,14=/,15=#,23=\%,24==> 2Childhood and Schooldays L~U~D~W~I~G Wittgenstein was born in the Alleegasse house at 8.30 p.m. on 26 April 1889, the last child and the eighth to live to maturity of Karl and Poldy Wittgenstein. It was one of a number of foibles he had in later life to insist that nice people must be born in April, which was in fact the month of his father's birth and also that in which he himself was to die. Photographs show him first as a fair and curly-haired baby with large blue eyes, later on as a small boy in a sailor-suit looking out from innumerable family groups, walking with a governess on the terraces, lawns, or meadows of one of his father's country-houses, endearing, a little earnest but by no means troubled_the typical Benjamin of a wealthy industrialist's family of that time and place. Typical too (at any rate for the first ten or twelve years of life) was his education and that of his brothers and sisters. They did not go to school but received formal instruction from a number of tutors and governesses. They were taught French and English from their earliest years by the well-brought-up native-speaking governesses or tutors available at that period. "My French is poor but English I know,' Ludwig told an Austrian friend in the First War: but all his family, not just those who spent years in England or America, could write it all their lives and speak it with that out-of-date purity and refinement of accent and vocabulary that is now heard only from survivors of their generation or middle-aged members of foreign royal families. Their German, too, was of a beauty and elegance not often heard now_the German of culture and the stage in the Austria of that time, recognizably different from the German of the empire but in no sense a dialect. Indeed they had little contact with the people except as servants and dependants. Their contacts at children's parties or dancing schools were with the upper classes. Their outlook and all their habits were those of Austrians, indeed, but Austrians of those classes. Education in the home accentuated this remoteness: the normal way of life of most Austrians_not just of das Volk but of those that became writers and scientists_was alien to them. Ludwig, for example, always wrote in a bold Latin hand: when he became a schoolmaster he had to struggle to teach himself the customary Kurrent. Their education, then, was typical enough, but typical of a particular class at a particular time. It was quite usual too that they should be in awe of their father, that they should see little of their mother, that they should be expected not to speak much in the presence of their aunts and uncles. They were impressed above all with the importance of honesty, of strict performance 25 2Childhood and Schooldays of duty, and of fulfilment of obligations towards servants and dependants. Formal religion, in comparison, played little part in their lives. Moral and cultural and material superiority to those that surrounded them (or the consciousness of each of the three) were inextricably interwoven and formed the atmosphere in which they lived. Their household had, of course, its special atmosphere. The eldest daughter, Hermine (Mining, as she was called after the Fritz Reuter character), said that all the children felt it to be one of constant excitement, an unrelaxed tension that came in the first place from their father. His vigour and decisiveness would have put his stamp on any family_a father at the height of his business success, disposing instantly of problems that puzzled his subordinates, but with time and energy free to fence and to ride as well as any cavalryman, he could not but be overpowering. His intellectual powers were formidable_there are many stories of his rapid mental calculations and the most considerable of his posthumously published papers (an analysis of the industrial achieve- ment of America) was a lecture delivered_tables, statistics and all_ without notes.1 A moral or human problem he would dispose of with the same rapidity: he did not like discussion and would cut it short with a pointed joke. Such a character is far from being without charm_indeed the very strength of the personality is an added charm when it is all bent to pleasing or gratifying or making comfortable. Good-looking, vigorous, confident, right (so far as they could tell) in his judgements, witty, adroit, a man who absorbed a wide general culture by casual reading, and in whom his business rivals recognized the power to charm a bird from a tree, Karl Wittgenstein was for his children the dispenser of all good things, the creator of the world of large houses, parks and estates which they took as a natural environment. Small wonder if his daughters especially, to whom he paid court, worshipped him. He remained their standard of manly excellence and long after his death if something was neglected by a servant, it was always "If Papa were alive to see this!' and each spot on their walks was associated with some small incident involving him_say a treat given to a grandchild or the like. Ludwig, too, and Paul, the second youngest brother, retained or allowed themselves to retain only good memories of their father. For both of them the idea of authority had great attractiveness: they were prepared to accept a world of moral absolutes which could be perceived immediately, not assented to on balance, and from which any deviation was complete failure. They were like Karl too in their dislike of humbug and their quickness to detect it. Until (for complicated reasons) the Second World War brought contact between them to an end, Paul's communications with Ludwig were for the most part "nonsense'_ 1."Die Ursachen der Entwicklung der Industrie in Amerika' [1898] in Politico-Economic Writings, pp. 22ff. 26 Wittgenstein: A Life cuttings of self-evident absurdity from some newspaper, which Ludwig carefully kept in the collection of such things especially mentioned in his will. Even these two youngest sons, however, though conscious of no resentment against their father, were clearly hampered in many ways by the upbringing he chose for them, though in their time he somewhat mitigated his re$0gime. For his vigour and self-confidence were purchased, naturally enough, at the price of a certain insensitivity and even at times brutality. A man of great largesse he could also refuse a request most harshly if he thought it somehow foolishly or maladroitly presented. His dislike of humbug passed over into practical jokes at the expense of those who would feel themselves socially insecure_an entire house-party secretly changing for dinner to embarrass a newly-arrived guest (whom the servants reported to have arrived without evening clothes), the hoax of a specially engraved honorific invitation to a circus performance, and the like. Sure of himself and of his values, he imposed them on his sons with not much attention to their gifts and none to their inclinations. They were to learn mathematics and Latin and in later life they were destined_by him_to combine engineering and business as he had done. Other subjects they would pick up for themselves. As for music, if one of them had a native gift for it, that was a bonus, but not something that should be allowed to affect the pattern of his life. This attitude bore hardest on the second child and eldest son, Hans, who was undoubtedly a musical prodigy_a genius, said Professor Epstein_playing the violin in St. Peter's church at the age of 9, playing also the organ and piano, and exhibiting a variety of musical feats. It was not so much that he lacked the intellectual abilities demanded by his father's plan_his sister Hermine describes childhood fancies and games involving elaborate measurements and calculations that recall exactly his father's facility at mental arithmetic. Much rather he had no interest in the career chosen for him and he had not learnt such habits of regular even if distasteful application as a normal schooling might have given him. Thus when he was sent, without a proper tutorial training, to pick up the necessary knowledge in various enterprises in Bohemia, Germany, and England, he had no idea what was expected of him and concerned himself much more with organizing string-quartets. The atmosphere between him and his father when he was on leave was an uncomfortable one. He vanished from a boat in Chesapeake Bay at the age of 26 in circumstances suggesting suicide: as such, certainly, from whatever indications, his death was always regarded in the family. The Wittgenstein family history (true to its time) contains many anecdotes that might have figured in the appendices to a treatise on psycho-analysis. Thus we are told that the first word Hans learnt was the name "Oedipus'. There are obviously grounds for saying that he 27 2Childhood and Schooldays identified with his mother and rejected his father. The reasons for this lie much deeper in the dynamics of the family than in the ill-chosen system of education. But his mother's attitude to that too was typical. The father had no time to supervise the education he had prescribed and the mother had in the first place little time except for the father. Moreover, distrustful as she was of herself, she was reluctant to correct or control those who worked for her. The children were brought up in their first years by a curmudgeonly nursemaid who paid little attention to their activities, their behaviour, or even their corporal well-being. Poldi's mother and others saw this clearly and protested to her but she was evidently afraid to commit herself to a programme of improvement and intervention, so that Fra$3ulein Elise stayed on for twenty-one years, until, in fact, Ludwig was six. It was the same when some of the tutors were useless. Above all, she said nothing to her husband about his harshness towards Hans (as she herself regretted in the retrospection of widow- hood). It is impossible now to trace the conflicts between feeling and a strong sense of duty that led to her unquietness. Her children sensed them_certainly her daughter did from whose family memoir most of this account is drawn_and saw that in her devotion to her mother and her husband she had exhausted her abilities to remain calm. When it came to the children's problems she seemed to lack the necessary sense of their individual characters and, above all, she was too anxious to believe that all was well lest she should be drawn into struggles beyond her powers. Her gentleness and courtesy and unselfishness were a constant model for her children. They saw too, and many of them inherited, her anxious concern not to have failed in any duty, but they suffered by reason of her inability to see clearly where her duty lay and to contrive and follow through the best policy available. For inner reasons and because of her marriage she was like a person holding her own in a storm and so far from giving strength to them she was someone whom they had to support and spare. This was more marked during her widowhood and the end of her life no