Ludwig Wittgenstein in Skjolden: Personality and thought.
"I can't imagine that I could have worked anywhere as I do here. It's the quiet and, perhaps, the wonderful scenery; I mean its quiet seriousness."
(LW, 1936)
Showing some pictures related to Wittgensteins life in Skjolden...
The austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein emerged on the international philosophical scene early in last century, between 1910 and 1920. At the same time he began his lifelong relationship to the village of Skjolden in western Norway. He started early on visiting and living in what is the deepest part of 200 kms. long Sognefjord between 1913 and 1951, in shorter and longer periods. After a while he lived by himself in a relatively small and completely secluded cabin.... 7x8m: called 'little Austria" by the local people.
Showing some pictures related to Wittgensteins life in Skjolden...
The austrian thinker Ludwig Wittgenstein emerged on the international philosophical scene early in last century, between 1910 and 1920. At the same time he began his lifelong relationship to the village of Skjolden in western Norway. He started early on visiting and living in what is the deepest part of 200 kms. long Sognefjord between 1913 and 1951, in shorter and longer periods. After a while he lived by himself in a relatively small and completely secluded cabin.... 7x8m: called 'little Austria" by the local people.
How the young philospher in the making could decide to seek out a place on a steep mountainside not far from the tiny, half forgotten village of Skjolden in the innermost part of Sognefjord, is something that has occupied people with an interest in Wittgenstein and his philosophy. Probably for very good reasons.
In 1913....
he came, together with his friend David Pinsent...
to Skjolden...and the year after...he designed and got his cabin built in the mountainside by the Eidsvatn....later, he visited Skjolden on different occasions...last time in the autum of 1950...together with his friend Ben Richards.
He had planned to go in the new year of 1950-51....but his cancer illness had then worsened...and so his trip late in 1950 became his last visit. Wittgenstein wrote some of his most important philosophical and personal texts while visiting Skjolden and living in his mountain cabin....both the solitude and calmness...and the landscape in itself..was necessary for his regaining an ability to do philosophical work...and as he says in one of his notes..."work on philosophy-like work in architecture in many respects-is really more work on oneself. On one's own conception. On how one sees things. (And what one expects of them", CV)
So...the ways Wittgenstein manages his life, his often problematic relations to himself and to the life he lived, his problems with relating to others, and his intensive lifelong efforts in philosophy and ethics and thinking, is almost uncomparable as a fascinating human story. ....
It is reasonable to think that there can and maybe must be some inner or deeper connection between his contributions as a thinker and philosopher, and his choosing of and struggling with his type of isolated existence in Skjolden, both far from the centers of philosophy and from ordinary modern human living. Wittgenstein often says something like that himself. But often academic philosophers are so busy thinking about his paragraphs about language, logic and concepts that they conceive of his diaries and thoughts about himself and human problems as something of interest, but to be treated as lying outside his genuine philosophy.
As Rudolp Carnap writes.....:'All of us in the Circle had a lively interest in science and mathematics. In contrast to this, Wittgenstein seemed to look upon these fields with an attitude of indifference and sometimes even with contempt.'
Wittensteins anthropology or what is it like to be a human being ?
Today, there is a growing consensus that this is a too restricted conception of Wittgensteins philosophy, of what he is trying to do in his philosophy. Many of his interpreters now find it impossible just to bypass the important antropological dimension in his work. Norman Malcolm has written about Wittgensteins thinking, that he “is trying to get his reader to think of how the words are tied up with human life, with patterns of response, in thought and action. His conceptual studies are a kind of anthropology. His descriptions of the human forms of life on which our concepts are based make us aware of the kind of creature we are. ”
Malcolm points out that Wittgenstein is not only analyzing concepts and words, and their uses, but he is trying to make us more aware of the kind of creature we are as we are using words in different ways. It seems at the same time that he is trying to tell and show us something very important also through his immediate way of living and his reflections on his own personal life - something that most of us today have problems with getting in contact with and often cannot grasp - it is not therefore surprising when it is said by E. Toynton: " since his death Wittgenstein seems to have become the victim of everything he hated most."
So; what did he hate in modern culture and social life - "in the darkness of this time", .......and why is this dark views on modern human living connected closely to his philosophical thinkin ? How does his relationship to the world, to others and to himself influence his articulation of views in philosophy?
