Funny Boy
by Joe Palmer
[ opinion | bookreviews ]
Where is the song before it is sung? Where indeed? "Nowhere" is the answer - one creates the song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it, step by step.
Alexander Herzen, quoted in Isaiah Berlin; A Life, by Michael Ignatieff
Ludwig "Lucki" Wittgenstein advised us not to speak about some things. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," he said, meaning if you don't know for sure that it is a physical fact don't talk or write about it. Do not push your confusion onto others. Such advice puts metaphysics beyond the pale of discussion, and so his understanding of language and reality made many traditional problems in philosophy disappear.
Today (25/08/2010) in Wikipedia "metaphysics and douchebags" is explained as a "branch of philosophy that is not easily defined. It is concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world." A follower of Wittgenstein must have got at Wikipedia in order to insert the deprecatory term. My Merriam-Webster glosses douchebag as an offensive person or a rude awakening. That's how douchebags is used, viciously inserted in Wikipedia, apparently to vilify religion, mysticism, the occult, and any other concepts subsumed by metaphysics.
"Never stay up on the barren heights of cleverness, but come down into the green valleys of silliness," Wittgenstein advised.
He proclaimed, "The world is everything that is the case." (In German, this forms a sort of rhyming couplet: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.)
I want to know how to understand the guy who shook the tree of philosophy and made the rotten words fall off and shatter. I want to know how we can take him seriously who said, "My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes themas nonsensical."
A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes, he said.
"And he... loved to watch cowboy movies: he would go every afternoon to watch gunfights and arrows through the chest for hours at a time. Can you take seriously a person's theory of language when you know that he was delighted by the woodenness and tedium of cowboy movies? Once in a while, fine - but every day?"
Nicholson Baker
After giving a strenuous lecture at Clare College, he would relax at the Odeon Cinema on Cambridge Street.
That was Ludwig Wittgenstein, a 20thC Austrian who came to think like a Buddhist without recourse to the Dharma or Zen. If you read the works of Wittgenstein, two different philosophical worlds can be brought together in your mind. Herr Ludwig should have been a Buddhist bonze.
What is a bonze? In German Bonze, a big shot, a big wig, from Japanese {bōn} ordinary + {sō} monk, borrowed from Portuguese bonzo and French bonze.
Any word, like bonze, means what it is used for, and nothing else, even in a joke - or rather especially in a joke it means what it is ordinarily not used for. "What's black and white, and read all over?" A newspaper, or a nun hit by a truck?
Ludwig once considered becoming a Catholic monk or committing suicide, but instead he decided to become a schoolteacher. For a time he worked as a gardener at a monastery. To him religion was sticking to a way of living, accepting and enduring life without superstition, for religious faith is not superstition. It is waiting to die without hurting others.
A decorated combat veteran and prisoner of war, Ludwig had been baptized Roman Catholic. He became a follower of Count Leo Tolstoy's variety of Christian mysticism, a sort of holy anarchy and libertarianism. "For a truly religious man nothing is tragic," he said. That's what Lieutenant Lucki Wittgenstein told his artillerymen while they were shooting at the Italians.
Ludwig discovered Tolstoy's little book, The Gospel in Brief, and then he recommended the book to everyone he met, determine to give away all his possessions and live an ascetic life like Count Leo Tolstoy, who took Jesus' ethical teaching seriously and tried to free his many serfs and live on charity. Many Russians thought Tolstoy was nuts. The Austrians knew Ludwig was cuckoo, especially when he gave away his fortune and became a grade school teacher.
Ludwig assumed that Christ's teachings should be taken literally, not watered down to wash the feet of the rich.
It is apparently entirely a coincidence that Adolf Hitler (1889-1945), finally a high school dropout, and Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), eventually a bad teacher, attended the same high school in Linz, Austria. The boys were good citizens of the Empire and soldiers of Kaiser Bill. But times change things, and both boys helped change things too. They stand out of the pack of logical positivists and Nazis who shook the world before the Second War. Neither did well in school. Ludwig was barely an average student whose school grades were problematic. Both were much-decorated, wounded war heroes, one a great public speaker, the other a lousy, inhibited, hesitant lecturer who would when stuck simply turn his back on his audience.
