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Michael A. Peters, Wittgenstein and the ethics of suicide: Homosexuality and Jewish self-hatred in fin de siècle Vienna, 51 Edu Phil & Theory 981 (2019)

If suicide is allowed, then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed, then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it is like investigating mercury vapours in order to investigate the nature of vapours. —Wittgenstein, L. Notebooks 1914–1916, Tr. G.E.M. Anscombe. Harper: New York, 1961, p. 91

Introduction

One of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s cousins and three of his four brothers committed suicide. Hans committed suicide most likely throwing himself from a boat in Chesapeake Bay in May 1902, having run away from home. Rudi committed suicide in a Berlin bar, administering himself cyanide poisoning in 1904, most probably because of homosexuality that he referred to as ‘perverted disposition’ in a suicide note. Kurt shot himself in 1918 at the end of the war when his troops deserted en masse.

The profound influences upon young Ludwig were the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann who committed suicide in 1906 and Otto Weininger, author of Sex and Character, who committed suicide in 1903. For the most part, these suicides were committed before Ludwig had turned 15. Young Ludwig was also profoundly influenced by Schopenhauer who he read while still at school. Schopenhauer denied that suicide was immoral and instead saw it as the last supreme act of freedom and assertion of the will in ending one’s life. In ‘On Suicide’ in Studies in Pessimism, Schopenhauer writes that none of the Jewish religions ‘look upon suicide as a crime’. Yet, these religious thinkers:

tell us that suicide is the greatest piece of cowardice; that only a madman could be guilty of it; and other insipidities of the same kind; or else they make the nonsensical remark that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every mail has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person.1 https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/pessimism/chapter3.html

Schopenhauer remarks ‘the inmost kernel of Christianity is the truth that suffering – the Cross – is the real end and object of life. Hence Christianity condemns suicide as thwarting this end ... ’ As Jacquette (2000) notes, despite his profound pessimism Schopenhauer rejects suicide ‘as an unworthy affirmation of the will to life by those who seek to escape rather than seek nondiscursive knowledge of Will in suffering’ (p. 43). Young Ludwig while of Jewish origins was baptised a Catholic. It is well known that Wittgenstein loses his faith while still at school.

Wittgenstein entertained thoughts of suicide from his early teenage years throughout his life. This suicidal ideation came to the fore even more intensely, if we are to judge from his letters to Paul Englemann, during the years he spent as an elementary school teacher in the mountain villages of Austria. In the period 1919 when he trained as a teacher until 1926 when he abruptly resigned after hitting a boy who fell unconscious as a result, Wittgenstein suffered intense bouts of depression (Peters, 2017).

This essay is devoted to the question: in view of his suffering and the Jewish cult of suicide in fin de siecle Vienna why did Wittgenstein not take his own life? I investigate this question focusing on Wittgenstein’s sources of suffering around what I call his ‘double identity crisis’ caused by his homosexuality and his Jewish self-hatred.

Identity crisis; suicide in Vienna

Under the heading ‘Suicide Squad’ Jim Holt (2009) reviewing Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War begins rather sensationally with the following:

“A tense and peculiar family, the Oedipuses,” a wag once observed. Well, when it comes to dysfunction, the Wittgensteins of Vienna could give the Oedipuses a run for their money. The tyrannical family patriarch was Karl Wittgenstein (1847-1913), a steel, banking and arms magnate. He and his timorous wife, Leopoldine, brought nine children into the world. Of the five boys, three certainly or probably committed suicide and two were plagued by suicidal impulses throughout their lives. Of the three daughters who survived into adulthood, two got married; both husbands ended up insane and one died by his own hand. Even by the morbid standards of late Hapsburg Vienna these are impressive numbers. But tense and peculiar as the Wittgensteins were, the family also had a strain of genius. Of the two sons who didn’t kill themselves, one, Paul (1887-1961), managed to become an internationally celebrated concert pianist despite the loss of his right arm in World War I. The other, Ludwig (1889-1951), was the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/books/review/Holt-t.html

At the end of World War I, troops under the command of Wittgenstein’s second oldest brother, Kurt, rebelled against his orders, and Kurt became the third brother to commit suicide. This is how Waugh describes the suicide of Rudi, a 22-year-old chemistry student at the Berlin Academy:

At 9.45 on the evening of May 2, 1904, Rudi walked into a restaurant-bar on Berlin’s Brandenburgstrasse, ordered two glasses of milk and some food, which he ate in a state of noticeable agitation. When he had finished, he asked the waiter to send a bottle of mineral water to the pianist with instructions for him to play the popular Thomas Koschat number, Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich. As the music wafted across the room, Rudolf took from his pocket a sachet of clear crystal compound and dissolved the contents into one of his glasses of milk. The effects of potassium cyanide when ingested are instant and agonising: a tightening of the chest, a terrible burning sensation in the throat, immediate discoloration of the skin, nausea, coughing and convulsions. Within two minutes Rudolf was slumped back on his chair unconscious. The landlord sent customers out in search of doctors. Three of them arrived, but too late for their ministrations to take effect. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/3559463/The-Wittgensteins-Viennese-whirl.html

His father forbade any mention of Rudolf in the Wittgenstein household, a decision that caused a rift between parents and children. Johannes ‘Hans’ the eldest son had died in a canoe- ing incident in America. As Waugh (2010: 29) writes: ‘the most likely scenario is that he did indeed commit suicide somewhere outside Austria, that the family had prior intimations, or direct warnings, of his suicidal intent, and that the spur that induced them to declare openly that he had taken his life was the very public death in Vienna, on October 4, 1903, of a 23-year-old philosopher called Otto Weininger. Weininger’s suicide caused a significant stir in Viennese society. The newspapers ran pages of commentary about him, and his reputation rose from that of obscure controversialist to national celebrity in a matter of days. All the Wittgensteins read his book.’

Weininger (1903/2005) had a profound influence on Wittgenstein through his notorious Sex and Character that he wrote and published in 1903. The book argues that all people are fundamentally bisexual and all individuals are composed of a mixture - the male aspect is active, productive, conscious and moral/logical, while the female aspect is passive, unproductive, unconscious, amoral and alogical. While emancipation is only possible for ‘masculine women’ it is the duty of the male to strive to become, a genius forging sexuality for the abstract love of God in which he can find himself. He was a Jewish convert to Christianity, and Weininger analysed Jewishness in terms of feminine qualities, later used by the Nazis. Weininger was a tormented soul who became a cult figure influencing a wide range of people. His genius was acknowledged by ‘Ford Maddox Ford, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Charlotte Perkins- Gilman, Gertrude Stein, and August Strindberg’ as well as William Carlos Williams, Freud and Hitler (Stern & Szabados, 2004). He was a deep misogynist, an anti-Semite and self-loather (Rider, 2013). He also deeply influenced Wittgenstein, who writes:

I think there is some truth in my idea that I am really only reproductive in my thinking. I think I have never invented a line of thinking but that it was always provided for me by someone else & I have done no more than passionately take it up for my work of clarification. That is how Boltzmann Hertz Schopenhauer Frege, Russell, Kraus, Loos Weininger Spengler, Sraffa have influenced me. (CV, 16)

Engaging the work of Otto Weininger (1880–1903), one of the most widely discussed authors of fin-de-siece Vienna, can help illuminate this sense of a ‘crisis of the subject’ and its relation- ship to the world that informed so much of Vienna’s cultural production and debate at the time. Of all the books Wittgenstein read in his adolescence Weininger’s Sex and Character has the greatest influence (Monk 1990, p. 25). Achinger (2013, p. 121) reads Weininger through the lens of Critical Theory to suggest ‘viewing “the Woman” and “the Jew” as outward projections of different, but related contradictions within the constitution of the modern subject itself.’ She goes on to argue:

More specifically, “Woman” comes to embody the threat to the (masculine) bourgeois individual emanating from its own embodied existence, from “nature” and libidinal impulses. “The Jew,” on the other hand, comes to stand for historical developments of modern society that make themselves more keenly felt towards the end of the nineteenth century and threaten to undermine the very forms of individuality and independence that had previously been produced by this society. Such a reading of Geschlecht und Charakter not only can help illuminate the crisis of the bourgeois individual at the turn of the twentieth century, but also could contribute to ongoing discussions on why modern society, although based on seemingly universalist conceptions of subjectivity, continues to produce difference and exclusion along the lines of gender and race.

Certainly, such a critical interpretation coheres with the reading of a ‘double identity crisis’ facing the younger Wittgenstein growing up in fin d’siecle Vienna. Le Rider (1990) argues ‘The crisis of the individual, experienced as an identity crisis, is at the heart of all questions we find in literature and the humane sciences’ (p. 1) and remarks that ‘Viennese modernism can be interpreted as an anticipation of certain important ‘postmodern’ themes’ (p. 6). He has in mind, for instance, the way in which Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language ‘deconstructs the subject as author and judge of his own semantic intentions’ (p. 28). He remarks in terms of the crisis of identity how Wittgenstein, ‘like all assimilated Jewish intellectuals, found his Jewish identity a problem’ and the problem of his Jewish identity was coupled with a crisis of sexual identity, when at least at some periods of his life he sought refuge from his homosexual tendencies in a kind of Tolstoyan asceticism (p. 295). He suggests:

Wittgenstein, who ... looked back nostalgically on a well-ordered world where everyone had his place, found modernity uncultured because it had lost its power to integrate, and left individuals in a state of confusion. The only ones who can keep their balance and personal creativity are those whom Nietzsche calls the strong men, that is the most moderate, who need neither convictions nor religion, who are able not only to endure, but to accept a fair amount of chance and absurdity, and are capable of thinking in a broadly disillusioned and negative way without feeling either diminished or discouraged. (p. 296)

He argues that the consequences of this double crisis of identity, much more than is commonly accepted, are intimately tied up with the fundamentals of his thought and with a number of his intellectual preoccupations: his interest in Weininger and in psychoanalysis, his mystical tendencies, but also his reflections on genius, on the self, and on ethics^ı (p. 296). The importance that Le Rider(1993) places upon Nietzsche as part of the cultural fabric of Viennese modernism exericised upon a young Wittgenstein is borne out by other scholars of fin-de-siecle Vienna.

There is a kind of Wittgensteinian hagiography that for years has prevented the investigation of these questions which is of itself an interesting question in the anthropology of philosophy, especially that form of analysis that insists on a sharp separation between the man and the work. This line of argument suggests that the realm of ideas properly belongs to that of the mind that can be discussed dispassionately and in a technical way that pays attention to the space of arguments and the structure of argumentation; while the realm of biography belongs to that of the body, to the temporal dimension of existence emphasising its finitude. Thus, the mind-body dualism lives on and also prevents the influence of arguments and observations of psychobiography on philosophy per se.

Viennese Modernism has attracted much scholarly and public interest in recent decades, in part because some of the most enduring works of art, literature, and philosophy produced in Vienna around the turn of the last century question key concepts of liberalism and Enlightenment – such as the notions of progress, of the coherent and rational subject, and of a stable and unproblematic relationship between subject and world in which language is nothing but a neutral and transparent mediator – in ways that seem to prefigure contemporary debates. There are many stories of Jewish artists and philosophers who wrestled with identity issues in a hostile social and intellectual environment of Vienna sometimes internalising aspects of anti- Semitic ideology that no doubt propelled many to seek a new Christianised identity to help mask the transition. How Gustav Mahler, a Bohemian-Jewish artist of genius, responds to the challenges of a German culture that he has appropriated completely but into which he is never fully accepted is the subject of Niekerk’s (2013) Reading Mahler: German Culture and Jewish Identity in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. Mahler was a frequent visitor to the Wittgenstein mansion when Wittgenstein was a boy. Mahler’s own artistic endeavours are determined by the complex responses to Goethe, the Romantics, Wagner, and, above all, Nietzsche and to rewrite German Romanticism at a time when German cultural history was dominated by Wagner’s anti-Semitic views. Another example is Fritz Waerndorfer who wanted to ‘His House for an Art Lover’ to ‘establish himself as an important participant in the Viennese avant-garde scene but also to promote a new artistic agenda’ and wished ‘to establish a new identity for himself as an assimilated Jew through the modernist redesign’ (Shapira, 2006).

Jewish self-hatred and homosexuality

The question of Jewish self-hatred has been an enduring issue for many years. Paul Reitter (2009: 359), author of The Anti-Journalist: Karl Kraus and Jewish Self-Fashioning in Fin-de-Siecle Europe (2008) indicates

The tendency not to lean too heavily on anyone else’s theory of Jewish self-hatred has no doubt helped a fairly small discussion produce a wide range of interpretive strategies: social psychological (Lewin), psychoanalytic (Gay), psycho-historical (Liebenberg), intellectual historical (Hallie), “topological” (Gilman), and cultural historical (Edelman and Volker).

He refers to Gilman’s (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred that ‘it is only natural, that where some measure of integration is a desideratum, and there is also bigotry in the ‘majority culture’, minority self-loathing will occur’ (Reitter, 2009: 360). He argues Gilman, like W.E. B. Du Bois before him, attempts to explain how ‘German Jews came to ‘accept’ and ‘internalize’ a distorted, decidedly negative image of their own group.’ Du Bois, as Reitter (2009: 360) reports, writes: ‘But the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which ever accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate’ (cited in Reiter, 2009). He quotes from Endelman, who as he remarks is an eminent historian of European Jewry:

Self-hating Jews were converts, secessionists, and radical assimilationists who, not content with disaffiliation from the community, felt compelled to articulate how far they had travelled from their origins by echoing anti-Semitic views, by proclaiming their distaste for those from whom they wished to dissociate them- selves. What set them apart from other radical assimilationists was that, having cut their ties, they were unable to move on and forget their Jewishness. (cited in Reitter, 2009: 366).

Reitter (2009) wants to retrace the evolution of the term ‘Jewish self-hatred’ as a more polite concept than ‘Jewish antisemitism’ with redemptive possibilities. The question is complex and the hypothesis that Jews who harboured such a negative self-image and possessed such a strong desire to be accepted in a society that was covertly and residually hostile to Jews’ might be true but it risks becoming ‘a rhetorical weapon to critics of assimilation’, as Janik (2013 Janich (2013, p.143) suggests in a review of Rietter. He refers to David Sorkin and Steven Beller, who ‘have provided us with accounts of how vigorous Jewish criticism of Jewish life, Socratic self-criticism, was part and parcel of a self-consciously Jewish ‘enlightenment’ (haskalah) from the time of Moses Mendelssohn.’

Wittgenstein’s Jewish self-loathing is a complex affair. David Stern (2001: 237) asks:

He answers his own question by reference to Brian McGuinness’ Young Ludwig (1889-1921) – ‘First, Wittgenstein did, on occasion, speak of himself as a Jew’ especially in relation to Weininger’s writings on Jewish character in a series of now famous remarks made in the 1930s recorded in Culture and Value. Second, ‘Wittgenstein did, on occasion, deny his Jewishness, and this was a charged matter for him’ (p. 239), in particular in his confessions to family and friends in 1936 and 1937 when he refers to his misrepresentation of his Jewish ancestry. Stern later comments: ‘Is there a connection between Wittgenstein’s writing on Jews and his philosophy? What did he mean when he spoke of himself as a “Jewish thinker” in 1931?’ (p. 265) and concludes

Wittgenstein’s problematic Jewishness is as much a product of our problematic concerns as his. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. Insofar as he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his time (p. 269).

Wittgenstein’s sexuality also caused him much anguish and led to bouts of homosexual self- loathing. In Austria and the United Kingdom homosexuality was still outlawed and considered not only a crime but also a psychiatric treatable condition. There were many risks associated with homosexuality and even with writing about in as late as the 1970s. William W. Bartley III (1973) published his book on Wittgenstein that included references to Wittgenstein being gay, much to the dismay of the philosophical establishment that tried to ban such discussion and to deny that there was any link at all between his work and his sexuality and the feelings it generated. Barley made a few off-hand remarks about Wittgenstein’s promiscuous homosexuality while he was training to be a teacher in Vienna. The evidence for this claim has never been established (Monk, 2018).

Wittgenstein had relationships with David Pinsent in 1912, with Francis Skinner in the 1930s and Ben Richards in the late 1940s. The first was purely Platonic or unconsummated and it is unclear to what extent the other two relationships involved physical expressions of love. It has been a major problem in Wittgenstein studies to address and analyse his sexuality and homo- sexuality as though somehow Wittgenstein’s sexual feelings tainted the ascetic moral ideal that had been built around him as a philosopher. It is interesting the extent to which perspectives have changed – not only societal values and the embrace of gay and transsexual rights but also the legitimacy of sexual autobiography in relation to questions of philosophy. The fact that Michel Foucault was gay by contrast is considered strongly to influence his outlook and his work, and he is celebrated because of it. It was a very significant part of his work in his genealogical studies of the history of sexuality and coloured his view of women’s sexuality. For Wittgenstein, a generation older, the societal reaction was quite vicious and Wittgenstein agonised over his sexuality, without ever addressing it, even though there was an underground acceptance of homosexuality at Cambridge.

There is little doubt of Wittgenstein’s homosexuality or its importance in understanding the man. The more difficult question is the effects of his homosexuality on his philosophy and on his relationships when he was a teacher. Psychoanalytically, much could be made of this personal secrecy and the need to preserve confessional material from prying eyes that might be very damaging. The question is fundamental yet there is no extant work that risks analysis in relation to Wittgenstein to my knowledge. Sex and language as a particular focus of a wider debate on the issue of gender and language now seems almost commonplace. Wittgenstein may have taken some relief from Freud’s analysis of the bisexual nature of human beings where everyone is attracted to both sexes yet Freud’s determinism in ascribing biological and psycho- logical factors on the basis of deep libidinal sexual drives making it difficult to change would have raised questions for Wittgenstein at the point he was trying to change.

Gay male culture began to flourish in the late nineteenth century in 1920s Vienna (sodomy was still an imprisonable offence) and sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Freud had begun to codify homosexual identity and to see it as a ‘perversion’. There were still very strong taboos in place when Wittgenstein was a teacher. It was not until the 1970s after the ‘Gay Holocaust’ that gay and lesbian activism saw a resurgence. Had Wittgenstein’s homosexuality been known at this time it would almost certainly would have led to his vilification. This anti-gay environment in general society and in teaching forced Wittgenstein’s sexual identity ruminations underground. Derek Jarman’s (1993) witty depiction of the gay ‘Wittgenstein’ is a path-breaking dramatic analysis of Wittgenstein’s opening up as a gay man.2

Wittgenstein on suicide

‘The Ethics of Suicide Digital Archive’ is an exhaustive work accompanying the book prepared by the philosopher Margaret Pabst Battin from the University of Utah3 that begins:

Is suicide wrong, always wrong, or profoundly morally wrong? Or is it almost always wrong but excusable in a few cases? Or is it sometimes morally permissible? Is it not intrinsically wrong at all, though perhaps often imprudent? Is it sick? Is it a matter of mental illness? Is it a private or a social act? Is it something the family, community, or society should always try to prevent, or could ever expect of a person? Could it sometimes be a “noble duty”? Or is it solely a personal matter, perhaps a matter of right based in individual liberties, or even a fundamental human right? https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/introduction/

The Digital Archive acts as comprehensive sourcebook, providing a collection of primary texts on the ethics of suicide in both the Western and non-Western traditions, with an archive based on Wittgenstein’s Notebooks 1914–16 and Letters. The introduction to these texts is prefaced by a note on Wittgenstein’s feelings about suicide during the years 1912–13 when how spent time with David Hume Pinsent, a friend, collaborator and Plantonic lover of Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein friend and collaborator David Hume Pinsent, with whom he traveled on holidays together, describes Wittgenstein’s frequent thoughts of suicide at numerous places in his own diary. In Pinsent’s entry for June 1, 1912, he notes that Wittgenstein told him that he had suffered from terrific loneliness for the past nine years, that he had thought of suicide then, and that he felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself; according to Pinsent, Wittgenstein thought that he had had “a hint that he was de trop in this world.” In his entry for September 4, 1913, when they were traveling in Norway, Pinsent describes Wittgenstein as “really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself ... it is obvious he is quite incapable of helping these fits. I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to say he is as bad–(in that nervous sensibility)–as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.” In his entry for September 25, 1913, Pinsent reports that “This evening we got talking together about suicide–not that Ludwig was depressed or anything of the sort–he was quite cheerful all today. But he told me that all his life there had hardly been a day, in which he had not at one time or other thought of suicide as a possibility. He was really surprised when I said I never thought of suicide like that–and that given the chance I would not mind living my life so far–over again! He would not for anything.” (Italics in origin, https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/wittgenstein/).

Pinsent (1891–918) was a descendent of Hume who gained a first class honours at Cambridge University in mathematics. Wittgenstein had only arrived at Cambridge to talk with Russell about whether he should take up philosophy in October 1911. During the Christmas vacation Wittgenstein comes to the end of a deep depression. He meets David Pinsent in Russell’s rooms and they quickly became friends, taking tea together, attending concerts, and making music. Within a month of meeting Wittgenstein proposed to Pinsent that they go on holiday together to Iceland in September 1912. They took a second holiday together at the same time in 1913 and were to meet in August 1914 before WWI intervened. As Preston (2018) has reported Wittgenstein received letters which he described as ‘sensuous’. Their relationship was fated when on May 8 1918 Pinsent is killed in an air accident while flying a de Havilland bi-plane. Preston writes:

In the immediate aftermath of Pinsent’s death, Wittgenstein was depressed to the point of planning to kill himself somewhere in the mountains in Austria. But at a railway station near Salzburg he bumped into his uncle Paul, who found him in a state of anguish, but saved him from the suicide he was planning. Wittgenstein kept in contact with Pinsent’s family at least until mid-1919, and probably beyond that. https://theconversation.com/how-ludwig-wittgensteins-secret-boyfriend-helped-deliver-the-philosophers-seminal-work-96557

Pinsent supported Wittgenstein and admired him. It seems clear that Wittgenstein was in love with Pinsent. He dedicated the Tractatus to him when it was published in 1921. Many of the reports on Wittgenstein’s depressed and suicidal state of mind during this period come from Wittgenstein’s letters and Pinsent’s diary.4

It is during this period that Wittgenstein (1961) comes to a resolution about suicide when he writes in what we know as the Notebooks 1914–1916

If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed. If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed. This throws a light on the nature of ethics, for suicide is, so to speak, the elementary sin. And when one investigates it it is like investigating mercury vapours in order to investigate the nature of vapours.

For Wittgenstein suicide is the paradigmatic case for ethics and while he seems to have entertained suicide as an idea from when he was a boy he steadfastly refuses to give into his despair. Suicide is an evasion of life and God’s will demands that we should come to terms with the facts as a moral task despite the sheer enormity of it and the difficulties of confronting one’s own nature. To his friend Paul Englemann (‘Mr E’ who edits the Letters) on May 30, 1920 he expresses how desperate he has become:

I feel like completely emptying myself again; I have had a most miserable time lately. Of course, only as a result of my own baseness and rottenness. I have continually thought of taking my own life, and the idea still haunts me sometimes. I have sunk to the lowest point.

And writing again to Mr E. he confesses that he is sinking more deeply into depression, that he is contemplating suicide but cannot will himself to take his own life:

I am beyond any outside help. – In fact I am in a state of mind that is terrible to me. I have been through it several times before: it is the state of not being able to get over a particular fact.... I know that to kill oneself is always a dirty thing to do. Surely one cannot will one’s own destruction, and anybody who has visualized what is in practice involved in the act of suicide knows that suicide is always a rushing of one’s own defenses. But nothing is worse than to be forced to take oneself by surprise.

One wonders about the state of mind of a man suffering from continual torment and living daily with the threat of suicide and his capacity to teach children under such circumstances. He writes to Keynes in October 18, 1925 just before the so-called Haibauer incident (hitting the boy):

I have resolved to remain a teacher as long as I feel that the difficulties I am experiencing might be doing me some good. When you have a toothache, the pain from the toothache is reduced by putting a hot water bottle to your face. But that works only as long as the heat hurts your face. I will throw away the bottle as soon as I notice that it no longer provides that special pain that does my character good.

Suicide could not be the answer for Wittgenstein. He had decided to learn to live with it as a test of his moral character. Paul Engelmann (1974) in a brief memoir writes:

Wittgenstein experienced the world as filled with ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’ people, not exempting himself. He told David Pinsent, the close companion of his prewar years in Cambridge, that he felt he had ‘no right to live in an antipathetic world ... where he perpetually finds himself feeling contempt for others, and irritating others by his nervous temperament without some justification for that contempt etc. such as being a really great man and having done really great work.’ He began to think of suicide at the age of 10 or 11; a decade or so later he told Pinsent he ‘felt ashamed of never daring to kill himself,’ and in 1918 we find him ‘on his way to commit suicide somewhere.’ ....Though Wittgenstein eventually died of natural causes, he was clearly a tormented figure. His search for decency and honesty not only led him to give his entire fortune away but often took the form of browbeating others ... .

