WITTGENSTEIN & MONK
THANKING THE BIOGRAPHICAL SUBJECT
BY
Kalu
Singh
[This essay was written in Spring
2007 as part of my preparations to visit Vienna with a friend, Mr Dan Jones, another philosopher. A short film of our
visit to Wittgenstein’s house appears on this website. Being a reflection on Ray Monk’s biography Wittgenstein, The Duty Of Genius and on the
moral problems raised by writing on the life of geniuses, its original title was The Excuse of Genius.
I showed it to some friends. After this I contacted Prof Monk,
He kindly invited me to send a
copy, which I did. A few months after our return from Vienna, Mr Jones & I had the great fortune to be introduced by Dr
Michael Briant, my former counselling
teacher, to his neighbour Dr Michael Nedo, who is editing the definitive Vienna Edition of
Wittgenstein’s work. It was a great
pleasure, and also a relief to my great shame at not-reading German, that next
year Michael Nedo’s biography of Wittgenstein will
appear in English.]
PREAMBLE
Soon
after beginning a long train journey, I realised I
had forgotten the house keys. With more dismay than vexation, I feared I might
not be able to do a small kindness I had long planned. But I did not regret my
old choice to not carry a mobile phone: which could have, before journey’s end,
arranged someone else to open the door. I did not mind waiting to phone.
Nothing could be done for almost ninety minutes. The new choice I had was
whether to try to sleep, knowing that low-level vexation would doom this hope
of rest, or to try to read my difficult book. Though the latter would also be
interrupted by occasional vexing memories of the lost key, I decide to read.
It
was Monk’s “How to Read Wittgenstein”. I was soon astonished at
the arrival of the always-hoped-for but rarely imagined, let alone achieved,
sensation of understanding – partial to be sure, but not the usual bafflement at - the Tractatus. Praise Ray!
This
is not merely allegorical twinning, but when I got up at the end of the
journey, I found the key – lost in a crevice of pocket-cloth. Dolt!
But
I was so glad of the emotional disruption, for it seemed that the concurrent
effort to contain vexation had somehow assisted my concentration.
Though
it was magical thinking rather than dilettanting, I
didn’t pick up the book again to finish it. I was waiting for the right train.
It came last month! After I had read the biography by Monk.
How reassuring that it was still great.
INTRODUCTION
The
reassurance about the philosophical work was vital because I found the life in
the biography deeply troubling as well as deeply interesting. Let me begin by
saying that rereading parts of it affirmed my admiration for its success at
that always difficult task of blending of the life and work. This essay
explores my distressed interest : and does so in the
spirit of both Wittgenstein and Monk, in that it is concerned with what was
not-said but palpably shown. I broach what I feel are crucial questions on the
interpretation of the character of genius and implicitly on the task of the
biographer. But I attempt to answer them obliquely by looking at what concepts
a biographer might foreground by stating his/her own position. I will proceed
as follows:
Section
1 : Affirmation of Wittgenstein’s status as among the
greatest
philosophers.
Section
2 : Affirmation
of Kantian universalisability and the refutation of
special
pleading.
Section
3 :
Introduction of various concepts a biographer might use.
Section
4 : Comparisons with other contemporary geniuses.
Section 5 : Concluding remarks.
Appendices : I- IV
[The
quoted words of others are given in bold italic. I have given the page
references for Monks biography.]
SECTION1 : Wittgenstein’s Status
Here
the focus must be on the published work: and this focussing
must be performed as if we had no biographical detail. One must put on
blinkers to shut out as much of the life as is possible: except where the
writer intends to connect his work and his life. We have a couple of
thousand pages written by Plato and by Aristotle: but none
written by Socrates. There are only a few stories about the this mighty trinity, revealing a character trait. But as
Whitehead said: “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical
tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.” The
indebtedness to Socrates is a given.
Monk, argues convincingly, that much philosophy of the late 20C
and early 21st century has been like footnotes to Wittgenstein. He
would be in the top three of 20C philosophers, and possibly make the top ten of
all-time.
Nothing
I will say below is intended to question this fact. Even though I will
question his worth as ethicist, I will proceed from the belief that he is wrong
in a challenging way.
SECTION 2 : Kantian Universalisability, The Refutation of Special Pleading, &
The Biographer’s
Protest
Kantian
ethics is grounded in a few prescriptive axioms.
1:
The line of humanity is to treat other human beings as ends not means.
This assumes and affirms absolute
equality, intrinsic and of respect.
2:
Moral judgements and prescriptions must be universalisable.
From this follows:
3:
No individual can assert that they, or another individual, are exceptions to
the moral laws of their community. Special pleading is not permissible by a
person or by anyone speaking for them. Those who attempt to plead speciality must be castigated and, if necessary, required
to leave this community : and go where they may, if
they wish, form another where their rule is universalisable.
4:
Within a moral community, no individual can say to another “Who [the fuck]
are you to judge?” A cat may
not only look-at but also judge a king! The right to judge is
assumed, an inalienable right of those who have assented to the moral laws of
the community. The right to respect for one’s judgement
is not assumed: but must be earned by the clarity of one’s reasoning in making
any judgement.
5:
The simple refutation comes from special pleading denying the line of humanity.
The Biographer’s Protest
All
very noble, if not pompous – some would say. “Oh Duty,
why couldn’t you be more of a cutie!” [anon?]
Biographers
choose to write about unusual people, great achievers – in, loosely speaking,
good and bad ways – sometimes deserving the highest abstract ascription
‘genius’. I am troubled by the unspoken, unargued,
assumptions, & axioms of the genre, some of which are usually implicit in
the finished biography.
1:
A genius cannot fail absolutely at anything:
s/he can only fail in a minor, but still quite interesting and charming
key. They are immune to the ascription ‘bad-enough’. [see
below]
2:
The assertion of major failure by a genius, and the attempt to propose reasons
for it, are very rarely interesting, usually without explanatory force, always
in poor taste, and often clear evidence of little-mind envy and loser’s spite.
3:
The attention of a genius is the best human-attention a non-genius can get. It
is a level of seductive, conversational energy no others can match. Time in the company of genius, however
frustrating or upsetting or even humiliating, is always more thrilling in one’s
head & heart, and even pants, than plain-life pleasures
4:
All the failures of a genius must be forgiven as the price of genius: both for
the interpersonal attention above, and for what they produce for humanity. Moral
rules don’t-quite apply to a genius : and the breaking
of them by a genius must be forgotten as soon as possible by a non-genius.
5 : Non-geniuses must ever keep in mind the fact that though
they might enjoy the coincidental charm of learning that a genius has made a
mistake exactly in the same way they have & do, they will not produce
anything to match what the genius gets right.
6:
Only the tiniest-brained, mean-spirited, non-genius spends time snuffling for
the lapses of genius or to abuse the defenders of genius.
7: Yes we all know the gospels and the aphorists:
“Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor”
(Anon)
“Hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue”. (La Rochefoucauld.)
"If we sin wilfully after having the
knowledge of the truth, there is now left no sacrifice for sins" (Paul: Hebrews 10:26).
“Bad Authority asserts - Do as I say, not as I do.” (Anon)
“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’” (W)
But
as Woody Allen says “Guilt is petit bourgeois crap. An artist creates his
own moral universe” . There, in that new universe, are
new rules: one of which might be expressed as a parody of St Paul (Romans):
“We shall continue in sin,
that creativity may abound! Thank God!”
Being fair to genius seems to require proceeding from these axioms.
COUNSELS OF PERFECTION & ENOUGHNESS
Most
religions include counsels of perfection to guide human behaviour: this even
when they know it is poor psychology. Believers say that the counsels are
innocent & beautiful and give direction & hope. Others argue that they
are simply perfect politics: dooming people to fail as a way to control them.
Secular politics is always slow to shed the controlling brutalities of
the foundational religious moralities. Even the diamond-hard Kant was trying to
be kinder and fairer.
Women
in all societies have had more counsels of perfection imposed upon them
than men. Winnicott’s great contribution to the
ethics of maternity was the idea of the good-enough mother.
This was intended to allow women to refuse the project of a
self-mortifying, almost Self-destroying intensity of preoccupation with the
care of her infant. She should instead aspire to be a good-enough mother, that
being measured by creating a facilitating environment for the child’s
maturational processes. Included in this was an acknowledgement of the
psychological truth that there may be brief and utterly normal moments when a
mother utterly hates her infant. So, ‘good-enough’ means ‘allowably-not-perfect’.
‘Bad-enough’
means ‘certainly-not-perfect’, failing the community’s moral laws, and – most
importantly – that excuse-making would be insulting sophistry.
THE NOT-BAD-ENOUGH GENIUS
The
biographer’s first axiom won’t allow their genius subject to be bad-enough.
At worst, they won’t allow them even to be confused-enough: screeds of
sophistry are advanced to ‘explain’ and excuse the genius’s failure at
casuistry! I’m sure the Reader will have
worked out that my essay-title [The Excuse of Genius] includes both the renowned genius’s own
special plea to be excused, and the non-genius advocate-of-genius’s special
plea for the genius to be excused.
It
seems that the only exceptions to the applicability of these axioms relate to
Hitler, and his mad ‘grandchild’ Myra Hindley. Though
he is accorded, and in a tone of strange excitement, the ascription ‘evil
genius’, she is described merely as evil.
But one should ask why are biographers not
philosophically and morally consistent? Why is Hitler, Wittgenstein’s
schoolmate, not offer the same sophistical defences (indulgence) as Albert Schweitzer or Gandhi?
One
of the very few commentators on Hitler, who follows axiom 2 and refuse to
search for explanation for failure, moral or technical, is the film-maker Lanzmann. In a powerful essay “The Obscenity of
Understanding”, he states his absolute lack of interest & belief in the
pursuit of any (personal) explanation for Hitler’s projects of extermination:
saying it is obscene to try to ‘understand’ a man like him. Hitler, in a way,
defines bad-enough by being evil-enough. Biographers
would be hesitant about saying he was good-enough in any way: civic
regeneration programmes, lung-cancer research,
national pride etc let alone colonising military
daring – which is by definition immoral or at least amoral.
REJECTING & REFUTING THE BIOGRAPHER’S PROTEST
What
would a biography look like if written from the contraries and opposites of the
axioms above? The simplest question to ask about bad-enough Action-X:
“If a non-genius did Action-X, how would we judge him/her?” Try these:
1:
A man says “I regularly take to my bed teenage girls. My motives are pure.