doubt coloured their recollections of her. But the pattern of her widowhood itself illustrates that she needed someone to hold her up, and it seems that her sons especially required more devotion and insight and individual care than she was capable of giving them. With regard to Hans, his elder sister doubted whether he would have been happy even if left free to live a life of music. There was a violence and nervousness in his playing that seemed to correspond to something in his whole nature. She thought that in all her brothers there was in youth a lack of the will to live_of Lebenskraft, Lebenswille, or jugendliches Lebensgefu$3hl, as she variously called it. The third son, Rudi, certainly committed suicide_he poisoned himself in Berlin. When he was seven, on the occasion of a test of 28 Wittgenstein: A Life elementary education that he had to undergo, he seemed so frightened and miserable that the examiner warned his mother that he was a nervous child, who ought to be watched. This was always quoted by the mother as a great joke. Rudi was remembered as the brother with the most feeling for literature, perhaps not creative but with the gifts of a critic. His suicide is usually attributed to his being or thinking he was a homosexual_though one second-hand account mentions the difficulty of making his own way in Berlin after the comfort of his father's house and also suggests that he had a venereal disease. Both his suicide and Hans's occurred in the early years of the century. A third brother, Kurt, second in order of age, also killed himself, but much later. He was to all appearances the least troubled of the sons (though this may be partly the Wittgenstein way of saying that he was not obviously gifted), remembered chiefly for the charming musicality with which he would sit at the piano to play what he had heard at the opera. His father had him appointed a director of a company. He disliked the work but supported it with apparent cheerfulness. Two attempts to marry failed and he seemed to be a rich and cultivated bachelor with no especially serious obligations. A photograph of 1918 shows him sitting on the terrace at the Hochreith with the rest of the family, the confident cavalry officer in dress, bearing, and expression. A few months afterwards, at the end of the War, on the retreat from the Italians he left the bivouac saying he must stretch himself, after which a shot was heard. A number of reasons have been suggested_shame at defeat, or at his soldiers' refusal to fight, a horror of being taken prisoner. But (as in Rudi's case) the precise precipitant cause seems unimportant compared with the the implications of the fact that there were three suicides in the one family and that the two remaining brothers (so their sister says) were also at times so near to it that it seemed the merest chance that either of them survived to live a full life. She thought it was perhaps a lack of das harte Muss, the stern sense of obligation, that the father so much wanted to give them. But a variant of this explanation seems more plausible_from both father and mother they had acquired too strong a sense of duty: from their father they learnt that their role in life was to act_to change the world in some way. Karl believed or at any rate he put the whole force of his personality into the belief that technical advances would solve every problem: he was the embodiment of the idea of progress that later haunted and repelled Ludwig who thought it the essential characteristic of the society of his time and the reason why he himself was alien to it. But the temperament that the sons inherited from their mother was one quite unsuited to these beliefs and this role_it was a passive and sensitive and self-distrustful temperament. It is not surprising if in the three elder sons this temperament lacked the strength to assert itself and to enable them to find a way of life tolerable 29 2Childhood and Schooldays for them. The father's own sudden changes of direction will be remembered. He too could not tolerate any degree of failure: but these sons perhaps lacked his almost manic belief that everything was possible. For their more depressive personalities any failure seemed absolute, whether in their careers, or in their moral life, or in the fortunes of their country. All in all the three daughters adapted best to what was expected of them, no doubt because less was expected of them. Hermine, or Mining, the eldest of the family, became her father's real companion. It was with her that he collected his pictures, to her that he dictated his autobio- graphy, and for her essentially that he bought and developed his country estate the Hochreith. She took something of her mother's place too in relation to the younger children. Later in life she became in effect the head of the family, sitting in the main houses_in the Alleegasse or on the Hochreith_das gna$3dige Fra$3ulein as she was known in their circle, the repository of family tradition and the eventual author of its history. It was a harmonious life, something like that of the older Wittgensteins. She painted and drew_mostly family interiors and scenes on the Hochreith _with taste. She played the piano and arranged or permitted the arrangement of musical evenings. She entertained the numerous prote$0ge$0s of the family and sent presents with exquisite taste. Until the first war she devoted herself entirely to family duties but during it she worked in a hospital and after it she ran a day-home for children_naturally with many and, fortunately, well-chosen helpers; for she had inherited much of her mother's unpracticality though not the anxiety that went with it. Her life seemed to her nephews and nieces a rounded one_they could not imagine her married, for example. There were, of course, sometimes tempestuous scenes with her brothers and sisters, most of whom had clear ideas about how the others ought to behave, but for the most part she was respected without needing, as her mother needed, to be spared. Harmonious too was the life of the second sister, Helene or Lenka. As happened from time to time in the family, the strength of her personality was not apparent in youth, when (by strict standards) she was judged rather frivolous. She was to marry a stable and humorous civil servant, Max Salzer, from a firmly Protestant family already connected with the Wittgensteins, who became an adviser of the family in all practical matters. She was one of the most musical of the family and organised a small choral group between the wars. The suspicion of frivolity vanished but she retained a lively form of the Wittgenstein strain of humour (the sort of thing that appears in her father's letters to his sisters) and she would talk nonsense by the hour with her brother Ludwig, who shared that strain. It was chiefly in this, in harmless jokes_a firework for her birthday present and the like, and in making music or talking about it that these two kept in contact. Lacking the maternal privileges of Mining 30 Wittgenstein: A Life and the unremitting zeal for human improvement of the remaining sister, she left him to manage his own life. Margaret or Gretl_the nearest sister to Ludwig in age, in ability and in temperament_had a much greater influence on his development. She was all through her life an imposing personality. It was only in comparison with her and in their relations with her that the other two sisters sometimes seemed less than strong characters. For nephews and nieces and to the outside world das gna$3dige Fra$3ulein and die Frau Sektionschef were powerful ladies with whom liberties would not be taken. Only Gretl (as she wrote to Ludwig) feared they might not be morally strong enough (she chiefly meant clear-sighted enough) in an emergency; only she sought to guide them; and only she could have taken over the responsibility for infusing a soul into one of Lenka's children. She was also always more advanced than they were. True, she contrived like them to live, until the middle of the twentieth century, something like the life of the old Wittgensteins, a little snobbish perhaps, a little narrow-minded (in this respect Gretl was a friend of Freud's in vain), but essentially well-intentioned and happy, if moderate self- satisfaction be happiness. But in her impatience with mere tradition, her passion for new ideas_for psycho-analysis, say, or for socialism_her determination to understand, to analyse, to improve, even in the scale of her enterprises, she, perhaps most nearly of all his children, recalled the versatility and energy of her father. If this was applied now to human problems rather than technical ones, this was not just because she was a woman but because that was the spirit of the generation of Wittgensteins to which she belonged. Paul and Ludwig were the two remaining sons, respectively five and seven years younger than Gretl, so that for the normal course of life they were thrown very much together. Paul's was a quite different nature from Ludwig's. He paid much less heed to the opinion of others. He wanted all his life to carry everything with a high hand. It was more important to be respected or even feared than to be liked. He certainly had the power and the determination necessary to secure this reaction. A pupil of Leschetitzky and destined for a career as a pianist (an evident sign of the mitigation of his father's regime), he made his concert debut in 1913. But in the early months of the war he lost his right arm on the Eastern Front. Returned by the Russians in an exchange of prisoners, he contrived both to be sent back to serve as an aide-de-camp and to teach himself to play with the left hand only (there was the precedent of Count Zichy for whom Liszt wrote pieces). He commissioned and performed pieces by Richard Strauss, Ravel, and others and continued his career as a concert pianist and a teacher with great success. It will already be apparent that the family provided its own severest critics and Paul's style of playing was not always to the taste of his brother and sisters, let alone 31 2Childhood and Schooldays of his mother. There was a violence about it which was only in part explained by the exigencies of execution with the left hand. They, who had heard Joachim and turned up their noses at Sarasate, were suspicious of any effect not strictly demanded by the music. (Ravel was to share these doubts.) On recordings and to a modern ear he sounds like a virtuoso indeed but an Austrian virtuoso and of the past, richer and less brilliant than a modern performer. The recordings, of course, are thicker than those of today and the unnaturalness of his mode of execution, which the Wittgensteins felt sharply, is not there to be seen. He seemed in many respects to force nature and his own powers. It was scarcely necessary to learn to box_he, a pianist_with his remaining arm, even as part of his constant exercise to keep himself as upright and straight as a two-armed man. The incredibly long walks he took served that purpose too and were of a piece with his