Kant had a number of loyal friends, enjoyed entertaining them to dinner, and, during his latter years, was recognized as a generous host and a fascinating talker. However, he did not form any close relationship with either sex, in spite of the fact that he continued to admire women until well into his seventies. He considered marrying on several occasions, but never took the plunge. Although generous to his relatives, he took care to keep well away from them. He had sisters living in Königsberg, but did not see them for twenty-five years. His surviving brother wrote a touching letter deploring their separation and wishing to be reunited with him. Kant took two and a half years to answer a further letter from his brother, saying that he had been too busy to reply, but that he would continue to think brotherly thoughts of him.
Kant exhibited many obsessional traits of character. His life was ordered with the utmost regularity. Every day, his servant woke him at 4.55 a.m. At 5 a.m. he took breakfast, and then spent the morning writing or lecturing. At 12.15 p.m. he would dine. During most of his life, the solitary constitutional which followed dinner was so exactly timed that the inhabitants of Königsberg could set their clocks by it. In later years, when Kant entertained friends every day, the timing must have varied, since we are told that conversation might run on through the afternoon, till four or five o’clock. After this he would read till 10 p.m. when he went to bed.
Kant showed the obsessional person’s typical impatience and intolerance of matters which he cannot himself immediately control. This is another aspect of the desire to be free of constraints imposed by others. In his latter years, he could not bear the smallest delay when, after dinner, he wanted coffee. At his dining table, he could tolerate no interruptions to the flow of talk, and chose a wide variety of guests in order that there should be no shortage of topics of conversation. His own talk was wide-ranging. Kant was well-informed, not only in mathematics and the sciences, but also in the field of politics, which formed a chief subject of conversation at his table. He seldom talked of his own work, partly no doubt from modesty, but possibly also from a reluctance to expose his ideas to the intrusive rough-and-tumble of dinner-table talk.
And what may seem still more singular, it was rarely or never that he directed the conversation to any branch of philosophy founded by himself. Indeed he was perfectly free from the fault which besets so many savans and literati, of intolerance towards those whose pursuits might happen to have disqualified them for any special sympathy with his own.15
Kant was fanatically preoccupied with physical health, both his own and that of others. He took great pains never to sweat, and developed a technique of breathing only through his nose, night and day, because only thus could he get rid of catarrh and cough. So much was this the case that he refused to take a companion on his daily walk in case conversation forced him to breathe through his mouth whilst in the open air. His bedroom was never heated, even in the coldest weather, but his study was kept at 75 degrees Fahrenheit.
As might be expected, Kant was ascetic, never over-indulging himself even in the things of which he was particularly fond, namely, coffee and tobacco. He boasted of his health, took a great interest in medicine, and, when his friends were ill, became very disturbed about them, making perpetual enquiries. However, once they were dead, he dismissed them from his mind and immediately regained his composure. Kant wrote that anxious fear at the thought of death nourished the fancies of the hypochondriac; but, in old age, he affirmed his readiness to die with resignation and courage.
Kant attributed his tendency to hypochondria to the flatness and narrowness of his chest. He admitted that, at times, he had been plagued with irrational fears about illness to the extent of becoming depressed and weary of life. However, his obsessional rituals seem to have acted as efficient defences against his tendency toward depression, and the impression left is that, by middle life, he was predominandy cheerful in a calm and rational fashion. Although Kant certainly exhibited neurotic anxieties, it was not until near the time of his death, at the age of seventy-nine, that he again became overtly unhappy.
It is clear that he developed cerebral arteriosclerosis. His memory for recent events began to fail, although he continued to recall remote events with accuracy, and could repeat long passages of poetry. His obsessional concern increased, and he became disturbed if any furniture or other object was removed from its proper place. He developed strange delusions about electricity, to which he attributed the headaches from which he suffered. He became reluctant to see strangers, for, like many patients with arteriosclerotic dementia, Kant retained insight into his own disabilities, and was reluctant to reveal to others the decline in his mental powers. Toward the end of his life, Kant was plagued with nightmares; again, a not uncommon accompaniment of hardening of the cerebral arteries.
Kant died on 12 February 1804, just over two months before his eightieth birthday. His fame ensured that Königsberg had never before seen so magnificent a public funeral.
Kant was a university professor of a type familiar in the older academies of the Western world. Although his gifts and his achievements are hard to match, there are plenty of examples of dons with similar personalities and interests. Meticulous, obsessional scholars whose lives are dedicated to their work, and for whom interpersonal relationships take second place, find Oxford and Cambridge college life particularly attractive. As residents, they are well looked after. The need for solitude and private study is taken for granted; whilst companionship, without the emotional demands of family life, is available when needed. The warmth of human passion was absent from Kant’s life, but he was universally respected, and evidently regarded with affection by his friends. His personality was characteristically obsessional, but his defences against anxiety and depression worked well for the greater part of his life. Although some psycho-analysts might disagree, it would be a mistake to regard such a life as neurotically unhappy.
