The World as I Found It (3 page)

But then the philosopher wondered if the young man was instead making a veiled philosophical point about the indeed curious fact that these two excitable ducks spoke with sputtering lisps.
Ah
, thought the philosopher. His companion was pointing out that the two ducks were of ambiguous, even synonymous, identity, like the curious duck-rabbit he had shown in his lectures, a drawing that could be seen as either a duck or a rabbit before it dawned on the viewer that it was both or neither, or just one continuous line.

Oh, brother!
lisped the philosopher, this to immediately fix in mind the duck in question. But don't you think it curious, he probed, pressing this obscure young man to make his point. I mean that neither of these ducks can speak
without spitting
. Assuming we could even
understand
a duck who could speak. But
spitting 
—

The young man, accustomed to the philosopher's unorthodox mind, ogled around.

That is rather odd, isn't it.

On the screen, meanwhile, it was pure stage business — the usual boy-girl stuff before the next dance number. Dispense with the duck. Broadly hinting now, the philosopher said:

And the rabbit. I
like
that rabbit. Or
cwazy wa-bbit
, as they say.

Bugs?
asked the young man carefully.

It was quite hopeless. He didn't get it. Ginger, meanwhile, was in another snit. Fred, crestfallen, was pacing in his dressing room, hands stuffed in his tuxedo pockets. Glancing around distractedly, the philosopher said:

Bugs the rabbit, yes.

The young man was squinting, looking troubled. Under the lapping light, the philosopher hardly heard him at first when he asked:

But
as art
, Dr. Wittgenstein?

Art?
Suddenly, the magisterial Dr. Wittgenstein looked profoundly uncomfortable. Whatever do you mean?

These films. Do you consider them art?

Fred, by then, was chasing Ginger across a moonlit bridge. Bathed in that powdery light, Wittgenstein screwed up his nose as if he'd whiffed Limburger:

To speak of these flicks as
art
? This I would view with the highest suspicion.

At this time, in the later forties, Ludwig Wittgenstein, not unlike the duck-rabbit, was himself an object of ambiguity and suspicion in many philosophical circles.

It came as no surprise to Wittgenstein that his ideas were misunderstood and misrepresented. In his shunning contempt for philosophy and philosophers, he almost consciously encouraged this reaction. Publishing his late work could have done much to boost his reputation and erase his mystery-man image, but despite his periodic waverings and the pleadings of his friends, Wittgenstein could not bring himself to bring out his new work — not in his lifetime. Instead, his ideas were repeated by word of mouth or passed around as transcripts of the shorthand notes that his students doggedly took down during his lectures.

Lectures! Séances was more like it. Wittgenstein held these classes twice a week in his two small, bare rooms in Trinity's Whewell's Court. The door would be open, and his students would enter as into a chapel this room furnished solely with an army cot, a shelf of books and manuscripts and the folding card table on which he wrote. Seated near the window, deep in a funk of thought, Wittgenstein would be facing partly away, like a figure posing for a life study. They would not have dreamed of greeting him, much less of bothering him with questions or small talk. He wanted no tourists or gapers, and none dared come late. Perched on the folding gunmetal chairs on which he expected them to remain for two or three hours
without squeaking
, they were not to talk, smoke, raise their hands or, in short, do anything that might distract him. The session would “begin” promptly at four, but another ten or fifteen minutes might pass before, without warning, he erupted into words. Grimacing, grasping the metal seat of his own chair, cast in the forcing house of their expectant gaze, he might talk brilliantly for the entire session, without a single note. These were the good days. But there were also the slow, halting or bad sessions, when he would sit there mentally whipping himself for his torpidity, snorting, Come —
on!
Oh, this is
intolerable
. As you can see, I'm perfectly stupid today …

