The World as I Found It (27 page)
Behold!
howled the
Maharal. Behold!
trumpeted Isaac ben Shimshon ha-Cohen, clutching his breast the better to upstage the
Maharal
, as meanwhile Cohen's disciple, Jacob ben Chayyim ha-Levi, tripped on his flowing robes. Rearing back in stupefied grease-paint amazement, they looked up, their fingers like gnarled branches, as he drunkenly arose on woodblocks, a gaping giant seven feet tall.
Yosele Golem
, the people called him. Mindless mute idiot. Being without soul. A heavy lump with a fringe of dark hair, the young man who played the golem had no talent, but then the part called for a lifeless nothing. Wittgenstein was overwhelmed. It was not what the actor brought or didn't bring to the role; it was Wittgenstein's own emptiness that brought the golem to life. The proscenium disappeared: down came the screen that shields the viewer from the engulfment of seeing. This was not a matter of disbelief willingly suspended. Wittgenstein was now so inexorably drawn to the golem's pain that there was nothing to hold him back, his mind guttering like a candle as the play lumbered along.
Yosele Golem, he knew nothing, did nothing but what he was told, clopping along so trustingly on clubbed feet. When the
Rebbitzen
, the
Maharal
's wife, told the golem to carry water, he carried it, bucket after bucket, until she opened the door and was blown back with a whoosh of imaginary water.
Oy!
Up went the hands, more schtick. Even for Gretl this was too much. Feeling the heat herself, she nudged him, whispering that she was ready to leave. But he waved her off. Why? she asked. He was staying only to spite her, as the golem predictably caught the butcher red-handed, then exposed the wicked priest Thaddeus.
Ludi, she whispered, giving him a nudge. Can't we go,
please?
But he still didn't hear, knowing no more than the golem did why he carried these empty buckets. What happened then? Why did Wittgenstein feel this paralysis when onstage the
Maharal
said that the golem, having avenged Israel, must return like Adam to the dust. And why was the golem so compliant, showing an almost stupefied relief when the rabbi bade him lie down so they could unweave his frail life. Dumb and trusting, the golem just lay there, staring up almost sweetly as they circled him, this time walking in the opposite direction while covering him with crumbling pages torn from old prayer books.
Gretl's first thought was that Wittgenstein was mocking the ending when he lapsed back in his seat with his arms sprawling. Everything stopped then. Looking around helplessly as some men laid him, pale and sweating, across three chairs, Gretl realized that the whole play had stopped. Even the golem was watching, sitting up in his nest of paper, when Wittgenstein himself finally sat up, saying in a groggy, underwater voice, I'm fine ⦠Thank you, I'm fine ⦠Please, let me up â¦
For five minutes he was captive to their solicitousness. For five hard minutes he
was
the play, Yosele Golem. Later, Wittgenstein remembered a bald and bespectacled doctor peering in his eyes as some woman brought up a cup of warmish water and a cookie for his blood sugar. Staring into that bower of faces, his ears tipped red with piquant mortification, Wittgenstein felt like a figure in a manger. Out of the sky he had fallen in with these queer folk and their play. Happy applause when it was announced the young man was all right. Under dimming lights, the play then resumed. And then once more the crumbling paper came flaking down, mounting and drifting like old dust, slowly covering the golem's somnolent face as one dream seamlessly merged with the other.
A
FEW WEEKS LATER
, Russell excitedly wrote Ottoline:
Today Wittgenstein brought me that paper he was to write so I could decide whether he is to be a philosopher or an aeronaut. I am pleased to report that, after reading his paper, I strenuously advised him to pursue the former course. The paper was short â 2 pp. only â & as usual, he merely stated his conclusions â fairly picked from the air â shown with some equations. His main idea, in essence, is that propositions have a true & a false pole. By this he means â I
think
â that to truly understand a proposition, we must know what it means to be true & false. Thus propositions contain, in advance, both senses of truth & falsity. He says this means that logic is devoid of subject matter â a sort of empty hole that can accommodate events & nonevents alike. In connexion with this point, Wittgenstein then drew two boxes as follows:
a.
here wd. correspond with a
negative
fact, a solid body with no room within it for a body or possibility; &
b.
with a
positive
fact, one that has room for a body or possibility.
