Wittgenstein's Secret Diaries

Semiotic Writing in Cryptography

Dinda L. Gorlée

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350011885
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Ludwig Wittgenstein's works encompass a huge number of published philosophical manuscripts, notebooks, lectures, remarks, and responses, as well as his unpublished private diaries. The diaries were written mainly in coded script to interpolate his writings on the philosophy of language with autobiographic passages, but were previously unknown to the public and impossible to decode without learning the coding system. This book deciphers the cryptography of the diary entries to examine what Wittgenstein's personal idiom reveals about his public and private identities. Employing the semiotic doctrine of Charles S. Peirce, Dinda L. Gorlée argues that the style of writing reflects the variety of Wittgenstein's emotional moods, which were profoundly affected by his medical symptoms. Bringing Peirce's reasoning of abduction together with induction and deduction, the book investigates how the semiosis of the emotional, energetic, and logical interpretations of signs and objects reveal Wittgenstein's psychological states in the coded diaries.

1

Introduction: Silence and secrecy

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: 7)¹

Diary as secret message

As an introductory note to the topic of this book, a picaresque anecdote. During a conversation I had some years back with an eccentric colleague from Belgium, he gave me his visiting card. The card was printed with three addresses: first his “public” domicile, officially shared with his wife, then his “private” home, where he went for holidays, and subsequently his “very private” residence, destined for rendezvous with his maîtresse. The printed information was used jokingly on the card. He demonstrated in strictest privacy the few words to be remembered by the receivers for some minutes or perhaps treasured for generations. The card tells the unique “story” of the life of this colleague; his intimate “things are stories” cannot be the “whole” or “finished” stories but are the complex signs as an apocryphal “story of stories” (Bär 1979: 193). The Belgian’s self-described history was fragmented into the cryptograms (or visual pictograms). The outside story was the invisible autobiography of the pleasure and pain of his life—as narrated in Roland Barthes’s ([1977] 2010) autobiographical scenes—but he was caught red-handed in the visible story of the visiting card.

After these humorous opening words, I move on to the real subject: the cryptic labyrinth of the codification of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889–1951) diary, which he wrote from 1914 up until close to his death. The metafictional diversity of Wittgenstein’s literary and scientific works inspired and influenced the secrecy of his life, in which the philosopher formed and shaped the “private” identity of his “public” works written in a strange code. Wittgenstein as literary narrator, or even conversational raconteur, used different styles of writing to relate the events of his private thoughts to the outside world. In philosophy, Wittgenstein was “naturally” self-taught. He wrote approximately 20,000 pages of his philosophy of language but did not seek public recognition as a scholar. Wittgenstein was a modest man. His published writings consisted of a single book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP) of 1922, announcing to the world the rule-guided foundations of the logical status of language. But in the Tractatus’ last words, Wittgenstein argued the fate of undecipherable and unmentioned words, for which he summoned the non-argument of “silence” (TLP: 7; Gorlée 2012: 42, 73–78). Silence—which is not the same as secrecy—was supposed to be the fame, or infamy, of Wittgenstein’s philosophical discourse, as argued in the fragments of his diary and discussed in this book, Wittgenstein’s Secret Diaries.

To break the instantaneous silence and secrecy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, he shifted from the overall aim of using the rules of language to learning the game/puzzle of the linguistic word-tool of human language. On every page, Wittgenstein “confused” the linguistic rules with the adjustments required to ensure consistency in our language. As a habitual fault-finder, Wittgenstein slandered the “confusions” made in the “ordinary” use of language. He analyzed the many competing paths of making and unmaking the creative and innovative “grammar” of language and put it into “good” philosophical use. Wittgenstein focused on practical examples, but avoided theories of interpretation and doctrines about how speakers should teach the use of language. Wittgenstein’s writings set the example of his experience: during his life, he wrote a large number of “public” manuscripts in the form of unpublished notebooks, lectures, articles, conversations, letters, and reviews, which included the “private” diaries written in the coded script. Wittgenstein’s public and private works were written together in his notebooks, some of which were penned for intimates but still kept private. After Wittgenstein’s death, the trustees had the diaries removed from the philosophical text when posthumously published. Under the trustees’ aegis, the secret diaries were thought of as belonging to Wittgenstein’s “private” life kept secret but bordering on the conspiratorial, since he had disguised his life with a professional code. The trustees decided that readers did not need to read Wittgenstein’s diary, since it was not meant to be made “public” property.

