Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  The two Nietzsches—critic and castigator, affirmer and celebrant—usually have different admirers. During his sad last raving days, according to a report in Gilman’s collection of reminiscences, he was given to brooding and was largely unreceptive to his surroundings—playing with dolls and other toys.

  When states of excitement come over him, his mother best knows how to calm him down. She caresses him, speaks to him in a friendly tone, and when he wants to scream she fills his mouth with small slices of apple or easily digestible delicacies, which he then chews and swallows while growling dully to himself.

  I think I prefer my Nietzsche without the bits of apple in his mouth.

  AT DEATH’S DOOR: WITTGENSTEIN

  The Wittgenstein home in Vienna, it was said with some exaggeration, held seven grand pianos, a condition that certainly stamped it as Viennese. It also housed five sons, the first three of whom were suicides: one by drowning, one from a gunshot, one through poison. The two sons who remained often considered taking their own lives, too, but, through some inadvertence, did not. The family’s three daughters fared better in this regard because, although just as much was expected of them, it did not include measuring up to quite so many marks or reaching quite such stressful heights.

  In those days, if music appeared to be the rosy flush of Vienna’s fame, suicide seemed its fever. The newsworthy surface of society was regularly ruffled by someone’s dramatically premature demise. There was Otto Weininger, whose crackpot book Sex and Character Wittgenstein, in his early years, admired; Ludwig Boltzmann, important for his work in statistical dynamics, and one with whom, equally early, Wittgenstein wished to study in Vienna; the poet Georg Trakl; notables like the architect of the Imperial Opera House, Eduard van der Null; aristocrats of a rank as elevated as the Baron Franz von Uchatius, including actual imperialities such as the Crown Prince Rudolf himself—each a distinguished suicide.

  For the old, dying is dismal and takes the shine from death. One has grown accustomed to the succession of small disappointments that makes up most of life, so the failures that have followed one about like a smelly, undismissable mutt now resemble a faithful, if antic, companion. The young, however—still so near the time when they were not alive that not being alive again exerts a powerful fascination—cannot help but look at the threat of the years to come and expect them to be as marked by loneliness, remorse, and triviality as those that they have so far survived. Success turns down no soothing bed of rest either, since it can seem to supply but the starting place for yet another, more arduous, climb. Life, they have to wonder (since they once had such hopes for it), life comes to … is for … what? And if life is so precious, why is so much of it—everywhere around them—habitually, extravagantly, wasted? If life is a meaningless chore, it is well one’s chores are concluded promptly, and the mess swept. Thus the suicide skips dying and goes to death as through a door—a door he may slam, if he likes, as he leaves.

  In households like the Wittgensteins’, what is remembered of the mother is often pale as an old print tacked to an out-of-the-way wall: its image gray, stiff, still, ornately ovaled. It is the father who is the moving Figure, the Presence, the Ghost of the Olden Days. It is his chains that will send their rattle through the rooms and bind the occupants to a presence that is past, yet a past that will not release its outlived days to die away in rings of weakening reverberation, but one whose hold grows greater by being gone.

  Gone, or for the moment far away, the Presence is enlarged by the erasure of what seems irrelevant about its actual Being until it can be simply felt as moral authority, heard as stern commandment, seen as shining example. That the Presence picks his teeth, is forgetful, frequently falls asleep and is afraid of dreaming: these foibles are mislaid; every sign of weakness is turned to point the other way. Whatever is ordinary fades until only a giant is remembered, one that is cross and condemnatory, implacable, its sentences certain, its judgments final. One thinks of the anger, the terror, the cringing obedience, the need to please, that Kafka’s father inspired, and how the father’s frown became a crease across his son’s face, and how loathsome the son’s sense of servitude was to both of them. For such a son, too, a role was reserved, defined for him from the beginning, waiting for him like his plot in the cemetery: to husband a wife, father her children, to head a household, to emulate a feared figure, to overcome, to succeed … in short, to be what he hated and could not compel himself to be.

