Author: Lars Iyer

A Chinese sage of the distant past was once asked by his disciplines what he would do first if he were given power to set right the affairs of the country. He answered: ‘I should certainly see to it that language is used correctly’. The disciplines looked perplexed. ‘Surely’, they said, ‘this is a trivial matter. Why should you deem it so important?’ And the Master replied: ‘If language is not used correctly, then what is said is not meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what ought to be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will be corrupted; if morals and art are corrupted, justice will go astray; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion’.

Erich Heller

Anyone who wishes to understand me fully must know Norway. The spectacular but severe landscape which people have around them in the north, and the lonely shut-off life – the houses often lie miles from each other – force them not to bother about other people, but only their own concerns, so that they become reflective and serious, they brood and doubt and often despair. In Norway every second man is a philosopher. And those dark winters, with the thick mists outside – ah they long for the sun.

Ibsen, in a letter

I now wish that lived together with someone. To see a human face in the morning. – On the other hand, I have now become so soft, that it would perhaps be good for me to have to live alone. Am now extraordinarily contemptible. I have the feeling that I am now perhaps not entirely without ideas, but that the solitude will make me depressed, making it impossible to work. I am afraid that all my thoughts would die in my house.

Wittgenstein, in his notebooks during a stay in Norway.

I took my camera with me – which was the cause of another scene with Ludwig. We were getting on perfectly amicably – when I left him for a moment to take a photo. And when I overtook him again he was silent and sulky. I walked on with him in silence for half an hour, and then asked him what was the matter. I seems my keenness to take that photo had disgusted him – ‘like a man who can think of nothing – when walking – but how the country would do for a golf course’. I had a long talk with him about it, and eventually we made up again. He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself … I only hope that an out of doors life here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to sat he is as bad – (in that nervous sensibility) – as people like Beethoven were. He even talks of having at times contemplated suicide.

Ludwig was horribly depressed all evening. He has been working terribly hard of late – which may be the cause of it. He talked again tonight about his death – that he was not really afraid to die – but yet frightfully worried not to let the few remaining moments of his life be wasted. It all hangs on his absolutely morbid and mad conviction that he is going to die soon – there is no obvious reason that I can see why he should not live yet for a long time. But it is no use trying to dispel that conviction, or his worries about it, by reason: the conviction and the worry he can’t help – for he is mad. It is a hopelessly pathetic business – he is clearly having a miserable time of it.

He is morbidly afraid that he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the world and of some use to the science of Logic. He has written a lot already – and Russell has promised to publish his work if he were to die – but he is sure that what he has already written is not sufficiently well put, so as absolutely to make plain his real methods of thought etc – which of course are of more value than his definite results. He is always saying he is certain he will die within four years – but today it was two months.

Excerpts from the diary of David Pinsent, Wittgenstein's close friend, with whom he travelled to Norway in 1913. Pinsent, with whom Wittgenstein was in love, died during World War One.

 

[…] all one has really is the posture of lament. Left with neither joy nor sorry, all that remains are the repetitions of gloom and palliative consolations; namely, for W. and Lars, drink and conversation while slouched over a bar. What I find interesting about this repetition, in light of Iyer’s manifesto concerning literature, is that it occurs purely for the enjoyment of others. We, the mostly university educated, some of  us vaguely professorial, derive the sort of pleasure these repetitions are patently designed in the book to avoid.

Very interesting review of Dogma by Brad Johnson at An und für sich.

Rather than, say, foregrounding the constructed and unstable nature of reality through unreliable narration and winking gestures toward the fictiveness of the text, Iyer’s self-deprecating presence in the story makes his prose more direct and his satire more poignantly pathetic.

Fascinating review of Spurious and Dogma by Saelan Twerdy at The New Inquiry.

Wittgenstein in those days often warned us against reading philosophical books. If we took a book seriously, he would say, it ought to puzzle us so much that we would throw it across the room and think about the problem for ourselves.

