My Job, My Life, My Blog

After my birthday dinner in November, my friends remarked, though not to me directly, that they had never seen me so happy. That really is a most extraordinary thing. I have been many things to many people, but happy? Not often. Entertaining, exciting, supportive, intense – those might fit, but not “happy.” At my worst I am depressive, moody, snappy. For people to notice, and be so shocked as to mention it to my girlfriend, must mean it was a real surprise. Indeed, the whole thing has been quite a surprise to me too.

In September, I started full time work. With Marx and Marcuse at the ready, I was so prepared to be alienated and miserable that I was completely blindsided by what actually happened. The work was interesting, my colleagues were brilliant and good fun, the company paid me well and gave generously into my pension, while allowing me great flexibility about when and where I worked. I quickly made friends with a few people in my team, and with several people from the same graduate intake as mine. I had time to meet them in the afternoons at the office café for free hot chocolate, and even hang out after work. I travelled to our headquarters in Germany a few times, and visited a power plant in the UK, walking around in a hard hat and covering my ears with a gleeful expression on my face as I tried not to be utterly overwhelmed by all the loud exciting noises.

Normally, when I go into work, I use the bus. From my family’s home, it’s a fifteen minute walk through the fields to get to the bus stop. In the mornings, the grass is slick with dew and you can smell the changing of the seasons. On the bus I read, and usually on the walk back I’ll call my girlfriend, who is just finishing off her studies at Cambridge. At home I have little enough time to sense its value, but just about enough time to make use of that knowledge and spend it well. Bizarrely, after many months of day-to-day freedom, I found myself reading far more, and far better. I even found myself writing, completing two stories late last year by getting an evening routine going. In November, I started running in the mornings too. Though I cannot say I always enjoy this, I’m glad I’m doing it.

A night or two each week I still teach a few Ukrainian refugees in the UK online as part of the charity my girlfriend and I set up. At this point, if their English isn’t good, there’s no helping them. But I have fun and so do they. On weekends I can travel to London or further afield. All told, I am managing to maintain a decent social life, given I’m not in London full time. And given I’m not in London full time, I’m able to put away a nice amount of my salary into savings.

So that is it on paper. A job that pays well, where I have a positive impact and career growth, travel and freedom, a good pension and nice colleagues. I have regular exercise, a wonderful girlfriend, a much loved social circle, some active participation in making the world a better place, and time for reading and creativity. Life is, perhaps as it’s never been before, good.

So why do I find myself asking if this is all there is to it?

We can approach the problem of our lives in at least two ways, psychologically and philosophically. I have been reading philosophical fiction, and now philosophy, for far longer than is perhaps healthy. But the main problem that we soon run into, clutching our copy of Crime and Punishment in the school medical centre while waiting for a checkup, is that Dostoevsky and his friends don’t actually have much to say to us, just yet. We may relate to questions of free will and meaning, but they are inevitably abstracted, airy – just like how we don’t really understand what it means when we read in introductions that Dostoevsky had gambling debts. All of these questions and answers about how to live our lives, even Rilke’s “live the questions for now” in his Letters to a Young Poet, require that one is actually living.

And living is an active thing. It is also a thing that requires, I think, certain life conditions. We cannot live at school, or even at university. We require a choice to live, and we require consequences. We may have to face our consequences all the time, but only rarely in the sense of consequences that last our entire lives. It was only when I was in an office with the odd fifty-year-old that I realised the impact of exercise and healthy eating can have as we age; and how undesirable the alternative is, as I watched the older colleagues shuffling around with the same kind of pace and face I’d expect at a retirement home. At school we make decisions about how we learn, in the holidays we establish good or bad habits, but it takes a great deal of wisdom to see through them all the way to their ultimate consequences. I certainly didn’t, and now I have plenty of regrets for my thousands of hours in Call of Duty matches.  

We have choices at university and school, but these are still fairly bounded. We can mess up our schoolwork and get kicked out, but this is like Sartre saying we always have a choice because we can always kill ourselves. It’s laughably irrelevant. Or rather, provided we make the decision to actually study, there’s only so much choice left. Just like, if we make the decision to fail, there’s only then a choice about how to fail. At the other end, in life, there are many more choices. Some of them rest on what’s come before – I cannot immediately become a doctor, for example. But most of them come to us with the freedom of a quest in Skyrim or any other role-playing game – we can choose whatever we want to do. Suddenly, a vastly increased weight of responsibility – for fitness of mind and body, for our social circles, for where and how we live and work and spend our time – is hurled upon us. Not everyone has to decide all of these things all at once, but the decisions come, and often sooner than we expect.

If the choices and the consequences were always there, as I now see they perhaps were, then what I mean is that once you are out of it all you can gain a wisdom you might have missed earlier. And some people miss it then too. But you’re on my blog, so probably haven’t. The wisdom is the knowledge that things you do matter. Now, at last, we can do philosophy.

