Wittgenstein: Another Genius with an Attitude
by Michael Fowler
Upon his arrival at Cambridge from Vienna, the legend goes, Wittgenstein handed Russell a philosophical paper he had written, saying, “Tell me if I have talent for philosophy; if I don’t, I will become a hairdresser.”
Russell looked over the paper and, astounded, replied, “Just take a little off the top and shape the sides.”
Wittgenstein and Russell remained on friendly terms for twenty minutes.
Then they took each other’s most cherished beliefs to task. Russell discovered that, although Wittgenstein was nominally his student, the latter had thoughts on laundry, hairstyles, movies, interior design, and women that he could never successfully challenge.
As Russell has reported, Wittgenstein frequently stayed in Russell’s rooms until all hours, threatening to order pizza in Russell’s name or to tell everyone at university that Russell didn’t inhale, if Russell threw him out.
It was not known until recently, however, that Wittgenstein refused to sit in Russell’s sumptuous armchair, but sat in a corner on the floor, utterly repelled by the floral pattern of the chair. Nor could the young Austrian abide Russell’s grand piano and chandelier.
By comparison his own rooms were famously Spartan, containing little more than the bed with Magic Fingers vibrator, the opened bags of snack chips and unsealed tub of cheese dip, and the pinball and soda machines. His whitewashed walls with phone numbers on them were in stark contrast to Russell’s busy wallpaper of rampant nymphs and satyrs.
Early in his career at Cambridge Wittgenstein took a tour of the city’s first refrigerated meat locker at Swineburn’s Store. Refrigeration was a novelty then, and Wittgenstein, with his interest in all things mechanical and scientific, couldn’t resist a firsthand viewing.
He liked the locker so much for its serenity and isolation that he insisted on moving in with the hanging cow carcasses, paying Mr. Swineburn a monthly rent of 25 pounds. He built himself a small wooded hut inside and even delivered brief lectures to the bloodstained butchers as they wandered in and out, referring to these stalwarts in letters to Moore as “the locals.”
Moore visited him there and took notes on Wittgenstein’s new theories of marblelization and tenderness. Noting that Wittgenstein also lectured the suspended sides of beef on his theory of colors, Moore asked him why he did this. “I thought they were undergraduates,” replied the amazed Wittgenstein.
When frostbite and a raise in the rent finally forced Wittgenstein out of the fridge, he returned to his rooms at university only to learn that Russell and Keynes had gotten him elected to the Apostles. As a member of that secret society, he was expected to stand before the senior members in a dress and sing “I Have a Bird that Whistles.”
He did so, but then resigned from the group in disgust when Strachey refused to play spin the bottle with him.
During the first world war Wittgenstein, who now only spoke English, was captured on the front line by both the Austrian and Italian sides simultaneously. This was all the more surprising since he had not joined up.
Since neither side would release him, he was forced to shuttle back and forth between prisoner of war camps. The time he spent in doing this he used to write his first philosophical classic, Done I Have Been, in which he believed he offered final answers to the problems that had long occupied him in hair design, socks, food and mortuary science.
After the war, with no conundrums remaining to be resolved, he gave up his post at Cambridge and took an identical one at Oxford. While at Oxford he refuted everything he had done at Cambridge, then went back to Cambridge and refuted that.
At about this time he came to the attention of Schlick and the logical positivists in his native Vienna. Schlick had been sitting on the front steps of the University of Vienna with a knife sticking in his side, wondering who had done this to him. Then he thought of Wittgenstein. “I wonder if he did it,” Schlick thought. The other positivists wondered the same thing, but none could prove it. Schlick died a bitter man, thinking that Wittgenstein might have stabbed him and then concealed the evidence.
Wittgenstein himself died in a Cambridge cinema at an advanced age, having sat through the same musical 65 times, and it wasn’t even one of his favorites. Today he is chiefly remembered for his work The Philosophy of Dessert, in which he claims there is no such thing as table manners, but only different ways to stuff one’s face. His influence on western thought has been enormous and continues through the end of the week.
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