It is just possible is not it that little Mr Wittgenstein the jolly Austrian rather than having a bad Herr day was teasing us with a little philosophical caprice?
Well! After several days' pondering we now incline to accept Mr. Garnett's theory. But the motive may have been not so much Wittgenstein's desire to tease as his wish to provide matter sufficient to prolong the otherwise flagging attention of one of the peachier and creamier of his students at some tutorial tête-à-tête!
For of course Wittgenstein was a member of the homo-sexualistic legion. The eminent W. W. Bartley has a forty-page chapter entitled "On Wittgenstein and Homosexuality" and containing sub-sections such as "The Question of the Relevance of his Homosexuality to Wittgenstein's Philosophy" and "Some Attempts to Link the Homosexuality and the Thought," yet after considerable consideration seems to conclude that on the whole there was little connection. George Steiner on the other hand is all for it, pointing out that "Eros and language mesh at every point. . . . It is likely that human sexuality and speech developed in close-knit reciprocity. . . . The seminal and the semantic functions . . . together they construe the grammar of being."
Wittgenstein himself asserted that true ethical judgements - judgements of "absolute value" he called them - transcend the factual, and are
supernatural. "What is good is also divine," he said. "The absolute good, were it a describable state of affairs, and it is not, would be one which everybody, independent of his tastes and inclinations, would necessarily bring about or feel guilty for not bringing about. But no state of affairs has, in itself, the coercive power of an absolute judge." Oh dear! That is intolerably disappointing of him is it not? It displays a fundamental lack of imagination and verve and is (therefore) entirely wrong. We are reminded of one of our own teachers who, himself a pupil of Wittgenstein, attempted to teach us Logic. How horrified and infuriated we were by the inadequacy of everything he said!
But
Wittgenstein's life is rather more significant than his philosophy. Let us end here by rehearsing a few facts for Members:
1) Der kleine Wittgenstein, as he was known, was
only five foot six; Mr. Garnett is quite right to call him "little"!
2) Little Luki, as he was also known, many times in his youth
had Brahms in the house.
3) For the first fourteen years of his life he was educated at home; in this he was
like Marie Corelli. Private education seems to produce exceptional people moulded in strange and superior ways does not it?
4) Then in 1903 he was suddenly sent to a day-school in Linz, where he found himself
a school-mate of Adolf Hitler. Here they are together:
Hitler and Wittgenstein shared a talent for accurate and prolonged whistling. One of the most interesting of the many good books about Wittgenstein is entitled "The Jew of Linz"; it deals with the whole complex question of their long relationship.
5) While yet a youth Wittgenstein had heard
Den Meistersinger thirty times, and he even
set up a rating system for composers! Wagner he judged to be a "second-rater" because a mere imitator of Beethoven; in Wagner "
Beethoven's cosmic irony had become earthly or bourgeois" Wittgenstein concluded. At one point he planned to become a conductor.
6) But we next catch sight of Luki at the age of nineteen, on the moors near Manchester in that ill-omened year 1908, experimenting with his own invention:
a motor-powered flying machine. It was there on the moors that he made the acquaintance of Eccles, who became his only friend at that time. They would attend Halle concerts together, but in Manchester Wittgenstein's principal pastime was to relax in a bath of very hot water. It was as an odd fish that he was known even then.
7) Passing quickly over the similarity between Russell's and Wittgenstein's backgrounds, we come to 1929, when Wittgenstein is discovered
sharing a staircase at Cambridge with Anthony Blunt.
8) Later, in 1935, Wittgenstein - a staunch defender of Stalin - was
in Moscow at the same time as Blunt.
The good Professor Findlay - a family man if ever there was one - surely hyperbolizes when of Luki he writes, "At the age of 40 he looked like a youth of 20, with a god-like beauty, always an important feature at Cambridge. . . . The tea one drank with him tasted like nectar."