father's preferred way of spending a holiday, except that the father always wanted his wife, no vigorous walker, and his eldest daughter with him, while Paul went alone. He had, or came to have as a result of adversities and the strain of overcoming them, a harsh and secretive strain in his personality. Thus he lived with his family until the Second War but only some accident revealed to them anything of his private life. He left them then_in circumstances probably deeply misunderstood on both sides, in the lurch it seemed to them; for obvious reasons it seemed to him_and an unrevealed wife as suddenly appeared. The Anschluss proved even harder to overcome than the hardships of the First War and the humiliations of defeat. Paul ist ein armer Kerl_"Poor Paul!', Ludwig said for the first time; something symbolized by his relations with his family was finally broken by it. Able, quick, well-read, with the manners of a grand seigneur, he seemed to carry with him as a professor in New York all the atmosphere of a vanished age. His time spent with the Starhembergs and with the officers of his old regiment (the 6th Dragoons) remained with him, for all that it was precisely the Germans that had excluded him. So did his wide culture and his interest in nature, again the qualities of an aristocrat. When he went on his long walks in Austria he would carry a Livy in one pocket and a botanical specimen in the other. Very characteristic of him at all times was a mocking sense of humour like his father's which deflated pretentiousness and cut discussions short. It is in this aspect that he first appears in his sister's reminiscences, a small boy torturing the now aging nursemaid with his flow of nonsense and only barely held in check by his grandmother's housekeeper, as tough a piece of timber as himself. To all of these brothers and sisters whose attitude we know of, Luki or der Lukerl seemed at first someone that needed to be protected_and not only because of his age relative to them, for no one took this attitude 32 Wittgenstein: A Life towards Paul. Luki was delicate and sensitive in temperament, and almost certainly in health also. By the age of 14 it is known that he had to be excused gymnastics at school and his history even before the hardships of the First World War is one of minor operations and surgical appliances (he had apparently a double rupture). At this time of his life he both needed and invited affection. Ludwig's later remarks about his childhood have to be treated with great reserve, except of course as evidence of his later state of mind. There is no absolute contradiction in them: it is possible to have the best of fathers, the best of sisters, and the best of environments and still to be unhappy, provided that the possibility of attributing the unhappiness to a defect in one's own character is not excluded. And Ludwig, far from excluding this possibility, embraced it. He looked back on his childhood with an eye like that of St. Augustine, searching for sins and faults in all the accidents and velleities of childhood. Often indeed it was precisely in the context of a general confession that he spoke or wrote of those years. At the same time he was proud of the sort of abilities that he developed and of the sort of intellectual and moral culture that surrounded him. This pride was a sort of affirmation of identity like that of the French politician whom he quoted as saying that French was the only language in which the words came in the order which one thought them. A good intellectual nursery-training_eine gute geistige Kinderstube_so he used to describe his earlier years, a remark covering, though not restricted to, the fourteen years he spent at home. This was not, for the most part, the merit of his tutors and governesses. They varied in their competence and, above all, they themselves were not supervised, and it would be an honest man indeed who would reveal to his employers that he was unable to overcome their children's laziness or disinclination. Even the piano Ludwig was taught by an unsuitable method and lessons were discontinued. The incident is a little strange, because Paul, who tells the story2 and who stresses Ludwig's exceptional musicality, himself managed to learn to play. It seems that Ludwig preferred subjects that he could teach himself, as he later taught himself the clarinet: perhaps also, where music was concerned, he preferred the role of critic or director of others to that of executant. At any rate, for music he was thrown back on the musical life of the household_the frequent concerts visited or given in the house and the frequent performance by the family of Mendelssohn's choral songs and duets, of Schumann's vocal trios, and of chamber works and sonatas in which his mother and father and brothers would play. He learnt to whistle with great accuracy and expression and he found the technicalities of music easy to master. It came as easily to him as if he had picked up a second language in the house. 2.In a letter to Professor F.A. von Hayek. 33 2Childhood and Schooldays The nursery training however was principally the reading and discussion that went on in the house. Particular passages were dwelt on and learnt by heart. Works that seemed appropriate for an individual were put out for him. It was a constant discussion of life by means of literature and the emphasis was on the chaste and unrhetorical language in which it was expressed. Ludwig once said to a friend, "It would not matter what you had done, you might even have killed somebody: what would matter would be how you talked about it, or whether you talked about it at all.' This is what he looked for in a literary work too_we find him recommending Tolstoy's Hadji Murat to Russell and Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas to one of his sisters: works in which the chief character shows not a stoical indifference to misfortune but, like an Aristotelian man, a readiness to do and suffer terrible things because, as matters had turned out, they too are part of the good or noble life that he has chosen. His life is ruined, o23mwv de4 kai4 e1n tou3toiv diala3mpei to4 kalo3n_but still the nobility shines through the misfortunes: it is true of the style as well as of the events related. In fact it is only from the style that one can see how these men accept their lot: in Wittgenstein's own phrase, that can only be shown, not said. Of these particular works we know only that Ludwig read them before the First War. Of what works and writers he came to know actually in childhood we have only strong indications. The great writers_Goethe, Schiller, Moerike, Lessing_he turned to all his life. They were like suns he said, meaning that they were central to a culture and defined it. Goethe especially dealt with problems of Western culture, not as much to be sure as Beethoven did, but still with problems that no philosopher had touched: or perhaps Nietzsche had just touched them, but then Nietzsche (as he also said_and without a trace of deprecation) was more of a poet than a philosopher. These last remarks date from the thirties and their awareness that Western culture was simply one phase in the history of mankind is of a piece with his respect for the ideas of Spengler. Ludwig was not obsessed with the thought that the culture he himself represented was a thing of the past. He accepted it more simply_as the medium in which to form (and eventually to express) his understanding of the meaning of life. Music provides a good illustration of this: for him and his family music meant the music of Vienna, from Haydn to Brahms. He saw no need for a change: Berg's work, for example, seemed to him a scandal. The classical repertory contained more than enough to think about all one's life. His relation to music, so understood, was like his relation to his native language: he had no need to look outside it for means of expression. Towards music this remained his attitude throughout life; and such too was his relation in youth to a certain brand of (essentially) German culture, until maturity and the War added new dimensions to his sensibility. When he went to England 34 Wittgenstein: A Life as a student he took with him large numbers of the elegant but not luxurious editions then available of the works of these central writers. The books were sold after the First War and later in England he assembled a collection of cheaper second-hand editions_no doubt, in a favourite phrase of his, both inner and outer reasons played a part here. He read intensively, rather than read widely: he would return again and again to a passage or a poem that "said something to him' rather as he would when listening to music on the gramophone put the needle back repeatedly to some musical transition from which he wanted to extract everything. This was his attitude towards literature, also towards philosophy, well-reflected by his friend Engelmann's comments.3 His reaction was not to say, "Well, we understand that, what is the next step', but to stay with any profound utterance and attempt to deepen his understanding of it. Naturally enough, therefore, his notebooks abound in quotations from Goethe and Schiller. Other writers and particular works became important later: those we are here concerned with formed part of the permanent furniture of his mind_of what he called, in fact, his Kinderstube. Lessing illustrates the inseparability in his eyes of ethics and aesthetics. The world changed in this respect and Ludwig came to think that culture had lost the integrity necessary if the best and strongest characters of an age were to turn to the arts, but he was himself a survivor of an earlier way of thinking. He often said that he belonged to a world that had vanished with the death of Schumann. In his admiration for Schiller too there was something out of date. The idealism, and the passion for freedom which attracted him took forms appropriate to the age before the Napoleonic wars. Moerike's merit was the simplicity and naturalness of his language: not exactly restraint but the exact fit of the emotion and hence of course the language to the situation. It is this quality that Ludwig found also in Gottfried Keller, whose works (as we happen to know) were among those he took to England with him and whom, Engelmann reports,4 he passionately revered. The tone never a fraction too loud for the depth of the feeling_this is apparent in the Zurich stories that he liked to recommend to his friends_Der Landvogt von Griefensee and Kleider machen Leute, a typical case of his love for the apparently simple parable; but the figure of Heinrich Lee in Der gru$3ne Heinrich is also very reminiscent of Ludwig and his judgements of himself, both in his shame over the betrayals of youth and in his sense (justified in Heinrich's case) that he had constantly refused and withdrawn when an opportunity was given him. To say what Ludwig admired in Goethe would almost be to say what he found remarkable or worthwhile in life, so many are the themes and 3.P. Engelmann: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, p. 132. 