Firstly I use them to keep warm. Secondly I am testing/proving
that my body is sexually unresponsive. I don’t try to have intercourse, and I
don’t have involuntary emissions.”
What
sort of girl would be persuaded by this invitation or who would try to persuade
their daughters/sisters to be used in this way? Would it make it easier or
harder to judge if the man said “I am married” or “I am a father” or “I’m an old man now”
or “I don’t really feel desire” ? From what kind of ordinary man would we accept
this as allowable, even good?
This
was a fact about the elderly Gandhi. (It is a gist-quote above) How should a
biographer use it? How should it be placed in any account of Gandhi’s remarks
and prescriptions about human sexuality? Is it allowable, excusable, because
many people have decided he was a moral genius: or is it bad-enough (&
evil), and thus proof that he wasn’t a perfect moral genius?
2 : A
woman says : “ I worship God and all God’s creations. I need to make contact
with all living things, the earth, the seas, the sky and all living bodies: to connect with them, share bodily joy. So I
must have my husband, and any woman’s husband who will have me. I will have my
sons, and their cousins. I will lie with the family alsation
and stallion. It is my religion, the oldest.”
How
might one tell the story of such an ordinary woman: what judgement would one
make? If one switches gender, then one has the gist of the ethics of Eric Gill,
who did fuck his daughters and their dog. Is it allowable because he was, I
agree, an artistic genius? Who can say – him, his daughters, the priest who was
his spiritual adviser, those who commissioned his work, me…?
Reflecting
on the prosecution of a trash novel for obscenity in the year of the legal
right to publish Lady Chatterly’s Lover, the
satirist Lenny Bruce remarked wryly: “So it seems we punish untalented
artists!”
What
he didn’t ask are the other questions, implied by his satire. “How
much of a genius artist/creator must one be to be allowed/excused adultery
or /child-abuse or political betrayal, which is always a personal betrayal as well ? Who can set the genius-wickedness score-card? Is time
an extenuating factor. ”
3:
As Dante argued, all the other sins are worse than the sexual sins. Wilde’s
seductive thief Mrs Cheveley
knows that the fortune and position, cash and honours,
of the eponymous ideal husband Sir Chiltern is based on his insider-dealing a
generation back. When she tries to get him to aid her in a new speculation he says : “ Believe me, it is a swindle. Let us call
things by their proper names. It makes
matters simpler. We have all the information about it at the Foreign
Office. In fact, I sent out a special
Commission to inquire into the matter privately.” By the end of the play he will hear
the same accusing ‘proper names’ from her mouth. As, in our day, did Wily Lord
Jeff & Fragrant Mary Archer and Swordboy Aiken.
There
can be few proper names as inditing of one’s moral
character as ‘coward’ and ‘traitor’. It is shocking to read them in Mary
Taylor’s letter to her childhood friend Charlotte Bronte for the hesitant
egalitarianism & feminism in her novel Shirley. Though I agree
Bronte pulls her punches, Taylor’s words seem to me disproportionate. But that
could be a weakness in me, for not recognising the circumstances in which her
remarks are true and just. Perhaps it is a failure of imagination that protects
Gunter Grass: his own as well as other people’s. There
are few citizen-commentators like Michael Hoffman, who are as comfortable with
proper names as Mrs Cheveley. Of Grass’s confession, prompted by the Stasi and not his conscience he writes: “This lifelong silence, and the manner
of his breaking it – long and miserably bad book - have hurt Grass's reputation in ways from
which it will never recover, and which, depressingly, he seems not even to
have understood. The post-war "conscience of Germany" now has to
suffer his name appearing disfigured with the double lightnings
of the SS” The
Guardian 7/7/7 [my emphasis]
Fifty
years after Eli Kazan’s time of shameful treachery,
the US Film Academy, itself culpable, decided to honour him for his great
works. Some, who had been directly hurt, still wouldn’t.
Moral
economics is the most perilous art
or science that humans can pursue: but that has not stopped any religion or
secular ideology imposing its formulae, backed by inquisitions and torturers
.This problem of justification, or at least excuse, by works, was
originally defined within the religious paradigm and referred to non-aesthetic
actions. A missionary, of any monotheistic faith, who converted a thousand
pagans, while privately drinking and debauching, was not likely to be
ex-communicated.
Shaw
moved the problem into the secular realm with “The Doctor’s Dilemma”. In
our time, the most perfect examination, at the level of narrative balance
rather than moral economics, of this moral puzzle, was written by Doris Lessing’s in her short story “Not a Very Nice Story”. That it should feature doctors shouldn’t
surprise one: for wounded mortals, they are the last chance of recovering life.
Baudelaire may be right that
“a man can not live one day without poetry”,
but even a poet with a coronary needs a heart surgeon not a sonneteer in those
four crucial minutes. At the naiivest ethical level,
people act as if being a doctor, living as a doctor, is the surest way to be in
moral credit, regardless of all one’s other moral choices. One senses that Lessing, who had a famously complex sexual life, wanted to
diminish the comparative and also absolute worth of these details of where a
(life-saving) human occasionally puts his/her genitals : and yet her title
gives away her ineluctable unease.
Here
is the dying Wittgenstein’s own version of the simple question above:
“If
a non-genius did Action-X, how would we judge him/her?”
“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’” [p.580]
1: PHILO-SEMITISM
In
case the Reader wonders - I am not a Jew. My parents were born and brought up
outside the Judaeo-Christian world-view. Their
(nominal) Sikhism, unlike Islam, did not require them even to comment on, let
alone mock, Jews. Despite us all living in the UK for decades, and my being
well-educated in the Graeco-Roman-Judaeo-Christian
weltanschauung, I still haven’t got any of the astigmatic anti-semitism that is so indelibly a part of it. But both
cultural history and the rise of disturbed Muslims do require one to revisit
the theme. So last year I wrote three essays on it. Here I will make a very
simple point.
Sub
specie aeternitatis, or even from the mind of a
bright ten-year-old who has surveyed, in a primer, ten millennia of human
history, the 20C Shoah is a unique horror. It is
tragically ironic that almost coincidental with Hitler’s deranged concept of “The
Final Solution to the Jewish Problem”, a Jewish psychoanalyst, Melanie
Klein, was fore-grounding the two concepts that can and must explain millennia
of Christian and Islamic anti-semitism, envy &
ingratitude.
The
Judaic conception of monotheism, the requirement of all Jewish communities to
establish yeshivas (study-houses) for the transmission and production of
interpretations of theology and ethics, and their extension into an absolute
affirmation of all learning, are the source of the highest human values and
tangible goods to humankind: the number of Nobel Prize Winners! And though it
was almost three centuries back that the great British scholar Oriental Jones
judged that Sanskrit writers had left a legacy surpassing the Greeks, their
works did not make it onto the public school curriculum. Here is a social fact:
the world owes the Jews, the Sanskrit sages, the Greeks, a boundless debt of
gratitude. Subsequent generations have merely added footnotes and plagiarism.
This has never been stated sufficiently comprehensively by Christian-Islamic
educators.
It
is bad-enough to omit teaching the fact of intellectual indebtedness &
obligation. But it is wicked to try to diminish or erase the fact of the
sublime primacy of these three groups. The mad sophistry this entails is
captured in the Lutheran patron [anon?] saying to Durer
“Can you make your Old Testament Patriarchs look less Jewish”. When Jews, fully or even an
eighth-Jewish, internalise and repeat such poisonous attempts at scorn and
erasure, then one must bring in psychoanalytic concepts to explain the
self-hatred: for no one aligned with Enlightenment rationality would be so
insanely partial.
Similarly
a Scot might say to his child: “Don’t listen to three centuries of English
mockery of us folk. Look at the book “The Hundred Most Influential Persons
in History”’. The records show that we are second only to the Jews in the disproportionality of our tiny ethnic group’s contribution
to science and medicine and thought.”
Neither
all Jews, nor the Jewish State, is perfect: but anti-semitism, like slavery, is perfectly indefensible,
inexcusable, gobshite. If a biographical subject
reveals anti-semitism, the (sane) biographer must
describe it as wicked, or mad, or both, giving no quarter.
I
feel is a waste of soul to even write a refutation of the anti-semitic rubbish produced by Frege,
Wagner, Weinenger, Spengler,
or contemporary Islamic
scholars.
When Monk writes of Wittgenstein’s racist period “Thankfully
it was mercifully brief”. [p.280] he reveals his
unease in how much indulgence he still offers him. One of the most shocking
passages in the book is where absolutely unprincipled financial greed is
revealed as the uber-principle of the Nazis and
also of the good-Catholic Wittgensteins viz buying the pure mischlinge
[p.398ff]. All the shameful strategies of sophistry, casuistry, legalism, are
used by both sides: the Jews are re-described as sufficiently non-Jew and the
Jew-haters have the Jewish money.
2 : PHILOGYNY
The
bright kid above, and even her younger sibling, at any time in recent
centuries, or even earlier, looking round or flicking through books, could work
out the following absolute irrefutable truths :
that even after many millennia of evolution,
a)
Fish
can’t ride horses or tricycles.
b)
Plants
can’t talk.
c)
Birds
can’t make omelettes.
d)
Cows
can’t deliver babies. BUT
e)
Whenever
a powerless group of humans - red/yellow/brown/black slaves, poor white
servants & trash, Jews, gypsies, and most of all women everywhere -
has been given the chance to learn, some of them have proved to be as learned
and as inventive as the few in the powerful group who give it a reputation for
civilization.
f)
Women
produce the babies that men need : and a happy baby is
one of the most cheering sights in the world.
g)
So
anyone who says all women are wicked, dangerous, worthless or unable to learn
& invent are vicious, shameless liars.
h)
Women
can be many things and for many purposes.
I
believe that the assent to misogyny, like the assent anti-semitism
and to slavery (caste, classical, capitalist or communist), is morally
indefensible. The socio-political explanations are valuable but are of a
different order to the deep psychopathology - fear, envy, ingratitude - which
ultimately is used to justify the brutality. The anti-presentist
argument – You can’t judge the past by the present – is specious nonsense. A
child – boy, girl, black, white, Jew, Gentile, rich, poor - in 300 BC or 300 AD - could work-out/get
both the points above: and that would be immensely valuable even if/she could
not change society to bring in fairer laws.
