During his World War I military service, Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein kept personal notebooks in which he recorded both details of his daily life and philosophical ruminations. The three surviving notebooks have now been published in a new edition, translated by Marjorie Perloff, with extensive notes. Ian Ground's review appeared in the TLS for 10 June 2022:
In Perloff's commentary on why the private notebooks have not been more readily available, she suggests that the cause may lie partly in Wittgenstein's executors' embarrassment, or worse, about his recording of his sexual acitivity, both alone and with other men. But it seems likely that his generation just thought it rather vulgar, intrusive, and ugly to publish such personal remarks. Wittgenstein himself found the endless gossiping about sex in the Bloomsbury group nauseating. This was a matter of aesthetic taste about privacy, rather than moralizing judgement about homosexuality. In his biography of 1990, Ray Monk remarks that Wittgenstein valued love almost as a divine gift, but was uneasy, less about being homosexual and more about being a sexual being at all. Monk ventures that Wittgensetin's sexual life took place more in his imagination than in reality, and often Wittgenstein curses himself even for that. . . . What's worth noting here is that for all of us, not just someone as decidedly strange as Wittgenstein, our sexuality is an area where questions, both political and personal, about responsibility and recognition, choice, and chance, swirl around our sense identity, what kind of person we are or need to be. Seen one way – the wrong way, probably, but nevertheless how Wittgenstein saw it – sexuality is a threat to a greater project, that of achieving integrity. It is possible to regard sexuality, whatever forms it takes, and indeed whether real or imagined, as an invasion of the self by brute contingency, by desires that are somehow not wholly our own. There is something about our sense of ourselves that balks at such adventitious intrusions in the soul.
I was just discussing this with my eldest son, and he told me one lecturer he has listened to said Wittgenstein was trying to become a saint, but by logic. I recently learned, from a book about the west coast of Ireland, that Wittgenstein lived there for some time in a primitive, one-room stone house, I believe in the 1930s.
Here is an entry from the notebooks, dated July, 1916:
Yesterday, I was fired at. I fell apart! I was afraid of death! I now have such a strong wish to live! And it is hard to renounce life once one is fond of it. This is precisely what "sin" is, an unreasonable life, a wrong view of life. From time to time I become an animal. Then I can think of nothing but eating, drinking, and sleeping, without the possibility of internal salvation. I am then at the mercy of my appetites and aversions. Then an authentic life cannot even be considered.
Authentic here means, I think, self-willed.
I think that if your goal is to live a life as much as possible willed by your conscious, intellectual self, your sexuality might indeed by a threat; I have known people much less philosophical than Wittgenstein who found their sexual urges deeply troubling. This is one of the main pieces of evidence that convinces me that the whole notion of "self" is somewhat illusory, because very much of what we are comes from those animal parts of us that insist on eating, drinking, and other things, and that for me as well as Wittgenstein it often feel as if they come from somewhere else.
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