Wittgenstein seems to have a strong need to leave the world of others behind, to be able to connect with himself and open up the process of thinking. So he becomes more and more convinced that thinking in his way is not compatible with ordinary social living, being exposed to and strongly influenced by the opinions and talk of others. To be able to set free his own thinking process, to be able to be creative, he feels the need to live alone, to confront himself and the world totally on his own
His friend Moore writes: "At the beginning of 1914 he came to see me in a state of great agitation and said: “I am leaving Cambridge....” “Why” I asked. “Because my brother-in-law has come to live in London, and I can’t bear to be so near him.” So he spent the rest of the winter in the far north of Norway".
Another friend of W. writes: "he returned to Norway alone and took up residence on a farm at Skjolden in Sogn north-east of Bergen. Here he lived for most of the time until the outbreak of the war in 1914. He liked the people and the country very much. Eventually he learned to speak Norwegian fairly well. In an isolated place near Skjolden he built himself a hut, where he could live in complete seclusion."
When Wittgenstein in 1914 told his philosophical friend Bertrand Russell that he wanted to go far away, to Norway - Russel reacted instinctively:
"I said it would be dark, and he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad, and he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)"
Despite Russell's ironies...and his almost dialogical and poetic attempts to stop the young philosopher, Wittgenstein of course travelled to Norway to hide away in exotic Skjolden; he experienced here an extremely productive process as he lived in isolation and worked on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But, he also suffered much from his intensive and changing emotional states - as his sister Hermine tells in a letter - "(he was) ... in a heightened state of intellectual intensity, which verged on the pathological." This visit became the start of a series of visits to Skjolden, when Wittgensteins thinking made some very important steps forward.
Today, there is a growing consensus that this is a too restricted conception of Wittgensteins philosophy, of what he is trying to do in his philosophy. Many of his interpreters now find it impossible just to bypass the important antropological dimension in his work. Norman Malcolm has written about Wittgensteins thinking, that he “is trying to get his reader to think of how the words are tied up with human life, with patterns of response, in thought and action. His conceptual studies are a kind of anthropology. His descriptions of the human forms of life on which our concepts are based make us aware of the kind of creature we are. ”
Malcolm points out that Wittgenstein is not only analyzing concepts and words, and their uses, but he is trying to make us more aware of the kind of creature we are as we are using words in different ways. It seems at the same time that he is trying to tell and show us something very important also through his immediate way of living and his reflections on his own personal life - something that most of us today have problems with getting in contact with and often cannot grasp - it is not therefore surprising when it is said by E. Toynton: " since his death Wittgenstein seems to have become the victim of everything he hated most."
So; what did he hate in modern culture and social life - "in the darkness of this time", .......and why is this dark views on modern human living connected closely to his philosophical thinkin ? How does his relationship to the world, to others and to himself influence his articulation of views in philosophy?
Wittgenstein seems to have a strong need to leave the world of others behind, to be able to connect with himself and open up the process of thinking. So he becomes more and more convinced that thinking in his way is not compatible with ordinary social living, being exposed to and strongly influenced by the opinions and talk of others. To be able to set free his own thinking process, to be able to be creative, he feels the need to live alone, to confront himself and the world totally on his own
His friend Moore writes: "At the beginning of 1914 he came to see me in a state of great agitation and said: “I am leaving Cambridge....” “Why” I asked. “Because my brother-in-law has come to live in London, and I can’t bear to be so near him.” So he spent the rest of the winter in the far north of Norway".
Another friend of W. writes: "he returned to Norway alone and took up residence on a farm at Skjolden in Sogn north-east of Bergen. Here he lived for most of the time until the outbreak of the war in 1914. He liked the people and the country very much. Eventually he learned to speak Norwegian fairly well. In an isolated place near Skjolden he built himself a hut, where he could live in complete seclusion."
When Wittgenstein in 1914 told his philosophical friend Bertrand Russell that he wanted to go far away, to Norway - Russel reacted instinctively:
"I said it would be dark, and he said he hated daylight. I said it would be lonely, and he said he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people. I said he was mad, and he said God preserve him from sanity. (God certainly will.)"
