Category: Thought

How to Read an Aphorism

The aphorism, that snippet of wit and wisdom, is not a prose form I imagine many of us encounter regularly these days. It is primarily French in origin, with its most celebrated practitioner being the moralist François de La Rochefoucauld. I myself first encountered it through Friedrich Nietzsche, whose ill-health meant he could only focus long enough to put down a paragraph or two before needing to cool his brains, and who was happy to take any influence provided it wasn’t German. Both of these men are long dead; just as dead can the aphoristic form itself strike us as being.

An aphorism is a sentence or two, maybe at most a few paragraphs, on whatever takes the author’s fancy. They are philosophical, in that they are driven by ideas, but never system-building. If you wanted to build, you would write an essay, not scatter fragments like seeds. To write an aphorism, you must typically believe against something. In Theodor Adorno (in Minima Moralia) or Nietzsche’s cases, this “against” is a dislike for significant portions of the world they lived in. In the case of the French-language Romanian thinker Emil Cioran, it’s a dislike of nearly all the world he lived in, indeed of life itself. The typical impression of an aphorism is of witnessing someone engaged in a futile conflict with a great edifice, an elegant swordsman stabbing at the cold stone of castle walls.

Prejudice is often necessary to the aphorism, and it is precisely this which makes the form seem challenging to imagine writing today. An infamous one by Nietzsche, “You go to women – do not forget the whip”, provides an example. On the one hand, it conveys succinctly the importance of power dynamics for Nietzsche to his reader, but on the other it is reliant upon a (male) reader who is happy to take sexist ideas without question. The more prejudices we attempt today to dissolve – on race, gender, nation – the more we lose that centre of common understanding which an aphorism can work with. Nietzsche may dislike much of the modern world, but he needs it there to make his points. The best aphorisms are short, but brevity is enabled by us being able to recognise the world, the idea, for ourselves.

Prejudice and the absence of a system are not the only things that are needful to the aphorist. The most important is an overwhelming sense of one’s own importance and, of course, correctness. We shouldn’t underestimate how rare this actually is. Writers, especially of fiction, are uniquely predisposed to consider themselves great geniuses – but they are also typically wracked with self-doubts. In the case of fiction a creator typically believes in the merits of each work as a whole, rather than every aspect of it. Philosophers and other thinkers may likewise be utterly convinced that their key ideas are right, yet ready to deny themselves the megalomania that sees their every thought as being worthy of a crown of laurels.

For the aphorist, it is not so. Your ideas in your aphorisms range widely, and you must believe each one to be totally correct and worth sharing. In other words, you must be willing to assert to yourself and the world that you are a polymath, a rare genius. Such arrogance is another reason why few aphoristic books are being written and published today – the people truly arrogant enough to produce such a book are too busy in politics or leading large companies. This is why, to a certain extent, for the modern aphorism, we should look to social media, because it is here that we hear the select thoughts of those who believe the entire universe needs to hear them, compressed into the shortform.

We need arrogance because to doubt, for an aphorist, is fatal. Since an aphorism rarely has time to give examples, let alone argue, it works by the beauty of its prose and the power of its emotions to persuade us to its view. (“Logic and sermons never convince, / The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul” wrote Walt Whitman, whose poems are often filled with aphoristic little moments.) Since this is the case, to show doubt is to undermine everything you write – if you doubt, the reader will have cause to also. Regardless of the arrogance noted above, the aphorists I have read seem to be human, and no freer ultimately from self-questioning than the rest of us. Not showing it, then, is the thing.

This tension between feeling and revealing becomes part of the excitement of reading aphorisms. I think one of the best ways into reading someone like Cioran or Nietzsche is to think of their works as collectively constituting a work of fiction, complete with a highly opinionated narrative voice trying to get our attention and our trust. One of our goals becomes, as it is when we read fiction, the analysis of this narrative voice, the pinning down of its consistencies and inconsistencies, and identifying those moments when it seems to be hiding something from us that may yet prove essential. In many cases we can read a book of aphorisms looking for the gaps between the mask and the man – and it is normally a man – and not feel our time has been entirely wasted.

All of the above is a kind of defence of the aphorism and its writer. But this does not, really, get us any closer to reading or enjoying reading the things. Here I can only speak for myself, those things I noticed that helped me in a recent attempt at this.