4.id. ibid., p. 86. 35 2Childhood and Schooldays attitudes from Goethe that recur in his thought. The contempt for academic learning; the fertility and originality of a mind looking for fresh bases of comparison and not content even with the authority of a Newton; more generally, the completeness and harmony of a character that gave a distinctive stamp to every sentence that he wrote, so that for "voila$1 un homme' one might substitute "voila$1 un style'. No sensualist himself, Ludwig did not neglect_probably on account of their sense of liberation_the Roman Elegies. Above all Goethe was the man of the Enlightenment who had resolved for himself the conflicts of a life and an age of confusion and vicissitude. Yet perhaps Ludwig had a deeper affinity with some Austrian writers. He said of Grillparzer: "We do not know how beautiful he is.' That Grillparzer's classicism would appeal to him we can see from his selection of Goethe's Iphigenie for Russell to read and the theme of Ein treuer Diener seines Herrn (one play that we know to have been a particular favourite of his)5_the theme of the loyal servant who willingly puts up with every slight, judging that the worst affliction would be to commit a wrong himself, chimes exactly with Ludwig's own attitude towards lawful authority. But all of Grillparzer's plays were well-known in the Alleegasse, including those that suggest a noble and far from servile acceptance of the house of Hapsburg and a sense of the special moral role of Austria, not so much as a ruler of peoples but as contributing a true and perceptive and unexaggerated morality to German culture: in a related context Engelmann speaks of reason with emotion, head and heart_Grillparzer himself speaks of Austria as the young man placed between the childhood of Italy and the maturity of Germany Inmitten Dem Kind Italien und dem Manne Deutschland Liegst du, der wangenrote Ju$3ngling, da.6 On the Rhine or in Saxony, he says, there may well be those who have read more in books but the Austrian strides far ahead when it comes to the heart of the matter: he has what most pleases God_a clear eye and a true and candid heart. He gives each matter what thought is due and lets others talk. The epigrams and notebooks are yet more critical of the German national spirit, partly because many of them come from after the triumph of barbarism (as Grillparzer regarded it) in 1848. In politics, in literature, and in thought, Germany was characterized by conceit, abstraction, and bombast. For much of this Hegel was to blame and many of Grillparzer's epigrams are aimed, sometimes sourly, sometimes 5.id. ibid., p. 88. 6.Ko$3nig Ottokars Glu$3ck und Ende, Act III. 36 Wittgenstein: A Life effectively, at him_"I'd rather believe [in] ten miracles than in one Hegel,' he said about David Fredrich Strauss: "The one merit of Hegel's system is that it is as incomprehensible as the world itself,' and so on.7 Austrian literature on the other hand was characterized by modesty, common sense, and genuine feeling. Grillparzer takes the comic poet Raimund as an example to show the Germans that the task of art is not ideas but giving life to an idea. In much of this opposition to nationalism, radicalism, progress, and so on, Grillparzer was, no doubt, reflecting an Austrian fear of forces that would divide the Hapsburg empire, but he was at the same time representing himself as one of the true heirs of Weimar classicism, now neglected in its own land. It is in a similar spirit that he appeals to Kant. Such a feeling was not peculiarly Austrian: it was shared by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Their names, with those of Raimund and Nestroy and Grillparzer himself (all authors Ludwig admired), serve to indicate a current_not the mainstream_in German culture which he felt he belonged to and which accords with his nostalgia for the period before 1848. The other typical representative of the survival of classicism in Austria_Stifter_was not a particular favourite of his, perhaps because too much of his simplicity seems contrived; he is guilty of what Engelmann8 calls "artificial banality', or Schlichtheit in a bad sense. Another Austrian writer who did impress Ludwig represented a different strain_Lenau's Faust seemed to him a Catholic Faust standing to Goethe's as Bruckner's Ninth Symphony did to Beethoven's. In both cases he admired more the men of the Enlightenment but felt sympathy with the Catholics. Lenau's Faust showed what despair was like and showed the powerlessness of man: Ludwig likened himself and his feeling of loneliness to that of this Faust. Ludwig's familiarity with these authors requires no special explan- ation. They were part of his cultural heritage, their works surrounded him in the libraries of his father's houses. His especial tastes seem to have been formed under the influence of his sister Gretl. With Rudi, the brother immediately older than himself, and his two friends the Zitkovsky brothers, enthusiastic actors, she provided the cultural ferment of the Wittgenstein household. The house performances of classical drama were of course no offence to the aunts and uncles and there Ludwig first got to know his Molie$1re, always a moral teacher for him, and Shakespeare, a unique figure in Western culture, he thought, like nature or a landscape, a creator rather than a poet perhaps because he was not a moral teacher. There naturally he heard Grillparzer again and again: Gretl's performance as the unwittingly incestuous Berta in Die Ahnfrau was particularly remembered. But as well as these respected authors the young people affected modern writers and modern thinkers; 7.Cf. David Heald's "Grillparzer and the Germans' in Oxford German Studies 6 (1971{-2). 8.Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, p. 113. 37 2Childhood and Schooldays Gretl's by no means muted championship of them though accepted sensibly and rationally by her Aunt Clara struck some other older members of the family as aggressive (a common reaction to directness in service of a cause not quite to our liking). Ludwig gave little sign at any period of interest in contemporary literature. Hofmannsthal was a distant family connexion and his idea of a return to the Baroque as a refuge from the decline of culture in his own day had some attraction. At any rate Ludwig liked to quote his saying One has to behave decently Some day, somehow, somewhere, it will pay off But on the whole he was a stranger to Young Vienna and he hardly knew the names of the writers Ficker selected for his benefaction in 1914: Musil with whom he has often been compared he probably never read: there could have been no question of that before 1906 in any case. The chief exception to this disregard for contemporary literature_an exception proving the rule_was his respect for Karl Kraus, one of the chief influences on his thought, he said in the 1930s, listing those influences in the order Boltzmann, Hertz, Russell, Kraus, Loos, Weininger, Spengler, and Sraffa. Presumably this is a chronological order of their influence, but it also seems likely that he knew Kraus from adolescence on. The little brochures (Die demolierte Literatur, Sittlichkeit und Kriminalita$3t, and so on) are to be found in their original editions on the shelves of family libraries and his sister Gretl (perhaps other family members too) had a complete set of Die Fackel, despite its fierce attacks on her father. It is obvious enough what he liked about Kraus_again, the style and the man. The satire, the exposure of shabby moral attitudes, the scorn were conveyed by a use and criticism of language which was more ethical than literary. Ludwig all his life had Kraus's habit of taking his opponent at his word and reading from a single ill-judged sentence a whole moral character. Further, the writers whom Kraus did respect and to whom he tried to lead his readers back were just those who belonged to that tendency in German literature that has been mentioned. The feuilleton- ist Ku$3rnberger, from whom the motto of the Tractatus is taken, is one example: probably an example of coincidence of taste rather than of influence, for Literarische Herzenssachen, from which that motto is taken, was also on the library shelves. Another is Lichtenberg: the early nineteenth-century edition of the Vermischte Schriften was at hand, for the Wittgensteins tended to have early and fine rather than scholarly editions. Ludwig told von Wright that Lichtenberg was "terrific',9 and 9.Von Wright had already noticed parallels between Wittgenstein and Lichtenberg_see "G.C.L. als Philosoph', Theoria 1942. Parallels between Lichtenberg and Wittgenstein's later work are noted and discussed in J.P. Stern's Lichtenberg (London, 1963), esp. pp. 158ff. 38 Wittgenstein: A Life much earlier, before the First War, he had found a second-hand edition for Russell. The theme of the errors and faults that arise from or are reflected in the misuse or misunderstanding of language is prominent here too; as is the aphoristic method of composition, which later became Ludwig's own. It was the natural method for one who distrusted systems and who believed in the inspiration of the moment_der plo$3tzliche Einfall_as if problems arose from an unhappy use of language and could be solved by finding exactly the right turn of phrase. Thus we find him longing for das erlo$3sende Wort_the keyword, the solution, but also the word of power that would release him; and in his letters to Engelmann he wrote: I know that brilliance_the riches of the spirit_is not the ultimate good, and yet I wish now I could die in a moment of brilliance.10 The ideas of Lichtenberg were certainly important to him and must be discussed, but those of Kraus exercised a more indirect influence, for he hardly recognized their existence, saying that, while raisins might be the best part of a cake a bag of raisins isn't better than a cake: "I'm thinking of Kraus and his aphorisms, but also about myself and my philosophical remarks.'11 For his own part he was to spend a great deal of time arranging and rearranging his remarks, but, true to this reflection late in life, he always read Kraus for the raisins, laughing heartily at the rather cruel jokes. "He was a man of iron and steel,' ran one panegyric: surely the wrong tense, said Kraus, he was a man of iron, and stole.12 As for modern thinkers, Rudi was studying science when he committed suicide and Gretl also pursued studies in chemistry and mathematics before turning to psychology. Besides it was then part of general culture to read philosophy and much that passed for philosophy. Rudi's copy of Emil du Bois Reymond's Die Weltra$3tsel remained on Gretl's shelves but it seems unlikely that Ludwig ever adopted anything other than a negative attitude to this attempt to solve the problems of metaphysics, or to see them as solved, by the methods of science: "The riddle does not exist,' he was to say in the Tractatus. Science did not contain the explanation, it did not even touch our problems; and in the rejection of its role as an explanatory agent he came nearer to Mach, a cult figure of the time of his youth and undoubtedly known to him. But much lies behind his remark to Russell that Mach's style made him sick, for here again the style reflects the thought and shares its weaknesses. 