Wittgenstein's Extraterritoriality

The goal of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was to explain the meaning of the world by a "culture clash" (24). He did so by devaluating the human "confusions" about the improper use of language and valuating them as proper signposts in language-and-culture. Wittgenstein was celebrated for his intellectual charisma and the cognitive power of his pragmatic linguistics. His enormous collection of theoretical lectures, papers, and professional notes were circulating in stencil forms at Cambridge University, where he taught. However, due to Wittgenstein's hardly-human criticism and self-criticism, his dissertation Tractatus (1923) was his only book to be published. Most of his writings, including his masterwork Philosophical Investigations (finished in 1946), were published posthumously. Throughout this book, Klagge argues that Wittgenstein was a man in exile, a genius grounded in a lost center of cultural temperament (21ff), who, despite the novelty of his philosophical shock treatment, needed some cure or therapy to deal with the darkness of his hard times (116ff).

Wittgenstein's "new" philosophizing sought to make philosophy alive and communicative for a twentieth-century audience, but his voice was, in biblical terms, "a voice crying in the wilderness" (Isa. 40:3; 49). Was this modern master a prophet in the language of philosophy, or perhaps an eccentric expatriate? In Wittgenstein's intellectual safari, he tried to compensate the unpopulated and uncultivated emptiness of what he felt to be a desert with a good place to think in isolation—a landscape of "milk and honey" (Exod. 3:17). Repatriating from the exodus, Wittgenstein emerged with a contemporary philosophy of language (73-81) written in a modern mixture of short sentences and paragraphs, fragments in common language and with little scientific or technical terminology (27, 88, 192-93 fn. 20)—except the term "language-game" and some others. Wittgenstein's intimacy with the use of language comes together in cryptic combinations of unexpected, unheard-of fragments. He is like a spokesman returning from "exile," haunting the readers uncannily and uncanonically with a hidden meaning.

Klagge reassesses Wittgenstein's refuge from the world as a "captive" of his individual biography. His home was Vienna, where his family was counted as a Jewish family, though they had converted to Catholicism. The Wittgenstein family was ostentatiously wealthy, since his father Karl was an iron and steel magnate. Due do their fortune, the Viennese home became a focal point for music, painting, and the sciences. Gustav Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Alfred Loos, Sigmund Freud, and many others flourished in the Austrian capital, bringing about a radical break with the centuries of the ultraconservative power of the Habsburgs. During World War I, young Wittgenstein became a voluntary soldier in Poland and was exiled as a prisoner of war in Italy. The trauma of the horrors of war drove him to become a primary school teacher in the Austrian village of Otterthal. His formative years were a failure, indeed a wilderness. His professional success became abroad during his time at Cambridge University. Living in England, he was able to avoid the Anschluss of Austria with Hitler's Germany. He even became an English citizen to avoid becoming a victim of the Holocaust on the European continent.

To construct his philosophy Wittgenstein hankered for a solitary life, found in the Norwegian fjords—and in his later life in Russia and Ireland (51, 76ff). His research interests marked his career with the transformations (Wandlungen) of a linguistic and cultural citizen of the world. Simultaneously, as a "stranger in a strange land" (Exod. 2:22), he thought in isolation. He mastered foreign languages and grammars, but his own linguistic pluralism as an "international" philosopher in the English language came from his native tongue of German or, better, Austrian-German. The cultural "unhousedness"—borrowed from George Steiner's Extraterritorial (1971, 10)—revolutionized the soul-searching Denkbewegungen (movements of thought) of Wittgenstein's alienation (43f, 61-72, 83f) from his home. His thought gained international prestige; he was "looked-at" and his work was read, but remained little understood. As Klagge claims, he remained an alien person and...