Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

What is attractive about Ludwig Wittgenstein is that he was a real genius. I did not gallop through Ray Monk’s Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius because I wanted to know about Wittgenstein’s philosophy – I did it because I wanted to know about the man. Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language are worth knowing about, sure, but certainly not near the top of the pile of philosophies I want to have a grasp of. Though Monk’s biography gave me some sense of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, the focus here was more on his life. This approach works because, for me at least, the parts of Wittgenstein’s thought that are most interesting are precisely those that came from his life – such as the way the mystical sections of the Tractatus came from Wittgenstein’s experience in the First World War.

Rather than summarise a summary of Wittgenstein’s thoughts, I thought I’d note here the parts of his life that struck me as particularly entertaining, saddening, or interesting. Being such a unique personality, Wittgenstein provides plenty of all three.

The Briefest of Biographical Summaries

Wittgenstein was born in Vienna to one of the richest of all Austrian families and had an extremely privileged upbringing. But the Vienna he was born into, at the tail end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s life, was not a happy place producing happy people. I counted at least five suicides in the first chapter of Monk’s book alone – three of them Wittgenstein’s brothers. Our hero moves to England for his studies, meets a number of philosophers including Bertrand Russell who all eventually come to consider him a genius. He spends time in Norway and as a soldier, works as a teacher and gardener, goes back to Cambridge to teach, helps out in the Second World War behind the scenes, and finally dies. Given that the lives of most philosophers are little more interesting than that of Immanuel Kant, who never left his province, Wittgenstein’s life of action is rather exciting.

Genius and its Duty

One thing making Wittgenstein interesting is that he was not a scientist and did not see philosophy as scientific. Instead, he approached philosophy creatively. At one point he shocked the boring old gits of the Vienna Circle of philosophers by recommending they read Heidegger and Kierkegaard. He also lectured primarily using the power of inspiration, standing in the lecture hall or else pacing until a thought came to him, and then announcing it to enraptured onlookers. Most importantly, Wittgenstein’s whole character was artistic. Monk quotes Russell here:

“His disposition is that of an artist, intuitive and moody. He says every morning he begins his work with hope, and every evening he ends in despair.”

At another point Russell had Wittgenstein pace up and down his room for three hours in silence before Russell finally asked: “Are you thinking about logic or your sins?” “Both,” Wittgenstein replies, and continues his pacing. 

The language of sins is surprising to people who like me think of Wittgenstein as a boring logician. In reality, Wittgenstein was of a decidedly religious sensibility. His major influences appear to be Tolstoy and Dostoevsky – Hadji Murat and The Brothers Karamazov are just two of several books by the authors that Wittgenstein adored and passed out among his friends. Acquaintances compared him to Levin from Anna Karenina and Prince Myshkin from The Idiot. Though he was raised a Catholic, Wittgenstein did not believe in the Church’s dogmas, even as he believed in a kind of God and definitely believed in his own sinfulness.

Sin, for Wittgenstein (as it was for Tolstoy), was determined by his own conscience: “The God who in my bosom dwells”. What Wittgenstein feared most of all was judgement – “God may say to me: “I am judging you out of your own mouth. Your own actions have made you shudder with disgust when you have seen other people do them.”” He was never happy with himself. He expected nothing less than perfection from himself, that beautiful but impossible congruence between one’s thoughts and one’s actions. At one point he made a confession to all of his friends in an attempt to rid himself of his pride. Instead, he just annoyed them. Few were interested in listening to all of his minor failings.

But Wittgenstein believed that he had a duty to be perfect – the duty of genius that Monk uses as his biography’s title. By perfect I do not mean in conduct so much as in the sense of squeezing out of himself as much philosophy as possible, by any means possible. At one point Wittgenstein was struggling from overwork, but rather than take a break as his friends suggested, he decided to try hypnotherapy to help him concentrate even more successfully. At another point he decides to abandon the world to live in a hut in Norway and write philosophy.

Russell, ever sensible, warns him against it:

“I said it would be dark, & he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, & he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad & he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)”

Wittgenstein does not listen. He does not listen to anybody at all. In many ways he reminded me of Tolstoy, who like him was sceptical of doctors and medicine, and had an all-consuming desire to be perfect: “How can I be a logician before I’m a human being! Far the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself!”

And Wittgenstein is miserable as a result: “My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed.”

