Ludwig Wittgenstein

Excerpt from Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude

Chapter excerpted from my book Loners: Writers, Thinkers, and Solitude, available in paperback and kindle versions. Read the introduction for free here.

In spite of his success as a Cambridge professor, with a cult-like following among certain of the students, Ludwig Wittgenstein fits comfortably within my group of loners. He had a small house built for him overlooking a remote fjord in Norway and worked alone there for long periods. He did important writing while living alone in a small cottage on the west coast of Ireland, in the empty wilds of Connemara, on Killary Bay. After writing his first significant work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, he spent six years as a lowly teacher in rural Austrian villages. He believed that such a humble vocation, where he lived alone and had little basis for interaction with the villagers, who considered him strange, was necessary for his own moral purification. Both during his first tenure at Cambridge as an undergraduate and upon his return to the university in the late 1920s, he was invited to be a member of the Apostles, the Cambridge society that selected a small number of especially promising undergraduates and that was devoted to rigorous discussion and debate. On both occasions Wittgenstein soon left the group because he did not trust that its manner of socialization truly fostered the honesty of his own intense inner debates. When he left Cambridge after World War II, he believed that the social culture of Cambridge was dangerous because it encouraged a certain performative quality, a shaping of the self for presentation to others, that Wittgenstein perhaps was strongly tempted by but found deadly to his philosophical and moral self-formation. One might have thought that his participation with so many ordinary soldiers in some of the very difficult campaigns of the first world war would bring him closer to a sense of social solidarity with others. But he found his fellow soldiers, often recruits from the lower classes of various ethnic groups of the far-flung Austro-Hungarian empire, disgusting and brutal. He felt when he was with them that he was slipping into an animal-like existence, into an engulfing mire of ordinariness that threatened his attempts at intellectual and moral purification. As a teacher in the Austrian mountains, he thought the villagers led a wormlike and partly animal-like existence, one that was a severe test for his own attempts at a kind of ethical and intellectual transcendence.

Some who became acquainted with Wittgenstein were surprised by his mentioning, as a strong influence on him, the eccentric book by the young Austrian intellectual Otto Weininger, who committed suicide in the residence once occupied by Beethoven. As we noted in treating Kafka, that book, Sex and Character, pictured humans as entrapped to such a degree in nature and in bodiliness, in the pushes and pulls of low-level desires, and in the world of social pressures from others as well, that a genuine intellectual and moral life was not possible for most. It required a masculine genius possessed by very few to rise to a level of thinking and of moral activity that could to any significant degree escape that entrapment. In Kant’s version of that escape, he must suppose that it is at least possible for us to be noumenal selves who choose moral actions autonomously, in a realm beyond that of time, space, and causation, even if we then experience our actions to be determined by prior natural sequences of causal events. For Weininger, as we saw, the achievement of intellectual and moral genius, and of true individuality, must be quite rare and would hardly ever occur in women or in homosexuals, who have a female element in their personality. Women, so he claimed, think not in clear ideas as the masculine genius does but in what he called henids, ideas joined with and contaminated by the images associated with them. Wittgenstein, it seems, sought with great passion throughout his life to achieve such genius in himself. He wanted to be sure that he was not held captive by certain pictures that dominated our conceptions of mental life. When he was thinking about philosophical issues, he worked very hard to be sure that he was getting at the truth of the matter, that he was not settling through laziness for answers that were too easy or that came too readily from others. Especially when he wrote about mental states and their relation to the world and to language, he wanted to be sure that the habits of thought of earlier philosophers were not overinfluencing him. He would believe that he had attained clarity and truth and then, with a rigorous self-criticism, would understand himself to have settled for something imprecise and unjustified, something still dominated by conventional pictures. (As he puts it, a picture held us captive.)

