Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir [Paperback]

Norman Malcolm was a close friend of Ludwig Wittgenstein's. They exchanged many letters and the reader can discover the 56 letters that Wittgenstein sent to Malcolm between March 26 1940 to April 16 1951 in this book.

Norman Malcolm does not discuss Wittgenstein's philosophical works - although he attended a respectable number of his lectures - but describes the philosopher in his daily life, his tastes, his talks with his fellows in Cambridge. It is interesting to learn that Wittgenstein was an emphatic talker both while lecturing and conversing privately, that he dressed as simply as possible although he had rigorous standards of cleanliness and that his room at Trinity College was austerely furnished.

His lectures were quite original. He didn't address his audience in a formal way but the meetings - in his room where the members of the class had to bring chairs - were rather a conversation during which Wittgenstein carried on original research. He was usually impatient and easily angered and his students often feared him. Making friendship with Wittgenstein was very exacting since his extreme harshness could rebuke a friend. Malcolm often experienced that Wittgenstein had a tendency to be suspicious of motives and character. It was always a strain to be with Wittgenstein because of the intellectual demands of his conversation and his ruthless severity. This was due to his passionate love of truth and that is the reason why his philosophical thoughts tortured and exhausted him. He detested academic life, he could not stand the society of his academic colleagues and could not suffer all forms of affectation and insincerity. His mood was often sombre because of the difficulty of achieving understanding in philosophy. As he struggled to work through a problem, his listeners felt that they were in the presence of real suffering. That may explain his strong inclination to pessimism, a feeling that was often close to despair. Another source of torment was that he felt himself to be a failure as a teacher, a profession he abandoned after a few years to devote himself exclusively to philosophy.

Towards the end of his life, Wittgenstein spent long months with Malcolm and his wife in America where Malcolm could witness Wittgenstein's increasing difficulty to concentrate and think, mainly because of his fragile health. A moving memory of one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century.

Malcolm's memoir, written as a straightforward account of his relationship with Wittgenstein over a number of years, vividly brings to life the odd charisma of the philosopher. It is easy to see, just from Malcolm's account, how Wittgenstein's personality influenced or overwhelmed people around him. Malcolm himself seems to have avoided a full dose of the spell, and simply accepted Wittgenstein as he was, which makes him a superior memoirist. (Furthermore, Malcolm was scrupulious enough that, upon reading his memior, I guessed from it that Wittgenstein was gay, long before I read any of the more heavy-handed books that claim new revelations about the philosopher. It was all already there for them to see, if they would just look at it.) Malcolm's accounts of conversations with Wittgenstein, and even more so the selection of letters included at the end of the volume, amply display the philosopher's character, as well as revealing his rather dry and odd wit and ability to produce aphoristic phrases of great, and sometimes comic, insight. I would strongly recommend giving it to a student who has taken a semester or two of philosophy; even though it won't tell him much about the content of Wittgenstein's actual philosophy, it does provide a serious, and fascinating, example of a way to approach philosophy, and makes the subject seem like it can be an exciting and live quest.

Erich Heller, a Germanist at Northwestern who left very readable and witty essays on Nietzsche, Kafka, Rilke, Wittgenstein and others, commented on the difficulty of understanding Wittgenstein in these words: ""Do you understand Kant?" is like asking "Have you been to the summit of Mont Blanc?" The answer is *yes* or *no*. "Do you understand Nietzsche?" is like asking "Do you know Rome?" The answer is simple only if you have never been there. The trouble with Wittgenstein's thinking is that it sometimes looks like Descartes's: you believe you can learn it as you learn logic or mathematics; but it almost always is more like Pascal's: you may be quite sure you cannot."

When it comes to the thought of Nietzsche, Pascal, Kierkegaard or Wittgenstein, he notes, its "temperature is of its essence, in its passion lies its seriousness, the rhythm of the sentences that express it is as telling as is that which they tell, and sometimes a semicolon marks the frontier between a thought and a triviality." If what we see in their philsophies are indeed the "destinies of souls," then an intimate understanding of the people they were should be essential for an understanding of their thought. And, in Wittgenstein's case, this memoir will be of not a small help.

An anecdote from this memoir seems to have become almost a legend, often quoted as exemplary Wittgensteinian integrity. One day on a walk with Wittgenstein in 1939, Malcolm mentions something about how what he believes to be the British "national character" would make it unlikely that they invade Germany. Wittgenstein remembers this and reproaches Malcolm 5 years later in a letter. To Wittgenstein, using a phrase like "national character" betrays a primitiveness and inability to be honest in thinking. And the very reason one studies philosophy is to improve thinking about important questions of everyday life. To quote him from the letter: "thinking about these things is not thrilling, but often downright nasty. And when it's nasty then it's most important ... You can't think decently if you don't want to hurt yourself."

A good life to Wittgenstein was living for the thing for which one has a talent with all the energy all life long. That way, the idea of immortality may assume a meaning. As Malcolm tells us, such was what Wittgenstein thought of one's "duty": "Wittgenstein once suggested that a way in which the notion of immortality can acquire a meaning is through one's feeling that one has duties from which one cannot be released, even by death. Wittgenstein himself possessed a stern sense of duty."

Early in Ray Monk's biography, we read about a discussion about "soul" between Russell and Wittgenstein. As to Wittgenstein's question of why it is so hard not to lose one's soul sometime in life, Russell's answer was perhaps the best way not to lose it is to have a purpose to devote oneself to. Wittgenstein disagrees and says it is a matter of suffering, how to endure suffering. Here we see an incompatible difference in the characters of these two thinkers. This also reminded me what he said upon his death, "tell them I've had a wonderful life." I think he really thought he had a wonderful life and it had to do with his talent for suffering.

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