Wittgenstein at War

https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/07/wittgenstein-at-war

by lermontov • 4 years ago

60 16 4 years ago

newstatesman.com

_0ffh• 4 years ago

It might be interesting to know that the author of this, Thomas Nagel, is quite renowned himself.

neonate• 4 years ago

https://archive.ph/8M030

abeppu2• 4 years ago

Remarkably, Wittgenstein was in occasional correspondence with English friends throughout the war. He records letters from Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and especially David Pinsent, a Cambridge contemporary whom he loved and thought of constantly.

That does seem almost shocking. How does that even work? I would have thought that if an active service military personnel tried to mail something from the front to an enemy country, it would surely be intercepted and thoroughly examined and/or stopped. Would each side send letters through some mutual acquaintance in some neutral country? Did the Austo-Hungarians not have censors on military communication? Did the already alienated author of so many numbered cryptic statements ever fear he would be investigated as a spy?

ginko• 4 years ago

WW1 was this weird inbetween of 19th century formation warfare and 20th century all-out total industrial war. The level of information control and propaganda was nothing like WW2, especially in the beginning.

abeppu2• 4 years ago

Ok, but if you're an Austro-Hungarian or German postmaster, and you have some number of letters going to French or British recipients, and somewhere there's a shifting front line of trenches and tanks and mustard gas, can you really roll up with mail bag to some quiet point and exchange it for incoming mail with some French or Italian counterpart? That seems like even if there wasn't a system of censors trying to make sure no military secrets are leaked, it would have required a great act of trust that no one on the other side had decided to mail a bomb or poison or at least instructions to a saboteur.

pomian• 4 years ago

I would think that the sanctity of "the mail" was observed internationally. Mail was opened only secretly, and by spies, and spying was always considered a dishonourable profession. So even if opened, it would have been done secretly, and not revealed to anyone, except on a bed to know, basis.

dwheeler• 4 years ago

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) appears to be the only major work of philosophy to have been composed while the author was an active military combatant.

I would add Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor's "Meditations" were probably largely written at Sirmium, where he spent much time planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Not quite the same thing, but related.

gumby• 4 years ago

Now, for the first time in his life, he was living and working side by side with a bunch of illiterate peasants and proletarians, and he found it hard to keep his disgust in check.

It's easy to see how Witgenstein could fit into midcentury British academia. This attitude is echoed by Eric Blair.

He's famous as a writer (under the name George Orwell) focused on the suffering of the lower classes, yet he explicitly despised the choices of the unfortunate. His writing on his time in Burma is correctly recognised as fundamentally anti-colonialist, yet his contempt for the colonized is just as clear (but not discussed). In Wigan Pier it's not just the workers but the socialists he scorns (sure, I agree the Fabians were useless, but he sneeringly refers to them as 'sandal-wearing vegetarians.') And his most famous book, 1984, he despairs the placidity and fecklessness of the proletariat.

Where are the nice people who are also influential?

scythe• 4 years ago

As far as I know, LW was no fan of the upper class either, famously declaring that GE Moore had "no intelligence" and asserting that Bertrand Russell would "never understand" his Tractatus.

50• 4 years ago

Reminds me of an excerpt from Cioran's The Temptation to Exist: "Only the illiterate have given me that frisson of being which indicates the presence of truth. Carpathian shepherds have made a much deeper impression upon me than the professors of Germany, the wits of Paris. I have seen Spanish beggars, and I should like to have been their hagiographer."

mudita2• 4 years ago

I did mandatory military service in Germany and from my own - much milder, of course - personal experience I can emphasise with Wittgenstein.

Military service can really force you out of your bubble: All my friends chose to do civil service instead or were unfit for duty. The other conscripts were very different from me and I never before or after in my life felt so alienated from the people around me.

Just one example: From the environment I grew up in, I though that it was natural that women could be leaders, until then I thought that sexism would be a subtle thing, mostly of implicit, hidden biases. I was shocked to hear how my fellow soldiers talked about the one female sergeant. They made fun of her behind her back (even though she was a hypercompetent badass, for example sneaking through the forest mock killing all the guards during a training exercise), talked about how they could never respect her, because she was a woman, fantasised together about going up to her room to have rough sex with her….

I really did not like them as persons, I did not want to be friends with any of them and I generally hated spending time with them (playing football together was still fun though). Maybe I was arrogant, too?

I don’t know, it’s kinda fun to accuse Wittgenstein of arrogance from the comfort of ones chair, surrounded by ones bubble of similar-minded people, while imagining how one would be friends with the proletariat one never meets - but I kinda believe Wittgenstein, when he called his fellow soldiers bigoted. I can feel with him, trying to do his best in a horrible, scary situation, praying to be brave, while being surrounded by people he really does not like and there are worse things than complaining a bit in your diary in a situation like this.

bcbrown• 4 years ago

Where are the nice people who are also influential?

I wouldn't recommend taking this article, and specifically this quote, as a suitable basis for saying Wittgenstein wasn't a good or nice person. He was a tremendously complicated person. The biography by Ray Monk paints a much fuller, more nuanced portrait.

zabzonk• 4 years ago

Actually, for some computerish stuff, he and Allan Turing used enjoy an argument:

https://www.cantorsparadise.com/when-alan-turing-and-ludwig-...

masswerk• 4 years ago

The rather obvious, funny thing being that Turing went on to work very practically on consequences of the liar paradox (if were to define lying as illegitimate, thus paradox information).

Wittgenstein at War

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