Despite Russell's ironies...and his almost dialogical and poetic attempts to stop the young philosopher, Wittgenstein of course travelled to Norway to hide away in exotic Skjolden; he experienced here an extremely productive process as he lived in isolation and worked on the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But, he also suffered much from his intensive and changing emotional states - as his sister Hermine tells in a letter - "(he was) ... in a heightened state of intellectual intensity, which verged on the pathological." This visit became the start of a series of visits to Skjolden, when Wittgensteins thinking made some very important steps forward.
Wittgensteins philosophy of language:
What is Wittgensteins main problem in thinking about language ?
A central problem in Wittgensteins thinking was - 'what is it for a proposition to say something?' The answer Wittgenstein gave in the Tractatus - 'the correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said' - is one he later summarised as follows: ‘The individual words of language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names’ (PI§1).
‘One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs’ (TLP, 4.0311)
This is his picture theory of mening; that tells that if a proposition says anything at all, it says that such-and-such objects are arranged in such-and-such a way. And, only thing we can do with words is to describe the facts.....or, misdescribe them if we are wrong..
In the 1930s, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language was dramatically transformed – he now tells that the meaning of a word is its use in the language; and that words can be used in many different ways, for an indefinitely broad and heterogeneous range of purposes. The picture of language in Tractatus is now seen, not as wrong, but as overly narrow, as Wittgenstein himself writes - it is ‘“appropriate, but only for this narrowly cirmcumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe”’ (PI)Philosophical activity is hermeneutical, it does not consist in logical analysis, but in description of human ‘language-games’. In this periode, Wittgensteins thinking represents ‘a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please’ (PI).
"In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ..Let's get a rough idea,' for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections.".
"Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points."......
How little is achived by philosophy
"Most propositions and questions which have been written about philosophical matters are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers
result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really not problems."(4.003)
"I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.".....
Tidlig i sin filosofiske løpebane skrev han at han en gang for alle har løst alle logikkens problemer. Men jeg har ikke dermed løst livets problemer; innrømmet han. Bare det logiske er logisk, den som møter livet og verden med logikk, møter bare logikken. Ikke livet og verden. Logikken er en bro, men ikke alle veiene fører over denne broen........
he tells us about his Tractatus:...... "On the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problem are solved." (L.W. Vienna, 1918). When all problems are solved, the problem of life, of living, goes on as if nothing have happened...........
Wittgenstein once asked a student, - "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?"
What is Wittgensteins main problem in thinking about language ?
A central problem in Wittgensteins thinking was - 'what is it for a proposition to say something?' The answer Wittgenstein gave in the Tractatus - 'the correct method in philosophy would really be the following: to say nothing except what can be said' - is one he later summarised as follows: ‘The individual words of language name objects—sentences are combinations of such names’ (PI§1).
‘One name stands for one thing, another for another thing, and they are combined with one another. In this way the whole group—like a tableau vivant—presents a state of affairs’ (TLP, 4.0311)
This is his picture theory of mening; that tells that if a proposition says anything at all, it says that such-and-such objects are arranged in such-and-such a way. And, only thing we can do with words is to describe the facts.....or, misdescribe them if we are wrong..
In the 1930s, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language was dramatically transformed – he now tells that the meaning of a word is its use in the language; and that words can be used in many different ways, for an indefinitely broad and heterogeneous range of purposes. The picture of language in Tractatus is now seen, not as wrong, but as overly narrow, as Wittgenstein himself writes - it is ‘“appropriate, but only for this narrowly cirmcumscribed region, not for the whole of what you were claiming to describe”’ (PI)Philosophical activity is hermeneutical, it does not consist in logical analysis, but in description of human ‘language-games’. In this periode, Wittgensteins thinking represents ‘a radical break with the idea that language always functions in one way, always serves the same purpose: to convey thoughts—which may be about houses, pains, good and evil, or anything else you please’ (PI).
"In philosophy matters are not simple enough for us to say ..Let's get a rough idea,' for we do not know the country except by knowing the connections between the roads. So I suggest repetition as a means of surveying the connections.".
"Language sets everyone the same traps; it is an immense network of easily accessible wrong turnings. And so we watch one man after another walking down the same paths and we know in advance where he will branch off, where walk straight on without noticing the side turning, etc. etc. What I have to do then is erect signposts at all the junctions where there are wrong turnings so as to help people past the danger points."......
