In the Dark Room

Ludwig Wittgenstein: Ein biographisches
Album
edited by Michael Nedo
C.H. Beck, 2012, 463 pages, €39.99

In the train of the acclaimed exhibition “Wittgenstein and Photography”, shown at the London School of Economics to much acclaim in the summer of 2012, Michael Nedo, director of the Wittgenstein Archive in Cambridge and editor of the Wiener Ausgabe of Wittgenstein’s writings, has produced a sumptuously illustrated biography of the philosopher under the imprint of the Munich publisher C.H. Beck. Like his earlier co-edited volume Ludwig Wittgenstein: Sein Leben in Bildern und Texten (1983), it combines the visual and the textual in a compelling manner: this book is an album of over 500 images—family snaps, letters, postcards, patent depositions, walking routes, manuscripts with handwritten annotations by Wittgenstein—accompanied by over 2000 excerpts and citations from the work and letters (in both of the philosopher’s languages) many of which engage with his insistence on the ostensive. After all, in the introduction to Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein himself would appear to concur, observing that his work was “really only an album”.

Though he was always keen in later life to play down his privileged background, Wittgenstein, who ended his life as a British citizen and is buried in St Giles’s cemetery in Cambridge, started it as the youngest of eight surviving children in the second-richest family in the Habsburg empire, and grew up in most cultivated and elegant surroundings. His industrial father Karl—a fascinating, driven and energetic figure—was a major patron of the arts, and funded much of Vienna’s musical and artistic life (of which the shimmering Klimt wedding portrait of Wittgenstein’s sister Gretl in 1905 is one of the most widely known relics), including the Secession movement and its later offshoot, the Wiener Werkstätte.

Like that other great dynastic contribution to modern British culture, the Freud family, the Wittgensteins seemed to know everybody who was anybody: their palatial home in Vienna’s Alleegasse, according to Bruno Walter, exuded an “all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture”. It is striking to see a photograph of the young Brahms—with whom music came to a “full stop”, as Wittgenstein told his friend Maurice O’Connor Drury in 1930 (and even there he could begin “to hear the noise of machinery”)—dedicated to the philosopher’s grandparents, followed by an image of the composer as a bearded old man (“Jehovah” Brahms) in the company of his aunts. Music permeated the lives of the Wittgensteins; his brother Paul, who lost his right arm in the war and became famous for his association with Ravel’s brilliant Concerto for the Left Hand (to which he enjoyed lifetime performing rights after commissioning it) used to tell his younger brother that he couldn’t practise “because I feel your scepticism seeping under the door”. (In many ways, Paul was all too like Ludwig: he refused to play some of the left-handed works he commissioned for himself, including large-scale works by Prokofiev and Hindemith, unless he first understood their “logic”.)

It was in one of the family’s magnificent summer houses around the capital, Neuwaldegg, that Wittgenstein worked on the Tractatus on leave from the eastern front in the last months of the Great War, finally completing the manuscript in his uncle Paul’s house in Salzburg. Many of the family pictures were evidently taken in or around the hunting lodge at Hochreith, their favoured summer residence, surrounded by nannies and retainers; Wittgenstein’s sisters evidently liked to indulge that old aristocratic penchant for dressing up in folk costume. Image after image in these years attests to the fact that the philosopher who seems the archetypal outsider actually came from the heart of cultural events in central Europe. There are far fewer than six degrees of separation between Wittgenstein and some of the most prominent Central European names of the early twentieth century: Rilke, Trakl, Kraus, Loos, Musil (whose apartment looked on to the famous gleaming white Platonic house which Ludwig built in a pared-down, starkly-delineated, ornament-hostile manner for his sister Gretl) and Friedrich Hayek, who was his second cousin. Each is present—and many more besides—in this monument to the transplantation of high European culture to the island of tea-drinkers and superficial manners that, to Wittgenstein’s considerable surprise, as related by his pupil J.P. Stern, proved to be a solid moral and physical redoubt against the nightmare of continental history.

An early photograph shows a surly-shy young Ludwig with his pony Monokel, a present from his brother Kurt (one of three brothers to commit suicide); a year or so later, the eleven-year-old can be seen seated at his lathe, the first evidence of the interest in technical objects that would be one of the constants of his life. At that tender age, he had made a working model of a sewing-machine out of wooden rods and wires: his sister Hermine writes in her family memoir that it was actually able to make a few stitches. In a few years kite experiments in Glossop and the design of a motorless “aero-engine” (British Patent No. 27.087, 1910: “Improvements in Propellers applicable for Aerial Machines”) followed the interest in anything that could be cranked and levered; and Wittgenstein was to maintain a keen interest in the mechanics of photography too. One of the more curious exhibits in the book is a composite image he made by superimposing individual facial portraits of himself and his three sisters with the idea of drawing out “Familienähnlichkeiten”, the incarnated resemblances in a family that transcend the individual members.

This slightly eerie picture is a reminder that the criminologists of the nineteenth century were experimenting with exactly this kind of anthropometric mugshot too in order to identify recidivistic “traits” in criminals. Indeed, Wittgenstein had read about the technique of composite portraiture in the work of Francis Galton, who spent many years perfecting his technique in the hope of being able to identify deviations from the normal in the infirm and criminal—he was looking, in a word, for types. Wittgenstein took a blither, even mystical view of the technique: he refers to it, in his famous lecture to the Heretics Society at Cambridge in 1929, as an analogy for his notion of ethics, progressing through relative aspects of ethical dilemmas so as to glimpse something of an absolute and formal nature emerging from them.