In The Myth of Sisyphus Albert Camus (1942/1997) declares ‘There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide’ (Il n’y a qu’un probl eme philosophique vraiment s erieux: c’est le suicide), a very similar definitive statement by Wittgenstein some forty years earlier: ‘Suicide is the elementary sin’. According to Schopenhauer, moral freedom – the highest ethical aim – is to be obtained only by a denial of the will to live. ‘When life is so burdensome, death has become for man a sought-after refuge’. Schopenhauer affirmed: ‘They tell us that suicide is the greatest act of cowardice... that suicide is wrong; when it is quite obvious that there is nothing in the world to which every man has a more unassailable title than to his own life and person’. Schopenhauer has a significant influence on Wittgenstein, especially in his the early period. Schroeder (2012, p. 367) notes that Schopenhauer influences his early thinking on ethics and the meaning of life:

His 1916 Notebook (NB 71–91) and the final pages of the Tractatus contain a number of echoes of Schopenhauer. Like him he describes aesthetic contemplation using Spinoza’s expression “sub specie aeterni[tatis]”; he repeats Schopenhauer’s criticism of the categorical imperative: that every imperative calls forth the question “And what if I do not do it?” (TLP 6.422); he also agrees with Schopenhauer (and Kant) that the good action should not be motivated by its consequences (TLP 6.422); like Schopenhauer he thinks that science cannot answer questions of value; like him he places “the solution of the riddle of life” outside space and time (TLP 6.4312), and like him he thinks that “what is higher” cannot ultimately be expressed in words. (TLP 6.432, 6.522)

Schroeder (2012) suggests that of greater philosophical importance are Schopenhauer’s thoughts on idealism and especially ‘world as idea’ (p. 368) and the notion that ‘the subject is ... a presupposition of [the world’s] existence’ (NB 79: 2.8.16) and the attendant idea that the metaphysical subject ‘cannot be encountered in experience’ but ‘must be identified with its experiences’ (p. 369). Wittgenstein came to identify both solipsism and idealism as errors, on the basis of early thinking for the private language argument. It seems the case that Schopenhauer did influence the early Wittgenstein’s thinking on suicide but this thought did not remain with him. Schroeder (2012, p. 380) writes:

As a young man, in times of crisis, trying to formulate his ethics and attitude towards life, he remembered and adopted various thoughts from Schopenhauer, some of which he tacked on to his logical-philosophical treatise; but they have very little to do with his philosophical achievements. His real debt to Schopenhauer lies elsewhere. For one thing, the young Wittgenstein was persuaded by Schopenhauer’s idealism (minus its transcendental side), and that proved extremely fruitful for his own thinking all through his life.

In ‘Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and the metaphysics of suicide’ Modesto Gomez (2018) suggests,

the problems that Wittgenstein raised and the views that he emphatically endorsed are in keeping with his overarching transcendental conception of the metaphysical I, the fundamental character of ethics (NB, p. 79), the meaning of life, and the I as “the bearer of ethics” (NB, p. 80), as it is extensively advanced in the Notebooks 1914-1916 and tersely expressed in the Tractatus. Far from demanding further development, what Wittgenstein’s views on suicide would require is an appropriate background. Such considerations naturally stemmed from the core of the metaphysical picture that permeates Wittgenstein’s early writings. This picture is, in its essentials, Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the Will (p. 299).

I think this is correct and there is no doubt that Schopenhauer was decisive in Wittgenstein’s early view of suicide but, at the same time, this ought not to detract from the biographical and autobiographical in explaining Wittgenstein ethics of suicide. Here, it is difficult to deny that Wittgenstein’s own experiences did not have an effect on his existential philosophy.

Notes

Schopenhauer writes that suicide is accounted a crime in England which is “followed by an ignominious burial and the seizure of the man’s property” and most often occasions a verdict of insanity.

http://www.openculture.com/2013/03/iwittgensteini_watch_derek_jarmans_tribute_to_the_philosopher_featuring_tilda_swinton_1993.html

https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/

http://www.wittgensteinchronology.com/6.html

References

Achinger, C. (2013). Allegories of destruction: “Woman” and “the Jew” in Otto Weininger’s sex and character. The Germanic Review, 88(2),121–149. 2013

Camus, A. (1942). The myth of Sisyphus (O’Brien, Justin, Trans.). London: Penguin Group. (First published by Gallimard)

Engelmann, Paul (1974) Letters From Ludwig Wittgenstein. With A Memoir. New York, Horizon.

Gilman, Sander (1986) Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP

Jacquette, D. (2000). Schopenhauer on the ethics of suicide. Continental Philosophy Review, 33(1),43–58.

Janik, Alan (2013) On the Origins of Jewish Self-Hatred by Paul Reitter (review) HYPERLINK "https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/181" Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, HYPERLINK "https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/29179" Volume 32, Number 1, Fall 2013, pp. 142-145.

Jamison, K. R. (2000). Night falls fast: Understanding suicide. New York: Vintage.

Le Rider, J. (1990). ‘Between modernism and postmodernism: The Viennese identity crisis’ (R. Manheim, trans.). In E. Timms & R. Robertson (eds.) Vienna 1900: from Altenberg to Wittgenstein, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Le Rider, J. (1993). Modernity and the crises of identity: Culture and society in Fin-de-Si ecle Vienna (R. Morris, trans.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Le Rider, J. (2013). Otto Weininger: A Misogynist, anti-Semite, and Self-loather as Wagnerite. Wagnerspectrum, 9 (1),2013, 89–93.

McGuinness, B. (1988). Wittgenstein: A life. Young Ludwig (1889–1921). Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Modesto Gomez, A. (2018). Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and the metaphysics of suicide. Rev. Filos., Aurora, Curitiba, 30(49), 299–321.

Monk, R. (1990). Ludwig Wittgenstein: The duty of genius. London: Jonathan Cape.

Monk, R. (2018). Bartley’s Wittgenstein and the coded remarks. In: Flowers, F. A., III (ed. and preface); Ground, Ian (ed. and preface); Portraits of Wittgenstein (pp.129–134). London; Bloomsbury Academic; 2018. (xiii, 489 pp.)

Niekerk, C. (2013). Reading Mahler: German culture and Jewish identity in Fin-de-Siecle Vienna. (Studies in German literature, linguistics and culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House.

Peters, M A. (2017). Les proc es et l’enseignement de Wittgenstein, et la « figure de l’enfant » romantique chez Cavell. A contrario, 25(2), 13-37. https://www.cairn.info/revue-a-contrario-2017-2-page-13.htm.

Preston, John (2018) How Ludwig Wittgenstein’s secret boyfriend helped deliver the philosopher’s seminal work, https://theconversation.com/how-ludwig-wittgensteins-secret-boyfriend-helped-deliver-the-philosophers- seminal-work-96557

Reitter, P. (2009). The Jewish self-hatred octopus. The German Quarterly, 82(3),356–372. 82.3 (Summer)

Schroeder, S. (2012). Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein, pp.367–384. In Ed. Bart Vandenabeele, A Companion to Schopenhauer, Oxford, Blackwell.

Shapira, E. (2006). Modernism and Jewish identity in early twentieth-century Vienna: Fritz Waerndorfer and his house for an art lover. Studies in the Decorative Arts, 13(2), 52–92. Vol. No. SPRING-SUMMER (2006).

Stern, D. (2001). Was Wittgenstein a Jew? In J. Klagge (Ed.), Wittgenstein: Biography and philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Stern, David and Szabados, Bela, (eds.) (2004). Wittgenstein reads Weininger, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 206pp., $24.99 (pbk), ISBN 0521532604

Szabados, B. (1992). Autobiography after Wittgenstein. The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 50(1), 1–12.

Szabados, B. (1995). Autobiography and philosophy: Variations on a theme of Wittgenstein. Metaphilosophy, 26(1/2), 63–80.

Szabados, B. (1997). Wittgenstein’s women: The philosophical significance of Wittgenstein’s misogyny. Journal of Philosophical Research, 22, 483–508.

Szabados, B. (1999). Was Wittgenstein an anti-Semite? The significance of AntiSemitism for Wittgenstein’s philosophy. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29(1), 1–28.

Weininger (1903/2005) Sex and Character. An Investigation of Fundamental Principles Otto Weininger, edited by Daniel Steuer and Laura Marcus, translated by Ladislaus Lob, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Waugh, Alexander (2010) The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War. New York, Anchor.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980). Culture and value, edited by G. H. von Wright in collaboration with H. Nyman , trans. P. Winch, Oxford, Basil Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1980/1998). Culture and value. First published as Vennischte Bemerkungen, German text only, G. H. von Wright & Heikki Nyman (ed.). Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977: Amended 2nd ed., traps. P. Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980; rev. 2nd ed., German text only, edited by G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, with revisions by Alois Pichler. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1994, rev. 2nd ed., new traps. P. Winch. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1998. (References will give the pagination for the 1980 and 1998 editions of the book; translations are taken from the 1998 edition.)

Wittgenstein, L. (1997). Denkbewegungen: Tagebiicher 1930–1932 1936–1937 (MS 183) ed. Use Somavilla. Innsbruck, Austria: Haymon Verlag.

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gaslitbyamadman · 4 years

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Aphorisms On Madness, Philosophy, & Society (from my book, Gaslit By A Madman)

Aphorisms On Madness, Philosophy, & Society (from my book)

Wittgenstein on Otto Weininger.

Wittgenstein once said about Otto Weininger: “If you were to reverse all of his assertions, they would still be equally fascinating and worthwhile. ” That tends to be how I view all utterances. (If only SJWs thought like this about all utterances!) This is much closer to truth as aletheia, the Greek and Heideggerian notion, rather than strict formal, propositional veracity.

If you believe in truth, you are delusional!

.......Thus, as things became even more extreme, and relativism spread from ‘values’ to truth itself, we increasingly began to see the crazed spectacle of Professors of Psychiatry ‘scientifically’ labelling everyone who simply happens to have different beliefs from themselves as ‘sick’ and ‘delusional’i. e meaning they have a ‘fixed false belief’. while their prestigious, highly rewarded colleagues in the Humanities, Philosophy or Literary Studies department loudly proclaim there is ‘no truth, only interpretations’! No doubt somewhere or other, the two doctrines have been combined and solidified in the very same individuals such that if you still believe in ‘truth’, you are delusional, i. e you have a fixed ‘false’ belief and require urgent ‘treatment’! Pretty deranged, eh?

Truth as the best healer

Real truth saves lives; real truth works better than any pill. Especially for the honest.

On self-identity and freedom of conscience

Nowadays, if a ‘woman’ came into a psychiatrist’s office and professed to be a Champion Bull, raring to butt horns in the otherwise peaceful long-grassed meadows of her youth once more . the good Dr. would quite rightly feel obliged to continue the interview in aggressive snorts and threatening raking at the carpet, like any other modern, non-bigoted professional. But if this erstwhile proud Minator were to opine that there is no such thing as ‘schizophrenia’ or ‘mental illness’, someone’s professional opinion would be gravely offended and someone else’s dosage – that of the poor, once righteous monster -- would be judiciously and roundly quadrupled.

Excessive codes of 'civility' as cause of hateful outbreaks

Excessive codes of 'civility', which rule out certain antagonistic, strongly felt forms of speech, when such cosy 'civility' is not truly felt are one of the leadingyet most over-looked causes of hatred and violence. The reason that throughout society and on all social media websites especially there is enforced civility is because the powers-that-be were afraid of people's differences being worked out in a peaceful manner and them growing united and thus harder to control and dominate.

Psychiatry’s inversion of health and sickness.

In all discernment between healthy and pathological behaviors, the key thing to be aware of is that the nature of the former is to be a deliberate, willful action -- realizing one's 'true will' to quote Aleister Crowley -- whereas that the latter is to be picked up unconsciously or half-consciously from one's environment, sometimes with a dimly conscious but burgeoning awareness that it is vulgar, stupid or slavish. Psychiatry precisely inverts the true nature of this dichotomy, labelling healthy, i. e willful liberation as pathological, and unhealthy, slavish unthinking conformity as healthy: it is the exact opposite. "Its sickness is for its traits and the traits of its parts to be traits by which the soul does not do its actions that come about by means of the body or its parts, or does them in a more diminished manner than it ought or not as was its wont to do them. Al Farabi

Harm, punish, or 'treat'.

If you harm, punish or 'treat' an bad man, he might just re-consider his wicked ways; but if you harm, punish or 'treat' a good one, he is often liable or prone to re-consider his good ways.

The disadvantages of self-control.

The exhortation to self-control is really an exhortation to obedience and submission. (When they said I lacked 'self-control', what they actually meant was I wasn't controlling myself according to their demands. and they proceeded to take actual selfcontrol away from me) If we are really going to free ourselves of the crippling influence of convention and actually arbitrary, oppressive socalled 'authority', we probably ought to rid ourselves of all self-control that is not absolutely necessary.

Real change.

The cave-dwelling masses and everyday non-mental -patients, while all too fatuously and recklessly embracing ideologies of social 'progress', are frightened of a real change in their Being and locked into a pattern of stagnation and decay. The madman, (remember, the etymological meaning of the word 'mad' is to 'change') at least in the normative, ideal sense of that term, (as well as often he or she who is solabelled), has awakened to the need for spiritual becoming, both in himself and others.

Madness and Art.

Madmen and poets are alike: they both give freer reign to their emotional and linguistic expressions than is considered decent. And, both of them too, do it largely for socially admirable, therapeutic reasons. Albeit the 'mad' one is more often misunderstood, since people forget that all life, and the unartistic life most of all, is a good opportunity for art, for therapy.

The unartistic life is the most drab, automatic, unredeemed kind of life, in which salutary disruptions are still possible No one blinks twice if they see an eviscerated heart in an art gallery nowadays. But if they see an eviscerated heart while it is still in someone's chest. That's magic.

Autobiography of values as requisite.

To counter-act the tide of artificial, false pretenses to expert, scientific 'objectivity', and the docile, herd-like conformity that actually entails within social science, within the healing professions, and within society a whole, I propose that a personal account of one's life-story, focusing on how one came to arrive at one's central, integral values, become a standard for all such careers. This would be a move towards bolstering the development of personality and character throughout society, preventing people from hiding entirely behind their professional veneers, and presencing the real-lived experience and actual, rather than false selves, of individuals. I don't propose this merely as a helpful task for the 'professional' on the way to qualifying, but as a central piece that he must present to his or her clients/patients. A kind of C. V., but, as I say, with the focus on HOW HE CAME TO HIS CENTRAL CONVICTIONS ABOUT LIFE

‘Recreational’ drug use is medicinal drug use.

The potential of currently illegal substances such as LSD and DMT, as well as more common and less potent ones such as marajuana, to provide radical new, mad vistas of consciousness, and so heal the mental sickness with which mainstream society is so disastrously afflicted ( see the work of Terence Mckenna), is no less important than their capacity to treat physical illness or relieve physical pain. While all substances can potentially be used ill-advisedly, the depreciation of supposed ‘recreational’ uses ignores the dire and gaping need even so-called ‘normal’ people have for fresh inspiration, hedonic sustenance, and the health benefits that all true enjoyment, relaxation or true insight brings. It merely repeats the fallacious and artifical seperation between these supposedly mutually alien aspects of ourselves, a long with the superstitious, ascetic and crude utilitarian privileging of the mere functionality of ‘health’, over the supposedly wicked nature of happiness in this world --- a sad residue of religious puritanism and centuries of slavery to sadistic dogmas of control --even though it is only Epicurean pleasure that ultimately justifies life itself. This attitude is so pervasive and so perverse that it simply cannot be under-stated.Ravi Das, a neuroscientist at University College London who is researching the effects of ketamine said: “The potential benefits are definitely downplayed in face of these drugs being used recreationally,” he said. “People view their use in a research setting as ‘people are just having a good time’. ”From this vantage point, must one not wager the theory that almost the whole of modern medicine, most obviously in terms of mental illness, but even in its approach to illness as such --- including physical illness- -- as simply a form of prolonged Christian hatred-ofthe-flesh and jaw-dropping sado-masochism on a mass scale ? That is why Prof. David Nutt equated the barriers to research to the Catholic church’s censorship of Galileo’s work in 1616. “We’ve banned research on psychedelic drugs and other drugs like cannabis for 50 years,” he said. “Truly, in terms of the amount of wasted opportunity, it’s way greater than the banning of the telescope. This is a truly appalling level of censorship. ” Ignoring the importance of psycho-active drugs for promoting health is bad enough, but to ignore or denigrate the importance of pleasure to this aim, is like discounting the use of the eyes in driving to work in the morning! --.

Beyond rational self-preservation ((lock him up! He's a danger to himself.

.!)

. Enlightenment thinkers such Thomas Hobbes and John Locke tried to appeal to and foster what is called man's rational selfpreservation, inserting it above all other goals as the centrepiece and pivot of the whole of society. Notice here the two concepts, reason, on the one hand, and self-preservation, on the other, are heavily intertwined, which still remains the case today. Madness, on the other hand, is commonly associated with throwing caution to the wind, tightrope walking over a precipice just for the sheer Hell of it, and embracing a variety of dangers that may very well end in personal extinction. However, when one considers the nature of our own inevitable mortality, is making selfpreservation our highest goal really so rational? In order to face life in all its grim reality, is it not necessary, at some point or other, to eschew 'rational' self-preservation for a bold leap, (if only in the imagination, if not outward practice), towards an affirmation and embrace of this inextricable fatality? Especially if one seeks to give birth to something greater than oneself, like the Christ, and take on the grave sacrifices that sometimes requires. In other words, rather than 'rational self-preservation', isn't the ability for the‘insane self-annihilation’ of loving sacrifice equally, or an even greater sign of maturity - or of true morality? Thus also the Buddha would seem to have it, who equally, in view of the passing away of all earthly things, preached 'Loss of self' rather than the steady incremental Lockean accumulation of an estate that is eventually destined to perish anyway; he who is said, out of compassion, to have given his life up to be voluntarily devoured by a starving tiger. Reminds me of those ‘voluntary patients’ on the ward that I was on!—.

Consequences of the dehumanization of madness on the collective mind.

The villifIcation of madness and the various phenomenon which are labelled as ‘mentally ill’ in our society, such as ‘grandiose delusions’, ‘hallucinations’, ‘paranoia’, etc. , a long with all the other countless represents a form of collective repression that not only has unspeakably dire results for those so labelled, but wreaks utter havoc on the collective unconscious and the collective conscious. Rather than being the shamen, the spiritual leaders of society, such men and women are quietly tortured and cast into ignominy. Thereby, society is not only deprived of its natural guiding elite, but everyone in society is trained to feel a senseless (‘paranoid’) fear and hatred of their own deepest spiritual roots, that prevents them re-connecting with these forbidden aspects of themselves and manifesting their true potential. Take for instance ‘paranoia’. This stigmatization of questioning the benevolent motives and fundamental agendas of one’s government is one of the most cynical and blatant causes of that government getting out of control and the citizenry failing to protect their own rights and freedoms. The same applies to all the other associated phenomenon of madness, which as has been argued, represent a perenial bed-fellow and midwife of intellectual and spiritual awakening. Just as the criminalization of drugs produces an association between drug-use and general criminality that does not exist independently, re-validating society’s negative view of drug-use in its own eyes, so the category of mental illness and the inhumane, disabling treatments with which those who fall subject to it suffer, is not merely a product of but re-inforces and creates society’s negative attitude to those who manifest these various ‘mad’ phenomenon. All the while, the fact that the sacred key to everybody’s own selfrealization is so maligned and spat upon understandably produces a deep, unacknowledged sense of disconcertedness and pessimism in the population as a whole, the root cause of many other of society’s ailments and self-destructive tendencies. In truth, the real mental illness is the senseless conformity which the ‘mental health’ establishment sacralizes. This sanctified madness then, unconsciously aware of its own shortcomings, in order to sustain its own self-conception as reasonable and sane, is driven to ever more fervent quest to identity and persecute those it delusionally deems ‘mad’, for the sake of externalizing and thereby gaining some sense of control over its own deepest insecuries, and having an Other to label & stigmatize in opposition to which it can re-affirm its own false, insecure and groundless sense of Self

The question is.

why do 'sane' family members (& Dr.s & nurses) have such an enormous problem correctly even identifying their 'unwell' relatives extremely normal human needs? ~Max Lewy

#aphorisms #frederick nietzsche #madness #foucault #medicine #mental health #philosophy

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badgaymovies · 4 years

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The Blob (1988)

Today's review on MyOldAddiction.com, The Blob by #ChuckRussell starring #KevinDillon and #ShawneeSmith, "as exploitative remakes go, is actually more than decent"

CHUCK RUSSELL

Bil’s rating (out of 5): BBB.5.

USA, 1988 . TriStar Pictures, Palisades California Inc.. Screenplay by Chuck Russell, Frank Darabont, based on the earlier screenplay by Theodore Simonson, Kay Linaker, story by Irvine H. Millgate. Cinematography by Mark Irwin. Produced by Jack H. Harris, Elliott Kastner. Music by Michael Hoenig. Production Design by Craig Stearns. Cost…

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hyperbanal · 3 years

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This is also the place to remember the similarity between the Englishman and the Jew, which has often been emphasized since Richard Wagner first noted it. Among all the Germanic peoples the English are most likely to have a certain affinity to the Semites. This is suggested by their orthodoxy, including their strictly literal interpretation of the Sabbath. The religiousness of the English often involves hypocrisy, and their asceticism a great deal of prudery. Like women, they have never been productive either in music or in religion. There may be irreligious poets—who cannot be very great—but there is no irreligious musician, and there is also a connection between religion and the fact that the English have never produced a significant architect and even less an outstanding philosopher. Berkeley is an Irishman, as are Swift and Sterne, while Erigena, Carlyle and Hamilton, like Burns, are Scots. Shakespeare and Shelley, the two greatest Englishmen, are still far from the pinnacles of humanity and come nowhere near Dante or Aeschylus. If we consider the English “philosophers,” we see it was they who have supplied the reaction against any depth ever since the Middle Ages, from William of Occam and Duns Scotus, through Roger Bacon and the Chancellor of the same surname, Spinoza’s spiritual relative Hobbes and the shallow Locke, to Hartley, Priestley, Bentham, the two Mills, Lewes, Huxley, and Spencer. This list contains all the important names from the history of English philosophy, for Adam Smith and David Hume were Scots. Let us never forget that psychology without the soul has come to us from England. The Englishman has impressed the German as an efficient empiricist and as exponent of Realpolitik in both practical and theoretical terms, but this is all that can be said about his importance for philosophy. There has never yet been a profound thinker who stopped at empiricism, and never an Englishman who transcended it on his own.

—Otto Weininger

#Otto Weininger #The English

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brettsinger · 3 years

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Waiting for Y The Last Man - Aaron Weininger - Ep 36

A TV heavy episode with a healthy dose of comic book reading suggestions. Aaron is the kind of fan who knows who the colorist is on a book. Who else was up for the role of Moon Knight? Do Avengers in the MCU get paid? Would Falcon ever cash in on his status? What are Aaron's problems with the CW superhero shows (Brett likes those shows)? Which version of Moon Knight does Brett prefer? Which Hawkeye comic elevates the character? Are Aaron and Brett excited about the new Hawkeye Disney Plus series? What is Nowhere Men about? What is Great Pacific about? When will we get a Y The Last Man TV series? Did the pandemic change what type of media we want to consume? What show made Brett feel stupid? What is a good comic for people who don't like superhero comics? Who controls Spider-Man's movie appearances?

Reading tips: Civil War (original Marvel comics), Extremis, Transmetropolitan, Planetary, Warren Ellis' Moon Knight (or anything by Warren Ellis), Ed Brubaker's Captain America (Winter Soldier et al), Matt Fraction and David Aja's Hawkeye, Nowhere Men (Image), Great Pacific (Image), Umbrella Academy (Dark Horse), Y The Last Man, Kevin Smith's Green Arrow, Saga, Invincible

Watch tips: Falcon and Winter Soldier, Umbrella Academy, Batman The Animated Series, X-Men The Animated Series, Invincible

Recorded 4/16/21 via Cleanfeed

Check out Comics Who Love Comic Books!

#comic books #comics #comedians #comedy #marvel #dc #mcu

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javierpenadea · 4 years

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"My Favorite String Quartet" by BY DAVID WEININGER via NYT Arts https://ift.tt/2zwno3X

#NYT #news

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lindsay36ho · 3 years

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Andras Schiff, Brahms and the Question of Tradition

Much attention and mention is given Sir Andras Schiff’s latest remarkable recording of both Brahms’ piano concertos with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. Schiff’s choice of instrument is a Blüthner grand piano built in Leipzig around 1859, the year in which the first D minor concerto was premiered. Schiff has changed foot in his views on period instruments and the recording can be seen as an ambitious attempt to scrutinize and fully bring out the true characteristics of Brahms’ works.

Several years ago, Schiff acquired an 1820 fortepiano, which was used to make recordings of two double albums with Schubert’s late piano works. Schiff says: ”Playing the Brahms concertos on a modern piano with modern orchestras, there were always balance problems. And I found, especially in the second B-flat Concerto, that it was just physically and psychologically very hard to play. Somehow, with this Blüthner piano, the physical difficulties disappear. The keys are a tiny bit narrower, so the stretches are not so tiring, and the action is much lighter. So there is not this colossal physical work involved.” In recent interviews, Schiff has criticised the increasing homogeneity of piano performance, with modern Steinways used for repertoire of every era.

In the album’s liner notes Schiff describes his aim of this ECM label New Series project: “To liberate it from the burden of the – often questionable – trademarks of performing tradition.”

The ambition has been to get back to the sound and scale of the performances that Brahms himself would have expected. Among Brahms’ favourite orchestras was Hans von Bülow’s band in Meiningen, which had just 49 players. Schiffs’ previous collaboration with the period instrument ensemble Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the Schumann piano concerto in London, led to a natural choice of ensemble for this recording.

Listen to a sample from the album:

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David Weininger in New York Times asked Schiff in which passages the use of these instruments allows the music to come across with unusual freshness, and Schiff replied: “For example, in the first movement of the Second Concerto, the development section can sound, in modern performance, very muddy and not clear, because there is so much counterpoint there. I’m very pleased to hear all those details. But also, take the opening of the third movement, with the cello solo. If it’s played with these instruments, next to the cello solo you hear all the other lower strings: the cellos and violas, and then later the oboe and bassoon. I just hear these layers of sound instead of a general sauce.”