It’s a bitter irony that the best times in our lives for reading philosophy, when our minds are most subtle (and supple) and our time most flexible, are inarguably the worst times for doing philosophy. Of course, I can kill a pawnbroker at any time, but as I age I am more interested in practical philosophies that will not send me to prison. I want to try Schopenhauerian ethics and annihilate my willing; I want to live the way Nietzsche’s works make us hope he does; I want to read Camus and Sartre and try it all out for myself; I want to be so religious my clothes stink of incense; I want to walk the world over with only Walt Whitman for company, looking like a tramp. Now I can start to put these things into practice.

Here is where that psychological element comes in. The problems of life that I face now are mine. If before, when I was depressed, I could often blame someone or something else directly, now I am in control. I could always say I’m not happy because I’m not doing meaningful work, or because I’m not seeing my friends enough and can’t, or because I’m not exercising. With all of those things sorted, any problem that remains – and there is one – is real. The easy solutions have been tried, now life is at hand. The diffuse problems of society and economics, these too are there in the background, but divided now from the mush of poor mental health that comes with living badly, as it were. I can see them, and I can allow myself whatever anguish they will cause – for example, when I decide to rent in London and have to deal with that mess.

So when I feel this this-is-it-ness, it’s deeper than just some unkind word taken to heart on the playground or a shut door at university where I expected an embrace. It is the world I have a problem with, and the world I must answer. The problem, it goes without saying, is that although I am doing everything I am supposed to, something is still missing. I have started thinking about death at night, and the repetition of days. “Days are where we live”, as Philip Larkin has it. And seeing my days not being right, still having some hole – that’s a problem, and one I am responsible for sorting out.

To resolve it, I can look at my life and begin tinkering with it. Should I do more writing? Maybe write to some literary magazines? Or is the running not enough? I feel disgusted with myself for eating meat still – can I finally give it up or properly cut it down? (Living at home, this is hard. When I move to Germany at the end of the month, then it will be all on me). Can I see my friends more? What about calling my brother? And so on. We approach life as if it is a PC we have built, and begin moving the wires around, occasionally adding some RAM or something else here and there, and see what works. It feels almost fun, like a game.

Then there are the stronger remedies, like the bizarre ones my Polish girlfriend gets recommended when she calls her grandparents with a slight sniffle (drinking onion syrup or placing a bulb of peeled garlic next to your pillow, to mention a few). These remedies are philosophical. Is my attitude right? Am I heeding the voice of my conscience? Or should I, on the contrary, just grab a pillow and suffocate the voice instead? Then there are wild lifestyle changes – why not try being properly Epicurean, or properly Stoic? Visit a monastery? Should I give all my money away? With these too, there’s an element of play involved. And a worth goal – our own happiness, or satisfaction, or soothed conscience, or peace. (After all, the goal is itself a question for the philosophers).

The general feeling is one of excitement. Life is real, and its problems are real, and the solutions are worth trying. Never have I felt so much joy from a cutting phrase in Weil or Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein or Weber. Like a child in a toyshop who can’t wait to get home and unbox the latest toy tractor, when I hear a cool idea I can’t wait to think it over properly, to live it, and to see whether it works. That is what explains my obsession with Wittgenstein these past few months – I am trying to live some of what he says. I’m not reading for essays anymore, not even for blog posts. (Apologies!) The sheer weightiness of my decisions, made day after day, suffocate me like a stone upon my chest. Yet at the same time, suffocation entails dizziness. And I am madly lightheaded!  

Life is so sweet when we know that this is it. Without excuses, with all responsibility heaped on, every joy is magnified. To look at a tree and run my hand over its rough bark is a pleasure I’ve never felt so richly before. I go through art galleries almost at a blind run, and then allow myself an hour before a painting that takes my breath away and reaches right through to my soul and makes it bleed. I live – more and more I am living. Even if the regrets are magnified too, because nothing now will ever replace the lost time, still I am living. Suddenly, I can say to myself “da capo” and mean it. I find myself growing strong enough to confront my regrets and my mistakes – not all of them, by any stretch – and tell them and myself that it was worthwhile. Life is good.

This insane post is an attempt to work out what I am feeling. The this-is-it-ness of life is frightening and I still do not have a solution to the thought of death. I am working on it. I am living and trying everything I can and not letting it get too much for me. Because this is the real problem and challenge of my days. One is rising and falling on a see-saw above the abyss. We can be elated, and find our excitement from the urgency and seriousness of the search, or we can be rendered miserable by the emptiness of all things as we confront the void. The latter is what happened to Tolstoy, but even he managed to get out of it. I know how he did it too – I’ve got his letters even, and I’m making notes, and maybe one day you’ll see a photo of me in one of my posts, my beard grown out and a roughhewn walking stick in hand. (Be careful though, that might be the Whitman phase!)