As he gets older Wittgenstein mellows in some ways, thanks in part to his loves, male and female. The sheer obstinacy of his youth is less visible, and there is less of the humorous, if sad, determination to ignore everyone else’s opinions or suggestions. 

A photo of Ludwig Wittgenstein
Rather than reading this piece one should really just stare at this face for five minutes or so. I cannot be alone in thinking that Wittgenstein’s gaze pierces into the soul.

The Dark Side of Genius

Wittgenstein’s perfectionist demands upon himself were ones that affected everyone around him, and rarely positively. He shows a remarkable lack of concern for others’ feelings and emotions, especially those of his partners. Even though when asked how to improve the world he declared that all we could do was improve ourselves, his attempts at self-improvement rarely seem to improve either him or the world. He loses friends at every turn – including Russell himself. His vaguely Tolstoyan ideal of a good life – working with one’s hands while developing spiritually – is not one he himself follows, stuck in Cambridge, but is one he forces on others, including Francis Skinner, one of his partners.

When Wittgenstein actually encounters “the common man”, said man rarely proves the best of us. Wittgenstein dislikes his soldierly comrades in the Austro-Hungarian army, and during his years of teaching in the mountains of rural Austria he ends up being a dreadful teacher for anyone lacking ability. Wittgenstein preferred to use fists to ensure mathematics got into his pupils’ heads, rather than patient and repeated explanations. At one point he even knocks a poor child unconscious, for which he is taken to court.

As for the intelligent people in his life, they are rarely treated by Wittgenstein to any greater kindness or concern. Of one friend he said: “he shows you how far a man can go who has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.” When another writes to him, wishing him well in his work and social endeavours, Wittgenstein responds especially pleasantly: “It is obvious to me that you are becoming thoughtless and stupid. How could you imagine I would ever have “lots of friends”?” And indeed, after reading such a letter, how could we doubt his social abilities?

Wittgenstein’s determination to destroy himself in the name of perfection ruined any chance at happiness, even though he thought that perfection would be what would finally provide him with it. In this Wittgenstein is no different from many other depressed people, your blogger included, who set themselves impossible tasks and achieve nothing but their own misery thereby. I found one moment particularly amusing in connection with this. Wittgenstein finally sees a doctor for some exhaustion and pain he was suffering from and gets given some vitamins. Once he takes them, he immediately recovers and returns to work. Rather than lying in his moral failings, perhaps his inability to work could have just lain in his poor health. However, in his determination to see everything through the lens of his own sinfulness, Wittgenstein obviously never considered the possibility that he might just need to live a little more healthily, eat well and sleep.

Conclusion

Wittgenstein wrote that “the way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that will make what is problematic disappear”. It’s a good idea, but Wittgenstein clearly chose the wrong way to live. Clearly? Wittgenstein achieved a great deal, his work revolutionised philosophy, and on his deathbed he was able to request that his friends be told he’d “had a wonderful life”. Alas, his life rather epitomises that dreadful, unbridgeable divide between happiness and achievement. The best happiness demands limited goals, while the greatest goals demand the sacrifice of (at least) part of our happiness. We may read Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius and say that Wittgenstein really just needed some good meds and some CBT for his OCD and other problems, but somehow that doesn’t sound quite right to me.

Would he have been able to work so well if he did not have this way of life, this drive? Wittgenstein was a genius – he had a self-appointed duty to destroy himself in the quest for a better way of philosophising. What is important is that Wittgenstein could squeeze more philosophy out of himself. Can we, depressed perfectionists, really hope to achieve that much more by destroying ourselves, or should we just cut our losses and be sensible, care about ourselves and the world, and eventually find that thing that others talk so lovingly about – happiness?

I don’t know.

Søren Kierkegaard – The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, like so many other thinkers of their time, saw their century as one engulfed by a crisis of faith. But whereas Nietzsche aimed to destroy the last remnants of a rotting Christianity to build a world where values might be reimagined, Kierkegaard attempted to create a new, fresh, and serious Christianity to take the place of the old and moribund one. In The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air we have three discourses analysing the famous biblical Sermon on the Mount. They fit into Kierkegaard’s larger goal of answering “what it is to be a human being”, especially from a “godly standpoint”, by teaching us a little about silence, obedience, and joy. Where Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous work always aims at making us think, here the goal is almost the opposite – here he wants us to act and change our lives.

