Wittgenstein the film

Our class just finished watching director Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein a little over an hour ago.

Wittgenstein seems very much an other in this film. At the beginning we see him as a child introducing the rest of his adult family. The child Wittgenstein stays with us throughout the film, as a very different person than the older Wittgenstein, one unplagued by anxiety and with a seeming clearness about the world.

Maybe that's the message we're supposed to get. The younger Wittgenstein, the one who thought he had all the answers, is carefree. It's when he gets older that he realizes the answers he had don't really work. We still seem him throughout the film, carrying his flag emblazoned with the Tractatus phrase: "The world is all that is the case". It's the younger Wittgenstein who thinks he can explain things to the Martian; at the end, it's the unmasked 'Martian' who explains things to Wittgenstein.

Wittgenstein doesn't feel at home in Cambridge, so he goes to Norway to sequester himself away and do philosophy. He wants to be like a 'real' person, so he volunteers and enlists to fight in the first world war. He leaves his post at Cambridge to get away from that life and just go teach at a school in rural Austria. He attempts to find work as a manual laborer in the Soviet Union, but is disappointed as he finds they only would want him as a philosopher. At Cambridge the others clearly make fun of him, though he does find love--though it's a love that society condemns, and he feels shameful about this.

Can we integrate this biography into his philosophical work? The words of the Martian at the end seem to suggest that Wittgenstein's life struggles and philosophical struggles were intimately related. As a young philosopher, Wittgenstein thought he had solved everything, had solved all the problems of philosophy. He had created a logical world which made sense, in which everything had its place. As he got older, however, Wittgenstein realized that this ideal world was just that--an ideal, one in which nothing could be done. And Wittgenstein wanted to be able to be part of the world. So he decided to go about investigating the real world, the rough one, the one in which one could act. But he still clung to that vision of the logical world, the one in which everything had its place. Just like the older Wittgenstein in life: he wanted to belong, to feel part of the world, so he tried to be ordinary and do ordinary things but still felt out of place. His youthful dreams of a perfect world were shattered, and the rest of his life he had to spend trying to make sense of what this shattered, confusing world is.