András Schiff on the many facets of Johannes Brahms

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András Schiff on performance tradition and choice of instruments

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”He has gone back to the original manuscripts to check details of his performances, discovering, for instance, that Brahms had attached a metronome marking to the first movement of the D minor concerto that is significantly slower than we usually hear today, but which was omitted from the printed editions. It’s a shock to begin with but Schiff makes it convincing, gradually building the tension through the movement as the sound of his Blüthner – with its much less overpowering lower register than we are used to hearing from modern Steinways – blends beautifully with the soft grained OAE strings, while in the slow movement, it’s the wonderfully mellow woodwind that come into their own.” – The Guardian

“Schiff’s whole point of doing it this way is to strip the music of all of its accumulated performance traditions, and what the Blüthner piano may lack in oomph is more than made up for by the mellow smoothness of its tone and the clarity of textures across the various registers of the instrument…This warmth is pleasingly complemented by the orchestral playing…I was really surprised by how much this recording changed the way I both heard and thought about these concertos.” – Presto Classical

from Piano Street’s Classical Piano News https://www.pianostreet.com/blog/albums/andras-schiff-brahms-and-the-question-of-tradition-11125/

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alfrediusthegreat · 4 years

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Boekerij

Een hele uitgebreide boekenlijst

Oswald Spengler - De ondergang van het avondland

Oswald Spengler - De mens en de techniek

Plato - De republiek

Aristoteles - Metafysica

Aristoteles - Poëtica

Aristoteles - Retorica

Aristoteles - Politica

Aristoteles - Ethica Nicomachea

Thomas van Aquino - Summa Theologica

Augustinus - De stad van God

Niccolò Machiaveli - De vorst

G.W.F. Hegel - Hoofdlijnen van de rechtsfoilosofie

G.W.F. Hegel - De filosofie van de objectieve geest

G.W.F. Hegel - Phenomenology of the Spirit

Arthur Schopenhauer - De vrijheid van de wil

Arthur Schopenhauer - Bespiegelingen over levenswijsheid

Arthur Schopenhauer - De wereld als wil en voorstelling

Friedrich Nietzsche - Voorbij goed en kwaad

Friedrich Nietzsche - Aldus sprak Zarathoestra

Friedrich Nietzsche - Menselijk, al te menselijk

Friedrich Nietzsche - De vrolijke wetenschap

Friedrich Nietzsche - De geboorte van de tragedie

Friedrich Nietzsche - De genealogie van de moraal

Carl Schmitt - The Concept of the Political

Carl Schmitt - Political Theology

Carl Schmitt - Dictatorship

Carl Schmitt - The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

Martin Heidegger - Being and Time

Martin Heidegger - De vraag naar de techniek

Martin Heidegger - Basic Wriings

Nicolai Hartmann - Moral Values

Nicolai Hartmann - New Ways of Ontology

Nicolai Hartmann - Moral Phenomena

Irving Babbitt - Democracy and Leadership

Irving Babbitt - On Literature, Culture, and Religion

Robert Nisbet - The Quest for Community

Robert Nisbet - Conservatism, Dream and REliaty

Christopher Lasch - The Culture of Narcissism

Christopher Lasch - The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

Christopher Lasch - The Minimal Self

Friedrich von Hayek - The Road to Serfdom

Friedrich von Hayek - Individualism and Economic Order

Friedrich von Hayek - The Counter-Revolution of Science

Friedrich von Hayek - Law, Legislation and Liberty

Otto F. Bollnow - Mensch Und Raum

José Ortega y Gasset - De opstand der horden

MIchael Oakeshott - Rationalism in Politics & Other Essays

Michael Oakeshott - Voice of Liberal Learning

Michael Oakeshott - On Human Conduct

Michael Oakeshott - Experience and its Modes

Michael Oakeshott - Hobbes on Civil Association

Michael Oakeshott - On History and other Essays

James Burnham - Suicide of the West

James Burnham - The Managerial Revolution

James Burnham - Congress and the American Tradition

James Burnham - De strijd om de wereldmacht

Bertrand de Jouvenel - The Ethics of Redistribution

Bertrand de Jouvenel - Sovereignty

Bertrand de Jouvenel - The Pure Theory of Politics

Christopher Dawson - Religion and the Rise of Western Culture

Christopher Dawson - The Movement of World Revolution

Christopher Dawson - Progress and Religion

Christopher Dawson - The Age of the Gods

Christopher Dawson - The Gods of Revolution

Wilhelm Röpke - A Humane Economy

Hans-Hermann Hoppe - Democracy, The God That Failed

Murray Rothbard - Anatomy of the State

Milton Friedman - Capitalism and Freedom

Milton Friedman - Why Government Is the Problem

Milton Friedman - Free to Choose

Milton Friedman - A Monetary History of the United State

Milton Friedman - Price Theory

Julius Evola - Ride the Tiger

Julius Evola - Men Among the Ruins

Julius Evola - Revolt Against the Modern World

Julius Evola - Meditations on the Peak

Julius Evola - Metaphysics of War

Julius Evola - The Doctrine of the Awakening

Julius Evola - Fascism Viewed from the Right

John Stuart Mill - On Liberty

John Stuart Mill - Principles of Political Economy and Chapters on Socialism

Thomas Hobbes - Leviathan

John Locke - Two Treatises of Government

Adam Smith - Wealth of Nations

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Origin of Inequality

David Hume - An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding

Karl Marx - Communistisch Manifesto

Karl Marx - Kapitaal

Edmund Burke - Reflections on the Revolution in France

Thomas Sowell - Basic Economics

John Maynard Keynes - The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

Ayn Rand - Atlas Shrugged

Thomas Piketty - Capital and Ideology

Thomas Piketty - Capital in the Twenty-First Century

Thomas Piketty - The Economics of Inequality

Naomi Kelin - The Shock Doctrine

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon - What Is Property?

Robert Nozick - Anarchy, State, and Utopia

Robert Nozick - The Examined Life

John Rawls - A Theory of Justice

John Rawls - Political Liberalism

Bertrand Russell - History of Western Philosophy

Theodore Kaczynski - Technological Slavery

Theodore Kaczynski - Industrial Society and Its Future

Theodore Kaczynski - Anti-Tech Revolution

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

David Stern, Was Wittgenstein a Jew?, In Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy, ed. James Klagge, 237 (2001)

In my mind's eye, I can already hear posterity talking about me, instead of listening to me, those, who if they knew me, would certainly be a much more ungrateful public.

And I must do this: not hear the other in my imagination, but rather myself. Le., not watch the other, as he watches me - for that is what I do - rather, watch myself. What a trick, and how unending the constant temptation to look to the other, and away from myself.

--- Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen: Tagebucher 1930-1932/1936-1937, 15 November or 15 December, 1931

1. Was Wittgenstein Jewish?

Did Ludwig Wittgenstein consider himself a Jew? Should we? Wittgenstein repeatedly wrote about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 1997) and the biographical studies of Wittgenstein by Brian Mc- Guinness (1988), Ray Monk (1990), and B€la Szabados (1992, 1995, 1997, 1999) make it clear that this writing about Jewishness was a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work. On the other hand, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein's thoughts about the Jews as relatively unimportant. Many studies of Wittgenstein's philosophy as a whole do not even mention the matter, and those that do usually give it little attention. For instance, Joachim Schulte recognizes that "Jewishness was an important theme for Wittgenstein" (1992, 16-17) but says very little more, except that the available evidence makes precise statements difficult. Rudolf Haller's approach in his paper, "What do Wittgenstein and Weininger have in Common?," is probably more representative of the received wisdom among Wittgenstein experts. In the very first paragraph, he makes it clear that the sole concern of his paper is the question of "deeper philosophical common ground" between Wittgenstein and Weininger, and not "attitudes on feminity or Jewishness" (Haller 1988, 90) . Those who have written about Wittgenstein on the Jews have drawn very different conclusions. He has been lauded as a "rabbinical" thinker (Nieli 1987) and a far-sighted critic of anti-Semitism (Szabados 1999), and criticized as a self-hating anti- Semite (Lurie 1989), as well as condemned for uncritically accepting the worst racist prejudices (Wasserman 1990). Monk (1990) provides a rather more nuanced reading of the evidence . He presents Wittgenstein as briefly attracted to using anti-Semitic expressions in the early 1930s, but only as a way of thinking about his own failings. Most discussions of the topic take it for granted that Wittgenstein was a Jew, but recently McGuinness (1999/ 2001) has contended that even this is a mistake.

In this essay, I argue that much of this debate is confused, because the notion of being a Jew, of Jewishness, is itself ambiguous and problematic. Instead, we would do better to start by asking in what senses Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew. Another way of putting this is to say that we should first consider different ways of seeing Wittgenstein as a Jew. Before rushing to judgment, we need to consider what it could mean to say that Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew, or an anti-Semite. This is not just a matter of tabulating various possible definitions of these expressions, but of considering the different contexts - cultural, social, personal - in which those terms can be used, and their significance in those contexts. In doing so, we need to give critical attention not only to the various criteria for being a Jew that Wittgenstein would have been acquainted with, and the presuppositions he might have taken for granted about Jews and Judaism, but also the ones that we use in our discussion of Wittgenstein as a Jew, and our motives for doing so. One of the great dangers in writing philosophical biography is the risk of turning the study of a philosopher's life and work into vicarious autobiography, wishful thinking, or worse.

I begin my discussion of the question of Wittgenstein's Jewishness by looking at two passages by Brian McGuinness that offer very different answers. The first, from the first volume of his biography of Wittgenstein, subtitled "Young Ludwig (1889-1921)," takes it for granted that Wittgenstein did think of himself as a Jew, at least during the first half of his life, and gives some indication of how important that fact was to him. The passage begins with a reference to Otto Weininger, who Wittgenstein identified, in a passage written in 1931 (1980/1998, 18-19/16-17), as an important influence. In the same piece of writing, Wittgenstein also discussed the connection between his Jewishness, his character, and his way of doing philosophy. Wittgenstein repeatedly recommended Weininger's pseudoscientific and anti- Semitic Sex and Character (1903) to friends, including G. E. Moore in the early 1930s and G. E. M. Anscombe in the late 1940s. As we shall see, Monk's biography also emphasizes Wittgenstein's indebtedness to Weininger's ideas about talent and genius, and their close connection to his views about Jewishness and femininity.

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.... 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 . (McGuinness 1988, 42)

In the passage quoted above, McGuinness puts his finger on two leading themes that must be addressed by anyone interested in the question of whether Wittgenstein was a Jew, or his views about the Jews : the nature of the Weininger connection, and the nature of Wittgenstein's "dissociation" from Judaism. First, Wittgenstein did, on occasion, speak of himself as a Jew, and the understanding of what it means to be a Jew we find in his writings - his conception of Jewishness, so to speak - makes use of ideas of Weininger's. Most of his surviving writing on this topic dates from the early 1930s, and much of it has been published in Culture and Value: these are the "later notes" McGuinness (1988, 42) refers to above in passing, and discusses in some detail in (1999/2001). (I examine this material in §§ 4 f. below.)

The second important point McGuinness touches on in the passage above is that Wittgenstein did, on occasion, deny his Jewishness, and this was a charged matter for him. In his last sentence, McGuinness alludes to Wittgen- stein's confessions to friends and family in 1936 and 1937 that he had misrepresented his Jewish ancestry. In 1935, the German government enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which specified that only those people with three or more Jewish grandparents were to be classified as Jews; those with one or two Jewish grandparents were classified as different grades of mixed race . In 1936 and 1937, while at work on what would become the first 180 sections of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein confessed to friends and family that he had misrepresented the extent of his Jewish descent, claiming that one grandparent had been a Jew, when actually three of them were. In 1938, as a result of the Anschluss with Austria, the Nuremberg Laws became applicable to the Wittgenstein family. Wittgenstein, who was living in Britain at the time, took British citizenship. His brother Paul fled to Switzerland in July 1938. Meanwhile his sisters stayed in Austria, eventually making a deal with the Berlin authorities, under which they repatriated very substantial foreign assets in exchange for classifying them as non-Jewish, an arrangement Wittgenstein actively supported. (McGuinness 1999, 74-75; 2001, 231; Monk 1990,396-400.)

The discussion of Wittgenstein's views about the Jews and his own Jewish- ness in McGuinness' Young Ludwig (1988) does not address the ways in which these terms have been used. In "Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewish- ness:' McGuinness (1999/2001) touches on this issue. He distinguishes vari- ous religious, scientific, and racial criteria for Jewishness and reviews the biographical evidence that he considers most relevant, including pasages from Culture and Value.The second passage from McGuinness that I want to take as a point of departure, the final paragraph of that paper, takes a sharply different position to the first. There he concludes that:

In the end, then, Wittgenstein did not think of himself as Jewish, nor need we do so. The concept is an attractive, although, or because, a confused one.It is possible to think that it would have been well if all "Jews" had felt solidarity, or to think that they now ought to do so - it is also possible to think the contradictory or even the opposite of these things. In any case these are aspirations, not realities (McGuinness 1999, 76; 2001, 231).

At first sight, the two passages seem to offer diametrically opposed answers to the question of whether Wittgenstein thought of himself as a Jew :the first says that he did, the second, that he didn't. Taking a cue from the words "in the end," which can be used to sum up a person's overall outlook, or their view at the end of their life, the apparent contradiction could be resolved if the passages referred to different phases of Wittgenstein's life. The first is taken from a chapter on Wittgenstein's childhood and schooldays, while the second sums up a piece about his life as a whole. The first passage mentions "later writings," written when Wittgenstein was in his early forties, and alludes to confessions made in his late forties, and these are topics in the more recent piece, too. The second passage certainly suggests that when McGuinness had earlier talked of Wittgenstein's Jewishness, he, too, had fallen prey to a certain kind of muddled thinking, taking Wittgenstein to have thought of himself as a Jew because it cast him in a sympathetic light, and had mistaken an attractive interpretation for the truth.

McGuinness does not say who he has in mind when he speaks of the "attractions" of thinking of Wittgenstein as a Jew, but in a note to the paper he speaks disparagingly of others who have made this error, not his own earlier work. In that note, at the end of the paragraph quoted above, he writes:

Having arrived so far, I have the impression that the polemical part of what I have said has in essence, been said before.... It seems always necessary to repeat it, and yet by airing the topic one risks nourishing it . This is part of the fascination I speak of. (McGuinness 1999, 76, n. 40; 2001, n. 44).

He gives, however, very little indication of the principal targets of his polemic; the only writings he explicitly mentions are an unpublished paper by J.J. Ross and a piece published in Hebrew by Yuval Lurie. Nor does he include references to those he is criticizing in his bibliography.This is, on the face of it, odd, for the scholarly literature on Wittgenstein's Jewishness is, for the most part, not well known. Perhaps this is because of McGuinness's concern that "by airing the topic one risks nourishing it," an obscure object of fascination that he apparently considers best left unnamed. Cornish's (1998) speculative and imaginative account of Wittgenstein's Jewishness as the driving force behind Hitler's anti-Semitism is a good example of the dangers of applying the conspiracy theory approach to Wittgenstein, but it seems unlikely that it was the focus of McGuinness's attention . Perhaps his principal target here is Ray Monk's biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, which takes the Weiningerian conception of the "duty of genius" as its leading theme in interpreting Wittgenstein's life and work, even though Monk's excellent biography, which rightly gives Wittgenstein's Jewishness and his relationship to Weininger a central place, is never cited or mentioned in McGuinness's paper.

Wittgenstein's favorite passage, which he quoted frequently, came from the introduction to Hertz's Principles of Mechanics.There, Hertz summed up his answer to debates over the meaning of terms such as 'force' or `electricity' : because the term has accumulated contradictory meanings, the only solution is to give some of them up. "When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered ;but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions" (1899, 8). Wittgenstein thought of his philosophy as analogous : a matter of uncovering inconsistencies in our use of everyday terms that lead us to talk nonsense yet think we make sense. In "Wittgenstein and the Idea of Jewishness," Mc- Guinness rightly observes that 'Jewishness' is just such a term . Yet instead of developing a Hertzian critique of 'Jewishness,' he tries to show that Jews and Jewishness in any sense were of very little significance for Wittgenstein.As part of his discussion of this issue, he gives a list of meanings of 'Jewishness' that reads as follows:

We have here at least five different sets of phenomena, or supposed phenomena :[1] the religion; [2] descent from persons professing it ; [3] the culture of assimilatedJews who still formed something of a community; [4] the common genetic heritage of Jews (thought to exist); [51 and (distinct from this) the supposition of such a heritage, typically the assumption by the anti-Semitic that it did exist and was an excrescence on European culture, with which we may class the mirror-image of this assumption, which finds in Jewish consciousness the origins of the modem world view .Of these five, only the first and the last are reasonably clearly definable and certainly existed, though they are by no means identical or very closely related. Jewishness, "das Judentwn", is surely one of those words of which Heinrich Hertz spoke in a favorite passage of Wittgenstein's. (McGuinness 1999, 70; 2001, 228. I have added the bracketed numbering).

This list not only omits some important senses of the term; the answers it offers raise more problems than they solve. McGuinness gives no reason for thinking that either "the religion" or the suppositions of the anti-Semitic can be clearly defined. The Jewish religion has a history spanning several millennia, and has comprised many competing sects and splinter groups, each of which have argued both among themselves and with their rivals about what it means to be a Jew. Anti-semitism is also an extremely variable phenomenon, and has taken very different forms. Oddly, the definitions of being Jewish that most Jews would offer, if asked - either being born of a Jewish mother, or having converted to Judaism - are not on McGuinness's list. Nor does he mention the idea that anyone with a Jewish ancestor is a Jew - akin to the "one-drop" rule favored by white American racists - or the 1935 Nuremburg Laws' definition of a Jew : having at least three Jewish grandparents . Finally, in talking about anti-Semitism, he only mentions a hereditary conception of Jewishness, passing over the Weiningerian idea of Jewishness as a personality syndrome, akin to effeminacy, a connection of traits that could equally well be manifested by those with little or no Jewish ancestry - for instance, both Wittgenstein and Weininger were prepared to extend the concept of Jewish- ness to other groups, such as the English (cf. Monk 1990, 313). The drawing of distinctions between races, and the principles on which racial boundaries are demarcated, are among the most charged questions one can ask about race, not only for those who apply them, and to whom they are applied, but also for those who study race. No list of definitions could do justice to the historical and genealogical dimension of this issue.

Unfortunately, much of the rest of McGuinness's recent discussion of Wittgenstein's Jewishness (1999/2001), leading up to his conclusion that Wittgenstein was not a Jew, loses sight of the rich possibilities suggested by Wittgenstein's favorite passage from Hertz, and is highly selective and tendentious: he seems determined to cut through this Gordian knot by doing the best he can to show that Jews and Jewishness in any sense were of very little significance for Wittgenstein. In particular, McGuinness seems to lay considerable stress on the claim that the Wittgenstein family would not have identified themselves as Jews, and neither would their immediate circle have done so. For instance, in the first paragraph of that paper, McGuinness emphasizes that no one at the turn of the century would have thought of describing Wittgenstein's relatives as a Jewish family (1999, 57 ; 2001, 221). Yet his insistence on the Hertzian - and Wittgensteinian - insight that the concept of a "Jew" is ambiguous and inconsistent suggests that "Was Wittgenstein a Jew?" is a question that stands in need of philosophical treatment, rather than a direct answer.

Indeed, the rapid and insistent move from the descriptive - "Wittgenstein was not a Jew" - to the prescriptive - "we don't need to do so" - suggests that we need to look more closely at his motivation for this overly insistent conclusion. Comparing McGuinness's two accounts, one gets the impression that he has followed the path of dissociation from Jewishness that he originally saw in Wittgenstein; he begins by insisting on Wittgenstein's need to deny that he was a Jew, and ends up denying that Wittgenstein was a Jew. Contradictions between different conceptions of Jewishness are not so much the subject of McGuinness's discussion as enacted in its development . Indeed, we might well ask what could have motivated someone as well-informed as McGuinness to make such an injudicious claim. Why is McGuinness so eager to silence those he disagrees with that he does not even name them? To answer these questions, we must look more closely at the connections be- tween what Wittgenstein had to say about the Jews, his life, and his philosophical work. The principal biographical reasons for rejecting the claim that Wittgenstein was not a Jew can be summarized quickly, however. Wittgenstein was certainly not, in any sense, a practicing Jew; he, his parents, and three of his grandparents, were baptized by the Catholic Church. On the other hand, he, and his brothers and sisters, knew that three of their four grandparents were of Jewish descent, and this fact was known to others. For instance, both Monk (1990, 14) and McGuinness (1988, 49) tell the story of how the young Wittgenstein wanted to lie about his Jewish background in order to join a Viennese gymnastic club, and had to be dissuaded by his brother Paul . Both biographers make it clear that while the Wittgenstein family presented themselves in public as Christians, it was widely known that they were of Jewish descent. In a diary entry written after the German-AustrianAnschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass, Jewish identity papers, as an "extraordinarily difficult situation" and compared it to "hot iron" that would bum in his pocket (MS 120,14.3.1938; cf. Monk 1990, 389 f.) To simply say that Wittgenstein was not a Jew, and didn't think of himself as a Jew, hardly does justice to this complex state of affairs . It is Wittgenstein's response to this predicament that is the principal concern of this essay.

After looking at the relationship between biography and philosophy (§ 2) and Wittgenstein's own thoughts on the topic (§ 3), the remainder of the essay considers two periods from the 1930s in which Wittgenstein's Jewishness occupied center-stage. First, in the early 1930s, his Jewishness was a recurrent theme in his writing and in his dreams . In 1931, he discussed the Jews and Jewishness at some length, connecting his character as a "Jewish thinker" with the nature of his philosophical work (§ 4 ; cf. Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 12, 13, 16, 18-21, 22/14, 15, 16-19, 23). In 1929 and 1932, he wrote down dreams about his Jewish descent and racial identity (§ 5 ; cf. MS 107, 219, 1.12.29; MS 183, 137, 28.1.32.) Second, in the latter half of the 1930s, Wittgenstein's Jewishness once again became a problem for him. In 1936 and 1937 he made a point of confessing to family and friends that he had misled others about the extent of his Jewish descent (Monk 1990, 367 f .) and in 1938 and 1939, he had to confront the implications of the German invasion of his homeland, both for himself and his immediate family (§ 6) .

2. Life and Work, Biography and Philosophy

As these passages already make clear, asking whether Wittgenstein saw himself as a Jew, and whether we should, are questions of considerable interest in their own right. They also raise more general problems both for the writing of biography in general, and philosophical biography in particular. Any biography turns the chaotic and conflicting events of a person's life into a coherent story. Biographers usually aim at a balanced and comprehensive account of the life of their subject, but that has proved to be an extremely elusive goal. Lives are rarely consistent, and are colored by changing motives and conflicting concerns. Those who write about them are tempted to give them greater coherence than they had when they were lived, a coherence that may be as much a product of the biographer as the life in question a further problem in the case of philosophical biography There is a further problem in the case of philosophical biography. Biographers are constitutionally inclined to explain the principal features of a person's philosophical writing in terms of the person's life - his or her character, or formative experience, or social circumstances. Most philosophers, on the other hand, regard any such explanation as a particularly egregious form of the naturalistic fallacy, holding that the values, or reasons, expressed in a philosopher's work cannot be understood in causal terms.

The question of the relationship between a philosopher's life and philosophy rarely receives the careful attention it deserves. Usually, the answers that are offered favor one extreme or the other - either the work is to be explained by the life, or the life and work are independent - and these diametrically opposed answers are usually taken for granted by their supporters. Many nonphilosophers, and some biographically minded philosophers, find it attractive to explain the philosopher's work in terms of the philosopher's life. A very wide range of positions fit under this broad heading, but they all maintain that some aspect of the person's life determines, explains, or is important for an understanding of the content of the work. Psychoanalytic accounts of the origins of philosophical views in the unconscious, or the claim that a philosopher's unreasoned convictions, class, or social interests underpin his or her arguments, are leading examples of this kind of approach .

If asked, most philosophers would sharply separate the arguments a philosopher gave from a discussion of his or her biography. In particular, they would insist that a philosopher's arguments stand or fall quite independently of what we know about his or her life. Life and work must be kept apart, at least when it comes to assessing the content and significance of the philosopher's work. While a philosopher's life undoubtedly plays a part in the causal processes that lead to the production of his or her writings, such matters are not relevant to the reasoned evaluation of the resultant philosophical position . Mixing one's account of a philosopher's life experience, convictions, and influences, on the one hand, and his or her philosophy, on the other, is a category mistake.

Insofar as this view, on which there is a sharp distinction between a philosopher's life and arguments, is usually taken for granted by most analytic philosophers and historians of philosophy, it is rarely defended or even discussed explicitly in the current philosophical literature . For the most part, those who accept this position do so by refraining from drawing connections between life and work, without explicitly arguing against them. Thus, most books and journal articles on Wittgenstein's philosophy either do not discuss his life, or keep it entirely separate from discussion of his philosophy . Most of those who do discuss the relationship between life and work do so because they reject the separation of biography and philosophy, and hold that a philosopher's biography can be fruitfully connected with his or her philosophy (propenents would include Engelmann, McGuinness, Monk, Szabados, Nevo, Nyiri, Lurie, Cornish, Nieli, Sass, Scharfstein).

Popper is perhaps the best-known defender of the view that the philosopher's life is irrelevant to the appraisal of his or her arguments, but his views are seldom mentioned in the literature on the relationship between Wittgenstein's life and work, perhaps because Popper and Wittgenstein were enemies, and represent approaches to philosophy that have often been contrasted with each other (cf. Munz 1985). There are wildly conflicting stories over how their confrontation at the Cambridge Moral Science Club, where Popper was a visiting speaker in 1946, ended, but what is most interesting for our purposes is that Popper was there to defend the view that there are substantive philosophical problems, and this was the point over which they fell out. The only Wittgenstein interpreter who appeals to Popper's views on the independence of biography and philosophy is Bartley (1973/1985), who maintains that Wittgenstein's character helps to explain his personal influence, but is irrelevant to his philosophy.

One of the rare exceptions to this rule is Hans-Johann Glock (2001), who maintains that any attempt to understand philosophical writing in general, and Wittgenstein's writing in particular, in biographical terms fails to do justice to its reasoned and argumentative character . (Another exception is Conant [1991], discussed in § 3.) Glock's argument proceeds from the premise that Wittgenstein's writing, early and late, includes many passages that must be read as philosophical arguments, arguments that must be taken seriously. Due to the central role of argument in Wittgenstein's writing, Glock classifies him as a "rationalist:' Rationalists, in his sense of the terns, provide an argumentative and reasoned defense of their position. "Irrationalists" appeal to something unreasoned, such as religious or existential commitment, or the idea that different philosophies are different ways of seeing things.