  Karl, who would occupy the Presence in this case, had a vigorous intelligence with an energy to match, and set a brisk, if not impossible, pace. He was quick of both head and hands, decisive, charming, bold, brutal (he became a successful industrialist), good-looking, confident, arrogant, witty (more German than Jew, he was loyal to his culture, not to God), a despiser of failure in any form, and of every form of humbug. Like the dyspeptic Flaubert, who compiled a dictionary of thoughtless thoughts in common use, or more likely Karl Kraus, who publicly exposed them, he snipped outstanding imbecilities from periodicals and papers and, in later life, sent them to his son Ludwig, who took custody of the collection.

  To Karl’s beleaguered sons an early death must have seemed the inherited fate of the family. In any event, Ludwig faced a life, as we read of it, that was remarkably free, almost from its inception, of those pleasures that fasten, like lions, young teeth to their meat; that tempt them to pranks, into forbidden explorations, or lead them to enliven dull routine with frivolity and flamboyance. There was, along his road, but rare success and frequent failure: success that was usually deceitful and temporary, and failure he took so to heart it could scarcely beat beneath the burden.

  Dutifully enough, Wittgenstein begins the study of mechanical engineering in Berlin, but shortly finds an excuse to enrich his education in Manchester and on the moors near Glossop, where he designs and flies his own kites during aeronautical and meteorological experiments. This is 1908, when he’s nineteen, and the flying machine is more than a dream. Although he had the inventor’s handyman mind, in addition to the abstract intelligence he would later display, his attention quickly turned from the kite to the motor that would drive it, and then, by stages that were by no means direct, to physics and the formulas that expressed its principles (from the craft to its engine, from the propeller to the propeller’s torque and the algebras of air, from the movement of molecules finally to the behavior of numbers). Wittgenstein flew to the fundamental as naturally as his kites and balloons rose in the wind, so that even when he whistled Mozart, the dexterity of his tongue and lips was still in the service of the logical articulation of an idea. One of his more dazzling—and puzzling—notebook entries runs: “Musical themes are in a certain sense propositions. And so the recognition of the essence of logic will lead to the recognition of the essence of music.” Schopenhauer, whom Wittgenstein had been reading, would have put it the other way around: “Propositions are in a certain sense like musical themes. And so the recognition of the essence of music will lead to the recognition of the essence of logic.”

  Taught by tutors, and with consequently little training in how to plod through a discipline from one bleak peak to another, it was easy for Wittgenstein to appear to drift toward whatever was prior and basic and presumably free of the clutter and tarnish of applications. Very soon his father’s funds were financing a sojourn in Cambridge, where he took in Bertrand Russell’s lectures the way some people might take in the Taj. In no time he was suffering from that fever for first principles we call philosophy; that heavy hunt for ultimates that only skepticism, or the petty grind and pretentious rites of graduate schools, can cool.

  Initially an eccentric, “unknown German,” Wittgenstein eventually made known to Russell, and then to Moore and Keynes, to Lytton Strachey and other members of the rather notorious Cambridge society called “The Apostles” who endeavored with mitigated success to recruit him, a presence that was a furious jostle of warring qualities—of emotional highs and succeeding lows, of course, ranging from intense
excitement to despondency, yet an active, elbowing crowd of all kinds of other contraries as well. He was shy but quick to correct his superiors. He had a poor opinion of himself, but he repeatedly required special treatment, and he regularly expected, for himself, an ungrudging suspension of the rules, since as low as he often felt he’d sunk, most of mankind still lay beneath him. If others understood their true condition, they would feel terrible, too. His misery, however, wanted no competition.