10.Engelmann: Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein with a Memoir, p. 55. Originally Wittgenstein wrote "in a brilliant conversation' ("Gespra$3ch'). Much more could be said, he thought, than written_the theme comes again and again in his letters. The letter is from August 1925; the cry for the word of power comes in Notebooks 1914{-16 in the entry for 20 January 1915. 11.L. Wittgenstein: Culture and Value, p. 66. 12.Actually Kraus made only typographical alterations: "Er war ein Mann von Eisen und Stahl'_"Er war ein Man von Eisen, und stahl'. 39 2Childhood and Schooldays The cumulation of instances, the lack of a central theme and of organization in Mach's writings correspond to the idea that all phenomena are equal, that science is an economical form of thinking forced on us in an evolutionary manner by the sheer repetitiveness of phenomena, that the self even is merely one prominent conjugation of impressions. Mach wrote without distinction, without epigrams and without striking images, because he did not think he was a philosopher: all unconscious of his own role he was embalming the science of his own day_an impressive achievement and justly influential but not always the best guide to its past history or the best help to an original thinker. Ludwig learnt much more from Hertz and Boltzmann: here he found the idea that science was a picture or model created by the mind, often with the utmost daring and freedom. He was to use Boltzmann's idea that different fundamental hypotheses_Ludwig called them networks_ might equally fit the world, and he was to use the ideas of both scientists in developing his more general account of language as well as of science. "The whole task of philosophy', he was fond of quoting from Hertz, "is to give such a form to our expression that certain disquietudes (or problems) vanish.'13 Boltzmann he certainly knew before leaving school, for there was talk (probably rather inaccurate) of an intention to study under him, frustrated only by Boltzmann's suicide in 1906. Boltzmann's Popula$3re Schriften were published in 1905 (many of course were available earlier separately) and the collection was dedicated to the shade of Schiller: it was he, closely followed by Beethoven, who had formed the man that Boltzmann supposed himself to be. The fusion of music, literature, and philosophy corresponds exactly to Ludwig's own habits of thought. That he came to know Hertz before undergraduate days is a conjecture based on his mentioning Hertz first among those that influenced him and also on the fact that Hertz and Maxwell were the sort of authors read in the Alleegasse. These scientists apart, his earliest philosophical reading seems to have been in Schopenhauer: von Wright reports him as saying that his first philosophy was an epistemological idealism, in Schopenhauer's manner, until he was converted by the works of Frege. Certainly he later knew Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung and was fond of quoting from the Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, indeed it was from there that he used to quote the epigram by Goethe which forms the motto of this book. Miss Anscombe has even suggested that he read and drew on Die vierfache Wurzel. Ludwig was far from possessing the scholar's virtue, or defect, of wanting to read everything in the obscurer and more original form, but he might have gone to this work if it had contained something of its own and if he had been particularly impressed by the work of Schopenhauer, but neither condition seems to have been fulfilled. As to the first, the 13.Quoted in Philosophical Grammar {S89 p. 421. 40 Wittgenstein: A Life reader who has a taste for German polemic must judge for himself: for the second, Ludwig later usually expressed reservations about Schopen- hauer_"Schopenhauer is so clear you can see to the bottom,' he told his friend Drury, "but Berkeley is really deep' (the contrast-figure chosen is surprising but characteristic): and in a similar vein he wrote, "Where real depth begins, his comes to an end.'14 The precise turn he gave to Schopenhauerian ways of thinking in his own writing must be traced later, but the attractions of Schopenhauer for any adolescent and particularly for Ludwig are clear. Elegantly written, for all its occasional shrillness, sprinkled with the quotations he was fond of, full of contempt for the professorial philosophy of philosophy professors, from which it differed so widely, original and personal in every line, it was the powerful expression of a proud and lonely spirit, fascinated on the one side by the clarity of its vision of the world, the plasticity of the world as an object of its knowledge, but horrified on the other side by the dark and mindless forces operative in that world and in itself. This loneliness, this fascination, and these obsessions were Ludwig's too; speaking often in correspondence of his evil spirits or bo$3se Geister, he also thought with Schopenhauer that art, and particularly music, could incorporate these forces in such a way as to give him better understanding of them; and that, for the rest of life, some form of renunciation or denial of the will was the only way he could obtain release from them. A similar set of problems, a similar agreement in attitude, attracted him to Weininger, whose Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character) first appeared in 1903. It is tempting to look for parallels in the more restrained U$3ber die letzten Dinge published posthumously in 1906 where Weininger says, for example, "Every true and perennial problem is equally a true and perennial guilt; every answer is an atonement, every piece of knowledge won a conversion.' But the first and chief impact on Ludwig, and what he discussed with his friends later, was the popular book and the attitude it expressed. Here, as in the case of Schopenhauer, there are details to be discussed in a scholarly context_the theory of elements borrowed by Weininger from Mach and Avenarius and echoed by Ludwig in the Tractatus, the placing of logic and ethics on the same level; but the personal aspect was the important one. Weininger's thought about character, superficial and half-baked at times, came from a deep concern with ethical problems of his own life. This explains why Ludwig later said that his was an important book because of the questions it raised_you could even put the word "not' before all his answers, the book was still worth thinking about. Weininger saw two ethical poles in human character_the one positive and creative and concerned with reality and truth; the other negative and amoral and concerned not with objective truth or goodness but with impulse and 14.Culture and Value, p. 36. 41 2Childhood and Schooldays above all with sexuality. It is unimportant, though of course it is the most striking feature of his book, that Weininger identifies the one type or pole as the man and the other as the woman; that he conceives every human being as a mixture of man and woman, as it might be MMMW or MWWW; that he supposes the ground of this mixture to lie in the cellular constitution; and even that he anticipates, or as it was alleged plagiarizes, Freud in his reduction of the affective life to sexuality. These wild assertions, and the accompanying absurdities, are not the chief message of the book. Its merit is to have identified and expressed a moral ideal embracing truth, beauty, and goodness and all that is admirable and to have seen at the same time that there were principles in human nature, often residing precisely in what we value, that directly opposed this ideal. In his later aphorisms Weininger expressed his ideal thus: The highest expression of all morality is, Be! Let a man so act that his whole individuality resides in every moment The paradox was that there were elements in a man that opposed this very expression. True, they were elements which, on Weininger's view, also opposed the formation of a soul, they did not belong to an ego, so that ideas like those of original sin or of the devil suggested themselves as a way of describing them. None the less those elements were there, and Weininger's second merit was to express, more from an ethical than from a scientific point of view, the virtual impossibility of overcoming them, indeed the actual impossibility for man in time of overcoming them except perhaps in an heroic act by what Weininger calls a genius. Finally the significance of Weininger for Ludwig resided in his attitude towards suicide_it was the decent man's way out when he felt he was finally becoming evil: so Weininger said, and his practice differed from it only a little, since he committed suicide shortly after his book appeared because with his inheritance (as he thought) he could not meet the moral demands he made of himself. Weininger is sometimes defended on the grounds that, while his psychological theories are absurd, he presents very vividly the problems of his own life. The praise is feeble: Weininger is not just a text-book case; like every imaginative writer in so far as he suceeds he does so by expressing a ...sorrow not mine but man's All the same it is true that many upright people do not feel, and even reprobate, this sense of guilt and powerlessness, whether because they have not reached religion or because they have come to it by another 42 Wittgenstein: A Life way. In some cases, perhaps in Weininger's, its effects seem to be almost wholly bad; in others, perhaps in Ludwig's, friends and relations cudgel their brains to know why a man living an apparently decent life tortures himself with scruples and they are even exasperated that he concentrates on failings of his own instead of engaging immediately in some good work. Their nature is not therefore less divine_it is possible for the simple to see and act directly, appropriately to the nature of the case and to the best of their ability; within the human limits that apply to the others too they can attain a true moral insight and not necessarily a purely conventional or a utilitarian one without being afflicted with feelings of worthlessness and failure. But the way of a thinker_here meaning not an intellectual or scientist necessarily, but one who thinks about human life and his own life and feels the need to make sense of it_is bound to be other. It is not in itself a better way and is far from being a happier one, but it belongs to the economy of human life because it shows something also about the forces at work in the life of the simple.15 It is for this that comfortable people read Augustine and Tolstoy, who followed this way, which was the way also of Weininger and of Ludwig. Born in humble circumstances to an admiring father, physically