what carefully tended gardens she had trampled and uprooted.

  Ramsey wasn’t the only casualty of Wittgenstein’s thinking. Another was Friedrich Waismann.

  Waismann was a member of the Vienna Circle, a group that arose partly in response to the concerns and aspirations of the Tractatus, especially in its desire to separate the realm of significant statement from that of nonsense. The dream was attainable, and the group’s early members looked to Wittgenstein to lead them toward an age of scientific philosophy based on logic and empiricism and, above all, freedom from the muddles of metaphysics.

  The first time Wittgenstein encountered this little group, waiting for him to help them throw off the last heresies and lead them, clear-eyed, into a new day, he felt a deep sense of sadness. They were the heretics. They took up his logic but cast aside his mysticism, never understanding how inextricably the two were bound. But in them Wittgenstein saw something else that nauseated him: it was the growing shadow of his own influence, as reflected in str
ong, sophisticated intellects surrendering not just to his ideas but to the sheer force of his personality — to a hateful style. It made him fearful and ashamed, all the more so because there was a side of his personality that craved the attention. Faced with the harsh mirror of their admiration, Wittgenstein did what seemed the only decent thing during that first meeting: he read these antimetaphysicians the passionate metaphysical love poems of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.

  Moritz Schlick, one of the leaders of the group, got along well with Wittgenstein — better, at least, than the more abrasive (and less deferential) Rudolf Carnap. Schlick was the first member of the group to establish a relationship with Wittgenstein, albeit an often delicate one. This was during the period after Wittgenstein had returned from Trattenbach, when he was engaged in building Gretl’s house, frequently with Max as his second in command. Building this house was more for him than just a favor for his sister. In asking her brother to undertake the house, Gretl also knew the work would provide him with a needed refuge.