The experience of reading a book of aphorisms is strange because it neither asks us to keep a thread of argument in mind, as does a typical non-fiction work, nor asks us to remember characters and stories as does a work of fiction. Yet memory is vital to the aphorism. “There are some words that hit like hammers. But others / You swallow like hooks and swim on and yet do not know it.” We ought to replace Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “words” with “aphorisms” to get an idea of the role of memory in reading aphorisms. We must read to remember. The startling thing, for me, when I read Cioran, or even Nietzsche (a writer I much prefer), is how so many of the aphorisms do nothing for me. I read them and shrug to myself. But if we remember them, they will return to us, and if they are good aphorisms they will return to us at precisely that moment when they can best reveal their value and hidden truth to us. To someone in the habit of letting the words one reads leave their head as soon as they move onto the next sentence there’s almost no point reading the aphorisms at all.

To say that we have to read to remember hints at the importance we need to place in ourselves as readers. Just as the aphorist cannot show doubt, the reader of aphorisms must believe she will one day be receptive to them. The faith, the confidence, must be on both sides. To give up a book of aphorisms as we may give up a novel damns us as much as it damns the aphorist, for in doing this we say, in effect, that we believe we will never have the right frame of mind, that we are incapable of the receptivity needed for appreciating what is in front of us. That we are fixed, and dull, and heavy of spirit.

Such were my thoughts, anyway, as I wondered whether to write about Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born. I finished it last week, and had thought it would get no blog post. There was too little underlining, too few thoughts of my own to work with. That strange aphoristic rhythm – where we read page after page before suddenly gasping at something of beauty, or wit, or profundity – was not doing anything for me. Cioran, who has found a posthumous popularity among the anti-natalist community, (“Not to be born is undoubtedly the best plan of all. Unfortunately it is within no one’s reach”), is relentlessly negative in a way that I try to avoid adopting for myself.

Only occasionally would I reach for my pencil. “No position is so false as having understood and still remaining alive” – certainly a silly view, but one well expressed. At one point he describes mankind as “fidget[ing] as if he were on the threshold of an astonishing career.” These things we can respect for their imagery, even as we chuckle from beyond the margin. (Just as Adorno wrote that there can be “no right life in the wrong”, there can be no good aphorism in wrong prose.)

Other moments required more consideration at my end. “There is no ‘ecstasy’ which either memory or imagination can resuscitate!” seems frightening in its implications about the value of our moments, and for that reason worth carrying about, seeking in life the evidence that may one day disprove it. “The jealousy of the gods survives their disappearance” is another good example of something that works for me. Even if there are no gods, nor ever were, such a phrase by its mystery makes me wonder about their value in trying to explain something about the world I live in. Just flicking through the book now, I have come across another thing to note, as if to prove my point about needing to find the right time, the right inner receptivity, for what at another moment may be so many dead words. (What a relief to find something I wrote at the beginning of this post makes sense, at least for my own case…) The aphorism in question: “Every friendship is an inconspicuous drama, a series of subtle wounds.” Here, it’s less a question of whether I agree, but whether this provokes something. Perhaps that’s another good way of looking at an aphorism – each successful one seems to carry in itself the seed of any number of novels.

Perhaps the hardest thing about aphorisms is writing about them. They ought to speak for themselves. At school I might be given one and told to go away and write 1,500 words, the length of a short blog post on this website. But to write, as I normally do, a few paragraphs on each of the above, would make me look like an idiot. (This result may occur by accident at other times, but is not the intention of the blog.) I trust readers to know how to unpack the obvious meanings of a saying. And as for the deeper meanings, the ones that come out of the wound an aphorism leaves in us – these are too personal for me to share, and I imagine are just the same for you too.

They are strange things, aphorisms. These sentences of prejudice, arrogance, at times barely-concealed anxiousness, sometimes resonating, sometimes aggravating, sometimes doing nothing at all. I wrote the first part of this post in an attempt to make myself believe the time I spent with Cioran (not the first, because I read A Short History of Decay a few years ago) was not wasted, and with the magic that is granted me as your blogger, I somehow succeeded. Reflection added meanings, brought a certain sense to stacks of nonsense. Cioran himself writes of his form: “An Aphorism? Fire without flames. Understandable that no one tries to warm himself at it.” This is a deliberate silliness, one we shouldn’t take too seriously. A mask, a play, an act.