I still have not decided yet whether I liked this short book. Kierkegaard places huge demands upon his listeners to act and be true Christians, demands which are unlikely to appeal to anyone who is not devout already. For those wavering, Kierkegaard has very little time. His faith is an all-or-nothing affair. But that does not mean that this work is without interest to the rest of us.

First Discourse: Silence

In the Sermon on the Mount we are called to consider, among other things, the lilies in the field and the birds of the air. From this pair Kierkegaard draws the lessons of The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air. The first discourse looks at the pair as a source of silence and explains why silence is important.

First, however, we are introduced to the character of the poet. The poet represents an inauthentic relationship with nature masquerading as an authentic one. Society, Kierkegaard thinks, is full of people who listen to the Bible and would like to follow its teachings. However, they do not even try to do so because they believe such a life would be impossible. The poet dramatizes the wish to live religiously, thus obscuring the fact that it is actually possible. We must stop listening to poets and start listening to the silence of the animals.

Humans are gifted with speech, but we must learn to keep silence. The reason is that “becoming silent, silent before God, is the beginning of the fear of God”. And fearing God is a good thing – it draws us nearer to Him and His kingdom. The first step to reaching God is to be silent – not to do anything other than cease talking. Our speech is dangerous, it distorts our situation. The lily suffers, but does not speak, whereas a human suffers and talks and makes their suffering all the greater. “In this silence, the many thoughts of wishing and desiring fall silent in the fear of God”. In our silence we perceive God, we remind ourselves of Him and make ourselves small before Him. Poets may talk of silence, but they seek it in order to talk about it. Their search is dishonest, the opposite of what is needful.

Ceasing to think, to speak, is to become like the birds and lilies. They live entirely in the moment, untroubled – and through silence we too can live orientated towards the moment at hand. There is a lot here that reminds me of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, which I looked at earlier. The creatures, unlike us humans, are capable of repetition – they have faith that things will repeat, without needing to worry and distract themselves from the now before them.

Second Discourse: Obedience

Silence leads to the fear of God which leads to His Kingdom – that is the idea of the first discourse. The second takes us further by confronting us with a choice – an either/or. Either God or whatever we want, but not a God who is a half-measure. For Kierkegaard, if we think we can combine God with other interests, other choices, that means that we have a false conception of Him. In fact, if we don’t give God our everything, he continues, that means we hate Him. Wait a minute, you might say, that’s ridiculous. But Kierkegaard says that what God demands is “obedience, unconditional obedience”.

The lily and the bird are teachers of obedience. They do not complain about the circumstances of their birth; instead, they accept everything as God’s will. They then blossom or flourish as best they can, given whatever situation they find themselves in. We humans complain, we despair at our brief time alive – and all this disobedience gets in the way of us becoming who God wants us to be. It also makes us vulnerable to temptation. “Where there is ambivalence, there temptation is” and “where ambivalence is… deep down there is also disobedience”.

Accepting everything our authority tells us on faith, allowing no doubts or disobedience, and trusting that later we will learn the reasons behind these injunctions – how little such suggestions must appeal to a modern reader! If you are a Christian already, Kierkegaard is describing a harsh but honest way of living in a way that pleases God; but if you are not one, then this is just sinister and authoritarian rubbish, the kind of thing we’d expect from our dictators. And if you are on the fence now, in the twenty-first century, Kierkegaard is just going to push you right off into scepticism. But perhaps that’s what he’d want.   

Third Discourse: Joy

After all the business with the silence and the unconditional obedience, how happy we readers are to learn about joy! For after all, in spite of the suffering of the animals, they are actually joyous. In fact, they are “unconditionally joyful, are joy itself”. The best kind of joy for Kierkegaard is a state of being rather than a temporary state. He defines it as when one is “truly to be present to oneself” – that is, when one is silent about the future and past, and instead focused entirely upon one’s own existence within the present. He even says that “Joy is the present time”. The birds and lilies are joyous because they exist in the present.

But it is more complicated than that. After all, how could the creatures both “bear so infinitely deep a sorrow” while remaining happy? Because – and here Kierkegaard says something that sounds impressive, if nothing else – they cast all their care and sorrow upon God. With the help of faith, they offload all of their cares onto God, which empties them of their worries, and leaves only joy remaining. And even if there is only a little joy there, the absence of sorrow means that this joy will seem huge. Anyone can be happy, so long as they have no sorrow – that is the message. And from the creatures we can learn how to hurl or sorrows onto God – we can learn “dexterity”.

