68 THENEWYORKER,M AY16, 2022
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
YOU’RE TALKING NONSENSE
How queer was Ludwig Wittgenstein?BY NIKHILKRISHNANN
o one expects contemporary
philosophers to be more than
mildly eccentric. Creatures of
the modern academy, they have careers,
not vocations. Some mixture of incen-
tive and professional obligation keeps
them productive. They can cultivate the
odd quirk—elbow patches or, naughtily,
a cigar habit—but more outlandish id-
iosyncrasies are ruled out by the institu-
tions that discipline them into tameness.
Of course, the archetypal Western
philosopher, Socrates, lived before there
was an academy to tame him. And he
was seen, even in his time, to be—using
the word advisedly—queer. Undoubt-
edly, that was the case in the modern,
pejorative-not-pejorative sense: he was
attracted to men. But he was also queer
in ways that are harder to define.
The Greek word often applied to him
was atopos, literally, “out of place.” His
out-of-placeness consisted in what the
scholar Martha Nussbaum has called a
“deeper impenetrability of spirit.” Soc-
rates simply could not be counted on to
say what one expected him to say.
He was also queer in how he man-
aged to combine rationality with the
most abject unreasonableness. No one
can really desire what’s bad, he said. It
is worse to do wrong than to be wronged.
The just man is happier than the un-
just man, even when he is being tor-
tured on the rack. What was it like to
be in the presence of someone who be-
lieved such things?
There is only one canonical philoso-
pher of the twentieth century with any-
thing resembling these traits: Ludwig
Wittgenstein. He was one of the found-
ers of a tradition—the “analytic”—that
has come to dominate academic philoso-
phy in much of the world. But he has not
been afforded the cloak of impersonality
that shrouds most analytic philosophers.
Wittgenstein belongs, rather, with
figures like Socrates, Jesus, and Gandhi,
in that seemingly everybody who met
him felt moved to record the encounter.
How many people in the history of phi-
losophy are the subject of a two-volume
tome of anecdotes? What explains the
fascination with the ephemera of one
man’s life, including among people who
claim that the work was the thing?
Even for those who know the facts
of that life well, “the difficulty has been
to discern in them an intelligible human
being,” as a reviewer of Ray Monk’s de-
finitive biography, “Ludwig Wittgen-
stein: The Duty of Genius,” from 1990,
wrote. A young man from a fabulously
wealthy and cultivated Viennese family
arrives in Cambridge, in 1911, to study
with Bertrand Russell, the preëminent
logician of his age. He is evidently a tor-
mented soul, and he makes little effort
to be liked. He is rude and a bit arro-
gant but in another way without vanity.
He hates the social world of Cambridge,
with its gossipy gays and sardonic dons.
He quickly shows talent enough to con-
vince Russell that he is no charlatan, and
charisma enough to convince Russell
that, even if he were, acquaintance might
be worth the bother.
On the verge of a radical breakthrough,
he decides to live alone in rural Norway,
to think about logic in absolute solitude.
But that plan is interrupted by the First
World War. He enlists in the Army of
the Austro-Hungarian Empire despite
being eligible for a medical exemption,and serves as an ordinary soldier even
though someone of his class could have
joined as an officer. The war and soldier-
ing evidently mean something to him, but
nothing about his decision is obvious.
Neither before nor after the war does he
show much interest in workaday politics.
In his free moments as a soldier, he
scribbles in notebooks that are divided
between remarks destined for an ambi-
tious philosophical manuscript and per-
sonal remarks on religion, masturbation,
and the quotidian business of being at
war. He repeatedly volunteers for the
most dangerous posting available to him.
Along the way, his manuscript on logic is
transformed almost beyond recognition.
The original project seems to have
been one that Russell initiated—to show
that behind the messy outward “cloth-
ing” of language lies a lean body of
thought, austere and simple. That aim,
to reveal the order behind the disorder,
survives the war. But there is now some-
thing new. The meaningful use of lan-
guage, Wittgenstein says, gives us a pic-
ture of the world: there’s a tree by your
house; there’s an apple on that tree. These
are ways that the world is or could be.
But he admits that his account of lan-
guage and thought, by design, leaves out
the aesthetic and the ethical: the tree is
beautiful; stealing that apple would be
wrong. Such propositions do not state
facts; they are, in his view, nonsensical,
even mystical. He is equally forthright
about admitting that his strictures apply
to his own words: propositions about the
nature of propositions don’t specify states
of the world, either; they, too, lack sense.
After the war, the manuscript is pub-
lished on Russell’s recommendation, ABOVE: ANTONIO GIOVANNI PINNA