How little is achived by philosophy
"Most propositions and questions which have been written about philosophical matters are not false, but senseless. We cannot, therefore, answer questions of this kind at all, but only state their senselessness. Most questions and propositions of the philosophers
result from the fact that we do not understand the logic of our language. (They are of the same kind as the question whether the Good is more or less identical than the Beautiful.) And so it is not to be wondered at that the deepest problems are really not problems."(4.003)
"I might say: if the place I want to get to could only be reached by a ladder, I would give up trying to get there. For the place I really have to get to is a place I must already be at now. Anything that I might reach by climbing a ladder does not interest me.".....
Tidlig i sin filosofiske løpebane skrev han at han en gang for alle har løst alle logikkens problemer. Men jeg har ikke dermed løst livets problemer; innrømmet han. Bare det logiske er logisk, den som møter livet og verden med logikk, møter bare logikken. Ikke livet og verden. Logikken er en bro, men ikke alle veiene fører over denne broen........
he tells us about his Tractatus:...... "On the other hand the truth of the thoughts that are here communicated seems to me unassailable and definitive. I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems. And if I am not mistaken in this belief, then the second thing in which this work consists is that it shows how little is achieved when these problem are solved." (L.W. Vienna, 1918). When all problems are solved, the problem of life, of living, goes on as if nothing have happened...........
Wittgenstein once asked a student, - "What is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?"
To be alone and influences
"Seventeen people are mentioned in the Investigations, among them Beethoven, Schubert, and Goethe; the Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Küohler; and the physicist Michael Faraday. Five others are mentioned twice — Lewis Carroll, Moses, and three philosophers: Wittgenstein's Cambridge colleagues Frank Ramsey and Bertrand Russell, and Socrates. The three remaining people named in the Investigations are also philosophers: Gottlob Frege and William James, each mentioned four times, with only St. Augustine exceeding them with five citations" (Goodman 2002)
......Suffering is a central theme in Wittgensteins thinking,as in his life
: I eit seinare brev skriv er Wittgenstein....."eg har opplevd mye liding, men eg er åpenbart ikkje i stand til å læra av livet mitt. Eg lid framdleis på akkurat same måten som eg leid for mange år sidan. Eg har ikkje blitt korkje sterkare eller klokare'.
Silence, the mystical and religious belief..
Wittgenstein was most of his life occupied both with his own lived religious beliefs, and with philosophical discussions of religion. In his thoughts on religion it is easy to find traces of his basic anthropological ideas, that both humans and the world are 'strange'; and his views on the secondary role of reason, rationality and science in human affairs and life.
1. sept. 1914 he started to read a book on religion by Leo Tolstoj...he tells that this book saved his life during the demanding years in the war..he always had this book with him..through those years of hardship and in company with death....Many philosophers do not see Wittgensteins relation to religion as a central aspect of his philosophy....it is often regarded more as part of his personality difficulties...than a philosophical matter......But for Wittgenstein religion, belief, sins and virtues, his continous working on himself ......is central aspects of his thinking.....as his says about Tractatus....
...... "the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. ”.......
L. Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig von Ficker,1919 (translated by Ray Monk)......
"My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it".......
......"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent")........og....‘What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’............‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (Tractatus 6.522)...
But serious philosophical reflection is not easily made part of the ordinary affairs of everyday living; "I sit with a philosopher in a garden; he says again and again 'I know that that is a tree,' pointing to a tree that is near us. A second man comes by and hears this, and I tell him: 'This man isn't insane: we're just doing philosophy.'".....
......"I can say: "Thank these bees for their honey as though they were kind people who have prepared it for you"; that is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: "Thank them because, look, how kind they are!"--since the next moment they may sting you".
Wittgenstein as a person
There is a close connection between Wittgensteins work on philosophical issues and his 'work on himself': "There is part of me that wants to write my biography and indeed I would like to have it all laid out clearly both for myself and for others; not so much as to hold judgment over it, but merely to be honest and open about it."
There has been an enormous interest..and fascination about Wittgensteins personality.