rather unattractive, evidently near to madness, Weininger had yet two important features in common with the young Ludwig. First he was Jewish. He suffered from the consciousness of that fact. He identified the Jewish with all that was (on his theory) feminine and negative. It was a shame which nothing could wipe out and, together with the sexuality he detested in himself, it made up that radical inadequacy of character which he died to escape. The theme of the stamp put on a man's life and thought by his Jewishness often recurs in Ludwig's later notes, though, to be sure, he saw it more as an intellectual than as a moral limitation. Already in childhood he was preoccupied on a more practical level with dissociating himself for social and even moral reasons from all the different strata of Judaism in Austria. We shall see what remorse that cost him and can measure in that way how compelling the need for dissociation was. More basic even than this obsession with Jewishness, and in Ludwig's case, much more important, is the importance both he and Wein- inger attached to a man's character as something he could not escape from_h15qov a1nqrw3p& dai3mwn_so they, and Goethe, interpreted Heraclitus' dictum. This is connected with the second feature of Weininger important for an understanding of his attraction for Ludwig. Weininger too had a lonely youth, no doubt more for internal than for external reasons, and he became not so much introspective as (in an intellectual sense) self- centred or even solipsistic: that is to say, he was inclined to see the whole 15.I paraphrase here a letter of Wittgenstein's to his friend Arvid Sjo$3gren, which itself draws heavily on the work of Ku$3gelgen already mentioned. 43 2Childhood and Schooldays world as related to his point of view. He was a microcosm of it and (perhaps the most important consequence) he felt whatever was evil in the world as his own guilt. As for the especial guilt Weininger felt over his own sexuality, the more marked (on some accounts) because his homosexuality, like his Jewishness, marked him out as one of the most feminine of men, there is little sign that Ludwig shared it. Some concern with sexuality is inseparable from adolescence; and from slightly later in his life_the time of the First War_we have diaries in which he notes recurrences of "sensuality' without evident guilt, simply as facts of life, distractions it is no use resenting. It seems that for him the dangers of an erotic relationship did not lie in its mere existence but as for most human beings in the risk that it might be conducted without straightforwardness or courage or with meanness and jealousy towards the other or towards some third person. In discussing the literature and thought with which Ludwig was familiar in his first eighteen years we have been led to use religious terms. It is clear that in some sense the problems these authors dealt with were religious ones and we shall have continually throughout this book to try to define that sense. We know that Ludwig received formal religious instruction_a priest later to be a bishop and so presumably fairly highly regarded in Viennese society was brought in to give it. But (as he told his friend Arvid Sjo$3gren) he lost his childish faith after conversations with his sister Gretl. She was at that time rather an enfant terrible in intellectual matters and her especial tendency was to reject tradition and externals and whatever smacked of humbug. Much later, demurring at von Wright's remark that Ludwig certainly did not have a Christian faith,16 she mentioned the influence of the "strong, severe, partly ascetic Christianity of my grandfather and his many children' and she said of Ludwig, "He was a Christian in my reckoning.' Late in life, under the influence of a powerful spiritual director, she and her sisters came much closer to their church; but there was little church-going from the Alleegasse and (as she implies) the strongest religious influence was that of their grandfather and uncles and aunts, who were not, even formally, Catholics. Ludwig held aloof from formal religion all his life_it was difficult, he said, for him to bend the knee. That he prayed during the First War and that his reading then was intensely Christian, we shall in due course see, but this was noted as a striking change by Russell, who had the impression before the war that Ludwig was hostile to religion. Russell was surely right in detecting a change, but as far back as we have indications of Ludwig's inner life, his thoughts ran on sin and guilt and good and evil spirits: much of the machinery of religion and eschatology seemed to be for him the natural expression of moral realities. 16.In Norman Malcolm: Ludwig Wittgenstein, p. 20. 44 Wittgenstein: A Life Such, then, so far as we know, was the intellectual nursery training that Ludwig received, the music, the books, and the thinkers that he came to know and respect and that, in most cases, continued to support him throughout life. Even in this part of his childhood and youth_ though it was the part about which he expressed himself most positively_we have been forced to observe a sombre colouring. He himself said little about the formal instruction that he received. His sister tells of the grumpy and incompetent nursemaid; and his brother Paul follows this up by an account of the willing but not always competent tutors and governesses who had great difficulty in persuading the high-spirited boys (here Paul was clearly speaking chiefly of his own case) to apply themselves. At last one more honest than the rest frankly told the father that the boys were learning nothing. Appalled at so natural a consequence of a lack of parental supervision, Karl now intervened not without heat, first testing the boys and confirming their ignorance, and then altering his plan for their education and sending them to normal schools. As for the change of plan, it is to be remembered that Karl was now considerably older than when he had last had a son to educate (these were the youngest boys and separated by some years from any older brother). Moreover, at just this time_it was 1903_the news of Hans's suicide had come (that of Rudi was to follow later), bringing home the defects of the former system of education. That the boys had learnt nothing was no doubt an exaggeration on Paul's part but Ludwig in fact did not show any particular ability in school subjects until later in life. We have already noted the phenom- enon of late development in his family. The particular form it took in his case_as in his father's_was that he proved able to learn very rapidly what he required for some immediate purpose in any subject. Examples are how quickly he mastered the problems (then a great novelty) of the foundations of mathematics, and, on a humbler plane, the ease with which he could read Latin when the Vulgate and St. Augustine's Confessions became important for his spiritual life. He was never one for learning a multiplicity of things because it was expected of him or in order to vie with his contemporaries or out of a general and undiscrimin- ating appetite for knowledge or information. It may be that he came to formal schooling, which favours such motives, too late; but it seems more likely that he was one child at any rate to whom his father's methods were intellectually suited. There was something very practical about his habits of mind. He did not, like many academics, lay in large stores of miscellaneous information which might some day turn out useful. His mind was not a compost heap in which disregarded scraps, lovingly preserved, eventually became a principle of fertility. Nor was it even a particularly efficient machine for collecting, sorting, storing, and retriev- ing whatever information it received. Obviously he did possess all 45 2Childhood and Schooldays necessary abilities of this kind, and he did become a man of wide general culture; but the peculiar excellence of his mind was his capacity for concentration. Once involved with a problem or question he could very rapidly master all necessary techniques. On the other hand he needed involvement with a problem if he was to make any progress. It was, agreeably with his father's wishes, an engineer's habit of mind, fitted to the analysis of a problem in fundamental and concrete terms and the envisaging and exploration of every possible combination that might solve it. It was a paradox, but perhaps the source of his fruitfulness, that with this disposition he became involved with problems generally considered, as he himself said, the most abstract that there are. He had also in a more literal sense the abilities of future engineer and his sister Hermine noticed the contrast with his brother Paul's interest in nature_in flowers, animals, and landscape. At the age of ten his technical interests were so far advanced that he made a model with wood and wire of the house sewing-machine, a model that actually sewed a few stitches. He retained throughout life an interest in the logic of machines and in his last years used to go to the Science Museum in South Kensington to look at the steam engines. He liked to think with the machine_to understand every detail of its functioning_and this accounts both for his interest in the older and more perspicuous types of mechanism (motor cars never fascinated him) and for his success in repairing mechanisms that had gone wrong. Always it was achieved by the most careful observation of the machine from every side and deep and concentrated reflection until he had internalized the principle of the machine. It was thus that he had observed the distrustful sempstress in the Alleegasse and it was thus that he would examine the searchlight or boiler or whatever it was, sometimes rather to the irritation of onlookers, only intervening (like a well-trained doctor examining a patient) when the course to be followed was absolutely clear to him. His notebooks and the scraps of paper that he left often contain schematic drawings of machines. One, that comes in his philosophical writings, is particularly interesting because it recalls his youth: it is a sketch of an apparently especially efficient machine whose principle occurred to his father but which will in fact not move at all.17 It is an early example of a favourite theme for Ludwig: the mind's liability to be misled by a superficial resemblance between the picture that it draws of a situation and other pictures it is familiar with. The essential thing is to have and to understand aright a picture that corresponds to all the real complexity of the situation. Ludwig seems to have been alone in the family in sharing such interests with his father. Such, then, was the cultural and intellectual atmosphere in which Ludwig lived until the age of 14, such the education he received, and 17.The example is used in PhGr 194. 