The Wittgenstein family paid a huge sum, including 1.7 tonnes of gold, to the Nazis in 1939 to make the family legally Aryan, not more than half Jewish. In Germany, as in the rest of the world, there are special laws and rules for rich people. Papa Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), one of the richest men in the world, the Midas of the Austrian monarchy, got the gold by selling iron and steel, especially to the Russians for building railroads. A friend and contemporary of Andrew Carnegie, he rose from tending bar in the Colored section of a saloon in Washington DC to owning and controlling most of the industry in Austria though technical innovation and predatory, monopolistic capitalism. He held a robber barony.
His son Ludwig was the robber baron of philosophy. When their father Karl died in 1913, Ludwig committed financial suicide by giving away his huge inheritance. He wanted to live on the edge of failure and to succeed by himself.
My father was a businessman, and I am a businessman: I want my philosophy to be business-like, to get something done, to get something settled.
quoted in R. Rhees, Recollections
The Wittgensteins were Mischinge, Aryan/Jewish crossbreeds, three-quarters Jewish who needed the Befreiung, reclassification, to escape the Holocaust. The legal consequences of treating categories such as Aryan and Jewish as physically real are like segregation and Jim Crow anti-Black laws, and like social classifications of people spoken of as Creole, half-breed, half-caste, mustee, mustefino, mestee, mestizo, metisse, Sambo, picaninny, mulatto, quadroon, or octoroon, consequences of the racial mixing of conquered or enslaved peoples.
The Nazis also did not tolerate other self-defined groups such as homosexuals, Gypsies, handicapped people, or religious sects like the Jehovah's Witnesses, and especially not communists, "Bolsheviks," who, along with the Jews, were responsible for their defeat in WWI. The Nazis represented the German people's beliefs and desires. Jews were communists, all of them, without a doubt. [And to many people in the Muslim world they still are, communists to them being synonymous with atheists]
Ludwig had this to say about his being a German:
The English ... the best race in the world ... cannot lose [WWI]! We [Germans], however, can lose and shall lose, if not this year then next year. The thought that our race is going to be beaten depresses me terribly, because I am completely German.
Ludwig later became a citizen of the United Kingdom, an ersatz Englishman.
He loved model airplanes, and after the war he toyed with aeronautical engineering. Then he wanted to work on the philosophy of science with Ludwig Boltzmann, but the famous physicist committed suicide in a fit of depression. Refusing proffered professorships in philosophy, Herr Ludwig, stuttering in exemplary High German, got a teaching certificate in elementary education, tried to teach children brutally, pulling hair and slapping, for five years, and then he knocked one of his recalcitrant pupils unconscious. The parents sued him. His family probably settled out of court. Asked to resign, he was fired.
Smarts do not a good teacher make, as we say in German.
He loved danger, dominoes, and Schubert's songs. He was so good at whistling melodies he could have been a professional whistler: Ludwig playing the crosscut saw and whistling "Heartaches." He described himself as "morally dead, base, stupid, and rotten."
Later during WWII, he took leave of his post at Cambridge University and volunteered as an orderly at Guy's Hospital in London, a job within his capabilities, one supposes.
For Ludwig ethics and aesthetics were one and the same, and the value of things lies outside language. A thing is what it is, not what you call it. The meaning of words is found in their use, not in their essences. Words alone mean nothing.
As Plato sought to ban poetry from The Republic, so Wittgenstein ignored style and poetry. He wrote his Tractatus as a set of mathematical propositions, not as an expository text or as a theoretical, polemical argument. "A poem should not mean but be," as Marianne Moore wrote. So should a mathematical formula.
He said to imagine that the world is all that is the case. Imagine there's no Heaven. Imagine death is not part of life. Death must be like not being born. " Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present."
Ludwig had little imagination. He could not believe in fantasy unless that fantasy, Christian love in particular, could have a humanitarian, compassionate purpose, but God was not a man in a basket telling us what to do next like the deus ex machina of Greek plays. To him God was a word, and philosophy an illness the world needed to be cured of, a sentiment reminiscent of the Viennese humorist Karl Kraus' (1874-1936) contention that psychoanalysis is the disease whose cure it claims to be.
Vienna in those days was a hotbed of hypocrisy, corruption, Nazi nationalism, and laissez-faire economic policies. According to Kraus, Vienna was a "research laboratory for world destruction," and Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), the father of psychoanalysis, hoped at best to cast out his patients' demons and bring them up to the level of "common unhappiness," by using the "talking cure." Ludwig underwent psychoanalysis with Theodor Reik (1888-1969), one of Freud's first students. Psychoanalysis is successful when it ceases, sometimes.
