THE PHILOSOPHER THAT WOULDN'T SPEAK

Author: Sten Andersson
Year: 2015
Publisher: Norstedts
Language: Swedish

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said that “if a lion could speak, we would not understand it”. By this, he suggests that speech as a means of sharing information is not dependent on words and grammar but on a shared understanding of reality. In order to understand the lion, you need to be a lion, even if it would speak to you in Queen’s English. This is one of the key criticisms of anthropological research.

Perhaps it is also why it is so difficult for us to understand Wittgenstein’s philosophy. We are not Wittgenstein and we do not understand what it is like to be him. While his ideas have been dissected to protons over the years, fuelled by the regular portioning out previously unpublished texts carefully curated by the guardians of his legacy, proper full-size biographies of his entire life have remained scarce.

Enter Sten Andersson, Doctor of Sociology and the translator of a catalogue of philosophical and sociological books. He presents us with an alternative and rather irreverent view of the great thinker in the voluminous monograph “Filosofen som inte ville tala” (not available in English but a rough translation would read “The Philosopher That Wouldn’t Speak”).

Andersson portrays a deeply troubled man constantly on the run from his overbearing parents, his family wealth, his sexuality, his inability to forge friendships, from Vienna, Cambridge, and Norway, and, most of all, his own intellect. His acuity of mind coupled with his pathological inability to grasp social code, made him an insufferable figure to most around him. And yet, there was something about him that commanded respect and submission; even from scholars as great as Bertrand Russell and George Edward Moore.

Wittgenstein arrived in Cambridge at a most fortuitous time. The massive success and swift progress of natural science during the 19^th century had influenced many academic disciplines, including philosophy. Bertrand Russell had recently published his groundbreaking Principles of Mathematics which had laid the foundation to a new branch of philosophy; analytic philosophy. It posits that only conclusions that can be proven (logically or empirically) carry a satisfactory degree of universal truth. It was largely a reaction to the Hegelian world order that had dominated Western philosophy for the past century. Russell was the standard bearer of a fresh and snowballing movement in British academia.

All this made the ideal backdrop for a young and aweless Wittgenstein, who was a student of engineering in Manchester at the time. Impressed by Russell’s work, he went up to Cambridge and, uninvited and without an appointment, knocked on Russell’s door demanding to speak to the Professor. But not to learn from him. Oh no, that was not Ludwig’s way. He had come to inform the great master about why his approach was faulty and how Wittgenstein alone could fix it. His arrogance only got worse from there and as a reader, I sometimes laughed and felt shivers down my spine at the same time from his maladroit antics.  

So what about the biography per se? To be honest, it is not brilliant. It is obvious that Andersson has a sea of knowledge that he wants to fit into the book but it seems to me he still has not figured out how to organise it. The result is a 700 pages long monster that could easily have been reduced to 400 or 500 pages by doing away with repetitions, unnecessarily long descriptions, frequent rabbit holes, and tedious musings. Chapter titles often do not correspond to their content, and several chapters bring up the same episodes or arguments. Linguistically, I find it ironic that a book about a philosopher of language would be written in such uninspiring, messy and colloquial Swedish.  Norstedts, being one of the leading publishing houses in Sweden, should have been able to produce a better editor for an effort as important as Andersson’s. I was not altogether surprised to see that the book, which was first published in 2013, has not been translated into English. If it ever will be, it needs to see considerable improvements.

With all that said, “Filosofen som inte ville tala” remains an important contribution to our understanding of one of the most legendary thinkers in the history of philosophy and I enjoyed it thoroughly despite its weaknesses. I feel that I have obtained a significantly deeper understanding of the complexity of Wittgenstein’s person and his painful life struggle.

But most importantly, I learned that Wittgenstein, fond as he was of hot cocoa and foreign to alcoholic beverages, was not, as is famously claimed by Dr Bruce from Woolamaloo University, in fact a beery swine.