THE LITERARY WITTGENSTEIN. By John Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer, editors. 356pp. Routledge. Paperback, £18.99. 0 415 28973 4
Why are artists so fascinated by Ludwig Wittgenstein?
Frege is a philosopher's philosopher, and Bertrand Russell was every shopkeeper's idea of a sage; but Wittgenstein is the philosopher of poets and composers, novelists and movie directors. Derek Jarman made his last major film about him; Bruce Duffy plucked a novel from his tormented life in The World As I Found It; M. A. Numminem has set Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to music in his Tractatus Suite, and garbled fragments of the same text can be heard croaked in a hilarious stage-German accent by a Dutch pop group. The list is long.
One source of the fascination, no doubt, is the fabular, riches-to-rags nature of the philosopher's career. The child of one of the wealthiest industrialists of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wittgenstein gave away most of his fortune and spent much of his life in zealously Tolstoyan pursuit of sancta simplicitas.
Like many early twentieth-century intellectuals, he hankered after the simple life in a complicated kind of way. His monkish austerity was among other things a reaction to the Vienna of which he was otherwise so exemplary a son. The place was a cockpit of magnificent art and appalling kitsch, glutted with waltzes, whipped cream, chocolate cake and high culture. The grimmer the political climate grew, the more relentlessly frivolous the city became. "In Berlin", remarked the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus, "things are serious but not hopeless.
In Vienna they are hopeless but not serious." This was not entirely true: in Wittgenstein's youth, the city was afflicted with an extraordinary outbreak of suicides, including two of the philosopher's own brothers.
Logical positivism was one response to the flatulence of Vienna. The new philosophy was to be chaste, lean, disciplined and translucent. Wittgenstein himself disdained material possessions and was forever on the hoof: engineering in Manchester (he was fascinated by anything that cranked, whirred, slotted, or articulated), spells of village schoolteaching and monastery gardening, an eccentric trip to the Soviet Union with the intention of being trained there as a doctor.
(He was no Communist, even though some of his closest friends in Cambridge were Marxists. No doubt there was some overlap between their critique of capitalism and his own patrician disdain for bourgeois modernity.)
Wittgenstein also fought in the trenches of the First World War, and with characteristic perversity bemused his military headquarters by constantly demanding to be transferred to more dangerous postings. The nearness of death, he hoped, might shed some light on his radically unfulfilled existence. He was forever eluding his Cambridge minders and scampering off to edges almost as extreme as the trenches:
Stalin's Moscow, a Norwegian fjord, a remote cottage in Connemara.
