Malcolm: ‘Wittgenstein: A Memoir’

 One of my favorite one-night reads is Norman Malcolm’s Wittgenstein: A Memoir.

My edition has 100 pages, but Malcolm’s memoir takes up only 77. If it makes sense to talk about “flushing out” a 100-page book, the filler is Georg Henrik von Wright’s “Biographical Sketch,” originally published in Philosophical Review.

I love this book because it gives you a sense of what Wittgenstein was like.

He was born into one of Europe’s wealthiest families, grew up in a mansion, gave his fortune away, mostly to his siblings, and lived in college rooms at Cambridge.

His rooms were Spartan and scrupulously clean. He had two canvas chairs, a wooden chair, and a card table to write on. He slept on a cot. The walls were bare. He had a safe for his manuscripts.

He wrote Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus while he was a soldier in World War I. He kept a notebook in his rucksack. He finished the manuscript while in a camp for prisoners of war.

Wittgenstein was interested in the logical limits of language, the limits of thought.

An understanding of those limits can yield two vastly different approaches to philosophy.

One holds that any subject that cannot be treated as a science is nonsense. That’s still the largely unspoken view of many scientists today. It’s a view that holds that the arts, ethics, religion and similar subjects are best avoided by serious people who don’t have time to waste.

Wittgenstein took the approach that language indeed sets limits on what can be said about the most important subjects in human life. But the limits do not diminish the importance of those topics.

While facts can be argued, values must be incorporated, embodied, lived.

The memoir gives us a glimpse of the values Wittgenstein lived by. It shows how he furnished his rooms and how he thought about money. It shows what kind of food and clothes he preferred. It shows what kinds of books he read and what kinds of topics he returned to in conversation.

I read Tolstoy’s Twenty-Three Tales to see why Wittgenstein had been so impressed.

During World War II, Wittgenstein and Malcolm had an argument about a comment Malcolm made. The two were estranged for a while. When they reconciled, Wittgenstein said this:

I then thought: what is the use of studying philosophy if all it does for you is to enable you to talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life, if it does not make you more conscientious than any … journalist in the use of the dangerous phrases such people us for their own ends. You see, I know that it’s difficult to think well about ‘certainty’, ‘probability’, ‘perception’, etc. But it is, if possible, still more difficult to think, or try to think, really honestly about your life & other people’s lives.

I thought about that passage many times. Maybe it was an especially important passage for a fellow who was a … journalist. (Is there any other kind than the kind that requires ellipses?)

Journalists handle questions of everyday life. It’s the stock of our trade. And it is enormously difficult to think well about those questions.

I failed often. But repeated failure doesn’t excuse one from trying.

• Sources and notes: Norman Malcolm: Wittgenstein: A Memoir; Oxford University Press, 1977. The quotation is on p. 39. I bought the edition soon after it was published. I was still in college. The cover price was $2.50.

Wittgenstein was born April 26, 1899. In my world, today is Wittgenstein Day.