We don’t read such things to become warm. As Kafka wrote of good books, they must “be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.” Aphorisms are for when we are cold. They are the prick of pain that tells us we’re alive, and we must keep a store of them inside us, just in case the ice is ever at risk of getting too thick.  

Smart Smut? De Sade’s Philosophy in the Boudoir

This is one of the trickier books I’ve had to review here. As it was a gift from my girlfriend, I really have no choice in the matter, however. It is certainly interesting, being the only philosophical porn book I’m ever likely to read, while also advocating philosophies that I have little personal interest in. I have read some Anais Nin, which is as close as the canon seems to get to proper erotic fiction, but de Sade is more complicated than that. Here, he is trying to make philosophical arguments and at the same time describe fairly non-standard sexual practices in as explicit and shocking a way as possible.

The two are linked, of course. Any work of philosophical fiction gains its power from using the fiction part as much as possible to bolster and enhance the philosophical part. Dostoevsky’s and Camus’ characters put their ideas into practice. In the Magic Mountain we can see the irony of the lengthy philosophical discussions being only possible because the real world is elsewhere, down the valley. So, it seems to me that the best way of writing about Philosophy in the Boudoir is to ask whether it is effective as a work of philosophical fiction. Does the “plot” work with the ideas?

De Sade himself does not really need an introduction. We know that from his name comes sadism. Even if he got up to only a fraction of what he describes in his books, he would already well deserve his poor moral reputation. A glance at his biography on Wikipedia is quite the ride.

As for Philosophy in the Boudoir, it is, as seems from my knowledge of his others, a relatively milder work. Eugenie, the girl who is gradually corrupted by the older characters, is both a willing student and at the age of 15 in most countries just around the age of consent. Nobody is murdered, though there is plenty of (consensual) whipping, and the story does end with some rape and torture which only seems mild to me because I expected something far worse!

The Story

“I’m committing both incest, adultery, and sodomy, and all that from a girl who only got devirginized today!”

At least de Sade simplifies the summarising of his tale by barely having anything to it. Madame de Saint-Ange, a libertine, meets the girl Eugénie at a convent retreat and invites her round for a debauched weekend with her – the Madame’s – brother, Chevalier, along with Dolmancé, another libertine. Over a day Eugénie is introduced to pretty much every sexual act you can imagine – from anal sex to a wide variety of poses available when there are plenty of participants. She not only loses her virginity but also learns a lot about her partners’ libertine morals. Sodomy, incest, and blasphemy are just some of the sins they all commit which today may be slightly more (some of them) acceptable than they were in late 18th century France, but which are still more than a little spine-tingling for the moral-minded among us.

Structurally, the story is almost like sex itself, with built-in refractory periods. We get “tableaux”, where the characters are arranged by Dolmancé for maximum pleasure, then they do the deed, and once they have finished and need to rest, they discuss philosophy. Rinse (I wish! – nobody washes here) and repeat.

I may not have spent time closely reading the philosophy as I would with another philosopher, but I think I have enough of a sense of the gist of it to be able to talk about it. The book is dedicated “to the libertines”; the goal is pleasure. “Listen only to those delicious passions; their source is the only one that will lead to happiness.” Essentially, the whole thing is about pleasure, which here is equated with happiness. Since pleasure is natural and nature is good, we must act in a way that aligns with nature. Pretty much everything that we deal with regularly – laws, religion, social customs – is the work of humans, and hence unnatural and ought to be the object of scorn.

Because we do not know other people, we can only trust our pleasure and ignore their pain and cries for help. Because nature does not care for us, we being tiny and irrelevant on a cosmic scale, it provides no higher guide for right conduct and no consolation for it either. Once we are old and can no longer have sex or engage in gratuitous violence, we should at least aim to have a store of pleasurable memories to look back on. The death of another is meaningless, for we all become mulch for nature to create a new life upon our deaths, so the overall balance of the living and the dead never changes. Hence murder is legitimised, including of our parents and children, as are the (alleged) pleasures of the sexual acts of things like incest and paedophilia. As soon as we recognise the absence of any authority except our own sensory pleasure and deny the existence of others’ inner worlds, we create a simplified world of pleasure available for those with the strength to take it. This is de Sade’s world.

Need I say that there’s plenty wrong with it?