Misogynists
are uncertain what women are for : they can’t
imagine equal conversations or equal sex with them. One compromise adopted by
such men who fear women is to adopt them as honorary men. Some women will
compromise with men offering such scorn for them as women: either out of
masochism or the minor glory of reflected fame, when the
man-who-doesn’t-quite-want-a-real-woman is a genius and/or famous, like
Kierkegaard or Kafka.
Again, I feel is a waste of soul to even write a refutation of the misogynystic rubbish produced by Weinenger,
Spengler, or contemporary Islamic scholars.
Here’s
a true story about the two forms of conceptual filth delineated above. In 1937
my philosophy tutor, Dieter Peetz, was ten, and in
class in Germany. His grandfather had finally revealed that he was half-Jewish.
“On the wall of my classroom were big photographs of all the leading
Nazis. I can remember looking long and hard at each face in turn and dwelt
particularly long on the horrific visage of Himmler
and I thought : ‘These people say that my god-like
grandfather, my mother (who by the way was a real beauty), my two uncles and
three aunts, my cousin and myself are not really fully human, are in any case
seriously contaminated and morally depraved. Now then, who says what about
whom, and who do I side with?’ And of course, and rightly, I repudiated, for
the first time, the hate of the Nazis, especially when peering at and through Himmler’s rimless spectacles.” [ Peetz : ed Childs 1990: p15]
This is magnificent for many reasons: the most touching being the
parenthetical affirmation of his mother’s beauty: the unAryan
dog-face of Himmler needing no gloss. Unsurprisingly,
he went on to establish, with his own money, the only Departmental University
Aesthetics Society in the UK.
Like
his contemporary Churchill, and despite having a talented mother & sisters,
Wittgenstein was “very much against women’s suffrage” [p.72].
Frances Partridge observed “In mixed company his conversation was often
trivial in the extreme and larded with feeble jokes accompanied by a wintry
smile” [p.256]. Little wonder then that he, God-like, re-made Anscombe as “an honorary male addressed by him as
‘old man’” [p.498]. Perhaps she
felt touched like Michaelangelo’s Adam, for she
didn’t protest when he said “Thank God we’ve got rid of the women” [ib]
I
was the only non-white boy in my English grammar/comp for six years. Around the
time Powell was spouting poison, a classmate said to me “You’re alright : not like them blacks”. I was five years older
than Dieter, at his moral epiphany, but alas still too stupid (and afraid)
enough to accept the remark as praise. Anscombe
should have told the 50 year-old Wittgenstein to apologise
to the women or fuckoff.
When
he was offered the love & body of Mrs Sjogren he fled. [p.184] One
senses he didn’t want to learn what she could have taught him about his body’s
good for a woman. Then at his mid-life crisis, or rather
continuing his adolescent crisis, the forty-year-old man “fell in love” with
the much younger Marguerite. [p.239] I quote Monk’s use of the common
phase because it contains the word for Adam’s felix culpa. The tragedy is that Wittgenstein’s was
incapable of such an ordinarily noble human falling. It was another
solipsistic charade. “[He] does
not reflect on her feelings” [p.281] He imagines marrying her but
without fulfilling one of the wedding oaths: “with my body I thee worship” . When I
read the diary entry, “For three hours we kissed each other a great deal
and it was very nice” I burst out
laughing at this piece of schoolgirl juvenilia. [p.28x] Then I was angry at the
wretched dishonesty of it. If the kissing was sexual in intent, it was not
permissible to a devout Christian. But only if it were truly sexual – had he
written in his masturbation diary “My God! What brilliant tits and such a cunt! I could hardly
wait to wank myself to sleep later.” - would it honour her body.
And what of his friends Russell and Keynes, why didn’t they intervene and
tell him he’s deceiving himself and her and wicked to do so.
3 :WITNESSING
There
are two aspects to this concept.
A: LYING
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbour.”
The
Ninth Commandment excoriates false-witnessing as destructive of personal
relations and of the community. It implies a form, which, tragically, Moses did
not emphasise. “Thou shalt
not bear false witness for/of they Self.” This can happen in two ways:
a) Intentional
Commission: when one gives other people a false impression of
one’s thoughts and feelings, especially one’s past & present vices, rarely
one’s virtues.
b) Intentional
Omission : when one allows to
stand uncorrected the false impression of one’s thoughts and feelings,
especially one’s past & present vices, rarely one’s virtues, that they have
somehow acquired.
The
point is that children don’t get the sub-commandment in the form above: what
they get is the vaguer parental injunction to not-lie. A psychoanalytical
explanation begins with the observation that childhood lying is a final attempt
to recover lost omnipotence. His/Her Majesty the Baby is soon disillusioned of
infantile omnipotence: and then for the next few years
labours under the belief that its parents are
omniscient, they can see inside its head and read its thoughts. The first
successful lie a child tells to its parents destroys that fear and also
persuades him that he can make a world in which his ad hoc beliefs hold sway.
Maturation is attained when one believes that even when the lie to another
person is successful too much mutual grace and love is lost, and one is worlds
apart from them.
Maturation,
at 7 or 17 or 47, involves knowing how to lie to not-hurt. I got this lesson
from the children’s writer, Richmal Crompton. When the eponymous William is told off for a
small lie, he resolves to tell truth always. This soon has him observing, in
plain tone, that his mother’s friends are fat, ill-dressed, bad cooks and so
forth – much to their and his mother’s distress. He is taught ‘new manners’.
B) AFFIRMING/DEFENDING
The
primary Christian form of witnessing is explained most movingly in the Gospel
tale of absolute repeated failure.
“Peter therefore denied again…Then began he to curse and to swear, I know not this man of whom ye
speak.”
Peter does atone and witness. In all belief-systems – religious & secular - many
ordinary believers have witnessed, without lapsing like Peter, and been
tortured and killed. The point of such affirmations is that one publicly aligns
with a group – a new form of life, beyond solipsism, with others
I was at teaching college in Oxford during the Mammonic
eighties. So I was surprised when a student said she and her husband weren’t
free the next evening as they were witnessing. This was part of their
Catholicism to knock on doors and witness publicly to the worth of their faith.
I could see this was an ordinary but necessary proof of belief: and could but
hope I would stand up for mine.
Braver than his ancient namesake, Peter Tatchell
has just been publicly praised for witnessing to the right to assembly and
protest, and the worth of a homosexual life, in Russia : and almost losing his
eye to police brutality.
[Guardian Editorial: 30/6/7]
THE FAILED DISAVOWALS
Monk’s biography begins by introducing the precociously philosophical
child wondering about lying. These efforts, and even the lies about staying in
bed or to join the Aryan gym, are part of growing-up. Also, it is an ordinary
wish in all adults to be thought well-of by others: and so a certain level of
active or passive false-witnessing of one’s Self is allowable or merely venial.
Wittgenstein was born with three ineluctable characteristics – Jewishness, richness, gayness – and chose a fourth he could
not relinquish, philosophicality. He wasted
vast amounts of intellectual & emotional energy and time in his attempts to
disavow these. Nor did he witness and align with a group: ironic for the
philosopher of the necessity of judging human action through the forms of
(group) life. If genius, in whatever domain, is marked by extraordinary
intensity of application and invention, then it is unsurprising that those very
two qualities are used to defend the indefensible, by producing clouds of comforting
sophistry. The observer must not allow herself to be choked by this conceptual
candy-floss. It is pitiful to read of these spectacular failures: those
repeated denials ringing in his head like tinnitus: “I am not (at all) Jewish”, “I am not
rich”, “I am not homosexual”, “I am not a professional (Cambridge)
philosopher”.
When he protests at the age of 47! “Most people would think that I
have had no relationship with women, but I have.”, he doesn’t have the
integrity to add that he had assiduously created that impression for 35 years!
Even worse, he doesn’t use this late opportunity to affirm his joy in women’s
bodies – Ludwig’s enigma variation on the Song of Solomon. It is only a bizarre
remark of reflex pride.
Like the Chaucerian monk, he wanted the social glory of the (virtual)cowl and the also young flesh beneath it, preferably in a
hut in the wild fjords. He may or may not followed
Wilde into ‘feasting with panthers’ in the Prater.
But he didn’t come out, or publicly attack the
strictures of Leviticus & Paul, or go into the dock for anyone persecuted
for gayness.
When one first reads his letter of condolence to Mrs Pinsent,
one is deeply moved: “he was to me a brother and a friend” [p.155]. But then I
thought of the French phrase,Sarotte’s
book title, “Comme un frere,
comme un amant”. I am
aware of different mores and laws in 1918, but I’d have thought a grieving
mother would be glad that her son had known deep human love: and that a Bible
reader like Wittgenstein could have dared another allowable comparison: that he
and David loved each other
like that Old Testament David loved Jonathon.
None of these remarks diminish his acts of bravery in the First World
War.
4 : THE PROPER
SPIRITUAL PURGATION
The most distressing thing about religion & the religious, of all
faiths, is the volume of poor thinking, sophistry, casuistry, bigotry and lies
they produce and persuade their adherents to respect, repeat and live by. This
may of course concurrent with ordinary acts of human kindness. As a kid one
often hears adult repeat the line : “Don’t discuss
politics & religion”. I’ve read a certain amount of theology and
comparative religion: and I have met and discussed religious ideas with
Professors of theology, Indian gurus, vicars and lay-followers of various
faiths. Mostly they have talked unhelpful or tendentious drivel. Eventually, my
conditions of conversation about religion became that the interlocutor
:
a) Knows the ten spectra of the spiritual life: and can not-only define
the concepts but describe their connections. [see
below]
b) Has read and reflected deeply on one or all of the following:
(i
) Purgatory : Dante’s
sublime account of proper spiritual purgation. Nothing in world literature or
theology or even ethics equals this.
(ii) The
Perennial Philosophy : Huxley’s luminously clear account of primary
concepts such as ‘prayer’, self-mortification’,
(iii) The Life of the Buddha : Iqbal Singh’s beautiful blending of Eastern & Western
ideas to explain this most philosophical of spiritual leaders.