Glock is certainly right that Wittgenstein wrote arguments, and took them very seriously, but this is only a problem for an extreme irrationalist reading of Wittgenstein, one that denies that arguments have any real significance in Wittgenstein's philosophy. This does nothing to undermine a quietist irrationalism, in which the point of the arguments in Wittgenstein's writing is to make problematic, and so subvert, the power of philosophical argument . It is possible that Wittgenstein's use of argument should be interpreted as defending a positive philosophical position, and that it is unconnected with the way he lived his life. If it is to be a plausible claim about Wittgenstein's own views, it must be backed up not just with philosophical argument, but with evidence that Wittgenstein accepted that argument, and this is not provided in Glock's argument.

My own reading of Wittgenstein, and the position I defend in this paper, is a quietist irrationalism, a position that draws on both the rationalist and irrationalist approaches to philosophy as characterized by Glock . Like the rationalist, I read Wittgenstein's writing argumentatively, as giving a reasoned defense of certain philosophical positions. Like the irrationalist, I read Wittgenstein's writing as trying to show that the unreasoned, the outer limits of philosophical argument, play a much greater part in philosophy than the

rationalist thinks. Philosophical argument rarely gets the last word in Wittgenstein's writing. Philosophy for Wittgenstein, when it is not criticizing the argumentative hubris of the rationalist, is a matter of description, not explanation. A philosopher who wishes to show the limitations of argument can hardly help making use of arguments - the works of the ancient skeptics, or Plato's early dialogues, perhaps the principal source of Glock's "irrationalist" tradition, are full of arguments. For someone who thinks that differences in philosophy come down to different ways of looking at things, or world views, or matters of temperament and character, may still depend on argument to defend the view that argument is not, ultimately, what matters in philosophy .

In a conversation with Oets Bouwsma about the difficulties involved in writing a completely honest autobiography, Wittgenstein argued that the author's motives will inevitably get in the way of the autobiographical project of giving an account of oneself and maintaining "a consistent attitude towards that account" (Bouwsma 1986, 70). The autobiographer aims to give a balanced survey of what happened to him or her, how he or she acted, and the motives for those actions. But no one can maintain an impartial attitude towards him or herself, for no one can be indifferent to one's own weaknesses or failings, and so any account one gives of oneself will inevitably be unstable:

No one can write objectively about himself and this is because there will always be some motive for doing so . And the motives will change as you write . And this becomes complicated, for the more intent one is on being "objective" the more one will notice the varying motives that enter in (Bouwsma 1986, 71) .

Wittgenstein was not just suggesting that self-serving motives will lead the autobiographer who tries to tell the truth to put the best possible light on whatever he or she is impelled to relate . He was also casting doubt on the very idea that telling the truth about onself can ever be a matter of simply providing accurate information about one's past, for the reason that whatever story one tells will always be colored by one's current preoccupations and concerns, which will, in turn, be affected by the telling of that story. Objectivity, which at first sight might seem to be a matter of impartially separating onself from one's involvement in what one did, turns out, on closer inspection, to be a particularly charged stance, precisely because of its claim to stand above the fray. The very effort to give a balanced and consistent account of the difficult questions about oneself will inevitably be marked by a certain instability and inconsistency in what one says, because no one can be indifferent about such charged matters.

In "Autobiography after Wittgenstein," a perceptive discussion of these concerns, Bdla Szabados contends that what Wittgenstein brings to our attention is that the very attempt to maintain such a consistent and coherent attitude, as if time had stopped and the writer is dead, involves the autobiographer in some form of myopia or self-deception . Such an aim fuels omissions, rationalizations, inventions: suppressions of salient, raw, stubborn memories which confound this imperial attitude of pretended wholeness or single-mindedness. It also masks the present concerns of the writer. So the traditional autobiographical project appears to contain inherently its seeds of self-destruction . Its aim, disengaged self-knowledge, objective stock-taking and cataloguing of truths about oneself is turned on its head; its goal ends up in self-deceit; its primary intention is frustrated (Szabados 1992, 7).

Szabados' essay explores the strategies of confession, self-acceptance, and self-transformation with which Wittgenstein attempted to overcome these difficulties, and closes by bringing out some of the similarities between Wittgenstein's way of doing philosophy and his ideas about autobiography . Traditionally, both autobiography and philosophy aim at objectivity, detach- ment, and self-understanding, and for this reason, both are fraught with the risk of self-deception. Like philosophy, autobiography is "a working on oneself, on one's own way of seeing things, on one's own interpretation and what one expects of it" (Szabados 1992, 10, paraphrasing Wittgenstein 1980/ 1998, 16/24).

At the very end of his discussion, Szabados uneasily brings up the topic of his own role in the essay he has just written about Wittgenstein's reflections on autobiography: he points out that he has, in effect, been impersonating Wittgenstein, claiming Wittgenstein's voice as his own, with the aim of evoking the reader's interest in his own concerns about autobiography as a kind of writing (Szabados 1992, 11). These final remarks touch on a point that is a central concern in this paper, for they make it clear that Szabados' problem is only a special case of a problem that arises for anyone writing about Wittgenstein's life or thought, regardless of whether that writing is autobiographical, biographical, or philosophical in character. For any attempt to write about Wittgenstein's life and thought - and for that matter, anyone else's life and thought - must face the very issues that make autobiography particularly problematic. While it is true that the biographer writes about someone else's life, rather than his or her own, this is no guarantee that he or she will be any more capable of Olympian impartiality than the autobiographer. Indeed, if Wittgenstein's train of thought about the impossibility of giving a consistent account of one's own motivations is correct, then anyone who aims at a coherent account of the life of another will have to confront that hermeneutic pitfall twice over. The biographer will not only have to come to terms with the inconsistencies and tensions in the subject's life, but will also have his or her own vested interests in the project - interests that may well be just as complex as the conflicting motivations that pull at the autobiographer.

In "Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea," Ray Monk (2001) draws a contrast between two ideal types of philosophical biography, which one might call "explanatory" and "descriptive:" An explanatory biography takes the life of its subject as grist for the author's mill, setting the events of the subject's life within the context of the author's pet theories about the nature of life. Monk gives the example of Sartre's biography of Baudelaire, and Sartre's use of Baudelaire's abandonment by his mother as an opportunity to advance his existentialist thesis that we all choose our fate - a thesis that is argued at length, but not supported by quotations from Baudelaire, or other evidence that he believed the views Sartre attributes to him. Such a biography is not really a biography at all, Monk argues, but rather a covert and self- aggrandizing argument for the author's own views. A descriptive biography, on the other hand, presents the events of the subject's life in rich detail, carefully choosing the most telling stories and drawing connections between them, but self-effacingly avoids moralizing or drawing conclusions from the material it presents. The author of such a biographer aims to be "part of the frame," rather than "part of the picture:' Such a biography does not have its form imposed on it by the biographer, as the "frame" simile initially suggests, but is rather due to the interconnected character of the life that is being described.

Monk cites Boswell's life of Johnson as his paradigmatic instance of a good descriptive biography, and said this was the method he had followed in his life of Wittgenstein. He notes, however, that he had found it much harder to follow this method successfully in the case of his Russell biography. In part, this was because Wittgenstein's was an unusually unified life. He never married, had few close friends, almost no possessions, and preferred to live alone. Monk's life of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Witgenstein: The Duty of Genius, takes as its leading theme the notion of the "duty of genius," an ethical imperative inspired by Wittgenstein's reading of Otto Weininger, an Austrian fin de si8cle popular psychologist and philosopher.

Perhaps Wittgenstein's unusual sensitivity to the paradoxes and inconsistencies involved in trying to tell a coherent and consistent life story was partly due to the intensity with which he strove to lead such a life. Monk's self-effacing approach to Wittgenstein's biography is particularly appropriate to the life that Wittgenstein led, or wished to lead. Yet to attempt to tell the story of someone's life in such a unified way runs the danger that it will pass over, or smooth over, the cracks and fissures that signal the inconsistencies and incoherences in even the most single-minded of lives . Indeed, it may well be the case that the impossibility of arriving at an entirely settled perspective on a life emerges most clearly precisely when one attempts to fit the whole life into a single frame.

3. Wittgenstein on Philosophy and Biography

There were times when Wittgenstein gave forceful expression to the irrationalist views that a person's philosophy is a matter of temperament, or a person's ethics a product of circumstance:

if it is said on occasion that (someone's) philosophy is a matter of temperament, there is some truth in this. A preference for certain comparisons [Gleichnisse] is something we call a matter of temperament & far more disagreements rest on this than appears at first sight // could be called a matter of temperament & a much larger proportion of disagreements rest on this than may appear// (Wittgenstein, 1980/1998, 20/17-18, 1931).

It is not unheard of that someone's character may be influenced by the external world (Weininger). For that only means that, as we know from experience, people change with circumstances. If someone asks: How could the environment coerce someone, the ethical in someone? - the answer is that he may indeed say "No human being has to give way to coercion," but all the same under such circumstances someone will do such & such.

"You don't HAVE to, I can show you a (different) way out, - but you won't take it" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 84/95, 30.3.50).

The first of these two quotations is from 1931, a time when he was particularly preoccupied with Weiningerian questions about the relationship between originality and influence. Thus this paragraph immediately precedes a passage on how the Jews are "experienced as a sort of disease" within European history. This passage is quoted and discussed toward the end of section 4. Comparisons [Gleichnisse] play an important role in Wittgenstein's philosophical writing, and in his understanding of the particular character of his approach to philosophy, another topic discussed further in section 4. The second quotation, which includes an explicit parenthetical reference to Weininger, is an example of how the topic of influence still attracted Wittgenstein's attention many years later. The reference to Weininger is by way of contrast, not agreement: Weininger did regard character as necessarily inner, and so did think it outrageous to say that character is a product of circumstance.

Yet, on other occasions, Wittgenstein gave voice to the rationalist conviction that philosophy and life are separate, and philosophy primary . Perhaps this is because it is much easier to think of philosophy, or character, as a product of temperament, or external circumstances, when one is thinking about others' convictions - and naturally adopts an external perspective - than in one's own case. In a manuscript written in 1948, he expressed his conviction that he should not publish a philosophical autobiography in which the specific difficulties he had felt were "chewed over." The real importance of his work, he thought, lay in the "remedies" he had developed, not the particular causes that had occasioned them:

These difficulties are interesting for me, who am caught up in them, but not necessarily for other people. They are difficulties of my thinking, brought about by my development. They belong, so to speak, in a diary, not in a book. And even if this diary might be interesting for someone some day, I cannot publish it. My stomach- aches are not what is interesting but the remedies - if any - that I've found for them (Wittgenstein, MS 136, 144, 24.1.48).

Notice that Wittgenstein's autobiographical difficulties are figured in vivid bodily terms, both as something that should not be "chewed over," and as the cause of his "stomach-aches." Perhaps Wittgenstein thought that overly close attention to his personal predicament would detract from the dignity and seriousness of the work he had written. As a result, he claims that his specific difficulties are really only of interest to himself, but not to others, and so should not be published.

Despite his inability to publish them - or any of the other writing that he did after 1929 - he did leave the corpus of his writing for his literary trustees to publish "as they see fit." (The words quoted are from Wittgenstein's will .)

As a result, it was his literary heirs who had to distinguish between his "philosophical" work on the one hand and the "nonphilosophical" work on the other, as though these dismembered limbs could be surgically separated from the corpus of typescripts and manuscripts that Wittgenstein left to posterity. As a matter of fact, the majority of that material does take the form of a diary, a dated sequence of notes, first drafts, and revisions that provides an intimate record of his struggle with the difficulties that occasioned his more polished philosophical writing . If one turns to this (still mostly unpublished) source material, one can see that Wittgenstein's writing arises out of a struggle between opposing intuitions and his attempts to resolve that struggle. One of the strongest currents of thought in his later philosophy is the idea that one cannot dissociate the first impulses toward a philosophical train of thought from its most finished expression, an idea that motivates the fragmentary arguments one finds in the opening sections of the Philosophical Investigations.The debate that animates so much of his writing is a conversation with interlocutory voices that express intuitions and instinctive convictions, not polished philosophical theories.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein says that what he does is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use (1953, § 116): but what is the everyday use of a word that we are led back to, the "language which is its original home"? (Ibid., my translation) Most biographically based accounts of Wittgenstein's thought find an esoteric doctrine at this point, a concealed view that supposedly animates his philosophical writ- ing, a view that is extracted from one aspect or another of his life . Leading candidates have included his religious convictions, which have been variously

construed as mysticism, rabbinicism, Catholic, Tolstoyan or Kierkegaardian Christianity, or his ascetic and self-denying ethical outlook. (There is a substantial literature along these lines . Representative examples include Chatterjee 1996, Cornish 1998, Edwards 1982, Engelmann 1967, McGuinness 1988, Janik and Toulmin 1973, and Nieli 1987.) Such biographically motivated readings depend on the premise that the real philosophy lies outside of the texts that Wittgenstein wrote, and that Wittgenstein's writing is to be decoded by attributing to him views that can be found in the books he read and admired.

James Conant's "Throwing Away the Top of the Ladder" (1991), a critical review of McGuinness (1988) and Duffy (1987), argues that approaching Wittgenstein's philosophy in terms of his biography does not do justice to his views about the nature of his writing. In other words, he maintains that the answers McGuinness and Duffy look for in their reading of Wittgenstein's life are to be found in the books he wrote, and the quite unusual way in which they are written. Conant charges them with using "the philosopher's life to decipher the ethical teaching that they know on independent grounds must be buried somewhere in his work" (1991, 351). Their claim, he replies, that Wittgenstein's values were those of the authors he read or admired mistakenly presupposes that influence must take the form of accepting, or adapting, another's views. They overlook the possibility that Wittgenstein criticized the ideas he took from his reading. By prioritizing biography over philosophy in this way they deny that Wittgenstein's own writing could itself provide an answer to our questions about the point of his work . With regard to the Tractatus, Conant argues that the ethical point of the book is not be found in any particular doctrine, either within the text or in one of the philosophers who influenced its author, but rather in the overall project of the book, which is a matter of helping its reader "to achieve genuine clarity" :

The achievement of such clarity inevitably requires learning how to overcome one's own innermost tendencies to evade such clarity, and this presupposes the attainment of an understanding of the sources and natures of these tendencies themselves . It is a kind of self-knowledge that exacts a high standard of honesty . In this sense of ethical, if any of the Tractatus is engaged in an ethical activity, then all of it is . The reason the ethical teaching of the work has eluded its commentators is that they have looked for it somewhere in the text rather than everywhere . They evade the pervasiveness of the ethical demand by attempting to locate it in some particular region of the text . When their externally imposed requirement for a discrete ethical doctrine is frustrated by the text itself, they are forced to flee outside the text into biographical detail (Conant 1991, 353-4).

Yet if Conant is right that an ethical imperative permeates Wittgenstein's work, one should also expect to find it expressed in his life, too; not as an esoteric doctrine, but rather as an activity, a way of being in the world, that Wittgenstein regarded as being of a piece with the point of his philosophical work. Norman Malcolm's memoir of Wittgenstein provides testimony that he did see his teaching and ordinary life as continuous in just this way . He tells the story of how he and Wittgenstein had a serious break in their friendship as the result of a disagreement over the German accusation, shortly after the start of World War II, that the British government had been behind a recent attempt to assassinate Hitler. Wittgenstein said that it would not surprise him at all if it were true, while Malcolm believed the British were "too civilized and decent to attempt anything so underhand" and that "such an act was incompatible with the British 'national character': ' Malcolm's remark "made Wittgenstein extremely angry. He considered it to be a great stupidity and also an indication that I was not learning anything from the philosophical training he was trying to give me" (1984, 30).

Until this event, Wittgenstein had regularly gone for a short walk with Malcolm before giving his lectures; afterward he gave up the practice and the friendship cooled. In a letter written from Trinity College, Cambridge, in November 1944, Wittgenstein wrote that he: couldn't help thinking of a particular incident which seemed to me very important. You & I were walking along the river towards the railway bridge & we had a heated discussion in which you made a remark about "national character" that shocked me by it's primitiveness. I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any journalist in the use of the DANGEROUS phrases such people use for their own ends . You see, I know that it's difficult to think well about "certainty," "probability," "per- ception;' etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other peoples lives. And the trouble is that thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty.And when it's nasty then it's most important (Malcolm 1984, 93-4).

Much of Wittgenstein's work in the early 1930s takes the form of a struggle with traditional philosophical conceptions of the essence of language. When he wrote the Tractatus, he was convinced that everyday language must have an underlying logical structure, and that philosophy had the task of clarifying that structure. The Tractatus, however, does very little to actually analyze our ordinary language. After he returned to philosophical work in 1929, Wittgen- stein came to see that the notion of an underlying essential structure was a demand imposed by a certain way of seeing things, rather than something given to us by the nature of things. In the early 1930s, he applied this critique not only to his own earlier work, but also to the work of figures such as Spengler and Freud, arguing that they betrayed their own insights into partic- ular cultural formations by transforming them into ahistorical trims about human nature (cf. Wittgenstein 1980/1998; Monk 1990; Bouveresse 1995; Szabados 1999).

One aspect of the later Wittgenstein's legacy that is of particular value here arises out of his critique of the traditional philosophical search for clear-cut, ahistorical essences: he offers a positive characterization of our language as a loosely interrelated network of activities, that are not unified by any one essence, and that have to be located within a particular practical context. This critique of essentialism is, in turn, the product of an attraction to essentialism, and it would be a mistake to assume that Wittgenstein easily overcame the traditional ways of thinking that preoccupied him . These developments in Wittgenstein's work emerge at a time when he was rereading, and recom- mending to his friends, Otto Weininger's Sex and Character.In this connec- tion, Monk aptly observes that

What is perhaps most ironic is that, just as Wittgenstein was beginning to develop an entirely new method for tackling philosophical problems - a method that has no precedent in the entire tradition of Western philosophy (unless one finds a place for Goethe and Spengler in that tradition) - he should be inclined to asssess his own philosophical contribution within the framework of the absurd charge that the Jew was incapable of original thought (Monk 1990, 316).

4. Wittgenstein and Weininger

In 1931, Wittgenstein included Weininger on a short list of writers who had influenced him, in the context of a discussion of the relationship between originality and influence, a discussion which clearly echoes Weininger's own views about the relationship between merely reproductive talent and genuinely creative genius. The Wittgenstein-Weininger connection thus not only provides an opportunity for examining the influence of one philosopher on another, but also has the topic of originality and influence as one of its foci. Unfortunately, Wittgenstein never specified the nature of his debt to Weininger. The topic has become a matter of considerable speculation in recent years, especially following the publication of Ray Monk's biography, with its emphasis on the Weiningerian theme of the "duty of genius" as a key to understanding Wittgenstein's life and work.

Weininger's Sex and Character (1903/1906), an extraordinarily popular and much-discussed book, contains an extremely misogynistic, anti-Semitic, and homophobic theory of human nature. Weininger held that everyone is bisexual, by which he meant that we all are partially feminine and partially masculine. Masculinity and femininity are, in turn, to be understood as ideal types that are only partially instantiated in any given person. This provided the basis for an "explanation" of homosexuality and heterosexuality as products of the mathematical combination of these components. Each person seeks out a partner within the complementary amount of masculinity and feminity; homosexuals, having less than the usual amount of masculinity, if male, or feminity, if female, find the complementary balance in another person of the same sex.

In the opening chapters of Sex and Character, Weininger elaborates his fundamental law of sexual attraction, in the form of a pseudoscientific equation, complete with Greek letters and mathematical formalism . Weininger contrasted masculine originality with feminine reproductiveness, and held that the latter traits are particularly exemplified by Jews; race, sexuality, and gender are all closely aligned in the Weiningerian economy. Women, according to Weininger, are governed by the imperative to reproduce, and are constitutionally incapable of thinking clearly . Only the rare genius can over- come his feminine component and avoid the snares of physical sexuality ; the only honorable alternative is suicide. Weininger, like Spengler and Kraus, was preoccupied with the decay of modem times, and took an aristocratic view of the rise of science and business and the decline of art and music, a time without originality. The worst aspects of modernity are identified in terms of their Jewishness and femininity.

Little of this was new, but it did set out a synthesis of contemporary prejudices that captured the attention of a huge readership. Shortly after the publication of his book, at the age of 23, Weininger killed himself in the room in Beethoven's house where Beethoven died, thus assuring himself of the fame that eluded him during his lifetime . Later, Hitler was to refer to him as the only good Jew, because he killed himself when he realized that the Jew lives upon the decay of peoples (Hitler 1980, 148, cited by Janik 1985, 101) . Wittgenstein was well-acquainted with both Sex and Character and On The Last Things, and discussed them with friends and family.

Most of the Weininger literature is polarized, and constrained, by the dispute between those who find it necessary to condemn, and those who find it necessary to excuse, Weininger's use of such stereotypes (see Hymns and Harrowitz 1995). Those who read Weininger sympathetically - let us call them Weininger's apologists- emphasize his observation that no human being is a pure instantiation of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, Jew or non-Jew. Rather, these are to be understood as ideal types that we all exemplify to varying degrees; it would, on this construal, be a grave misunderstanding to take Weininger to be setting out crudely racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Thus, according to Allan Janik: "Weininger goes out of his way to insist that he does not identify the Jew as a member of a race. Judaism is a possibility for all men in his eyes" (1985, 101 . Cf. 1985 87 f., 98 f., and 1995).

Those who read Weininger unsympathetically - let us call them Weininger's critics - argue that his writings implicitly invite and encourage such bigoted uses, even as they explicitly reject them. On this approach, defending his stereotypes as heuristic devices is comparable to the familiar defense that "some of my best friends are Jews," when it is used to set out prejudiced views while ostensibly denying that the speaker is prejudiced.

There is a striking congruence between Wittgenstein's remarks about the Jews, and the significance of his Jewishness, and Weininger's views on the topic. In a note written in 1931, Wittgenstein discusses his own reproductiveness and lack of originality, describing it as a characteristically Jewish trait. After distinguishing creative genius from mere talent, which is only reproduc- tive, he wrote:

The saint is the only Jewish "genius." Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.)

...It might be said (rightly or wrongly) that the Jewish mind is not in a position to produce even so much as a tiny blade of grass or flower but that its way is to make a drawing of the blade of grass or the flower that has grown in the mind of another & then use it to sketch a comprehensive picture. This is not to allege a vice & everything is all right as long as what is being done is quite clear. Danger only arises when someone confuses the nature of a Jewish work with that of a non-Jewish work & especially when the author of the former does so himself, as he so easily may. (Doesn't he look as proud as though he were being milked himself?)

It is typical of the Jewish mind to understand someone else's work better than he understands it himself (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 19/16-17, 1931).

In an apologetic reading, Wittgenstein's talk of 'Jewishness' here, and in similar passages, should not be taken literally as a claim about all and only those people who are Jews - however one ultimately understands that term - but rather as a metaphor that Wittgenstein uses to think about issues of creativity and originality, and different kinds of intellectual activity, a topic to which he repeatedly returned. In this reading, he is really talking about his particular way of approaching philosophical problems, which he connects with his temperament. Certainly, the four paragraphs that immediately follow the passage just quoted explore further his conviction that he is constitution- ally incapable of producing anything fundamentally new, that his talent rather consists in rearranging and making good use of materials provided by others . We shall see that at the end of the 1930s he expressed much the same ideas without making explicit use of the image of the Jew (§ 6).

McGuinness (1999, 71 ; 2001, 229) tries to minimize the role of Jewishness in the earlier passages by drawing on Kienzler's observation that in such places "one can replace 'Jew' by 'philosopher' without essentially changing the sense [Sinn]" (Kienzler 1997, 43). Given a narrowly Fregean notion of sense, this may be strictly true, but it all depends on what one takes to be essential. Wittgenstein's talk of "Jewish reproductiveness" here contributes a metaphorical dimension to this passage that would be missing if he had instead chosen to speak of "philosophical reproductiveness." Even McGuinness does acknowledge that there are prejudicial pictures of the Jews in a few places in Wittgenstein's writing - for instance, where he speaks of "the Jews' secretive & cunning nature" as innate, rather than a result of persecution (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 22/19).

On a critical reading, what is most troubling about the lengthy passage quoted above, and a number of others written in 1931, is that they take Weininger's prototypically anti-Semitic ideas about the Jewish mind so much for granted. As Monk puts it, "what is most shocking about Wittgenstein's remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language - indeed, the slogans - of racial anti-Semitism. The echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf (1990, 313).

Around the same time, Wittgenstein recommended Weininger's book to several friends, including G. E. Moore. According to Ray Monk, "Ibeir response was understandably cool. The work that had excited the imagination of pre-war Vienna looked, in the cold light of post-war Cambridge, simply bizarre. Wittgenstein was forced to explain" (1990, 312). In response to Moore's lack of sympathy for the book, Wittgenstein wrote:

I can quite imagine that you don't admire Weininger very much what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you . It is true that he is fantastic but he is great and fantastic. It isn't necessary or rather not possible to agree with him but the greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake which is great. Le. roughly speaking if you just add a "-" to the whole book it says an important truth (Wittgenstein 1995, 250 ; letter dated 23.8.31).

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein's letter does not further explain what he means by negating the whole book, or identify what he takes to be the "important truth" that emerges. Monk pointedly sets out the questions raised by this silence:

But why did Wittgenstein admire the book so much? What did he learn from it? Indeed, given that its claims to scientific biology are transparently spurious, its epistemology obviously nonsense, its psychology primitive, and its ethical prescriptions odious, what could he possibly have learnt from it? (Monk 1990, 23)

Monk's own answer to this question is contained in the subtitle of his biography of Wittgenstein, namely "the duty of genius"; he argues that Wittgenstein identified with Weininger's valorization of the figure of the male. Monk is right to stress that the later Wittgenstein rejected Weininger's genius; on one occasion, he said of Weininger's views on this topic: "How wrong he was, my God he was wrong" (Drury, in Rhees 1984, 91). Consequently, Monk emphasizes the affinities between Wittgenstein's and Weininger's positive views about love and self-knowledge:man can choose between the masculine and the feminine, love and sexuality ; to find oneself is to find one's higher self, and escape the empirical self . The only love that is of value in the end is love of the divine in oneself, of the idea of God.