He had he said, only once been to high table at Trinity and the clever conversation of the dons had so horrified him that he had come out with both hands over his ears. The dons talked like that only to score: they did not even enjoy doing it. He said his own bedmaker’s conversation, about he private lives of her previous gentlemen and about her own family, was far preferable: at least he could understand why she talked that way and could believe she enjoyed it.

He liked the north of England, too: when he asked the bus conductor on a Newcastle bus where to get off for a certain cinema, the conductor at once told him it was a bad film there and he ought to go to another. And this started a heated argument on thus bus as to which film Wittgenstein ought to see and why. He liked that: it was the sort of thing that would have happened in Austria.

From Karl Britton's 'Portrait of a Philosopher', his memories of Wittgenstein

Do not think, he said, that you can understand what another philosopher is saying (and I believe he mentioned Spinoza as an illustration). The nearest you can get to it is this, ‘The landscape is familiar. I have been in this neighbourhood myself’.

I went on to ask why he had left his chair in 1947, and I think I can recall the words he used in his reply: ‘Because there are only two or three of my students about whom I can say, I do not know I have done them any harm’.

From  Tranoey's reminiscences of Wittgenstein

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

He remembers them well: my work years, W. says. My writing years. I used to sleep in my office, in my cupboard, didn’t I? I used to live in my office, showering in the gym, living on discounted sandwiches (as I still live on discounted sandwiches, W. says) …

How much I wrote! How much I published! I was like the Hunchback of Notre-Dame, W. says, gone mad and deaf in my belfry, ringing out the bells of my stupidity …

Even he was inspired, W. says. Oh, not by what I wrote – it was complete rubbish, he says. But by my shamelessness in publishing it at all. One essay after another, one essay and then another in every kind of academic journal, W. says, across every discipline you could name.

It was pell-mell, W. says. Completely shameless. Completely opportunistic …

Ah, but my work years are long past. What do I do all day?, W. wonders. How do I occupy myself? Do I read? Write? Do I continue to refine my knowledge of Sanskrit? Of ancient Greek? Do I continue to try to understand mathematics, and keep up with the latest developments in the sciences?

Ah, he knows the answer, W. says. He knows how I live.

A Whelk on a Whale

A hot day. Dundee's famous micro-climate. – 'You don't sweat much, do you?', W. says. 'It must be your Hindu genes'.

Indians have more sweat glands: haven't I told him that? You'd think that that would make you sweat more, W. says.

At the same time, I have the thick skin of a Scandinavian, W. says. Thick skin, to keep the Viking warm during the long winters.

And there's blubber under your skin, W. says. I'm as warm as a walrus, no matter how cold it is, he says. As warm as a sperm whale, diving beneath the Arctic ice. I am insulated by my fat, just as my head is insulated by my stupidity.

A fathead, that's what I am, W. says. But perhaps you need a fat head to dive into the depths of thought. Perhaps you need a kind of insulation, he says. Perhaps only the fat-head can think, W. says. Well, he'll dive with me, a whelk on the side of a whale.

Surly

At the conference. Why don't I ask questions anymore?, W. wonders. Why don't I intervene, after the presentations?

He remembers the questions I used to ask, W. says. After every presentation! My voice, booming out! My voice, resounding beneath the vaulted ceilings! For a time – a long time – no conference presentation was complete without one of my booming questions. There'd be no conference discussion in which I didn't have my say.

W. remembers the questions I asked in the warmest and stuffiest of lecture rooms. He remembers my interventions in the final hour of a long day of presentations. In the final minute! I cut through the fog. I broke through the torpor. It was marvellous, W. says. – 'Your lucidity. Your far-sightedness'.

Then what happened?, W. wonders. How did I end up so sullen and uncommunicative? I became silent. Surly. I sat with folded arms, and took no notes.

W. remembers the notes I used to take. Pages and pages of them! With diagrams! In different colours! He remembers the array of pencils and pens I used to line up beside my notepad. He remembers my underlinings and exclamation points. He remembers me writing No!, or Yes! beside my notes in capital letters.