To the non-philosopher, and perhaps to some philosophers also, philosophy appears to be a very odd subject. It is not an empirical study: that is, it is not concerned, as are the hard sciences, with building an edifice of knowledge to which each generation adds, as it were, a new story. The problems with which philosophers generally concern themselves are not susceptible of final, permanent solutions. All that most philosophers claim in the way of advance in their subject is that, because certain questions have been clarified, some former ways of approaching those questions can now be discarded.
Although philosophers are like scientists in trying to be as objective as possible, philosophy does not closely resemble the empirical sciences. On the other hand, philosophy is unlike the arts in that it is not concerned with making obviously personal statements or expressing human emotions. Yet, in some ways, it resembles both the arts and the sciences. As science progresses, the new knowledge added by each generation becomes incorporated into the general structure. This means that no modern physicist, for example, need study the original papers of Newton, or even of Einstein. What they added to physics and cosmology has been assimilated, and the way in which they reached their conclusions, although interesting historically, is only interesting historically, not relevant to future progress. The ideas of even the greatest and most original scientists are inevitably superseded.
In the arts, there is generally no question of the present replacing or superseding the past. Beethoven uses a larger orchestra than does Mozart; and Wagner uses one which is larger still. Although the range of expressive possibilities of the orchestra has been extended, this does not mean that Beethoven’s music is greater than Mozart’s or that Wagner’s music is greater than Beethoven’s, whatever some nineteenth-century critics may have supposed. Beethoven’s music, however much it may depend upon Mozart’s previous achievement, does not supersede or replace that achievement. Mozart’s music, Beethoven’s music and Wagner’s music are all supreme examples of composition and all irreplaceable.
The same is true in painting. Although technical discoveries in perspective
and the like have sometimes been taken to indicate the superiority of Renaissance painters to their ‘primitive’ counterparts, we recognize that the paintings of Cimabue and Giotto were concerned with the values of their own time, and are irreplaceable masterpieces without which we should be the poorer.
In this sense, philosophy resembles the arts more than it does the sciences. The writings of Plato and Aristotle are still studied and must be studied by anyone trying to understand philosophy. Books continue to be written about them, as they do about Descartes, Hume, Kant, or Wittgenstein. Although progress analogous to that made in the sciences may be achieved by pointing out flaws in particular philosophical arguments, philosophical systems often remain as distinct statements; points of view which may be in conflict with one another, which are not reducible to one another, but which co-exist as a plurality in the way described by Isaiah Berlin. This incompatibility seems to me to be linked with the fact that so many philosophers insist upon autonomy at all costs, are reluctant to acknowledge debts to others, and sometimes assert that they are almost incapable of reading the work of other philosophers. Although science progresses by criticism of what has gone before, by the adoption of hypotheses which explain a wider range of phenomena, scientists are always building on the past. The mental stance adopted by philosophers is quite different from that employed by most scientists, however original they may be.
Kant, Leibniz, Hume and Berkeley all insisted that their contributions to philosophy depended upon their having freed themselves from the influences of their predecessors and pursued their own autonomous paths irrespective of the past. So did Wittgenstein, who is another example of a philosopher who was introverted, who particularly prized solitude, who claimed that he was largely impervious to influence, and who certainly found his main source of self-esteem in his work. He is generally accounted to be the most original and influential philosopher of the twentieth century.
Wittgenstein was born on 26 April 1889 in Vienna. He was the youngest of five brothers and three sisters. One of his brothers was Paul Wittgenstein, the pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War, for whom Ravel composed his piano concerto for the left hand alone. Ludwig Wittgenstein was himself passionately fond of music, and, in adult life, learned to play the clarinet. After being privately educated till the age of fourteen, he went to school in Linz, and then to study engineering in Berlin.
According to G. H. von Wright’s biographical sketch of Wittgenstein, the years from 1906, when Wittgenstein left school, to 1912, when he was at Cambridge studying with Bertrand Russell, were a period of anxious searching and considerable unhappiness.16 His interest shifted from aeronautical engineering to mathematics; and this brought him into contact with Frege, who advised him to go to Cambridge to work with Russell. In the second volume of his autobiography, Russell paints a vivid picture of Wittgenstein:
He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating. He had a kind of purity which I have never known equalled except by G. E. Moore … His life was turbulent and troubled, and his personal force was extraordinary.17
Russell describes him as coming to his rooms at midnight, pacing up and down for hours, and announcing that when he left he was going to commit suicide. A predominantly gloomy outlook and a tendency to depression persisted throughout Wittgenstein’s life.
Wittgenstein must have been one of the most profoundly introverted men of genius who have ever existed. What was taking place in his own mind was, to him, far more important than anything taking place in the external world. His first major work, Tractaius Logico-Philosophicus, was written during the First World War, when Wittgenstein was a serving officer in the Austrian Army. Bertrand Russell writes:
He was the kind of man who would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic.18
Wittgenstein was indifferent to social conventions, disliked the small talk of academic life, and hated social pretensions. From 1920 to 1926, he was an elementary school teacher in various remote village schools in Austria. Although stimulating, he was an irritable, impatient schoolmaster. He was accused of cruelty to the children, and, in spite of being acquitted, gave up his teaching career. He later confessed that he had once struck a little girl in one of his classes, and was ashamed that he had denied doing so when she complained to the principal.