Another suggestion as to how to understand Wittgenstein's response to Weininger can be found in a recent article by B€la Szabados. He finds it implausible that what Wittgenstein meant by negating Weininger was simply a matter of replacing his prejudicial attack on Woman with an equally one-sided denigration of Man, for that would amount to retaining Weininger's Platonism, with the proviso that he charged the wrong suspect:

That the mature Wittgenstein would give the nod to stipulative, evaluatively loaded definitions of Man and Woman strains credulity. The suggestion is completely out of alignment with the resolute anti-essentialism of the late philosophy. So "Man and masculinity are the sources of all evil" is not the important truth that we are supposed to get out of negating Weininger's book. For this is as much of an absurdity as his central theme, and between two absurdities there is nothing to choose . It rests on a kind of essentialism that the later Wittgenstein rejects simply in virtue of its prejudicial nature. The author of the Investigations is devoted to a method of looking and seeing how things are rather than saying and prejudging how things are. Both absurdities reveal a deep prejudice and distort the particularity and individuality of people. (Szabados 1997, 492-3; the closely parallel passage in "Was Wittgenstein an Anti- Semite?" (1999, 16-17) indicates how important this claim is for his reading .)

I want to agree with this reading of the text of the Philosophical Investigations, but there is no guarantee that the views of the person who wrote the book are as congenial. This is an attractive reading, but it is "attractive" in just the sense that McGuinness (1999/2001, 76/236 ; cited above, 240) warns against: it would have been good if Wittgenstein had freed himself of the deeply prejudicial, evaluatively loaded definitions of Man and Woman, Jew and non-Jew, that one finds in Weininger, but we should be wary of arguing from what we think our philosophical heroes should have believed to what they actually believed.

Furthermore, Monk's sanitized attempt to recuperate a positive vision from the Weiningerian cesspool, and Szabados's suggestion that it is just a matter of two "absurdities," both involve a failure to see how much Wittgenstein identified with the complementary image of the abjectly feminine - both as Jew and homosexual (cf. Cavell 1990) . Part of Weininger's achievement in Wittgenstein's eyes, I believe, was to clearly and honestly set out the prejudices of his age. In the late 1940s, Wittgenstein explained his admiration for Weininger to G. E. M. Anscombe by contrasting him with Kafka : Kafka, he said, "gave himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble," while Weininger, whatever his faults, was a man who really did write about his. Anscombe had lent Wittgenstein some of Kafka's novels ; Wittgenstein, on returning them, compared Kafka unfavorably to Weininger, and recommended "Weininger's Sex and Character and The Four Last Things" (Monk 1990, 498). The latter is presumably a mistranslation, or misplaced memory of Weininger's Ober Die Letzte Dinge [On the Last Things], a posthumous miscellany of his other writings. Weininger's pronouncements about Jews, gender, national character and sexuality are the kind of stereotypes about how people and culture "must be" that Wittgenstein criticized in his attacks on "dogmatism" and the use of "prototypes" in the early aspect of Wittgenstein's debt to Weininger was the central role Weininger accorded to what Freud called "projection" in the construction of stereotypes : Weininger contends that the conception of women as either virgins or whores he sets out is a product of male needs, not of women's nature.

Monk and Szabados read Wittgenstein's image of negating Weininger's book as a matter of denying its odious components . It is hard, however, to avoid the conclusion that the negation we are discussing here is not the notion of Fregean logic, but rather the Freudian notion of denying that with which one cannot help identifying. One can see this in the ambiguous reference to "W" in the first sentence of Wittgenstein's letter - "I can quite imagine that you don't admire Weininger very much, what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you" - a "W." that both names and does not name its author. Wittgenstein saw in Weininger, and Weininger's anti-Semitism, a mirror of his own self-hatred, a way of figuring a relation- ship of identification and denial that he both had to and could not confront. During the question period after the presentation of this paper at the Virginia Tech conference on Wittgenstein, Monk challenged this reading, pointing out that Wittgenstein explicitly used a " ", the Fregean negation sign, not the word "not:" Certainly, there is no evidence that his conscious intention was to make use of the Freudian notion of denial ; equally, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein's fascination with Weininger at this time arose out of an uneasy identification with that famously Jewish, homosexual philosopher who was himself deeply troubled by his own identity.

One can see the same tension between identification and denial in a problematic discussion of anti-Semitism from the same period, where he explores the idea of comparing the Jews to a disease in the body of Europe .

"Look on this wart //swelling// [Warze // BeuleJi] as a regular limb of your body!" Can one do that, to order?

Do I have the power to decide at will to have, or not to have, a certain ideal conception of my body?

Within the history of the peoples of Europe the history of the Jews is not treated so circumstantially as their intervention in European affairs would actually merit, because within this history they are experienced as a sort of disease, anomaly, & nobody wants to put a disease on the same level as normal life //& nobody wants to speak of a disease as though it had the same rights as healthy bodily processes (even painful ones.)

We may say: this bump [Beule] can be regarded as a limb of one's body only if our whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes.) Otherwise the best we can do is put up with it.

You may expect an individual to display this sort of tolerance or even to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation since it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things . I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone to retain the original aesthetic feeling for his body & also to make the swelling [Beule] welcome (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 20/18, 1931).

Peter Winch's 1980 translation for the GermanBade was "tumor." Presum- ably the change was made because "tumor" is not supported by current German dictionaries or usage: in contemporary German, a Beule is a bump or swelling, with no implication of malignancy. There is a clear etymological connection with the English "boil" - a "hard inflamed suppurating tumor" (Little et al. 1973, vol. I, 212). Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's historic dictionary makes it clear that the principal senses of the term in the nineteenth century were far from benign: their two leading definitions of the term both characterize it as a tumor (Grimm and Grimm 1854, 1745-6).That sense was still alive in the 1960s, although by then it was no longer the leading meaning. The entry for "Beule" in a German-English dictionary first published in the 1960s begins as follows: "bump, lump, swelling; (Geschwflr) boil, tumo(u)r;..." (Messinger and Rtldenberg 1964, 114.) This strongly suggests that Wittgenstein must have been aware of the negative connotations of the term, and that "tumor" is the correct translation . The context in which Wittgenstein used the word does provide additional support for the original translation: he first wrote "wart;' an unhealthy growth, and compares the Beule with a disease. This passage has attracted attention in the secondary literature, and several English readers have been quick to condemn it for its noxious racist similes. Thus Monk reads this, and related material, as "anti- Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form" (1990 314, 315).Isaac Nevo's reading of this passage stresses that the anti-Semitism is primarily self- directed, but also part of an intolerant nationalism:

The genocidal fantasy with respect to the Jewish tumour, which in the period this was written was being acted out on the European scene, is articulated by Wittgenstein from within . The analogies and judgments here are his own . The Jewish anomaly could, after all, be portrayed as a curable, rather than incurable, disease.... But the nationalism Wittgenstein displays in this passage is defined by intolerance (Nevo 1987-8,238).

Szabados, on the other hand, working from Winch's first translation, the passage to be laying bare, in a philosophically critical spirit, racist ideas that Wittgenstein most certainly does not accept. He lays great stress on Wittgenstein's use of certain distancing devices in setting out these dangerous ideas. The opening sentence is an instruction to see things in a certain way, placed within quotation marks; the second asks us whether it is possible to carry out the instruction. This is followed by a further question, an outline of a way of looking at European history that is about to be rejected, then a "we may say" and a "you may expect." On Szabados' reading, Wittgenstein is bringing up racist ideas to help us see how they hang together with some of the most dangerous problems that liberal democracies currently face, and proposing philosophical therapy for the idea of the nation-state.

What we have here is an attempt at a precise description and diagnosis of the conceptual and political roots of the problem the liberal democracies found themselves in, in the wake of the Holocaust: how to restructure and reinscribe the nation-state and what it is to belong to it, so that the conditions leading to intolerance of difference and subsequent genocide do not recur (Szabados 1999, 7-8).

Szabados is right that Wittgenstein does not straightforwardly endorse the anti-Semitic ideas he explores in this passage, and Wittgenstein's critics have been far too ready to assume that he accepted the prejudicial views he discusses. Also, one must remember that these were private notes, not intended for publication; however, while it is possible to imagine that Wittgenstein might have expanded the proposals and questions just quoted with the sensitive exploration of nationalism and racism Szabados sketches, he did not, as far as we know, ever do so. Instead he follows it up in his manuscript with Weiningerian reflections on how Jews supposedly are only interested in money as a form of power, not in possessions for their own sake.

Power & possession are not the same thing. Even though possession also gives us power. If Jews are said not to have any sense for possession that is presumably compatible with their liking to be rich; for money is for them a particular sort of power not possession. (I should for instance not like my people to be poor, since I wish them to have a certain power. Naturally I wish them to use this power properly too.) (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 21/18, 1931)

The use of "people" in this translation is potentially misleading, for at first sight it suggests that Wittgenstein is talking about the Jewish people as a whole, but the German word in question is Leute, and so the people in question are rather Wittgenstein's own family. In this connection, it is important to note that this remark is not only a reflection of his conception of Jewishness, power, and possession, but also a matter of thinking over his feelings about his extraordinarily wealthy family. As we have already seen, seven years later his sense of the proper use of power would lead him to side with his sisters in their dispute with his brother over how best to respond to the German annexation of Austria, in favor of his sisters' paying for non-Jewish identity papers.

Another passage about the Jews, also from 1931, makes it clear how little Wittgenstein was able to transcend the stereotypes about Jews and nation that were current at the time.

"Fatherlandless rabble" (applied to the Jews) is on the same level as "crooked-nosed rabble:' for giving yourself a fatherland is just as little in your power, as it is to give yourself a particular nose (Wittgenstein 1997, 59, 2.11.31).

This passage takes certain prevalent negative stereotypes about the Jews - that they are a rabble, lack a fatherland, are crooked-nosed - as a point of departure, and does nothing to challenge them. These are hardly the words one would expect of the critic of "intolerance of difference" Szabados describes. A critique of intolerance of difference may well draw on Wittgenstein's writings, but that critique is not articulated there.

5. Wittgenstein's Peculiar Dreams

There is reason to think that Wittgenstein's uneasy relationship to his own racial identity, a relationship framed in terms of the prevalent anti-Semitic discourse of his times, also figures in his relationship to his sexuality . First, Weininger's racial and sexual theories are themselves mutually congruent, and both depend on drawing a binary contrast between a valorized and a denigrated term, a contrast that is drawn in strikingly similar ways in each case. Recent work on the anti-Semitism of this period by Nancy Stepan (1986) and Sander Gilman (1986, 1993) has made clear the ways in which racial and gender theories draw on each other, so that the racial other, the feminine, and the homosexual are all constructed in terms of the same set of distinctions. Second, Wittgenstein's virulent racial self-hatred, recorded in 1931, occurs at the same time that he was considering marrying Marguerite Respinger, a friend of his family. Her visit to him in Norway in 1931 was conducted on strikingly Weiningerian lines . He found her a room of her own at a neighbor's house, and proposed that they prepare for a new spiritual life by reading the Bible together. Even Monk, who minimizes the links between Wittgenstein's attraction to the darker side of Weininger's thought and his own self-hatred, notes the connection between Wittgenstein's anti-Semitic writing in 1931 and his proposed marriage:

Wittgenstein's remarks on Jewishness, like his projected autobiography, were essentially confessional, and both seem in some way linked to the "sacred" union he planned for himself and Marguerite. They coincide with the year in which his intention to marry Marguerite was pursued with its greatest earnestness (Monk 1990, 317- 8).

Monk, presumably relying on Marguerite's testimony, presents the "union" as an idea of Wittgenstein's that she never took very seriously.

The themes of race, gender, guilt, and identity all converge in a "strange dream" of Wittgenstein's, which he wrote down, in code, in one of his manuscript volumes, on 1 December 1929. The dream concerns a character named "Vertsagt" or "Vertsag"; the name is the only word not written in code.

A peculiar dream. Today toward morning I dreamt: I see in an illustrated newspaper a photograph of Vertsagt, who is a much discussed hero of the day. The picture shows him in his car. There is talk of his disgraceful deeds; Hansel is standing next to me and also someone else, similar to my brother Kurt . The latter says that Vertsag is a Jew but has enjoyed the upbringing of a rich Scottish lord ; now he is a workers' leader. He has not changed his name because it is not the custom there . It is new to me that Vertsagt, which I pronounce with the stress on the first syllable, is a Jew, and I see that his name simply means "verzagt" [German for "faint-hearted . ."] It doesn't strike me that it is written with "ts" which I see printed a little bolder than the other letters. I think: must there be a Jew behind every indecency? Now Hansel and I are on the terrace of a house, perhaps the big log-cabin on the Hochreit, and along the street comes Vertsag in his motor-car ; he has an angry face, slightly reddish fair hairand a similar moustache (he does not look Jewish.) He opens fire with a machine-gun at a cyclist behind him who writhes with pain and is mercilessly gunned to death with many shots. Versag has driven past, and now comes a young poor-looking girl on a cycle and she too receives Vertsag's fire as he drives on . And these shots, when they hit her breast make a bubbling sound like an almost-empty kettle over a flame. I felt sympathy for the girl and thought: only in Austria could it happen that this girl would find no helpful sympathy and people watch as she suffers and is killed . I myself am afraid to help her because I fear Vertsag's shots. I go towards her, but look for cover behind a plant. Then I wake up. I must add that in the conversation with Hansel, first in the presence of the other person and then after he had left us, I am embarassed and do not want to say that I myself am descended from Jews or that Vertsag's case is my own case too....I wrote the dream down immediately after waking up (MS 107, 219, 1.12.29. The passage is also translated in Monk 1990, 279-80, and the German text is provided on pp. 612-3. See also the transcription of the text in Wittgenstein 1993-, vol. 2, 127).

Hansel was a close friend, the first person he wrote to in 1936 to confess he had concealed his Jewishness, asking Hansel to pass on his confession to his family (see the correspondence between Wittgenstein and Hansel, re- cently published in Somavilla 1994). In his notes on the dream, Wittgenstein tries, three times, to interpret the significance of Vertsagt's name . In the dream, he thought he saw "that his name simply means 'verzagt',' which is German for "faint-hearted?' After waking, he came to think that it was really written "Pferzagt," which means nothing at all. His closing attempt suggests that "the name as I pronounced it in the dream, 'Vie-sagt' is Hungarian. The name had for me something evil, spiteful and very masculine about it?'

Clearly, the dream is connected with Wittgenstein's pervasive sense of guilt, and its connection with his discomfort with his sexuality and racial origins. Monk takes the dream to be about Wittgenstein's sense that he was "hiding something ...allowing people to think of him as an aristocrat when in fact he was a Jew" (1990, 279) . Consequently, he treats the trail of associations as a distraction from the manifest content of the dream, and the initial thought that the case of Vertsagt is his own case, the case of a man who hides his origins, and is too faint-hearted to admit it (1990, 280). It is surely right to take Wittgenstein's attempts to make sense of the name as themselves faint-hearted, and a distraction from thinking about the fact that the predicament of the protagonist is his predicament . Yet the search for the meaning of the name is not just a screen: looked at one way, the names are nonsensical; looked at in another way, they all have similar and connected sounds and meanings. Christoph Nyfri has pointed out that, despite Wittgenstein's repeated attempts to decode the name, he fails to consider a striking alternative: that the word is "versagt", from versagen, the German word not only for 'failed:' "denied," - an obvious construal under the circumstances - but also "betrothed?' The usage in the sense of "betrothed' 'is no longer common - it is not in the current Duden - but it is in the 1967 Zangenschefdt, and it would have been familiar to Wittgenstein (Nyfri 1992, 22).

Nyfri's piece, written before he. had seen Monk's biography, takes it for granted that Wittgenstein was not betrothed . Monk's account, presumably based on his conversations with Marguerite Respinger - specific sources for such matters are not given in his biography - gives the impression that while Wittgenstein might have desired a celibate marriage with her, this was never a realistic possibility. Wittgenstein's diary from this period presents a rather different picture, which is that Marguerite needed him at a time of personal crisis, but that this could not be a permanent relationship.Another complicated dream, a few weeks earlier, is interpreted by Wittgenstein as being about how he imagines he is bound to Marguerite by a thousand ties, but as a matter of fact, it is easy for him to walk away from her (Wittgenstein 1997, 63-4). In any case, it seems fair to say that the Vertsagt dream epitomizes Wittgenstein's sense of failure at the time, and particularly the failure of their proposed "union:'

The theme of struggling to make sense of nonsense, and in particular of a name containing consonants with similar sounds, recurs in another dream that Wittgenstein wrote down early in 1932:

Today I dreamt the following strange dream. Someone (was it Lettice? [Ramsey]) said to me that someone was called Hobbson "with mixed b"; which meant, that one pronounced it "Hobpson :' I woke and remembered that Gilbert [Pattison] once told me about the pronunciation of a word that it was "pronounced with mixed b ;'which I had understood as "mixed beef" [in English] and didn't know what he meant, but it sounded as Iif he meant that one would have to have a dish called "mixed beef" in one's mouth when saying the word, and I had understood Gilbert to have said it as a joke. I remembered all that immediately on waking. Then it sounded less and less plausible to me, and by the time I'd got dressed it seemed obvious nonsense.(By the way, if one went into this dream, it leads to thoughts about racial mixing, and what that means to me.) (Wittgenstein 1997, 67; MS 183, 137-8; 28.1.32)

Lettice Ramsey was a close friend and confidante of Wittgenstein's, with whom he could discuss his feelings for Marguerite (Monk 1990, 258) ;Patti- son, a friend with whom he joked and played with nonsensical language (Monk 1990, 265 f.).Wittgenstein does not explain the connection he sees between this dream and his thoughts about mixed race, but both dreams give great significance to almost imperceptible differences in pronouncing a name that is difficult to say correctly, a name whose meaning seems clear during the dream, then elusive, and ultimately nonsensical.In each dream, racial difference, and differences in meaning between nonsense words, play a central part. A name takes on a racially charged significance, but the significance resists his analytic efforts. One further connection here is that both nonsense and racial mixing arise out of combinations that are not permitted; both are offenses against the normal ways of going on . Both seem to make sense within Wittgenstein's "strange" (1 .12.29) and "peculiar" (28.1.32) dreams, but turn into nonsense when he tries to reconstruct their meaning. Wittgenstein's unsuccessful struggle to make sense of the nonsense names in the Vertsagt and Hobbson dreams is an uncanny parody of the traditional philosophical quest to explain a name's meaning in terms of what it stands for.

6. Jewishness, Anti-Semitism and Philosophy

Is there a connection between Wittgenstein's writing on Jews and his philosophy? What did he mean when he spoke of himself as a "Jewish thinker" in 1931? Monk takes Wittgenstein to be engaging in a form of self-directed anti- Semitism, humbling himself by describing his own work as nothing more than clarifying the ideas he had taken from others, or reminding himself of "his limitations, of his 'Jewishness' "(1990, 317).

It is as though, for a brief time (after 1931 there are, thankfully, no more remarks about Jewishness in his notebooks), he was attracted to using the then current language of anti-Semitism as a kind of metaphor for himself (just as, in the dream of Vertsagt, the image of the Jew that was propagated by the Nazis - an image of a cunning and deceptive scoundrel who hides behind a cloak of respectability while committing the most dreadful crimes - found a ready response in his fears about his own 'real' nature.) .. .So long as he lived, Wittgenstein never ceased to struggle against his own pride, and to express doubts about his philosophical achievement and his own moral decency. After 1931, however, he dropped the language of anti-Semitism as a means of expressing those doubts. (Monk 1990, 316-17)

Yuval Lurie sees a direct connection between developments in Wittgenstein's views about meaning and his giving up talk of Jewishness in this way. For it was around this time that Wittgenstein began to talk about family resemblances, the similarities that things of certain kinds have in common with each other without sharing a common essence .

Is this simultaneity coincidental? I think not. It seems to me that he found he could no longer hide behind the claim that he was merely conducting a metaphysical discussion about the ideal Jew when he spoke of Jews as he did (Lurie 1989, 340).

Lurie, like Szabados (1999), supports this reading by connecting Wittgenstein's particular use of the concept of Jewishness with the Weiningerian notion of a prototype, a conception of an idealized instance of the concept in question that can be used to organize empirical evidence, a notion that Wittgenstein rejected shortly after these discussions of the Jews in 1931. Lurie also goes on to show that many of Wittgenstein's subsequent and closely related discussions of talent and genius, creativity and originality, make use of other metaphors, such as talk of how seeds grown in different soils will produce different plants.

Strictly speaking, Monk is correct in saying that there are no more re- marks about Jewishness, per se, after 1931 in Wittgenstein's surviving note- books, and that he no longer used the language of anti-Semitism as a means of doubting his own decency; and Lurie is right that Wittgenstein did develop other ways of thinking about reproductiveness and originality . Yet there are remarks about Jews and the bible, dating from a series of notebooks from 1939 or 1940, that show that the anti-Semitic metaphors and connections that he had made in the early 1930s were still alive for him. In these passages, Wittgenstein returned to the themes of the difference between genius and talent, and how courage and character distinguish genius from talent. Thus we find him asking himself the question, "What does Mendelssohn's music lack? A 'courageous' melody?" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 35/40, 1939-1940). In 1929, Mendelssohn is introduced as an exemplar of Wittgenstein's idea of Jewishness, and used as a way of thinking about Wittgenstein's own ideals, which he thinks of as akin to Mendelssohn's. Wittgenstein compares the Jew to a tree that avoids tragedy by bending, rather than breaking: "Tragedy is something unjewish. Mendelssohn is perhaps the most untragic of composers" (1980/1998, 1/3) . Wittgenstein takes it for granted that the Jew lacks the courage, or resistance, that is required for tragedy. Indeed, he identifies his own ideal in these terms, for the passage, which up till now has been in ordinary German, continues in code: "Tragically holding on, defiantly holding on to a tragic situation in love always seems quite alien to my ideal . Does that mean my ideal is feeble? I cannot & should not judge" (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 3- 4; the passage is not included in the pre-1994 editions) .

In another notebook from the same period, he writes :

The Old Testament seen as the body without its head; the New T[estament]: the head; the Epistles of the Apostles: the crown on the head.

If I think of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament on its own, I should like to say : the head is (still) missing from this body The solution to these problems is missing .

The fulfilment of these hopes is missing . But I do not necessarily think of a head as having a crown.

The measure of genius is character, - even if character on its own does not amount to genius

Genius is not 'talent and character', but character manifesting itself in the form of a special talent. Where one man will show courage by jumping into the water, another will show courage by writing a symphony. (This is a weak example.)

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest human being - but the genius concentrates this light into a burning point by means of a particular lens (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 35/40-1 . 1939-1940).

My originality (if that is the right word) is, I believe, an originality that belongs to the soil, not the seed. (Perhaps I have no seed of my own.) Sow a seed in my soil, & it will grow differently than it would in any other soil.

Freud's originality too was like this, I think. I have always believed - without knowing why - that the original seed of psychoanalysis was due to Breuer, not Freud.

Of course, Breuer's seed-grain can only have been quite tiny . (Courage is always original.) (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 36/42, 1939-40)

Although he does not explicitly make any of the claims about "the Jews" that one finds in the earlier remarks, he continues to talk in terms that take those earlier ideas for granted. The biblical analogy makes it clear that Wittgenstein cannot entirely let go of using the Jews as a way of thinking about his identity: his Bible, the Jew's, and the Catholic's are compared to a body, a headless body, and a crowned body. Apparently, it is integral to Wittgenstein's conception of his Christianity that it be seen as contrasted with the supposed shortcomings of Judaism. Isaac Nevo reads this passage as a figure of the Jewish faith as "a living death":

The essential point is that variation, or even schism within Christianity does not constitute an anomaly, or a disturbance.... The "Jewish Bible," on the other hand, constitutes a real disturbance : a (living?) body without a head (1987-S, 236).

While the passage as a whole is not as strikingly anti-Semitic as the earlier writing on the Jews, the fact remains that he is still writing about the difference between genius and talent in terms of a stock example of a Jewish composer who lacks the un-Jewish virtue of courage, interspersing it with a biblical analogy that cannot help but suggest the image of the Jews who lost their heads, and worse, as the result of the Shoah.

7. Conclusion

Wittgenstein's later philosophy, with its far-reaching criticism of essentialism and Platonism about meaning, certainly lends itself to a critique of anti- Semitic stereotypes, and his falling-out with Malcolm makes it clear that he saw a close connection between his more technically philosophical work and a critical attitude toward nationalistic stereotypes. On the other hand, his continued uncritical use of Jewish stereotypes in material from the same time as his dispute with Malcolm show that he was far from being fully successful in applying his own methods to his use of anti-Semitic discourse. Indeed, his final recorded reflection on anti-Semitism, written three years after the Sec- ond World War, begins by comparing anti-Semitism to a tangle, a knot he was unable to untie:

If you cannot unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing you can do is to recognize this ; & the most decent thing, to admit it . [Antisemitism .]

What you should do to cure the evil is not clear. What is not permissible is clear from one case to another (Wittgenstein 1980/1998, 74/95, 4.11.48).

It is hard to know what to make of this passage. Nevo reads it as Wittgenstein's confession that he could not unravel the tangle of anti-Semitism, that he was still entangled in it, and suggests that he was contemplating suicide, the "honourable" Weiningerian way out (1987-8, 242). Yet, given the available evidence, such a reading is extremely speculative. Wittgenstein neither says what unravelling the tangle would be, nor specifies what one "must not do." The reference to unravelling a tangle evokes an image that Wittgenstein repeatedly used in talking about the nature of philosophy. In section 2 of the Philosophical Remarks, written in 1930, he writes:

Why is philosophy so complicated? It ought, after all, to be completely simple.- Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking, which we have tangled up in an absurd way; but to do that, it must make movements which are just as complicated as the knots. Although the result of philosophy is simple, its methods for arriving there cannot be so.