I want to begin by undermining all of this using the work itself, before moving on to a more direct engagement with the significance of the ideas. The primary problem with Philosophy in the Boudoir is that its two parts, the smut and the philosophy, do not work together. This does not seem obvious at first. The philosophical text advocates for hedonism, and the story shows some people having the wildest of orgiastic pleasures, after all. But the problem is that the sex is utterly dreadful, and the characterisation so lax, that every opportunity for proving the truth of the philosophy within the bounds of the story’s world ends up doing the opposite – the story makes the philosophy look silly.

Allow me to explain. There is nothing wrong with hedonistic characters, or monsters, depending on how you look at them. Bad people exist, so that when Dolmancé declares he lit a bonfire for joy when his mother died, we can accept that. We can accept also, even, when someone says of Eugenie “What a delight to corrupt her, to suffocate in that young heart all the seeds of virtue and religion that were planted in her by her tutors!”. We’re all guilty of hamming things up from time to time.

Eugenie

But the problem, one of them, is Eugenie herself. We were all once teenagers – and many of us will have been horny teenagers. So we might think she really could be immediately corrupted by being removed from a convent and masturbated and abused for hours at a time. She might regret it afterwards, but who hasn’t, in the heat of arousal, done or thought things that the cooling water of the aftermath makes sting? No, we can tolerate that and still find her an utterly unbelievable creation. This comes across in the joints, the seams where de Sade is trying to stitch the two parts of the work together. Here is an example of one such shoddy transition:

“I’m dead, I’m shattered… I’m devastated!… but please explain two words that you’ve used and that I don’t understand. First of all: what does “womb” mean?”

Readers, I don’t know. I can accept orgiastic pleasures just as much as I can accept that a young girl in the 18th century may know very little about her own body. But the juxtaposition, this switch from post-coital exhaustion to notebook-on-lap schoolgirl is too sharp. It is laughable. Or, several orgasms later, how about: “What do you mean by that expression “whore”? I apologize, but I’m here to learn.” I know and you know damn well too. But in case readers of this blog post have become convinced that the poor girl really is just an innocent ingenu inducted rapidly into the world of physical pleasures and trying to catch up on the theory, I present the most egregious example:

“I’d like to know whether a government truly needs a set of morals, whether they can really influence the essence of a nation.” This, I am afraid, is too much for post-coital discussion. I was an annoying 15-year-old, but even I wasn’t that bad – and that was without getting laid!

Other Problems

So, Eugenie’s characterisation rather makes the whole thing silly. There are plenty of other things too. One of them is de Sade’s tendency to pat himself on the back: “I can’t tell you how persuasive you are!”. Another is that classic mistake of any erotica, the oversized male member. We might believe that the average is eight or nine inches if we are regular readers of men pretending to be women on the internet, but de Sade, long before message boards, was way ahead of them. Take the servant, Augustin, who is brought in to deliver additional male firepower: “his member is thirteen inches long and eight and a half inches around.” I leave off the absence of lube in spite of all the anal and other sex, which seems the lightest graze against the edifice of realism when set aside such blatant howlers.

The Pamphlet – a moment of realism?

By showing the pleasures of constant orgies, we might come to believe that a good life really is one where we can say with Eugenie, that “Lust is now my only god, the single measure of my conduct, the sole basis of all my actions.” Instead, de Sade is constantly undermining himself. This is nowhere more obvious than in the pamphlet that appears halfway through the book.

This is a really interesting moment. I love texts-within-texts because they can do a lot to reflect and refract what goes on around them. Purportedly a pamphlet found on the street, Dolmancé reads it to the gathered pleasure-fiends. (Allowing for the reading out of lengthy texts is a concession to unrealism I can always allow – it gave us Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, and a lot of lovely German novellas.) The pamphlet could, like the sex, bolster the philosophical arguments. By providing something similar, it could legitimise them by making them seem more widespread. By providing a, for example religious, alternative, it could allow the characters to create more finely formed counterarguments. Instead, and this is de Sade’s perennial problem, he can only talk like himself.

It begins well, or at least, it does not advocate violence, and it talks about republican virtues – virtue being hitherto a dirty word. It shares with the characters the simpler things, like a rejection of religion, for example. It is also boring and long, which has the singular advantage of making it seem more like a real pamphlet. But then de Sade’s restraint falls away, and this text too starts talking about the need for murder to be allowed, and the importance of pleasure. It just means that we are listening to the characters all over again, without the sex to make us laugh. It fails, in other words.

