[Peace-discuss] Coincidence

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The gods of the air (those forces in the universe that Christianity, Judaism 
and Islam forbid belief in) delight in arranging coincidences. One such turned 
up on my virtual desk this morning.  I'd just posted a comment that concluded 
with a line from Wittgenstein, when I received a review by Terry Eagleton -- 
protege of the theologian I recently mentioned, Herbert McCabe -- of a book on 
Wittgenstein written by the grandson of Evelyn Waugh, a great favorite of mine. 
(I once read  the novel by Waugh Sr., Brideshead Revisited in its entirety on 
overnight radio.)  That -- and the inherent interest -- seem reason enough to 
post it. --CGE]

	Palace of pain ...
	Terry Eagleton on a gripping account
	of the Wittgenstein madhouse


The Wittgensteins, ensconced in their grand Winter Palace in fin-de-siècle 
Vienna, were hardly a model family. The father, Karl , was a brutal autocrat as 
well as a high-class crook. He was an engineer by vocation, and his son Ludwig 
would later do some original work in aeronautics at Manchester University. A 
fabulously wealthy steel magnate, Karl rigged prices, bleeding his workers dry 
and doing much the same to his timorous wife Leopoldine. She once lay awake all 
night, agonised by an ugly wound in her foot but terrified of moving an inch in 
case she disturbed her irascible husband. She was an emotionally frigid mother 
and a neurotically dutiful wife, from whom all traces of individual personality 
had been violently erased.

The family was a seething cauldron of psychosomatic disorders. Leopoldine was 
afflicted by terrible leg pains and eventually went blind. Her children had 
their problems too. Helene was plagued by stomach cramps; Gretl was beset by 
heart palpitations and sought advice from Sigmund Freud about her sexual 
frigidity; Hermine and Jerome both had dodgy fingers; Paul suffered from bouts 
of madness; and little Ludwig was scarcely the most well balanced of souls. 
Almost all the males of the family were seized from time to time by bouts of 
uncontrollable fury that bordered on insanity.

Behind Karl the prosperous bourgeois lay a madder, more reckless man. He ran 
away from home at 17, boarded a ship bound for New York and joined a minstrel 
band. Before making his pile in Vienna he was a restaurant violinist, a night 
watchman, a steersman on a canal boat, and taught the tenor horn in an 
orphanage. Despite being one of the premier families of the Austro-Hungarian 
empire, most of the Wittgensteins were spiritual outlaws and adventurers. They 
combined the aristocrat's cavalier disdain for convention with the underdog's 
suspicion of authority.

The sons of the household had a distressing habit of doing away with them 
selves. Handsome, intelligent, homosexual Rudolf strolled into a Berlin bar, 
dissolved potassium cyanide into his glass of milk and died in agony on the 
spot. Two years earlier, Hans Karl had disappeared without trace and is thought 
to have killed himself at sea. He was a shy, ungainly, possibly autistic child 
with a prodigious gift for maths and music, whose first spoken word was 
"Oedipus". He, too, was thought to be gay. Kurt seems to have shot himself 
"without visible reason" while serving as a soldier in the first world war. The 
philosopher Ludwig claims to have begun thinking about suicide when he was 10 or 11.

Paul, a classmate of Adolf Hitler, became an outstanding concert pianist. 
Unusually for male members of the family, he was robustly heterosexual. The 
Wittgenstein ménage was more like a conservatoire than a family home: Brahms, 
Mahler and Richard Strauss dropped in regularly, while Ravel wrote his "Concerto 
for the Left Hand" specially for Paul, who had lost an arm in the first world 
war. Paul thought his brother Ludwig's philosophy was "trash", while Ludwig took 
a dim view of Paul's musical abilities. The Winter Palace resounded with 
constant yelling and vicious squabbling.

Entrusted with the family fortune after his father's death, Paul invested it 
unwisely in government war bonds and lost most of it. Ludwig still inherited a 
sizeable amount of money, but in Tolstoyan spirit gave it all away to three of 
his siblings. His rooms in Trinity College, Cambridge, were almost bare of 
furniture. He is said to have remarked that he didn't mind at all what he ate, 
as long as it was always the same thing. It was a far cry from the overbred 
Vienna of his youth. Ludwig's monkish austerity, evident in the style of his 
first great work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, was among other things a 
reaction against a Viennese world of cream cakes and swollen bodies, in which 
many of the poor slept in caves or parks.

Unconsciously re-enacting his father's impulse to escape, Ludwig fled from 
Cambridge to become an assistant gardener in an Austrian monastery, sleeping in 
a potting shed. He also lived for a while in a remote cottage in the west of 
Ireland, shacked up on the edge of a Norwegian fjord, and taught as a 
schoolmaster in several Austrian villages. Perhaps all this was a spiritual 
version of his brothers' suicides, on the part of a man seized by spiritual 
torment and self-loathing. If he inherited his father's instinct to scarper, 
however, he was also lumbered with his crazed bouts of fury. In one village 
school, he hit a girl so hard that she bled behind the ears, and then belaboured 
a boy about the head until he slumped unconscious to the floor. While Ludwig was 
dragging the boy's body off to the headmaster, he bumped into the irate father 
of the girl whose ears had bled, dropped the unconscious boy and did a runner.

Alexander Waugh's eminently readable, meticulously researched account of the 
Wittgenstein madhouse might have speculated a bit more on how this background 
helped to shape the most celebrated of all the Wittgensteins. It certainly casts 
some light on Ludwig's extraordinary contradictions. Haughty, imperious and 
impossibly exacting, driven by a fatiguing zeal for moral perfection and 
contemptuous of most of those around him, he was a true son of patrician Vienna. 
Yet his greatest work, Philosophical Investigations, also represents a rejection 
of this world in its embrace of the ordinary, its acceptance of the imperfect 
and incorrigibly plural.

Wittgenstein was an arresting combination of monk, mystic and mechanic. He was a 
high European intellectual who yearned for a Tolstoyan holiness and simplicity 
of life, a philosophical giant with scant respect for philosophy. He could never 
really decide whether he was a Brahmin or an "untouchable". Much of this makes 
sense if one sees it as an ambivalent relationship to his family background.

On the one hand, he tried to divest himself of all that pomp and excess. If he 
was sometimes plunged into spiritual despair, it was because he was unable to 
strip himself of himself. Wittgenstein struggled to live on what he called the 
rough ground of everyday life.

As a man who hailed from an Austro-Hungarian empire inhabited by Germans, 
Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs, Slovenes, Magyars and a good many other quarrelsome 
ethnic groups, he came to see human cultures as inherently diverse. But he was 
also haunted by a lofty, lethal vision of purity (what he called the pure ice), 
which was a product of his background and a form of rebellion against it. And 
the fact that he was torn between the rough ground and the pure ice was the 
source of much of his sorrow. Perhaps his brother Hans's first word sums it all 
up: "Oedipus".

• Terry Eagleton wrote the screenplay for Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein.

     * guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008