The complexity of philosophy is not in its matter, but in our tangled understanding .

This passage is the basis for Big Typescript, § 90 (pp. 183-9 in Wittgenstein 1993), and can also be found in the company of much post-1945 writing in Zettel, § 452 . This suggests that the talk of a tangle one cannot unravel was a way of acknowledging that anti-Semitism was a philosophical problem that Wittgenstein was not able to resolve, or cure. Wittgenstein's confidence that it was clear what not to do in particular cases is hardly reassuring, in view of what we have seen of his own actions. Anti-Semitism is strikingly akin to a Wittgensteinian philosophical problem : it arises from taken-for-granted prejudices and the misuse of language, and can only be resolved by a change in the way people lead their lives. The philosophical significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein is not primarily that he thought of his philosophy as Jewish, but that Jewishness was not a problem that he was able to write about philosophically.

Finally, we can briefly return to the question : was Wittgenstein a Jew? My Hertzian answer is that we would be better off distinguishing different senses of the term, and reflecting on their role in his life and in our own . Wittgenstein's problematic Jewishness is as much a product of our problematic concerns as his. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. Insofar as he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the anti-Semitic prejudices of his time. It would have been good if he could have untangled those prejudices, but he did not do so.'

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Szabados, B6la (1999) "Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Significance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein's Philosophy," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29: 1-28.

Wasserman, Gerhard (1990) "Wittgenstein on Jews: Some Counter-examples," Philosophy 65: 355-65.

Weininger, Otto (1903/1906) Geschlecht and Charakter. Translated (without footnotes) as Sex and Character.New York: Heineman, 1906.

Weininger, Otto (1904) Ober Die Letzte Dinge [On the Last Things]. Vienna & Leipzig: W. Braumuller.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicas, trans. C. K. Ogden. London : Routledge and Kegan Paul. Second edition, 1933.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953) Philosophical Investigations, ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and R. Rhees; trans. G. E. M. Anscombe. Oxford: Basil BlackweR Second edition, 1958; third edition, 1973.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1968) The Wittgenstein Papers, microfilm and/or bound photocopies. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Libraries. Revised 1982.

#ludwig wittgenstein #jewishness #identity #yiddishkeit #self-concept #heritage #otto weininger #antisemitism #culture

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ebaycurious · 6 years

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AUCTION ENDS 3/24/18 - CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO Original hand-signed and numbered David Lance Goines (#112 of 200). Starting bid is the original purchase price. From goines.net: (#164) NAGANO [BERKELEY SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA 25TH ANNIVERSARY]: October 11, 1995 16-3/4" x 24" Twelve colors Model: Kent Nagano Client: Berkeley Symphony Orchestra Berkeley Symphony Orchestra 2322 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley CA 94704 Sponsor: Harry Dov Weininger Art actually has two quite distinct branches, which can be categorized as right brain and left brain. The former was once considered god-inspired (unconscious) and the latter merely mortal, lacking the divine, an area in which we were basically on our own (conscious). Though speech per se is a left brain activity, music, song and poetry are right brain activities, and both sides of the brain can understand speech. So far as I know, all ancient performance was chanted or sung in meter and rhyme. The Iliad begins with an invocation of the Muse, asking her to sing, through the medium of the bard, of the wrath of Achilles. The ancient idea that poetry, song and dance were dictated by a divine presence, and that the performer was only a more-or-less suitable vehicle for divine revelation, was not to my knowledge applied to the arts of drawing, painting, or sculpture. Indeed, the elevation of the plastic and representational arts to equal status with the liberal arts did not take place until the Italian Renaissance was well underway.* While there are Muses in overlapping profusion for the right-brain activities of dance, song, mime and the many aspects of poetry, there is not so much as the shadow of a Muse for the dominant left hemisphere activities of drawing, painting, sculpture or architecture. By itself, this provides an insight into the ancient mind. Speech seems to have been more highly valued than any other human attribute, perhaps because it was perceived as the great distinction between people and animals; perhaps also because it was the means by which the gods communicated with mankind. The Roman poets identified the Muses with the Italian Camenae: prophetic nymphs of springs and goddesses of birth, who possessed a grove near the Porta Capena at Rome. The sacrifices made to the Muses were libations of water or milk, and of honey. The Homeric Muses (the thinkers) were originally nymphs of springs, then goddesses of song and later, of different kinds of poetry. In the works of Homer (who interestingly enough was portrayed as blind, thus reinforcing the importance of hearing over other forms of perception of the divine, and speech over other means of divine communication), the Muses are the inspiring goddesses of song who dwell among the gods and sing at their banquets under the leadership of Apollo Musagetes. The Muses were the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, the personification of memory. They were also presented as the children of Uranus (sky) and Gaea (earth). The three ancient Muses were Mneme (memory), Melete (meditation) and Aoide (the bard). Their number later expanded to nine, and at last to ten. Hesiod first gives the usually accepted names and number, and they are portrayed this way in Herculaneum paintings. Chief of the muses is Calliope (beautiful voiced), the Muse of epic poetry-her symbols are a tablet and stylus, sometimes a scroll; Clio (to make famous), is the Muse of history-her symbols are a scroll or an open chest of books; Erato (loved one), the Muse of erotic poetry and mime (she's still in business, inspiring rap musicians and street performers)-her symbol is a lyre; Euterpe (well pleasing), lyric poetry and music, especially wind instruments-symbolized by a flute; Melpomene (the singing one), tragedy-her symbols are a tragic mask, the club of Heracles and a sword. She wears the cothurnus-a boot worn by tragic actors-and her head is wreathed with vine leaves. Polyhymnia (abounding in songs), is the muse of sacred hymns, rhetoric and mime-she has no single attribute but is represented sitting in a pensive posture; Terpsichore (to delight with dance), choral dance and song-usually represented by a lyre; Thalia (the blooming one), comedy and merry or idyllic poetry-is symbolized by a comic mask, shepherd's crook and a wreath of ivy. Urania (the heavenly one), the Muse of astronomy, is symbolized by a staff pointing to a globe. That there should be a muse of astronomy is not so strange as it may seem: Pythagoras contributed the notion that there was such a thing as the music of the spheres. He ascertained that the pitch of notes depends on the rate of vibration, and since the planets move, they must therefore make sounds. Since they move at different rates, they must make different sounds and, as all things in nature must be harmonious, these celestial sounds must also harmonize, creating music. Bringing their number to an awkward ten, the latecomer Arethusa (a nymph who, pursued by the river god Alpheus, was changed into a spring), is addressed by Virgil as the Muse of pastoral poetry. Basically, the Muses are creatures of sound. That there should be a Muse of mime-silent performance, the opposite of sound-serves somewhat to reinforce the notion of the importance of speech than otherwise. Muses told the poet, musician, choral dancer or historian what to say, sing, chant, recite or perform. They did not concern themselves with "artistic vision," this despite the enormous percentage of the human brain dedicated to sight. I envy those who have a Muse. We who have been chosen for representational art feel so alone sometimes. * The liberal arts, so-called because their pursuit was the privelege of liberi, or freemen, were in the middle ages the seven branches of learning: grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. Technical Note My posters begin as small black-and-white drawings, which are then photo-copied and colored with gouache. When I arrive at a satisfactory painted sketch, I ask the client to come by and take a look. If the color-sketch is approved, I then begin the actual work of turning a drawing into a full-color printed poster. The original drawing is a "key-line," which means that it not only is a rendition of the subject, but also contains information that tells me, as a printer, where every color belongs in the final printed piece. Consequently, the drawing sometimes looks more like a contour map than an identifiable representation. The drawing is photographed and enlarged in a specialized type of large camera called a "copy camera." This step provides me with a negative that is the same size as the final, printed poster. The master negative looks just like the original drawing, except that it is larger, black where the original drawing was white, and clear where the original was black. The master negative is then contacted onto a fresh piece of film. This "positive," as it is called, provides me with a second master negative, from which all the subsequent negatives, one for each color-called "color separations,"-will be made. In the process that I use, the color separations are made by hand, one negative and plate for each color in the finished poster. This is quite different from the kind of color printing that you see on the cover of a popular magazine, as well as the kind of printing that is used for reproductions of works of art. If you were to look at the cover of a magazine, or an art reproduction, you would see that it looks like a faithful, full-color reproduction of a work of art, or an original photograph. If you were to take a magnifying glass, and look closely at the printed image, you would see that it is not actually a picture of a tree or a house or a person, but actually a large number of tiny colored dots, arranged in regular patterns, all over the paper. You would notice that there were only four colors: red, yellow, blue and black. In mass, these tiny colored dots create the illusion of an image. Your eye cannot resolve the many tiny dots individually, but instead takes them in as a whole, much as it would if you were looking at a lawn. You don't see, or pay attention to, every individual blade of grass-instead you see a velvet, green, continuous expanse. You don't pay attention to every leaf on a tree, you just see a tree. You don't pay attention to the individual trees in a forest, you just see a forest. It's the same for a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. You don't pay attention to the myriad tiny colored dots, you just take them all in and your eye and brain process the information so that you see an intelligible image. This type of printing is called "four-color process," and uses a limited number of colors to create the illusion of images made of many colors. The kind of printing I use for my posters is different. It is called, "solid-color lithography," or "solid-tone lithography." This is in distinction not only to four-color process printing, but also to "continuous tone" printing, in which shades and tones of color are created by small, irregular blotches of color. An original color photograph, for example, would be a good illustration of continuous tone reproduction. One of the limitations of four-color process is that it cannot faithfully reproduce anything like the range of colors that the eye is able to see. An advantage of solid-color printing is that it allows a much greater range. The disadvantage is that it is difficult to create the impression of a continuous tone. This is easy to do with four-color process. So, everything is a compromise. If you want a smooth graduation of tone-appropriate for reproducing a photograph or painting-you lose density and range. If you want the maximum density and range of color, you find that you cannot easily get smooth graduations of tone. Therefore, I design my posters with both the restrictions and virtues of solid-tone printing in mind. With solid-tone printing, each color is individually printed from a separate plate. Each plate is made from a separate negative. Each negative is made from the master positive, which is painted by hand, following the key-line, so that the area for that particular color is solid, and will transmit no light. This painted positive is then photographically contacted to a fresh piece of film, which when developed has a large, clear area which corresponds to the particular color desired. When the color separations are done, and every color in the original sketch has been faithfully transformed into a separate negative, I begin making the plates from which the printing will be done. There may be as few as one color or as many as twenty-two. The Berkeley Symphony Orchestra poster is made of twelve separate plates, plus one extra plate called a "touch-plate." I will discuss this later. The plates are made by direct contact with the negatives, and are therefore exactly the same size. I begin printing with a light color, such as a grey or tan. With this first plate, I print not only the color that will be visible in the finished poster, but in addition, the complete original key-line. This allows me to register-that is put every new color exactly where it belongs-each succeeding color to all the others. When the printing begins, I tack up the original drawing and refer to it throughout. Color is a function not only of the shade and hue and so on, but also of two other exterior factors: the source of light under which it is viewed, and the other colors that surround it. Consequently, I follow the original sketch faithfully, as decisions that were made while looking at the original as a whole will be difficult to copy without this reference in front of my eyes. I compare each new color to the original, and try not to depart from it without careful consideration. With the Berkeley Symphony poster you will notice that the first color down is a rather dark, greenish grey. But, if you look at the finished poster, you will see that this grey-which represents the lightest part of Kent Nagano's dress shirt front and other highlights, has been transformed into a color that you might think of as a cool white. This is a good example of how colors change according to their surroundings. Each color is mixed separately to match the original sketch. I mix the color by eye, and when I think I'm getting close, run a few sheets through the press to see how it looks. This "hit and miss" process can go on for quite a while. I need to have enough ink to last for the whole run, which is somewhere between a pound of ink for moderate coverage to four or five pounds for heavy coverage or a long run. I use a few basic ink colors: transparent white, opaque white, yellow, cyan (pure blue), reflex blue, magenta (pure red), warm red, rubine red (cold), and black. With these colors I can faithfully create combinations which will satisfy most of the demands made by the eye. I print the posters on a photo-offset-lithographic press. The sheets are printed one at a time, though rather quickly. Barring interruptions, the press runs at 3600 impressions per hour. Since the press runs vary from a few hundred to as many as five thousand, this part of the process is relatively quick. Each plate is mounted on the press in sequence, and the color to which it corresponds is completely printed before another layer of color is put down. Aligning the image on the plate with those that have preceded it is called registration. A second important part of printing is getting the ink balance and density correct for the area to be printed: large areas of coverage call for copious amounts of ink, whereas small areas need only a little ink. Since both large areas and small areas of coverage are often found within the same image, it is important to make them look alike, despite the varying amounts of ink called for. A third part of my task as a printing pressman is to make sure that the paper feeds properly and continuously, and is delivered in a neat stack after the image has been laid down onto the sheets, so that I can run it through the press again, if necessary. A constant and careful eye must be aimed at the printed sheets, as well. Dirt, dust, flaws in the paper, the occasional suicidal insect, the malign influence of evil spirits-all these misfortunes demand unremitting vigilance. Things go wrong all the time. The colors are printed one at a time, usually only one per day. This is to allow adequate drying time between them. Lithographic ink takes about twelve hours to dry so that it can be handled without smearing. The more colors build up on top of one another, the longer this drying time can be, so the roughly 24 hours that elapses between colors insures that the sheet will be thoroughly dry on the next pass through the press. As the colors are laid down, I take a few sheets from each pass and set them aside. When the poster is finished, there will be a set of what are called "progressives," which form a record of the printing process. So, with the Berkeley Symphony poster, the first sheet contains only the lightest grey. The second, the lightest grey and a light tan. The third, the lightest grey, the light tan and a darker tan. Colors are often printed on top of one another to create a third color, which is a combination of the two. This goes on until the last color-in this case a black-completes the series. When the poster is finished, it may be that I have discovered a mistake or feel that one or more of the colors is not quite right. When this happens, I make what is called a "touch-plate," which allows me to add another color. In the case of the Berkeley Symphony poster, I felt that the last color-black-was not dense enough. With every other color in the spectrum you can claim that whatever you ended up with is what you intended, and nobody can say it wasn't. But, everybody knows black. So, I made a second black plate, somewhat smaller around the edges so that registration would not be a big problem (this is called a "stay-in"), and laid down another coat of black ink. The interesting thing about this poster is that, at every stage, it seems to reflect a different aspect of Kent Nagano's complex personality. First, the outline-just a sketch of an idea. Then through the sun-bronzed athlete, the contemplative thinker, the demanding compulsive, and at last the integrated whole. People are made of many layers, too. November 15, 1995

#David Lance Goines #nagano #berkeley symphony #kent nagano #signed #numbered #poster

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wakingwriter · 6 years

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When and why did you begin writing?

I’ve always written, mainly articles, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I decided to write my first novel, The Artist’s Muse. I’ve always admired anyone who has finished a novel, as I have started and abandoned so many over the years and recognize the commitment it takes to see a novel through to completion. I always told myself that I would write a novel one day but the more I talked about it the less likely it seemed that I would ever do it. Life was good and very distracting. I went out a lot, my work as a teacher was fun.

Then it happened – the event that got me to put pen to paper where everything else had failed. I was attacked in the classroom by a violent male pupil who had issues with women in authority. After that, teaching wasn’t the same.

I turned to writing. I wrote compulsively, penning articles to motivate others, writing pieces on art, travel, food. I had a desire to give meaning to my world and writing was the most powerful way to do it.

When did you first consider yourself a writer?

This is a tricky one as there’s something almost mysterious, possibly pretentious, to call oneself a ‘writer’ which belies the hard graft that goes into the writing itself. When I first started to write The Artist’s Muse I would meet up once a week with a friend who also wrote. Yet when other friends asked us what we were doing we would be evasive, self-conscious, wary of criticism and the odd raised eyebrow. It was only when I had finished the novel that I decided it was time for me to tell people about it. I considered myself a writer at that point. I had completed a work of fiction. I’d written 90,000 plus words. I’d researched the paintings I’d mentioned and the historical context, I’d edited and re-edited, removing unnecessary detail, delighting in the sounds of my sentences. Though to call myself a writer, that took a little bit longer. It was only when articles and reviews presented me as ‘Kerry Postle, author of The Artist’s Muse‘ that it truly sank in. I had written a novel. I was ready to call myself a writer.

Why did you choose to write in your particular field or genre?

My first novel, The Artist’s Muse, is historical/literary fiction. I’ve always loved art and art history. I’ve studied it, even taught it. I’m interested in gender politics too. And so, when I went to an Egon Schiele exhibition in Vienna back in 2015, my two loves came together. I knew what I had to write about.

I saw rooms full of paintings of the same model, the wonderful Wally Neuzil, but I could find out very little about her life. She was very evidently key to Schiele’s work, and yet, for such an important figure, she was unsettling absent. And to make matters worse, what little I did manage to dig up about her was presented from a very male perspective. I felt compelled to put this right and to tell her story from her point of view, and that’s what I’ve done. I’ve given her a voice where she presents her life with and influence on Schiele through her eyes. In this way we can understand her actions. She challenges us to judge her if we dare as she is aware that she very often swims perilously close to the limits of acceptability. However, to see how society dismisses her, how it turns a blind eye to the exploitative way that she is treated by powerful men, the reader has no option but to condemn the hypocrisy of those who should know better. The Artist’s Muse celebrates the glittering art of turn-of-the-century Vienna while never ignoring the decay and corruption at its core.

What made you decide to sit down and actually start writing this book?

What made me start writing was the need to celebrate Egon Schiele’s art but also to challenge the right of one person to use another as a possession. I was compelled to breathe life into the artist’s muse and show her to be the inspiration she really was. The work Schiele completed with Wally is his most original. He failed to reach the same artistic heights after he had abandoned her and so The Artist’s Muse is my acknowledgment of the contribution she made to his ‘oeuvre’ and recognition of the sacrifices she had to make. I had to write it.

Tell us more about your main character. What makes him or her unique?

Wally Neuzil is the main character in The Artist’s Muse. She is Schiele’s muse and her commitment to him enables him to achieve the greatness that he does. Her voice is refreshingly unique. We follow her thought processes and although she has few choices we see, as she shares with us what she thinks, that she knows right from wrong. Exploited, in an abusive relationship, we feel her pain and understand why she does what she does. She has a knowingness about her that recognizes the wrong in what she’s made to do, yet she does it anyway because she must. Her voice is distinct and clear and she often challenges the reader directly, asking if he or she would act any differently. Her aim is to make us think, feel uncomfortable about the blind eye we may sometimes turn to the unpalatable truth before us. Yet underpinning it all is the little voice of a young girl who only ever wanted to live a good and happy life, to love and be loved.

Who is your least favorite character and why?

My least favorite character, yet the one who was the most fun to write, is the repulsive Herr Altmann. He is the most repellent character in the novel. Like a slug, he oozes bodily fluids. I’d been looking at Ursula LeGuin’s book on writing called Steering the Craft where she urges you to have fun with your language and that is what I did when I had Wally go into Herr Altmann’s study. She delivers a drawing to him (it’s of her body) and as he unrolls it the sense of menace builds up. A powerful man who abuses his privileged position, I portray him as a vile and ultimately ridiculous fool.

If your book was made into a movie, who would you cast?

Egon Schiele is the enfant terrible of the art world – stylish, handsome, louche. A young David Tennant, therefore, would be perfect but as time waits for no man I’m going to have to give the role to a younger model. Possibly Eddie Redmayne. As for Wally, his red-haired model, I would go for Sophie Turner (Sansa Stark in Game of Thrones) or Kate Mara, while the cold Emilie Flöge would be best played by Tilda Swinton or Cate Blanchett. Then there’s Klimt – not too sure who I’d like to play him. Nick Frost? The Artist’s Muse would make a wonderful film!

What is your next project?

My next project is a novel set during the Spanish Civil War. It again looks at misogyny, this time when used as a weapon in war. The trigger for the action is a war crime perpetrated by Franco’s Nationalists in a finca near the village of Fuentes de Andalucia. The soldiers, tired after a grueling campaign, kidnap local women. They are forced to cook and dance for the soldiers. Then they are raped, murdered and thrown down a well. The soldiers return to the village, bloodied underwear trailing like flags from the tips of their rifles.

What role does research play in your writing?

Research is key. It helps add authenticity to your work. When researching The Artist’s Muse two texts became central to the novel. The first was Otto Weiniger’s Sex and Character published in 1903 which is a pseudo-scientific attempt at illustrating the differences between men and women. It’s a work of unparalleled misogyny, so full of odious opinions that I found it hard to choose just one quotation to sum it up. However, the one for which I’ve opted should give you a flavor: ‘Woman,’ Weininger writes, ‘is soulless and possesses neither ego nor individuality, personality nor freedom, character nor will.’ The other text is by an Austrian feminist called Adelheid Popp. It’s called The Autobiography of a Working Woman and it shows the hardships poor working class women had to endure at the beginning of the 20th century in Vienna. I used much of the detail presented in this book to fill in the gaps and add authenticity to Wally Neuzil’s early life.

How successful has your quest for reviews been so far?

I’ve got quite a few in the UK but have struggled to get many in the USA, which is a shame, as I believe the US readership would love my story. I haven’t tried very hard to get more but that’s because I don’t know how to. Part of me hopes that the book will speak for itself, but I realize that readers need to know about it before that can happen.

Who is your favorite fictional character and why?

This changes constantly and depends on which book I’ve read recently. At this point in time, my favorite is Tabitha in Francis Spufford’s On Golden Hill. She’s really very intriguing. Nasty? Quite possibly. Prickly? Of course. But there’s something quite desperate about her that makes my heartbreak. Her own worst enemy.

Who are the writers that have influenced your work?

I studied French literature from the 11th through early 20th century as an undergraduate and specialized in 17th-century French drama and Proust’s A la Recherche du Temps Perdu for my Masters. My studies have given me an appreciation of well-written literature irrespective of genre and context. However, when I’m writing I immerse myself in books that do well whatever it is I’m aiming to achieve at that time. If pushed I would have to say that Proust is my turn-to author when I need general inspiration. He combines great insight with a sharp wit that spares no one, least of all himself – a valuable attribute in a writer. The writing of Richard Flanagan (Gould’s Book of Fish/ The Narrow Road to the Deep North) is also a favorite, but in truth, there are so many great books out there.

How can you discover more about Kerry Postle?

Kerry Postle, author of The Artist's Muse @kerry_postle #historicalfiction When and why did you begin writing? I’ve always written, mainly articles, but it wasn’t until 2015 that I decided to write my first novel, The Artist’s Muse.

#historical fiction

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jgmail · 3 years

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Entrevista a David l’Epée: contra el nuevo puritanismo

Traducción de Juan Gabriel Caro Rivera

El 19 de mayo en Burdeos, por invitación del Cercle Rébellion Bordeaux, imparte una conferencia titulada El nuevo orden moral. ¿De qué se tratará?

Nos ocuparemos de un fenómeno muy inquietante que venimos trabajando desde hace varios años y que está en proceso de adquirir un peso considerable: el establecimiento, en las costumbres y en las leyes, de un nuevo puritanismo de inspiración feminista. Rompiendo con el feminismo histórico y con la tradición de progreso social a la que hasta entonces se había suscrito, esta nueva ideología se presenta como un puro producto universitario, una doctrina no fundamentada que poco a poco ha ido tomando el rostro de una especie de jesuitismo secularizado. El nuevo orden moral del que habla el título es en cierto modo un retorno de lo victoriano reprimido que aún acecha en el inconsciente colectivo de las culturas anglosajona y escandinava, que son precisamente a las que debemos esta ofensiva neo-feminista. Intentaré, en el tiempo que se me ha asignado, hacer una genealogía de este fenómeno, explicar su coherencia y examinar cuáles son sus implicaciones. En los últimos años he recogido muchos ejemplos concretos y elocuentes de este fortalecimiento de las relaciones entre los sexos deseado y promovido por algunas de nuestras élites. Pero tenga la seguridad de que no voy a pronunciar un discurso conspirativo o declinista, creo firmemente que se está gestando una revuelta de sentido común contra esta regla de plomo y estamos aquí para alimentar las críticas. Es una charla donde, espero, también tendremos la oportunidad de reír: las fechorías de los nuevos policías del pensamiento son a menudo tan ubicuas y tan surrealistas que necesariamente inspiran la risa, y esta risa bien podría, ante este sistema que desconfía del humor como la peste, resulta ser un instrumento de resistencia.

Lo que dices es asombroso porque los opositores que escuchamos en el momento de reformas como la introducción de la ideología de género en las escuelas o el “matrimonio para todos” hablaban poco de puritanismo: ¡al contrario, a menudo eran acusados, por sus adversarios o por los medios de comunicación, de hacer ellos mismos de mostrarse puritanos!

Es cierto, pero habrás notado que, en todos estos movimientos de protesta, los medios de comunicación han tenido mucho cuidado en dar la palabra solo a representantes de movimientos religiosos (católicos la mayor parte del tiempo, musulmanes a veces) y si es posible entregan sus micrófonos a los más fundamentalistas y los más caricaturizados entre ellos, con el objetivo de poder desprestigiarlos ante la opinión pública. Si hay que reconocer que los movimientos católicos sí han jugado un papel de peso en esta oposición (y podemos agradecerles por ello), no fueron los únicos, y las razones que empujaron a tantos franceses a intentar bloquear a los científicos locos del gobierno no eran todos religiosos o morales. Si no me encuentro en la lucha de estas personas es porque -aparte del hecho, después de todo anecdótico, de que no soy creyente- su crítica es incompleta, no acarrea todas las consecuencias que ella le debía este desafío al neofeminismo. No voy a hacer amigos diciendo esto, pero por un tiempo me ha parecido que un cristiano que ataca la ideología de género es como un izquierdista (o un diestro) que ataca al liberalismo: sólo hace la mitad del trabajo, se pone en contacto rápidamente y, tarde o temprano, pone los pies en la alfombra. El problema no era tanto que se les llamara puritanos, sino que con bastante frecuencia lo eran. Se ha visto a partidarios de la vieja Iglesia saliendo a las calles para interrumpir a los representantes de la nueva Iglesia, la que está actualmente en el poder. Algunos creían en Dios mientras que otros creían en el progreso, ciertamente no estaban de acuerdo en todo, pero muchos de ellos, a ambos lados de la barricada, se encontraban en una relación conflictiva con nociones tan centrales como naturaleza, cuerpo, sexo. A los abrazos indignados y a los predicadores mahometanos que vociferaron contra las faldas demasiado cortas, la desnudez en el cine y la galantería, quería decirles: no hay necesidad de gritar, muchachos, no es necesario ir a manifestarse en los principales bulevares, las feministas hacen el trabajo por ti en los ministerios, ¡solo tienes que esperar un poco más y esperar a que se hagan las cosas!