There was a strong continuity in him between that vigorous intellectual self-examination and his reflections on his own moral life. His sense of guilt was unusually strong and his notebooks often mentioned the sinfulness of his character and the difficulty of overcoming this. He seems flawed in that he could apologize with great ceremony to others for what seem like rather trivial faults while at the same time he seems insufficiently self-critical for lengthy periods regarding certain key relationships in his life. His longest romantic relationship, with the considerably younger Francis Skinner, seems marked by a certain reserve when it came to returning Skinner’s strong emotional attachment to him and by a manner of psychologically manipulating the devoted and self-effacing Francis to carry out Wittgenstein’s vision of a moral life rather than something more appropriate to Francis’s desires and capabilities. For example, he persuaded Francis to leave his graduate studies in mathematics and to do skilled manual labor instead in a screw factory, simply because Wittgenstein thought that the latter sort of life was a better route to holiness. He found himself feeling cooler toward and more detached from Francis as the opportunity for intimacy increased, and after a year of their living at the same address, he seems to have asserted a greater physical and emotional distance, something Francis himself almost certainly did not wish for. To his credit, Wittgenstein did regret his treatment of Francis after the latter’s early death from poliomyelitis, admitting that for the last two years of Francis’s relatively short life he had been emotionally very cold to him.

He seems to exemplify a structure we are familiar with in my group of loners: both a very strong need for intimacy and a need to protect a vulnerable inner space by maintaining distance and substituting inner conversations with oneself. “It is x times easier to be independent of things than to be independent of people,” he writes in his notebook. “But one must be capable of that as well.”¹ Reading Tolstoy helps him take external appearances more lightly, “so as to leave undisturbed my inner being.”² In a letter to Bertrand Russell he says: “Perhaps you regard this thinking about myself as a waste of time – but how can I be a logician before I’m a human being? For the most important thing is to settle accounts with myself.”³ After a visit home: “Every day I was tormented by a frightful Angst and by depression in turns and even in the intervals I was so exhausted that I wasn’t able to think of doing a bit of work.”⁴

Wittgenstein was notably religious in a way that Proust, for example, was not. In the dangerous situations of the war’s frontlines he found himself praying often to God, not just to protect him from danger but to prevent him from losing himself, a frequent worry. A book on Christianity by Tolstoy was one he turned to often and recommended warmly to others. He wondered how a genuinely meaningful human life was possible if Christ had not been resurrected from the dead. Although his family line was three-fourths Jewish, he was a baptized Catholic and trained in Catholic religious teaching at his secondary school in Linz. Yet he was never attached to orthodox religious beliefs or practices. At his prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, following the surrender of the Austro-Hungarian army, he told another prisoner that he might like to be a priest and he also tried to join a monastery. The abbot recognized that his particular goal of self-purification, in the manner that he intended it, did not truly fit with the spiritual life of the monastery and allowed him instead to work as a laborer in the monastery gardens. At the end of his life he conferred with a local priest in England regarding a return to the Catholic Church of his youth and his friends had him buried in a Catholic ceremony. Yet he himself might have taken that final gesture to be an inappropriate one, given his actual attitudes toward the ideas of orthodox religious believers.

Indeed, he can often seem rather Kierkegaardian in his religious attitudes. Kierkegaard believed that one could not attain an adequate individuality either through a disciplined aesthetic shaping of one’s drives and desires, as is the case for Nietzsche, or through an acceptance of universalizable moral laws, as in Kant. One could be truly individuated only through one-to-one relationship with God. The divine address is a calling upon the individual as such, a command that is not in any manner sharable with others in a communal moral enterprise. As with Abraham, such a command to the individual might well go against the moral beliefs supported by established religious practices. Unlike with T. S. Eliot, Wittgenstein’s religious intuitions do not seem to lead him toward the practices of a shared moral community. As with his cottage on the west coast of Ireland, he wants to face the metaphysical pressure of the world and of individuality alone, and to find on his own what moral and religious consolation is possible for him, just as he wants to determine completely for himself just what he should believe regarding the inner mental items postulated by the empiricists, Russell, and the logical positivists.

