The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was scrupulous — intellectually and morally scrupulous. He took as his motto some lines of Longfellow:
In the elder days of art
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part,
For the Gods see everywhere.1
In other words, Do your best, do an honest job, don’t be careless or slipshod. A scrupulous person like Wittgenstein takes this approach to everything. Jesus said, “He that is faithful in that which is least is faithful also in much.”2 The Austrian-Jewish writer Karl Kraus believed that writers should be scrupulous about style, including punctuation. Kraus was
| convinced that every little error... shows the great evils of the world.... Thus, he could see in a missing comma a symptom of that state of the world that would allow a world war.... Language was to him the most important tell-tale for the wrongs of the world. He viewed his contemporaries’ careless treatment of language as a sign for their careless treatment of the world as a whole.3 |
Karl Kraus
Can we judge a literary work by the number of typos it has? Spelling and typing may not be important per se, but they’re important as indications of whether a writer takes his own work seriously, whether a writer is making his best effort. In recent years, I’ve noticed lots of typos in the New York Times, which probably didn’t have lots of typos fifty years ago. Nowadays one sees mis-spelled words even on monuments carved in stone! Is the number of spelling mistakes an indication of the decline of civilization? In an earlier issue, I discussed the spelling mistakes made by late Romans on coins.
Rousseau said that he wrote his Confessions partly because he wanted to confess misdeeds, especially something he did as a youngster — he stole a ribbon, then accused a girl named Marion of the theft. One finds a similar incident in the life of Wittgenstein: When he was an elementary-school teacher, Wittgenstein hit a girl, who complained to the headmaster. When the headmaster asked him about it, Wittgenstein denied hitting the girl.
Like Rousseau, Wittgenstein was haunted by the incident. Wittgenstein felt that he couldn’t continue teaching, and left the profession.4 Wittgenstein tried to purge his conscience by confessing. He wrote about the incident, and read his confession to a friend at Cambridge, Fania Pascal. He confessed other misdeeds, too: “On several occasions in the 1930s Wittgenstein made confessions to friends and family, in writing and in person.”
Ludwig Wittgenstein
As Karl Kraus aimed at writing a perfect sentence, a perfect page, so Wittgenstein aimed at perfection in a moral sense. When Wittgenstein read his confession to Fania Pascal, she asked him,
“What is it? You want to be perfect?”
“Of course I want to be perfect.”5
Wittgenstein aimed at honesty. Jonathan Beale says, “Like Socrates, [Wittgenstein] knew that being honest with oneself is the most philosophical act of all.” Beale compares Wittgenstein to Socrates, who tried to follow the Delphic oracle’s maxim, Know thyself.
For Wittgenstein, philosophy is about honesty, about overcoming self-deception, about confessing; philosophy is not a purely intellectual endeavor. “Wittgenstein writes that philosophy’s difficulty lies “with the will, rather than with the intellect.” Perhaps there’s wisdom in the Catholic Church’s rite of confession; perhaps this rite helps one to “know thyself,” and helps one to unburden oneself.
Wittgenstein’s pursuit of honesty was related to his pursuit of courage and self-discipline. As a soldier in World War I, he volunteered for the most dangerous job, “the forward observation post in No Man’s Land.” He believed that danger would help him develop honesty, courage, and self-discipline.
“In 1916 [Wittgenstein] wrote: ‘Yesterday I was shot at. I was scared! I was afraid of death. I now have such a desire to live.’ For ‘only death gives life its meaning.’ Although a coward by his own exalted standards, he was a hero by more conventional ones, testament to which are the medals he received for bravery.”6
Wittgenstein was scrupulous about intellectual matters as well as moral matters; he was scrupulous about truth. He aimed at clarity of expression. He said, “Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is to have gained a great deal.”
Fania Pascal said that Wittgenstein visited her in the hospital, after she had her tonsils out: “I croaked: ‘I feel just like a dog that has been run over.’ [Wittgenstein] was disgusted: ‘You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like.’”
Harry Frankfurt comments on this incident; Frankfurt says that Wittgenstein
| perceives what Pascal says as being... unconnected to a concern with the truth. Her statement is not germane to the enterprise of describing reality. She does not even think she knows, except in the vaguest way, how a run-over dog feels. Her description of her own feeling is, accordingly, something that she is merely making up.... Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying. |
Frankfurt says that Wittgenstein takes a dim view of Pascal’s comment, Wittgenstein thinks that Pascal’s comment is bullshit. (Frankfurt was a philosophy professor who, in 1986, wrote a well-known essay called On Bullshit.)