Concluding Complaints about Realism and Effectiveness

There are a few other things that Philosophy in the Boudoir does against itself. Its ending, where Eugenie rapes and tortures her mother, then infects her with syphilis, is unpleasant to read. It may be milder than the violence of the summary of the 120 Days of Sodom, but it still makes a reader interested in pleasure who may have enjoyed at least some of the sex go “this is too much.” To put it more simply, if de Sade wanted to be persuasive, he should have stopped earlier – instead, it seemed he was too interested in getting himself off. And it costs the book, and by extension us. But then again, perhaps de Sade didn’t want to convince – he probably just didn’t care, if he was doing his own philosophy properly!

Good bits

Now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I want to mention some qualities of the book that do make it interesting and not only the unrealistic, unrewarding picture I painted of it earlier. For one, the book is aware of its context. Written during the French Revolution, we have a sense of the Enlightenment and its consequences quite forcefully here. Eugenie has come “to be taught” – like Rousseau, de Sade is interested in education, good and bad, and is trying to advocate for a “right” version. We have a sense at times of the advancement of science and world exploration (Captain Cook is mentioned) and how these are destabilising a Eurocentric, Christian worldview.

At times, de Sade sounds a lot like Nietzsche or Freud. He has a keen, if probably more intuitive than reasoned, sense of the origins of social rules. For example, he claims incest is only considered bad because it allowed wealth concentration within families – hence people had to find a way to prevent people from marrying their siblings. By showing how other people practice murder or casual sex, (in Richard Holmes’ The Age of Wonder the section on Tahiti is extraordinary – and very sad) de Sade does successfully make his ideas seem more reasonable or acceptable. He also uses the Bible to show how incest has been acceptable or practised at one point or other, letting him both devalue the Bible a little and legitimise incest in the same swipe.

What is here would understandably be shocking to a reader in the 18th century, and is often shocking to me in the 21st. But what is exciting at the same time is how de Sade really does fall into an intellectual tradition by showing its more extreme points. He is a fool, for example, when he says that despotism in bed and despotism in the halls of power are not linked. But precisely by being that fool, he presages the fools that eventually did gain power and placed violence on a pedestal. By revealing the tendencies of the Enlightenment towards the extinguishing of ultimate truths, he’s like a horny Max Weber.

And the real problem, intellectually rather than in the sense of quality as before, is that it seems the closer to the present we get, the more de Sade seems to be saying something almost true. Sodomy and blasphemy are now well tolerated in my country. Sex is mass-marketed and widespread – you can buy toys and lube in any supermarket. Contraception means that coitus and reproduction are now divorced. Apps make casual sex even more widespread than before, while recent trends towards step-sibling porn are merely a slope that ends eventually in simulated sibling porn, and then real sibling porn.

For example, it seems to me, intellectually, that there really is no good argument against incest, provided the people involved are over the age of consent and are not groomed before then (these are gigantic if’s), and conception does not take place. It may take people out of society because of the taboo and hence social discrimination, and also the way that having a partner within one’s own home gets in the way of going out to find a mate. But we value choice, and let people legally ruin their lives in many other ways. I am not sure we will be happy with this – but what I mean by bringing it up as an example is that de Sade taught us long ago that we don’t really have good arguments against it, only feelings. Likewise, with books like Open being reviewed in the New York Times, the nuclear family continues its dissipation into a startling – or refreshing? – array of alternatives.

I am not about to say what I think of this – a piece like this is not the place for moralising. To repeat, what I am saying is that seems de Sade saw where we are going. We may get there in my lifetime or yours, but society really does seem to be slipping towards a kind of freedom where we can do everything we want, with whomever we want, provided power is sufficiently evenly distributed (through the mutual consent of people in a position to give it). It is only this check, consent, that separates the future world from the world of de Sade’s dreams. Is it a good world? I’ll admit I may have some doubts.

Another thing we must grant de Sade is that by being wrong but different, he still has value in the context of women’s rights. Women certainly were not made just to have fun having sex, but at least by questioning what women were made for de Sade makes us think women may not just be made for whatever most people thought they were made for (babies), back in the 18th century. He loosens our ideas of what is right and wrong, and if we may not like what he puts in their place we at least can get started with thinking of what we ourselves might put in their place. This, the challenging of received ideas, is never unwelcome, even when it comes in so strange a guise as here.