What happened?, W. wonders. Do I still have questions in my head? Do questions still burn somewhere inside me? There's no sign of it, W. says. I sit, W. says. I slouch. I let it all wash over me – presentation after presentation, speaker after speaker. I let the waves break over me.

It means nothing to me now, does it, W. says. All thought, all philosophy. I am a mollusic on the shore, W. says. I am a pebble on the beach, simple and impermeable. I am lost in the single, as the waves break over me.

How did I become so passive, so inert?, W. wonders. When did I give up any effort to think? When did I stop externalising myself in questions and comments?

Gnosticism

He knows the end of times suits me, in some way. He knows that it might allow me to come into my own.

It's as if the world were my nightmare, W. says. As if the whole would is nothing but a fever-dream of mine, in which he, W., has no real existence.

It's a kind of gnosticism, W. says. I'm the bad demi-urge, who made everything go wrong, and he's the divine principle which struggles for the good.

But in the end, W. knows that he's no match for me. The world's coming to meet me, W. says. Everything's heading in my direction, and happening on my terms. And there I am laughing in the midst of the apocalypse. There I am, a little piece of it – a sample, like the tester pots of paint you can buy in B & Q.

This is what it's going to be like: that's what W. discovers in my company. The end times are going to be exactly like this.

How do I bear it, my day to day reality?, W. asks. But it's quite clear: I don't bear it. My life is in a state of collapse, anyone can see it. Lars is in the final act, W. always tells himself. It can't go on, can it? But it does go on, W. says. Empires have collapsed more slowly.

And there's my smile, W. says. My dreadful smile. It's as though I were enjoying some kjind of revenge, W. says. As though I was exacting a kind of revenge on myself, for what, he doesn't know.

'You have that look which says: everything's over, it's all finished', W. says. 'But it hasn't finished, has it? And it won't be finished until that dreadful smile, the mockery of the whole of existence, is wiped from my face.

The Frenemy

Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer, W. says. But what when your friend is your enemy? What, when you friend is your saboteur and discourager?

Your Best Feature

W.'s question: 'Would you consider yourself a man of ambition, a man of persistence, a man who will leave a legacy?' And then, 'Are you a man who has honoured philosophy, or dishonoured it?' Are you a man of wisdom, or a man of folly? Are you a man of sound judgement and discrimination, or a man of foolishness and panic?'

And then: 'What do you think is your best feature: your wit? Your grace? Your elegance?'

A School For Fools

W. is in a questioning mood. – 'Would you call yourself a moral man?', he asks. 'Would you call yourself a man of honour?' And then, 'Do other people look up to you? Are others moved by you, inspired by you?' And then, 'Do you think you've touched other people's lives – in a good way? Have your students changed the way they live because of you?' And then, 'Do you think you deserve the title, lecturer? Do you think you stand in the tradition of other great lecturers in the past?

More questions. – 'What do you think you've imparted to your students? What do you think they've taken from you?' And then, 'What does teaching mean to you?', he asks me. 'What is your method of teaching? Do you think they've learned from your example?' And then, 'Do you regard yourself as an inspiring presence, or an inhibiting presence? Have you been an open road, or a living obstacle? Have you pointed beyond yourself like a seer, like a prophet, or have you only ever pointed to yourself as a living warning?'

'Do you teach by example?', W. says. 'Do you tell your students about your life, about the way you've sought to exemplify the philosophical ideal?' He tells his students about my life, he says. He uses me as an example. Of the vices of thought. Of thought's compromise and destruction. Lars is where philosophy crashed and burned, he tells them. Lars is where philosophy shot itself in the head.

Here in Turin I exercise a perfect fascination. Everybody glances at me as if I were a prince …, Everything comes easily to me, everything succeeds, although it is not likely that anyone has ever had such great things on his hands … there is a special satisfaction in the way doors are held open for me, meals set out.

Nietzsche

The last philosopher, I call myself, for I am the last human being. No one converses with me beside myself and my voice reaches me as the voice of one dying.

Nietzsche

A human being must live in such a state of anguish that if he were a pagan he would not hesitate to commit suicide. In that state, then, he must – live! Only in that state can he love God.

Kierkegaard