  Wittgenstein’s manners were formally aristocratic and coolly correct, except when he was excoriating someone’s errors, because his pursuit of truth was often an excuse to be rude. He would feel bad about his behavior and apologize, but not without reminding his victim of the nearly sufficient reason that had provoked him. He believed that menial tasks were humbling and generally good for you, except when menials did them, and then they became demeaning. His taste was for an elegantly simple life, with the simplest part of it, of course, an absence of the demands others might make of him. He approached people as warily as an animal from the wild, one whose recurrent and natural impulse is to run away. Although he seemed unusually self-absorbed, driven in upon himself as one in pain, he sought in his studies the solution to problems of apparently the most impersonal and objective sort. He prized solitude, especially for his work, and was instantly furious when any course of thought was interrupted, yet he dropped round to Russell’s rooms nearly every midnight to bounce ideas off those patient walls, or to recount his weaknesses and consider suicide. As Russell writes in 1912:

  Wittgenstein is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, not far removed from suicide, feeling himself a miserable creature, full of sin. Whatever he says he apologizes for having said. He has fits of dizziness and can’t work—the Dr. says that it is all nerves. He wanted to be treated morally, but I persisted in treating him physically—I told him to ride, to have biscuits by his bedside, to eat when he lies awake, to have better meals and so on. I suppose genius always goes with excitable nerves—it is a very uncomfortable possession. He makes me terribly anxious, and I hate seeing his misery—it is so real, and I know it all so well. I can see it is almost beyond what any human being can be expected to bear. I don’t know whether any outside misfortune has contributed to it or not.

  Stubborn, arrogant, critical, demanding, prickly, solipsistic: was it only his intellect that saved him from being principally a pain in the ass? Russell initially found him “obstinate and perverse.” Very soon, however, he was referring to Wittgenstein, with affection though understandable condescension, as “my German.” “My German friend threatens to be an affliction.” Was he only a crank or really a genius? “My German, who seems to be rather good, was very argumentative.” “My German engineer, I think, is a fool.”

  Consulting my own brief memory of the man, I am inclined to think it was not Wittgenstein’s brilliance by itself that impressed Moore, Russell, Keynes, and the others, but the fact that he did indeed burn with a bright, gemlike flame; that his commitment was not merely quirky but intensely real; that he brought to his investigations the desperate energy and concentration of one whose mind has drawn a noose around its body; because if his reasoning failed to reach the necessary degree of clarity and insight, if it showed itself to be more than momentarily incompetent, then Wittgenstein might not decide upon another day of life, but choose suicide instead—hanging his head in order to throttle some sinfully inadequate thought.

  The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus might be characterized philosophically as a romantic rationalist. He is a “rationalist” because he believed in grounds and foundations; because he thought that these were to be found in the fundamental principles of logic; because these principles, in themselves, were easy enough to understand and could probably be grasped in a single mental intuition, so that what difficulties there were would have to be ascribed to the shortcomings of the thinker, not to an inherent darkness or complexity in the proper objects of his thought; because one could make the move from logic to the world without damaging or mislaying all the latter’s furniture. He is a “romantic” because he believed that thinking clearly, correctly, sincerely, completely, was the central human obligation and a moral struggle; that one made oneself, consequently, into a soul that could see, and then saw—then plumbed and discovered—just as Rilke, for example, felt he had to become a poet first in order to write his poems, rather than become talented, wise, or strong, by trial and error, effort and exercise.

  In the realm of morals and manners, Wittgenstein disdained principles and programs, justifications and excuses. Talk was a screen for who knew what weakness. He made most of his decisions in secret, because (although he would pace up and down through his miseries with Russell) most talk disguised motives and entangled the mind; it led others to think that they had a say and some authority over your soul; it encouraged “saws”; it proceeded from partial truths to arrive at falsehoods like a late train. One’s acts ought to spring spontaneously from the sort of person one was: calculation suggested subterfuge; obedience suggested servility. Hence his frequently brutal frankness, his lack of social concealment, his mysterious reversals of course and changes of heart.

  Character was something that simply showed itself in the way one thought, in the way one lived. Style and idea were inseparable, so he rarely troubled to hide the fact that what was most important to him was the course and quality of his own mind. It was, after all, his art. His impatience with what he took to be lackadaisical reasoning, philosophical obfuscation, or any weakening of intellectual resolve was severe and immediate, and based upon the identification of knowledge with virtue, and of the right to exist with the claim of creative accomplishment. It was always all or nothing with him.