Understand that the ideas are germinal & still a bit jumbled. Nor are either of us entirely clear on all the ramifications of the foregoing. Nevertheless, this is, I think, a truly original & important contribution that may give us another look into the hole of logical form. One thing we see is that a proposition is not a name for a fact. The reason for this is that there are
two
propositions corresponding to each fact. Suppose it is a fact that Socrates is dead. You have two propositions: “Socrates is dead” & “Socrates is not dead.” And with those two propositions corresponding to the same fact, there is one fact in the world wch. makes one true & one false. That is not accidental, & it shews how this two-pole relation of a proposition to a fact is a totally different one from the one-to-one relation of a name to the thing named.
To the layman, these ideas may seem evident, even trivial, but like many an important discovery we forget that somebody had to think of it. He is a lightning rod â it gives me chills to hear him & I feel what it is to be young again & vital. “Two poles!” he shouted. “Every proposition has two poles!” I thought for a moment he wd. smash the furniture, he was so excited.
He was so pent up â I gather he had an awful holiday since he virtually refused to discuss it. I thought of sharing with him some of my
own
new ideas, but then I held back, knowing the ferocity with which he treats germinal ideas â except of course his own. He told me then that he has further ideas â so much is coming free in him. I suppose I should have held my tongue, but I sd. that while intuition is the seed of many great ideas, he ought not simply state what he thinks is true but also give the proper arguments. But he sd. arguments wd. only spoil its beauty; he wd. feel he was dirtying a flower with muddy hands, especially one still only days old. Wittgenstein does so appeal to me â the artist in intellect is so very rare. I told him I hadn't the heart to say anything against that, & that he had better acquire a slave to state his arguments. But he was in no mood then to be lectured, even if it was well intentioned. Joking, I sd., “You don't suppose I will write out your arguments for you, do you?” He sd., “How could you? Then they wd. be your ideas. Which is to say they would be your problems.” I sd., feeling rather hurt, “Do we not share the same problems?” He looked so pained, so concerned for me, then sd. rather mysteriously, “I certainly hope for your sake we do not.”
It made me melancholy for some reason, this wish that we might shoulder the same burden. Could I reconstruct Wittgenstein's vision from a fragment in the way a paleontologist might produce a whole mammal from a knucklebone? I suppose it's my fear that he shall not last, & that I shall have to do something of the sort. I do fear for him.
But still, my love, there are limits to induction & I am happy I have you, if only reconstructed from a scented letter. But this is, as you say, a Sir Philip Sidneyism â a mild reproach to one's fair mistress. Still, I need more than a lock to rape or handkerchief to hold. So when, prithee, shall it sithee? Saturdee? â¦
Russell had the results â the knucklebone â but, as Wittgenstein said, Russell did not have the history that gave rise to the life, of which bipolarity was just a fragment. Perhaps this was why Wittgenstein was so evasive when Russell asked how he had come upon his idea. Acting as if it was quite beside the point, Wittgenstein said, I was walking in the Prater. I wasn't
looking
for the idea, if that is what you ask.
Perhaps Russell should have asked not how or where but why and at what cost Wittgenstein's idea had come to him. No answer, Wittgenstein would come to realize, is a virgin birth; every answer comes as a response to a discrete set of problems. An answer, like a life, is a prism. Seen one way it seems sound, a complete solution. Seen from another vantage point, however, it is only a further bewitchment, one step forward and one step back.
Still, Wittgenstein had told the bare truth. The concept of bipolarity had come to him while he was walking in the Prater. This was several days after
The Golem of Prague
, and Wittgenstein was still haunted by that image of the empty golem hauling the
Rebbitzen's
heavy buckets. Pain was in the buckets. The buckets were as brimming full as Wittgenstein was empty. In one hand was a bucket full for the living; in the other hand was an empty bucket for the looming dead who block the path of the living. And then the door opened, and out burst bountiful white water, the grass inundated. To have a thought is one thing, but it is another to say what that thought means or portends. Full or empty, both buckets were as full with meaning as he, the hauler of buckets, was then hollow enough â receptive enough â to divine their meaning.