People would watch him and wonder. Was he happy? Sad? A troubled man beneath? But what could the outer world know of the inner? Morning and evening, when the light was most intense, the most transitional, they would see him barging through the Cambridge Backs, a wild expanse of cattails and lilystems, impossibly green, through which the River Cam glides under ductile willows. Even then, late in his life, Wittgenstein looked a good ten years younger than fifty-eight. He was a trim man of average height, with a sharp nose, flat, literal lips, and curly brown hair graying at the temples. His eyes were dark and piercing, and he often carried a bamboo cane, not as a crutch, but as a foil and pointer. About him there was a vaguely martial air, a certain cleanness and sobriety, like that of a priest on an off Sunday. His dress was functional, meticulous and, above all,
consistent
: an old tweed coat or a worn leather jacket, a shirt open at the collar. The dark flannel trousers were worn but carefully pressed, and the cracked leather of his old oxfords was buffed to the burnished hue of an old pipe bowl.

Often one of his young friends would accompany him on these walks. These were, as a rule, self-effacing, innocent young men from middle- or lower-middle-class families, the type who took the early school prizes and were duly brought under the wing of some lonely master who made it his cause to get the lad into Oxford or Cambridge. But besides being innocent and brainy, Wittgenstein's young men were slender and good-looking. More beguiling still, for Wittgenstein, they were often as not quite unaware of their looks and indeed of sex in general. Oblivious to the pull of mirrors, they were themselves mirrors — deep, drowsing pools of innocence in which Wittgenstein could lose himself while feeling, in certain fundamental respects, more innocent himself.

He craved their companionship. Like a possessive mother, he fussed over them and read their fate like tea leaves: to marry late, if ever, and be forever tied to him. A few years before, in fact, Wittgenstein had even taken one of these young men with him to Russia — for Wittgenstein the spiritual land of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky — with the idea of their emigrating there to study medicine in preparation for a life spent treating the poor. They went quietly, secretively, but of course stories got out that Wittgenstein was a Red or a Marxist, while others snottily said that the former aeronautical engineer had taken his young shadow to Russia so they might get their wings — their angel's wings.

But Russia was not what Wittgenstein wanted. Whatever its merits, philosophy wasn't what he wanted either, not when life offered so many other useful pursuits. Certainly he did not advise his students to become philosophers; that was the last thing he would have suggested. No, he warned them to avoid at all cost the trap of academic life — at least if they planned to do any honest or original thinking of their own.

On the surface, this might have seemed hypocritical, coming as it did from a man with a tolerably comfortable chair at a great university. But Wittgenstein was not advocating a path he had not himself followed, for he had done many things in life besides philosophy. After the First World War, where he fought with the Austrian army on the Russian front, Wittgenstein had even abandoned philosophy for ten years, dispensing with a sizable fortune he had inherited and going off to live a life of servitude and penury as a rural schoolmaster in a poor Austrian village. Hard as he tried, though, he was not cut out for life among stunted village folk, and he left a few years later. He then worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and even considered taking vows until the abbot wisely talked him out of it. With that, he returned to his native Vienna, where he put his early engineering background to use designing and building for his wealthy older sister a splendid modernist home of angled steel and stone, whose chaste, rigorous lines suggested the ascending logic of a tone poem. In the Vienna telephone directory at this time, during the late twenties, he even listed himself as
Ludwig Wittgenstein: Architekt
.

But architecture couldn't hold him either. Philosophy, he was forced to realize, was his supreme gift, yet when he returned to philosophy in 1929, his mind never entirely settled there. Still, much as he hated Cambridge, he instinctively knew that college life, and the relative freedom it afforded him, was more conducive to his work than a life spent on the Russian steppes, tending an endless line of human misery. But because he couldn't settle on anything, the young men around him couldn't really settle, either. And so this, too, was his legacy: to leave them and, later, philosophy deluged with his huge, half-conscious will, which, like a sweeping flame, sucked up all the oxygen.