This is an area that has occupied many Wittgenstein students....both philosophers and people with other primary interests than philosophy...but with little consensus when it comes to views on what he was like, and what was his most important characteristics...and how he came to develop them...He is both admired, and looked upon as a halfmad and tragic outsider....who occasionally had something intresting to say. As Anthony Quinton wrote in 82 -"Wittgenstein was a tormented and paradoxical figure. A central European of nouveau riche background and aristocratic outlook, of mixed religion, with a well-founded fear of madness, a leaning toward suicide, sexually uncomfortable, a high stylist with a taste and gift for aphorism, widely cultured but uninterested in and unimpressed by learning, almost a human embodiment of the fascinatingly disintegrating city and empire of his birth, he becomes a professor, an academic in the most complacent city in generally complacent England, the most philistine of major European nations. Hoping to change men's lives, he writes about the highest logical and semantic abstractions, and leaves behind not saved souls but decent academic functionaries who occupy a crucial position in the industry of explaining his works so that they are suitable for purposes of teaching and examination. It was an ironic situation, the attempt of an eagle to make a career in a cuckoo clock." (Anthony Quinton, Essays. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1998, p.356)
Wittgenstein as a person...what kind of personality did Wittgenstein have ? And how did he himself think about and relate to himself and his own person and personality ? For me, this question is a very central part of the rest of his philosophical thinking.
This is a complex of questions that also has an important connection to his philosophy and his thinking. For Wittgenstein his thinking in philosophy all along and all the time was and must be part of how he tried to live as a human being.... so he tells in a personal note: ...."How can I be a logician when I am not yet a man?'' And, in the letter to Malcolm, he writes: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends"-
"Ludwig Wittgenstein was undoubtedly a most uncommon man. Though he was free from that form of vanity which shows itself in a desire to seem different, it was inevitable that he should stand out sharply from his surroundings. It is probably true that he lived on the border of mental illness. A fear of being driven across it followed him throughout his life. But it would be wrong to say of his work that it had a morbid character. It is deeply original but not at all eccentric. It has the same naturalness, frankness, and freedom from all artificiality that was characteristic of him." (From Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p3)
To be human is for Wittgenstein never to be satisfied with who you are. As humans we always are seeking self betterment, to rise above what we are given....Wittgenstein always had a close relation to the amercan philospher William James, and especially his book on the 'Varieties of religious experience', a book that Wittgenstein read first time in 1912. James had a type of personality showing many of the traits that we can find in Wittgenstein as well: "Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down”(VRE). In a letter to Russel, Wittgenstein writes that "whenever I have time now I read James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This book does me a lot of good. I don't mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much; namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge".
For Wittgenstein, self observation, confession and ascese was part of his searching for self betterment, for the Perfect both as a thinker and as a person.
But to be able to use philosophy as a method and way of human betterment, you can't just go on, busy and shortsighted - you have to learn to stop dead, to look into things...to question things...and yourself...your own way of living......as he would have said, in a poetic form;and you need a form of life that is the right setting for such problems
.......And that occupied him very much, how to solve the problem of becoming a better human being; his was not an easy existence: "I remember him as an enigmatic, noncommunicating, perhaps rather depressed person who preferred the deck chair in his room to any social encounters." (Dr E.G. Bywaters).....But one should never misunderstand this, and take Wittgenstein for a asocial or nonsocial person; we hear all the time about his friends, and he makes a very strong impression on many people - as B. Russell expresses it: 'Getting to know Wittgenstein was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life'.
Malcolm wrote about him: "In general, there is a striking contrast between the restlessness, the continual searching and changing, in Wittgenstein's life and personality, and the perfection and elegance of his finished work."
No, this is not the right way to see it; Somavilla (1997) in contrary says that...."his circles with language reveal themselves ethically grounded, his search for philosophical clarity as a search for clarity about himself." So, the continual searching and changing are part of Wittgensteins work on himself...
Abreu and Neto says..that "Wittgenstein’s Diaries (-) are basically made out of
these two self technologies (of self observation and confession). He begins the Diary of Cambridge by declaring that one need a bit of courage in order to write a reasonable observation about himself (-). And later on, in the Diary of Skjolden he writes: How hard is to know oneself, to confess honestly what one is.