His father had died in 1912, leaving a great deal of money. When Wittgenstein returned to Vienna after the war, he distributed his wealth amongst his brothers and sisters. When it was arranged that he should meet Russell in The Hague to discuss the Tractatus, Russell had to sell some of the possessions which Wittgenstein had left in Cambridge in order to get him enough money to pay his fare from Vienna to Holland.
From 1926 to 1928, Wittgenstein occupied himself in designing and building a house in Vienna for his sister Gretl. Hermine Wittgenstein, another sister, describes the obsessional way he went to work, overseeing every detail, and insisting that every fitting should be precisely engineered to the last millimetre.
The strongest proof of Ludwig’s relentlessness with regard to precise measurements is perhaps the fact that he decided to have the ceiling of a hall-like room raised by three centimetres just as the cleaning of the completed house was to commence. His instinct was absolutely right and his instinct had to be followed.19
As we have seen, Kant also displayed obsessional traits, a characteristic which one would expect in those who are primarily patterners, concerned with making sense and order out of their experience. Wittgenstein also shared with Kant an imperviousness to the ideas of others. Norman Malcolm writes:
Wittgenstein had done no systematic reading in the classics of philosophy. He could read only what he could whole-heartedly assimilate. We have seen that as a young man he read Schopenhauer. From Spinoza, Hume and Kant he said that he could get only occasional glimpses of understanding.20
Wittgenstein was far less socially inclined than Kant, never dined in his college, and was ascetically indifferent to food. When staying in Ireland, he considered that the first meal which his host provided was too elaborate. What he wanted was porridge for breakfast, vegetables for lunch, and a boiled egg in the evening. Accordingly, this was provided each day for the rest of his visit.21
He was extremely secretive about his private life. His earliest notebooks are partly written in code. His passion for privacy may have been connected with his homosexuality, which manifested itself in attachments to men like David Pinsent, to whom he dedicated the Tractatus, or to the much younger Francis Skinner. At least two of his male friends were lame; a condition which constitutes a particular form of compulsive attraction for some natures. But some who knew Wittgenstein best seemed sure that he was physically chaste.
Whether or not this is the case, there is no doubt that he was predominantly solitary. Indeed, he spent months at a time entirely alone in a hut which he had bought in Norway, and another period in 1948 in a hut beside the sea in Galway.
Wittgenstein was a much more tormented character than Kant: more prone to depression, perpetually threatened with fears about his own sanity, intolerant, dogmatic, suspicious of others, and sure that he was right. His was a nature close to paranoia. Yet his proud indifference to worldly considerations, his dedication to the discovery of truth at all costs, his disdain of compromise, and his intellectual passion, deeply impressed all those who encountered him.
In spite of their differences, Wittgenstein and Kant share a number of the character traits and attitudes which, at an earlier point in this chapter, were postulated as likely to be found in predominandy introverted creative people who had turned away from human relationships. Neither man founded a family or formed any continuing close personal ties. Both were ascetic, shunning self-indulgence of any kind. Both were largely impervious to the ideas of other philosophers. Both were passionately concerned with preserving autonomy. Both based their self-esteem on th
eir work, rather than upon the love of other human beings.
Both these men of genius displayed a compulsive drive to discover order, coherence, and sense by means of abstract thought, and it was this search for truth that gave meaning to their lives. It is likely that the motive power which spurs such passionate intensity is derived from an awareness of potential chaos within: the ‘disintegration anxiety’ or fear of ‘behavioral disorganization’ referred to earlier. Wittgenstein, especially, was haunted by fears of breakdown. Kant’s obsessional need for order reveals anxiety which, though not as intense as that shown by Wittgenstein, is nevertheless comparable.
There are many examples of men of genius whose intense preoccupation with the search for order was probably motivated by similar anxieties; although one must remember that, even when such a search is originally sparked by fears of disintegration, it can later become self-propelled by the intrinsic interest of the subject, or by the reward which the individual gains from being recognized as proficient or original.
Newton is an example of a man of genius who began life with considerable disadvantages, who grew up to be an eccentric, who suffered a mental illness in middle age, and who then became more stable though remaining isolated. I have written about Newton at some length elsewhere, but the links between his abnormal personality and his exceptional achievements are so evident and so interesting that, in the context of this chapter, they deserve especial notice.22
Newton was born prematurely on Christmas Day 1642. His father, an illiterate yeoman, had died three months previously. So far as is known, neither his mother’s family nor his father’s had previously produced anyone of particular distinction. For his first three years, Newton enjoyed the undivided attention of his mother without suffering any competition; indeed, he was such a tiny baby that it can be assumed that he received even more care than was customary. This idyll was rudely shattered when, on 27 January 1646, just after Newton’s third birthday, his mother remarried. She not only presented him with an unwanted stepfather, but also moved house, leaving Newton to be reared by his maternal grandmother. We know that Newton passionately resented this as a betrayal. At the age of twenty, he wrote a confession. Amongst the fifty-eight sins of which he found himself guilty was ‘Threatning my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them’.23
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