THE TEN SPECTRA OF THE SPIRITUAL LIFE
1:
The Stages of the Spiritual Quest
2: The Necessary Aspects of the
Purgation
a) AVOID SINS -
SINFUL THOUGHTS AND ACTS
b) PURSUE VIRTUES - VIRTUOUS
THOUGHTS AND ACTS
c) CONGREGATIONAL WORSHIP :
CHURCH / SATSANG
d) GOOD COMMUNITY WORKS /
SERVICE/ SEVA
e) PRIVATE PRAYER/
MEDITATION
3 : The Only Types of
Prayer/Meditation (spiritually lowest to highest)
PETITION INTERCESSION ADORATION CONTEMPLATION
4 : The Cardinal Sins (worst first)
PRIDE
ENVY WRATH SLOTH AVARICE GLUTTONY LUST
SUPERBIA
INVIDIA IRA ACEDIE AVARITIA GULA LUXURIA
5:
The Cardinal Virtues (Classical)
UNDERSTANDING KNOWLEDGE WISDOM
6:
The Divine Graces : Gifts of the Holy Spirit
(Christian)
FEAR-OF-GOD : PIETY :
STRENGTH : WISDOM : UNDERSTANDING : KNOWLEDGE :
COUNSEL
7:
The Christian Theological Virtues
FAITH HOPE CHARITY (LOVE)
8:
The Christian Monastic Virtues
POVERTY CHASTITY OBEDIENCE
9:
The Christian Creed Summary
TEN COMMANDMENTS :
LORDS PRAYER: GOLDEN RULE : BEATITUDES:
1 CORINTHIANS 13 : NICENE
10:
The Daily Lifelong Puzzle to Distinguish
THE GOOD : THE WISE : THE CLEVER
: THE HOLY
Since the decision above, I have met
only a couple of people worth talking to. Luckily one is a close friend, so the
conversation has been strong and regular.
SAINT LUDWIG
Wittgenstein famously wrote : “I am not a religious man but I cannot help
seeing every problem from a religious point of view” [p.464].
Most commentators accept this: even
though the aphorism is perilously close to Derrida’s provoking rhetorical
device: “X if and only if not-X ” On the final page of
his biography, Monk writes: “In a way, that is certainly important but
difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious life.” [p.580]
To which I heard myself say aloud: No
he hadn’t! Then I noticed Monk’s two
qualifying clauses “In a way, that is certainly important but difficult
to define” before the main assertion. They are perfect example of
obfuscation, even bewitchment: for after seven millennia of prescriptive
theologies it ought to be, and it is, easy to define a devout life.
Wittgenstein sometimes might have wanted to live it, but he rarely did. Mostly
he wanted to go down in philosophical history as the omniscient philosopher who
solved every problem, and also to be in sexual & intellectual love with a
loving boyfriend: both of which are, let me say clearly, noble-enough
aspirations.
The descriptions of his spiritual
awakening & agony don’t match Pascal & Hopkins. His ‘creed’ is
painfully feeble. [p 140ff & 185 ff]. It was
distressing to read how little good theology or literature he read. His favoured authors, Dickens, the tragically anti-semitic giant Dostoevski, and
even the mighty Tolstoy, pontificating on religion, are - when compared with
Dante & Shakespeare – weak or disturbed. Of course his philosophical
remarks on religion, in his true idiom, are witty and profoundly interesting:
but almost no help in one’s purgation.
Despite declaring that “Christianity
is indeed the only sure way to happiness”,
his imitation of Christ
was disastrously confused and dangerous. [p.125]. Jesus moved easily,
understandingly and kindly among publicans, thieves, gamblers whores, soldiers
etc. Ludwig never shed a core misanthropy : at the
front, frothing at “a company of drunkards.. of
vile and stupid people” : then
in his teaching village “[Hassenbach people]
are not human at all but loathsome worms.” [p.139/212].
As one would expect from a genius he
was capable of monumental pride, both in its positive form, and in its vain
inversion “I am far too bad” [p.153]. His contrition was vitiated by scruplosity, typically flamboyant and for himself : both
the belated apologies in the Viennese villages and to Mrs
Thompson “earnestly apologizing for a transgression of quite
extraordinary inconsequence” [p.412]. Monk is to be praised for the
sharpness of that description but he hesitates to explain & judge these
gestures. (I will attempt it below). Nor did Wittgenstein ever get the measure
of his acedie : “The best thing would be if I were already ill,
then at least I would have a bit of peace.” [p.145]
The staggering number of hours,
miles, and millions, and the amount of other people’s good-will that he wasted
in his demented pursuit of his misguided self-denial & self-mortification
is a perfect illustration of the dangers of this particular cul
de sac off the spiritual path.
Fortunately, the Father Superior, to whom he presented as a candidate
novice, was one
of the very, very few people he met in forty years who not only who saw through
the splintered veneer of his spirituality to the raging confusion of
psychopathology below but had the nerve to tell him that he “was led by
motives which the order could not welcome” [p.235] Most people were
glad to bask in his genius than to challenge him. This is very shocking and
very sad.
5 : MILK &
MONEY
Currency is the bridge of exchange.
The denominations of the first currency – between mother/carer & child - are milk, skin-contact, eye-contact,
and soothing sounds. Soon after, are added different foods and imitable words. When given with attentive love, these goods/acts are
the best, the most valuable things in the human world. It should be kept in
mind that everything else that one human being offers to another is
conceptually and morally of less worth than this. Eventually a child grows up
and can get food and shelter and other bodies for him/herself. But the loving
attention & conversation of its parents remains necessary. Money and jewels
can add to but will never substitute for regular personal attention, conversation &
caress. Nor can one somehow in adulthood
erase the money spent on one’s childhood.
As a teenager I remember lingering
over the paradox in the lines:
“Helpless like a rich
man’s child”. [Dylan]
It took a while to see the failure
of reasoning in:
Money buys help.
Great wealth buys all the help a
person might need.
A rich girl has great wealth.
She has all the help she needs.
So she can’t be helpless.
It took another few years to
understand that the highest currency a person has to offer is their present
grace-full attention. One can’t give money instead. This is what helps the
most: thus the phrase “the milk of human kindness”. The most pathetically helpless rich girl in
history was the daughter of Hans Frank, the Reichsrechtfuhrer
in Poland. Brought up like a princess in Cracow
castle, after the war she killed herself by drinking a vast amount of milk.
Psychoanalysis emphasised
some traditional symbolic equivalences for money, (as shit: and the Devil as
the Shitter-of-Ducats) and introduced new ones. One
must have balls like Hermann & Sugar, not of sugar, to become filthy rich.
Refusing parental money is partly refusing bad-milk and partly castrating the
father.
A person
who knows the worth of loving attention, knows the worth of money, and how to
give personal gifts with-love and public endowments with-grace. One can infer
from someone who repeatedly fails to use money well, rejects money and gives gifts
almost with ill-will, that he/she never got enough loving attention, even if
they were brought up in a palace full of servants. For some such damaged souls,
the only consolation is to get more money, perhaps also to enjoy depriving
others of it.
In an Old People’s Home, where I
worked, I often saw how the nearness of ‘big money’ from house-sales &
wills corrupted kin and friends. But I
also saw great generosity.
Regardless of when they were poor or
when comfortable, my parents had a wide reputation for hospitality. When they
eventually did have some spare money, they gave thousands to museums and
universities and to establish a school-room: and were happy to meet the
beneficiaries and receive their thanks.
Wittgenstein may have felt he was
the rich, young man at the eye of the needle, who actually did what Christ
advised, but in truth he had a deeply disturbed understanding of money. One
minute he was willing enough to spend & squander it like one of Eliot’s “loitering
heirs of City directors” : the next, he was ill-naturedly giving
endowments to artists and intemperately scorning their thanks: and finally
shedding his fortune as if were leprosy on his soul. This final action
committed him, and countless people he made complicit, to decades of a melodrama
of near-poverty. At death’s door he was still refusing a kinder person’s
endowment, with his usual pompous sophistry in such matters.
Wittgenstein could have used his
inheritance to establish a university college or a medical department, or a theatre
or a library-plus-librarian to serve every ten villages in Austria etc or a
school for poor girls in Africa like Oprah. He could have set up an (almost)
free publishing house anywhere in Europe for new daring work, in his
preferred moral or intellectual idiom, by anyone. Think of how much time,
pointless letter-writing and whining this would have saved him as he tried to
bring-out the Tractatus. But most crucially he
should have imitated the Buddha and put a proper irreversible distance between
himself and accessible money/help. As long as he stayed in the West, within
easy use of mail, the phone, motor transport, willing friends, banks kind to
faux aristos, then the pose of sort-of-poverty was a
disgusting charade. Not that he tried that hard. There is a vicious pomposity
in the fact that “While [he] welcomed visits from his Viennese friend,
his family were under strict instructions not to see
him or to offer him any help. Food parcels were returned unopened, and letters
left unanswered.” [p. 197]
He didn’t even go as low into the
gutter as his contemporary Orwell.
Before the end at Storey’s he goes his first home in Vienna, where “he
allowed himself the luxury of leading the kind of comfortable life for which
the family home was so admirably equipped” [p.560]. The word ‘allowed’
is important in this almost estate-agent prose. Among his many failed
disavowals was the fact that he always knew he could go back to such a
home. One wonders how he could stomach it.
As Trude Levi, a Jew from the Hungarian half
of the Austro-Hungarian empire found, her home was
stolen: there not being enough money to cut a deal with Nazis or her
opportunist Hungarian neighbours. Even in 1997 I saw
her distress at this.
6: THE GOOD WORK GROUP
It is a requirement of maturation that a child/teenager/young-adult comes to understand the differences between desired-tasks & required-tasks, between
rent-(food&shelter)-work & free-work,
between work and rest and creative-play: and the difference between each of
these activities done alone or with others, in a pair or group. Only a tiny
number of people, in any culture, don’t have to do rent-work or spend most of
their time on desired-tasks and creative-play. Life in the rent-work-group is
endured, partly by devising compensatory satisfactions: slow-working, merry-gossiping,
work-spoiling, back-stabbing. Because humans have
protean, unconscious desires, even the creative-group or the play-group can get
spoiled by over-proud ambition, envy and malice. Most people hope for a good
rent-work-group : and if that fails, a good
creative-group or play-group to compensate.
One might say that whatever kind of
group one enters, one’s moral task – as distinguished from the technical
& economic tasks – is to try to negotiate with others to develop it into a
better or at least good-enough group for all the
group. This might require a (minor) revolution.
Apart from groups designed to
humiliate and torture, no work-group, whatever it produces – engines,
medicines, caviar, concepts - is intrinsically bad. Plato’s heresy is said to
be the assertion of a hierarchy of worth in which any work other than abstract
geometry and philosophy is almost worthless. But any work-group – including
those producing root-vegetables, sack-cloth, prayer or philosophy – is
corruptible.
Some of the most astonishingly
fertile work, both theory and practice, on groups was done by Wittgenstein’s
contemporary Bion: much of it arising from
soldier-groups.