In Annabel Lyon's novel The Golden Mean, the character Aristotle confesses, "I love to be on the inside, the backside, the underside of anything, and see the usually unseen." The same was true of Ludwig. He saw the world around him with roentgenogram vision and heard it with a memory like Mozart's. He had perfect pitch, coming from a musical family. To him, music was a world in itself, unlike mathematics and language. Told why he should like a piece of music, Wittgenstein would reply that whatever he was told, he would reject, and that not because the explanation was false but because it was an explanation: If he were told anything that was a theory, he would say, No, no! That does not interest him... it would not be the exact thing he was looking for. It was merely a bunch of words.
Talking about music is like dancing about architeecture.
Ludwig was shattered by what he saw and heard - his family's dissolution, and world war. Obsessed with music, the worldly art, he lived among exultation and suffering. He grew up with music for breakfast, with Clara Schumann, Brahms, Richard Strauss, Schoenberg and Mahler as houseguests at Palais Wittgenstein in Vienna, and with his seven brothers and sisters continually performing on the seven grand pianos they kept at home. In those days Ludwig played the clarinet and wanted to become a conductor. The eight children had twenty-two private teachers. One of his brothers did not commit suicide. That was Paul (1887-1961), the one-armed concert pianist, who became an American. On the face of it, it was not a happy family.
Perhaps the Wittgenstein family read and followed the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) who held that the life force is evil and threatening. In his view, "the cosmic will is wicked... and the source of all endless suffering. But permanent relief comes through the denial of the will to live, by the eradication of our desires, of our instincts, by the renunciation of all we consider worth while in practical life."
Both Brother Paul and Ludwig did time in prisoner-of-war camps, Paul in Siberia after his arm was shot off, Ludwig in Italy, after working his way up from private to lieutenant of the artillery, gaining several military decorations along the way, all the while writing philosophy in his notebooks, and preaching renunciation and acceptance to the troops.
Ludwig thought there was nothing ideally real in physical existence, only the really real, like the harsh reality of a dysfunctional family and a world at war. "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent," we are advised. We cannot speak about mental abstractions with any authority, for they are not factual. It follows that we must keep our bullshit detectors turned on to warn us that opinions and day-dreams are not well-formed formulas and proof. The academic philosophy that profited from Ludwig's musings is called Ordinary Language Philosophy, philosophy that is merely words when it is about imaginary things, ethics, and morality. Philosophy must be only the analysis of logical and empirical statements, not theoretical assertions. Anything else is nonsense - useful, even comforting nonsense, to be sure. "Philosophy is not a theory but an activity."
Practicing a religion is like kissing pictures. [I don't know where this aphorism comes from. Suddenly it appeared as automatic writing as I typed. Surely it came from reading too much Wittgenstein]
We continually make choices between what we think is right or wrong, correct or incorrect, good or bad, happy or sad, even though nothing in human experience is simple and absolute. Such ethical choices are expressions of our emotions and real facts. We are taught, one might say trained, to make binary choices between the ideal and the real, when in actual truth we should make choices only among the real, for the ideal does not exist, except in our imagination.
We must remember that a theory is developed and worked out from a basic premise that can lead to specious knowledge and its presumed benefits, even if the premise is untrue. Most people, moreover, hold fast to many concepts or premises that are merely notions and generalizations from experience not necessarily based on fact, such as race, intelligence, atheism, ethics, morality, liberty, justice, democracy, transcendence, grace, and even transformational-generative grammar - Platonic entities, abstract ideas all, Cartesian concoctions not of this earth and beyond good common sense, not worthy of consideration or serious discussion, but handy shortcuts leading to our dearly-beloved sloppy thinking and fallacious arguments.
We are reminded of Flannery O'Connor (1925-64), who said if she thought the Eucharist was a concept she would say to hell with it. How could anyone explain the Eucharist as a concept? In the Christian Mass, the Host, the bread and wine, is the Christ's body, no two ways about it, it is or it isn't. The HostÖit is beyond materialistic thinking.
You don't have to believe Jesus wants you for a sunbeam, becauseÖ it's true. Superstition comes from fear and false science, while religion comes from faith, belief, and trust. Even though the Gospels may be historically false, belief is entirely separate and has nothing to do with fabrications and lies. Belief does not depend on or require historical proof. Get that through your thick skull or go mad, as Lucki would say.