That attitude of facing matters alone is what makes his later philosophy such an intriguing development. His Tractatus had appealed to the grammar of a logical language to portray how we represent the world as well as what the world itself might be said to consist in. The logical positivists of the Vienna Circle felt that Wittgenstein was one of them and invited him to their meetings. But it turned out that he actually had rather little in common with the Circle’s members. They were scientists and logicians and saw their work as an aspect of a radical modernity that was iconoclastic toward any traditional metaphysical and religious undertakings. They would create a clear and precise logical language, with a baseline of testable evidentiary statements. They liked the social process of engaging in lively debates, of assessing and testing the claims made by others. Wittgenstein was different. He did not engage in real discussion, so a member of the Circle, Rudolf Carnap, claimed. Instead he presented his thoughts as if he were a prophet receiving the ideas from on high, in an almost mystical manner, and were then delivering them to the group. The Vienna Circle wished to delineate an extremely specific realm of statements as empirically testable in various direct and indirect ways and then to dismiss all other language usage as ultimately meaningless nonsense. Wittgenstein in contrast believed the purpose of delineating a realm of meaningful statements in his Tractatus was, by marking out that limited set, to point to what truly mattered but could not be said. All such aspects that could only be pointed to were central to Wittgenstein’s vision of the world but were worthy of quick dismissal for the members of the Circle. While they tended to be modernizing socialists interested in removing the unnecessary and obfuscating elements of earlier cultures, Wittgenstein had a fondness for an earlier aristocratic Vienna and he hated most of modernity, including its socialism. Even when he considered going to Russia with Francis in the mid-1930s and working in the fields, it seemed to be Tolstoy’s Russia he was thinking of rather than Stalin’s.

He believed that well-achieved philosophical work would be like fine novels whose key virtues lie in showing rather than telling. Such a novelist will present a simple narrative of the facts of a life, while the overall significance of that life will come through like background lighting, never mentioned or articulated. In a similar manner the philosopher’s delineation of a manner of setting forth the facts of the world is meant to highlight what comes through in the background, as what can only be shown: the lighting, as it were, in which the facts of the world appear and that makes them ultimately meaningful. When asked whether he thought that something was good because God willed it or that God willed that thing because it was good, he came down very strongly in favor of the former. The latter view would make ethical and religious beliefs ultimately reducible to facts, reasons, explanations, and theories. That sort of reduction, Wittgenstein holds, must miss out on everything that is truly valuable in ethical and religious experience. On his account, the unutterable appears, like an inexpressible illumination from without, in the patient accumulation of what is uttered, not by our trying to find ways of uttering it. Only that sort of conception honors the mysterious aspect of our religious experience, the way it brings an opening both for a feeling of awe and a feeling of ineffable security, as if nothing that happens can harm us. Only that sort of conception shows how we can be moved to an ethical view of the world, rather than by the accumulation of ordinary arguments and evidence.

Wittgenstein disagreed with the members of the Circle on a further point that is crucial to my discussion. They were trying to link up new logical languages, such as that created by Gottlob Frege, with something of the empiricism of David Hume. So they needed a base level set of statements about an individual’s immediate sensory experiences, or sense data, as the evidentiary foundation of any legitimate way of speaking. (Later this view tended to be given up by the Circle members because of philosophical problems with it.) Wittgenstein himself was deeply skeptical about that notion of a private language of sense data and he spent much of the rest of his career dismantling it philosophically. He argues that if anything is to be a meaningful unit of a language, private or otherwise, then it must have a determinate identity. That is, there must be conditions of repeatability; there must be a way of determining what it is to mean the same thing on future occasions. What then are the conditions for determining that the private sensory experience I’m having now is the same one that I had a week ago? If the only criterion is that it feels the same to me, then I could never be wrong. But the price of thus never being wrong is an unacceptable arbitrariness. Just about anything could count in the future as the same if it appears so to me. How could that level of arbitrariness be the basis for an actually meaningful language? Suppose, Wittgenstein continues, I try to control that arbitrariness by associating a particular mental item with a rule for how to go on producing the same mental item on future occasions. In Philosophical Investigations he argues that this solution cannot work in the manner required. Whatever mental item I bring forward for my conscious survey, it will be just one more linguistic shape, without any essence or other determining ground that underlies it. It will need to be interpreted and there will always be more than one way of doing so. The same will apply to applications of a rule. Suppose I attach the rule to several examples of application and then I say: now go on to do the same thing in the future. But any sequence of examples allows possible divergences in the future regarding what will count as a continuing of the same application practice. Simply by concentrating on our mental states, as we speak, we cannot go forward and fix for the future what must pass as a proper continuing of our practice now, as a doing of the same thing again. There is nothing about the linguistic or mental or sonic shape of utterances that has that essential power.

