Wittgenstein Jr

by Lars Iyer

  Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can’t therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don’t live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems.

  Wittgenstein’s class. Thursday, three o’clock.

  Silence. The hum of the computer. The cranking of an unbled radiator.

  A poem on the board:

  It is possible that to seem—is to be.

  As the sun is something seeming and it is.

  The sun is an example. What it seems

  It is and in such seeming all things are.

  There must be no more fundamental work in logic, Wittgenstein says. Logic must not be put on a proper footing. It is not a question of helping logic to its feet.

  Logic must be left to stumble, he says.

  Logic must suffer a blow to the head, he says. We must strike off the head of logic. No: we must strike off our own heads, if we are to do logic.

  A form of life: that’s what he’s looking for, he says. A context in which his life would make sense.

  Simply to stand with your feet upon the earth. Just to open your eyes. Just to be here—here. To be of God. With God. And no longer asking, Why?

  A rose has no why. Ordinary life has no why. Isn’t that what he’s in search of: ordinary life, where the things themselves are right in front of us?

  Our problem is that we want him to say something complicated, Wittgenstein says. But all he’s concerned with is the obvious, the ordinary. All he’s interested in is showing us what we already know.

  DOYLE: But if we already know it, why is it so hard to understand?

  WITTGENSTEIN: Because something stands between us and what we know. Because the obvious has become difficult to access. The obvious is not obvious for us, that’s the trouble.

  Friendly faces, Wittgenstein says, looking round the room at us. Faces to watch him as he tries to think. As he fails to think.

  Once, love was the rule, and each one drew his neighbour upward, he quotes. Our faces, our very presence, draw him upward, he says. And perhaps, in his own way, he will draw us upward. Perhaps our presence will bring him the calm he needs, he says. Our presence, all of us around him, like a host of angels.

  We are too young to hear him, he says. Too innocent. But he loves our youth, he says. He needs our innocence.

  He must find our level, he says. He must put himself in our place, for his sake, if not for ours.

  Pascal said that the true philosopher makes light of philosophy. He must try to learn from our lightness, Wittgenstein says. He must descend into our valleys.

  Why is Chiron, the teacher of Achilles, presented as a centaur?, Wittgenstein asks—because the student must feel that the teacher is at a distance. A distance created by the presence of thought.

  The teacher must be higher than the student, he says. A pause. No, that’s not it. The teacher must bring the student into relationship with what is higher. Another pause. No, that is not it, either. And then: the teacher must suffer from his own lack of height, all the while consoling the student for his lack of height.

  • • •

  Socrates began thinking at whatever point his interlocutors were starting from. He accompanied them, travelled with them, until they came to their moment of crisis, when they were overwhelmed by discouragement and wanted to break off the discussion. And then—by what miracle?—Socrates would take his interlocutors’ doubt and discouragement upon himself. And then—another miracle!—Socrates would transfigure this doubt, and affirm this confusion, until doubt and confusion became the positive outcome of philosophy.

  Aporia, that’s the word, Wittgenstein says, writing it on the blackboard. Literally—no passage, no way forward. There exists a point of arrival, but no path, he says, quoting. But perhaps there is no point of arrival, either.

  A walk on the Backs.

  We speak of the legendary night-climbs of Cambridge. Of St John’s College Main Gate (easy—Doyle has climbed it on a drunken night out, he says). Of the Wren Library (very pretty, Alexander Kirwin says—he’s climbed it twice). Of New Court Tower (he’s stood on its peak before dawn, Benedict Kirwin says). And we speak of the famous Senate House leap, with its deadly plunge (Mulberry wants to plunge, he says).

  Wittgenstein smiles. He likes listening to our nonsense, he says. He glories in our inanity! In the poverty of our prattle! It is like a balm to him. It is possible to bathe in nonsense, he says. To be refreshed by it.

  We are his assistants, he says. His helpers. No, that’s not it. For we do not really help him—we are more likely to get in his way. We are obstacles on his path. But we are necessary obstacles—obstacles placed there by God. Obstacles to remind him of lightness. Obstacles to show him that his way is too heavy—too arid, when it should be lightness itself; too dull, when it should flash and laugh and dazzle.