Wittgenstein didn’t have to work. He
had a deranged hysterical attitude to money, which infected his conception of
work and ruined the lives of others. In couple-work, especially with a young
disciple (Pinsent, Ramsey, Skinner, Drury) rather than peer, he was said to be wonderful. This
was an honourable quality. But his life shows
repeated failures in group-work.
He despised most of the humans in
his military-groups and he “came close to duel with a young officer” [p.120]
which left hum suicidal (again). But, unlike his brother Kurt, in a similar
stand-off, he didn’t follow through. Perhaps if he had, like Wilde, actually
got into a physical fight with lippy or teasing soldiers, then he would not
have ended up some months later pulling out the hair of little girls. There is
no doubting of his sublime inventiveness as a teacher or of his mythic status
as a Christ-Engineer laying hands on the broken
village-engine. But he did not have the humility to realise
he was in no fit psychological state to train to be and to practise
as a village-teacher. He didn’t like the kids enough or their parents
enough as human beings.
He was certainly traumatised
by his upbringing: and it is reasonable to conjecture the War left him with
PTSD. One strategy of such damaged people is to develop Carer’s
Syndrome: to do worthy work, backbreaking & endless hours, with the poor,
broken and needy because one can rely on them to need and to not abandon one.
One’s own need is so great that it matters little that one likes or really
cares about the recipients of one’s efforts. This of course
another form of demented religious, or even secular, self-mortification.
Eventually one’s one suppressed needs and violence break out
: as in the Haidbauer case. He was rich enough
to be freed by toff’s justice.
(At about the same age as
Wittgenstein, I too was in bad shape as I desperately began doing a teaching
certificate. During the year I got worse. Professor Dummett’s
kindness saved me and helped me finish the course – with high marks and an
offer of a job. I liked kids, but I knew I was not well-enough to be in a
classroom, and that to do so would be unfair to the children. This doesn’t make
me a genius!)
Wittgenstein almost repeated this
dangerous vanity thirty years later. Monk writes that he thought he “might
have a special talent” for helping the mentally ill. [p.356]. The image
of a still-suicidal fifty-year-old using his wealth and charm to look at the
poor broken sods of St Patricks – like the
aristocrats who came to de Sade’s prison at Charenton – was upsetting. He was no wiser in this than the
broken nineteen-year-old patients I’ve had who, after four sessions, ask
earnestly how they might train as therapists because they are ‘very good at
listening’.
THE IN-GROUP CULT-LEADER
Inverting Plato’s heresy,
Wittgenstein, all his life, spoke scathingly of Academia and especially
professional philosophy, in comparison with other forms of manual work. There is a long history of a kind of
anti-industrial, pastoral, Essene, longing, buffed by
anti-intellectualism. Often it is just fluffy or gobshite.
It becomes insidious when the teacher/prophet spoils another person’s
opportunities to test their talents. It is the nadir of bad authority, utter
wickedness, when the leader excuses himself from his own counsel. All faiths are littered with tales of
religious leaders who impose a severe discipline on their adherents that they
themselves don’t follow. Imagine an argument:
Cyanide is poison.
Don’t use this pretty wallpaper as
it has cyanide in it: in fact, have bare walls.
I use it to make my flat look
beautiful, because I am immune.
He famously said.
“There is no oxygen in Cambridge for
you: [implying – You must leave now!]
It doesn’t matter for me. I
manufacture my own oxygen” [implying – It’s alright for me to remain here] [p.6]
Ii is important to note the
re-description: he is no longer on planet Earth but on Planet Cult-Wittgenstein
trying to get us to join.
Monk lists the “the bright
young undergraduates at Cambridge of the 1930s and 1940s who chose to
learn an honest trade rather than pursuing the kind of careers for which
their education and privileged backgrounds had prepared them.” [p.181]. I have the emphasised
the words ‘chose’ and ‘honest’ because Monk seems to accept Wittgenstein’s
cultish duplicity. As I argue, above this notion of ‘honest work’ is nonsense.
The absolutely defining cultish strategy is using sexual promise as control:
which subverts any notion of choice.
Monk observes that “though he
sometimes talked of finding a job among ordinary people as he had encouraged
Skinner and Hutt to do, he seems to have made little
effort to do so.” [p.401] I feel Monk is too forgiving
with that ‘seems’. Wittgenstein took
& kept the Cambridge professorship. He didn’t become a lens-grinder like
Spinoza, but he did manoeuvre others like Skinner to
that miserable destiny, with the promise of an occasional home philosophy
seminar and a fuck. There can be very few inditements
of one’s moral principles and actions than to have a mother refuse to speak to
one at her child’s funeral, as Mrs Skinner refused
Professor Wittgenstein. [p.428]
7 : THE
SUICIDAL HYSTERIC’S BID TO BE SEEN NOT- DISAPPEARING.
In common usage the word ‘hysterical’ has a positive and a negative meaning.
a) X was
hysterical means X was very, very funny and engaging.
b) X was
hysterical means X was (is) a tiresome over-reactor, performing florid
displays of excitement or self-abasement to the point where s/he becomes a
vexation and burden : her/his body becomes the site of repeated words, screams, tears, laughter,
vomit, flailing, faints, fits : and crying ‘Wolf’.
That a hysterical person is helped
by being, or must be, slapped, is one of the few lessons of black & white cinema : the pain surprises & distracts her (and it
mostly is a ‘her’ except in the film The Producers ) them & enables
them to collect themselves.
Psychoanalysis suggested an
additional bodily symptom: physiologically implausible sickness or mis-control of part of the body. A desire or a conflict of
desire is apprehended: but as this gives rise to anxiety, it is disavowed. Soon
the act of disavowal becomes unbearable to consciousness: some part of the
affects of desire & anxiety & disavowal are repressed into the
unconscious: and others are put into the body – what is called hysterical
conversion. There may be a secondary benefit: one’s broken body is noticed and
attended to by people whose attention one wants.
This fore-grounding of the body –
and as Freud said The ego is ultimately a bodily ego - is a way of solving
the puzzle/the belief that one is invisible to the person whose attention one
desires. As we saw above, the first
communication is via milk and skin. In normal development, the infant, then
child, learns and soon knows that its mother’s body and its father’s body are
available to it – for relief and comfort, and to establish its own body,
as-a-whole, that can be given to share. If this communication fails, a person
will feel fundamentally uncertain of his/her body and what and whom it is for.
To repeatedly stimulate the body until fluids appear – crying, masturbating,
cutting oneself, vomiting, shitting - is a way of proving to oneself one
is here, in the same space, or at least house, as the person ignoring one. The
contemporary writer Elizabeth Wurtzel, who as a child
felt abandoned by her parents, gives a powerfully honest image of this
confluence of actions to prove presence, even at 30+ :
simultaneously taking cocaine, masturbating, crying, watching porn and reading
French theory.
Such an ignored child eventually
suppresses (almost) all desire for human closeness, and comes to imitate the
ignoring and rejecting parent, hurting everyone who tries to rescue her from
herself. The mildest hysterical expression is repeated unpunctuality. By being
unpredictable in one’s arrivals, one forces a thought about one – will
he/she come late or at all? – into other people’s
heads. The worst form is repeated declarations of suicidal thought and
intention.
Monk describes “Wittgenstein’s
recurring thoughts of suicide between 1903 and 1912 [ages 14-23]” but resists any urge to
explain apart from deranged books. [p.25] There is something paradoxical about
the declaration of suicidal thoughts – “I am telling you that I am going to
make myself disappear from you.” . It is not-hard
to disappear. Richey Edwards, the talented songwriter ands another manic
preacher, managed it. The theology student in the next room to mine at
college – so the police told me – had managed it. What is hard is to keep
crying “Wolf!” or rather “Sheep!” It
becomes a form of life! Wittgenstein
kept it up till his deathbed! Monk’s
biography includes a wearying, and ultimately embarrassing, number of examples.
Though it is fitting with this thesis, I confess I also found it funny that he
developed “unexplained anaemia” [p.442] : the ‘wrong’ kind of iron in the soul. Because it
is not about his body, he refuses medication. [p.539]. Being solipsistic,
he “advised patients [at Guys] not to take the medicines” which
it was his job to only deliver. [p.432] His medical inventiveness is not the
point. If he truly wanted to be in the medical work-group and defend his preferred
medications and placebos he should have joined that group through the honourable route.
Fairness demands that one includes
his own fundamental explanation for a lifelong drama of suicidal intention : “the state of not being able to get over a
particular fact” [p.187]. But despite his endless public intentions to
be truthful – and how perfect a philosophical phrase is ‘a particular
fact’ - he chickens out of saying what it is. So we are left
conjecturing an ‘objective correlative’. Is it chance or is there a brilliant
support of Freud’s theory of truth-slips in one of his last remarks “queer states of
nervous instability….teach one to pray”. [p.523]
The puzzle for the biographer, when
given Ramsay’s conjecture, is to gauge how much of it was true-words between phil-lovers, and how much intelligent observation: “They [the Wittgenstein children] were
made to work so hard by their father… at the time the eight children had
twenty-six private tutors: and their mother took no interest in them.” [p.221]
Of course one must be wary of the ‘my mother/father
made me a homosexual’ school of biography. But it is surprising how rare
a presence she is. When Parak falls for his almost
unconscious, teasing offers of discipleship, Wittgenstein “began to
withdraw ‘like a mimosa’ from Parak’s attachment. Parak, he said, reminded him of his mother” [p.159n] What are we to make of this? Or of the
observation that “he could not bring himself to do anything that
could risk seriously offending his mother” [p.97] ?
Or of the fact that he returned her gifts and could only enjoy Christmas at
home when she was dead.
Even at forty he can write “What
others think of me always occupies me to an extraordinary extent” [p.278] This
misery must not be understood. It is not a mere wish for compliments, for like
any genius he knew how good he was. What he feared was being forgotten, that
other people would, like his mother, not keep him in mind (and heart).
One of my unhappiest patients was a
brilliant French girl, who was throwing her degree finals. She said “My
father does not remember anything I tell him about myself”. Now
she would pay him back by a failure he would not forget!