So the private mental language fails. It cannot on its own have the determinacy that a language requires. Fortunately, says Wittgenstein, it does not follow that meaningful language breaks down. For language is anchored in two ways. It is anchored in the solid world of things that we move among as we speak (the simple language games he devises for philosophical consideration often involve moving bits of the world around) and it is anchored in the actual common practices that we share with others. In principle there might be wildly diverse ways of going on to mean the same thing as before, so that speakers of a language would at some point diverge radically in how they go on to continue their speaking behavior in the future. Nothing about our mental items taken on their own prevents that from happening. But in practice we share enough in our basic biology and brain structure, and we experience the conditioning of our social practices themselves. As a consequence, our practices of going on to do the same thing in future cases tend to conform strongly with the practices of others even if there is no fully determined metaphysical basis, either in the mind or in a Platonic heaven, for the meaning in question. Even without some deeper metaphysical backing that fixes identity, we have enough stability to make our social practices of language work as well as we need them to, to produce congruent behaviors when that is necessary. It is not that we discover some novel metaphysical grounding to guarantee sameness. The practices work well enough in their own pragmatic fashion without such a grounding.

There is a background framework that is in play here and that is relevant to my narrative, though Wittgenstein himself addresses it only briefly. Why would it seem so obvious to so many philosophers, from late medieval thinkers to Descartes to the main British empiricists and on to Russell and the logical positivists, that a survey of private mental states could play the crucial role they assigned to it? In the background is Augustine’s turn to interior mental items that are seen at all times by God. If anything can be the metaphysical basis for the determinacy of one’s mental items, then God the creator of the universe and constant observer of all mental realms can be such. Our ideas, it is claimed, are imitations of ideas in the mind of God. We do not need a further anchoring of a mental items in the world itself or in the social practices we share with others. The Protestant Reformation emphasized that Augustinian turn and its effects can be seen in the British empiricists. Even the logical positivists, with all their iconoclastic dismantling of earlier metaphysical presuppositions in philosophy, never fully bring into view their own dependence on an ultimately theological account of the determinacy of our mental states. When cognitive scientists today do lab experiments to test participants’ descriptions of their conscious states, they emphasize how much editing, re-editing, external suggestion, and social construction is always going on that attends those descriptions, such that it is very difficult to defend the claim that there is a determinate fact of the matter as to what are the contents of an individual’s consciousness at any moment. The idea of determinate mental states that philosophers can appeal to as a support for their programs in epistemology seems a hopeless one.