It had been dusk when he returned to the Prater, that hour when respectable people are bundled up and heading home. In the early winter darkness, the Ferris wheel, that whirling constellation of lights, pitched down for its last ride, and then the white lights blinked out. The sun was almost spent. Looking up, he saw a weak red light that just tinged the treetops, and above that, a dry winter sky sliding beneath a hazy half circle of moon. Ahead, across the meadows, he could dimly see the distant peaks of the easternmost Alps, as his mind, like a dog sled, pulled him along, still thinking, he solemnly told itself, about logical form and the mystery of negation. He remembered thinking that the problem was really one of a profound simplicity, a thing so simple that it seemed almost insurmountable. And then in that unaccountable way in which things dawned on him, appearing as if planned in queer relief, he looked down and noticed how the snow outlined an empty footprint. White space had formed around a black space where once a foot had stood. The logical space might admit the foot; or it might negate it by saying, The foot must not stand in this spot. And then, feeling as if he had touched cold iron, it struck him: the sublime oddity of being able to say,
This is
not
how things are, and yet we can say
how
things are
not.
The space of logic was large, offering both unlimited space and possibility â or no possibility. It was the Blocker again, holding the purloined nose just close enough to elicit belief yet not close enough to dispel doubt. And then, with a shiver, Wittgenstein saw the trees had also lost their light as the wind reared up and the boughs cast down their bony branches.
Tack tack tack
came the wind across the crystallized pond, and he pulled his head down into his coat. No evading it. His eyes now settled on a spot where he saw not empty footprints but a pair of formless boots filled with stout legs. Here was a possibility, one before which he saw no possibility. And as with that empty footprint, Wittgenstein then saw a logical space that he would fill, crouched before this stranger who now approached like Mammon, giving no name as he unburdened himself in the roaring darkness.
Walking home later, not so much sorry as empty, Wittgenstein wondered if a man might build around his life a machine by which he might become decent. The full bucket, this was easy to fathom; but to realize that in emptiness also there was pain â this he did not expect. Nor was it much recompense when his germinal idea came to him, and he saw, like a piece of logic, what it is to be both true and false, as well as empty.
W
ITH WITTGENSTEIN'S DISCOVERY
, then, Russell ceased to think of him as a student. From this time on, he treated him as a full equal, if not sometimes more than an equal. Yet with this acceptance other tensions emerged as the two put their heads to the same questions.
They were tremendously idealistic. As they both saw it, ego and pride had no place in a great collaboration. To differing degrees, they both recognized the dangers but felt that with humility there was certainly room enough in the wide world (and one full of such tremendous technical problems) for two to fit into the same trousers â at least so long as they could agree on the cut.
Fortunately, Russell was an experienced collaborator. And collaboration was so very modern: it was the method of science, that collegial relay race of progress. After all, for a single mind to try to unite all the spheres of philosophy or put forth one unassailable view that the world is like
this
â that was the legacy of the
old
philosophy, of the system builders in whose fantastic contraptions logical error cavorted with religious belief, superstition and blind prejudice. In a sense, Russell was like the proverbial general fighting the last battle and the last enemy: even now, years later, he was still beating back those now vanquished idealists like McTaggart, who held that the external, physical world was but a figment of the mind. Surely, Russell felt, it was most pleasant to sit in the parlor with our teacups perched on our knees while imagining the world as a phantasmagorical dance animated by the brain. Perhaps, as Dostoyevsky opined, men do crave miracle, mystery and authority, but if Ars Philosophia was ever to stroll with Dame Science into the sunlight of this new century, Russell felt that philosophers would finally have to pledge themselves to sobriety â to renounce their mundane personal desires for power, salvation and the
presto
of metaphysic. Still, Russell found it hard to take his logical-empirical philosophical science cold. Increasingly now, the scientist had to taste, nay, to squeeze the bosomy grapes of mystery.