To conclude, then, there really are some interesting thoughts in this book. The problem is that de Sade was not willing to make his fiction and philosophy work together. He was too much writing for himself in the sex/plot scenes, to be able to allow them to speak to the rest of the work in a way that enhanced it. Do I regret reading it? At 170 pages in the Penguin translation by Joachim Neugroschel, it’s not too bad. But I cannot see myself reading de Sade again. Readers, I believe I can say I have saved you the trouble too.

Thank me later.

Wittgenstein at War – his early ethics and two extracts from his diary

Ludwig Wittgenstein was an enigma: a radical philosopher with an overriding impulse to understand how the world worked, whether that be the mechanics of aeroplane engines or the logic of language itself. He had a mind of ice, pure and clean. In 1913 he went to Norway to be alone in the mountains and focus entirely on his philosophy. He gave away all his inheritance (billions in today’s money), wore the same clothes, and ate more or less the same food, whenever he could. It seems plausible that he had autism.

Yet for all his coolness, in 1914 he enlisted voluntarily in the Austro-Hungarian army and faced combat on the Eastern front against the Russian army, where he was awarded for bravery. This same steely logician also had the habit of coming to Bertrand Russell’s rooms in Cambridge and pacing for hours into the early morning, declaring he would end his life as soon as he left, and then thinking and thinking before the exhausted Russell until he found a solution or scrap of progress that meant he returned to his rooms only to sleep.

These two Wittgensteins seem in conflict with one another, and I previously wrote about them while reviewing the excellent Wittgenstein’s Vienna, which paints a far more hot and fiery cultural and intellectual milieu for Ludwig to grow up in than his philosophy reflects at first glance. Really, though, Wittgenstein seems to me a thinker who was utterly obsessed, tormented, and battered relentlessly, by questions of meaning and action. What must we do, and why. Suddenly, every word he wrote seems to reflect the attempt to build a logical scaffolding from which better to consider and resolve these problems of action and meaning.

A Man at War

It is the Wittgenstein at war who is the topic of the piece. What happened between 1914 and the completion of the Tractatus in a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy in 1918 is fascinating. For while much of the logic of the book had been written previously, in Norway, it is here, with death a regular companion, that the sixth section of the Tractatus took shape. The “mystical”, the “higher”, all those things that so alarmed Russell when the two met after the war was over, yet which seem to have been utterly vital in the most literal sense of that word, were added during this time.

In Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Meaning of Life, edited by Joaquin Jareno-Alarcon and published earlier this year (the piece was written in late 2023), we have an incredible treasure trove of material to work with. The book aims to gather together all of Wittgenstein’s comments on ethics and religion, whether in diaries or letters, notebooks or second-hand through the memoirs of others. It gives us an incredible insight into the man, the sort that would only be available otherwise to a specialist. I keep coming back to things in it, over and over. It is here, in Wittgenstein’s most private moments, that he seems willing to fill in the gaps of the Tractatus.

The Diary

There is a curious feature to Wittgenstein’s diary of this period. On the left-hand side, we have the mundane, and on the right, he wrote his philosophy. At first, there was no link. The extracts Jareno-Alarcon selects describe Wittgenstein’s army work and his feelings. To give an example: “In post from 1-3. Slept very little.” What merits their inclusion in the collection is Wittgenstein’s inevitable referral to God and the Devil, who emerge as very real forces within Wittgenstein’s life: “It is enormously difficult to resist the Devil all the time. It is difficult to serve the Spirit on an empty stomach and when suffering from lack of sleep!” The philosopher G.E.M. Anscombe said that Wittgenstein told her he lost his faith when still a child. So how then do we explain such utterances, which are extremely regular and indeed run right through to his death?

It seems a cop-out to say merely that God is the world, i.e. the totality of facts, as it is defined in the Tractatus. Certainly it is. But these extracts show a man who is having a very real, very challenging relationship with two forces – I won’t say beings. They seem constantly on his mind. Many readers would be bored to death by the strangeness of the text if that was all there was to it. On the other side of the page, from 1914 to 1916, logic plods along and the Tractatus takes further shape. The two halves of Wittgenstein’s life, the clean precision of logic and the messiness of human reality, are separated by an impermeable barrier.

And then, on the 11th of June 1916, as the Russians conduct a major offensive on the battlefield, they not only punch through Austrian defences – they also punch through this barrier in Wittgenstein’s own world. Here is the diary entry for that day, in the philosophy column:

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?