My point is that it might appear that Wittgenstein, with his private praying to God and his Kierkegaardian sense of the pressures of radical individuation, should have been on the Augustinian-empiricist side of the debate, but that is emphatically not the case. The account of language that we find in the Investigations makes shared social practices absolutely crucial to the meaningfulness of language. It is as if Wittgenstein the inveterate loner who experiences so intensely the psychological pressures of being an individual self wishes in his later philosophy to find a resonant communal linkage. He wants to assure himself that he is, just by being a speaker of the language, already richly part of a significant social fabric, already engaged with others in a shared enterprise that matters. While he might be writing alone in Norway or on the west coast of Ireland, he is already part of a larger, if implicit, orchestral performance. Just by being the user of a language, he has to give up the thought that he might himself survey his own mental states and fix their meaning finally. Instead he has to depend on how social practices shared with others will go on into the future. That outcome is not a failure but rather a success on my account of the later Wittgenstein. At various points in his life he was anxious about the possible strength of arguments for solipsism and eager to defeat them. This was not for him merely a philosophical puzzle. He worried that he and his mental states might be all there was in the world and, as a habitual loner, he was happy to prove that the very conditions of thinking and speaking made solipsism impossible.

Earlier I mentioned the influence of Otto Weininger on Wittgenstein’s attempts to raise himself to a level of intellectual and moral genius. Such a project, according to Weininger, was not possible for women or for homosexuals, though masculinized lesbians might approach it. Wittgenstein’s own homosexuality, on this account, must have disturbed him in terms of making his task more difficult. He was clearly in love with David Pinsent, a fellow Cambridge undergraduate he invited as his guest on an expensive trip to Iceland, with treks by pony across the lava landscape. Pinsent, who almost certainly did not understand or return Wittgenstein’s special feelings for him, later died during the war while testing a mechanical flaw in an airplane in England. Wittgenstein, on the other side in the war, would feel rapturous joy when he received a letter from David and was depressed when he did not, and he was crushed by David’s death.

He was into his 40s and had lived a life so far, so it seems, devoid of much intimacy when he met the undergraduate Francis. They were together, in some sense or another, for nearly a decade and Wittgenstein’s diaries reveal that the relationship was, at least briefly, a physically sexual one. But intimacy with Francis seemed to threaten Wittgenstein’s sense of autonomous selfhood and he could behave rather coolly toward him. He would wait eagerly for Francis’s arrival in Norway, then find his presence irritating and unsatisfying, and then miss him so desperately when he left for England that he felt he could not possibly survive alone. We find clear echoes here of Kafka and Felice and of Proust’s narrator and Albertine. A diary entry admits “how unique and irreplaceable Francis is. And yet how little I realise this when I am with him.”⁵ After Francis’s death: “It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless . . . I suffer greatly from the fear of the complete isolation that threatens me now. I cannot see how I can bear this life. I see it as a life in which every day I have to fear the evening that brings me only dull sadness.”⁶ Later: “My unhappiness is so complex that it is difficult to describe. But probably the main thing is still loneliness.”⁷ For the last few years of his life he is in love with Ben Richards, almost forty years his junior. He describes the pain he feels in recognizing that Ben does not love him with the same degree of passion, and in waiting around for letters that may or may not arrive and for contacts that may or may not occur. In thinking that he may lose Ben, he says: “I do not know whether and how I can bear to continue this relationship with this prospect. . . Whenever I imagine myself having made the break, the loneliness terrifies me.”⁸ So he is someone who often makes solitary living the condition for any work of his that will truly matter and someone who often feels the pains of loneliness and separateness as too great to bear. That whole pattern seems to go back to difficulties in the psychological space of separation-individuation that I traced out earlier. He requires a strong sense of intimate attachment but finds any such attachment to be an immediate threat to his project of maintaining a separate selfhood, with sustainable boundaries, adequate strategies of distancing and of working on his own, and a resistance to being formed by the pressure of others upon him. As with Kafka, it is only when he is working alone that he seems to ascend into a higher activity that grants him an enduring and compelling identity, invulnerable to the ordinary pressures of the world. He can be sure of that solution only if he keeps subjecting his mental activity to the most rigorous self-criticism possible, so that this activity is the genuine article and not some kind of consorting with idols. That psychological structure does seem to yield a rather high level of excellence.

