Those familiar with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy know that his thought is constituted by two distinct eras—partitioned by a period of inactivity—and that these two eras are actually more like epochs, since they exist in outright confrontation and contradiction with one another, the later work amounting to a total disavowal of the earlier. The long interim between these epochs began after the publication of the Tractatus Logo-Philosophicus in 1922, which proclaimed itself a “final solution” to the problems of philosophy, as summarized by its last line: “Whereof we cannot speak, we must pass over in silence.” Shortly thereafter, Wittgenstein left Cambridge and moved to a little village in Lower Austria to teach at a children’s school. This episode is one of the more famous abdications of one’s talents (Susan Sontag included it in her essay “The Aesthetics of Silence”), right alongside Rimbaud’s dereliction of poetry to hawk coffee and guns in Abyssinia. Unlike Rimbaud, however, Wittgenstein didn’t stay gone.
It was but one of the many (abortive) renunciations Wittgenstein made throughout his life. His first, arguably, was his decision to abandon aeronautical engineering in favor of studying philosophy at Cambridge (at Bertrand Russell’s behest), in defiance of his domineering father, a steel magnate and one of the wealthiest men in Austria. When his father died in 1913, Wittgenstein ditched his inheritance, giving most of it away to artists, writers and his remaining siblings—remaining, because two of his older brothers, Kurt and Rudolf had both committed suicide (in 1904 and 1918 respectively). And like them, Wittgenstein too was long tempted to renounce life altogether. (He reportedly kept Russell up many nights with talk of self-slaughter.) Lesser-known, though, is Wittgenstein’s second botched attempt to excise philosophy from his life: in 1935, he planned to emigrate (or defect, depending on how one thinks of it) to the Soviet Union, along with his then lover and collaborator Francis Skinner, with the intention of becoming a manual laborer.
As early as 1922, while working at the elementary school in Austria, Wittgenstein wrote to his friend Paul Engelmann that he was thinking about going east: “It still goes round in my head—an eventual flight to Russia.” And, later: “Russia: the passion there contains the promise of something, whereas all our gabble is impotent.” What connection he felt with Russia, to such an extent that he considered moving there, was a matter of speculation even amongst those closest to him, and most of what we know about it is anecdotal. We know that he loved Pushkin and Dostoyevsky, and that Tolstoy’s The Gospels in Brief (from which he borrowed the numbered structure of the Tractatus) had been his vademecum in the trenches during the disastrous Galician campaign, in which over half a million people were slaughtered in three weeks. The book “virtually kept me alive,” he later wrote—“you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.”
But Russia as it was in the 1930s, in the permafrost of Stalinism, was very different from the country as seen through the literature of the 19th century. At the time, Wittgenstein was unhappily stationed at Cambridge. He had returned in 1929 to once again take up a teaching post, having abruptly resigned from the school in Austria in 1926 after striking a child so fiercely that it caused him to collapse. The university was then a ferment of left radicalism (including a ring of Soviet spies—the so-called “Cambridge Five”). What Wittgenstein’s relationship to Marxism was is difficult to say. Having disowned his bourgeois inheritance, he clearly cared nothing for money. He despised poverty and class distinctions and his sympathies were obviously with working people, having great respect for those who made things with their hands. Many of his friends were fellow travelers, like Piero Sraffa, Italian economist and comrade of Antonio Gramsci, the historian George Thomson, and the economist Maurice Dobb, who helped establish a historical society within the British Communist Party. Skinner had also volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but was turned away for health reasons. Wittgenstein once remarked that he was a Marxist in his “heart.” Thomson, seemingly confirming this, claimed that he was “Opposed to [Marxism] in theory, but supported it in practice.”
In 1934, he started taking Russian lessons with a Jewish-Ukrainian woman named Fania Pascal. His Russian was reportedly fair, and his notebooks show that he copied out poems by Pushkin. Pascal remarked that Wittgenstein’s “feeling” for Russia seemed to have more to do with “Tolstoy’s moral teachings, with Dostoyevsky’s spiritual insights, than with any political or social matters.” Wittgenstein was also encouraged by John Maynard Keynes’s A Short View of Russia (a kind of honeymoon postcard to the West), in which he’d claimed that the country contained a promise of the “true religion of the future.” After finishing the book, Wittgenstein wrote to Keynes: “It shows that you know there are more things between heaven and earth etc.” The account stood in contrast to Russell’s Theory and Practice of Bolshevism (1920), the first major leftist critique of the Leninist experiment, which Wittgenstein in any case seems not to have regarded very highly, to the extent that he regarded it at all.
