Abstract
The aim of this chapter is to provide the first in-depth examination of Wittgenstein’s view of suicide. Attention is focused on the early period. This choice is motivated by two main reasons: first, Wittgenstein’s most interesting remarks on suicide date from this period; and second, suicide was an intensely personal matter for the young Wittgenstein. After an introduction in which it is shown how Wittgenstein’s early life was affected by several suicides and how he himself often thought of this possibility, attention is first drawn to some of the important sources that influenced and shaped his view of suicide (§5.1). Subsequently, in order to contextualize his otherwise obscure remarks on suicide, an overview of Wittgenstein’s peculiar worldview as well as of his understanding of ethics is provided (§5.2). Finally, in the third and last section, attention is focused on Wittgenstein’s remarks on suicide. Their meaning is explained and Wittgenstein’s peculiar view of suicide is elucidated (§5.3).
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Notes
- 1.
After Wittgenstein’s death, his sister Margarete gave the manuscript as a personal memento to Rudolf Koder, an old friend of Wittgenstein.
- 2.
See Klagge and Nordmann (2002: 4).
- 3.
- 4.
I here use Waugh’s translation (see Waugh 2009: 79).
- 5.
It is interesting to contrast what happened to Paul with the following passage from Norman Malcolm’s memoir (the reference is to Wittgenstein’s stay in Ithaca, NY, in the summer of 1949, approximately two years before his death): “More than once, Wittgenstein said to me that it was a problem for him as to what to do with the remainder of his life. ‘When a person had only one thing in the world–namely, a certain talent–what is he to do when he begins to lose that talent?’ he asked. Wittgenstein spoke so earnestly and sombrely that I, knowing that three of his brothers had committed suicide, feared that he might attempt the same.”
- 6.
It should also be mentioned that an aunt and a cousin committed suicide as well. See Waugh (2009: 37). Furthermore, on 15 June 1938, Jerome Stonborough, who in 1905 had married Ludwig’s sister Margaret (Gretl), took his life.
- 7.
For a list of prominent Austrians of the time who committed suicide, see Janik and Toulmin (1973: 64–65).
- 8.
- 9.
Paradoxically, Wittgenstein’s severe critiques of Russell’s manuscript Theory of Knowledge convinced Russell that he was no longer capable of fundamental work in philosophy, producing in him an almost suicidal depression. On this, see Monk (1991: 80–83).
- 10.
The Geheime Tagebücher contain coded entries about private matters and should not be confused with the Notebooks 1914–1916, containing philosophical remarks written in normal script. The coded entries were written on left pages of the notebooks, whereas the pages on the right contain the remarks in normal script.
- 11.
See the two letters to Russell dating from Christmas 1913 and January 1914 (McGuinness 2008: 63, 65).
- 12.
See also Rhees (1984: 106).
- 13.
- 14.
According to Bartley (1973: 44), “in 1920 Wittgenstein told his schoolteacher colleague Martin Scherleitner, in Trattenbach, that he had originally volunteered to serve in the First World War in order to find death, as a method of suicide.”
- 15.
See Somavilla (2013).
- 16.
See also what Wittgenstein wrote to Eccles on 7 May 1925: “England may not have changed since 1913 but I have. However, it is no use writing to you the exact nature of the change (though I perfectly understand it) you will see it yourself when I get there” (Eccles 1963: 62).
- 17.
See GT 20 and 21.10.14; 5, 9, 14 and 17.11.14; 8 and 14.3.15.
- 18.
- 19.
See also the letter that Wittgenstein sent to Russell on 7 July 1920: “How things will go for me—how I’ll endure life—God only knows. The best for me, perhaps, would be if I could lie down one evening and not wake up again. (But perhaps there is something better left for me.) We shall see” (McGuinness 2008: 121).
- 20.
- 21.
See also Drury’s recollection of a conversation with Wittgenstein dating from the autumn of 1948: “When I read Schopenhauer,” Wittgenstein said, “I seem to see to the bottom very easily. He is not deep in the sense that Kant and Berkeley are deep” (Rhees 1984: 158).
- 22.
According to Malcolm (2001: 45), Wittgenstein once said that “The House of the Dead was Dostoevsky’s greatest work.”
- 23.
See also Paperno (1997).
- 24.