Conclusions

We have no excuses for not being proper, Christian Christians, in Kierkegaard’s view. Even in the midst of society one can still be a proper Christian, because birds group together, yet they still show unconditional obedience, are joyous, and are silent – and people are basically birds. If we too show unconditional obedience, unconditional joy, and silence our spirits, then we can abide in God – we can temporarily take part in the eternity which is God’s time. What a rousing conclusion, ay, readers?

As for me, I am not convinced. Or rather, I think that Kierkegaard’s description of a truly Christian way of living in The Lily of the Field and The Bird of the Air is both fascinating and repulsive at the same time. He smashes any suggestion that anything other than a life lived entirely for God can be a godly life, and for most of us wavering moderns this is a commitment far greater than what we are capable of.

At the same time, we can take away things from this piece. The value of silence is universal, and so too is the value of orientating ourselves towards the present. But as for the middle section, the authoritarianism and recommendation of political and social quietism are more curiosities, than things I hope we may actually want to learn from.

If you want more authoritarianism, you can read my comments on some essays by Thomas Carlyle. If you want more Kierkegaard, here’s my piece on Repetition. 

Machado de Assis – Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

A Brazilian and grandson of slaves, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis is probably the most important Portuguese-language writer of the past two-hundred years. When I asked my director of studies for recommendations for South American literature – beyond the usual suspects – she named various people, but when she mentioned Machado and this novel specifically, she spoke with such passion that I really had no excuse not to go out and get a copy. Also translated as Epitaph of a Small Winner, I read Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas in the recent translation by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson, though there is also a new Penguin translation too.

There are many reasons for having a go with this book. It is short and immensely readable thanks to its equally short chapters; it is funny; it has an interesting narrative approach; and it tells a story whose messages remain valid a hundred years later – and will remain valid, I don’t doubt, for many hundreds of years yet.

The novel is the life story of the titular Brás Cubas, written by himself from beyond the grave, where he lies festering. Being dead allows him a certain degree of perspective on his life, but this is not the dramatic perspective of, say, the dying Ivan Ilyich, who realises that his entire world was a dreadful bourgeois lie. Instead, Brás Cubas gains just enough perspective to criticise the world, but not enough to properly criticise himself. As a result, there are two layers of irony here – first Brás Cubas ironises his world, and then the author ironises Brás Cubas. And what was Brás Cubas’s life? An affair, bachelorhood, and some politics. But how wonderfully is all that story told!

Style

Let’s begin with the style. After all, it’s unmissable. Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas is written in a style that is self-consciously imitative of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and de Maistre’s Voyage Around My Room, but with an additional “harsh, bitter sentiment” – a kind of pessimism about human nature. What I mean is that the text knows it is a text: there are chapters that ask to be deleted, chapters that ask to be inserted elsewhere, and the reader is a regular partner in Brás Cubas’s narration. He is always talking to us, advising us, telling us what we think. His preface is wonderfully short because that’s the best way to “win the sympathy of… popular opinion”, and he regularly suggests that if we don’t like the book we can simply get rid of it – “the main problem with this book is you, the reader”.

Although the story of Brás Cubas’s life is told in a fragmentary, if realist, style, these chapters are then further broken up by more philosophical ones, including a selection of our narrator’s finest aphorisms, and comments on the construction of the book itself. Not for nothing does Brás Cubas refer to his book and style as akin to “a pair of drunkards” staggering down a street. Chapters and approaches never overstay their welcome – most are no longer than a page. What is more, the style is funny. At one point a character is discoursing tediously so our narrator announces his decision to cut him off and get on with the narration.

But at the same time, within the style itself there is already a hint of the pessimism that characterises the work. Brás Cubas’s mother dies and he cannot properly mourn her because he feels an obligation to move on to a happier chapter. After another death he lists various things he saw at a funeral – “this may seem like a simple inventory, but these were actually notes I took for a sad, rather trite chapter I won’t now write”. Brás Cubas’s disdain for these things, and a certain sense that he doubts the reader is interested, means that he ends up unable to write seriously about almost anything – the style and self-consciousness of what readers apparently want all end up reinforcing his own sad self-centredness.