  The path to thought lies also through laughter and forgetting: that is what we recall him to—that there must also be a giddiness of thought; that God Himself laughs; that God wants us to laugh … Christ’s Pieces, after class. On the benches, Wittgenstein among us.

  Guthrie performing Doyle’s new show, based on the life of the real Wittgenstein.

  Wittgenstein’s visit to Bertrand Russell’s Cambridge rooms (Guthrie expertly playing both men: Russell, languorous, relaxed, the English don, at ease in the world; Wittgenstein, frenetic, feverish, the Austrian intellectual, pacing the floor).

  First song: ‘Am I an Idiot, Or Just a Philosopher?’ Sample lyric:

  I knocked on Bertrand Russell’s door

  Just before the First World War

  I said, Tell me, Sir, am I a real philosopher

  Or have you heard it all before?

  Wittgenstein’s period as a soldier, hating his fellow soldiers, and possessed by the most terrible despairs (Guthrie’s face an expressive miracle), but filled, too, with a new mysticism, a new religiosity (Guthrie’s face luminous, God-touched) …

  Second song: ‘Absolutely Safe.’ Rousing chorus:

  And when the enemy machine guns strafe

  God keeps me … absolutely safe!

  Wittgenstein’s break with philosophy—his period in the Austrian countryside, teaching peasant children, inspiring peasant children, but being over-severe with lazy peasant children. Wittgenstein, boxing their ears, spanking their backsides (Guthrie masterfully playing both Wittgenstein-the-teacher and the lazy pupils) …

  Third song: ‘No One Understands Me.’

  When I box the children’s ears

  It’s just in order to still my fears

  That they will grow up fearful slobs

  And they will not believe in God …

  Wittgenstein’s architectural period, designing and managing the building of a house for his sister. His extreme rigour, his eye for the smallest detail. And the uninhabitable home he constructed in the Bauhaus style, all severity, all sharp corners. (Guthrie’s face an image of intensity, of focus, of exasperation … Guthrie playing both Wittgenstein-the-architect, and his put-upon project manager, bursting into tears with stress …)

  Fourth song: ‘Sharp Angles.’

  Don’t think I’m just acting

  I’m not cruel, I’m just very exacting …

  Wittgenstein’s return to Cambridge, not in triumph, but in humility. Philosophy, for him, now no longer a mapping of depth, but a topography of the surface (Guthrie, shoulders rounded, eyes to the floor).

  Fifth song: ‘Ordinary Life.’

  I’m in love with ordinary life

  I’ll take the everyday as my wife

  I prefer the chat of porter and bedmaker

  To academic talk and the cocktail shaker …

  How Wittgenstein works! How he writes! (Guthrie miming the philosopher sitting at his desk, copying his remarks into an enormous ledger.) Wittgenstein, taking solitary C
ambridge-hating walks (Guthrie, stomping, scowling). Wittgenstein, estranged from his colleagues (Guthrie, wagging his fingers, looking vexed). Wittgenstein, full of apocalyptic thoughts about the end of the world (Guthrie, hand to brow, shaking his head) …

  Wittgenstein, diagnosed with cancer. Wittgenstein, dying. Wittgenstein, speaking his last words (Guthrie, in swan-song brilliance).

  Sixth song: ‘A Wonderful Life.’ As moving as Susan Boyle singing ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’ As Paul Potts doing ‘Nessun Dorma.’

  Tell them I had a wonderful life!

  Tell them it was worth the strife!

  Laughter, from Guthrie’s fans. Even Wittgenstein smiles.

  After philosophy, lightness will be the highest virtue, Wittgenstein says. Blitheness will be sought after above all things.

  Divination: that’s what he sees in our idiocy, he says. Prophecy. We are fragments of the future.