The inaccessible print of Wittgenstein’s secret diary had to render the personal news from “hidden places, disguises, locked doors” (Kahn [1968] 1974: 452). The “meaningless” messages of Wittgenstein’s “hidden” diary in coded script were regarded as different news from the “open” story of contemporary postcards arranged as a series of uncoded messages sent openly in a semi-transparent envelope (Derrida 1987). The secretive matter of the autobiographical diaries are “open” signs, but the “hidden” content had to be deciphered through the fantasy and imagination of the possible future readers of the diary. Composed as creative reflections by Wittgenstein, the real content must be imagined as not interpreted by diarist Wittgenstein but through the fantasy and imagination of the possible future readers of the diary. Wittgenstein enjoyed the modern practice of sending postcards to family members and friends, going against the traditional principles of letter writing (Net 2009: 62–63). Away from the family circle at Vienna, he sent cheery postcards home, obviously taking delight in the cunning deception of crazy messages sent in “open” messages.

In the European fin-de-siècle after the First World War, Wittgenstein was searching for a new outlet for his artistic energies. The postcard symbolized the psychological escapism of the “lost generation” avoiding in short messages the private “closed” memories to be interpreted by the flux of creative messages. Wittgenstein’s diary entries were psychologically “open” signs to be observed and analyzed through the painstaking work of learning the “hidden” words, syllables, and letters to gather the close ties with his own soul-searching identity and the threatening environment around him. Indeed, Wittgenstein spoke in a relaxed and less formal tone about his “open” diary, while asking, encouraging, and even stimulating his possible readers to welcome the habits of the stream of consciousness. He captured the sense of selfhood, but he opened up to the flow of human experience in the thoughts and responses of other readers.

Some of Wittgenstein’s obligatory messages were more conventional communications, as in the correspondence from holiday places, work trips, and even military posts. He wanted these letters to be remembered as formal tokens of his life addressed to family members and friends (McGuinness, Ascher, and Pfersmann 1996).² But other messages were more creative signs, providing his epistles with pictorial images and references to the sense of biblical proverbs, lyrical poems, and other quotations. Some of Wittgenstein’s private messages were written in a collection of postcards to illustrate the brief story of the anecdote in question. He scorned these emotional notes as the art of sending “nonsense” (Unsinn) (TLP: 5.5303, 5.5321) sent to his intimi. Wittgenstein’s self remained open to facing the ambiguous and contradictory habits he had as a private person from a wealthy home in Vienna, but he needed to face, as a private teacher and scientific scholar, the task of somehow psychologically assimilating the political horrors of his time in his writings.

Wittgenstein himself spread his philosophy in the new style of journalistic culture. The satirical journals Simplicissimus, Der Brenner, and Die Fackel, as well as other journals, told of the politically turbulent times of Austria and Germany. These journals provided the readers with contemporary text, illustrated by caricatural pictures and cartoons (Culture and Value [CV]: 22), that made no logical sense and after the First World War moved into the fragmented style of Dada and surrealism. The “degenerate” forms of nonsensical art made politically brutalized art, since it is “harder for defeated soldiers to adapt to civilian life than victorious ones” (Buruma 2018). After the humiliation of losing the war, the old culture of the Habsburg Empire was reformed into the political and cultural style of the “degenerate” forms of nonsensical art, sympathetic to the political Left.

Wittgenstein even dispatched crazy greetings and funny jokes to his closest friends, sometimes written in dialect or scrawled out in intimate codes (Schulte 2001; Monk 1990: 265–267). The jokes would perhaps amuse, delight, and puzzle the receivers. However, Wittgenstein’s levity of the new style of writing seems to be more aggressive than simple humor sent to his closest friends. He even frustrated the jokes by adding the pseudo-notation (Begriffsschrift, Begriffsätze) (TLP: 5.333 and following) by adding phrases or epigraphs to point a moral to the readers’ social taboos. Such “riddles of technology” (CV: 22) maximized the personal curiosity of Wittgenstein’s self-conscious mood of the old soldier in the First World War. His temperament was one of a creative thinker ready to strip the sign-receivers down from the attitude of blasphemy to the taste of kitsch. He communicated the political belief in the “ordinary” jokes of fellow citizens who served as soldiers. Acting as fool or trickster, he lifted up the word taboos to parody the sociocultural habits of the old Hamburg Empire to embrace the new style of communication (Waugh 1984; Perloff 2016). The jokes made the history more approachable. Wittgenstein provoked his correspondents with a shock of aphoristic wit to share the use of popular forms in ideological (that is, political and religious) use to abuse the speech of language (Tilghman 1984: 88).