These thoughts and reflections, if they deserve that title, are best, I realise anyway, to have when you are not too old. I am now twenty-six, and not old by any stretch, but there are times when I do feel a bit un-young. Leaving aside the body, my memory is ever-so-slightly weaker and my ability to work with complex ideas is decreasing a bit too, from the baseline of my manic teenage years. I am not sure I could work my way through the Critique of Pure Reason anymore, even if I wanted to. Luckily, I don’t think this will be a problem.

If I had come to the realisation that I needed to change my life too late, I might have found I lacked the strength of mind and will to actually do anything. Tolstoy latched onto religion and stopped thinking. But he did a heck of a lot of thinking before he got to that point, as even his mature religious writings show. I, anyhow, have time and energy to live. To take us back to the beginning, part of that is thanks to having been very lucky in ending up with the job I did. I know that my consultant friend at Bain, or was it BCG, who is much cleverer than me and knows her Russian literature as well as I do, doesn’t have the time to do any thinking any more. That, to me, is a real waste.

Anyway, against the this-is-it-ness of things, and the void in the far distance, I am trying to keep myself excited. I hope the drama of my mental life, which is as much a part of this blog as is the stuff I read, continues to provide some interest in the years to come. And do tune in again for the inevitable update, some years hence, when I say that I have finally had a child of my own, and owing to the stress I have decided to stop thinking after all! (From what I understand, this is fairly common, though hardly deserving of condemnation.)

I did not make a post about it last year, but this one marks five years of Mostly About Stories. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of the posts. I’ve even enjoyed writing some of them!

Jon Fosse – Septology

When I wrote about Aliss at the Fire, I wondered whether it had now become necessary for anyone wanting to write stories about faith and religion to adopt a style like Jon Fosse’s. A style that shifts constantly, fluctuating between perspectives and making porous limits which normally seem solid. One feels adrift within a more mystical world, where God and faith are not idle thoughts but lived experiences. Now, having finished Fosse’s much longer Septology, I wonder whether I can even write a blog post about it without adopting the same style, which here reaches still greater heights of mystic power, and letting my sentences run and run, and my entire language become like a breath, going in and going out but never, except at the end of the post, finally ceasing. 

I will spare readers such an attempt. Instead, I will try to say a few words about the book. It is hard. Normally, if I like or dislike a book, I will annotate it heavily. My Septology has been only lightly touched, mainly just with marginal notes indicating what scene we are in. I underlined only a single phrase. This gives some indication of some of the strangeness of the text, which has no full stops and lives by commas, ands, and paragraph breaks. Much of the narrative here is mundane, repetitive stuff, the kind we might know from Samuel Beckett or Thomas Bernhard – a character’s struggle to persuade themselves to get out of bed or open the door. When moments of great beauty or significance arrive, they are entire paragraphs of reflection which gain their power by accumulation and contrast, and which whither and die when we try to extract them. 

Septology concerns a painter called Asle, who lives in the Norwegian countryside. He has a friend, almost a double, also called Asle, who lives in Bergen and suffers from alcoholism. There is another double-like figure in the form of Asle’s wife, Ales, who died some time ago of a mysterious illness. Other characters include Beyer, a gallerist, and Asleik, a farmer. There is also a somewhat sinister woman called Guro, who has her own double too. Our narrative is mostly of reflection. The first Asle is our narrator, and he uses the first person, but when he reminisces or transports himself to the life of the second Asle, he uses the third person, even if he seems to be thinking of his own past.  

Over Septology’s seven books narrator-Asle goes to Bergen several times, discovers his friend Asle passed out in the snow and takes him to the hospital, delivers some paintings to Beyer, has an artistic crisis and decides not to paint anymore, and decides to visit Asleik’s sister for a Christmas meal. But mostly he ruminates. As in Aliss at the Fire, Asle seems to see into his doppelgänger’s soul. He also sees into his own life’s story, seeing figures as he drives past the places of his past, and in such a way that we cannot know whether he falls into their world, or whether they emerge back out into his.  

Asle is not the other Asle. But they are almost one another, being both artists, both being bearers of the same name. Yet what is the meaning of this? Fosse is careful with names. Streets and restaurants are given simple names like “The Lane” or “Food and Drink”; so too are people – “The Teacher”, “The Bald Man”, and so on. One effect of this is to give every encounter a heavy sense of symbolism and significance, even if we cannot always identify at first glance what that might be. The second Asle, when met for the first time in a memory, is “The Namesake” – not the same, but bonded to him, nevertheless.  

