Once I, Ludwig Wittgenstein, dreamed I was a butterfly and was happy as a butterfly. I was conscious that I was quite pleased with myself, but I did not know that I was Wittgenstein. Suddenly I awoke, and there was I, visibly Wittgenstein. I do not know whether it was Wittgenstein dreaming that he was a butterfly or the butterfly dreaming that he was Wittgenstein. Between Wittgenstein and the butterfly there must be some distinction. But one may be the other. This is called the transformation of things.
"No I won't! No I won't! I will never!" Wittgenstein screamed at a fashionable New Year's Eve party in Berlin, ushering in 1921. The next day found him on a train to Sweden, where he got himself a small room in a boardinghouse. For the next six months, Wittgenstein refused to speak a single word. He communicated in a series of grunts and gestures, spending his days hunched over a desk, writing furiously, tearing out his hair, ripping up pages and pages of manuscripts. Often at dinners, Wittgenstein would frustrate his fellow boarders by trying to participate in their lively conversations about Swedish politics and art - but without words. The great philosopher would get angery that nobody could understand him, often throwing plates against the wall and shaking intractable interlocutors. When summer came, he built a large bonfire in the countryside and burnt all of his past six months' of work. He wrote a postcard to his sister soon after that said, simply "Life is for reading great works. And writing them. There is nothing else."
Wittgenstein scholars have long fantasized about those lost pages. What new insights could they give to Wittgenstein's sometimes obscure oeuvre? In 1998 their questions were answered when the landlord of the Swedish boarding house was cleaning up the disused attic, and found a manila folder, with Ludwig Wittgenstein's signature on the cover, one edge half-burnt. He looked inside and found the only surviving pages of that 1921 manuscript. But Wittgenstein hadn't written a word. He'd filled the reams of paper with nothing more than thousands of drawings of differently sized squares.
In 1824, Klaus Wittgenstein - Ludwig's great-grandfather - patented a game called Purris, to be played in honor of the mirthful Jewish holiday Purim. In the game two people hit decorative rubber balls meant to represent Haman - the Babylonian bureaucrat traditionally demonized in Purim celebrations - with a pair of broad mallets. The game became quickly popular in fashionable Jewish circles.
A fallen British aristocrat, Archibald Ten, was holidaying in Austria when he met with the young Klaus Wittgenstein. After a couple rousing rounds of Purris, Ten realized that the young Jew had invented a "most smashing pass-time," as he wrote in his biography. The two spent the next weekend secularizing the rules, and when Ten left for England again, he popularized the new sport - redubbed Tennis.
The invention made the Wittgensteins' fortune. Strangely, Ludwig was loathe to admit the very existence of the game. Whenever he was invited to play, he would look dumbly around and say, unconvincingly "Did somebody say something? I couldn't hear them. How odd."
In a rare journal entry, half-obscured by a wine-stain, Wittgenstein explains: "Oh, the wretchedness of having a body. Exploited for profit, no less! If I could just be the tennis ball, a perfect sphere, my meaning postulated by the whack of the racket, rather than this imperfect, lump of flesh. That is the mystery, that is the real genius. And yet who understands!"
In the last weeks of his life, crippled from the pain of his prostrate cancer, Wittgenstein sent a note to Russell, asking him out for a game of tennis. The older philosopher came to Wittgenstein's cottage a week later, but it was too late, Ludwig was too weak to rise from his pallet. He died having never played the game in his life
Wittgenstein was on a walk along the Cambridge river one afternoon with his friend Ben Richards. Wittgenstein had just been to the movies, and as always, he was upset about something, and giving Richards a long lecture. It was early afternoon, and as the pair passed a pub, Richards mentioned he was hungry and hadn't eaten breakfast, but Wittgenstein ignored him. As the hike went on, Richards found himself getting increasingly hungry. Finally he sat down on a rock, dizzy, saying, "Ludwig, I simply cannot listen to you anymore: I am too hungry." Wittgenstein continued to lecture him. Finally, Richards snapped. "Stop it!" he yelled. "I am simply starving."
Wittgentsein looked him in the eyes and said, tersely: "You are not starving," and continued talking, walking further down the river. Desperate, Richards told Wittgenstein: "I need to eat."
The philosopher laughed. "Oh," he said. "I knew you were hungry. But you never said you wanted to eat. There was that nice pub a ways back there. You should have simply said something...."
In early December 1941, Wittgenstein saw the cartoon short, All This And Rabbit Stew; he left the cinema in a state of desperate shock. He wrote in his diary that night: "If philosophy does not laugh, then what does it do?" He composed a short essay, which was never published, denouncing the cartoon.
But two months later he had a change of heart and wrote: "A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes." He became obsessed with Merrie Melody shorts, especially All This And Rabbit Stew, and by the time of his death was one of the largest private collectors of early Bugs Bunny memorabilia.
In 1943, Wittgenstein invited Bertrand Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and some promising students up to his large Cambridge office, where he told them he was to share a great discovery. The guests sat rapt at attention, while Wittgenstein stood before them, silent, for fifteen minutes, gnawing on some carrots with obvious distaste. He then pulled out a portable projector from behind a coat-rack, and showed All This And Rabbit Stew. When the film was finished, he left without a word.
As Wittgenstein was dying, he had a projector set up in his cottage, and would watch the film at least once a day. He was found dead as the credits of All This And Rabbit Stew were rolling, on April 29th, 1951. A sheet of loose paper sat in his lap, with drawings of rabbits and ducks filling almost every bit of white space. Scrawled in the lower corner - perhaps the last words Wittgenstein ever wrote - was this: "I have finally understood! That RASCALLY RABBIT!"
"Of all the animals," Wittgenstein wrote to his sister Helene from the Western Front, "surely the moth is the most perfect. I disdain the company of the other soldiers. God, they are less than vermin! But when a friendly moth flutters by my night-lamp, my heart warms. I put down my book and regard it's beautiful movements. When one alights on me, I cannot forget its touch for hours. Oh, it is the only thing that can ease this loneliness!"
Wittgenstein was obsessed with moths for the rest of his life: Soon after leaving the military in 1919 he proposed a method of telegraphic communication based on the fluttering of moth antennae, based on his view that moths had psychic powers. He wrote an unpublished monograph in 1923 encouraging the rearing of moths to cure depression. The first edition of The Philosophical Investigations was even dedicated to Actias luna, the Luna Moth, or, as Wittgenstein dubbed it, the "Queen of Language". This dedication has been expunged from the book's subsequent editions.
For a period of two days when he was lurking around Cambridge in 1929, Ludwig Wittgenstein, author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, wore nothing but a set of two-toned leather shoes. When asked by a young student to explain his nakedness, Wittgenstein hit him over the head with a copy of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, which he was studying at the time: "The beauty of a circle is not that it has no beginning but that it has no end!" he screamed. He wasn't seen again for a week and a half.
One night Wittgenstein broke into Bertrand Russell's estate, made himself a cup of tea, and sat in Russell's bedroom, watching the older philosopher sleep. When Russell woke up in the morning, he noticed the young eccentric and let out a shocked yelp. Wittgenstein calmly asked Russell if he'd ever watched a Bugs Bunny cartoon, and if he had, did it make him think of how philosophy should be practiced? Russell blinked a couple times and asked, "Ludwig, can't this wait until I've gotten out of bed?" Wittgenstein was confused: "Well, you wouldn't be in bed then, would you?"