8 : HEALING RIGHTS
& ALLOWANCES
“He told Russell that the happiest hours of his
life had been spent in his rooms. But this happiness was caused not simply by
his being allowed to follow his impulses, but also by the conviction that – as
he had an unusual talent for philosophy – he had the right to do so” [p.45]
For some years I worked with the damaged talent, perhaps even genius, of
the recent generation of Oxbridge scholars. Occasionally I would ask, in a
level tone, the young man or young woman a question that I had not been taught
during my training to ask, but which seemed absolutely fitting: “Do you feel
you have a right to be: and to thrive?” Interestingly, they never misunderstood this
question, probably asked for the first time. They would reply – and this was
predictable from what they’d said so far – “No” .
It was a profoundly sad moment. When I went on to say the obvious: “Giving
this right to their child is a parent or guardian’s first moral task”,
they felt a flicker of relief and the hope of
thinking.
The hysterical failed-suicide keeps asking this question again and
again. What is even more tragic than this is when they keep refusing to allow
any one else to answer, even when their parents are dead! What a waste of
oxygen! And what ill-grace of the absolutely worst kind! As he acknowledged,
Russell saved his life. He should have, for the rest of his living days, shown
him more grace and gratitude. This didn’t mean compromising his own beliefs:
but it did mean - stop sniping at him year after year like a moody
adolescent.
9: CONVERSATIONAL SPECTRUM
One of the tasks of good-enough parents is to teach children the
spectrum of different ways humans can talk : but that
in each modality talking-time must be shared with goodwill: and that there is
great human grace in being able to do this well.
TIMEOFDAY – CHAT – GOSSIP – CONVERSATION – DISCUSSION- HEARTTOHEART –
CONFIDENTIAL DISCLOSURE - CONFESSIONAL
My experiences in and outside the therapeutic space have shown me how
little ordinarily good conversation most people have: how much fear and malice
subverts the possibility of it. I have experimented with friends and kin,
changing the conditions – the place, the time, the sharing etc. These new ideas
weren’t philosophically complex but did require delicate negotiation. Some of
the results were sublime for both participants.
Wittgenstein was a charismatic speaker but he rarely got human-talk
right. He could ‘do’ good manners: but, like abandoned children, he didn’t
believe in them. Russell reported
Wittgenstein saying “he prostituted his mind taking to intelligent people” [p.90] Picture Socrates’s goodwill in the agora. Monk rightly I think
implies that Wittgenstein never attained to “Russell’s generosity of
spirit” [p.83]
Despite hardly ever being in conversation with peers, preferring the
psychological advantage of talking to (emotionally captive) younger people, he
was still too often impatient and needy. His mike-hogging, hectoring and fairly
frequent verbal violence – even to kids - were appalling. Despite this style of
his, he didn’t have the grace to abide kids talking noisily among themselves:
their liveliness pained him. Johnson wasn’t the first or last to conclude that
Wittgenstein was “a man who is quite incapable of carrying on a
discussion” [p.262]
The conditions he imposed on, not negotiated with, others for his
English confessions and for his Viennese apologies were
an absolute disgrace. He left almost all of the interlocutors puzzled and
distressed, badly used. One spoke of “the embarrassment at having to sit
in a Lyons Café while opposite sat Wittgenstein reciting his sins in a loud and
clear voice” [p.368] We can be confident that he didn’t give a thought
to any young waitress also being upset by his dark material.
It was some relief to read that he could do and did miss having “someone
with whom he could talk nonsense by the yard” [p.265] What is puzzling,
given his great gift for metaphor, and for stunning philosophical vignettes, is
that he told “astonishingly feeble jokes” [p.267].
He couldn’t talk to let alone flirt with women. Nor did he ever get,
despite decades in England, what George Watson, lauding another genius Empson, observed was an essential part of English discourse
and sensibility – whimsy.
We should not shirk the question implied in these criticisms: what is
the moral responsibility of the listener/discussant? The two qualities all
human beings are bewitched by are genius and beauty. When such a person comes
into their orbit and chooses to talk to them, most people lose their senses and
reason. Nor should it be ignored that beauty is intellectually captivating and
that displays of genius induce sexual energy in the observer. It seems that
almost all Wittgenstein’s interlocutors did a quick private emotional/moral
calculus and such was their pride and pleasure that he had chosen to speak to
them, that they decided it was worth putting up with his mike-hogging,
hectoring, even scorn. They could dine-out on stories of brushes with genius,
but it left him morally under-developed. A true friend would have challenged
him to show more respect and to share conversation like the ordinary, decent
man he aspired to be!
(Neither Thatcher nor Blair had genius:
but a common criticism of their Cabinets is their spinelessness in the
presence of solipsistic & dangerous sophistries.)
SECTION 4 :
Forms of Genius Life : Some Comparators
A genius is an extraordinary person. What happens to our sense of wonder
when one places such a person in the company of other geniuses.
This is often only from the pathetic non-genius’s bitterly envious motive to
spoil & cut down to their own worthless size. I am trying to do something
different. A genius has the burdens of
genius – one of which is how to be with & for non-geniuses. In the Wittgensteinian spirit of Goethian
morphology, I will simply state some
background of this First Eleven, all but the first and last being exact
contemporaries of Wittgenstein (1889 –1951), and then an action or two they did
or omitted. Let the Reader take in the resonances with our subject. (They are
men only to be in strict comparison, not to slight female genius.)
1: DARWIN (1809 – 1882)
He is that most rare specimen: a genius who easily loved and was easily
loved by his wife, his children, his servants, his friends, his colleagues, and
his village community, and who did not have florid lapses of immorality. In
fact, he is the most perfect benign example of Wilde’s mock-lecture title “The
influence of a permanent income on thought.”
2: CHEKHOV (1860–1904)
Born to freed-serfs he
worked very hard as a doctor and writer to support his families. He tried to
write as truly and compassionately as possible. His need, even when his health
was weak, to see and report suffering took him to the wretchedly poor East.
3: FREUD (1856 – 1939)
“A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother
keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.”
Given the world by his mother, he was never, for one
moment, going to be dissuaded by anti-semites (or
Jungians) of his sense of absolute worth.
4 : SIDDIS (1898
-1944)
Born in the US to poor
Jewish migrants, his IQ is said to have been greater than Einstein’s. He gave his
first lecture at Harvard at 11, on maths. Accepting his parent’s pacifism, he
refused to do any work that would be used for military application. The State
could not, would not, find a place for him to think. He did low clerking, while
working out black-hole theory etc and died poor.
5: BION
(1897-1979)
He was almost awarded the
VC in the First World War. His passion for the ancients and psychoanalysis led
him to be the most philosophical and literary of Freud’s followers. An abiding
interest in the war-work-group led him to revolutionise group therapy.
6: TURING (1912 –
1954)
Visiting Bletchley Park in
1993 was one of the great moral experiences of my life. I tried to imagine the
concentration of human intellects working on a project to defeat evil. It was poignant to learn how rag-panted the
ruling genius Turing was. Counterfactual history is depressing: as must be the
fact that had the State kept his Team together and not constrained where men
put their genitals, Britain would have had a decade’s advantage on the Americo-Japanese IT revolution: and ruled the virtual
world. He was brave enough to die by biblically symbolic suicide.
7 :
LEVI (1919
– 1987)
Already broken by a
disturbed, broken mother, he was most alive in Auschwitz. He strived heroically
to understand the desire to destroy and to glory the periodic table. Decades
later, she was still in the family apartment when he threw himself down the
stairwell to death.
8: WOLLHEIM (1923 – 2003)
Born into sufficient, if not great wealth – economic and
cultural – he too experienced World War & Oxbridge philosophy. His childhood memoir Germs
has been given the greatest litote as compliment “a
human document”. Perhaps because it was molten truth, it could only be
written by a dying man.
9: VIDAL (1925 -)
Gore was born into great
wealth and political influence. His self-belief surpasses mere aristocracy. It
has been his lifelong quest to witness the ancient wisdom that the word
‘homosexual’ is an adjective not a noun and to use the ideals of American
Independence to judge contemporary betrayals and tyranny.
10 : VIDAL SASSOON
(1928 –)
Can there be a genius in
hair design? As a young man in the 30’s, he took to the London streets to fight
hand-to-hand the British Nazis.
11: BIN LADEN (1957
- )
Born into Croesus-like
wealth of a Zeus-like fertile father in the Land of the Shrines, he didn’t lack
for palaces but he knew he was barely recognised among the almost unrecitable number of wives and children. He remade his
religion to allow a project to make himself an unforgettable & ever-elusive
tower-trampling colossus. Imagine Osama & Ludwig exchanging views on
self-mortification.
SECTION 5 :
Concluding Remarks
We are programmed to seek energy, high energy, bursting life : in nature and in other people. Some people will take
it even in its spuriously intense forms : heavy-metal,
soaps, trash-fiction, reality tv, sophistry -
religious and secular- and the confused
conversation of genius. Maturation consists in relinquishing satisfaction in
such spurious forms. This is a difficult temptation to resist. It is worth
remembering that fascination is the most troubled form of human attraction:
being neither pure love nor pure desire, but a dim apprehension of an unformed,
unconscious longing that cannot picture mutual, shared satisfaction.
Monk’s justly praised biography begins with the accurate observation
that Wittgenstein has become the most fascinating philosopher of our time and
culture. His contemporaries felt it personally. Subsequent generations feed off
their recorded wonder. “Wittgenstein is a most wonderful character…
Well God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train” [Keynes p66]. Reading this
book confirmed my old belief in Wittgenstein’s brilliance as a philosopher. But
it also completely dissolved my fascination with him as a man. In this essay I
have tried to explore how one might think about, what concepts one might use to
describe and judge, the man: and implicitly judge Monk’s judgement
of the man. (Readers will have noticed
that I didn’t use the concepts Oedipus Complex
and transference: which are of course utterly applicable.) I offer the
advice to young philosophers, theologians, and general readers that they should
resist bewitchment by Wittgenstein’s deeply flawed persona and often deranged
counsels about good-work, women, sexuality and God.
Unsurprisingly, a genius can talk-the-talk :
even the talk about talking the talk! “What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is
to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of
logic” [p.424]. He knew that his
life, like the house he had designed for his sister, was “lacking in primordial
life, wild life striving to erupt into the open” [p.240]
One is reminded of James’s surely autobiographical story of terrified
desire deferred into endless waiting & talking (& writing) The Beast
in the Jungle. Alas, he himself very rarely got past that ‘all of logic’ : not even as he was
dying.