46 Wittgenstein: A Life such the interests he displayed. It was, as our whole account of the house of Wittgenstein will have shown, very much a life inside an extended family. Visits to aunts and uncles apart, the year would be spent chiefly in the frowning Palais on the Alleegasse, with stays of a month or so in spring and autumn in Neuwaldegg, where Karl owned a couple of houses with large gardens stretching up into the hills behind them and forming a private Wienerwald. In the summer, the family would go to the Hochreith_Karl bought the estate when Ludwig was five and throughout Ludwig's childhood was busy rounding off his purchase, constructing a road and houses and arranging for planting and clearing. It was a place where no one save the family and its intimates could penetrate. Even the small town of St. Aegyd nearby was part of the Wittgenstein world_Karl had owned the factory there and there he also built, like a confident landowner, a church of his own confession and in the now rather pompous-looking Sezession style that he preferred. A rich and varied, but none the less an enclosed, environment, it reinforced in more than one way Ludwig's feelings of isolation. First it confined him to a small circle in which, as we have seen, the parents for all their good will could not, by reason of character and preoccupations, supply a vital sustaining warmth. There was affection from the brothers and sisters, to be sure; a slightly off-hand masculine kind from Paul, an enthusiastic and demonstrative kind from the sisters for their dear, their good Luki. It was clear that they wished him everything good, even, as Gretl once said, the good things he could not wish for himself, but they were sisters, with the normal tensions of a family relationship heightened by the open concern evident in that family for each other's spiritual as well as physical well-being; they were, moreover, (by the standards of childhood and youth) much older sisters. Ludwig needed, and always felt the need of, a friend. Here another influence from his home environment came into play_the moral, cultural, and even social fastidiousness which made most human relationships irksome for him, the more so, no doubt, because he was not at first exposed to a great variety of them. During the First War he was fond of quoting Schopenhauer's parable of the porcupines who crowded together for warmth on a winter's day and then drew apart to avoid one another's spines and so moved to and fro until they found a moderate distance that they could support. So it is with men too: The middling distance that they eventually find, which makes life together possible, is politeness and good manners. True it gives an incomplete satisfaction to the need for mutual warmth, but to make up for that no one gets pricked by the spines. But a man who has a great deal of inner warmth (a man of great qualities) will 47 2Childhood and Schooldays prefer neither to cause nor to receive annoyance and will avoid the society of others:18 if such men there be, Ludwig was certainly not one of them. He possessed in a high degree_too high for what most people would count as happiness_both the need for affection and for warmth and a sensitivity to the frictions and differences inseparable from any relationship. It is not necessary to think of these qualities_or these degrees of these qualities_as morbid. No doctrine of the mean can be applied to them simply. Both seem to belong to human good, even though a high degree of both makes many things difficult in life. Together with the intensity and concentration that he brought to any task, they made it certain that he would always be regarded as a Sonderling, an eccentric, someone out of the normal run. In later life Ludwig rarely recurred voluntarily to his childhood. He used to say that it was an unhappy time and that he was lonely, but there was no element of blame for others in what he said, least of all for his parents. Just as he was proud, we have seen, of his intellectual nursery training, so he was glad to have been brought up to have "standards'_ standards which applied to intellectual work, to publication, to all cultural and moral matters from the greatest to the smallest. He accepted and affirmed just the things (it might be thought) which made his a difficult life. We have mentioned that he looked back on his past with the eye of an Augustine, detecting faults and motives he may hardly have been conscious of at the time and subjecting them to as ruthless an analysis as he would (occasionally) apply to analyse the gestures or the turns of phrase of a friend. One such survey is preserved for us schematically in notes that he left among his papers. It is not clear whether he was preparing a confession for his family and friends or an account of his life for a psychiatrist (for he once had to be examined). In either case his purpose would have been the same: I do not want to be satirical at my own expense (he writes), rather I am trying to be just. The draft begins with continuous passages and then turns to notes. The few at the end that deal with his time in Linz will be given later. As far back as my memory goes I was an affectionate child but at the same time of weak character. Very early in life I recognized the greater strength of character of my brother Paul. When he had been slightly sick and was recovering and was asked whether he would like to get up now or would prefer to stay longer in bed, he would calmly say that he would rather stay lying down; 18.Parerga und Paralipomena vol. 6 (Frauensta$3dt), p. 690 (cf. vol. 5, p. 452). 48 Wittgenstein: A Life whereas I in the same circumstances said what was untrue (that I wanted to get up) because I was afraid of the bad opinion of those around me. When I was about 8 or 9 I had an experience which if not decisive for my future way of life was at any rate characteristic of my nature at that time. How it happened, I do not know: I only see myself standing in a doorway in our house and thinking "Why should one tell the truth if it's to one's advantage to tell a lie?' I could see nothing against it. It is not as if I then set to work with the wickedness of a devil, unless one calls lies in themselves something devilish. I was not wicked and my lies had the aim of making me appear agreeable in the eyes of others. They were simply lies out of cowardice. I do not want to be satirical at my own expense, rather I am trying to be just. From my 10th or 11th year I remember the following incident: box on the ear looking for a gymnasiumAryan origin Gymnasiumlove for Erich fight relation to Paul to Gretl to Rudi good memories WolfrumI attempt to win him over and to entice him away from my brother being in lovePaul a mischief-maker innocent expression lewdness Latin exercises for Papathoughts of suicide19 It was entirely characteristic of Wittgenstein, at any rate when these notes were made in the twenties or thirties, to be fiercely concerned about any departure from the truth even for the sake of giving pleasure to others. It was the sort of problem that exercised his sister Gretl too. Brought up (it was perhaps more the style of the nineteenth century than of the present one) to consider always in a conversation what would gratify the other person and what way of saying it was most appropriate to him, they had to reconcile this aristocratic courtesy with a severer, perhaps a Protestant, tradition of saying the exact truth. She often spoke or wrote of how it might be done_a person, say a child, must never be rebuked unless he could be made to feel that you would far rather be praising him; a criticism should never be conveyed in a letter but only face to face, so that it could be adjusted to the reaction it provoked and the good will underlying it could be allowed to appear. Ludwig did not always follow these precepts and his rebukes in later life often seemed too fierce. All the more striking that he saw himself in childhood as having 19.The paper (in the possession of Wittgenstein's literary heirs) is fairly heavily corrected, like many of Wittgenstein's drafts, despite the absence of punctuation and some small slips. 49 2Childhood and Schooldays the opposite fault of wanting too much to please. The need he later (and not long later) felt to tell the unpleasant truth was a conscious reaction against an earlier tendency to complaisance. Probably he was right both in suspecting this tendency in himself and in supposing (as he hints in these notes) that most aspects of it had been left behind after his childhood. He did give in first youth the impressive of a sensitive person, anxious to please: the real force of his character (which came as a surprise to many) only appeared_perhaps it only developed_later. He managed in some way and at great cost to himself to put his life in order, and the effort this cost him bore heavily also on those that became at all intimate with him. The general picture these notes give of a discontent with his attempts to conceal his failure to do all that he realized was expected of him, discontent with the innocent face that covered unconfessed weakness, cannot now be filled out with much detail. The episode of the search for a gymnasium is one he related to his friend Arvid Sjo$3gren: then, as later, such clubs were extremely nationalistic and Aryan origin was usually required. It was so at any rate with the one Paul and Ludwig would have liked to join. Ludwig thought they could simply pretend to it: Paul, older and more realistic, saw that they would never get away with it. They found another. Wolfrum was the name of one of his father's close colleagues. The Latin exercises evidently date from the end of his period of private education and fit in with Paul's account of their father's discovery of the inadequacy of it. Ludwig remained unusually sensitive to duties of this kind: he reproached himself bitterly in the war, using his usual phrase Ich bin ein Schweinehund, when he had neglected to learn the organization of a K.u.k. infantry division or some similar piece of military pedantry. Most of the incidents referred to are, we can guess, of a type fairly usual in adolescence, especially when allowance is made for the greater sexual segregation of those days. Even thoughts of suicide were common enough at 14 in 1903_the year of Otto Weininger's suicide. It is customary to draw attention to the prevalence of suicide among prominent Austrians at this time and to relate it to the loss of identity of their society, the wide divergence between the forms by which it lived and the real forces at work in it.20 It is obvious that Ludwig and his brothers were affected by belonging to a society which recognized suicide as an acceptable way out, but beyond that their suicides or thoughts of suicide seem to have been only rather obliquely the expression of the moral constitution of their society. We have seen that their family formed a sort of enclave, fortified against the corruption and inadequacy that surrounded it by severe and private moral standards, which, it seemed, some of them had not the temperament to match or meet. Ludwig's case, 20.So for example Janik and Toulmin: Wittgenstein's Vienna (London, 1973), pp. 64{-5. 