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Was Wittgenstein an Anti-Semite? The Significance of Anti-Semitism for Wittgenstein's Philosophy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Béla Szabados
Béla Szabados*
Affiliation:
University of Regina, Regina, SK, Canada545 OA2
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Extract

pour l'autre en nous et parmi nous

An apologia seeks to cover up the revolutionary moments in the course of history. The establishment of continuity is dear to its heart. It only gives importance to those elements of a work that have already generated an after-effect. It misses those points at which the transmission breaks down and thus misses those jags and crags that offer a handhold to someone who wishes to move beyond them.

I am all the same convinced that these notes [in Culture and Value] can be properly understood and appreciated only against the background of Wittgenstein’ s philosophy and, furthermore, that they make a contribution to our understanding of that philosophy.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1999 , pp. 1 - 27
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1999

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References

1 Benjamin, Walter in N, reprinted in Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Smith, Gary ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press 1989), 64–5Google Scholar

2 From von Wright's, G.H. Preface to Ludwig Wittgenstein's Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980)Google Scholar.

3 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Culture and Value (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980), 18eGoogle Scholar.

4 Rhees, Rush ed., Personal Recollections (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1981), 175Google Scholar

5 Schulte, Joachim Wittgenstein: An Introduction (Albany: State University of New York Press 1992), 16Google Scholar.

6 Monk, Ray Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Jonathan Cape 1990), 314Google Scholar

7 Wassermann, Gerhard D. ‘Wittgenstein on Jews: Some Counter-Examples,’ Philosophy 65 (1990), 361CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Malcolm, Norman Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1958), 32Google Scholar

9 Weininger, Otto Sex and Character (London: William Heinemann 1906), 97 and 138Google Scholar. Note, however, Isaac Nevo’s ‘suspicion’ of Richard Wagner's Judaism in Music as an influence in these matters, rather than Weininger. Since Wittgenstein explicitly cites Weininger as an influence, and because of the many discernible intertextualities between Culture and Value and Sex and Character, I suggest that Wagner's alleged influence is only of an indirect nature as the father of anti-Semitic cultural criticism. Although Nevo’s analysis of Wittgenstein’s early and late expressions of religiosity is insightful, I find his view that Wittgenstein was a life-time anti-Semite unpersuasive for reasons that are evident in this paper. See Nevo, Isaac ‘Religious Belief and Jewish Identity in Wittgenstein,’ Philosophy Research Archives (1987-88) 225–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ibid.; see also 7, 9, 169, 290, 346. For an informative and illuminating general discussion of Weininger's characterology, see Janik, Allan and Toulmin, Stephen Wittgenstein's Vienna (New York: Simon and Schuster 1973), 71–4.Google Scholar

11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig Letters to Russell, Keynes and Moore Wright, G.H. von ed. (Oxford: Blackwell 1974), 159Google Scholar

12 Ray Monk (312-13) seems to suggest such an interpretation.

13 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1958), 178eGoogle Scholar

14 McGuinness, Brian Wittgenstein: A Life (Berkeley: University of California Press 1988), 42Google Scholar

15 Monk, 368-9. Wittgenstein was three-quarters Jewish- meaning that he had three Jewish grandparents even though they were baptized either as children or as adults. What Wittgenstein confessed to Fania Pascal (his Russian language teacher) and a few friends was ‘the crime’ that he allowed people to think that he was three-quarters Aryan and one-quarter Jewish, when in fact the proportion was the exact reverse. Obviously Wittgenstein felt guilty that the had done nothing to correct this misapprehension. (See Pascal's, Fania ‘A Personal Memoir,’ in Rush Rhees, 48–9.Google Scholar) There is a naïve and protective view expressed by the otherwise insightful Rush Rhees: ‘I am sure he [Wittgenstein] was never worried about his Jewish ancestry and I have never heard of anyone who said Wittgenstein tried to conceal it from him…. You might ask what there was that could be a matter for “confession” in all this’ (Rhees, 195). My perspective in this paper makes sense of all the available data: of the fact that Wittgenstein himself used the word ‘confession'; of Fania Pascal's report; of Wittgenstein's preoccupations with his Jewishness in the 1930s and his philosophical turn.

16 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 1e. I am indebted to Steven Schwarzschild's stimulating article ‘Wittgenstein as Alienated Jew’ for stressing the important role of cultural and social context in understanding Wittgenstein, if not his philosophy. See Telos 40 (1979) 160-5.

17 L. Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, Conversations Recorded by Waismann, Friedrich McGuinness, B.F. ed. (New York: Harper and Row 1987)Google Scholar

18 Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 131Google Scholar; see also Culture and Value, 263.

19 Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1964), 17Google Scholar

20 Spengler, Oswald The Decline of the West (New York: Knopf 1939), 101Google Scholar

21 Ibid. But notice the reservations, even better expressed and argued in Wittgenstein’s Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics (1966). Also see McGuinness, Brian ‘Freud and Wittgenstein’ in Wittgenstein and His Times, McGuinness, Brian ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1982), 27–43Google Scholar.

22 Rhees, 106. For an illuminating view of Wittgenstein's remarks on culture, the disappearance of culture and the Spenglerian language of culture criticism, see Lurie, Yuval ‘Wittgenstein on Culture and Civilization,’ Inquiry 32 (1989) 375–497CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also his ‘Jews as a Metaphysical Species’ which was a late stimulus for revising and developing my initial essay. I am grateful to Isaac Nevo for bringing it to my attention.

23 Malcolm, Norman Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (London: Oxford University Press 1958), 32Google Scholar

24 I am indebted to the referees of the Canadian Journal of Philosophy, the Canadian Philosophical Association and SSHRC for their comments on this project, as well as to the editors of this journal. An earlier version of this paper was read at the 1997 meetings of the Canadian Philosophical Association in St. John's, Newfoundland. I am grateful to my respondent Andrew Brook. Many thanks are also due to Heather Hodgson, Steven Burns, Corrine Gogal, T.Y. Henderson, Kai Nielsen, W.T. Perks, David Raynor, Eldon Soifer, Stanley Stein, and Florence Stratton.