the redeeming word
by
Douglas Messerli
Ludwig
Wittgenstein Private Notebooks 1914-1916, Edited and Translated by
Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022)
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What
was the important 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein really like as a
human being? Although we have a provocative film by Derek Jarman about him
(1993), a fine fiction concerning the man by Bruce Duffy, The World As I
Found It (1987), and we have numerous observations from the many students,
biographers, admirers, detractors, and acolytes who met him
“If
by pressing a button it could have been secured that people would not concern
themselves with his personal life, I should have pressed that button....
Further, I must confess that I feel deeply suspicious of anyone’s claim to have
understood Wittgenstein. That is perhaps because...I am very sure that I did
not understand him.”
Surely there is a certain logic to
Anscombe’s thinking. I myself have noted that among my friends a person of
special genius produces various contradictory reactions in others, some finding
this remarkable writer and raconteur to be off-putting and dismissive, others
angry that their brilliant acquaintance doesn’t allow them equal time in
conversations to express their own views; some outrightly hate the intelligent
friend, demeaning any expressed viewpoints more out of envy it appears than
actual logic; and still others sit quietly at the feet of my genius friend in
dumb admiration. None of these reactions seem appropriate to the person I know
well and love. But that is always the way with individuals of genius or any
kind of notable eccentricity.
Does it truly matter that the philosopher
was also a living, breathing being who had sometimes very ordinary habits and
desires? Other than our fascination in any celebrity’s ordinariness isn’t it
the art, writing, dance, music, acting, or thinking that is paramount?
Of course it does very much matter. We
want our gods always to be slightly fallen messes of human frailties so that we
are not made to feel that their gifts were out of reach for us ordinary human
beings. And we like to imagine how someone very much like us might also have
been able to accomplish all the other things he or she did. Perhaps if, like
Charles Dickens or Leo Tolstoy, the latter a writer who Wittgenstein very much
admired, the philosopher had simply had a wife whom he deeply loved, cheated
on, or maltreated no one might make an issue of Wittgenstein’s private life
once a biographer a biographer had provided us with all the juicy tidbits.
But so much of Wittgenstein’s private
life remains unknown and unexplored, and as we have begun to discover in the
years since his death, much of this was not his own doing as it was a series
purposeful acts by those to whom he entrusted his manuscripts and others who
have kept still in their biographical studies, it clearly becomes even more
important that we need to know as much about the man as we can, even if that is
highly selective and limited information.
This particular genius, moreover, was not
only a queer human in the sense of being an odd fellow, something we might well
expect of a great intellect, but was queer in the 20th century use of that term,
a homosexual, which has been well documented in his commentary and remarks.
And as Marjorie Perloff suggests,
without putting it as bluntly as I now do, the Austrian-born philosopher who
spent most of his days in England was the subject of homophobia and the
resistance to the revelation of his sexuality that always travels along with
that state of mind. In 1954 the editors of what came to be called The Nachlass—the collection of Wittgenstein’s
unpublished notebooks, ledgers, typescripts, and collection of clippings—decided
to publish his notebooks written during his service in World War I from
1914-1916, what was left along with three of four other such notebooks of the
same period which were missing, “lost or destroyed.” But as Perloff notes,
“they chose only those sections they regarded as philosophically relevant,” excluding
the entries of the verso side of the notebooks which were coded, acceding
perhaps the master’s suggestion of “Keep Out,” although the code was an easy
one that Wittgenstein had used as a child with his sisters in which a is
replaced by z, b by y, etc. The 1961 edition, published by Blackwell (later by
the University of Chicago Press in 1979) contains only the right-hand pages,
without giving any evidence of what is missing.
When later in the 1960s the executors
were trying to decide what to do with the coded remarks for a new Cornell
microfilm edition of the Nachlass, another of the three executors, Rush
Rhees commented:
“I
wished (and do) that W. had not written those passages. I do not know why he
wanted to; but I think I do understand in a way, and I understand then also why
he chose this ambiguous medium. I fear especially that if they are published by
themselves—not in the contexts (repeat: contexts) in which they were written;
so that what was a minor and occasional undertone to Wittgenstein’s life and
thinking, will appear as a dominant obsession.”
The phrase “minor and occasional
undertone,” Perloff perceptively argues refers to Wittgenstein’s expression of
“sexual (specifically, homosexual) desire.” To solve their dilemma, Perloff
tells us, quite shockingly, first a microfilm of the entire manuscript was
produced, and then a second was made in which the coded remarks were blacked
out. Scholars saw the expurgated copy only.