Frankfurt distinguishes bullshit from lying: “[Pascal’s] statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth — this indifference to how things really are — that I regard as of the essence of bullshit.”
According to Frankfurt, bullshit is more opposed to truth than lying is:
| Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are. |
So Wittgenstein has two types of conscience, intellectual and moral. There’s a third kind of conscience, which deals with issues of justice — the exposure of the guilty, the exoneration of the innocent. Justice is closely related to truth. Did Wittgenstein deal with questions of justice at some point in his life? Given his deep interest in moral and intellectual issues, I suspect that he had a deep interest in justice. An example of a “justice case” is The Dreyfus Affair; Wittgenstein was too young to be involved with that case.
Of Wittgenstein’s four grandparents, three were Jewish. He was strongly attracted to Christianity. He wrote, “Christianity is indeed the only sure way to happiness.” He studied Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief, and carried it around with him, so his fellow-soldiers called him, “the man with the gospels.” He also studied Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, and “knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zosima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal.”
Like Proust and other writers, Wittgenstein was ridiculed by classmates as a youngster. His biographer writes, “the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: ‘Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts’ (Wittgenstein wanders wistfully Vienna-wards in worsening winds).”
One of Wittgenstein’s classmates (in Linz, Austria) was Hitler. The photo below shows Hitler in the upper right, circled; the other boy who is circled is probably Wittgenstein.
If you think that Frankfurtian bullshit is characteristic of Trump, or of our politics generally, you might enjoy a podcast by Eli Lake. John Podhoretz says “The Honestly podcasts with Eli Lake are always a highlight, but this one — about Trump’s defining quality — is Hall of Fame.”
If bullshitting is “Trump’s defining quality,” and if Wittgenstein abhorred bullshit, then we can view Trump and Wittgenstein as opposites, and thereby understand both of them better. Can you imagine Trump volunteering (as Wittgenstein did) for the most dangerous job in an army, in order to cultivate courage?
One who is hard on himself, as Wittgenstein was, is likely to be hard on others, too. One who is easy on himself, as Trump is, is likely to be easy on others. If you’re an elementary-school student, you might prefer Trump as your teacher, rather than Wittgenstein. Perhaps one reason for Trump’s popularity and success is that he’s easy on himself, he enjoys himself, and people enjoy being around him.
Frankfurt says that bullshit has a long history. Doubtless Mark Twain met some gifted bullshitters on the Mississippi, and used them in Huck Finn. But perhaps our own age is the Golden Age of Bullshit, with our advertising industry, our partisan media, and our skepticism about truth. Frankfurt: “The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are.”
I spend little time discussing the possibility of knowledge, and countering the arguments of skeptics. I go to the world, to objective reality, and try to learn — learn about Jewish history, Roman history, American history, about all sorts of things, about the world in general. I don’t argue that it’s possible to know, I show that it’s possible. So my approach to philosophy is different; I spend my time on knowledge itself, reality itself, rather than spending my time building an argument about the nature of knowledge, the possibility of knowledge, etc.
I suppose I’m reacting to the current situation, I’m reacting to a dearth of knowledge/learning. Our time can rediscover the world, the object, which a previous generation thought was out of reach.
But as we study the external world, we should remember the maxim “Know thyself,” and remember that Socrates felt it was “absurd to consider problems about other beings while I am still in ignorance about my own nature.” The subject and the object are equally important; the inner life is as important as the external world; your own deeds and misdeeds are as important as those of Pericles.
A celebrated biography of Wittgenstein was written by Ray Monk. The American philosopher Norman Malcolm wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir; Wikipedia says it’s “widely acclaimed as one of the most captivating and most accurate portraits of Wittgenstein’s remarkable personality.” Alexander Waugh wrote about the Wittgenstein family in The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. There’s a film about Wittgenstein (click here for details) that does a good job of quoting Wittgenstein, and summarizing his life.
When Wittgenstein was about 20, he was interested in engineering, especially the design of airplanes. This may have kindled an interest in math. He began studying mathematical theory and logic, reading Frege and Bertrand Russell. In 1911, at age 22, Wittgenstein introduced himself to Frege at Jena. Frege suggested that he study with Russell, so Wittgenstein went to Cambridge, introduced himself to Russell, and began attending Russell’s classes.