50 Wittgenstein: A Life about which we know most, if still little, seems to have been that of a phenomenally strong assent and attachment to these standards, often at war not only with the normal human failings that became glaring in their light, but also with a particularly soft and affectionate nature. Even if the thoughts of suicide are juxtaposed with exercises done (evidently inadequately) for his father, Ludwig was not one to see his problem as that of being unable to do what his father required. It was a struggle inside himself which led him constantly, for years after 1903, to doubt whether he could ever do anything worth while, and hence to the thought sometimes of suicide, sometimes of impending (because wished- for) death. In 1912 he told David Pinsent_ that for nine years, till last Christmas, he suffered from terrific loneliness (mental_not physical): that he continually thought of suicide then, and felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself: he put it that he had had "a hint that he was de trop in this world', but that he had meanly disregarded it...21 These thoughts recurred even after 1912 and we shall see that he was at least once on the point of suicide (though there was much that held him back, and not fear only). In 1903, then, it was decided to send Paul and Ludwig to state schools. Paul went to a gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt, Ludwig to a Realschule in Linz. This is perhaps a sign that he seemed more fitted than Paul for the scientific or technical education that such a school would prepare him for. Also he was thought to be below the severer standards of a Gymnasium, which gave a classical education. The choice of Linz too was partly dictated by the thought that he would more easily pass the entrance examination to the appropriate form in that town than in Vienna. But it must also have been thought desirable both to separate the boys and to take them out of the atmosphere of the family home in which they had not achieved either much learning or much happiness. Ludwig welcomed the change in prospect at first: he later told Arvid Sjo$3gren that he had wanted to go to Linz: it was as far west from Vienna as he had any prospect of getting. It was a school for dayboys and he lived with one of the masters at the local Gymnasium, a Dr Strigl. It is typical of the style of generosity of his family that the Strigl family thereby became prote$0ge$0s, receiving tactful presents and help on important occasions, as when the daughter studied in Vienna and needed to have a couple of operations. Luki (as he was known to them too) was fortunate in this choice of lodgings, where he was held in great affection. Diffidence and the desire to please were in him allied to an originality which made them long remember his 21.Extracts from Pinsent's diary that deal with Wittgenstein have been copied and deposited in Trinity College Library. This one is dated 1 June 1912. 51 2Childhood and Schooldays opinions and sayings. Even his formality had its charm. With the son of the family, Pepi_Herr Pepi as Ludwig at first called him_he had a particularly close though characteristically stormy relationship. The K.u.k. Realschule in Linz has its small place in history, since Adolf Hitler attended it from 1900 to 1904. Hitler was a few days older than Ludwig, but during the year in which they overlapped he was in the IIIrd class while Ludwig was in the Vth. It seems that he was a year behind and Ludwig a year ahead of the average. The school counted as a stronghold of German nationalism and Hitler in Mein Kampf mentions one history master who traced all that was glorious back to the Teutonic tribes. There were a handful of Jews, rather isolated, but, by the rough standards of schoolboys, not persecuted. One former pupil explained that if a Jew were called Saujud! in a quarrel, this would only be in the formulaic manner in which a Bavarian would refer to a Saupreuss. Hitler's contempt for his contemporaries was more general. "All future civil servants,' he is reported as saying, "and with this lot I had to sit in the same class.' There is a slight inaccuracy here, for they would most be destined for technical or commercial occupations, but the inaccuracy may be Hitler's. Hitler, who was rather lazy in his schoolwork, and even in art relied on his facility, got little from his time in Linz, except for some contact with the musical life of the town, which was of rather a high level_though to be sure this would be so in comparison with Passau, not with Vienna. Ludwig's first reaction to the boys in his class was more violent than Hitler's: Mist! (perhaps: "What a shower!') he thought. One of his contemporaries later told his sister that he seemed to come from quite another world. His way of life was entirely different, he addressed them as Sie (surely a deliberate distancing of himself from them) and all his reading and interests were quite different from theirs. It was painful for him (then as later in life) to sit in a class, and, in the event, though he completed his three years successfully, his performance in school subjects was far from distinguished. Paul thought that his main interest was in physics and that this was the only subject in which he obtained Vorzu$3glich_the highest mark. This may correspond to his interests, but in fact on the five-point scale then used,22 he obtained in his Matura certificate a 1 only for Religious Knowledge; a 2 for Conduct and English; a 3 for French, for Geography and History, for Mathematics, for Natural History, and for Physics, and a 4 for German, Chemistry, Descriptive Geometry, and Free-hand Drawing. Religious Knowledge, taught and examined by priests rather than professional teachers, was often rather generously marked: Ludwig later in life often speculated about the meaning of, as it were the moral truth behind, this or that element of 22.Vorzu$3glich, lobenswert, befriedigend, genu$3gend, nicht-genu$3gend. Say: excellent, good, fair, satisfactory, unsatisfactory. 52 Wittgenstein: A Life traditional Christianity; perhaps he did so all the more effectively for a lack of that automatic consciousness of qualifications and definitions which is the chief by-product of a thorough training in Christian doctrine by the methods that have usually prevailed. The other marks on his Matura certificate, mediocre in themselves, are ludicrous in com- parison with his later knowledge in these various fields. A lack of early training in scientific subjects is not a sufficient explanation for a result obtained after three years at school. It was more that his background and his temperament alike made the cumulative methods of a school distasteful to him. Depth, and not mere rapidity, was what he instinctively sought. However strong these temperamental reasons may have been, he himself saw them as failings; and in 1931 he remarked: My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study). This special difficulty with spelling presumably explains why, in German, he was actually given the failing mark of nicht-genu$3gend in the written examination, redeeming himself only by obtaining lobenswert in the viva voce. It always cost him some effort to spell correctly and there are a fair number of mis-spellings, sometimes quite expressive ones, in his rougher drafts. His written English naturally varied with the length of time he had been in or away from England; but at all times the spelling was shakier than the idiom. This shadow of a defect, possibly hereditary, can be associated with the slight stammer that Engelmann observed. The stammer had disappeared by the twenties, when he spoke with the clear high voice not uncommon among those who have overcome an impediment. Ludwig's remaining notes on his inner life, fragmentary as they are, show a concentration of his affection on one friend and the first attempts to make a general confession. Realschule class first impression. "A shower.' Relation to the Jews. Relation to Pepi. Love and pride. Knocking hat off. Break with P. Suffering in class. Halfway reconciliation and further break with P. Seeming innocence I learn the facts of life. Religiosity, G's influence on me, talk about confession with my colleagues. Reconciliations with P. and tenderness Inventions Halfway confessions to Mining but ones in which I manage to appear to be an excellent human being. Berlin. Ludwig was of course registered at the school as a Roman Catholic; his origins will have been little known in Linz. It is probable that he felt he 53 2Childhood and Schooldays had denied or minimized his Jewish blood_for this was a common theme of his confessions. We shall see that at the time of the First War and in the years just after it he felt himself to be thoroughly Austrian and indeed in the cultural sense German. Pepi was the forerunner of a series of attempts to find a friend: David Pinsent, Arvid Sjo$3gren, and Francis Skinner are the best-known examples. Sometimes the friend was the same age, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, younger. Sometimes there was a great intensity or erotic charge on Ludwig's side (often unperceived and usually not shared by the other). At least once the other was a girl. But in all there tended to be angry outbursts arising from Ludwig's pride and from his too accurate perception of the other's occasional failure to place the highest value on his friendship or to give first consideration to what his feelings might be. These difficulties were additional to the concern for the other's well-being and decent behaviour which made even his less emotional friendships an exacting privilege. Whether they led to breaks depended on the calm, as well as the depth of affection, of the other. Ludwig needed, and sometimes found, a friend more simple-hearted than himself. We shall probably never know how it went with Pepi, who fell in August 1914. Ludwig himself counted Pinsent as his first friend. The influence of Gretl and the abandonment of childish faith, we have already seen. From these notes alone it is clear that a darker religion took its place: a consciousness of sin without a ground for hope of redemption. It became an important aim to set his own house in order (mit mir selbst ins reine kommen), to recognize in the first place, in order to detest, the weaknesses and dark places of his own nature. This was one purpose of his confessions: he said something of the kind later about a nephew's psycho-analysis_that the good it would do him would be the disgust with himself that he would feel when he had to tell all those things to the analyst. Another purpose was to get rid of one bad element at any rate, namely the pretence that the others were not there. Here, however, there were various temptations, among them that of making the fault appear something to be proud of_a vitium splendidum. To this temptation he felt he had yielded in his early confessions to his sister Mining. It was in this spiritual condition, carrying the seeds of much future distress, that he left Austria for Berlin.