See McGuinness (2013: 233). Before and after school teaching, Wittgenstein entertained the idea of entering a monastery. He even worked as a gardener’s assistant at a monastery.
- 25.
It is noteworthy that, in the notes for the novel’s ending, Raskolnikov was to take his life by shooting himself (Lantz 2004: 426). However, this ending would have deprived the novel of its pars construens, namely the possibility of Raskolnikov’s spiritual rebirth and future resurrection.
- 26.
As Wittgenstein writes to Engelmann, “[o]f course it all boils down to the fact that I have no faith!” (Engelmann 1967: 35).
- 27.
A footnote explains that “the words ‘& suicide does not end it’ were written between two lines as if he [Wittgenstein] was planning perhaps to insert them behind ‘unless one puts an end to it’. Wittgenstein used an arrow to indicate their insertion behind ‘has no end’” (Klagge and Nordmann 2002: 127).
- 28.
On Kierkegaard’s influence on Wittgenstein, see Schönbaumsfeld (2007).
- 29.
Wittgenstein confessed to some of his friends and family members that he had done nothing to prevent most people he knew from thinking that he was three-quarters Aryan and one-quarter Jewish, whereas the reverse was the case. When he was a school teacher, he had also hit and hurt a little girl, and had later denied the fact. Beyond these two major sins, Wittgenstein confessed a number of minor sins as well. See Monk (1991: 367–372) and Rhees (1984: 34–39).
- 30.
- 31.
Wittgenstein alludes here to the fifth act of Faust’s second part, in which four grey women (Want, Debt, Care, and Distress) appear in Faust’s courtyard. Of the four women, only Care (German: Sorge) is able to slip through the keyhole of the portal. She then presents herself to Faust as follows: “Once I make a man my own, / nothing in this world can help him; / everlasting darkness falls, / suns no longer rise or set—/ though no outward sense has failed, / all is darkness in his heart, / and however great his treasures, / there’s no joy in their possession. / Good and bad luck both depress him, / he is starving though there’s plenty; / source of joy or spot of trouble, / it’s postponed until the morrow—/ caring only for the future, / he gets nothing done at all” (Goethe 2014: 289).
- 32.
Term coined by the French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot.
- 33.
As Llinares Chover (2010: 113) points out, Tolstoy transferred his spiritual crisis to his fictional alter ego, Anna Karenina’s character Levin (Levin is a diminutive of Lev, Tolstoy’s own name). See the following passage from the last part of Anna Karenina: “And, happy in his family life, a healthy man, Levin was several times so close to suicide that he hid a rope lest he hang himself with it, and was afraid to go about with a rifle lest he shoot himself. But Levin did not shoot himself or hang himself and went on living” (Tolstoy 2001: 530). It is noteworthy that, in an entry of 2 September 1913, David Pinsent wrote in his diary: “He [Wittgenstein] is—in his acute sensitiveness—very like Levin in ‘Anna Karenina’” (Wright 1990: 64).
- 34.
It is precisely to this ethical demand that Wittgenstein’s following passage from the aforementioned letter to Russell (22 June 1912) refers: “I don’t mean to say that I will be a saint soon, but I am not sure that it [James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience] does not improve me a little” (McGuinness 2008: 30).
- 35.
This attitude probably finds its clearest expression in Wittgenstein’s decision to give away his entire inheritance after the end of the First World War. As Monk (1991: 171) points out, on his arrival home from the war Wittgenstein was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. In one month, his complete inheritance was made over to his sisters Helene and Hermine, and to his brother Paul. Wittgenstein’s insistence that his inheritance be given in its entirety, without any money put aside for him (in case he should later come to regret his decision), precisely recalls James’ claim that the desire for regeneration is incomplete and ineffective as long as one does not give up all possessions. As James puts it, “[s]o long as any secular safeguard is retained, so long as any residual prudential guarantee is clung to, so long the surrender is incomplete, the vital crisis is not passed, fear still stands sentinel, and mistrust of the divine obtains” (James 1985: 321).
- 36.
- 37.
See Weininger 2005: 139: “Any ethics is only possible in accordance with the laws of logic, and any logic is at the same time an ethical law.”
- 38.
The German word used by Weininger is Heiligkeit.
- 39.
Schopenhauer’s sentence is quoted explicitly in On Last Things. See Weininger (2001: 118).