The third of Wittgenstein’s literary
executors, G. H. von Wright, however, took a different tack and published a
book of 1,500 remarks from different manuscripts of Wittgenstein to express the
philosopher’s views on “culture and value,” published in German as Vermischte
Bermerkungen in 1977. The bilingual, German/English edition of this book
has gone through several printings, and Perloff finds it inevitable,
accordingly, that given this focus on Wittgenstein’s cultural values that his
private notebooks might also draw, as it did, the attention of readers. The
Private Notebooks were finally published—transcribed from the code cracked
by Alois Pilcher and fellow scholars— by Wilhelm Baum under the title Geheime
Tagebūcher, published in Vienna in 1991.
Elizabeth Anscombe immediately sued,
which basically banned the book until in 2014 Baum changed the title to Wittgenstein
im Ersten Welkrieg along with new introductory material explaining the context
of his book. But by this time, after major biographies by Brian McGuinness and
Ray Monk, the actual edition of the private notebooks was basically ignored.
And in his comments about them Monk downplays any essential significance,
suggesting that Wittgenstein was not as uneasy about homosexuality as he was
about sex itself. “Sexual arousal, both homo- and
heterosexual, troubled him enormously. He seemed to regard it as incompatible
with the sort of person he wanted to be.”
Yet for the years after Wittgenstein’s
death, his most private and personal of works remained unavailable in English
until this year’s wonderful translation of Private Notebooks 1914-1916,
by Perloff, published in a bi-lingual by Liveright.
That does not mean that we suddenly have
a true revelation of the “gay” Wittgenstein, if there was ever such a being. Even
uncoded, Wittgenstein’s notebooks are written in a kind of code, a decorum that
simply refuses to fully discuss many things, and not just of the sexual kind.
But certainly this is not the sort of daily diary that any straight doughboy
might have kept—or even a homosexual one such as Wilfred Owen.*
First of all Wittgenstein, who might
easily have been given a medical exemption and because of his family wealth and
social standing surely could have served as an officer, chose instead to enlist
as an ordinary foot soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Army serving as a
searchlight orderly on a boat, the Goplana, crawling up and down the
Vistula River from Kraków to Gdańsk, almost always under the watch and gunfire
of the Russian enemy. Wittgenstein had no political allegiances and at one
point in the notebooks even proclaims that the British will surely win being a
superior people. And he had previously given away most of his inheritance to
poets and writers selected by an agent, having little knowledge of contemporary
poetry.
It is clear, given these strange
decisions, that the young thinker saw the experience as a kind of crucible in
which to examine his own life to see if he might survive the kind of moral
intensity he would have to undertake in order to truly examine meaning as he
intended to. Accordingly, he wrote a personal record of that experience while simultaneously
attempting to get to the heart of issues in which his philosophy would take
him: “What cannot be said, cannot be said,” later expressed in Tractatus
as “Of what one cannot speak, of that one must be silent.” He hoped that by the
end of his service, if he survived, that he might be made over into another
man, which he finally comes to realize by the Notebook’s end, which he
has indeed become simply as a survivor.
That does not mean that he does not
express the pain he suffers. Like any soldier, for much of the time he is
simply worn out from the terrible sleeping accommodations and the long nights
he is made to stand duty, usually alone without a properly working searchlight.
And the vast majority of the entries are devoted to the “pack of rogues,”
tough, uneducated thugs from the far reaches of the Austro-Hungarian Empire such
as, Perloff suggests, “the provinces of Serbia or eastern Hungary” all too
ready to make fun of the somewhat effeminate book-reading effete (his voice was
described as a “ringing tenor”) who probably was equally dismissive of and
aloof from them. Given the intensity of their torment it is also apparent to
any gay individual who has been bullied that they knew he was a homosexual.
Indeed, any gay reader will recognize in
passage after passage of these strange notebooks an understated representation
of gay bullying and determined denigration. No matter what his opinion is of
them, it clearly hurts, and ultimately ends in his deep depression, having
perhaps never before encountered so many coarse beings who he describes as
seemingly “non-human.”
Just a few random passages from Private
Notebooks makes it clear how much this becomes a repeated theme. He begins
good naturedly enough, recognizing how ridiculous his position is:
10.8.14
“I’ll
need a great deal of good humor and philosophy to feel at home here.
When I woke up this morning, I felt as if I were in the middle of one of those
dreams in which, for no reason at all, you are suddenly sitting in a
schoolroom. Given my position, there is of course much to laugh at & I
perform the most menial tasks, smiling ironically.”
But quite soon, the complaints show his
inability to keep either humor or philosophize about the situation.