Tenemos un pequeño problema para seguirte. En un programa reciente de TV Libertés se te vio derribando un libro de Esther Vilar (a quien calificaste como "Otto Weininger con útero"), que sin embargo es considerado por muchos como un referente en la lucha contra feminista…

¡Pero yo no soy antifeminista! Difícilmente podría serlo, ya que este término (como el término feminismo) es demasiado polisémico si no especificas lo que pones detrás. Esther Vilar es una panfletista completamente neurótica y lisiada por el odio a sí misma, sus libros sólo son interesantes como testimonios de una patología - y una patología no muy diferente a la que se encuentra en estos hombres avergonzados de ser hombres, estos blancos. avergonzados de ser blancos, esos franceses avergonzados de ser franceses, etc. Quería mencionarla en este programa porque el hecho de que encuentre un eco favorable entre los críticos actuales del feminismo me parece bastante preocupante. El problema no se debe solo a su falta de rigor intelectual, sino a la premisa violentamente misógina de su tesis. Desafortunadamente, asistir a la nebulosa antifeminista me ha revelado que detrás de una crítica común (o aparentemente común) a menudo se encuentran motivaciones y suposiciones diametralmente opuestas. Quienes consideran los libros de Esther Vilar o La pornocratie de Proudhon (y, sin embargo, soy un gran admirador de Proudhon, ¡pero por otras razones!) como instrumentos serios de crítica antifeminista, están mostrando un gran error en su apreciación, error que solo puede explicarse por el problema que tienen no con el feminismo sino con las mujeres. Notarás, y volveremos al tema en mi charla de manera incidental, que la mayoría de los misóginos son puritanos. El puritanismo es ante todo un odio a la naturaleza, a lo creado, y el cuerpo y el sexo son la naturaleza por excelencia, y en nuestras representaciones culturales multimilenarias, siempre es sobre todo la mujer la que se vincula a esta corporeidad, la que vuelve a su sexo: es indudablemente arbitrario, pero lo es. ¿No hablamos, todavía en el siglo XIX, de una "persona del sexo" para designar a una mujer? Los que devalúan a la mujer y afirman su inferioridad, ya sean imanes fundamentalistas o vírgenes atormentados que son lectores de Sexo y carácter de Otto Weininger, son por tanto los peores de los puritanos, y esto los hace iguales a las neo-feministas contra las que creen luchar y de la que son sólo el reflejo inverso.

Que el feminismo a veces se toma con bocanadas androfóbicas, lo sospechamos y lo notamos, pero ¿cómo podría atacar a las mujeres cuando se supone que la ideología defiende sus intereses?

Esta es toda la paradoja del neofeminismo que, al radicalizar ciertas posiciones de los viejos feminismos, acabó volviéndose contra estos últimos. Una parte del feminismo clásico defendió, casi de manera "corporativista", los intereses de las mujeres, ya sea en materia de derechos, salario, igualdad, libertad, etc. Estuviera uno de acuerdo con este programa o no, era una causa coherente, ya que en muchos puntos muy concretos las mujeres reales encontraron allí su ventaja. Pero el neofeminismo, filtrado a través de las ideologías de la deconstrucción y el ultraculturalismo universitario, ha llegado a negar la naturaleza, es decir, el hecho de que hay la mitad de la humanidad nació como femenina. El sujeto del feminismo clásico era la mujer, pero el objetivo del neofeminismo es deconstruir y evacuar todas las categorías sexuales. Pero, ¿qué es el feminismo sin mujeres? Sería tan absurdo como un antirracismo que, al tiempo que condena la discriminación racial, niega la noción de raza... Oh no, eso también existe. En definitiva, si el feminismo comenzó atacando al patriarcado, la dominación masculina, la falocracia e incluso, en ocasiones, en sus expresiones más radicales, al hombre mismo (encontramos, entre ciertas teóricas lesbianas separatistas, desde Ti-Grace Atkinson hasta Valérie Solanas, un verdadero odio hacia el hombre a veces llevado a fantasías casi genocidas), ahora ha dado el siguiente paso y ha convertido a las mujeres en su nuevo objetivo. Lo que se desprende de cierta lógica: no se puede liquidar la masculinidad sin liquidar la feminidad en el mismo movimiento ya que es el principio mismo de la identidad de género el que está siendo atacado. Al contrario de lo que dice Eric Zemmour, que me parece que tiene una visión un tanto superficial del asunto, no creo que el movimiento en el trabajo apunte a la feminización sino a la neutralización. Si las neo-feministas se propusieron atacar todas las especificidades y características de la mujer, ya sean culturales (como la coquetería o el coqueteo) o biológicas (como las relaciones heterosexuales o la maternidad), es porque que la feminidad es su enemiga. ¿De verdad crees que personalidades del feminismo radical como Beatrice/Paul Preciado o Marie-Hélène/Sam Bourcier habrían decidido cambiar de sexo si les impulsara la idea de defender a la mujer y la feminidad?

Ha estado trabajando en estos temas durante varios años. ¿Qué te motivó a emprender esta investigación?

Frecuenté un poco los círculos feministas cuando estaba involucrada en la extrema izquierda, no porque creyera en ello sino porque no podía hacer otra cosa, era parte del paquete trotskista y siendo secretaria de sección tuve que prescindir de la cabra y el repollo. Ya tenía las mayores dudas sobre el sentido y los méritos de esta lucha, muy alejada de los grandes ejemplos del feminismo socialista o anarquista del pasado (Louise Michel, Rosa Luxembourg, Emma Goldman, etc.) y más cerca del punto de inflexión hacia la burguesía y el culturalismo que ha tomado hoy. Pero lo que realmente me hizo reaccionar y decidirme a interesarme en el tema de manera más precisa, fue el clima creciente de penalización y el retorno al puritanismo que sentí que venía lenta, pero de forma segura. Mi reacción no fue estrictamente política, fue motivada por el temor generalizado de que muchas cosas que amaba y que ocupaban un lugar importante en mi existencia me parecían amenazadas por esta ideología creciente: las bellas artes, el erotismo, el humor, el flirteo, el cine, la seducción, un cierto arte de vivir, un cierto gusto por la belleza y por la diferencia de sexos, todo esto fue cuestionando gradualmente, incluso colocado en el banco de un acusado por estas nuevas doctrinas corporalistas importadas del otro lado del Atlántico. Es por eso que he estado escribiendo y dando conferencias sobre este tema durante varios años y también es el tema de un libro en el que he estado trabajando durante algún tiempo. Siendo mi perspectiva decididamente diferencialista, lucho espalda con espalda contra las neofeministas y misóginos y espero convencer a quienes me lean o me escuchen de que la armonía entre hombres y mujeres solo será posible si aprendemos nuevamente a valorar nuestras especificidades en lugar de negarlas, criminalizarlas o "deconstruirlas".

Fuente: http://rebellion-sre.fr/entretien-avec-david-lepee-contre-le-nouveau-puritanisme/

#ideología de género #género #feminismo #entrevista

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bluewatsons · 4 years

Text

David G. Stern, The Significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein's Philosophy, 43 Inquiry 383 (2000)

Abstract

Did Wittgenstein consider himself a Jew? Should we? Wittgenstein repeatedly wrote about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and biographical studies make it clear that this writing about Jewishness was a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work. Those who have written about Wittgenstein on the Jews have drawn very different conclusions. But much of this debate is confused, because the notion of being a Jew, of Jewishness, is itself ambiguous and problematic. The paper provides a close reading of leading passages in which Wittgenstein discusses Jews and Jewishness, and argues that previous interpreters have been too quick to condemn or defend him. If we consider what it could mean to say that Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew, we will see that Wittgenstein’s problems with ‘Jewishness’ arise out of the philosophically problematic nature of the concept, a philosophical problem he was unable to resolve.

I. Was Wittgenstein a Jew?

Did Ludwig Wittgenstein consider himself a Jew? Should we? Wittgenstein repeatedly wrote about Jews and Judaism in the 1930s, and biographical studies make it clear that this writing about Jewishness was a way in which he thought about the kind of person he was and the nature of his philosophical work.2 On the other hand, many philosophers regard Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the Jews as relatively unimportant. Most studies of Wittgenstein do not even mention the matter, and those that do usually give it little attention. For instance, Joachim Schulte recognizes that ‘Jewishness was an important theme for Wittgenstein’3 but says very little more, except that the available evidence makes precise statements dif cult. Rudolf Haller’s approach in ‘What do Wittgenstein and Weininger have in Common?’ is probably more representative of the received wisdom among Wittgenstein experts. In the very rst paragraph, he makes it clear that the sole concern of his paper is the question of ‘deeper philosophical common ground’ between Wittgenstein and Weininger, and not ‘attitudes on femininity or Jewishness’.4 Those who have written about Wittgenstein on the Jews have drawn very different conclusions. He has been lauded as a ‘rabbinical’ thinker,5 and a far-sighted critic of antisemitism,6 characterized as a self-hating antisemite7 and con- demned for uncritically accepting the worst racist prejudices.8

But much of this debate is confused, because the notion of being a Jew, of Jewishness, is itself ambiguous and problematic. Instead, we need to consider what it could mean to say that Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew. Another way of putting this is to say that we should rst consider different ways of seeing Wittgenstein as a Jew. Before rushing to judgment, we need to consider what it could mean to say that Wittgenstein was, or was not, a Jew, or an antisemite. This is not just a matter of tabulating various possible de nitions of these expressions, but of considering the different contexts – cultural, social, personal – in which those terms can be used, and their signi cance in those contexts. In doing so, we need to give critical attention not only to the various criteria for being a Jew that Wittgenstein would have been acquainted with, and the presuppositions he might have taken for granted about Jews and Judaism, but also the ones that we use in our discussion of Wittgenstein as a Jew, and our motives for doing so. One of the great dangers in writing philosophical biography is the risk of turning the study of a philosopher’s life and work into vicarious autobiography, wishful thinking, or worse.

Wittgenstein was certainly not, in any sense, a practicing Jew; he, his parents, and three of his grandparents, were baptized by the Catholic Church. For instance, both Monk and McGuinness tell the story of how the young Wittgenstein wanted to lie about his Jewish background in order to join a Viennese gymnastic club, and had to be dissuaded by his brother Paul.9 Both biographers make it clear that while the Wittgenstein family presented themselves in public as Christians, it was widely known that they were of Jewish descent. Wittgenstein did, on occasion, deny his Jewishness, and this was a charged matter for him. In 1935, the German government enacted the Nuremberg Laws, which speci ed that only those people with three or more Jewish grandparents were to be classi ed as Jews; those with one or two Jewish grandparents were classi ed as different grades of mixed race. In 1936 and 1937, while at work on what would become the rst 180 sections of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein confessed to friends and family that he had misrepresented the extent of his Jewish descent, claiming that one grandparent had been a Jew, when actually three of them were. In 1938, as a result of the Anschluss with Austria, the Nuremberg Laws became applicable to the Wittgenstein family. Wittgenstein, who was living in Britain at the time, took British citizenship. His brother Paul ed to Switzerland in July 1938. Meanwhile his sisters stayed in Austria, eventually making a deal with the Berlin authorities, under which they repatriated very substantial foreign assets in exchange for classifying them as non-Jewish, an arrangement Wittgenstein actively supported.10 In a diary entry written after the German- Austrian Anschluss, he described the prospect of holding a German Judenpass, Jewish identity papers, as an ‘extraordinarily dif cult situation’ and compared it to a ‘hot iron’ that would burn in his pocket.11

Readings of Wittgenstein’s life are inevitably coloured by the interpreter’s commitments, and often tell us more about the interpreter’s imagination than Wittgenstein. In a diary written in 1931, he found himself drawn toward anticipating such a readership, and admonished himself to resist the temptation:

In my mind’s eye, I can already hear posterity talking about me, instead of listening to me, those, who if they knew me, would certainly be a much more ungrateful public.

And I must do this: not hear the other in my imagination, but rather myself. I.e., not watch the other, as he watches me – for that is what I do – rather, watch myself. What a trick, and how unending the constant temptation to look to the other, and away from myself.12

Discussing the difficulties involved in writing a completely honest autobiography, Wittgenstein argued that the author’s motives will always destabilize the autobiographical project of giving an accurate and consistent account of one’s life.13 Wittgenstein was not just suggesting that self-serving motives are ineliminable; he was also observing that whatever story one tells will be coloured by one’s current concerns, which will, in turn, be affected by the telling of that story. Objectivity and impartiality, turn out, on closer inspection, to be particularly charged stances, precisely because of their claim to stand above the fray. Any attempt at a balanced and consistent account of the dif cult questions about oneself will inevitably be marked by a certain instability and inconsistency, because no one can be indifferent about such matters. But anyone writing about Wittgenstein’s life or thought – or, for that matter, anyone else’s life and thought – must face the very issues that make autobiography particularly problematic. Why should the biographer be any more capable of Olympian impartiality than the autobiographer? Indeed, anyone who aims at a coherent account of the life of another faces two sources of potential conflict, two hermeneutic pitfalls.

Wittgenstein’s favourite passage, which he quoted frequently, came from the introduction to Hertz’s Principles of Mechanics. There, Hertz summed up his answer to debates over the meaning of terms such as ‘force’ or ‘electricity’: because the term has accumulated contradictory meanings, the only solution is to give some of them up. ‘When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions’.14 Wittgenstein thought of his philosophy as analogous: a matter of uncovering inconsistencies in our use of everyday terms that lead us to talk nonsense yet think we make sense. In a recent piece on Wittgenstein and Judaism, written in English, but published in German, ‘Wittgenstein und Judentum,’ [Wittgenstein and Jewishness] Brian McGuinness rightly observes that ‘Jewishness’ is just such a term. But instead of developing a Hertzian critique of ‘Jewishness,’ he tries to show that Jews and Jewishness in any sense were of very little significance for Wittgenstein. For instance, in the first paragraph of that paper, McGuinness insists that no-one at the turn of the century would have thought of describing Wittgenstein’s relatives as a Jewish family, passing over the point that their Jewish descent was known, and meant that they would be classified as converted Jews. Similarly, McGuinness reads Wittgenstein’s writing about his Jewishness as an indirect way of talking about his philosophical method. Ultimately, he concludes that:

In the end [Letztlich] Wittgenstein didn’t consider himself Jewish, and we too don’t need to do so. The concept is attractive, even though, or because, it is misleading: it is possible to think that it would have been good if all ‘Jews’ had felt solidarity, but also, that they should have – it is however just as possible to think something conflicting or even completely different. But in any case it is speculation – and not reality.15

Oddly, this is quite incompatible with his account in Young Ludwig, which stresses the importance of his Jewishness for Wittgenstein:

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. . . . 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.16

McGuinness does not say who he has in mind when he speaks of the ‘attractions’ of thinking of Wittgenstein as a Jew, but in a footnote he speaks disparagingly of others who have made this error, not his own earlier work. In that footnote, at the end of the paragraph quoted above, he writes:

Here I have the impression, that the polemical part of what I have said, has already, essentially, been said before. It seems necessary to repeat it, even though, in talking about the topic, one risks furthering the very thing in question. That is part of the fascination of which I speak.17

However, he gives no references to his targets, and there are no references to those he is criticizing in his bibliography. This is, on the face of it, odd, for the scholarly literature on Wittgenstein’s Jewishness is, for the most part, not well known. Perhaps this is because of McGuinness’s concern about ‘furthering the very thing in question,’ an obscure object of fascination that he apparently considers best left unnamed. Cornish’s speculative and imaginative account of Wittgenstein’s Jewishness as the driving force behind Hitler’s antisemitism is a good example of the dangers of applying the conspiracy theory approach to Wittgenstein, but it seems unlikely that it was the focus of McGuinness’s attention.18 Perhaps his principal target here is Ray Monk’s biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, which takes the Weiningerian conception of the ‘duty of genius’ as its leading theme in interpreting Wittgenstein’s life and work, even though Monk’s excellent biography, which rightly gives Wittgenstein’s Jewishness and his relationship to Weininger a central place, is never cited or mentioned in McGuinness’s paper.

Comparing McGuinness’s two accounts, one gets the impression that he has followed the path of dissociation from Jewishness that he originally saw in Wittgenstein; he begins by insisting on Wittgenstein’s need to deny that he was a Jew, and ends up denying that Wittgenstein was a Jew. Contradictions between different conceptions of Jewishness are not so much the subject of McGuinness’s discussion as enacted in its development. But if the concept of a ‘Jew,’ or ‘Jewishness,’ is so problematic, then questions about Wittgenstein’s Jewishness need Hertzian treatment, not a direct answer. We can best begin by considering the connections between Wittgenstein and Weininger.

II. Wittgenstein and Weininger

In 1931, Wittgenstein included Otto Weininger on a short list of writers who had in uenced him. Following the publication of Ray Monk’s biography, with its emphasis on the Weiningerian theme of the ‘duty of genius’ as a key to understanding Wittgenstein’s life and work, the question of how Weininger in uenced Wittgenstein has received considerable attention. In Sex and Character, Weininger contrasted masculine originality with feminine reproductiveness, and held that Jews particularly exemplify the latter traits; race, sexuality, and gender are all closely aligned in the Weiningerian economy.19 Most of the Weininger literature is polarized, and constrained, by the dispute between those who nd it necessary to condemn, or excuse, Weininger’s use of such stereotypes.20 Those who read Weininger sym- pathetically – Weininger’s apologists – emphasize his observation that no one is entirely masculine, feminine, Jewish, or homosexual. Because these are ideal types, Weininger is not committed to racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Thus, according to Allan Janik: ‘Weininger goes out of his way to insist that he does not identify the Jew as a member of a race. Judaism is a possibility for all men in his eyes’.21 Those who read Weininger unsympathetically – Weininger’s critics – argue that his writings implicitly invite and encourage such bigoted uses, even as they explicitly reject them.

There is a striking congruence between Wittgenstein’s conception of Jewishness, genius and talent, and Weininger’s. In a note written in 1931, Wittgenstein first distinguishes creative genius from mere talent, which is only reproductive, then continues:

The saint is the only Jewish ‘genius’. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance.)

On an apologetic reading, this talk of ‘Jewishness’ should be taken as a metaphorical discussion of creativity and originality, and the relationship between his temperament and philosophical method. McGuinness tries to minimize the role of Jewishness in the earlier passages by drawing on Kienzler’s observation that in such places ‘one can replace ‘Jew’ by ‘philosopher’ without essentially changing the sense [Sinn]’.23 Given a narrowly Fregean notion of sense, this may be strictly true, but it all depends on what one considers essential. Wittgenstein’s talk of ‘Jewish reproduc- tiveness’ here contributes a signi cance to this passage that would be missing if he had spoken of ‘philosophical reproductiveness’. Certainly, the paragraphs that follow explore Wittgenstein’s conviction that he cannot produce anything fundamentally new, that his talent lies in making good use of others’ work.

On a critical reading, what is most troubling is that Wittgenstein takes Weininger’s antisemitic ideas for granted. As Monk puts it, ‘what is most shocking about Wittgenstein’s remarks on Jewishness is his use of the language – indeed, the slogans – of racial anti-Semitism. The echo that really disturbs is not that of Sex and Character, but that of Mein Kampf’.24

Around the same time, Wittgenstein recommended Weininger’s book to several friends, including Moore. Responding to Moore’s objections, Wittgenstein wrote:

I can quite imagine that you don’t admire Weininger very much, what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you. It is true that he is fantastic but he is great and fantastic. It isn’t necessary or rather not possible to agree with him but the greatness lies in that with which we disagree. It is his enormous mistake which is great. I.e. roughly speaking if you just add a ‘ ’ to the whole book it says an important truth.25

Unfortunately, Wittgenstein did not say what he meant by negating the whole book. Monk argues that while Wittgenstein rejected Weininger’s idea of Woman, he adopted Weininger’s valorization of the male genius, ‘the duty of genius’, contrasting it with most men’s lives. Monk emphasizes the af nities between Wittgenstein’s and Weininger’s views about love and self- knowledge: Man can choose between the masculine and the feminine, love and sexuality; to nd oneself is to nd one’s higher self and thus God, and escape the empirical self. Monk is right to stress that the later Wittgenstein rejected Weininger’s view of Woman; on one occasion, Wittgenstein said of Weininger’s views on this topic: ‘How wrong he was, my God he was wrong.’26

Szabados nds it implausible that this is what Wittgenstein meant by negating Weininger, for it only changes the object of Weininger’s prejudices.

That the mature Wittgenstein would give the nod to stipulative, evaluatively loaded de nitions of Man and Woman strains credulity. The suggestion is completely out of alignment with the resolute anti-essentialism of the late philosophy. So ‘Man and masculinity are the sources of all evil’ is not the important truth that we are supposed to get out of negating Weininger’s book. For this is as much of an absurdity as his central theme, and between two absurdities there is nothing to choose. It rests on a kind of essentialism that the later Wittgenstein rejects simply in virtue of its prejudicial nature. The author of the Investigations is devoted to a method of looking and seeing how things are rather than saying and prejudging how things are. Both absurdities reveal a deep prejudice and distort the particularity and individuality of people.27

This reading of the text of the Investigations is attractive, but in the very sense McGuinness warns against. It would have been good if Wittgenstein had freed himself of Weininger’s prejudices, but we should be wary of arguing from what we think our philosophical heroes should have believed to what they actually believed.

Both Monk and Szabados fail to see how much Wittgenstein identified with the complementary image of the abjectly feminine – both as Jew and homosexual.28 Part of Weininger’s achievement in Wittgenstein’s eyes, I believe, was to clearly and honestly set out the prejudices of his age. In the late 1940s, Wittgenstein explained his admiration for Weininger by contrasting him with Kafka: Kafka, he said, ‘gave himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble’, while Weininger, whatever his faults, was a man who really did write about his. Anscombe had lent Wittgenstein some of Kafka’s novels; Wittgenstein, on returning them, compared Kafka unfavourably to Weininger, and recommended ‘Weininger’s Sex and Character and The Four Last Things’.29 The latter is presumably a mistranslation, or misplaced memory of Weininger’s U ̈ ber Die Letzte Dinge, a posthumous miscellany of his other writings.30 Weininger’s pronouncements about Jews, gender, national character and sexuality are the kind of stereotypes about how people and culture ‘must be’ that Wittgenstein criticized in his attacks on ‘dogmatism’ and the use of ‘prototypes’ in the early 1930s. Another aspect of Wittgenstein’s debt to Weininger was the central role Weininger accorded to what Freud called ‘projection’ in the construction of stereotypes: Weininger contends that the conception of women as either virgins or whores he sets out is a product of male needs, not of women’s nature.

early 1930s. Another aspect of Wittgenstein’s debt to Weininger was the central role Weininger accorded to what Freud called ‘projection’ in the construction of stereotypes: Weininger contends that the conception of women as either virgins or whores he sets out is a product of male needs, not of women’s nature.

Monk and Szabados read Wittgenstein’s image of negating Weininger’s book as a matter of denying its odious components. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the negation we are discussing here is not the notion of Fregean logic, but rather the Freudian notion of denying what one cannot help identifying with. One can see this in the ambiguous reference to ‘W.’ in the rst sentence of Wittgenstein’s letter – ‘I can quite imagine that you don’t admire Weininger very much, what with that beastly translation and the fact that W. must feel very foreign to you’ – a ‘W.’ that both names and does not name its author. Wittgenstein saw in Weininger, and Weininger’s antisemi- tism, a mirror of his own self-hatred, a way of guring a relationship of identi cation and denial that he both had to and could not confront. In conversation, Monk has challenged this reading, pointing out that Wittgenstein explicitly used the Fregean negation sign. Certainly, there is no evidence that he intended to make use of the Freudian notion of denial; equally, there is good reason to think that Wittgenstein’s fascination with Weininger arose out of an uneasy identi cation with that famously Jewish, homosexual philosopher who was himself deeply troubled by his own identity.

III. Wittgenstein’s Strange Dreams

There is reason to think that Wittgenstein’s uneasy relationship to his own racial identity, a relationship framed in terms of the prevalent antisemitic discourse of his times, also gures his relationship to his sexuality. First, Weininger’s racial and sexual theories are themselves mutually congruent, and both depend on drawing a binary contrast between a valorized and a denigrated term, a contrast that is drawn in strikingly similar ways in each case. Stepan’s and Gilman’s work on the antisemitism of this period has made clear the ways in which racial and gender theories draw on each other, so that the racial other, the feminine, and the homosexual are all constructed in terms of the same set of distinctions.31 Second, the most troubling of Wittgenstein’s remarks about the Jews were written in 1931, when he was considering marrying Marguerite Respinger, a friend of his family. Her visit to him in Norway in 1931 was conducted on strikingly Weiningerian lines. He found her a room of her own at a neighbour’s house, and proposed that they prepare for a new spiritual life by reading the Bible together. Even Monk, who minimizes the links between Wittgenstein’s attraction to the darker side of

The Significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy 391 Weininger’s thought and his own self-hatred, notes the connection between

Wittgenstein’s antisemitic writing in 1931 and his proposed marriage:

Wittgenstein’s remarks on Jewishness, like his projected autobiography, were essentially confessional, and both seem in some way linked to the ‘sacred’ union he planned for himself and Marguerite. They coincide with the year in which his intention to marry Marguerite was pursued with its greatest earnestness.32

The themes of race, gender, guilt and identity all converge in a ‘strange dream’ of Wittgenstein’s, which he wrote down, in code, in one of his manuscript volumes, on December 1, 1929. The dream concerns a character named ‘Vertsagt’ or ‘Vertsag’; the name is the only word not written in code.