For Wittgenstein, Bertrand Russell was the ideal teacher, and for Russell, Wittgenstein was the ideal student; it was an extraordinary teacher-student relationship. “[Russell] saw in [Wittgenstein] ‘a pure intellectual passion’ that he had ‘in the highest degree’; ‘it makes me love him.’ This importance of passion recurs again and again in Russell’s correspondence about Wittgenstein.”
Russell wrote, “I have the most perfect intellectual sympathy with him — the same passion and vehemence, the same feeling that one must understand or die, the sudden jokes breaking down the frightful tension of thought.”
The phrase “understand or die” reminds me of Jung’s determination to understand the symbol in his unconscious, or kill himself.
According to Wikipedia, “Russell’s encouragement had proven [Wittgenstein’s] salvation, and had ended nine years of loneliness and suffering, during which [Wittgenstein] had continually thought of suicide. In encouraging him to pursue philosophy and in justifying his inclination to abandon engineering, Russell had, quite literally, saved Wittgenstein’s life.”
Russell felt that Wittgenstein surpassed him: “He has more passion about philosophy than I have; his avalanches make mine seem mere snowballs.”
Like many writers, Wittgenstein had a weak ego and a strong will. His passions often got the best of him. Schopenhauer said, “The greatest mental abilities are found only with a vehement and passionate will.” Julian Bell wrote a poem about Wittgenstein:
Who, on any issue, ever saw
Ludwig refrain from laying down the law?
In every company he shouts us down,
And stops our sentence stuttering his own;
Unceasing argues, harsh, irate and loud,
Sure that he’s right, and of his rightness proud.
Gustavo Silva argues that Wittgenstein was autistic, or on the autism spectrum. Silva says that “Wittgenstein was philosophizing about his behavioral and cognitive difficulties, including those related to language.” His language difficulty began early; Silva says that Wittgenstein didn’t talk until he was four. Silva speaks of Wittgenstein’s “difficulties forming social relationships.” Silva quotes Bertrand Russell:
| He was not always easy to fit into a social occasion. Whitehead described to me the first time that Wittgenstein came to see him. He was shown into the drawing-room during afternoon tea. He appeared scarcely aware of the presence of Mrs. Whitehead, but marched up and down the room for some time in silence, and at last said explosively: “A proposition has two poles. It is apb.” Whitehead, in telling me, said: “I naturally asked what are a and b, but I found that I had said quite the wrong thing. ‘a and b are indefinable,’ Wittgenstein answered in a voice of thunder.” |
In an earlier issue, I quoted the American poet Charles Bukowski:
so you want to be a writer?
if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
Bukowski’s motto was, Don’t try. Wait for inspiration to come to you, don’t try, don’t force it.
Wittgenstein didn’t try to philosophize, philosophy grabbed him, it forced him to answer its questions. As Ray Monk wrote, “Philosophy... came to him, not he to philosophy. Its dilemmas were experienced by him as unwelcome intrusions, enigmas, which forced themselves upon him and held him captive, unable to get on with everyday life until he could dispel them with a satisfactory solution.”
What Wittgenstein calls “philosophy” bears little resemblance to what I call philosophy. In my view, his philosophy has nothing of interest, nothing of value; it sheds no light on human nature or on history; it doesn’t help us to live. Wittgenstein murdered philosophy, or tried to.
With the election behind us, this might be a good time for bipartisan conversations — for example, a conversation about the debt. Is there anything that can be done to rein in the debt? All indications are that, under Trump, the debt problem will get worse. Neither party wants the unpopularity of being “deficit hawks.” Can anything be done, on a bipartisan basis, to address the debt?
We should also have a bipartisan conversation about the filibuster. Should it be eliminated entirely? Or should it be restored to “full force” (as it was before 2013)? In 1975, the senate reduced the number of votes required to end a filibuster from 2/3 to 3/5, or 60. Should the number be reduced further, perhaps to 55? If the two parties agree on a “filibuster plan,” it should be phased in over ten years, so it doesn’t adversely affect the party that currently controls the Senate.
“Any sort of filibuster leads to gridlock.” Maybe it’s good to hamstring federal action, hamstring partisan policies, maybe we shouldn’t take bold action at the federal level, but rather at the state and local levels.