Wittgenstein introduced the art of writing in brief fragments (epigrams), which often turned quite ordinary statements into ponderous news about his situation and environment. His experiments in caricature were a means to criticize the anxious tidings of the time, particularly the tragic Anschluss of his Austrian homeland by Nazi Germany in 1938. Wittgenstein deeply resented the heroic (and unheroic) dangers to life of the fate awaiting him and his family members and other Jewish citizens of Austria. The private monologue of Wittgenstein’s diaries was garbled with the fictional dialogue to visualize his political troubles to survive difficult times. The mixture of “political” realism with quasi-“romantic” supplements was probably not meant at that point to be given wider circulation. Yet the restriction of Wittgenstein’s style has completely changed in today’s digital age, when “open” and “closed” messages are no longer opposite terms excluding themselves but can be almost considered as near synonyms.

“Ordinary” readers can first read the bitter style and sentiments of Wittgenstein’s “unknown” journals in print (Geheime Tagebücher [GT]; Denkbewegungen [DB]). Beyond the early diaries made during the First World War, the real Tagebücher of 1930–1932, 1936–1937, and further years invite the ideal readers to decode and disclose the profoundly personal thoughts of Wittgenstein’s youth in the new style of writing. Wittgenstein kept the critical intimacy to himself: he felt like a displaced person surviving in a time of war and therefore had to write in a secret code. By incarnating his unvoiced interior monologues into dialogues, he used no public statements. Wittgenstein’s style of writing has a special significance: the specialist-expert reader needs to rearrange their understanding of the secrecy of the secret code to identify the possible answers to Wittgenstein’s cultural and political questions. Finally, the readers have to reply to Wittgenstein’s passionate attitude with some objectivity and a certain dispassion. Scholarship needs to frame a hypothesis to reflect on what Wittgenstein as a philosopher probably meant with the hidden significance of the diary-like entries coded in “quasi-language”³ and mixed with the pages of philosophy. The short micro-episodes, taken from Wittgenstein’s own life and integrated in the philosophical notebooks, reflect the tension he felt between the objective shape and subjective content, going back and forth, to give the fragments not the meaning itself but any meaning to puzzle the readers.

The pseudo-autobiography of Wittgenstein’s diary entries is bound up with the linguistic ego and non-ego of his identity, secretly including the cultural self and selfish emotions, discussed in this book. The emotions are translated (self-translated and retranslated) in the postmodern fashion of acknowledging self-identity, self-knowledge, and self-criticism of his self (Colapietro 1989). The selfish symptoms of Wittgenstein’s diaries are the immune reaction to the tolerance and intolerance of his anxieties and fears in his environment (Sebeok 1979: 263–267). In the diary entries, he spontaneously reflected the desire to self-analyze the complex and inconceivable circumstances of his life in the “adventures” of his writing. In the philosophical discourse and the diaries, he provided the double anxiety of positive and negative feedback. The emotions of rephrasing the ego-symptoms alternates with the pseudo-ego, which self-controlled the mixed style of both genres into the speech of his life.

Meanwhile, among philosophers, social scientists, psychologists, and literary thinkers a strong opinion has developed to imagine the rhetoric of Wittgenstein’s modalities of writing the diary in a different way. The diary seemed to be derived not merely from the mind but also from the heart. The experts are expected to divide and subdivide the occasions of the auto-messages into the analysis of the episodes and then into the whole structure of his life (Gorlée 2016a). This structure forms Wittgenstein’s paradox, since the first-person diaries are intertextualized into the scholarly work and cannot be studied alone. Some scholars have even approached the secret diaries with a certain ironical tone, providing allegorical fragments about the choice of the literary genres. Wittgenstein’s style of writing, indeed, did not present the finished book but rather the unfinished thoughts of fragmentary writings. Today, the game or joke of Wittgenstein’s coded and uncoded diaries is the unclear transaction, which must be solved.

Wittgenstein’s works were not presented alone as solid diaries in splendid isolation from his scholarship. Instead, he described the self-emotions within his life episodes; strangely assembled and mixed together within the pages of his philosophy. Also, he did not keep his journal separate from his philosophy. Instead, each entry is a kind of epigram or inscription, knitted together with other pages in “private” and “public” notebooks. The diaries were even transposed into “very private” aphorisms and anecdotal material made of intimate paragraphs, allowing the reader to see the entire narrative spectrum of his natural and secret self in the infinite range of values and possibilities. Wittgenstein’s diary opens the reader’s eye to the truth of the mixture of his “forms of life” (Lebensformen) (Glock 1996: 124–128).

