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although Russell is dubious about its
contents. Meanwhile, Wittgenstein sur-
prises everyone by forswearing philoso-
phy (whose central problems he thinks
he has now solved) and going off to rural
Austria to teach schoolchildren; he clouts
one student on the head so hard that the
boy collapses to the ground. Under scru-
tiny for his disciplinary methods, and
lately convinced that he hasn’t, in fact,
solved all the problems of philosophy, he
returns to Cambridge, slowly making his
way to a new, and equally radical, phil-
osophical outlook.
Once, he had hoped to X-ray lan-
guage and expose the concealed solidi-
ties of meaning and logic; now he’s after
the significance of surfaces—he wants
to explore how ordinary language is used
in ordinary settings. The results of his
inquiries don’t lend themselves to a slim
volume, and he does not manage to fin-
ish another book in his lifetime. He dies
in 1951, at the age of sixty-two, of pros-
tate cancer, leaving behind dozens of rev-
erent students and many thousands of
pages of unpublished manuscripts.
Those, at any rate, are the basic facts
of Wittgenstein’s life. For a sense of
what he was like, one must turn to the
anecdotes. These provide a sense of the
man’s presence, with his flannel shirts,
leather jackets, and tweed caps, his ring-
ing tenor voice. They also provide a sense
of the surrounds—the spartan rooms
with their canvas chairs and iron stove—
where he put on his terrifying perfor-
mances of thought.
The American philosopher Norman
Malcolm, who was a student of Witt-
genstein’s, writes of the “frequent and
prolonged periods of silence” in his classes,
of how sometimes, “when he was trying
to draw a thought out of himself, he
would prohibit, with a peremptory mo-
tion of the hand, any questions or re-
marks.” Malcolm goes on, “His gaze was
concentrated; his face was alive; his hands
made arresting movements; his expres-
sion was stern. One knew that one was
in the presence of extreme seriousness,
absorption, and force of intellect....
Wittgenstein was a frightening person
at these classes. He was very impatient
and easily angered.”
Many things angered him: someone
failing to tend to one of his houseplants,
a student unable to formulate a thought.
(“I might as well talk to this stove!”) But
he could sustain the intensity for only
so long. A couple of hours of that, and
he would be ready for an excursion to
the “flicks.”
He loathed British films and gener-
ally insisted on American ones, being a
particular fan of Carmen Miranda. (He
was also a devotee of the pulpy murder
mysteries served up in the magazine De-
tective Story.) He would sit in the front
row so that he could see nothing but the
screen—perhaps fearing memories of
the draining lecture. Woe betide any
companion who tried to talk to him.
There was only the movie on the screen,
and Wittgenstein, rapt in his seat, munch-
ing on a cold pork pie.O
f the students who still turn up
every year for introductory courses
on Wittgenstein, some of them are there
for the genius logician, the inspiration
behind both something called “logical
positivism” and something opposed to
it, called “ordinary-language philoso-
phy.” But other students are there for
Wittgenstein the sage, the magus, the
riddler—the man who left Russell be-
wildered by a turn to mysticism at the
end of a book that was supposed to be
about logic.
The book in question, the “Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus,” carries the im-
press of both Wittgensteins. The work
was composed during a period of mili-
tary leave in the summer of 1918, out of
those notebooks. It was published in 1921
in German, and in English the follow-
ing year. Whether anyone at the time or
since has understood it fully remains an
open question.
One of the few things it’s safe to say
about the “Tractatus” is that it is con-
cerned with the line between the effable
and the ineffable. What, if anything, lies
beyond language? Some of Wittgen-
stein’s early readers—the so-called log-
ical positivists of interwar Vienna—saw
in him a kindred spirit, someone draw-
ing the “limits of sense,” as they did,
around the propositions of natural sci-
ence. Almost everybody rejects that in-
terpretation of the “Tractatus” now, but
without agreeing on another.
It’s hard to know what to make of a
book that begins with “The world is ev-
erything that is the case” and ends with
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one
must be silent.” The numbering of prop-ositions (from 1 to 7, with innumerable
nested propositions—5.251 and so forth),
the use of symbols and of a special idio-
lect, all suggest the kind of work one
must be a mathematician to understand.
But then we come up against lines—al-
lusive, enigmatic—that would not be out
of place in a piece of modernist poetry.
A queer book, then, by a queer man.
The queerest thing of all about the
“Tractatus” is its notorious proposition
6.54, near the end of the text, which states,
of his propositions, “he who understands
me finally recognizes them as senseless.”
The reader must “surmount these prop-
ositions; then he sees the world rightly.”
The lines have inspired a lively debate on
how Wittgenstein wanted his book to be
read, and on how seriously this remark
itself is to be taken. But it has been rec-
ognized as significant that Wittgenstein
referred to “understanding me,” rather
than to “understanding my propositions.”
Clever students can eventually make
sense of the logic and turn out elegant
little essays about the “picture theory of
meaning,” “logical atomism,” and “the
saying/showing distinction.” But clever-
ness seems the wrong virtue to employ
for understanding a man who tells us,
mysteriously, that the “world of the happy
man is quite another than that of the
unhappy man” (6.43). Or that “he lives
eternally who lives in the present” (6.4311).
Taken out of context, the seeming mys-
ticism comes perilously close to kitsch.
Some clever people (starting with Rus-
sell) have concluded that we’d do well
not to bother with it.
But others see in those remarks a call
to a virtue rarer than cleverness. A vir-
tue that could be described as depth.
Wittgenstein, Malcolm recalled, likened
philosophical thinking to swimming:
“Just as one’s body has a natural tendency
towards the surface and one has to make
an exertion to get to the bottom—so it is
with thinking.” Whatever depth is, Witt-
genstein is one of a small number of phi-
losophers of the twentieth-century canon
to have some claim to it. That is the real
basis for his place in the canon, and it
manifests itself in the voice of the “Trac-
tatus,” which can lurch without warning
from the technical to the confessional.
That unprecedented mixing of registers
is another aspect of the text’s queerness.
The challenge of understanding the
“Tractatus” is not, then, easily severable