A book that illuminates Wittgenstein’s ideas by showing us his life. Alternately, it illuminates his life by showing us his ideas. Flip-flop, mish-mosh, two sides of the same coin. His ideas grew organically from his life, in the same way that his Picture Theory claims that a picture is not a mental representation of a fact but is a fact itself, so that understanding comes immediately from seeing (not through abstraction and representation). This method of illumination works more for Wittgenstein than it would for other philosophers because for Wittgenstein, philosophy was not a mere game (perhaps that’s one of the reasons he despised academic philosophers so much, and called them un-serious), philosophy was a way of living and thinking rightly in the real world, by stripping oneself of all the comforts of illusion. If it didn’t do that (and he doubted if it did many times) then what good was it? Perhaps that's why he was intent on destroying philosophy as it was known then, uprooting it from its illusions of logic by exposing it to the sun. In life too, he was obsessed with questions of honesty and self deception, and tortured himself terribly over moral questions.

At times he seemed less like a philosopher and more like a religious figure with his ascetic lifestyle and exacting standards for his inner life. At other times, he was more like an artist with his severe judgements and social outbursts, and his tendency for perfectionism in his writings. Obviously, he was not always likeable, but he was always so much himself, a singularity whose contradictions made him even more who he was.

***

Most of my reading falls into two categories. First are the books that I actively seek out because someone recommended it to me, or I’ve been thinking about certain topics. These constitute the majority of my reading. The second category are books that seek me out. These are happy accidents that happen to fall along my path so that I could not ignore them. This book belongs to this second category.

I've never read any Wittgenstein before this, and I rarely read any philosophy either, but I came across this book at just the right time: I had finished the first book of [b:The Man Without Qualities|634624|The Man Without Qualities (1/3)|Robert Musil|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1176550846l/634624._SX50_SY75_.jpg|25979878] and was awaiting the second book’s arrival via Amazon. So I picked this up and just started reading, thinking I’d put it down after just a taste, but it wouldn’t let me stop! I read it compulsively. What’s odd about the timing of this book (between the Musil volumes) is that as I read it, I inevitably began to draw parallels between Wittgenstein and Musil.

I've also noticed that for the last few months my Goodreads reviews have become increasingly Reviews Without Books... as the Man Without Qualities is necessarily a man possessing all qualities, my reviews have increasingly tried to incorporate all my recent readings (Walter Benjamin, Hopscotch, and Man Without Qualities have crept up most often) to swallow them in a shameful act of gluttony. But hopefully (I hoped) out of it will come some kind of a larger picture, where colors complement each other, yet differences in shape are still preserved, even appearing more distinguished instead of falling into a big mush. It seems to me that reviewing one book in isolation is rather like taking a photograph of someone against a blank background: useful only for official documents and passports.

(This recent urge is also similar to a striving for context that both men (Musil and Wittgenstein) incorporated into their visions, with one big difference, this context is completely contrived internally. These books don’t really have anything to do with each other per se, other than the fact that I read them together, so in this way contextually weaving them together can only give the reader an idea of my mind, as if each book were a spider’s web I can only free myself from by stumbling into another one)

So I will talk about Musil here, and I will not be apologetic about it. First comes the superficial resemblances: both Musil and Wittgenstein were born in Austria, both were trained as engineers, and studied mathematics and philosophy. Both were around at the same time, and they both fought in the war, though there was no indication from this biography that they ever met.

But it is only when thinking about Wittgenstein’s philosophy that I found deeper resemblances.

***

An interesting thing happened to me when I was writing this book review. At this point in my sure-to-be-phenomenal study of the two men, I was overcome with a case of severe reviewer’s block. I had so many good points to make, about Wittgenstein’s interest in bridging distances between the utterable and the unutterable and even a brief mention in this book of imaginary numbers (Musil territory); about the two men’s similar love/hate relationships to science, pushing it away, yet inevitably using its exactness for their very own purposes; of their resistance to systematization, that tendency to boil things down to some kind of essence. Wittgenstein’s emphasis on context that creates meaning, context which is the antidote for science’s constant ‘craving for generality’, and Musil’s obsession with the same which he showed in his novel by playing with each character’s myopic extremes, while showing them completely unaware of the larger society’s constant vacillations between ideas that tend to wipe out all traces of the previous idea. And the concept of ‘genius’ that Wittgenstein was so obsessed about, seeing greatness as a justification for living the way he wanted, and that Musil talked about as the ‘genius of the racehorse’, an elegy to an antiquated idea. No longer do we have real geniuses, now even a racehorse can be a genius. Wittgenstein similarly laments when he sees photos of scientists in a store window instead of Beethoven. But not to stop there, because there are differences too, major differences, how one loved music for example and the other (Musil) hated it. These men also had different ideas about action, where one took the route of ideas, the other man (Wittgenstein) sought to purge all ideas from ideas, to escape from philosophy and into the purity of living (though he was unsuccessful) as Geothe said: in the beginning was the deed. But both courses were, I wanted to show, like two roads around the same block.

I had pages of similar notes not only because I wanted to write this review so badly, but also because I genuinely thought these little things could bring me closer to an understanding of these two men. Afterall, as Basil Reeve, a young doctor and one of Wittgenstein’s friends said years after they worked together, he was influenced by Wittgenstein in two ways:

first, to keep in mind that things are as they are; and secondly, to seek illuminating comparisons to get an understanding of how they are.

But what constituted an illuminating comparison? Things are as they are, and as soon as you compare them, even that comparison becomes an egregious generalization, a way of smoothing over complicated differences, and it would not live up to the original ‘thing as it was’ until you put so many qualifications and exceptions to your comparisons between the subtleties of one thing verses the subtleties of another thing that you might as well not make any comparisons to begin with! This is essentially the crux of the problem of writer's block: being confronted with the unutterable, feeling your irrelevance in the face of it, and not being able to capture that which overcomes one without reducing it to something obscene. Essentially the only way to write about a book would be to include the entire text of the book, and nothing else:

And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be -- unutterably -- contained in what has been uttered!

Maybe that was why it was so difficult for me to continue writing where I had stopped for weeks, looking over my notes in cafes and reading over lines I had underlined twice, three times, with exclamation marks penciled in the margins. I wanted so much to capture something inexpressible about this book, this life. I found myself emphatically in agreement with many of Wittgenstein’s points, but I had to admit to myself that afterall I had not really read any of Wittgenstein’s own writings. I had to admit that I was slightly intimidated by the logical propositions, and the rigorous uncompromising language. So that in the end what I had were only a collection of loose inexpressible feelings arising from the man’s life (as portrayed in this book) that I felt vaguely good about, and Wittgenstein’s own quiet insistence that "whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."