I know that this world exists.

That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.

That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.

That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it.

That life is the world.

That my will penetrates the world.

That my will is good or evil.

Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world.

The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God. And connect with this the comparison of God to a father.

To pray is to think about the meaning of life.

I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.

I can only make myself independent of the world – and so in a certain sense master it – by renouncing any influence on happenings.

This is, as far as I am concerned, real philosophy. This is a person with a phenomenal mind trying, very hard and for themselves, to think about big questions. When I read this for the first time I felt elated, giddy. This is the kind of thing that is exciting. It was like someone was for the first time pointing at a stain that only I seemed able to see and saying “there, there it is!” And he was standing beside me. In a way, it’s probably the most serious, most personal thing I have ever read.

Another entry soon after it runs:

To believe in a God means to understand the question about the meaning of life.

To believe in a God means to see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter.

To believe in a God means to see that life has a meaning.

The world is given me, i.e. my will enters into the world completely from outside as into something that is already there.

(As for what my will is, I don’t know yet.)

That is why we have the feeling of being dependent on an alien will.

However this may be, at any rate we are in a certain sense dependent, and what we are dependent on we can call God.

In this sense God would simply be fate, or, what is the same thing: The world – which is independent of our will.

I can make myself independent of fate.

There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.

I am either happy or unhappy, that is all. It can be said: good or evil do not exist.

A man who is happy must have no fear. Not even in face of death.

Only a man who lives not in time but in the present is happy.

For life in the present there is no death.

Death is not an event in life. It is not a fact of the world.

If by eternity is understood not as infinite temporal duration but non-temporality, then it can be said that a man lives eternally if he lives in the present.

In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what “being happy” means.

I am then, so to speak, in agreement with that alien will on which I appear dependent. That is to say: “I am doing the will of God.”

Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life.

When my conscience upsets my equilibrium, then I am not in agreement with Something. But what is this? Is it the world?

Certainly it is correct to say: Conscience is the voice of God.

For example: it makes me unhappy to think that I have offended such and such a man. Is that my conscience?

Can one say: “Act according to your conscience whatever it may be”?

Live happy!

In the Tractatus, we have only a little to go on. Wittgenstein does not attempt to talk about that “about which we should be silent”, as he does here. But still, there are moments that are tantalising, which these two extracts and the others in the book explore in greater detail. Like the moment when he says, in 6.43, that “the world of the happy is a different one from that of the unhappy”, or, in 6.521, that “the solution to the problem of life is found in the vanishing of the problem.”

The ethics that we discover Wittgenstein as having during the First World War are actually not at all complex. They are, in fact, undoubtedly influenced by Tolstoy, whose Gospel in Brief Wittgenstein carried with him all through the war. Tolstoy, like Wittgenstein, came to value the conscience highly. Both men struggled, throughout their lives, with an overpowering sense of guilt, which partly explains it.

Thinking about life as a stage

Yet what does Wittgenstein actually say? What is his vision of the world here? With the help of an influential essay by Eddy Zemach on “Wittgenstein’s philosophy of the mystical” and an extended metaphor, we can perhaps summarise. The facts of the world are as they are. We arrive upon a stage which has been set out already, ready for us to play out our role. God is not a person – God is the stage, we can say. God is the world, is the arrangement of all things that we have to make use of while we perform – “we are dependent on what we can call God.” If there were no world, there would be nothing at all to stand on.

It is mysterious that there is a world at all. How things are, that’s not a problem. (6.52, “We feel that even if all possible scientific questions were answered, the problems of life would remain completely untouched”). Science can explain the world just fine – its composition, its creation even back at the Big Bang. The world, the entire universe and all the things in it, are again this stage, or perhaps an entire theatre. But we cannot see beyond the stage. No matter what discoveries we make, we are limited in this. Yet we may have a sense that there is something more, something that cannot be explained – why there is a stage at all. Indeed, on stages people perform. Yet what are we to perform and why?

“There are two godheads: the world and my independent I.” We come into the world and like it, or have a problem with it. If we have a problem, we are not happy. Our unhappiness can be reconsidered as a feeling that if we were to die, we would be upset as death approached. “Fear in face of death is the best sign of a false, i.e. a bad, life.” This fear is the result of a bad conscience, and bad conscience is finding that we are not living in a way that is harmonious with things. We go around the stage, frustrated at the chairs and tables placed on it. We constantly stub our toes on the world as it merely is.

