Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity: Philosophy as Personal Endeavor by Béla Szabados (review)

Ludwig Wittgenstein on Race, Gender, and Cultural Identity is a wonderfully engaging book that offers one of the clearest and most persuasive cases for understanding the deep and necessary connection between Ludwig Wittgenstein’s more autobiographical and cultural remarks and his philosophy. Analytic philosophy tends to draw a hard line between philosophy and personal life or autobiography, and Professor Szabados systematically erases that line through careful exegesis of Wittgenstein’s Nachlass, letters, remarks from what philosophers call the ‘transitional period,’ and his statements now gathered in Culture and Value. This book will challenge Wittgenstein scholars in all the right ways; it functions as a very articulate interlocutor.

Szabados addresses issues that many Wittgenstein scholars have relegated to the margins. This is precisely why Szabados’s book is so exciting and provocative; he is willing to explore the loaded questions. Was Wittgenstein a misogynist? Was he anti-Semitic even though he himself was of Jewish ancestry? What is the influence of Otto Weininger, who was also Jewish and understood as an anti-Semite and a misogynist? Why was Wittgenstein so seemingly critical of Mahler (also Jewish) and his music? And most importantly, how do these issues affect or shape Wittgenstein’s philosophy and how he lived his life?

The question about the influence of Weininger on Wittgenstein is an abiding one for Szabados. The tendency in more traditional Wittgenstein scholarship is to see the young Wittgenstein as captivated (for better or worse) by Weininger and the older, wiser Wittgenstein as no longer operating under his influence. Szabados argues that this dismissal is too facile; we must take Wittgenstein at face value when he identifies Weininger as an influence. Szabados provides several considerations for readers to ponder: each was concerned with the darkness of their times and each offered a critique of ‘modern psychology.’ These topics need further exploration and Szabados has provided the invitation.

Szabados offers an original and radical interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on Judaica. Mining resources not usually seen as significant to Wittgenstein’s philosophy understood in the narrowest sense, Szabados claims that Wittgenstein is trying to identify and diagnose the sources of Europeans’ failures to understand and appreciate Jewish cultural contributions. Instead of seeing ‘Jewish’ and ‘European’ in essentialist ways, Wittgenstein is pointing toward the historical and cultural contexts in which such distinctions and valuations are made. Szabados identifies this as one of the places where Wittgenstein begins to work out his concept of ‘family resemblance.’

One recurring strand that Szabados identifies in Wittgenstein’s work and life is the worry about self-deception. For Wittgenstein, speaking about oneself and then acting in accordance with this truthfulness require moral courage. This topic is first raised by Szabados in the context of the role of autobiography; Wittgenstein’s views on the possibility of self-knowledge tend to fly in the face of the point of autobiography. Autobiography is often seen as the pursuit of self-knowledge, but how is this possible when self-deception is a risk because one can never have a disinterested and objective view of oneself?

The reader is invited to ask this question of self-knowledge and self-deception about Wittgenstein himself. Szabados makes an elegant case for seeing Wittgenstein as attempting – in all his remarks and his deeds – to meet such a standard all the while interrogating it. Wittgenstein does display a kind of moral courage, and it is refreshing to see that courage so artistically reflected in this book.