Wittgenstein’s style of writing was not fluid narration; his diaries were sporadic episodes coming from deep emotions, whisked off by the real logic of his mental scholarship, and back again to affect his heart. Wittgenstein seemed to make the tone of his words a secret mystery, primarily because he transliterated his vitriolic tone into the diary’s secret code (Geheimschrift). The “naïve” or unknowing readers were unable to decipher the paragraphs, while scholars felt the private secrecy needed further attention and reflection to become a symbolic form, drawing from mythical code to reach human understanding to comprehend the contents. The secret script was a method of security, guaranteeing secrecy and confidentiality in the encryption of the text. Wittgenstein seemed to keep his self-evident thoughts to himself, but until when?

The “classic” interpretation of Wittgenstein’s broken and unbroken series of diary entries would be that they reflect the private language as a mirror image of the public, but most of the philosophical work and writings was unpublished during his life. This approach has over time turned into a technical argument about what can be noted and noticed as standing for the truth (or untruth) to judge Wittgenstein’s sense of privacy of speech as the mirror image of his life (Eco 1984: 213–219). Meanwhile, the debate about Wittgenstein’s own private language has become increasingly problematic. The notion of private language has provoked the intellectual or even dogmatic controversy now that Wittgenstein’s coded biography and uncoded autobiography have become available for reading and studying. The Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen provide readers open access to Wittgenstein’s works (see Appendix; Wittgenstein Online 2018; Wittgenstein Source n.d.).

Wittgenstein’s modalities in different genres and styles raised scientific questions for cognitive scholarship (Gray 1969: 7–19). Wittgenstein wanted to invent a “new” approach for the more socializing style applied to his writings and sayings. The journalistic style he used was close to simple speech, written in short paragraphs with hardly any extraneous terminology. At the same time, his self-knowledge encouraged him to keep the diary fragments not broken but intact. In the exclamatory fragments of Wittgenstein’s diary, the fragments lift some of the curtain to reveal the cultural identity. Both the philosophical text and the diaries were written simultaneously and side by side on the right and left pages of his notebooks. Under the cover of the carefully coded and uncoded art of style mediating between science and humanities, Wittgenstein’s secret code remains for uninitiated readers far removed from ordinary realistic journalism, but (as shall be argued) there is no secret mystery involved.

Wittgenstein’s occasional papers, conveyed in “strange” messages through the pages of “serious” works, create a garbled collection of paragraphs with popular sayings, proverbs, and allegories. They episodically follow each other on alternating pages of the single scripts of Wittgenstein’s manuscripts. Interrupting each other, the cultural genres are reciprocally exchanged or abandoned in the edited works, leaving an unread vacuum. However, when studied, the clarity of Wittgenstein’s alternative ideas and thought created a tangle of interpretation, underinterpretation, and overinterpretation to disentangle the real “facts of life,” thus problematizing any conclusion that one of Wittgenstein’s selves was a “serious” writer. Thereby, the stylistic turn of personal diaries must be more than the dramatic cry of the heart to express the sense of mental misery he suffered in his life.

The subject of this book is the problem Wittgensteinian thinkers face in their social duty to offer, when possible, the most appropriate philosophical, linguistic, theological, and other orientations of Wittgenstein’s diary as desired, hoped, or intended by Wittgenstein himself. As argued in this book, the fragmentary concept of Wittgenstein is based on unwritten material, it requires one to study the hidden subjectivity between the objective manuscripts of philosophy of language and the subjective emotion or desire of the diary. Steering between the dispute of art and the cultural event of artifact, the evidence of the ménage à trois was probably revealed by the visiting card of my Belgian colleague. It demonstrated, by analogy, that Wittgenstein’s diaries clearly and unclearly display the necessary self-statements of his tragic life experiences. Wittgenstein seemed to mirror the internal sensations into his outer thought. But the question remains—were his diary entries directed to insiders or outsiders?

Semiotics

While Wittgenstein’s early diaries, written during the First World War, were almost “real” diaries, in the later ones he acted as the “cryptosemiotician,” that is, a “late modern thinker involved with but not thematically aware of the doctrine of signs, still a prisoner theoretically of the solipsist epistemology of modern philosophy” (Sebeok 1979: 259, quoted in Deely 2015: 1:98). The close association of Wittgenstein with semiotics draws on Ferruccio Rossi-Landi’s (1921–1985) lecture “Wittgenstein, Old and New” (1992: 87–108), which emphasized Wittgenstein’s interests in the enculturation and multic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Silence and secrecy
• 2 Symptoms
• 3 Cryptography
• 4 Cryptomnesia
• 5 Fact or fiction
• 6 Cryptosemiotician
• 7 Tentative conclusion
• Appendix: List of coded passages from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Imprint