By the summer of 1935 he was writing to Keynes: “I have now more or less decided to go to Russia as a Tourist in September and see whether it is possible for me to get a suitable job there. If I find (which, I’m afraid is quite likely) that I can’t find such a job, or get permission to work in Russia, then I should want to return to England and if possible study Medicine.” Keynes seems not to have endorsed the idea, but nonetheless got Wittgenstein a meeting with the Russian ambassador in London. Wittgenstein was obsessively decorous: he wore a tie (an apparent rarity) and addressed the ambassador as “Your Excellency.” A trip was arranged for September of that year. Wittgenstein acknowledged there was perhaps something foolish about the whole endeavor: “I admit that they are partly bad and even childish reasons [for going],” he wrote to Keynes, “but it is true also that behind all that there are deep and even good reasons.” Long phobic of pests, he also wrote to Sraffa asking what he should do about bugs in the hotels.
He arrived in Moscow in September 1935 and stayed “in the rooms which Napoleon had in 1812.” There he met with Sophia Janovskaya, professor of mathematical logic, who helped secure him offers to teach philosophy at Kazan or Moscow University. He was also shown around Leningrad, where his appeals to get manual work were rejected by party officials. It became apparent that outside of a teaching position, there would be no work for him. In any case, he failed to impress the authorities. Pat Sloan, a correspondent for the Daily Worker, who met with Wittgenstein in Moscow, wrote to Dobb that—“He [Wittgenstein] is hardly a suitable person to come to live and work in the USSR. His mind is so narrowly confined (amounting almost to insanity) that he, feeling this, wants to abandon his mind altogether.”
Who knows what exactly he expected to find in Russia. His belief that there would be manual work for him was beyond naïve, and in any case, he wouldn’t have been allowed to carry on for very long. By 1935, the country was still recovering from the horrors of rapid industrialization, collective farming, famine and the crushing of the peasantry. At this time, Victor Serge was being held in captivity in a prisoner’s camp near the Kazakhstan border (he would be released the following year), Kirov had just been assassinated and the country was on the verge of the purges. Wittgenstein shouldn’t have had any illusions about being able to survive in such an environment. He was infamous for not suffering fools, losing his temper and sometimes insulting his colleagues. And if that wasn’t enough, homosexuality had recently been recriminalized under Stalin, and his relationship with Skinner would have likely aroused suspicion from the authorities. Any one of these things could have gotten him locked up or sent to a labor camp, where the manual work he so wished for would have been amply provided.
He returned to England by the end of the month and seems to have dropped the idea after that. Outside of a few comments, he never spoke about the trip. That he said so little suggests that he was stripped of his ignorance, joining the ranks of those like André Gide, who went to the country nearly at the same time, intending to praise and coming back disillusioned. Still, as late as 1937, he continued to float the idea: “God knows what will become of me,” he wrote to Engelmann, “Perhaps I shall go to Russia.” What was clear was that he was done with the intellectual cloister of Cambridge. Soon after, he went to Norway to live in seclusion and further develop the work that would eventually culminate in the Philosophical Investigations.
In his biography of Wittgenstein, Ray Monk writes that “Presumably, for Wittgenstein, the life of a manual laborer in Russia was the epitome of a life without treacle.” This seems to chime with Wittgenstein’s remark that in the West “all our gabble is impotent.” Wittgenstein recognized that most people’s (even the philosopher’s) relationship to the world is not essentially theoretical—otherwise we would never get out of bed in the morning—and he understood that academic inquiry often fails to capture the “sense” of what makes life meaningful to us. He also experienced first-hand the ways in which philosophy can be a kind of elaborate self-deception, by which the philosopher convinces himself of things that would never trouble a “normal” person—say, that consciousness is an illusion, or that we have no free will. Perhaps the idea of working with his hands alongside people who were unburdened by philosophical problems seemed like a respite from the torture of the life of the mind. Indeed, he often encouraged his students to do something “useful” instead of studying philosophy, and he once remarked that he wished he could make himself useful, as Spinoza had grinding lenses.
He had a machinist’s mind and long felt a connection with manual work. No doubt he had spent time on factory floors as a boy with his father. And after his resignation from the school in Otterhal, he helped design a villa in Vienna for his sister Margaret, lording over millimeter details like the composition of door handles and radiator valves (his sister Hermine later described the house as “embodied logic”). In the winter of 1915/16, while serving in the Austrian army, he briefly worked in a military workshop near Lviv, alongside a Russian-speaking prisoner-of-war who had been assigned to him as a servant. One can imagine Wittgenstein calling out to him, in some Austrian-Russian pidgin: “Hammer! Rivet! Belt!” Incidentally, the Investigations opens with a similar scenario for how a primitive language might develop—where a bricklayer calls out to his assistant the tools he needs.
From this scenario Wittgenstein deduces that much of language is essentially gestural, but points out that the situation is too narrowly circumscribed. How would you know, for instance, that when I call out “Hammer!” I am referring to the object I need—not its color, essence, or formal properties? I could be using its name metaphorically; it could also be a command, a question, or a prophecy. This shows us that language is not, as we may naturally think, the act of naming things. Names rather are tags that we assign to things “in preparation for using” them as we wish, much like tools in a box. This discourse on naming led to Wittgenstein’s idea of “language games,” which began to germinate, perhaps uncoincidentally, at the same time as his trip to the Soviet Union.