When I read the story of
the final photo, “He would not accept Elizabeth von Wright’s offer of a
fresh sheet” [p.567] I found myself shouting out “For fuck’s
sake! Take the sheet you mad bastard!” As
a house designer, he knew what it was like to want to get something to be
beautiful as well as functional. At the least, one can say she was being nice
or being gracious. Surely his ethics had introduced him to those
ordinary workaday concepts. What was he doing and communicating with this
refusal: apart from spoiling the artist’s vision, rejecting a human
kindness, asserting his self-denial as being more valuable, and rubbing his
host & friends’ faces in his dirty linen, his sick perhaps seamy sheets?
THE BIOGRAPHER’S EXCUSE
An honourable biographer ought to be neither a
disciple nor Prosecuting Counsel. Can
they be Defence Counsel? The dying Othello, offering
the first biography of himself, nobly cautions “nothing extenuate” and then does so! One expects a
biographer to offer excuses for the lapses, even for the shameful horrors, of
genius. What interested me was where the line was drawn, and if it was held
consistently, applicable across all of this one life, if not quite universalisable.
Judging Wittgenstein’s
Black (Nazi) Period, Monk writes “Thankfully it was mercifully
brief”. [p.280]. I was struck by this gesture of thanks. Who is being thanked
and why? He goes for double qualifiers at crucial moments, which don’t
strengthen, which I guess he intends, but in fact communicate ambivalence. This
comes out later, After firmly saying: “[Wittgenstein’s]
whole litany of lamentable nonsense… were they not written by Wittgenstein
would be understood as… [shit]”
[p.314 : my final word], he concludes “[His] remarks on Jewishness,
like his projected autobiography, were essentially confessional, and both seem
in some way linked to the ‘sacred’
union he had planned for himself and Marguerite” [p.317 my emphasis ] If this vague speciousness, “seem in
some way”, is allowed to excuse Saint Ludwig, then it
must in all decency be allowed to excuse St Adolf and
St Eva who believed, by Wagner & Christ, that their union was sacred and
actually did marry !
After
reading several hundred pages of Wittgenstein’s hysterical reports of suicidal
longing, and of his whining about Cambridge, as if the place were a dry shrew,
we suddenly see this sentence: “Wittgenstein was forced to return
to Cambridge” [p.470] It is my
emphasis, for Monk doesn’t comment on the word. This is the perfect example of
the biographer aligning with the genius: one can imagine Wittgenstein offering
the excuse “I was forced to return to Cambridge” I
thought this is a lamentable trahison des clercs by both Wittgenstein and Monk. Like for St Peter
three intellectual cocks gave signs:
1) Wittgenstein’s
homage and development of Hertz’s use or rather non-use of ‘force’. [p.261]
2) Wittgenstein’s
further development of this with Grant’s use/non-use of ‘shock’
. [p.444]
3) Wittgenstein’s near-mockery
of Freud for (supposedly) confusing ‘cause’ and ‘reason’.
This
was in the middle of a World War. A less heroic philosopher, Sartre, said that
the circumstances of the war in fact ‘condemned men to be most free’ .
This was validated by the Nuremberg trial judges who rejected the common plea
of “only following orders” , an ‘internalised’
force.
Wittgenstein’s
declaration of (some) desire & love was what persuaded those enraptured
young men to deny themselves an attempt at Cambridge Professorships. It would
be plausible to say he forced them out of Cambridge.
And
now I must be silent and go freely back to his philosophy………..
APPENDIX
I : THE ORIGINS OF ORDINARY MORAL GENIUS
Some
Readers may feel that I have exaggerated the moral sense of some children, and
unfairly used these exceptional children to castigate the
adult-Wittgenstein’s moral confusions. I hope the Reader
will remember that I do not mock the young Wittgenstein – who did fancy himself
as a proto-ethicist. What I am doing is simply foregrounding the
(cross-cultural) fact that a child who has received good-enough parenting
usually attains to sufficient moral sense to carry them through life as decent
adults, sometimes even as moral giants: even without reading Plato & Kant.
The child has, in Ryle’s terms, the know-how
of moral life, even if they don’t they have the know that of
philosophical or religious ethics. I use the term ‘decent’ in its ordinary
meaning of good-enough adult. Wittgenstein’s use of the same word had a more
bizarre, ascetic inflection.
In
this brief appendix I will say a little more of what the child’s know-how is
comprised of. But first a brilliant story that I came across after I had
finished the First Draft of this essay.
“Further proof that, after many years of looking like precisely the
opposite, children may indeed be returning to their allotted role of harbingers
of hope for the future, came during a visit to the gym this week. I spent
several minutes watching a three-year-old girl tug futilely on her mother's
coat, trying to bring her attention to a broken toy while her mother remained
locked in conversation alternately with her friend and on her mobile.
Eventually, a look of dawning comprehension and horror spread across the
child's face. "Mummy!" she roared, giving one final, desperate tug.
"Do you recognise me?" I quickly swabbed
her and intend to deliver a clone to the house of all similarly rubbish parents
forthwith.”
[Lucy
Mangan :
The Guardian : 2 June 07.]
How
luminously that child’s question resounds. It is the sublime correlate to Primo
Levi’s sublime poem of recognition “If this is a man”. Few people
remember that the poem, beginning with one of the most famous conditionals in
world literature, ends with the promise of a curse on the Reader’s children.
The three-year-old has no power, nor has she yet got the knowledge of how to
curse, but she is a moral genius. Even she knows that her question is not about
re-cognition of a person in a police line-up, nor of a child dressed as a
fairy, among twenty other school-play fairies. It is about unfairness,
rejection, denial, temporary erasure/murder.
PRIMARY
LIFE LESSONS
During Primary
School, in class and in the playground, and also at home during those years, a
kid learns how some (performative) utterances
and actions work: how, when, and why to say the words
below.
1:
Please show me how to do X.
2:
Please let me have a go at doing X.
3:
May I show you how to do X?
4:
Would you like to have a go at doing X?
5:
Please show OP how to do X.
6:
Please let OP have a go at doing X.
7:
Shall we take turns in doing X?
8:
Shall we do X together?
9:
You do X much better than me.
10:
Thank you.
11:
Sorry for butting in.
12:
Sharing is good and fair’s fair.
13: Z won’t show me or OP how to do X: Z won’t
let me have a go. Z won’t wait & take turns: Z won’t share. Z never gives thanks. Z butts in.
Z
is bad, nasty, mean, horrid, cruel.
(X
can involve food, toys, games, tasks, talk-time, attention. OP is an Other Person.)
Childhood
is mostly waiting to be shown how to do X and waiting to have a go
at doing X. So children are acutely aware of the emotions that go with this
waiting: anxiety, frustration, anger, greed, relief, pleasure, joy – solo &
shared. As Freud. Klein, Bion
and Matte Blanco have shown, and proven, among the tasks of words is to bind
affect. Knowing how to use these ‘formulae’ above is one level of relief.
Another
child’s age, skin-colour, disability, wealth, creed, is usually irrelevant to
the children’s projects above: in fact it is usually adults who make them
relevant. Children hope that doing X will bring pleasure - even if action-X is
difficult – and so the question is always - who helps to bring about the
opportunity to do X.
Greed,
bullying, not-sharing, social withdrawal, are all defences to cope with the
feeling (and belief) that the opportunities to do X will not be shared: and
that often words will fail.
We
can meet the decent-adults-who-were-such-decent-children both in peacetime and in wartime.
PEACETIME
There
is a lovely tv documentary which shows a group of
ordinary working-class adult Americans, talking about one of their primary
school lessons from two decades earlier : the
Blue-Eye-Brown-Eye experiment. Most of them speak undramatically
of the way that lesson in equality & respect had stayed with them and
shaped their responses as teenagers & adults. They implied that the truth
was irrefutable and inescapable.
WARTIME
As
Anon said “Altruism
is generosity without hope of reciprocation”.
It
is a beautifully concise and accurate aphorism. Perhaps because we all crawl
under the burden of counsels of perfection (religious or secular), the
aphorisms implied by this are rarely fore-grounded.
Cordiality
is generosity with hope of commensurate reciprocation.
Civility
is minimal goodwill with hope of like goodwill.
Common
civility is the basic line of civilization, the good manners by which one
indicates that one will not resort to irrationality and violence. As intimacy
increases, one moves towards the line of cordiality. Of course one does not do
sums – one expensive present equals three cheap snacks etc: it is the
commensurate spirit that matters. We are back in the childhood lesson of
sharing.
In
their justly celebrated work with people who had been rescuers from the Nazis,
the Olners repeatedly received the following type of
explanation from those ordinary citizens who had acted altruistically:
“It’s how we were brought up, what we learned as children –
to treat people fairly. What we did was nothing special: we had to do it. Yes,
we put our own children in danger, but they understood.”
A
few of them, but not all, cited religious or political creeds. But mostly it
seemed to be a pre-creed humanitarian lesson. The Olners’
uncontroversial conclusion was that such crucial moral orientation must begin
in the school playground.
CONCLUSION
I
feel I have made my case. A child can know this much. Therefore we can say that
all colour-racists, caste-bigots, anti-semites,
anti-feminists, aristocrats, slave-owners, did not get or take-to-heart this
lesson in childhood. No matter how rich or powerful they become as adults,
what they say about women, or other races or Jews is shit. It cannot be
defended or extenuated. Biographers shouldn’t try.
Though
Wittgenstein makes much of Augustine’s remarks on childhood acquisition of
language, he doesn’t move onto the way children acquire the utterances above in
their playground games.
APPENDIX II : Biography
as Make-up Sex
The
other controversial theme in the essay above is with respect to the line of
necessary forgiveness. This begins with the psychological question: how
much must the author forgive the faults and failings of the biographical
subject in order to ‘live-with’ the subject during the writing, and to write
fairly and honourably. It is understood that the Biographer is comfortable with
the easier emotions of praise and admiration for the subject’s success,
virtues, and genius. What I am offering for discussion is how to judge the
difference, or even dissonance, between where the Biographer draws the line of
forgiveness and where the Reader draws it. The Reader may say that his/her line
represents the Community line of forgiveness: and that the Biographer is guilty
of
over-defending, partiality, and unfairness. S/he may go on and say that were the
Biographer to read their own words, as written by someone else, they are likely
to respond nearer to the Reader/Community line of forgiveness. The argument
above implies that it might be hard if not impossible to write about a hated
tyrant. But that is easy, if unpleasant: for the biographer easily disconnects
from a personal connection. It would be harder to write a biography of a parent
or partner or colleague or friend that one felt bitterly let-down by.