This influence wasn't an entirely conscious thing on Wittgenstein's part. On the contrary; because it was so deeply rooted in his character — because it was not overtly selfish or deliberately manipulative — the bond he created was all the more powerful. And strong as this bond was in life, it was that much stronger after his death, when in the collective memory of those who knew him he would become a sort of splatched and angled concatenation of images, wishes, evasions, running feuds, regrets. For some who knew him, his name would evoke pains such as old men feel — sharp, bunionlike pangs that would shoot out at the mention of
Witt-gen-stein
, that fractious weather system of remembering and forgetting which finally consumes the life of the thing remembered.

* * *

For years, Wittgenstein had been engaged in a struggle with language, examining — and indeed exhaustively auditing — language in its variety to discern its endless games and guises. He was discouraged to hear of Einstein's continued effort to bring the forces of gravitation and electromagnetism under a single law. How, he wondered, could so great a mind succumb to the will-o'-the-wisp of mere
unity
? The world, he was now convinced, defied reduction or summary, despite his own attempts in that direction as a young man. Philosophy needed no more dinosaurs, no more grand systems. His own intentions were as humble as the words “table,” “lamp,” “door.”

As he saw it, the rightful course of philosophy was not the pursuit of elegance or the distillation of intoxicating mathematical essences. Our natural craving for generality, for the handy rule of thumb, was precisely the problem. Our crude rules were only hammers, when we also needed chisels and screwdrivers — when we needed a whole toolbox, as well as an encyclopedia and a taxonomy of the things we say, and what we
think
we mean by them. A language, he said, is nothing more than a collection, and to understand it, we must plow over the whole ground of language, examining it in all its particular crotchets and uses. For the philosopher, he felt, the problem was much like that of seeing the rabbit within the duck — that is, seeing with the freshness of
second sight
, holding in mind the image of what one first saw while yet bringing to it the force of what one saw later, since one was always seeing more in the picture. Still, in an age addicted to scientific leaps, he knew the ambiguous, ongoing, necessarily fragmentary nature of the search was not exactly a cheering prospect. Like many a stealthy thinker who presents something difficult and vaguely uncongenial, he was often at some pains to make himself clear, at times even dropping broad hints. Once, for instance, he told a friend that where the usual thinker wants to show unexpected resemblances, his task was rather to show many discrete
differences
among the various families of language, families that each have their own resemblances and eccentricities, their rules and disguises. Their duck-rabbits, so to speak.

In contrast to his early hostility to Freudian thinking, Wittgenstein now spoke of himself as a disciple of Freud but warned that Freud had to be read extremely critically. Since when, asked a young man to whom he had given this advice, had he ever read
anything
uncritically? Wittgenstein laughed. But here was another hint, and he was pleased when someone later remarked that the seemingly unordered remarks that composed his
Philosophical Investigations
and other late works had the cumulative effect of a kind of linguistic psychoanalysis designed to help the analysand overcome the muddles that cloud understanding. Suspicious of the dubious virtues of order and equally suspicious of how order could lead to error and intellectual complacency, Wittgenstein found this a fair analogy. Still, it was a somewhat guilty explanation: despite his misgivings, he and others had expended much labor in a fruitless effort to organize his ideas. But the river would not be diverted: he could not change the course of his mind. Like analysis, and indeed like thinking itself, the method was not linear but circular, obsessively returning to the same general concerns: concepts of meaning and understanding, states of consciousness, logic, the nature of propositions and philosophy and, above all, the “games” through which language is acquired and transmitted. A question would appear, disappear, then resurface again a few pages later in altered form, clouded as thought, tricky as talk. Yet he still felt that the indeterminacy of his method was oddly appropriate to the very ambiguity and indeterminacy of the subject, his point being to present thought as a
process
, rather than a canned result to be read and forgotten. And finally for him, these investigations went even beyond the more parochial concerns of philosophy. After all, he asked, what was the use of studying philosophy if it did not improve your thinking about important questions of everyday life? The investigation is eternally open, longer than life, as endless. Thinking is begetting. We do not practice philosophy, or think, in order to forget.