The idea that language is a kind of tool and that its “meanings” arise from usage suggests that meaning is generated between people in social life, based on what they do and how they do it rather than what they think about it. It is an activity that we participate in, or a “form of life.” Wittgenstein understood, therefore, that so many of our inquiries often terminate with the shrug: “that’s just what we do.” This might seem hostile to the spirit of theory, the philosophical equivalent of telling a child “because I said so,” but Wittgenstein was no purveyor of truisms or common sense. The problem is that philosophers, even those that claim to be radical, often obscure, compound or complicate false theories of reality—precisely through the abuse of language—rather than lead us out of those theories.
As Terry Eagleton argues, for Wittgenstein, philosophy, “Like psychoanalysis or the Marxist critique of ideology… is a demythologising activity, a therapy held in store for particularly grievous cases of mystification.” Seen this way, philosophy is a kind of neurosis. The purpose of philosophy therefore is to find a cure for philosophy, or to “show the fly the way out of the fly bottle.” Thus, the Investigations seeks to elicit or draw out our awareness of the “blindly” held assumptions on which our use of language is built, and in so doing, lay the groundwork for questioning all other orders of social life. There is something of the Socratic gadfly in this—not only in the recognition that philosophy belongs to the totality of the social life in which it is embedded (philosophy must be done in the polis, since trees can’t speak), but that its practice begins with questioning, almost to the point of naiveté, foundational assumptions that people hold in common.
One of the ways we can do this is by recognizing that language games can be treated as games, which can be finessed, teased, subverted—so as to disarm us of what we think we know about the world. Whereas the Tractatus ends with a call for silence, the Investigations ends with an invitation to play. This chimes with the Nietzschean attitude of playfulness, as dramatized by Zarathustra. (Jokes are one form that this playfulness can take: Wittgenstein imagined a philosophical text composed entirely of jokes, while Zarathustra, who constructs his teaching in the form of games, seeks to raise up “laughing lions.”) In Nietzsche, the playful spirit is the fount of a political and ethical ideal; it is a liberating force as well as one of self-creation and transvaluation. Wittgenstein may have stopped short of going this far himself, but his theory of language games certainly points in the same direction.
Like Nietzsche, who saw that the “re-evaluation of all values” can take place only once we recognize that nothing holds fast the grand theoretical schemes on which those values rest, Wittgenstein recognized that first curing the self-deceptions generated by philosophy itself opens us up to curing all other deceptions. This means re-examining what we already think we know and what we take as simply given. For Nietzsche, this was what it meant to philosophize “with a hammer” and Wittgenstein echoes this with his remark that “All that philosophy can do is destroy idols.” But the re-evaluation of language is not just a deconstructive exercise (as so much philosophy concerned with language would become in the 20th century) but a constructive force as well. We might remind ourselves of a remark Wittgenstein made when building the villa for his sister: “I am not interested in erecting a building, but in… presenting to myself the foundations of all buildings.” Thinking about language is a way of addressing foundations, and one must first address the foundations before any groundwork renovation—of assumptions, illusions, prejudices, practices, etc.—can take place.
The language of “foundations” and “buildings” here is revealing. Not for nothing does Eagleton include Wittgenstein in his book, Materialism (2017), in which he argues that the idea of language as an activity embedded in social life means that it operates firmly within historical-materialist conditions—not in abstract, theoretical space. That is to say, renovations of language constitute renovations of relations between people and their environment. Eagleton also points out that like Marx, Wittgenstein understood that while ideological mystifications often take on theoretical form, they are (quoting Marx): “directly interwoven with the material intercourse of men, the language of real life.” Problems of philosophy are therefore problems of the world: if there is something wrong with the way we think, it is because there is something fundamentally wrong with the way we live.
Questions like What does it mean to practice philosophy? and Where and how is it practiced? certainly occurred to Wittgenstein during the period when he considered moving to Russia. As difficult as it is for us to imagine him donning the laborer’s salopettes, perhaps it was his attempt (however uninformed and misguided) to live closer to something like the baseline of these “forms of life,” to live closer to that which lies right under our noses, hiding in plain sight. If so, what appears a renunciation is actually deeply consonant with the ideas he was developing at the time.
When it comes to the way we live, Wittgenstein understood that there are no oracles: philosophy is about re-seeing what is right in front of us, and in this respect, the philosopher is a guide, not a liberator. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, he writes that “the sickness of philosophical problems” can be cured “only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual.” In the end, the only emancipation is self-emancipation. Recognizing the mystifications we’ve built into our language is one way toward this. It may seem like a revolutionary philosophy, if not exactly a philosophy of revolution. But then again, philosophy, like language, is a tool that we can call upon and use as we wish. The philosopher gestures toward it, shows us its potential, but we must ultimately be the ones to take it in hand. ♦
