Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore

About this book

Wittgenstein never did much to encourage the fossicking of amateurs, & in particular loathed phrase-making dilettantes. Yet people of a literary turn with no training in or indeed capacity for rigorous philosophy will probably go on finding him of high interest. He said we shouldn’t be seduced by language—-an admonition which will continue being useful to those whose business it is to be seduced by language every day of the week. He's The Cure. He's a rhetorician’s way of going on the wagon. This new volume of letters to Russell, Keynes & Moore is a companion piece for the slim collection of letters to Ogden & Ramsay. Those, being mainly technical, are stiff going for the nonprofessional. These—-especially the substantial sheaf of letters to Russell—-are of more various interest. The reader will find himself drawn to speculate about all aspects of Wittgenstein’s strange life. The problem of his personality is eventually insoluble, but that doesn’t mean people are going to stop trying. Most of the letters to Russell stem from the years 1912-21—-i.e., from the 1st Cambridge period up until the publication of the Tractatus. In '22 came a break in their relationship, of the same kind that severed Wittgenstein from G.B. Moore in Norway in '14. (Apparently he also quarrelled with Russell in '14, but Russell’s part of that exchange isn't available.) All the intensity of Wittgenstein’s focused intellect is there from the 1st ‘There is nothing more wonderful in the world than the true problems of Philosophy.’ Engelmann was quite right in saying that thinking was Wittgenstein’s poetry. ‘I feel like mad.’ He accuses himself of having ‘half a talent’ for thought. Fearing he'll die before being able to publish his ideas, he begs Russell to meet him so he can explain. But explanation is difficult (it's always encouraging for those of us puzzled by the Tractatus to find that Russell found it hard reading as well) & he has the poet’s reluctance to ‘It bores me BEYOND WORDS to explain...it is INTOLERABLE for me to repeat a written explanation which even the 1st time I gave only with the utmost repugnance.’ A letter from Norway evokes the identikit Wittgenstein whose components everybody knows from Norman Malcolm’s excellent memoir. ‘My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks & being depressed.’ Angst is a continuing theme, screwed to fever pitch by the suspicion his fellow thinkers don’t find him ‘I find it inconceivable that Moore wasn’t able to explain my ideas to you.’ (Letters written in German are given in the original as well as in translation, & like all his German writings are so transparent they flatter the reader into believing he knows that language quite well.) In 12/19 Russell met him in The Hague & discussed the Tractatus with him for a week. There's a useful quotation from a hitherto unedited letter to Ottoline ‘I told him I could not refute it, & that I was sure it was either all right or all wrong.’ It was difficult to get the book published—-a frustration treated more fully in the letters to Engelmann than here. An introduction by Russell was meant to smooth the book’s path to publication, but he didn't like what Russell wrote & characteristically didn't forbear to say so. Once the elegance of Russell’s style had been lost in translation, only ‘superficiality & misunderstanding’ were left. Wittgenstein was incapable of diplomatic flattery, as of any form of give & he was, to that extent, antisocial. It's useful, on this point, to look up the letters to Ogden & see how he found himself unable to say the merest of kind words about The Meaning of Meaning, even after Ogden had knocked himself out translating the Tractatus. Friendship with him was almost impossibly difficult, the demands were so heavy. (‘What a maniac you are!’ wrote Keynes) But he could be generous with his mental treasure, as long as you submitted. He was one of those mentors a pupil has to knuckle under to & eventually break free from. But even the proudest could temporarily forgo their liberty if it meant gaining access to a mind like his. There are many reminders here of a great truth about Wittgenstein which has taken a long time to emerge. His spiritual life was extraordinarily rich. When he said you had to be silent about what you couldn’t speak of he didn’t mean that it wasn’t important-—only that it wasn’t philosophical. He himself made the point very clearly in one of his Briefe an Ludwig von Ficker (Salzburg, '69), when he said that his work (i.e., the book that was later to be the Tractatus) fell into two parts, what was there & what wasn't-—& that the 2nd part was the important one. In English, he devoured pulp fiction & worshipped Carmen Miranda & Betty Hutton, two of the most off-putting stars ever to burden Hollywood. This kind of slumming—-quite common among people who do intellectual work at high intensity—-tends to obscure the profundity of his culture...