  When the end of philosophy comes, we will weep, without knowing why we weep, he says. We will laugh, without knowing why we laugh. And as we weep, we will laugh. And as we laugh, we will weep …

  Mulberry and Doyle are modelling their relationship on George Michael and Kenny—free to fuck whoever they want; free to surf Grindr and cruise.

  But Doyle’s heart is not in it, he says—he just isn’t promiscuous. Besides, he’s too busy with the theatre. There are other things in life besides sex. But Mulberry …

  DOYLE (rolling his eyes): Well, you know what he’s like.

  Last night, Mulberry smoked crack on the roof of his house, Doyle says. Up on the roof, the ridge tiles between his thighs, laughing like a maniac, he declaimed a poem about a coffin full of shit … Mulberry’s obsessed with death, Doyle says. Even his laughter is tinged with death; even his laughing mouth is a pit of death …

  Nihilism: that’s Mulberry’s disease, Doyle says. A sense that nothing’s really worth the candle. That the meaning of the world is vanishing. That all that is left are parodies of parodies of parodies. The blackest of black laughter. A laughter that laughs at itself, and laughs at itself laughing … That all his laughter is laughter before a mirror …

  I’ve been possessed, Mulberry told Doyle last night. I am legion. There’s a horde of demons inside me, mocking me, he said. Laughing at me.

  Doyle reminded Mulberry of Wittgenstein’s words. We must not think about our thinking. We must not philosophise about philosophy. To know our dividedness, to state it, is to be divided yet further. And when Mulberry climbed onto the roof, Doyle shouted up to him that we must not laugh at our laughter. But Mulberry was too high to hear.

  E-mails from the Careers Service. Posters and flyers everywhere, advertising the employers’ fair. Recruitment agents, from the big City banks, from consultancies and law firms.

  Brochures in our pigeonholes: Your future starts now (image: graduates throwing mortar boards in the air). The career of your life starts here (besuited trainees laughing with other trainees). What if the next big thing is you? (Godzilla-like graduate striding about). Individuality rocks (long-haired graduate playing a Flying V guitar). Be more than just your job (graduate sledding in the Arctic behind a team of huskies). Grow further (graduates in snorkels and flippers, exploring a coral reef). Scale new heights (free-climbing graduate, halfway up a cliff). Apply if you want to go faster (graduates on a down-plunging roller coaster). Think big (graduates in crampons crossing a ravine). Are you extreme? (parascending graduate, soaring into the sky). We’ll take you further than you imagine (graduates slashing their way through the jungle).

  We pass the time before class, translating the brochures. Never manage to launch (graduate back in childhood bedroom). Earn nothing like the living wage (graduate eating discount sandwich from Boots). Never settle anywhere or at anything (graduate with backpack, trudging city streets). Join the intern nation (graduate at the photocopier) …

  The failure to launch. To leave your house. To leave your room. To leave your bed. To open your eyes in the morning. How easily it could happen! One mistimed bout of depression and that would be it—the rest of your life, in your parents’ house, on soul-rotting medication.

  We are nymphs, yet to shed our bodies. Yet to ascend fine-winged into life. But how easy it would be to slip and fall. How easy, to end up half-employed, underemployed, unemployed …

  We feel as though the future were rummaging through us. Who knows what the future will find?

  Wittgenstein, mystical today.

  The kairos is coming, he says. The end is coming.

  Time is gathered into itself like a wolf poised to leap upon its prey, he quotes.

  He speaks of a new vocation of philosophy. A revocation of philosophy.

  He speaks of philosophy practised without philosophy. Philosophy no longer subject to its own law.

  He will have to reawaken philosophy, he says. He will have to conjure up all of its ghosts.

  Philosophy must be reborn, he says. But without itself—without its substance.

  He speaks of the time when we will have joyously forgotten philosophy. Forgotten what philosophy was for. A time when we will play with philosophy, like gods …

  We will not recognise him, after the end of philosophy, he says. We will not recognise each other!

  Everything we have known, we will have forgotten. And when we remember it again, it will be in a new way.

  You will leave Babylon with joy, he quotes. You will be let out of the city in peace.