Given that he frequently leans on the analogy between pictures and propositions throughout his writings, a visual biography seems a clever strategy to catalogue his life. The photograph is an index, as the American polymath C.S. Peirce first observed: it presents an object immortalised in its natural “projective relations” without any need for a formal aesthetics other than the framing of the scene (Wittgenstein liked to crop his photos too). The nature of the image is such that there can be no such thing as a fictive photograph, fictive being understood as the work of the imagination—although a photo can of course be “doctored” or faked, especially now in the digital era. In its first hundred years the photo, like so many Victorian technical advances, offered a new degree of verisimilitude in replicating experiential reality—“the real”. Images were evocative, without revealing all the clues the viewer might possibly want (or need) to know about the photographer’s motives for taking the photograph.

The aesthetics of the photograph is therefore one of present effect, obscured cause. And the scope of that effect is at the viewer’s discretion; meaning isn’t entirely or even necessarily inherent in the photographer’s intention or the half-coordinated, half-impulsive moment of the “snap”. (The influential American street photographer Garry Winogrand confessed that he photographed “in order to see what things looked like in photographs”.)

After his initial attempt to continue his studies in aeronautical engineering at Manchester in 1908, Wittgenstein moved to study philosophy with Bertrand Russell at Cambridge in 1911, when Russell referred to him in a letter to Ottoline Morrell as “my ferocious German”. On the outbreak of the Great War across Europe a few years later, Wittgenstein returned home patriotically to enlist in the Austrian army: he served on the Galician front with courage and daring (receiving many decorations for valour), and then in the Tyrol, when he ended up as an Italian prisoner-of-war in a camp at Cassino, an episode that later provided the title for a remarkable “machine-part” and aluminium cast sculpture by Eduardo Paolozzi.

Wittgenstein, who had always been attracted to monkish and even puritanical ways of life, especially after being exposed to the “intellectual superficiality” of Cambridge—as the several photographs of Norway, where he built his own wooden cabin at Skjolden near Bergen, and Connemara attest—took it into his head after the war that he ought to be a simple schoolteacher in various villages in the Semmering area of Lower Austria, and wound up in the isolated village of Puchberg am Schneeberg: a double-page spread taken outside an Alpine hut with snow on the tiles shows him with his charges, girls lined up in front, boys behind, all more obviously used to life on the farm than in the classroom.

If a philosophical problem has the form, “I don’t know my way about”, Wittgenstein had clearly strayed into the valleys of stupidity (where “a philosopher always finds more grass to feed upon”, as he remarked elsewhere) rather than taking up the Nietzschean example of exposing himself to the crystalline heights. Both are self-consciously “authentic” poses, and both look pretty silly. Wittgenstein’s attempt to shed his patrician identity and go “among the people” ended badly, by most accounts, although there is no documentary evidence in this book of what has become known as the “Haidbauer incident”, when he himself filed a petition for a court hearing which acquitted him of physically ill-treating one of his slower pupils.

Perfectly out of place in rural Austria, he subsequently put in two years’ penance as architect and fittings designer to his sister Gretl, the outcome being the aforementioned house whose “lines, planes and volumes” were so pure his other sister Hermine felt unable to live in it. The early twentieth-century tendency—a  trait held in common by the philosophers of the Viennese Circle and the theorists of the Bauhaus movement—to reduce complex things to their simplest formal expression (a movement sometimes dubbed “simplexity”), had found an avid if unwitting disciple in Wittgenstein. What he had built was the general proposition of a house plus fixtures, or as he wrote elsewhere: “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.” This was Wittgenstein’s unofficial contribution to Rudolf Carnap’s “logical construction of the world”. Haus Wittgenstein is now the cultural institute of the Bulgarian embassy, having been saved from destruction in the wreckers’ decade of the 1970s by the concerted efforts of an organisation devoted to preserving landmark buildings in Vienna.

By 1929, Wittgenstein was back in Cambridge—for good, as it were—where he was generally contemptuous about the insider knowledge required to “be” a Trinity don—a status he had acquired by the expedient of having his now famous (at least in philosophical circles) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus submitted as a doctoral thesis. And why not? The British knew this exigent intellectual type from their literature. Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever commented on how much Wittgenstein fits the image of Sherlock Holmes, especially as played by Basil Rathbone. And some famous people were prepared to range his eccentricities on an even higher level, even if tongue in cheek. Keynes wrote to his wife: “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train.” It is a reflection on our politically very correct times that these days even the author of a work of the order of Tractatus would be most unlikely to secure a doctorate, no further scrutiny required. Without the proper paperwork “God” wouldn’t get a sniff at a chair in Cambridge.

Over the rest of his life Wittgenstein was to turn away from the inert, unhistorical summation of facts that seem to constitute the world in the Tractatus—a boxed-in Brownie-camera-vision of reality—to a realm in which many kinds of conceptualisation are possible, and indeed welcome. In his writings on the nature of language itself Wittgenstein found what he had been denied in the Austrian Alps. As the later photographs seem to suggest in their altogether more modest scenery and even bleakness (cottages in Ireland and deserted British beaches), although Wittgenstein turned towards the notion of language as providing communal and cultural legitimacy for thought, he displayed no interest at all in politics and little more in social issues. It seems fitting enough that a search engine like Google should cope with the problem of the enveloping polysemy of natural languages by applying some of Wittgenstein’s ideas about syntax, in which algorithms for keyword searches are now context-bound. “Don’t look for the meaning, but for the use”: it could almost be a new Mosaic pronouncement for the age that owes so much to his quondam colleague Alan Turing, who designed a logic machine in the hope that it, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, would inhabit—guilelessly—the future.

Iain Bamforth lives in Strasbourg