6.
WITTGENSTEIN GAVE A VIENNESE RESPONSE TO MODERNITY
From the perspective
of the early 21st century,
these ponderous developments make us want to step
back and say, "What a mess end-of-century Vienna
made of the modern condition." In 1918, ancient
Kakania finally died in the smoke of war. Despite the
demise of the Habsburg Empire, however, Vienna's
contributions to modernity were not over. Born in
that same smoke of war was Ludwig Wittgenstein's
treatise,
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. In
his person and in his first philosophical work,
Wittgenstein (1889-1952) seemed to present a 20th
century Viennese response to the situation of
modernity that had taken such concentrated form in
his native city at the end of the 19th
century, when he was just a boy.
To list the
contributions of major figures who were nurtured in
the Viennese culture is to highlight critically
important features of modernity as it played out in
the 20th century: the
positivist philosophy of Ernst Mach; the psychology
of the subconscious developed by Sigmund Freud; the
twelve-tone musical scale of Arnold Schoenberg; the
representation of the irrational in the art of Oskar
Kokoschka; the removal of ornament in the
architecture of Adolph Loos; the critique of
established cultural dishonesty in the satire of Karl
Kraus; the political philosophy of social openness in
the work of Karl Popper; the free-market economics of
Friedrich von Hayek. (Edmonds &
Eidenow discuss
some of these, p.98)
The extraordinary
wealth of the Wittgenstein family—wealth earned
by Ludwig's father and grandfather in the burgeoning
industrial life of 19th
century Austria—set Ludwig and his siblings
apart from many future high achievers. Wittgenstein,
nevertheless, shared with such figures an upbringing
in the unique Viennese environment prior to World War
I. As Janik and Toulmin see it, that environment set
the course of life and thought that Wittgenstein
would follow. In particular, it focused his mind on
the fundamental philosophical issue of the limits of
language that Viennese culture had generated. Could
the precision and certainty of scientific statements
be reconciled philosophically with the imprecision
and uncertainty of statements about ethics
"within a single consistent exposition?"
(168)
( Janik and Toulmin
paint a dramatic portrait of life in the fabulous
Wittgenstein family [169-175]. The point is to show
that the cultural activities of the Wittgenstein
salon, which drew in the leading artists and thinkers
of the day, would obviously have sensitized young
Ludwig to the compelling issue at the heart of
Viennese culture: "Certainly, Wittgenstein's
family situation placed him at the focus of the
Austrian quandaries and paradoxes." [169].)
But the world war
that Austria ignited with its ultimatum was an
additional and essential influence on Wittgenstein's
life and thought. He served as a soldier on the
eastern front and spent the year after the war in a
prisoner-of-war camp in Italy. In the fog of war the
manuscript of the Tractatus came
into being. One wants to believe that the existential
extremes of the battlefields and camps bore in some
indispensable way on the subject matter of the text,
just as it bore on the ascetic style of life
Wittgenstein came to cultivate. Once the Tractatus
was nursed into print with the help of Wittgenstein's
Cambridge friend and advocate, Bertrand Russell, he
retreated into schoolteaching and gardening. He
renounced his magnificent inheritance and gave it to
his surviving siblings. By the time he returned to
Cambridge in 1929, at Russell's behest, he was
following an ascetic style that eschewed the
politeness and polish of the life into which he had
been born. (Edmonds & Eidenow, p. 48) It clashed
notoriously with the mannerist subtleties of
Cambridge academic style.
(In Wittgenstein's
Poker, Edmonds & Eidenow capture the
most incandescent example of his directness and
expressiveness in the academic setting. They build
their readable book around a ten-minute encounter
between Wittgenstein and Karl Popper, his fellow Austrian, on the
evening of Friday, 25 October 1946 at the Cambridge
Moral Science Club meeting. Popper, the guest of the
evening, and Wittgenstein, the faculty chairman,
clashed over the question whether there were
meaningful philosophical problems. When Popper
allowed that there were, Wittgenstein objected and
left the meeting. In the process, he allegedly
wielded the hot poker from the hearth in some
apparently menacing way—although Edmonds &
Eidenow, in digging for the truth, acknowledge that a
definitive account of what Wittgenstein did and what
Popper said cannot be reconstructed from the
recollection of eye-witnesses.)
