The World as I Found It (83 page)

Say it, thought Wittgenstein. Max was in pain. That was the “meaning” this “sin” expressed, and though this sin no doubt had a root somewhere, it had no “reason.” It was simply pain, disfiguring scribbles over a once pure page.

If the conscience is not an ethical organ, thought Wittgenstein, might it at least furbish the mind with a decent recollection? Looking out across the hills, he felt an impulse to sleep for weariness. The truth was, Wittgenstein vividly wished to die at that moment. But then he realized that even death was just another metaphor for something else.

M
OORE HAD GOOD REASON
to be offended by the epic ingratitude of Wittgenstein's remark about Ramsey. But patronizing or not, Wittgenstein's feelings about Ramsey were more than just a lack of gratitude. Ramsey was an unpleasant reminder of other things.

When Ramsey had first met Wittgenstein in Trattenbach in 1923, he was not yet twenty, but in Cambridge he was already widely regarded as the most promising young man to have come down in a generation — meaning, since Wittgenstein. Moore took tremendous pride in his brilliant young protégé and fellow Apostle. It was Moore who introduced Ramsey to the
Tractatus
, and it was Moore who wrote the letter of introduction that Ramsey enclosed with his own letter to Wittgenstein, asking if he might come to Trattenbach to discuss the
Tractatus
with him.

Wittgenstein was at a low ebb when he received Ramsey's letter. His attempt to adopt Franz Kluck had just failed, and the witch-hunt that would eventually force him out of the village was just starting in earnest. Responding to Ramsey's letter, Wittgenstein wrote, “I'm afraid that I have little to offer in my present state of mind. But you are certainly welcome to come,
if you really think it will do any good
.”

An older, less enthusiastic man might well have been put off by Wittgenstein's gloomy letter, but Ramsey immediately sent a wire providing the full details of his arrival. This pleased Wittgenstein. Depressed and lonely, he was curious about this young man whom Moore had spoken about so highly, and he knew the arrival of a cultivated foreigner would set the village buzzing. Wittgenstein thought it was sad, and certainly a sign of how low he had sunk, that he should feel the need for such ostentation, but he couldn't help it. On the heels of his humiliation at the hand of Herr Kluck, Wittgenstein felt a positive hunger to remind himself and the Trattenbachers — as if they needed reminding — that he was a worldly, influential man with distinguished friends.

Ramsey never did see why Wittgenstein chose to waste himself in Trattenbach. Even the children seemed scarcely enough to justify such loneliness. In a letter he sent to Moore shortly after his arrival, Ramsey wrote in part:

Ramsey was especially struck by a class zoology project that had begun when Wittgenstein found a dead cat in the road. Wittgenstein plopped the cat in a burlap bag and carried it back to his room, where he skinned it, then boiled the carcass to bones in a big black pot. His excitable landlady was grievously upset when she learned that he was cooking cat in his room. Are you so poor? she wanted to know, and not without some cause. The smell — remarkably like venison — had permeated the grubby little grocery downstairs, where the teacher's eccentricities were already a favorite subject of conversation.

Wittgenstein could not be bothered with the landlady's female squeamishness. The cat was duly cooked, and when Ramsey arrived, he found Wittgenstein and his boys restringing the skeleton by drilling tiny holes in the bones and fastening them together with fine brass wire. In another letter to Moore, Ramsey reported:

But for all Ramsey's enthusiasm, it was hard blowing life into cold coals. Wittgenstein said he was sorry for this, and he warned Ramsey, lest he wind up the same way, that there came a time when a man had to drop such thinking if he was not to be completely wrecked by it. Ramsey was no Pinsent. He never became Wittgenstein's protégé, and, unlike Wittgenstein, he never lived long enough to quit philosophy. Still, as Wittgenstein sat there eating with Moore that afternoon, he was not sorry for what he had said about Ramsey, nor could he join with those like Moore who would wonder aloud at all Ramsey might have done had he lived. Wittgenstein had seen too many promising young men die in the war to indulge in what-ifs.

Heartless or not, this was how it was and how it would be. Because as much as Ramsey helped Wittgenstein clear the ground for his new work, Ramsey was inevitably somewhat stunted as a thinker by the higher stories of Wittgenstein's influence. And thanks in part to Ramsey, Wittgenstein could now roam on, unbothered by bourgeois questions of influence or gratitude, drifting over the landscape like a grazing cow called History, which had broken down the fence and wandered off, not even bothering to look back over what carefully tended gardens she had trampled and uprooted.

Ramsey wasn't the only casualty of Wittgenstein's thinking. Another was Friedrich Waismann.

Waismann was a member of the Vienna Circle, a group that arose partly in response to the concerns and aspirations of the
Tractatus
, especially in its desire to separate the realm of significant statement from that of nonsense. The dream
was
attainable, and the group's early members looked to Wittgenstein to lead them toward an age of scientific philosophy based on logic and empiricism and, above all, freedom from the muddles of metaphysics.

The first time Wittgenstein encountered this little group, waiting for him to help them throw off the last heresies and lead them, clear-eyed, into a new day, he felt a deep sense of sadness.
They
were the heretics. They took up his logic but cast aside his mysticism, never understanding how inextricably the two were bound. But in them Wittgenstein saw something else that nauseated him: it was the growing shadow of his own influence, as reflected in strong, sophisticated intellects surrendering not just to his ideas but to the sheer force of his personality — to a hateful
style
. It made him fearful and ashamed, all the more so because there was a side of his personality that craved the attention. Faced with the harsh mirror of their admiration, Wittgenstein did what seemed the only decent thing during that first meeting: he read these antimetaphysicians the passionate metaphysical love poems of the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore.

