'Never Has a Man Deserved a Reputation Less'

My middle son, a Marine Corps officer at Quantico, asked last week if I would be interested in “working through Wittgenstein” with him. Of course, so we met online on Sunday for ninety minutes and read propositions 1 and 2 of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. I first read the book as a university freshman. I was taking an introductory course in philosophy – St. Anselm, Descartes, Kant – and in a private conference my professor suggested I should read Ludwig Wittgenstein, a name unknown to me. I was smitten.

My plan at the time was to major in philosophy but English finally seduced me. To this day I tend to read philosophy as a species of literature. I’m not an analytical thinker. The Tractatus is a philosophical text free of argument. Guy Davenport points out the obvious but still surprising fact: “Wittgenstein did not argue; he merely thought himself into subtler and deeper problems.” He writes like an aphorist, mystic or Heraclitus. I read his propositions as poetry. Michael is more deeply schooled in mathematics and logic than I, and that helps offset some of my literary bias. Despite the subtlety of Wittgenstein's thought, he is a rare philosopher who can be profitably read by non-specialists. Can you think of another book in which the first and final sentences have been memorized by generations of students, even people who have never read the book? In the third-to-last paragraph of the Tractatus, Wittgenstein writes:

 

“My propositions are elucidatory in this way: he who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them, over them. (He must so to speak throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)”

 

Michael and I are still climbing the ladder. In Davenport’s essay “Wittgenstein” (The Geography of the Imagination,1981), he writes, "What the philosopher says about the world is not too different from the proverb, the old saw, the infinitely repeatable line of poetry," and adds:

 

“He came to believe that a normal, honest human being could not be a professor. It is the academy that gave him his reputation of impenetrable abstruseness; never has a man deserved a reputation less. Disciples who came to him expecting to find a man of incredibly deep learning, found a man who saw mankind held together by suffering alone, and he invariably advised them to be as kind as possible to others. He read, like all inquisitive men, to multiply his experience. He read Tolstoy (always getting bogged down) and the Gospels and bales of detective stories. He shook his head over Freud. When he died he was reading Black Beauty. His last words were: ‘Tell them I had a wonderful life.’”