Wittgenstein Jr

Once, the value of youth lay in their potential. In the openness of their horizons. In the opportunities before them.

But now, we are all supposed to exist in potential. We are never supposed to close our options down. Never supposed to become anything. Commit to anything.

Weare required only to become more and more open, more and more adaptable, transferrable, substitutable...

Flexibility without an ‘in respect of something’: utterly meaninglessness. Openness without an ‘in relation to something’: utterly contentless.

The student is never upset by anything, he says never able to be surprised. The student is indifferent because there’s too much difference.

Nothing can be revealed because nothing can be concealed. There’s nothing to think against, and therefore nothing to think for.

No, we do not learn. We cannot learn. Nothing goes into our heads. Nothing stays in our memories.

Nothing can sink in. We’re already filled with too much. There’s too much information. Too much Wikipedia.

It is not that we slouch in the classroom – we all sit upright, he can see that. But that we are spiritually slouching.

It is not that the ground is exhausted and has been overused, but has been overprepared and therefore nothing grows.

It’s impossible to philosophise on your own, he says.

The solo philosopher: a contradiction in terms.

Will we ever want anything in our lives so much again? Will we ever come as close to brilliance as this? Will we ever live as keenly as we do now? Will we ever be as light or as a free as now? Will thought ever sing through us again like a dawn chorus, as now? Will we ever feel this urgency again? This fragility? Will we ever feel the precariousness of life as we do now?

The moment sin was invented was a great moment. The moment religion allowed a consciousness of sin.

Christianity declares us to be wretched: that's its greatness, Wittgenstein says. Christianity knows us as sinners.

We must approach the word God on our hands and knees. And the word, religion. We should keep the word, religion behind a veil, like the holy of holies.

Just as devout Jews do not write the word God, we should not speak the word God. Or religion. And perhaps we shouldn't speak the word, philosophy, either.

We object to his use of the word, God, he can see that. We bridle at it. We rear and buck.

But we must not think that we understand the word, God. We must not think that we know what to do with the word, God.

The way he sips his tea. The way he lifts his cups to his lips. His intensity. The narrowing of his eyes.

Real philosophers will know when philosophy comes to an end, he says.

They will tremble when philosophy ends. They will laugh! They will weep.

If you listen hard enough you can hear the stars scream.

Some say that God went mad because he could not die.

God created the world to give dying a meaning, he says. To give dying something that could actually die.

God created the world to give dying a meaning. To give dying something that could actually die.

Silence in class. No response to his question.

Very well, he says. He will play chess against himself.

The face of Hegel is that of a degenerate, he says. Schelling: a paedophile. Schopenhauer: a zoophile. Kant: a spinster. Leibniz: a child-molester.

The Greeks were never ashamed of their bodies, he says. Nor were the Romans, until Plotinus came along. Until Neoplatonism.

Porphyry couldn’t bear the Christian idea of God’s incarnation, Wittgenstein says. By becoming man, God was stained by blood and bile, and worse than that.

The Greeks know nothing of anxiety, he says. Nor do the Romans. You have to wait until modernity for that.

Kierkegaard: anxiety. Heidegger: anxiety. Sartre: anxiety. What has happened to simple wonder?

Montaigne said that Socrates’s greatness lay in the simplicity of his life, and his language. He was able to play with children, and to consider his time so doing well spent. He was able to talk with ordinary people, and to consider such conversation worthwhile.

Why is his life never simple?, Wittgenstein wonders. Why does he hide from ordinary people, and avoid conversation with them at all cost?

Plutarch says that Socrates was a philosopher because he spoke of philosophy not as a master, but as a friend. Socrates chatted with his friends; he laughed with them. That’s how his philosophy was done.

Why is friendship impossible for him?, Wittgenstein asks. Why has he been denied friends?

No, we do not learn. We cannot learn. Nothing goes into our heads. Nothing stays in our memories.

The desire to experience his despairs. His darknesses.

To wake up, as he does, full of ominous dread. To be half in love with easeful death, as he is. To see the sun as black, as he does.

The desire to try and lighten his mood. To distract him from his concerns. To bring a bit of levity into his reflections.

The desire to offer a few words of comfort to him. To touch his elbow. To offer him a boiled sweet to take his mind off things.

The desire to smile and say, Never mind. Things will turn out alright. 

The desire to be a solice to him. The desire to be a kind of good luck charm...

His silence. What does it mean? What does he want from us?

What do we want? To please him? To have him call us by name? To have him smile at us, like an indulgent father?

Silence. The heat of the room. One of us should open the window. One of us should get up and pull open a window. One of us should ask him whether we should pull open a window. But who dares disturb him?

Guthrie, hand in the air. Wittgenstein’s eyes snap open. Guthrie asks whether he can open the window. Wittgenstein nods. Guthrie pulls up the window by its handles.

A cold blast of air. Broken noises from the football game outside. 

Today, he saw off a kind of mutiny in class.

DOYLE: How are we meant to grasp what lies behind your remarks?

WITTGENSTEIN (making the quote marks audible): Nothing lies ‘behind’ my remarks.

DOYLE: Is there some theory that you’re trying to express?

WITTGENSTEIN: No theory. And no application of theory.

MATHENGE (taking up the baton): Then what are we supposed to take from your lectures?