The way to be happy is to accept the world. To use the chairs as chairs, to sit at the table, to play a role that the stage allows. Wittgenstein’s idea in this period is that we must follow our conscience, while also accepting the world as it comes to us. It is obvious that such a view comes easily from the experience of war, where we come face to face with evil and death and pointless suffering with a monotonous regularity. If we accept this state of things, then that’s part of the way to happiness cleared up – the world does not upset us.

The next stage is to follow our conscience. Once we accept things, we need to know how to act. Also, just as we can get the world to stop upsetting us by accepting it, we can get ourselves to stop upsetting us, by aligning ourselves with our conscience. Asking our conscience what to do will let us act in a way that is right to us, so that if we were to face death we could not say to ourselves that we had done something wrong. There can be no guilt to expiate if we were true to our own obligations, as we felt them.

In entries both before and after the war, Wittgenstein struggles with the voice of his own conscience, because it places great demands on him. For example, he feels he must write a confession of his sins and give it to all his friends. He does not do this, and so he makes himself miserable. But unlike with one’s attitude to the world, our conscience seems harder to change. And so, we are better off following it.

“I am conscious of the complete unclarity of all these sentences.” What we have here are just ideas that Wittgenstein toyed with as he faced the Russians’, and then the Italians’ bullets and bombs. We can see stoicism, but more than that we will recognise the influence of Schopenhauer, whose ethics consists simply of extinguishing one’s own desires while trying to reduce the suffering of others. Wittgenstein’s ethics shares the idea that one should not desire for things to be other than they are, while emphasising the importance of one’s conscience in inevitably leading us to help others, presuming our souls retain the ability to see and mourn their sufferings.

We can and should ask whether these ideas survive the battlefield. By the time the war ends, it seems that Wittgenstein has indeed stopped thinking philosophically about God and wills. “Let’s cut out the transcendental twaddle when the whole thing is as plain as a sock on the jaw”, he writes to a friend, Paul Engelmann, in 1918. And there must be a reason why the Tractatus itself is so quiet on these things. (Because we are not supposed to talk about them, perhaps). Yet as we read beyond the bounds of this post’s timeframe, we find that Wittgenstein the individual does not move on. He is still coming back to overwhelming feelings of guilt, to the falsity and baseness of his desires, and he is still talking about “God” and the “Devil” in ways that seem to go beyond just considering these two synonyms for words like “fate”.

Now, as a way of living, we might find plenty of problems with this worldview. It may not seem true to our experience. We may note that war, in fact, can easily warp and ruin the conscience, in a way that seems unacceptable to those who haven’t experienced it, but which does not matter to those who have. (Someone with a ruined conscience cannot really understand what they’ve lost). Yet enough of these ideas appeal to me that I keep coming back to them. Though he does seem to have had a life of torment and personal struggle, given his conscience and sense of guilt I doubt Wittgenstein could have survived existence any other way. Perhaps we should take him at his word when, dying, he said “tell my friends I’ve had a wonderful life.”

Conclusion

I spend a lot of time myself in conflict with my own conscience. Most of my wasted and hence ultimately saddest moments come from ineffectual attempts to avoid my conscience, numbing it in various ways. If I were to face death now, I am not sure I would manage it well. Not primarily because I would be upset for those I leave behind – for like Wittgenstein, your blogger is on a certain spectrum – but because I know that there are falsities in my life that require remedy. I would regret, and regret much.

A friend of the family is a doctor in Switzerland, the sort whose patients are extremely wealthy and mostly on their way out. According to them, most of their patients scream on their deathbed, a little like Ivan Ilyich. I tend to see this as an indication that the kind of life that leads to you dying wealthy in Switzerland is often incompatible with the Last Judgement (another phrase Wittgenstein used wholly seriously, funnily enough) you make of yourself and your life. It is certainly something to consider as we make decisions about careers, families, and related matters.

There are other explanations, of course. If we truly love life, we will be loathe to part with it. We may be upset for our loved ones, losing us. But in any case, considering whether we have a bad conscience, or whether we would scream and scream if death came suddenly to us in the near future, is probably a good rule-of-thumb when assessing our own lives. Given it’s almost the New Year as I finish this post, it’s the perfect time to audit ourselves.