The World as I Found It Read Online Free Page A

might have seemed hypocritical, coming as it did from a man with a tolerably comfortable chair at a great university. But Wittgenstein was not advocating a path he had not himself followed, for he had done many things in life besides philosophy. After the First World War, where he fought with the Austrian army on the Russian front, Wittgenstein had even abandoned philosophy for ten years, dispensing with a sizable fortune he had inherited and going off to live a life of servitude and penury as a rural schoolmaster in a poor Austrian village. Hard as he tried, though, he was not cut out for life among stunted village folk, and he left a few years later. He then worked for a time as a gardener in a monastery and even considered taking vows until the abbot wisely talked him out of it. With that, he returned to his native Vienna, where he put his early engineering background to use designing and building for his wealthy older sister a splendid modernist home of angled steel and stone, whose chaste, rigorous lines suggested the ascending logic of a tone poem. In the Vienna telephone directory at this time, during the late twenties, he even listed himself as Ludwig Wittgenstein: Architekt .
    But architecture couldn’t hold him either. Philosophy, he was forced to realize, was his supreme gift, yet when he returned to philosophy in 1929, his mind never entirely settled there. Still, much as he hated Cambridge, he instinctively knew that college life, and the relative freedom it afforded him, was more conducive to his work than a life spent on the Russian steppes, tending an endless line of human misery. But because he couldn’t settle on anything, the young men around him couldn’t really settle, either. And so this, too, was his legacy: to leave them and, later, philosophy deluged with his huge, half-conscious will, which, like a sweeping flame, sucked up all the oxygen.
    This influence wasn’t an entirely conscious thing on Wittgenstein’s part. On the contrary; because it was so deeply rooted in his character — because it was not overtly selfish or deliberately manipulative — the bond he created was all the more powerful. And strong as this bond was in life, it was that much stronger after his death, when in the collective memory of those who knew him he would become a sort of splatched and angled concatenation of images, wishes, evasions, running feuds, regrets. For some who knew him, his name would evoke pains such as old men feel — sharp, bunionlike pangs that would shoot out at the mention of Witt-gen-stein , that fractious weather system of remembering and forgetting which finally consumes the life of the thing remembered.
    * * *
    For years, Wittgenstein had been engaged in a struggle with language, examining — and indeed exhaustively auditing — language in its variety to discern its endless games and guises. He was discouraged to hear of Einstein’s continued effort to bring the forces of gravitation and electromagnetism under a single law. How, he wondered, could so great a mind succumb to the will-o’-the-wisp of mere unity ? The world, he was now convinced, defied reduction or summary, despite his own attempts in that direction as a young man. Philosophy needed no more dinosaurs, no more grand systems. His own intentions were as humble as the words “table,” “lamp,” “door.”
    As he saw it, the rightful course of philosophy was not the pursuit of elegance or the distillation of intoxicating mathematical essences. Our natural craving for generality, for the handy rule of thumb, was precisely the problem. Our crude rules were only hammers, when we also needed chisels and screwdrivers — when we needed a whole toolbox, as well as an encyclopedia and a taxonomy of the things we say, and what we think we mean by them. A language, he said, is nothing more than a collection, and to understand it, we must plow over the whole ground of language,