  I do not believe that Bertrand Russell had wings, so he can’t have taken the young Austrian under one, but he did gradually grow fonder of this intense intelligence. Russell’s treatment of his friend does him great credit, I think. A hint of jealousy (or perhaps envy) shows up later, but this is only a speck on what is otherwise an unblemished record of magnanimous behavior on the part of the older, more established, and more esteemed philosopher. Russell was a man, furthermore, of quite different cut and character from Wittgenstein’s: sensual, worldly, keenly observant, calculating but capable of real devotion, and able on occasion to achieve the impulsive life that Wittgenstein longed for and, paradoxically, planned, yet could never achieve because his personality was far from free and easy, because it was, instead, neurotically impacted and impaired.

  Wittgenstein makes immense demands upon Russell’s time, his patience, his energy, his ego. In the name of philosophical truth, the student is mercilessly, sometimes scornfully, critical of his teacher’s labors. Russell takes the criticisms to heart, however, only to find the easy flow of his work slowed, its course altered, its publication consequently postponed. Although Russell sometimes allows himself an impatient rejoinder, his appreciation of Wittgenstein’s genius never weakens, and he welcomes his surly friend’s regained warmth and return to friendship whenever it occurs. Russell reports to Lady Ottoline Morrell:

  We were both cross from the heat—I showed him a crucial part of what I have been writing. He said it was all wrong, not realizing the difficulties—that he had tried my view and knew it wouldn’t work. I couldn’t understand his objection—in fact he was very inarticulate—but I feel in my bones that he must be right, and that he has seen something I have missed. If I could see it too I shouldn’t mind, but as it is, it is worrying, and has rather destroyed the pleasure in my writing.

  Russell became aware of Wittgenstein’s mystical tendencies very early. Still, his ardent young pupil’s love of logic can hardly have prepared the positively inclined Russell for Ludwig’s later romance with informality, or his repeated religious temptations. He did not immediately realize that Wittgenstein, in removing reason from the realm of religion, was really protecting faith from certain destruction. An urgent need for salvation pursued Wittgenstein always, and it intensified
immediately following the First World War (during the time the Tractatus was being translated, titled, prefaced, and published by his English friends) when—among his choices for the future—suicide, teaching school, and a somewhat monastic withdrawal from society were the favored alternatives.

  Wittgenstein distinguished himself as a soldier; and despite the hardships of many campaigns, the crassness of the common soldier, the repeated bollixes of a decrepit bureaucracy, the cultural limbo of military life—conditions that he patiently endured—the war perversely supplied him with something he desperately needed: an objective hell that could replace his private one, and an equally dangerous outside enemy. In the army there were not only orders of several sorts, aims of various kinds, discipline and routines; there were hands other than his own hand raised against him; there was death as it might come to a comrade as well as to himself, a death unwilled, even unexpected. Thus Wittgenstein performed under fire with that coolness that comes when a world gone mad asks for sanity from the asylumed, and through hardship and valor he recovered the ordinariness in himself, felt as his fellows felt, and had his small sins swallowed by more substantial woes.

  Wittgenstein tells us that when he was about twenty-one, at a performance in Vienna of a mediocre play, the necessary word was nevertheless said (as if a random note had completed a chord in his heart), so that the possibility of a religious life, stripped of the theology that had previously rendered it unacceptable, became suddenly attractive and real. The revelation, if that is what it was, lay in the assertion by one of the characters that he was, in effect, “beyond the fell clutch of circumstances,” that nothing bad could happen to him. Wittgenstein gave this bit of bragging a semi-Stoical interpretation, and it reappears later as one of the consequences of the Tractatus. The world is an ensemble of facts. Nowhere among these facts are there any values to be found, nor are any values connected to them by whatever devious means a philosopher may imagine. To all the chief questions of culture “it” is totally deaf; it neither promotes nor prohibits; it neither disdains nor cares. It’s it, and that’s that.