A peculiar dream. Today toward morning I dreamt: I see in an illustrated newspaper a photograph of Vertsagt, who is a much-discussed hero of the day. The picture shows him in his car. There is talk of his disgraceful deeds; Ha ̈nsel is standing next to me and also someone else, similar to my brother Kurt. The latter says that Vertsag is a Jew but has enjoyed the upbringing of a rich Scottish lord; now he is a workers’ leader. He has not changed his name because it is not the custom there. It is new to me that Vertsagt, which I pronounce with the stress on the rst syllable, is a Jew, and I see that his name simply means ‘verzagt’ [German for ‘faint-hearted’.] It doesn’t strike me that it is written with ‘ts’ which I see printed a little bolder than the other letters. I think: must there be a Jew behind every indecency? Now Ha ̈nsel and I are on the terrace of a house, perhaps the big log-cabin on the Hochreit, and along the street comes Vertsag in his motor-car; he has an angry face, slightly reddish fair hair and a similar moustache (he does not look Jewish.) He opens re with a machine-gun at a cyclist behind him who writhes with pain and is mercilessly gunned to death with many shots. Vertsag has driven past, and now comes a young poor-looking girl on a cycle and she too receives Vertsag’s re as he drives on. And these shots, when they hit her breast make a bubbling sound like an almost-empty kettle over a ame. I felt sympathy for the girl and thought: only in Austria could it happen that this girl would nd no helpful sympathy and people watch as she suffers and is killed. I myself am afraid to help her because I fear Vertsag’s shots. I go towards her, but look for cover behind a plant. Then I wake up. I must add that in the conversation with Ha ̈nsel, rst in the presence of the other person and then after he had left us, I am embarrassed and do not want to say that I myself am descended from Jews or that Vertsag’s case is my own case too. . . . I wrote the dream down immediately after waking up.33

Ha ̈nsel was a close friend, the rst person he wrote to in 1936 to confess he had concealed his Jewishness, asking Ha ̈nsel to pass on his confession to his family.34 In his notes on the dream, Wittgenstein tries, three times, to interpret the signi cance of Vertsagt’s name. In the dream, he thought he saw ‘that his name simply means “verzagt”,’ which is German for ‘faint-hearted’. After waking, he came to think that it was really written ‘Pferzagt’, which means nothing at all. His closing attempt suggests that ‘the name as I pronounced it in the dream, “Ve`rt-sagt” is Hungarian. The name had for me something evil, spiteful and very masculine about it’.

Clearly, the dream is connected with Wittgenstein’s pervasive sense of guilt and its connection with his discomfort with his sexuality and racial origins. Monk takes the dream to be about Wittgenstein’s sense that he was ‘hiding something . . . allowing people to think of him as an aristocrat when in fact he was a Jew’. Consequently, he treats the trail of associations as a distraction from the manifest content of the dream, and the initial thought that the case of Vertsagt is his own case, the case of a man who hides his origins, and is too faint-hearted to admit it.35 It is surely right to take Wittgenstein’s attempts to make sense of the name as themselves faint-hearted and a distraction from thinking about the fact that the predicament of the protagonist is his predicament. But the search for the meaning of the name is not just a screen: looked at one way, the names are nonsensical; looked at in another way, they all have similar and connected sounds and meanings. Christoph Nyiri has pointed out that despite Wittgenstein’s repeated attempts to decode the name, he fails to consider a striking alternative: that the word is ‘versagt’, from versagen, the German word not only for ‘failed’, ‘denied’, – an obvious construal under the circumstances – but also ‘betrothed’. The usage in the sense of ‘betrothed’ is no longer common – it is not in the current Duden – but it is in the 1969 Langenscheidt, and it would have been familiar to Wittgenstein.36

Nyiri’s piece, written before he had seen Monk’s biography, takes it for granted that Wittgenstein was not betrothed. Monk’s account, presumably based on his conversations with Marguerite Respinger – speci c sources for such matters are not given in his biography – gives the impression that while Wittgenstein might have desired a celibate marriage with her, this was never a realistic possibility. Wittgenstein’s diary from this period presents a rather different picture, which is that Marguerite needed him at a time of personal crisis, but that this could not be a permanent relationship. Wittgenstein interprets another complicated dream, from late 1931, as being about how he imagines he is bound to Marguerite by a thousand ties, but as a matter of fact, it is easy for him to walk away from her.37 In any case, it seems fair to say that the Vertsagt dream epitomizes Wittgenstein’s sense of failure at the time, and particularly the failure of their proposed ‘union’.

The theme of struggling to make sense of nonsense, and in particular of a name containing consonants with similar sounds, recurs in another dream that Wittgenstein wrote down early in 1932.

Today I dreamt the following strange dream. Someone (was it Lettice? [Ramsey]) said to me that someone was called Hobbson ‘with mixed b’; which meant, that one pronounced it ‘Hobpson’. I woke and remembered that Gilbert [Pattison] once told me about the pronunciation of a word that it was ‘pronounced with mixed b,’ which I had understood as ‘mixed beef’ [in English] and didn’t know what he meant, but it sounded as if he meant that one would have to have a dish called ‘mixed beef’ in one’s mouth when saying the word, and I had understood Gilbert to have said it as a joke. I remembered all that immediately on waking. Then it sounded less and less plausible to me, and by the time I’d got dressed it seemed obvious nonsense. (By the way, if one went into this dream, it leads to thoughts about racial mixing, and what that means to me.)38

Lettice Ramsey was a close friend and con dante of Wittgenstein’s, with whom he could discuss his feelings for Marguerite; Pattison a friend with whom he joked and played with nonsensical language. Wittgenstein does not explain the connection he sees between this dream and his thoughts about mixed race. But both dreams give great significance to almost imperceptible differences in pronouncing a name that is difficult to say correctly, a name whose meaning seems clear during the dream, then elusive, and ultimately nonsensical. In each dream racial difference, and differences in meaning between nonsense words, play a central part. A name takes on a racially charged significance, but the significance resists his analytic efforts. One further connection here is that both nonsense and racial mixing arise out of combinations that are not permitted; both are offences against the normal ways of going on. Both seem to make sense within Wittgenstein’s ‘strange’ (1.12.29) and ‘peculiar’ (28.1.32) dreams, but turn into nonsense when he tries to reconstruct their meaning. Wittgenstein’s unsuccessful struggle to make sense of the nonsense names in the Vertsagt and Hobbson dreams is an uncanny parody of the traditional philosophical quest to explain a name’s meaning in terms of what it stands for.

One can see the same tension between identi cation and denial in a passage where Wittgenstein explores the idea of comparing the Jews to a disease:

‘Look on this wart //swelling// [Warze //Beule//] as a regular limb of your body!’ Can one do that, to order?

Do I have the power to decide at will to have, or not to have, a certain ideal conception of my body?

We may say: this bump [Beule] can be regarded as a limb of one’s body only if our whole feeling for the body changes (if the whole national feeling for the body changes.) Otherwise the best we can do is put up with it.

You may expect an individual to display this sort of tolerance or even to disregard such things; but you cannot expect this of a nation since it is only a nation by virtue of not disregarding such things. I.e. there is a contradiction in expecting someone to retain the original aesthetic feeling for his body & also to make the swelling [Beule] welcome.39

Peter Winch’s 1980 translation for the German Beule was ‘tumour’. Presumably the change was made because ‘tumour’ is not supported by current German dictionaries or usage: in contemporary German, a Beule is a bump or swelling, with no implication of malignancy. But there is a clear etymological connection with the English ‘boil’ – a ‘hard inflamed suppurating tumour’.40 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s historic dictionary makes it clear that the principal senses of the term in the nineteenth century were far from benign: their two leading definitions of the term both characterize it as a tumour.41 That sense was still alive in the 1960s, although by then it was no longer the leading meaning. The entry for ‘Beule’ in a German-English dictionary first published in 1964 begins as follows: ‘bump, lump, swelling; (Geschwu ̈r) boil, tumo(u)r; . .’.42 This strongly suggests that Wittgenstein must have been aware of the negative connotations of the term, and that ‘tumour’ is the correct translation. The context in which Wittgenstein used the word does provide additional support for the original translation: he first wrote ‘wart’, an unhealthy growth, and compares the Beule with a disease.

This passage has attracted attention in the secondary literature, and several English readers have been quick to condemn it for its noxious racist similes. Monk calls it ‘anti-Semitic paranoia in its most undiluted form’.43 Isaac Nevo reads this passage as primarily self-directed antisemitism, but also as intolerant nationalism:

The genocidal fantasy with respect to the Jewish tumour, which in the period this was written was being acted out on the European scene, is articulated by Wittgenstein from within. The analogies and judgements here are his own. The Jewish anomaly could, after all, be portrayed as a curable, rather than incurable, disease . . . But the nationalism Wittgenstein displays in this passage is de ned by intolerance.44

Szabados, however, emphasizes Wittgenstein’s use of distancing devices in setting out these dangerous ideas. The opening sentence is an instruction to see things in a certain way, placed within quotation marks; the second asks us whether it is possible to carry out the instruction. This is followed by a further question, an outline of a way of looking at European history that is about to be rejected, then a ‘we may say’ and a ‘you may expect’. He reads Wittgenstein as bringing up racist ideas to help us see their dangers, and offering philosophical therapy:

Szabados is right that Wittgenstein does not straightforwardly endorse the antisemitic ideas he explores in this passage, and Wittgenstein’s critics have been far too ready to assume that he accepted the prejudicial views he discusses. Also, one must remember that these were private notes, never prepared for publication. However, while Wittgenstein might have expanded the proposals and questions just quoted with the sensitive exploration of nationalism and racism Szabados sketches, there is no evidence he did so. Instead, what follows are Weiningerian re ections on how Jews supposedl y are only interested in money as a form of power:

‘People’ here translates the German Leute, and so refers to Wittgenstein’s family, not the Jews. Thus this is not only a re ection on his conception of Jewishness, power, and possession, but also concerns his extraordinarily wealthy family. As we have already seen, seven years later his sense of the proper use of power would lead him to side with his sisters in their dispute with his brother over how best to respond to the German annexation of Austria, in favour of his sisters’ paying for non-Jewish identity papers.

Another passage about the Jews, also from 1931, makes it clear how little Wittgenstein was able to transcend the stereotypes about Jews and nation that were current at the time.

‘Fatherlandless rabble’ (applied to the Jews) is on the same level as ‘crooked-nosed rabble,’ for giving yourself a fatherland is just as little in your power, as it is to give yourself a particular nose.47

This passage takes certain prevalent negative stereotypes about the Jews – that they are a rabble, lack a fatherland, are crooked-nosed – as a point of departure, and does nothing to challenge them. These are hardly the words one would expect of the critic of ‘intolerance of difference’ Szabados describes. A critique of intolerance of difference may well draw on Wittgenstein’s writings, but that critique is not articulated there.

IV. The Significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy

Is there a connection between Wittgenstein’s writing on Jews and his philosophy? What did he mean when he spoke of himself as a ‘Jewish thinker’ in 1931? Monk interprets these ideas as self-directed antisemitism, humbling himself by describing his work as merely reproductive, reminding himself of ‘his limitations, of his “Jewishness”’.48

It is as though, for a brief time (after 1931 there are, thankfully, no more remarks about Jewishness in his notebooks), he was attracted to using the then current language of anti-Semitism as a kind of metaphor for himself. . . . So long as he lived, Wittgenstein never ceased to struggle against his own pride, and to express doubts about his philosophical achievement and his own moral decency. After 1931, however, he dropped the language of anti-Semitism as a means of expressing those doubts.49

Yuval Lurie sees a direct connection between developments in Wittgenstein’s views about meaning and his giving up this talk of Jewishness. For it was around this time that Wittgenstein began to talk about family resemblances, the similarities that things of certain kinds have in common with each other without sharing a common essence. ‘Is this simultaneity coincidental? I think not. It seems to me that he found he could no longer hide behind the claim that he was merely conducting a metaphysical discussion about the ideal Jew when he spoke of Jews as he did.’50 Lurie, like Szabados, supports this reading by connecting Wittgenstein’s particular use of the concept of Jewishness with the Weiningerian notion of a prototype, a conception of an idealized instance of the concept in question, a notion that Wittgenstein rejected shortly after these discussions of the Jews in 1931. Lurie also observes that Wittgenstein’s subsequent discussions of talent and genius, creativity and originality, make use of other metaphors, such as talk of how seeds grown in different soils will grow differently.

Strictly speaking, Monk is correct in saying that there are no more remarks about Jewishness, per se, after 1931 in Wittgenstein’s surviving notebooks, and Lurie is right that Wittgenstein did develop other ways of thinking about reproductiveness and originality. But there are remarks about Jews and the Bible, from 1939 or 1940, where the antisemitic metaphors and connections of the early 1930s recur. Wittgenstein once again asks how courage and character distinguish genius from talent. On the rst page of Culture and Value, Mendelssohn is introduced as an exemplar of Wittgenstein’s idea of Jewishness, and connected with Wittgenstein’s own ideals. Wittgenstein compares the Jew to a tree that avoids tragedy by bending, rather than breaking: ‘Tragedy is something unjewish. Mendelssohn is perhaps the most untragic of composers.’51 Wittgenstein takes it for granted that the Jew lacks the courage, or resistance, required for tragedy. Indeed, he identifies his own ideal in these terms, for the passage continues: ‘Tragically holding on, defiantly holding on to a tragic situation in love always seems quite alien to my ideal. Does that mean my ideal is feeble? I cannot & should not judge.’52 In 1939–1940, Wittgenstein returns to the question ‘What is lacking in Mendelssohn’s music? A ‘courageous’ melody?’53

The following passages were written at the same time:

The Old Testament seen as the body without its head; the New T[estament]: the head; the Epistles of the Apostles: the crown on the head.

If I think of the Jewish Bible, the Old Testament on its own, I should like to say: the head is (still) missing from this body The solution to these problems is missing The ful llment of these hopes is missing. But I do not necessarily think of a head as having a crown. . . .

The measure of genius is character, – even if character on its own does not amount to genius.

Genius is not ‘talent and character’, but character manifesting itself in the form of a special talent. Where one man will show courage by jumping into the water, another will show courage by writing a symphony. (This is a weak example.) . . .

There is no more light in a genius than in any other honest human being – but the genius concentrates this light into a burning point by means of a particular lens.54

Although Wittgenstein does not explicitly make any of the claims about ‘the Jews’ that one finds in the earlier remarks, he still takes those ideas for granted. Wittgenstein is still using the Jews to think about his identity: his Bible, the Jew’s and the Catholic’s are compared to a body, a headless body, and a crowned body. Apparently, it is integral to Wittgenstein’s conception of his Christianity that it be contrasted with the supposed shortcomings of Judaism. Isaac Nevo reads this as a figure of the Jewish faith as ‘a living death’:

[T]he essential point is that variation, or even schism within Christianity does not constitute an anomaly, or a disturbance. . . . The ‘Jewish Bible,’ on the other hand, constitutes a real disturbance: a (living?) body without a head.55

While it is not as strikingly antisemitic as the earlier material, Wittgenstein is still discussing genius and talent in the context of a Biblical analogy that evokes the Jews who lost their heads, and worse, in the Shoah.

Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, with its far-reaching criticism of essentialism and platonism about meaning, certainly lends itself to a critique of antisemitism. On the other hand, his continued uncritical use of Jewish stereotypes shows that he was far from being fully successful in applying his own methods. Indeed, his final recorded reflection on antisemitism, from 1948, begins by comparing antisemitism to a knot he could not untie:

If you cannot unravel a tangle, the most sensible thing you can do is to recognize this; & the most decent thing, to admit it. [Antisemitism.]

What you should do to cure the evil is not clear. What is not permissible is clear from one case to another.56

It is hard to know what to make of this passage. Nevo reads it as Wittgenstein’s confession that he was still entangled in antisemitism, and contemplating suicide, the ‘honourable’ Weiningerian way out.57 But this is extremely speculative. Wittgenstein neither says what unraveling the tangle would be, nor specifies what one ‘must not do’. The reference to a tangle does evoke an image Wittgenstein repeatedly used for the nature of philosophy. In the final, postwar, version of a passage first drafted in 1930, he writes:

How does it come about that philosophy is so complicated a structure? It surely ought to be completely simple, if it is the ultimate thing, independent of all experience, that you make it out to be. – Philosophy unties the knots in our thinking; hence its result must be simple, but philosophizing has to be as complicated as the knots it unties.58

This suggests that his talk of a tangle one cannot unravel was a way of acknowledging that antisemitism was a philosophical problem that Wittgenstein was not able to resolve, or cure. Wittgenstein’s con dence that it was clear what not to do in particular cases is hardly reassuring, in view of what we have seen of his own actions. Antisemitism is strikingly akin to a Wittgensteinian philosophical problem: it arises from taken-for-granted prejudices and the misuse of language, and can only be dissolved by changing people’s lives. The philosophical significance of Jewishness for Wittgenstein is not primarily that he thought of his philosophy as Jewish, but that Jewishness was not a problem that he was able to write about philosophically.

Finally, we can briefly return to the question: was Wittgenstein a Jew? My Hertzian answer is that we would be better off distinguishing different senses of the term, and reflecting on their role in his life and in our own. Wittgenstein’s problematic Jewishness is as much a product of our problematic concerns as his. There is no doubt that Wittgenstein was of Jewish descent; it is equally clear that he was not a practicing Jew. But insofar as he thought of himself as Jewish, he did so in terms of the antisemitic prejudices of his time. It would have been good if he could have untangled those prejudices, but he did not do so.

Notes

This paper, on the place of Jewishness in Wittgenstein’s philosophy, is an abridgement of a longer paper, ‘Was Wittgenstein a Jew?’, which includes an extended discussion of the problematic relationship between a philosopher’s life and work. It was written for a conference on Wittgenstein, philosophy and biography held at Virginia Polytechnic & State University, Blacksburg, VA, in March 1999, and will be included in a book edited by James Klagge, Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2001). The other contributors to the book are Ray Monk, James Conant, Kelly Hamilton, Louis Sass, Alfred Nordmann, Joachim Schulte, Hans-Johann Glock and Brian McGuinness. Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the 6th North American Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Studies Conference; a conference on ‘Body Matters’ at the University of Hull, North Humberside, England; the Society for Lesbian and Gay Philosophy; the History of Science and Technology program, UC Berkeley; the Iowa Philosophical Society; a conference on Russell and Wittgenstein at American University; and the Canadian Philosophical Association meeting in Edmonton, Alberta. I particularly want to thank Geeta Patel, who got me to write a four-page paper on Wittgenstein and Weininger, the many people whose constructive comments led me to keep on rewriting that paper until it turned into this one, and the University of Iowa, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld for fellowship support during which this paper was completed.

The principal published primary sources are Ludwig Wittgenstein, Denkbewegungen: Tagebu ̈cher [Movements of Thought: Diaries] 1930–1932, 1936–1937 (MS 183), ed. Ilse Somavilla (Innsbruck, Austria: Haymon Verlag, 1997) and Culture and Value, revised second edition, trans. P. Winch (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998). The principal biographies are Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein: A Life. Young Ludwig (1889–1921) (London: Duckworth, 1988) and Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990).

Joachim Schulte, Wittgenstein: an Introduction, trans. William Brenner and John Foley (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1992), pp. 16–17.

Rudolf Haller, Questions on Wittgenstein (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), p. 90.

Russell Nieli, Wittgenstein: From Mysticism to Ordinary Language (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1987).

Be ́la Szabados, ‘Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Signi cance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1999), pp. 1–28. See also ‘Autobiography after Wittgenstein’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (1992), pp. 1–12; ‘Autobiography and Philosophy: Variations on a Theme of Wittgenstein’, Metaphilosophy 26 (1995), pp. 63–80; ‘Wittgenstein’s Women: The Philosophical Signi cance of Wittgenstein’s Misogyny’, Journal of Philosophical Research 22 (1997), pp. 483–508.

Yuval Lurie, ‘Jews as a Metaphysical Species’, Philosophy 64 (1989), pp. 323–47. See also ‘Wittgenstein on Culture and Civilization’, Inquiry 32 (1989), pp. 375–97 and Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, p. 317.

Gerhard Wassermann, ‘Wittgenstein on Jews: Some Counter-examples’, Philosophy 65 (1990), pp. 355–65.

Wittgenstein: A Life, op. cit., p. 49; Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., p. 14.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, ibid., pp. 396–400; Brian McGuinness, ‘Wittgenstein und Judentum’, in Ursula A. Schneider (ed.), Paul Engelmann (1891– 1965) Architektur Judentum Wiener Moderne (Vienna: Folio Verlag, 1999), pp. 74–75. The English text of this paper will be published in James Klagge (ed.), Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bergen Edition MS 120, 123r (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–). 14.3.1938.

Denkbewegungen: Tagebu ̈cher, pp. 64–65. November/December, 1931. My translation.

Oets Bouwsma, Wittgenstein: Conversations, 1949–1951 (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1986), p. 70.

Heinrich Hertz, The Principles of Mechanics, trans. D. Jones and J. Walley (London, 1899), p. 8.

‘Wittgenstein und Judentum’, op. cit., p. 76; all translations from the German are my own.

Wittgenstein: A Life, op. cit., p. 42.

‘Wittgenstein und Judentum’, op. cit., p. 76; n. 40.

Kimberly Cornish, The Jew of Linz: Wittgenstein, Hitler and Their Secret Battle for the Mind (London: Century Books, 1998).

Otto Weininger, Sex and Character, anonymous ‘authorized translation from the sixth German edition’, but omitting all footnotes (New York: Heinemann, 1906). First edition, Geschlecht und Charakter, 1903.

See Barbara Hyams and Nancy A. Harrowitz, ‘A Critical Introduction to the History of Weininger Reception’, in Nancy A. Harrowitz and Barbara Hyams (eds), Jews and Gender: Responses to Otto Weininger, pp. 3–20 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), pp. 3–20.

Allen Janik, Essays on Wittgenstein and Weininger, p. 101; cf. pp. 87 ff., 98 ff. (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 1985). See also Janik, ‘How did Weininger Influence Wittgenstein?’ in Jews and Gender, op. cit., pp. 61–72.

Culture and Value, op. cit., p. 16. 1931.

‘Wittgenstein und Judentum’, op. cit., p. 71; Wolfgang Kienzler, Wittgenstein’s Wende zu seiner Spa ̈tphilosophie 1930–1932: Eine historische und systematische Darstellung, p. 43 (Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp, 1997).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., p. 313.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Cambridge Letters: Correspondence with Russell, Keynes, Moore, Ramsey and Sraffa. Edited by Brian McGuinness and G. H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), p. 250. 23 August 1931.

Drury, in Recollections of Wittgenstein, in R. Rhees (ed.) (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 91.

‘Wittgenstein’s Women’, op. cit., pp. 492–3. The closely parallel passage in ‘Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite?’ pp. 16–17, which begins ‘That the mature Wittgenstein would give the nod to stipulative, evaluatively loaded definitions of race, sex and nationality strains credulity’, indicates how important this claim is for his reading.

See Stanley Cavell, ‘Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern’, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990), pp. 248–90.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., p. 498.

Otto Weininger, U ̈ ber Die Letzte Dinge [On the Last Things] (Vienna & Leipzig: W. Braumu ̈ller, 1904).Nancy Stepan, ‘Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science’, Isis 77 (1986). Sander

Gilman, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); Freud, Race and Gender (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, op. cit., pp. 317–18.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wiener Ausgabe [Vienna Edition], Michael Nedo (ed.) (Vienna: Springer Verlag, 1993–), MS 107, pp. 219–222. 1.12.1929.

Ilse Somavilla (ed.) Ludwig Ha ̈nsel – Ludwig Wittgenstein. Ein Freundschaft, (Innsbruck: Brenner Studien, vol. 14, 1994).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., pp. 279, 280.

J. C. Nyiri, ‘Wittgenstein 1929–31: Conservatism and Jewishness’, p. 22. In Nyiri, Tradition and Individuality (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992). The unpublished Bergen transcription of the dream spells the fth occurrence of the name as ‘Versag’.

Denkbewegungen: Tagebu ̈cher, op. cit., pp. 63–64.

Ibid., p. 67. 28.1.32.

Culture and Value, op. cit., p. 18. 1931.

Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. I, 212 (Oxford, 1973).

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutches Wo ̈rterbuch 1745–6 (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854).

Heinz Messinger and Werner Ru ̈denberg, Langenscheidt Concise German Dictionary English–German p. 114 (Langenscheidt, 1964; McGraw-Hill, 1969).

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., p. 314; see also p. 315.Isaac Nevo, ‘Religious Belief and Jewish Identity in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, Philsophy Research Archives 13 (1987–8), p. 238.

‘Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite?’ pp. 7–8.

Culture and Value, op. cit., p. 18. 1931.

Denkbewegungen: Tagebu ̈cher, op. cit., p. 59. 2.11.31.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: the Duty of Genius, op. cit., p. 317.

Ibid., pp. 316, 317.

‘Jews as a Metaphysical Species’, ibid., p. 340.

Culture and Value, op. cit., p. 3. 1929.

Ibid., pp. 3–4. 1929; not in previous editions.

Ibid., p. 40. 1939–1940.

Ibid., pp. 40–41. 1939–1940.

‘Religious Belief and Jewish Identity in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, op. cit., p. 236.

Culture and Value, op. cit., p. 95. 4.11.1948.

‘Religious Belief and Jewish Identity in Wittgenstein’s Philosophy’, op. cit., p. 242.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, §452 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). Earlier versions include Philosophical Remarks §2, 1930; Big Typescript §90, p. 422, 1933–4.

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