The real meaning of
the Tractatus has puzzled
readers from the beginning. Bertrand Russell,
world-famous for his writings, wrote the interpretive
introduction because the publisher wanted him to
legitimize the publication of a difficult text by an
unknown philosopher. While it might have done so, it
also completely misinterpreted the book's meaning,
according to Wittgenstein. (Janik & Toulmin, p.
200). The book puzzled readers, including Russell,
because it appeared to extend the mathematical
representations of the world that Russell, Gottlob
Frege, and other modern symbolic logicians had been
developing.
Janik & Toulmin
argue that Wittgenstein at heart was only an apparent
practitioner of modern mathematical modeling, which
carried forward the rationalistic project rooted in
the Enlightenment. Readers misinterpreted the book
when they focused on the "truth tables"
that modeled propositions; in doing so, they
neglected the final aphorisms in the book on the
value of life. They mistakenly took the latter to be
gratuitous and irrelevant humanistic addenda to a
scientific treatise.
Janik & Toulmin
tell us, however, that the final section is essential
to the whole work. Scientific logic, mathematical
modeling, can produce a certain knowledge of the
world; but this knowledge excludes "the
fountainhead of value" that lies within the
human being. (196) The Tractatus speaks
to us in the manner of a weary warrior, searching for
a reconstructed meaning for himself in a torn world.
It is a voice speaking at the darkening of
Enlightenment, the fading of faith in reason, in the
power of human language to express historical
progress accurately and prophetically. It is a voice
that declines to believe that words can will the
future into being. Hear it in the following selected
aphorisms from the Tractatus:
5.1361 We
cannot infer the events of the future from those of
the present./ Belief in the causal nexus is superstition.
5.1362 The
freedom of the will consists in the impossibility of
knowing actions that still lie in the future.
5.142 A
tautology follows from all propositions: it says
nothing.
5.6 The
limits of my language mean the limits of my world.
5.621 The
world and life are one.
6.421 It is
clear that ethics cannot be put into words./ Ethics
is transcendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and
the same.)
6.43 If the
good or bad exercise of the will does alter the
world, it can alter only the limits of the world, not
the facts--not what can be expressed by means of
language./ In short the effect must be that it
becomes an altogether different world. It must, so to
speak, wax and wane as a whole./ The world of the
happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy
man.
6.431 So too
at death the world does not alter, but comes to an
end.
6.44 It is
not how things are in the world
that is mystical, but that it
exists.
6.521 The
solution of the problem of life is seen in the
vanishing of the problem.
6.522 There
are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words.
They make themselves manifest. They
are what is mystical.
7 What we
cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
Such was the way in
which Wittgenstein, scion of end-of-century Vienna,
resolved the fundamental dilemma conferred on him by
his time and place. In his writing, he sought to
complete the argument about the limits of language.
Language was prohibited by its very structure from
including the ultimate meaning of life. In his life,
he seized modern alienation by the scruff of the neck
and turned it into an affirmation of his personal
authenticity. Amid academic sophistication and urban
cacophony, he lived a simple and frugal life derived
from the vision of life in Tolstoy. He sought to
express goodness in action because he had decided
that goodness expressed in language was pointless.
Wittgenstein
completes the paradox of the modern self. The power
of reason brought it into being. The limits of reason
led to an existential repertoire that could not
employ reason's jewel, language. Was Wittgenstein's
response, then, a rejection of the modern self or a
completion of it? One can imagine him seizing a hot
poker and waving it at the questioner, shouting,
"What a pointless question!"
End
of 6.
