“My own interest in Wittgenstein” writes W.W. Bartley, “was awakened when I discovered that this man had actually gone about practicing what he preached.”
That interest had Bartley wandering between remote Austrian villages, climbing over mountain-sized hills, door knocking between schools, houses, and farms, all on the off-hand tips of old ladies; even visiting the then-underground homosexual bar scenes of London and Vienna, looking for anyone who might have known Ludwig Wittgenstein during his poorly understood – post-First World War – “dark decade.”
On a staunch and prescient hunch, what he didn’t do was consult the archives. Feeling strongly that much of what had – until then – been said and reported about Wittgenstein, was riddled with false stories and corruptly attributed philosophy, Bartley indeed found a new man behind the folklore. Someone who never abandoned philosophy (as the tale goes), but who took so seriously his own claims about needing to show certain things rather than just saying them, that he set-out into the world to do just that (as well as formulating his later philosophy).
Wittgenstein’s larger than life back story is allowed to settle into the reader’s imagination without much fanfare, as is the extraordinary writing process behind the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in the mud, the blood, and the trenches, of The Great War. Instead, Bartley kicks things off with its 1919 publication and a man crowned upon his arrival as “the finest philosophic talent of his generation”.
Or as Bertrand Russell put it: “the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.”
Carrying around the twin shadows of suicide and guilt (about his sexuality and promiscuity), Wittgenstein lived on the “edge of madness” and battered his few friends with gloomy, depressive, and unmistakably self-indulgent letters; casually letting them know that he had “been feeling morally dead for more than a year…”
But in there too, are Nietzschian clues – little moments of mopey insight that explain the grandiosity of his intellectual project (a philosophy to end all philosophy): “I ought to have done something positive with my life, to have become a star in the sky.” Something so impossibly prodigious that it might exonerate all the things he hated about himself.
In a violation of Popperian methodology, the Tractatus begins without an obvious problem to solve. Whether it is to answer the Kantian hangover about how language is even possible, or the Vienna Circle-inspired demarcation between meaningful and meaningless, or the harder demarcation line between science and non-science, what is clear is that Bartley is full of both hot-flushed admiration and head-slapping scorn.
This scorn comes thickest in those moments when Wittgenstein drops an unexplained, unexampled, absent of criteria, statement onto the page and then walks nonchalantly away as if the job is done. Lacking obvious detail and rigor, and yet sounding profound enough to be quickly quotable (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”), Bartley is unimpressed and asks aloud what so many others dare not: how should we distinguish between silence that is “deep” and silence which “stems from having little or nothing to say”?
He was not the first to have such doubts about the Tractatus, but in being so clear, so direct, and so unprotected by his questions, Bartley turns the atmosphere away from a straightforward academic dispute, and towards the emperor having no clothes. Half taking aim at Wittgenstein, and half at those fawning crowds around him, nodding in desperate approval lest they be accused of being non-geniuses for failing to understand the genius.
Having shown Wittgenstein to be naked (at least in part), Bartley does help to explain the social upheaval that made such mistakes understandable. In the white swell of revolutionary change, the German language at the turn of the century was unmoored and in sudden crisis; “on the verge of collapse”. In the heart of this turmoil, Wittgenstein found his audience – and perhaps his problem to solve – through the presumably solid foundations of Russell’s logical atomism and in the logical theories of Gottlob Frege; someone who could save the German language from an early death.
Then moving from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations, Bartley offers his own – and only – piece of nonsensically dense language: “My view… is this. It is more accurate to, if also a bit misleading, to argue that the movement from early Wittgenstein to the work of the later Wittgenstein is a movement from a pre-critical, pre-Kantian position to a post-Kantian, Hegelian-style position without the benefit of Kant.”
Either way, it was a movement facilitated by six years spent teaching elementary school in the Austrian country-side – a journey into hardship, isolation, and simplicity, about which we “both know too little and too much.” Schoolmaster Wittgenstein lived largely rejected and quarantined by the same villagers he wanted to uplift through his social work. Yet he was clearly loved, adored, and remembered fondly, by the children he taught, challenged, and occasionally beat unconscious.
The Austrian school-reform program was a hard – and long overdue – turn away from the Kaiser-introduced (1805) education system. Gone was the emphasis on rote learning, on memorisation, on repetition, and on the philosophical idea that the human mind was neutral, passive and crude. In its place was a new kind of establishment – the “Working School” – where students would actively participate in the lessons. The hope being, that they would then develop into “independent and original” thinkers: “citizens of a democracy” rather than “passively accepting state decrees and church authority.”
Though far from enthusiastic about these reforms, Wittgenstein saw them as a chance to live by his own commandments (some things just needed to be shown, rather than said). It was also an opportunity to test his philosophy (observing how children learn and how they don’t), as well as to satisfy the romantic ideal that he had attached to the Austrian wilderness and its inhabitants.
He left “bitterly disappointed”, hated by the adults around him as being “dangerous” and “threatening to their way of life”, but with a new philosophy under his arm. The Tractatus – the philosophy to end all philosophy – was wrong!
He returned to Cambridge to all the expectant fuss and pomp that his name carried, but also to a colder philosophical world, much less impressed by his new work than by his old. The most scathing of whom was his friend Russell, who wrote that what he now saw from Wittgenstein was an “abnegation of his best talent”, a “treachery to his own greatness.”
Whereas previously, all of thought was pictorial, now there was a new savannah of language games and imageless thinking to deal with. Something that seems to Bartley as a near-complete plagiarism of the work of Karl Buhler, whom Wittgenstein had almost certainly encountered and read.
But perhaps the most significant defect with the Philosophical Investigations, was that it lacked the reach and boldness, as well as the systematic structure, of the Tractatus; a book that just wasn’t going to trick anyone into thoughts of “greatness”.
Nonetheless, it did correct some previous errors… just not the most important one: “Wittgenstein’s conviction that the solution of the Tractatus was ‘definitive and unassailable’”. And this is where Bartley finally stamps his foot, picking further into the loosening scab of Wittgenstein’s aura until, finally, there’s blood: his criteria are still not properly set, his language games are lacking insight and are never defined, his rules of grammar aren’t rules at all, his descriptions never actually describe anything, and his side-talk about religious belief is embarrassing and unreasoned.
Wittgenstein the man, certainly understood a thing or two about courage, about honesty, about conviction, and about the psychological presentation of brilliance. However, after Bartley, his whole philosophy can now be regarded as little more than “one grand category-mistake.”