WITTGESTEIN: Connections. That’s all I want you to see.

MATHENGE (exasperated): But I can’t see anything!

Wittgenstein shrugs. Why do we think that logic must come to us, when it is really we who must go to logic?, he says. Why do we think that we are the measure of all things, when it is really logic – what he calls logic – that is the measure of all things?

He’s read the real Wittgenstein, Mathenge says. He’s read Kripke on Wittgenstein. He’s read introductory guides to the Tractatus and the Philosophical Investigations. He’s read Russell; he’s familiar with the Theory of Types. He’s read Frege – and Dummett on Frege. And still he understands nothing.

There is a blindness to learning, Wittgenstein says. Sometimes we must feel our way. Sometimes, we must simply trust that a way is out there. And sometimes we must reconcile ourselves to there being no way. Sometimes, we must declare ourselves lost, he says. And we are lost, he says.

MATHENGE: This is mysticism!

WITTGENSTEIN: And do you think the mystical is to be despised?

I interrupt him, raising my hand. Can I pull open a window? He makes a dismissive gesture. Says, Of course, of course.

Cold air from outside. A real draft. Should I pull on my coat? I want to pull on my coat. But there’s silence in the room. Stillness. It will disturb everyone if I pull on my coat. It will disturb Wittgenstein, if I pull on my coat.

Or should I close the window again? Should I push down the window? Again, the risk of noise. Of disturbing everyone. And I will have to stand so that I can push it down, the window.

Cold, cold. My goosepimpled skin beneath my shirt. But I do not move.

We’ve never been up against it. We’ve never undergone anything. We’ve never been on trial.

To have experienced nothing. Undergone nothing. Never to have been risked…

We know nothing of the world. Nothing of ourselves. We can’t trust our own judgement. We’re too young to have really formedjudgements.

Our lives haven’t begun. But will they ever begin?

Haven’t our lives been too easy? And won’t they always be too easy? Nothing has really happened to us. But will anything ever happen to us?

We should stand watch over him. We should protect him. But how?

We’re too young. Too young to understand... But he says our youth helps him.

We are in awe of his despair. It seems greater than all of us.

His despair: massive, like a wall of ice. Like a coming glacier. Vast, unignorable.

This is the time of the end, he says. The time before the last judgement. And isn’t that why he’s come to Cambridge, he says, to deliver the last judgement?

They say that after the world ends, and the Last Judgement is called, there will remain those whose fate is as yet undecided, who are fated to live as ghosts on the earth, he says. Who are fated to live their lives again and again.

Is that who we are? Is that who he is?

His suspicion that he is merely a Wittgenstein-imitator. That he’s nothing more than a stand-in, than a cardboard cut-out.

Just as we cannot tell ourselves apart from real students – from what students once were – he cannot tell himself apart from the real Wittgenstein – from Wittgenstein, and what Wittgenstein once was.

Something great is expected of Wittgenstein; he has the aura of greatness. At the same time, the suspicion that nothing will come from Wittgenstein, that he is only a kind of madman, and that his madness has taken the form of posing as a philosopher.

Warmth... God has taken our hands in his own. God has wrapped his scarf round our necks.

A sense of our vulnerability. A sense of being open to chance. Of being exposed on all sides.

Soon, it will come. The words are blowing that will lift us up and disperse us – soon, we’ll all be gathered up and dispersed. 

A sense of our youth, and of the fragility of our youth... A sense of our lightness …

We are feathers on someone else’s breath… We’ve been puffed up into the air…

Where will we settle? What will we become? 

And who are we? Nothing. No one yet. A collection of traits, without consistency, without a tie to past actions… We have no souls. No substance. No coherence. We’re part of nothing, and do not mind.

We’re not even self-conscious. Not even self-aware. Philosophy hasn’t reached us. Philosophy cannot reach us.

Nothingness, frail but insistent… Whispering, but saying nothing… Nihilism. An anti-prayer. The eleven dimensions of the void unfolding…

The absence of god… Sense breaking down…

Vacancy - diffusing… The living void…

Collapse – inward… Outward...

Nihilism. Meaninglessness alive. A kind of hollowing. An evacuation. A dispersal of atoms.

A turbulence in all things. A nausea of the world. A rocking. A kind of seasickness. The rising of the world’s bile.

Nothingness, spreading over the English lawn. Nothingness adrift like some spore-bound plague.

An emptying of space. A voiding of time. Nihilism adrift, air-borne, spreading everywhere. Nihilism robbing the very sense of sense…

He close to the end, he says. God’s work is nearly done.

Philosophy is really only a prayer to be relieved of philosophy, he says.

I will do such things –/ What they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth. He is quoting.

He orders orange pekoe tea – the prince of teas, he says, and when it comes, pours cups for us all. 

In the beginning was the deed, he says. It’s not true anymore.

Words are cut off from thought, from praxis, from life.

There can be no sincerity, he says. Sincerity impossible for us now.

This is a philosophical age, a self-conscious age. An age where life is thought about, and not lived.

In the beginning was the deed, he says, quoting. Then he writes it on the blackboard in German: ‘Im Anfang war die Tat’.

Ordinary life - what does that mean? Ordinary things - what are they?

A pause, and then: A form of life: isn’t that what he’s looking for? A context in which his life would make sense?