13.8.14
“Day
before yesterday at the captain’s. I was quite rattled & didn’t appear
appropriately military to him. He was a little sarcastic toward me and I didn’t
find him very likeable.”
16.8.14
“Again:
the stupidity, insolence and malice of this bunch knows no limits. Every job
turns into torture.”
25.8.14
“Yesterday
a terrible day. In the evening the searchlight would not function. As I was
trying to fix it, I was interrupted by my shipmates with shouts and catcalls
etc.”
15.9.14
“Night
before last, terrible scenes: practically everyone drunk.”
20.9.14
“Yes.
again: it is infinitely hard not to take a stand against the malice of
human beings! For the malice of beings inflicts a wound every time.”
A year later things have obviously gotten
even worse:
4.13.15
“Am
morally blank; but I see the enormous difficulty of my position and so far, it
is entirely unclear to me to how to correct it.”
5.3.15
“Talked
to Gürth today about my humiliating position. No decision yet.”
6.3.15
“My situation is still not resolved. My mood
very variable.—.”
And for days after, he repeats again and
again, “Situation unresolved.” Indeed we wonder at moments whether or not some
of the problems stem from his own sexual responses to the other crew members;
at one point later in the Notebooks Wittgenstein suggests that things
have become very tense with a Lieutenant and that it may come to a duel.
Interestingly, in the midst of these cries for help, he still expresses his
sexual feelings, an odd placement for them.
9.3.15
“Situation
unresolved! = . Mood wary but dark.—”
The very next day:
10.3.15
“Strongly
sexually aroused. Undecided. Restless in spirit.=.
And the following days he writes still of
an unchanged “situation.” That this “situation” and his sexual arousal is
somehow connected is made even more clear when a few days later he receives a
letter from his beloved friend and student David Pinsent:
18.3.15
“Lovely
letter from David yesterday!— ....Replied to David. Feeling very aroused.”
(Compare this with the entry from 21.12.14.: “A letter from David!! I kissed
it.”)
And
his feeling of arousal continues over the next few days.
In short, the pattern is quite clear: like
so very many bullied gay school boys, the torture appears to alternate with sexual desire,
perhaps even for one of his bullies, a kind of early S & M syndrome, which
would explain, if true, what William Warren Bartley’s biography of Wittgenstein
claims, to have unearthed evidence of the philosopher’s taste for “rough trade”
in a Viennese park.
The tension between these two forces as
expressed in these notebooks is not dissimilar from the pulls between his
belief in God and a denial of religion that is very much at the heart of Wittgenstein’s
philosophical undertakings—characterized in these notebooks as “my work”
meaning his writing, not his activities as a soldier—that activity itself being
generally expressed in an alternating pattern of progress and a complete
breakdown, days of good work followed by an inability to move on. One might be
tempted, in fact, to describe Wittgenstein as being somewhat like a manic
depressive, with a pattern of remarkable achievement before collapsing into
near despair.
If these personal expressions, however,
still seem ambivalently expressed even with the code broken we must also ask
ourselves how could they not be so at a time when homosexuality was outlawed in
both England and Germany (paragraph 175 of German penal code was not abolished
until 1994, and despite the later openness of homosexuality in Weimar Germany
after the War, British law required imprisonment and other punishments until
section 28 was abolished in 2000). One need only to recall the evident suicide
of another Cambridge University genius, Alan Turing to realize the consequences
of openly expressing one’s homosexuality.**
In fact, Wittgenstein appears to be
quite open about his homosexuality with regard to his trip to Vienna with his commander.
Returning to his home city, he mentions his mother and family only in passing,
but makes an important note to himself: “Let me note here that my moral standing
is now much lower than it was at Easter.” (2.1.15), which to me reads as an
obvious statement of having had some sexual encounters while in the city. One
can only wonder, moreover, if his “moral standing” has anything to do with
Gürth, who in describes in the entry from 10.1.15, “Had many very pleasant
hours with Gürth. Am very curious about my future life.—.” Or, perhaps, it is
more connected with his repeated trips to the baths, which even though were
universally used by men and women to get a thorough cleansing of the body in
the days before some had indoor plumbing, were even then a place where one
could engage in same-sex activities in the gender-separated sweating rooms and pools.
And, finally, any gay male would recognize
that it was highly unlikely that a heterosexual doughboy would note again and
again throughout the Private Notebooks every time he masturbated. If a
straight soldier were even to keep such a diary it might surely be full of the
visits he made on return to Krákow to the brothels or a woman’s apartment, but
surely would not record for himself his masturbatory habits as does
Wittgenstein. I may be mistaken, but appears to me that young heterosexual
males don’t like to even talk about masturbation since it presumes that they
are unable to find sex with a female, and might hint of sexual abnormality.