It seems relevant here that, as Ray Monk points out in his biography, Wittgenstein would go home to Vienna for family Christmas gatherings until his father died in 1913. Then he skipped these gatherings every year until his mother died in 1926, after which he started sharing family Vienna Christmases again with great pleasure up until the second world war. Of course, there were reasons for his absence during his wartime service, but even when a reunion with his family during this period would have been easy, he tended to avoid it, and when he was serving as a teacher just a short distance away in the Austrian mountains, he also avoided the family Christmases. So some quite serious tension with his mother seems plausible. That tension may have little to do with any negative quality or parental flaw on her part and more to do with Wittgenstein’s need to assert his distance, in order to secure a sense of identity not threatened by engulfment in an earlier more anxious, more unstable, more precarious state of separation. What was the ultimate basis for that in childhood we do not know, though an early awareness of his homoerotic desires, with an increased mobility and oscillation in his self-to-other architecture, may have played a part.

While he was with Francis, Wittgenstein’s notebooks show that he felt strongly attracted to Keith Kirk, a nineteen-year-old working-class youth whom he was tutoring for a technical exam. Kirk had no sense of Wittgenstein’s attraction to him. It is difficult to determine to what degree, if any, Wittgenstein’s homosexuality increased his sense of guilt and unworthiness beyond his more general sense of moral inadequacy and his sense of needing moral or religious purification. He found it distressing to be dragged down by physical desires, even in the case of Francis. In his diaries he marked down the times that he masturbated.

Tell them I’ve lived a happy life, Wittgenstein says to those around his bedside when he is dying, as a message for his friends. Will it seem happy to us when so much loneliness and inner torment were central to it? He tells his diary plaintively that being strongly in love with another who loves one back must be the greatest satisfaction in a human life. But in his own life attraction to another might mean not even a recognition on the part of that other person of his feelings, or a very painful loneliness for long period. The actual physical presence of the other might, as with Kafka, make sexuality desired, on the one hand, but also off-putting and even disgusting, as a threat to the integrity and boundaries of the self, or as a return to entrapment in the base operations of matter. Wittgenstein seems an example of one who has, from early on in life, recruited not yet matured erotic energies for the task of securing the self against external pressures. The young men he tended to fall in love with were of a type: intelligent, boyish, self-effacing, unaggressive and innocent, with a clear sense of basic integrity and a fundamental moral sense. It seems that his attention to them was also a matter of identification. He could feel, through his visual contact with them, that he somehow shared in a primitive, unconscious manner their integrity and self-effacing innocence, against his own strong feelings of guilt and shame, his ambivalence toward his own natural aggressiveness, and his fears of a dissolving of the self. Their boyish character could bring into view some of his own childhood structures of separation-individuation. An evolutionary readiness to help the vulnerable young of the tribe might seem to offset the sexual and aggressive elements in an attraction and so will be part of an inner coalition that makes that attraction more acceptable. But that strategy of recruiting eros early on for the process of securing self-identity in an almost magical fashion is a poor foundation upon which to lay the structure of adult intimate interaction. That foundation will not lead to mutual relationships among partners who, while quite differently situated, can negotiate enterprises of satisfying and long-lasting intimacy.

In the end it will be his work that fills the psychological vacuum generated by the failure of other individuals to satisfy the demands of his project of separation-individuation. That work will have the self-sustaining integrity, the rigorous lightness of movement, the satisfying anchorage in the way things are arranged and in convincing patterns of argument, that he hoped to find analogous identifications for in his earlier recruitment of eros. The compelling rightness of the philosophical work he produces, after the most rigorous possible examination of his intellectual conscience, will have expelled his sense of radical guilt, radical contingency, and radical loneliness, by seeming to convey a similar rightness to his life. In a manner he could not guarantee simply through his own efforts, a light will have shone on that life from without. What is unutterable will have made its appearance in and through what he has uttered.

If you would like to read the rest of the book, you can purchase it on Amazon in paperback or kindle version. Read the introduction for free here.

1. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), 116.

2. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 116.

3. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 97.

4. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 97.

5. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 374.

6. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 442.

7. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 442.

8. Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 504.