On Living Like Wittgenstein

There are about a thousand stories you’ll hear repeated online about Ludwig Wittgenstein’s odd habits and strange way of living. Maybe half are true. Here’s my favorite: Wittgenstein decided he’d move to the USSR in 1935 once his Cambridge fellowship had ended. This is certainly true, though he ultimately decided not to go.

Here’s the part that might not be true: There’s a persistent rumor that Wittgenstein wanted to go work in a factory or a coal mine, but the Soviet authorities insisted that he come teach philosophy instead. When they refused to listen to his protests, he decided to abandon his plans and return to the hut he’d built on the Norwegian coast. (And yes, the hut was real.)

For as brilliant of a thinker and writer as Wittgenstein was, he might be even more fascinating as a simple human being. He was often ill-tempered and cruel—you might have heard about when he threatened peers with a fire poker during heated philosophical debates, or maybe about when he cruelly beat two young students as a schoolteacher in Austria. Somewhat paradoxically, he was sometimes fiercely empathetic and struggled with horrible guilt over his outbursts—later in life, he traveled to nearly all his friends and acquaintances (including those two young students) to apologize for everything he’d ever done wrong. His friend G.E.M. Anscombe told him that he didn’t have to apologize for all this—“Do you want to be perfect?” she asked him. Wittgenstein was bewildered: “Of course I do. Who doesn’t?”

It often seemed like he was not of this world. Wittgenstein lived a fiercely ascetic lifestyle: After receiving a huge inheritance, he gave away every penny of it and spent his life living in small homes in the countryside between stints of teaching. He variously considered becoming a monk or a shepherd, though he never seemed to make up his mind entirely on religious questions. During both world wars, he felt guilty sitting at home while the fighting went on: In the First World War, he enlisted as a soldier in the German army; in the Second World War, he quit his job teaching to work as a nurse at a London hospital, never telling his patients or colleagues that he was one of the world’s foremost philosophers.

For as strange as Wittgenstein’s life was, it’s appropriate that his philosophy was just as unconventional. Really, his philosophy was that philosophy is impossible. At the very least, what we think of as philosophy—developing theories, advancing arguments, making logical deductions, and so on—is nothing more than a long series of confusions. Philosophy happens when language, as Wittgenstein puts it, “goes on holiday,” leaving its natural place and going somewhere it doesn’t belong.

The only role of philosophy, Wittgenstein argues, is therapeutic. Its duty is to show us where we’ve made mistakes and help lead us out of them. Rather than solving problems, it shows that there was never a problem in the first place. As he once put it:

A person caught in a philosophical confusion is like a man in a room who wants to get out but doesn’t know how. He tries the window but it is too high. He tries the chimney but it is too narrow. And if he would only turn around, he would see that the door has been open all the time!

I’m not sure if I agree with this position—certainly, I’d feel like I’ve wasted a good bit of my life if I decided that every bit of philosophy I’d read and studied was just a meaningless confusion. But much like I admire Wittgenstein’s bold way of life, I admire this bold view of philosophy.

More than anything, I think I admire how Wittgenstein’s philosophy was not some strange activity detached from real life. It was instead a natural part of a life lived reflectively. Wittgenstein often advised his students and friends to give up teaching philosophy and instead take on some humble work like herding or farming. He dreaded teaching philosophy himself (he once called his job at Cambridge “a kind of living death”)—the lessons he gave were far from conventional, often nothing more than him sitting in his office talking through his thoughts with students.

At risk of oversimplifying Wittgenstein, I think we can say something like this: His conception of philosophy was nothing more than learning to see the world exactly how it is. It’s less of a form of knowledge and more of a way of life.

What does it mean to try to live a Wittgenstinian life? I’m still not sure, nor do I believe I’ll ever be—even his friends were often confused about his intended meaning behind his odd sayings. But at risk of making myself look absolutely absurd, I think I’d like to take these principles from Wittgenstein’s life:

1. Learn to look straightforwardly at life, beginning not with distant concepts but with what’s right in front of you.

2. Philosophy is not a kind of work nor a kind of life; it’s a way of working and living. Philosophical living is possible anywhere.

3. Try to make amends for every wrong, no matter how far in the past it may have been.

4. Meaning and understanding belong to a particular context. We can’t readily apply the same meanings to every possible situation; we must first understand where our language has begun.

5. It’s absolute blasphemy to take the pursuit of truth as an excuse to leave active, “normal” life.

And who knows: maybe I’ll make my way to a hut on the Norwegian coast in due time.

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