And then there’s the Supreme Court. We should fix the number of justices at nine, by law, or by constitutional amendment; court-packing should be out-of-bounds. If there’s bipartisan agreement on term limits, or age limits, this agreement should be phased in, so as not to have partisan impact, immediate impact.
Neither party should create states for partisan advantage. The number of states should be fixed at 50 (by law or by constitutional amendment). If states are created for partisan reasons, that will intensify partisan warfare, and hasten the country’s decline. I realize that a constitutional amendment would be difficult, but the attempt might be healthy for our political system.
And then there’s the process of voting. Should we have early voting and secret ballots? If early voting is available, are mail-in ballots needed? Since mail-in ballots increase the risk of fraud, should they be reduced to their pre-pandemic level, or eliminated completely? Democrats have proven many times that they can win with old-fashioned voting, with secret ballots; Democrats don’t need mail-in ballots.
This country wasn’t intended to be a pure democracy, it was intended to be a republic, a constitutional republic, a federal republic. Our only objective standard, our only protection against partisan extremism, is the Constitution. If we don’t respect the Constitution, then our politics is a pure power-struggle. Respecting the Constitution means keeping the Electoral College, not making Washington DC a state, etc.
One reason the Democrats lost is that they pursued policies that the people didn’t want. The Democrats opened the border, and the people didn’t want an open border.
Latinos are more opposed to the open border than the average American. “The story of the Texas Senate race: Ted Cruz won Latino voters by 6 points.... In his last race in 2018, Cruz lost Latinos by 29 points. A 35-point swing.”
In the recent election, I voted for Trump for the first time. In 2016 and 2020, I didn’t vote for any Presidential candidate. I became more “Trumpy,” and at the same time, the country became more Trumpy. I didn’t like Trump more, or respect Trump more. Rather, I was horrified by Democratic policies, as many people were. My vote wasn’t a “pro vote,” it was an “anti vote,” just as many Harris voters weren’t voting for Harris, they were voting against Trump. In a polarized country, voting is often an expression of what you’re against.
The Democrats weren’t moderate in their policies, they were extreme, extreme Left. They tried to crush the Republican Party (by importing voters, etc.). They went for the jugular, instead of trying to find common ground, and reduce polarization.
Biden decided, early in his term, not to be moderate, but to “go big.” A group of historians (Jon Meacham, Michael Beschloss, Doris Kearns Goodwin, etc.) visited Biden, and advised him to “go big.” In other words, historians advised Biden to be an extremist, to “double down” on polarization, to do exactly what the other side didn’t want. The recent election was a rejection of left-wing extremism.
Biden and his team had no respect for the Republicans. Democracy can only work if both sides have a modicum of respect for each other, just as a marriage requires that both people have some respect for the other person. Trump should signal his respect for Democrats by reaching out to them in some way. He should also apologize for the insult to Puerto Ricans at his rally; he should go to Puerto Rico, or meet with PuertoRican leaders at the White House.
Once again, many polls turned out to be misleading, by under-counting Trump voters. The betting markets were more accurate than the polls. Some polls, however, such as Trafalgar and AtlasIntel, were accurate.
One of the “channels” I watched on election night was The Free Press. I was impressed by the quality of the analysis, and by the diversity of opinion. And no ads! And no paywall! Who needs the mainstream media, the legacy media?
One guest on the FreePress broadcast was Mark Halperin, one of the country’s most astute political commentators. He has his own channel, called 2WAY. Like The Free Press, 2WAY tries to be bipartisan, though it leans conservative.
Charles Swann is a character in Proust’s multi-volume novel, Remembrance of Things Past (sometimes called In Search of Lost Time). Charles Swann is the “Swann” in Swann’s Way, the first volume in the series. Like most of Proust’s characters, Charles Swann is based on a real person, or two real people.
One of the models for Charles Swann is Charles Ephrussi, an art critic and art collector, 22 years older than Proust. Ephrussi died in 1905, when Proust was 34. Like Proust, Ephrussi was from a wealthy Ashkenazi-Jewish family. Ephrussi’s parents were doubtless both Jewish, but Proust had only one Jewish parent (Proust’s father was Catholic). There may be a resemblance between Ephrussi and Proust; in the photos below, they both have heavy eye-lids, conspicuous eye-lids; they both appear relaxed but serious, kindly but reserved.