L. Wittgenstein developed early a personality dynamics with a strong and lifelong orientation toward selfbetterment, self transformation, a trait often found in religious and spiritual saints: "sanctification is an inner process that reflects a spiritual transformation of the entire person" (Emmons)
Wittgenstein lived his last years, ill from cancer, and emotional impoverished - writing: "It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death, (-) I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless." He was staying as the guest of various friends and disciples - but he always continued to discuss philosophy. As he was dying, his last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."
And as he had written some time before: "Death is not an event in life; we do not experience death."
Wittgenstein was most of his life occupied both with his own lived religious beliefs, and with philosophical discussions of religion. In his thoughts on religion it is easy to find traces of his basic anthropological ideas, that both humans and the world are 'strange'; and his views on the secondary role of reason, rationality and science in human affairs and life.
1. sept. 1914 he started to read a book on religion by Leo Tolstoj...he tells that this book saved his life during the demanding years in the war..he always had this book with him..through those years of hardship and in company with death....Many philosophers do not see Wittgensteins relation to religion as a central aspect of his philosophy....it is often regarded more as part of his personality difficulties...than a philosophical matter......But for Wittgenstein religion, belief, sins and virtues, his continous working on himself ......is central aspects of his thinking.....as his says about Tractatus....
...... "the point of the book is ethical. I once wanted to give a few words in the foreword which now actually are not in it, which, however, I’ll write to you now because they might be a key for you: I wanted to write that my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: All of that which many are babbling I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. ”.......
L. Wittgenstein, Letter to Ludwig von Ficker,1919 (translated by Ray Monk)......
"My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one. My book draws limits to the sphere of the ethical from the inside as it were, and I am convinced that this is the ONLY rigorous way of drawing those limits. In short, I believe that where many others today are just gassing, I have managed in my book to put everything firmly into place by being silent about it".......
......"Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen" ("Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent")........og....‘What can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence’............‘There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical’ (Tractatus 6.522)...
But serious philosophical reflection is not easily made part of the ordinary affairs of everyday living; "I sit with a philosopher in a garden; he says again and again 'I know that that is a tree,' pointing to a tree that is near us. A second man comes by and hears this, and I tell him: 'This man isn't insane: we're just doing philosophy.'".....
......"I can say: "Thank these bees for their honey as though they were kind people who have prepared it for you"; that is intelligible and describes how I should like you to conduct yourself. But I cannot say: "Thank them because, look, how kind they are!"--since the next moment they may sting you".
Wittgenstein as a person
There is a close connection between Wittgensteins work on philosophical issues and his 'work on himself': "There is part of me that wants to write my biography and indeed I would like to have it all laid out clearly both for myself and for others; not so much as to hold judgment over it, but merely to be honest and open about it."
There has been an enormous interest..and fascination about Wittgensteins personality.
This is an area that has occupied many Wittgenstein students....both philosophers and people with other primary interests than philosophy...but with little consensus when it comes to views on what he was like, and what was his most important characteristics...and how he came to develop them...He is both admired, and looked upon as a halfmad and tragic outsider....who occasionally had something intresting to say. As Anthony Quinton wrote in 82 -"Wittgenstein was a tormented and paradoxical figure. A central European of nouveau riche background and aristocratic outlook, of mixed religion, with a well-founded fear of madness, a leaning toward suicide, sexually uncomfortable, a high stylist with a taste and gift for aphorism, widely cultured but uninterested in and unimpressed by learning, almost a human embodiment of the fascinatingly disintegrating city and empire of his birth, he becomes a professor, an academic in the most complacent city in generally complacent England, the most philistine of major European nations. Hoping to change men's lives, he writes about the highest logical and semantic abstractions, and leaves behind not saved souls but decent academic functionaries who occupy a crucial position in the industry of explaining his works so that they are suitable for purposes of teaching and examination. It was an ironic situation, the attempt of an eagle to make a career in a cuckoo clock." (Anthony Quinton, Essays. Manchester, England: Carcanet, 1998, p.356)
Wittgenstein as a person...what kind of personality did Wittgenstein have ? And how did he himself think about and relate to himself and his own person and personality ? For me, this question is a very central part of the rest of his philosophical thinking.