I
have spoken above of the charm and fascination of genius. Here I would like to
propose another related reason for the indulgence a biographer gives to the
often awful personal flaws of genius. I begin with an analogy.
Men
and women, who finally abandon decades of the pathological pursuit of
unsuitable partners – who use and abuse them emotionally, physically and
sexually for years – often complain that sex with their sane and kind new
partner is (a little) boring. The
therapist or friend who hears this can but explain as follows;
“Isn’t
make-up sex wild and thrilling, the best being straight after a flaming row?
Anger is physically energising like sex: its arrival is often as thrilling and
unwilled as an erection or wetness: the anxiety & fear of expressing it
adds another quantum of energy: the daring to express it – shouting, throwing
things, even hitting - brings yet another rush. Finally when the storm is over,
the relief is almost as physical as fainting. If at that moment you and your
partner decide to have sex, your bodies are already on fire, and so the sex is
unimaginably intense. The point is that kind of foreplay is intrinsically
unhealthy. What you have to hope for is that as your trust in your nice new
partner increases you will dare to go to a sexual plateau even higher than
make-up sex. Trust is stronger than anger: but it may take some time.”
Scott
Fitzgerald famously said “The mark of a first rate mind is the ability to
hold two contradictory ideas at the same time and still retain the ability to
function." This is like the omniscience & omnipotence felt by
the child at its first lie.
The
morally-flawed genius offers to the non-genius both wonder at their genius (at
making objects and/or ideas) and revulsion at their personal flaws. Both induce in the non-genius a physical
response. Sometimes there is a connecting or cross-fertilisation between the
two feelings: usually with the revulsion heightening the wonder and thereby
increasing fascination, intellectual and emotional :
just as above, anger or relief from anger heightens sexual arousal. Human
excitement is not arithmetical but geometrical in its progression: libido
squared not merely added. But it is possible that the non-genius Reader may
refuse the connecting.
APPENDIX III :
Wittgenstein Goes Window Shopping for Schubert’s Beetle Box
I
have just re-re-read Monk’s some of How to Read Wittgenstein. Yet again the familiar feelings of awe & admiration at some of
his philosophy and distress & anger at some of his life-pronouncements.
In a Wittgensteinian spirit, I am appending, rather
than properly integrating, more new material: this being a discussion phase
still. But I could not let pass this famous quote:
“I was walking about in Cambridge and passed a bookshop and in
the window were portraits of Russell, Freud and Einstein. A little further on,
in a music shop, I saw portraits of Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. Comparing
these portraits I felt intensely the terrible degeneration that had come over
the human spirit in the course of only one hundred years”
This
is so wretchedly wrong. In the mouth of a teenager it could be extenuated by
youthful innocence & idealism. But, anyone who has truly understood the way
adult desire, greed & hatred lead men & women to war in the hearth, the
polis and the battlefield, wouldn’t come out with such
tendentious drivel. It is easily rejected and refuted.
The
plain refutation comes from the shadow-war of the Holocaust. How ought one to
theorise, or just describe, the fact that a person could be so moved (to tears
of understanding & emotion) by Beethoven being performed/heard in his
lounge that he arranged for others (under his control) to perform Beethoven,
and then murdered them & their kin without remorse? Of course this is not a
weakness in Beethoven. One cannot even say the Nazi aesthetes misunderstood
Beethoven’s project and intention. Burgess explained it mostly simply, and
starkly, when he posited “different ducts” : that a
person may genuinely & aptly cry at a work of art: and may also cry for a
wounded pet, but not-cry for a person they’ve hurt or even murdered.
What
has to be explained is how, in some forms of life, art & the abuse
or murder of those in the designated out-group is used to protect the
privileges of the in-group. There was sufficient indifference to human
suffering, and sufficient denial of opportunities to thrive – justified by
(tawdry & confused) ideologies relating to gender, class, religion,
country, ethnicity – in the time of Wittgenstein’s heroes. If a nominal or
implicit secularism in our time has produced the ideas of Russell etc, it has
also provided more opportunities for women, the poor, non-whites, etc to get
some education & a chance to invent art or sport or medicine for the
community.
The
second refutation is possible using Wittgenstein’s own magnificent philosophical
fable. Apart from going against his own principles and expecting
all
geniuses-of the-human-spirit to be of one limited set of criteria, and making
unfair and irrelevant comparisons, rather than sharing a family resemblance,
there is an implication of Schubert et al having a special beetle in their
special box-of-the-soul which his first-mentor Russell, and the other two
modern geniuses, didn’t have or that they had a recessive mutation. But who
could name that not-no-not-some-thing?!
(Had Wittgenstein lived a bit longer, he could have joined the chorus
that were scandalized by Tony Palmer’s assertion in the sixties "If
there is still any doubt that Lennon and McCartney are the greatest songwriters
since Schubert, then . . . [the White Album] . . . should surely see the last
vestiges of cultural snobbery and bourgeois prejudice swept away in a deluge of
joyful music making. )
There
are a tiny group of cities that later Western intellectuals dream of having
lived in because of their awesome range of creativity :
Ancient Athens, Renaissance Florence and 1920s Vienna. It is almost bizarre
that Wittgenstein couldn’t relish his luck. One wonders what he would have made
of that work of genius, Ulysses, had he had the humility to read it.
Joyce’s migrant Jew, Bloom, is intended as a portrait of an absolutely decent
man, with a deep fascination with all modalities of life – science, art,
(especially music), religion, politics, commerce – and, above all that, a
commitment to the varieties of human love.
A
final philosophical refutation of his position is perhaps to be found in
Kierkegaard’s separation of the religious/spiritual realm (form of life) from
the
aesthetic, and also ethical. In which case Wittgenstein’s famous inability to
express what music meant to him is irrelevant to his other avowed project to
live a decently religious or religiously decent life.
Wittgenstein’s
personal tragedy was that he never quite understood where to put his money or
his mouth. Why didn’t he build a (free) school or a seminary for farming, or
music or even his form of philosophy?
One of the things musical aesthetics and ethno-musicology must explain
is how music (with or without words) sometimes makes the auditor want to dance,
alone or with others: and the human worth of this. Though he was from the city
of the waltz and lived in houses with ballrooms, one wonders what dance meant
to him. What did he make of the cliché that gay men dance better than straight
men? Russell at least tried to establish a new school. Despite his engagement
with Freud, Wittgenstein didn’t understand his own motions of sublimation &
desublimation: how libido flows through epistemophilia, scopophilia and
the varieties of bodily & sexual desire. His default position was a
defensive self-mortification that often extrapolated to reflex tirades against
how others express their bodies and minds.
Enlightenment
secularism was carved out of centuries of the restraining hypocrisies of the religiouse. Braying & sniping at secularism doesn’t
automatically return the believer to the moral high ground. One would have
thought that after having several millennia to prove/show the worth &
how-to of a holy life, believers could show it more quietly. As many a
spiritual director has cautioned his/her over-eager spiritual aspirant,
frequent railing against the secular is not a form of devoutness, it is the
sins of wrath and acedie.
The
decent Reader & Beatles fan must leap to the defence of the beleaguered
books in the window.
[ NOTE : AUGUST 08 ]
Mad Ludwig’s despair of being able to word-the-meaning of music came to
mind as I stood in Mauthausen Concentration Camp and
read the most brutal story of the pursuit of meaning & identity through
music I have ever read in my life. As Monk is silent, I wondered if
Wittgenstein, on his final trips to Vienna, dared to visit the camp, or even the
school in Linz that he shared with Hitler. Both places are less than two hours away from
his family palaces. ]
APPENDIX
IV Level Headed
Wittgenstein
famously declared that he could not say what (a piece of) music meant to him.
This is of course a different question to what a group of musicians & music
critics (including him) might say a piece of music means. But he did not
hesitate to say what a poem Uhland’s Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn meant and what it meant to him. In
fact he used this (quite lame) poem to supplement his argument about the
distinction between saying and showing. The obvious point to be made is that
here we have an allegorical interpretation. This might stand even if there had
been little or no intention in the author to write allegorically.
It
is surprising that despite being brought up as a Catholic, and despite being
contemporary with Lewis and Williams, the principle Oxbridge writers on
allegory, and despite advocating “philosophy ought really to be written
only as a poetic composition”, he did not engage
with Dante, the world-master of multi-levelled
writing. His four levels at least match and at time surpass Freud’s levels of
human engagement : but this is to compare unfairly.
Mr Jones suggests that Wittgenstein deliberately chose not to
use allegory, and was attempting, through his brilliant metaphors & tiny
stories, something else. This is probably true, but I still feel it would have
been valuable to have his account of this decision.
Like
a great artist Wittgenstein seductively invites imitation – usually tragically
pale. So it is I find myself thinking of the precise austere logic of the Tractatus as a hypodermic needle straight
into the heart, and of the Investigations & Certainty as a
black forest gateau smashed into one’s face: so tasty but frustrating because
one’s tongue will never collect all its deliberately imprecise meanings.
To
return to the cherished confessional remark by Wittgenstein and Monk’s gloss.
A) : “I am not a religious man but I cannot help seeing
every problem from a religious point of view”
[p.464].
B) :”In a way, that is
certainly important but difficult to define, he had lived a devoutly religious
life.” [p.580]
Here
Wittgenstein is claiming a seamlessly anagogical perception of the world. Monk
infers from this claim that he was devout. I argue that Wittgenstein was
deluded and that Monk’s inference fails because he did not live a devout life.
So
a fundamental question is - What is a biographer to do with levels of
interpretation, how conscious s/he must be of them? Connected with this is the
space/silence a biographer leaves after a description of the subject that s/he
knows will trouble the reader. What of the pre-emptive strategy, common to
footballers and politicians, of (over)using ‘obviously’?
A friend recently observed that his generally happy fifteen-year-old
daughter had arrived at a stage of frequently using the word ‘hypocrisy’ and
‘hypocrite’, but often strangely accompanied by puzzlement and dismay. Both of
us were impressed by her complex struggle with this hardest of languages games.
Thinking again of the biography, after the first discussions of this
essay, I am again impressed by its essentially Wittgensteinian
achievement. What he tried to do in philosophy, effect a release from
bewitchment – ‘disenchantment’ has other connotations – Monk achieved (for me)
in his biography. As I argue, this partly through the space he leaves/shows
between his descriptions & judgements. But this
leaves me with the puzzle of why other books – Dufy, Eagleton & Jaman’s film kept
me bewitched?
I can but wonder how I will feel after reading Michael Nedo’s biography next year.