When I really think hard about Septology, I can say that it is a book of suffering. And the two Asles are part of this. They have led divergent lives, with a common root in their art and countryside upbringing, and the split occurring when it comes to the matter of love. Narrator-Asle meets Ales by chance in a café in Bergen, and immediately they fall in a kind of magical, dreamlike love that seems to last until her death. The other Asle arrives in Bergen to go to The Art School there with a girl already following him, pregnant with his son – The Boy. He marries her, but within a year has already found someone else, Siv, a woman who studies at The Art School and who seems to offer a more fulfilling relationship than the suicidal Liv. But like the names, the relationships echo, and it seems – seems, because nothing in Septology is quite certain – that Asle is then unfaithful towards Siv with another woman, Guro, and Siv leaves him too.  

A harmonious home life, versus a chaotic one. But both are marked with tragedy and ultimate loneliness. Both Asles drank heavily when younger, but Ales’s Asle gave up – under pressure from her – whereas the other Asle did not. Early on in the novel we are faced with shocking images of the second Asle, “weighed down as he is now, so weighed down by his own stone, a trembling stone, a weight so heavy that it’s pushing him down into the ground, I think”, as he struggles even to get up to pour himself another drink. His life has completely collapsed with the breakdown of family life, and his thoughts seem to circle around suicide.  

The other Asle has also seen his life collapse. The love he has for Ales is so pure, so total (in a novel with much German, Ales’s similarity to Alles – “everything”, cannot be entirely coincidental), that her loss leaves her own Asle with deep, deep wounds too. He lives alone, he lives in the countryside, with barely a friend, and now his heart’s companion is gone. Though years have passed since then, the wounds remain. 

But still our narrator survives. He does not return to drink, he does not end his life. The reason is, without a doubt, his religion. Septology is a novel about faith’s ability to be a fortress that can protect us from the greatest injuries. Faith is this novel’s foundation and its source of power. Each of Septology’s seven sections begins with art, but each ends with Asle in prayer. Whenever he is in pain – and he often is, thinking of Ales and his loss – he takes his rosary and prays. The Our Fathers, Hail Mary’s, and Christ Have Mercy’s, stabilise him and help him cast off from the world when he needs to sleep. Because his life is so full of pain, these moments in the text feel fair and earned. Religious or not, we see that these moments are necessary – utterly vital and necessary – for Asle’s own survival.  

For the survival of pain is this story – not its complete defeat. We notice that for all the memories we encounter, Septology is also full of silences. Asle mentions, without remembering, the end to his drinking. And in truth aside from its beginning, the relationship with Ales is also a blank. We have to take on faith that the relationship was what he claims it was. Often Asle thinks of Ales and then says he doesn’t want to think about her, that the pain is too great, so that these blanks remain. We notice, sooner or later, that Asle’s memories of the boy Asle are indeed usually about himself. But making him another, not the “I”, seems itself a way of hiding past pains whilst approaching past realities.  

God is also present in the silences. Asle feels God, just as he feels Ales’s presence, and seems even to see her at times. The flowing prose of Septology allows for this, just as it allows the whole text to seem, at times, like a breath or a prayer. Asle’s art draws him close to God, as does his contemplation of Ales – who had introduced him to faith to begin with. Septology’s world is full of pain, as is that of Aliss at the Fire, so that as with that work God becomes a necessary force – the only way of not falling into despair. A child drowns, a sister dies suddenly of illness, as does a beautiful friend – and many other characters suffer similarly upsetting fates. But we see here, unironically, what it might mean to commend the spirits of the departed to God – and what solace we might find in those words.  

Ultimately, what Septology does is argue for the power of faith as well as any apologist could, perhaps better. Religion is proved, if ever, by experience, and Septology draws us into an experience which shows faith’s potency in that specific life – and, in the second Asle’s case, the damage of its absence. We see something similar in my other favourite religious writer, Marilynne Robinson. Both writers, Fosse and Robinson, are adept at making a reality that is sanctified and filled with wonder. Fosse’s difference is that it sometimes seems we are relying on Asle’s consciousness to make his reality so, whereas in Robinson’s works life really does seem to be invested with God’s reality. By this I mean that her language constantly confirms God’s presence, whereas Fosse’s language confirms God only at particular points, for a particular consciousness. That means that stretches of Septology can be quite dull and meandering, as we wait for that moment where we will feel significance and harmony again. 

Such an approach would most aid a story showing a wavering, on-off faith. But that’s not really what’s going on here. It’s just that Asle is remembering something, and we need to work to make it meaningful for ourselves, if we can. If sometimes it can feel like this is not worth the effort, that shouldn’t take away from the rest of the book. Septology is a work of contrasts, of light and dark, faith and the loneliness of its absence, and it may be that its magnificent, truly heavenly highs are dependent on the moments when the story is simply a limited low. Really, truly, it’s a marvellous book regardless.  

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.