- 40.
- 41.
The Lecture on Ethics was given in Cambridge sometime between September 1929 and December 1930.
- 42.
In his Introduction to the Tractatus, Russell remarks that “Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said. […] The whole subject of ethics, for example, is placed by Mr. Wittgenstein in the mystical, inexpressible region. Nevertheless he is capable of conveying his ethical opinion” (Wittgenstein 2001: xxiii-xxiv).
- 43.
See Barrett (1991: 32–33) and Stokhof (2002: 214). This is the part of the Tractatus that seemed to Anscombe most obviously wrong: “As Wittgenstein asks in Philosophical Investigation (§644): ‘Did not your intention reside also in what you did?’ ‘What happens’ includes ‘actions’, in the sense of the word in which ‘good’ and ‘bad’ are predicated of actions” (Anscombe 1965: 172).
- 44.
See section VII, Of the Idea of Necessary Connection.
- 45.
Compare with the following passage from section IV of the Enquiry: “The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise to-morrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction, than the affirmation, that it will rise” (Hume 2007: 18). On Wittgenstein’s Humean view of causation, see Cook (1994). On Wittgenstein on causation and induction, see Sandis and Tejedor (2017).
- 46.
For a more detailed analysis of Wittgenstein’s conception of a happy life, see Somavilla (2013).
- 47.
On 4 January (it was a Thursday), Wittgenstein sent a letter to Engelmann, announcing that he was going to leave Vienna on Saturday night, namely on 6 January. See Engelmann (1967: 3).
- 48.
See McGuinness (1990: 257).
- 49.
See McGuinness (2013: 231).
- 50.
See Dostoevsky (1992: 69, 82, 263, 589, 632, 649).
- 51.
The logic behind Ivan’s idea is obviously more complex. For a detailed analysis, see Stellino (2015: 158–163, 214–216).
- 52.
Another important source was Meister Eckhart. As Russell Nieli (1987: 154) points out, “Wittgenstein’s eternal Present, transcending time and history, is virtually identical with the eternal Now symbol of Meister Eckhart.”
- 53.
See Sect. 4.1 of this book.
- 54.
Readers interested in a further analysis of Schopenhauer’s influence on Wittgenstein’s view of suicide may refer to Gómez Alonso’s paper. I find Gómez Alonso’s analysis convincing and, in certain aspects, my interpretation of Wittgenstein’s view of suicide is indebted to his.
- 55.
- 56.
The three experiences are the experience of wondering at the existence of the world, the experience of feeling absolutely safe, and the experience of feeling guilty. Wittgenstein points out how these experiences are analogous to the following religious expressions: God created the world, we feel safe in the hands of God, and God disapproves of our conduct.
- 57.
To be more precise, Schopenhauer makes specific reference to the arguments put forward by the monotheistic religions. As I have already pointed out in Chap. 3 of this book (Sect. 3.1), Schopenhauer emphasizes the fact that Hinduism, far from condemning or prohibiting suicide, considers it as a religious action.
- 58.
See Sect. 3.2 of this book.
- 59.
See Gómez Alonso (2018: 316–317).
- 60.
I am thankful to the anonymous reviewer for drawing my attention to this possibility.
- 61.
See Kant’s distinction between arbitrium sensitivum brutum and liberum in Sect. 2.2.3 of this book, dedicated to Kant’s freedom argument against suicide.
- 62.
See Kant (LE, Collins 27: 372/Kant 1997): “anyone who has already got so far as to be master, at any time, over his own life, is also master over the life of anyone else; for him, the door stands open to every crime, and before he can be seized he is ready to spirit himself away out of the world.” On this, see Sect. 2.2.2 of this book.
- 63.
In the Notebooks, Wittgenstein clarifies that “physiological life is of course not ‘Life’. And neither is psychological life. Life is the world” (NB 24.7.16).
- 64.
I owe this alternative reading to Vicente Sanfélix Vidarte.
- 65.
Recall that, according to Wittgenstein, the two initial propositions of the entry—“If suicide is allowed then everything is allowed / If anything is not allowed then suicide is not allowed”—throw “a light on the nature of ethics.”
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Stellino, P. (2020). Ludwig Wittgenstein: Suicide as the Elementary Sin. In: Philosophical Perspectives on Suicide . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-53937-5_5
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