Moritz Schlick, one of the leaders of the group, got along well with Wittgenstein — better, at least, than the more abrasive (and less deferential) Rudolf Carnap. Schlick was the first member of the group to establish a relationship with Wittgenstein, albeit an often delicate one. This was during the period after Wittgenstein had returned from Trattenbach, when he was engaged in building Gretl's house, frequently with Max as his second in command. Building this house was more for him than just a favor for his sister. In asking her brother to undertake the house, Gretl also knew the work would provide him with a needed refuge.

Gretl often acted as his intermediary in those days, and it was she who arranged the first meeting with Schlick. Having led the members of the group through two years of intensive analysis of the
Tractatus
, Schlick came as a votary, and the meeting was a success. Wittgenstein especially appreciated Schlick's highly cultivated personality. Schlick also came at the right time, when Wittgenstein was feeling the first surge of new ideas. Sensing this, Schlick subsequently introduced Wittgenstein to his young associate Waismann, largely in the hope that Waismann might get Wittgenstein's chaotic thoughts into a systematic and publishable form.

The Vienna Circle dreamed of making philosophy a handmaiden to science, and Waismann was no less willing to make himself a handmaiden to Wittgenstein's evolving thinking. For the past four years, Waismann had virtually dropped his own work while fruitlessly trying to systematize Wittgenstein's ideas. That it was proving an impossible task was certainly not because of Waismann's skills as an organizer and creative midwife. Rather, the problem was the speed with which Wittgenstein's ideas were changing — that and Wittgenstein's inherent dissatisfaction with his own productions. Wittgenstein was like a molting bird, all swatched and patched and unclear, wondering at his own wild growth, with no idea, or concern, about what kind of bird he would become. Poor Waismann, meanwhile, was trying to turn him into a definite kind of bird with a definite shape. Twice now Waismann had ordered Wittgenstein's new ideas into the scope of a book, but each time Wittgenstein had rejected it, saying that the ideas in it were far too flawed, that his thinking had changed and was changing still.

It would have been an act of kindness, even humility, for Wittgenstein to have told Waismann to abandon this doomed undertaking, but he would not do this. Wittgenstein was nothing if not pragmatic in this regard. He thought Waismann was brilliant and capable, certainly, but otherwise unoriginal. But then this was not altogether surprising, since Waismann was a Jew. As Wittgenstein saw it, it was part of the Jewish nature to understand another man's work better than he himself understood it. Nor was Wittgenstein attributing to Waismann anything that he did not clearly see in himself. In perceiving this deficiency in Waismann, Wittgenstein was no less aware of the essentially derivative nature of his own talent, which stemmed largely from Russell and Frege, among others.

Jewish reproductiveness
— this was how Wittgenstein termed this characteristic one day in conversation with Max. It was an ill-considered and irresponsible remark, and Wittgenstein immediately regretted having said it in Max's presence. Certainly, Wittgenstein did not mean for Max to view it as being in any way in sympathy with the various racial theories that were then surfacing with renewed vigor. But it was too late. Max immediately latched on to this as another important insight to be added to his Jew lore, that rag-bag of jokes, pseudohistory and scurrilous “scientific facts” culled from various strident newspapers and pamphlets.

In any case, it seemed to Wittgenstein that if Waismann could not get on with his own work, he could at least help him get on with his. After all, he reasoned, it didn't matter, in the end, who did the work, just so long as someone did it.

This at least was what Wittgenstein told himself. The truth was, Wittgenstein was anything but adverse to what Waismann could do for him. Wittgenstein had once told Waismann, and emphatically, that he was not yet willing to speak about his ideas in public. Nonetheless, he was secretly intrigued several days after this pronouncement when Waismann took the hint and nervously asked, after a floundering and abasing preface, if
he
, Waismann, might give a paper on Wittgenstein's mathematical ideas. Wittgenstein gave a laboring sigh, a look of distaste. But despite these feints, Wittgenstein, much like Pontius Pilate, was finally willing — if not compelled by the world's barbaric curiosity — to accept “Waismann's idea” and send his work forth like the condemned to a fate of almost certain incomprehension. There was nothing else to be done. Why, Wittgenstein even went so far as to provide Waismann with an outline of what he was to say at the mathematical conference held in Königsberg in 1930. Nor had Wittgenstein objected — or failed to subtly jerk the wires —that past year when Waismann had presented several other papers on his views in Vienna.

Unfortunately, things had not gone so well when Waismann attempted to write a paper of his own. In his preface, Waismann said that conversations with Wittgenstein had provided “valuable stimuli” in the development of his ideas. The master was not at all happy when Waismann sent him a complimentary copy along with a humble letter of thanks. Instead of an appreciative letter, Waismann received an icy rebuke pointing out that Waismann's alleged original ideas had not risen like marsh gas from the mere
stimulation
of their discussions. Rather, Wittgenstein said, Waismann's ideas had come directly from his own, and not just from conversations, but from dictations and unpublished typescripts.

Waismann was of course devastated, all the more so because the mistake had been so unconscious. Even now Waismann was struggling to draft a formal acknowledgment of his error. But how was he to explain it? Overinfluence? Inundation? A
mirage
?

In the meantime, though, this Sisyphean undertaking would proceed apace, with Waismann rushing to complete another version of the master's ideas for his almost certain repudiation.

R
USSELL DID CATCH
a glimpse of the lovers before they disappeared.

He had run up the stairs to his study roost, to comb the hills with his binoculars. And there, in a sweep of the horizon, he had caught them. Max had a blanket under his arm. He saw her willful back, her windblown hair. Then they were gone. Over the hill.