Worms

Brás Cubas dedicates his novel to those worms that have been enjoying his decomposing corpse, and worms are a significant image throughout the novel. They are those things that drive us and eat away at our minds – negative things, mostly, such as ambition, vanity, and greed. There are few good characters in the novel. Old friends rob our main character or else steal his money in more indirect ways. Everyone is obsessed by a good political position, and even Brás Cubas’s own family is not exempt from these things. His father has told a pleasant lie about the family’s origins so much that he has now forgotten the rather more boring truth, while even the Brás Cubas’s priestly uncle is full of pride, hoping the child will turn out to be a great and powerful member of the clergy.

Our narrator himself is in no way exempt from all this. In fact, he’s more interested in justifying himself than anything else. At several points, he mentions his theory about “windows” in one’s conscience. Put briefly, it suggests that one good deed, however small, is more than adequate for cancelling out the awkward feelings created by a bad one. Brás Cubas uses this to justify all sorts, and especially his illicit affair with a friend’s wife.

Slaves

These worms draw our attention to the essential rottenness of the world, at least as Brás Cubas sees it. Another example of that, albeit one hidden behind a few of the text’s layers, is slavery. The novel was published in about 1881, and slavery in Brazil was only abolished a few years later (!). In the text slavery is regularly present, but often only in the background. Brás Cubas describes how, as a boy of six, he would take a slave “and I would place a rope between his teeth as a bridle, climb onto his back, and then, with a stick in my hand, I would whip him and make him carry me hither and thither”. This got an “ugh” in the margins of my copy, but it gets worse.

We encounter the same slave when our narrator is an adult, and by this time the slave is a free man. Brás Cubas meets him on the street, where the former slave is busy lashing a slave of his own in broad daylight. Our narrator explains the situation thus – “it was Prudencio’s way of ridding himself of all the beatings he had received, by passing them on to someone else”. There is no moral judgement of slavery in the text, certainly not by our narrator, but with comments like these the novel makes us aware of how violence perpetuates itself, not exactly to our world’s credit.

At the same time, our heroic narrator – who is anything but – discusses his own “slavery” to love. Oh, how hard it is to have a lover! He does spend a lot of money on her, true, but nevertheless I would still say that such a situation is slightly better than being someone else’s chattel. It is a ridiculous comparison – we can’t help but notice it. And it forms another aspect of the novel’s general view of humanity as not in a particularly good state – greedy, self-centred, and ultimately cruel.

Our Heroic Narrator

Towards the end of the novel there is a chapter, not containing any words, called “How I did not become minister of state”. And indeed, aside from his romance, there’s very little that might be called a success in Brás Cubas’s life. We do not notice, perhaps, for although this story is full of a certain emptiness – the wreckage of so many disappointed ambitions – Brás Cubas’s narrative style manages to make hollow “somethings” out of so many failures to do or achieve anything. At the end, Brás Cubas is pleased that he did not, at least, have any children, “and thus did not bequeath to any creature the legacy of our misery”.

The whole book is funny and silly, but it is still a highly pessimistic work. People live dreadful lives – the women all seem to die early, or die in poverty, or both, with their only chance at salvation being marriage to a rich man. This is easier said than done, given our hero rejects one girl because she has a lame foot. And indeed, Brás Cubas, for all his faults – at one point, he describes taking the dead to the cemetery as not unlike “taking money to the bank” – does not appear any worse, morally speaking, than the other characters. Everyone here is ambitious, and unable to show any concern for the lives of others. Why on earth were we born, our author seems to ask. Yes, if it weren’t so funny, this whole story would be rather depressing.

Conclusion – Layers of Irony

What redeems this pessimism is the feeling that that’s not all there is to Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. The world he describes is cutthroat, money-driven, and incredibly petty. And he himself, for all his hindsight now that he is dead, still remains wedded to those values that he had had during his life. Only the sense that Brás Cubas does not quite understand all that he says saves him and his story. We have a feeling that Machado de Assis is hiding behind him, showing us that not all he says needs to be taken at face value, and that what drives our narrator – his vanity and the rest of it – need not drive us all. Life is more than political positions and making money and good marriages, and Brás Cubas’s own life – his bachelorhood and political failure – demonstrate that, even if he does not quite notice it himself.

Short, funny, serious, it’s well worth reading.