This is a complex of questions that also has an important connection to his philosophy and his thinking. For Wittgenstein his thinking in philosophy all along and all the time was and must be part of how he tried to live as a human being.... so he tells in a personal note: ...."How can I be a logician when I am not yet a man?'' And, in the letter to Malcolm, he writes: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any . . . journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends"-
"Ludwig Wittgenstein was undoubtedly a most uncommon man. Though he was free from that form of vanity which shows itself in a desire to seem different, it was inevitable that he should stand out sharply from his surroundings. It is probably true that he lived on the border of mental illness. A fear of being driven across it followed him throughout his life. But it would be wrong to say of his work that it had a morbid character. It is deeply original but not at all eccentric. It has the same naturalness, frankness, and freedom from all artificiality that was characteristic of him." (From Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), p3)
To be human is for Wittgenstein never to be satisfied with who you are. As humans we always are seeking self betterment, to rise above what we are given....Wittgenstein always had a close relation to the amercan philospher William James, and especially his book on the 'Varieties of religious experience', a book that Wittgenstein read first time in 1912. James had a type of personality showing many of the traits that we can find in Wittgenstein as well: "Well, we are all such helpless failures in the last resort. The sanest and best of us are of one clay with lunatics and prison inmates, and death finally runs the robustest of us down”(VRE). In a letter to Russel, Wittgenstein writes that "whenever I have time now I read James's Varieties of Religious Experience. This book does me a lot of good. I don't mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it does not improve me a little in a way in which I would like to improve very much; namely I think that it helps me to get rid of the Sorge".
For Wittgenstein, self observation, confession and ascese was part of his searching for self betterment, for the Perfect both as a thinker and as a person.
But to be able to use philosophy as a method and way of human betterment, you can't just go on, busy and shortsighted - you have to learn to stop dead, to look into things...to question things...and yourself...your own way of living......as he would have said, in a poetic form;and you need a form of life that is the right setting for such problems
.......And that occupied him very much, how to solve the problem of becoming a better human being; his was not an easy existence: "I remember him as an enigmatic, noncommunicating, perhaps rather depressed person who preferred the deck chair in his room to any social encounters." (Dr E.G. Bywaters).....But one should never misunderstand this, and take Wittgenstein for a asocial or nonsocial person; we hear all the time about his friends, and he makes a very strong impression on many people - as B. Russell expresses it: 'Getting to know Wittgenstein was one of the most exciting intellectual adventures of my life'.
Malcolm wrote about him: "In general, there is a striking contrast between the restlessness, the continual searching and changing, in Wittgenstein's life and personality, and the perfection and elegance of his finished work."
No, this is not the right way to see it; Somavilla (1997) in contrary says that...."his circles with language reveal themselves ethically grounded, his search for philosophical clarity as a search for clarity about himself." So, the continual searching and changing are part of Wittgensteins work on himself...
Abreu and Neto says..that "Wittgenstein’s Diaries (-) are basically made out of
these two self technologies (of self observation and confession). He begins the Diary of Cambridge by declaring that one need a bit of courage in order to write a reasonable observation about himself (-). And later on, in the Diary of Skjolden he writes: How hard is to know oneself, to confess honestly what one is.
L. Wittgenstein developed early a personality dynamics with a strong and lifelong orientation toward selfbetterment, self transformation, a trait often found in religious and spiritual saints: "sanctification is an inner process that reflects a spiritual transformation of the entire person" (Emmons)
Wittgenstein lived his last years, ill from cancer, and emotional impoverished - writing: "It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death, (-) I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless." He was staying as the guest of various friends and disciples - but he always continued to discuss philosophy. As he was dying, his last words were: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."
And as he had written some time before: "Death is not an event in life; we do not experience death."
Depression and pessimism
Wittgenstein read Gottfried Kellers book 'The Last Laugh' where could find a formulation that he adapted to himself......"I have no religion, except perhaps this: that when things go well for me, I tell myself they don't have to."
‘Wittgensteinianism’ and Wittgenstein today
"In recent years we have seen a widespread regression to pre-Wittgensteinian attitudes and ways of doing philosophy, in which the tendencies he regarded as unwholesome are given full rein." (Oswald Hanfling, Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life)
"In recent years we have seen a widespread regression to pre-Wittgensteinian attitudes and ways of doing philosophy, in which the tendencies he regarded as unwholesome are given full rein." (Oswald Hanfling, Wittgenstein and the Human Form of Life)
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