  After philosophy, no one will read, Wittgenstein says. And no one will stop reading. It will be impossible to distinguish reading from looking, from glancing, from letting your eyes rest on one sight or another.

  After philosophy, no one will write, he says. And no one will stop writing. The merest gesture will be a kind of writing. A cough. A hairstyle. The flight of birds: all writing.

  And after philosophy, there will be no more teaching, only learning, he says. No more studying, only encountering. No more classrooms, only walks along the Backs …

  Walking home. Okulu ahead of us on the path, massive headphones over his ears. Faint strains of Mozart. A one-man protest against Cambridge superficiality.

  We disappoint Okulu, we know that. He wants something from us. Seriousness. Depth. He wants to discuss ideas. But we let him down.

  Okulu is like a reverse missionary, we agree. Like one of those Anglican priests, come from former colonies to reevangelise us. Only it’s not religion Okulu brings, but culture—old culture, high culture. Okulu is a high priest of old culture …

  Okulu is a man of taste. Of cultivation. And Okulu knows things—about current affairs, about the latest philosophical and scientific theories. But about the past, too. He’s been seen in the library, with piles of old hardbacks …

  But who needs libraries? Who needs books? We have them on our e-readers. Or rather, we could have them. We could have anything at all. Everything from the past can be called up in the present. Everything can be here—everything that was ever thought, or written, or composed, or painted. We can commune with all the ghosts. We can wake up the dead. But who wants to wake up the dead?

  Library hardbacks should stay closed, their secrets hidden. Their spines should stay turned to us on their shelves. Keep them asleep. We won’t disturb them. They’re not for us, after all. They were not written with us in mind.

  And they reek of the past. Their pages have the musty smell of the past. The smell of old forgotten things. Of things that should be forgotten. Sun-browned pages. Date-stamps from decades ago. Annotations in a tiny hand. Underlinings. Whole passages marked in yellow highlighter. Tan-brown stains from coffee and tea. Evidence of squashed insects. Dried-up tear splashes. Curly strands of pubic hair. Traces of wiped blood. Mementos: an old train ticket, a cinema ticket … Old things! Old things!

  The old world is passing. Worlds and worlds are vanishing. A whole civilisation—that was once our civilisation—sinks into the greeny-black depths of forgetting …

  Poor, mournful Okulu of the libr
ary stacks … Poor deep-diving Okulu. He, like us, is seeking a past that grows ever more remote. He, like us, is a creature of the upper waters—of the sun-suffused shallows. But he, unlike us, hasn’t forgotten the depths …

  Next year, a new crop of students will appear to replace us. Next year, our tutors will already have begun to forget us. Our essays and exam scripts will be shredded and recycled. Our photos will disappear from internal websites. Our academic referees will no longer be sure who we were. We’ll be confused with this person, with that one. And in the end, we’ll be lost in the anonymous crowd of all the students who were ever taught here.

  We each bear a trace of every student who ever studied at Cambridge. We are each a ghost of all the other students—students who have been here, and students who have yet to be here. Our lecturers, who will have seen us already, will see us again. We will have been here before, for our lecturers. We will be here again. There is neither end nor beginning.

  But with Wittgenstein it is different. We are not nobodies. We are not insignificant. We are at Cambridge for a reason: that’s what his presence helps us to believe. We are here for him, just as he is here for us. And we are here, Wittgenstein and his men, for the sake of thought.

  Something is happening. Something is going on that will not be repeated.

  The convolutions of his lectures. How complex his enemy is!, he says. How complex, then, his classes must be!

  Is it necessary, in some way, to recapitulate the entire history of philosophy in his lectures?, he wonders. The entire history of philosophical mistakes?

  Is it necessary to lead his class to the origins of philosophy? Is it necessary to lead us to an originary philosophical bafflement?

  Katargesis: written on his blackboard in capital letters. And in small letters, below: The fulfilment of the Law. Fulfilment underlined. Then, in still smaller letters: The fulfilment of philosophy?? Two question marks. The end of philosophy??? Three question marks.