Far from Monk’s assertion that sexual
arousal “troubled him enormously,” this Wittgenstein seems very much fascinated
by it, perhaps by the fact that he even could continue to fantasize a sexual
object successfully enough to masturbate; despite the tortures his fellow
“rouges” put him through, he still could get aroused, or today as we might
describe, he still remained quite sexually horny.
This is clearly not a record of his humiliations
or misdemeanors but almost a listing of his abilities to retain his sexual
identity despite what he describes in these self-reflective works, which
up until the end of these writings haunt him: “Not in the best of health and
sick to my soul as a result of the bigotry and meanness of my compatriots”
(6.18.16). To the very end Wittgenstein is aware of his being queer, different
and hated by those around him for simply who he is. But he has survived and by
the end of the Private Notebooks seems to have answered his question of
1.6.15, “Is there a priori an order in the world, and if so, of what does it
consist?”
On 12.8.16, answers: “The ‘I’ makes
its appearance in philosophy by means of the idea that the world is my
world. / This is connected with the fact that none of our experience is a
priori. / Everything we see could be otherwise.”
19.8.16: “Surrounded by viciousness. God
will help me,” he closes with a sense of hope, even if as he earlier comments:
“The redeeming word...has not yet been articulated.” (p. 149), which I
can only imagine, if such a word does exist, to be “liebe, love.”
In the end, accordingly, Wittgenstein’s
personal life does very much matter, not only because it has helped lead him to
his philosophical revelations, but shows us a suffering yet enduring and even
resilient individual battling the sexual bigotry around him. It angers me when
I am told by others, accordingly, that these issues don’t matter in the life of
a thinker I so very much admire. I am not interested in his sexuality for
prurient reasons but for the fact that he did think it worth his keeping a
record of his personal engagement with a world which he had been ill-raised to
confront but with which he obviously deemed it necessary to engage.
The fact that even a “god,” as John
Maynard Keynes (himself a gay man) described him, had to endure harassment for
being gay in his own life, and suffered yet more homophobia by his beloved
followers and admirers, and now even after Perloff’s important contribution, is
still being denied the truths he himself recorded*** reveals that homosexuality
is still a troubling topic for many in our society. The advances many gays have
made in the last several decades is being threatened anew in the US and
throughout the world.
*Owens
wrote back from the war: “There are two
French girls in my billet, daughters of the Mayor, who (I suppose because of my
French) single me out for their joyful gratitude for La Déliverance. Naturally
I talk to them a good deal; so much so that the jealousy of other officers
resulted in a Subalterns’ Court Martial being held on me! The dramatic irony
was too killing, considering certain other things, not possible to tell in a
letter.”
**Three
of Wittgenstein’s brothers committed suicide, which helps to explain some of
his final entries about suicide in Private Notebooks. In two instances,
the reasons for the brothers’ deaths seem vague, but in his brother Rudi’s
case, he was known, before his drinking a glass of milk and potassium cyanide
in a Berlin bar, to have what a friend described as a “perverted disposition.” Shortly
before, he evidently sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee,
an organization campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code,
which prohibited homosexual sex.
***An
anonymous reader on Amazon wrote almost as much as Perloff has in her short
section introductions and final essay to this book in an attempt to browbeat
the critic and deter any potential reader for her having even suggested that
Wittgenstein was a homosexual. His or her running thesis is “This book is
mostly Perloff’s attempt to conjure and reify Wittgenstein as a homosexual. She
does this without evidence and by implication, inference, insinuation, leaps in
logic, fake causality, association, and by saying “no doubt” and “of course” a
lot. What she lacks in evidence, she attempts to make up for by brow-beating
the reader into submission and agreement. For some reason she wants
Wittgenstein to have been a homosexual. Her narrow personal agenda, in this
regard, casts a pall over this book. She abdicates her responsibility. She
disrespects the reader and she disrespects Wittgenstein and his legacy.”
I laughed heartily at these comments
since most readers have now long know of the philosopher’s sexual preference,
the subject even of a movie by note director Derek Jarman. The homophobia of
this review is so obvious that it is quite frightening.
Does he or she imagine that the
Wittgenstein’s coarse military compatriots are mocking and abusing him for his
proper use of German or his ability to speak English, for his refined manners,
or something similar? These are generally not the sources of the kind of
bullying he implies.
Los
Angeles, May 15, 2022
Reprinted
from Green Integer Blog (May 2022)
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