Marcel Proust at 29
Charles Ephrussi
As a young man, one of Proust’s chief goals was to enter the fashionable drawing-rooms, the exclusive salons, of Paris. Ephrussi had achieved this; Wikipedia says that Ephrussi was “a welcome guest at some of the most famous salons.” So it would have been natural for Proust to look up to Ephrussi, and include him in his novel. Ephrussi even had royal connections; he “conducted Queen Victoria around Paris.”7 Proust describes Swann as a friend of the Prince of Wales.
Ephrussi was Jewish, as is Proust’s “Swann.” Ephrussi consorted with artists, as well as aristocrats; Swann does the same. Swann consorts with “Elstir,” Proust’s artist-figure. Elstir “has elements of both Whistler and Renoir.” Proust describes Swann in a painting by Elstir (i.e., Ephrussi in a painting by Renoir): “A gentleman wearing a top-hat at a boating party where he was clearly out of place, which proved that for Elstir, [Swann] was not only a regular sitter, but a friend, perhaps a patron.” Below is Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party; note the man in the back, wearing a top-hat.
Ephrussi and Swann were both art critics; Ephrussi wrote about Durer, Swann wrote about Vermeer. Both are interested in Venetian medallions, both are interested in Giotto and Botticelli, both are “patrons of the Impressionists. [Ephrussi and Swann] advise society ladies on which paintings to buy. They are both dandies, both chevaliers of the Legion d’honneur, both infatuated with unsuitable, complex women.”
Ephrussi and Swann both side with Dreyfus, and both suffer socially because of The Dreyfus Affair; the Dreyfus Affair undermines their position in French society. “The precarious structure of assimilation [comes] crashing down.” The Dreyfus Affair reminds Ephrussi/Swann that they’re Jews. Swann is “grateful to Dreyfus,” Proust writes, “for revealing ‘the paths that his forebears had trodden and from which he had been deflected by his aristocratic associations.’”
It was The Dreyfus Affair (at least in part) that prompted Theodor Herzl to initiate Zionism, and aim for a Jewish nation, where assimilation would be unnecessary. The Dreyfus Affair began in 1894, Herzl published The Jewish State (Der Judenstaat) in 1896.
A relative of the Ephrussis, Edmund de Waal, wrote a book about his family called The Hare With Amber Eyes (2010). It deals with art works hidden from the Nazis — small Japanese carvings called netsuke. The Ephrussis’ netsuke collection was started by Charles Ephrussi who, like Elstir, seems to have had an “infatuation with Japonisme.”
The Ephrussis were a wealthy banking family, “peers of the Rothschild family.”8 They were so prominent that they appear, not only in Proust, but also in the fiction of Joseph Roth and Isaac Babel.
A. “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.” (@Culture_Crit)
B. People often say things like, “I’ll turn sixty in five years. Five years will go by just like that,” and they snap their fingers. Should we be glad that time is flying by? Should we say, “Time flies when you’re having fun”? Or should we try to slow the passage of time — appreciate the moment, the day? Should we travel in order to slow the passage of time? Do we make our life longer by slowing the passage of time?
© L. James Hammond 2024
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| Footnotes | |
| 1. | These lines are from The Seaside and The Fireside, “By the Fireside” ==> “The Builders” Link here My source is Harry Frankfurt’s essay On Bullshit, which discusses Wittgenstein. Frankfurt has “the Gods are everywhere,” but I think it should be “the Gods see everywhere.” back |
| 2. | Luke 16:10, King James Version back |
| 3. | These are Erich Heller’s words, which I quoted in an earlier issue. back |
| 4. | See the excellent essay in the New York Times by Jonathan Beale. Beale discusses another incident involving Wittgenstein hitting a student, and Beale thinks that this second incident may have prompted Wittgenstein to leave teaching. The first incident, mentioned by Fania Pascal, may not have occurred, it may be a “memory mistake” by Pascal. back |
| 5. | I’m quoting Beale’s article back |
| 6. | Beale, slightly modified back |
| 7. | See the article on Ephrussi and Swann by Edmund de Waal in The Telegraph.
Most critics say that the chief model for Charles Swann is Charles Haas, who was Jewish, a decorated soldier, a member of the prestigious Jockey Club, and a friend of the Prince of Wales. back |
| 8. | Wikipedia back |