the
redeeming word
by Douglas Messerli
Ludwig
Wittgenstein Private Notebooks 1914-1916, Edited and Translated by
Marjorie Perloff (New York: Liveright, 2022)
I never reviewed Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996), but when I discovered that she was translating the philosopher’s Private Notebooks which further revealed his personal life, in particular, his homosexuality at a time when I had become so very involved in LGBTQ concerns in relations to my large multi-volume work on My Queer Cinema, I couldn’t resist taking time out to write on her Wittgenstein translation, the first time we are able to read Wittgenstein’s Private Notebooks in English.
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 or simply
report second-hand, describing him in various terms—"He was very impatient
and easily angered” (Norman Malcolm); at times he is "absolutely sulky and
snappish"(David Pinsent); Wittgenstein was a tormented soul who made
little effort to be liked (Ray Monk); “Both he and his setting were very
unnerving. His extraordinary directness of approach and the absence of
paraphernalia were the things that unnerved people” (Iris Murdoch); “he used
his power over people to extract worship” (Alice Ambrose), while others
describe him as somewhat affable at moments, a man who loved popular films and
reading detective stories. Although Ambrose also noted that there
was “a very great deal in him to love, there were as many others such as
Elizabeth Anscombe who apparently believe that all that truly matters is the
philosophical writing itself, even though much of Wittgenstein’s thinking was
left unpublished at the time of his death since his was a commitment to an
ongoing revelation of thought that could never be entirely completed except
with death. Other than his first book, Tractatus
Logico-Philosphicus (1922), he produced, as Marjorie Perloff tells us,
“approximately 20,000 pages of manuscript and typescript,” some of it almost
ready for publication. The final volume that was assembled by his former
students, disciples. and editors became Philosophical Investigations.
Yet, for Anscombe the entire focus on Wittgenstein should necessarily be on
these philosophical writings with no attention at all to his corporeal being,
an argument arising, it appears, from the solipsistic position that since she
does not fully understand Ludwig, no one else should attempt to:
“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.
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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