ACADEMIA Letters

Death of the Philosopher

James Wetzel, Villanova University

Wittgenstein did not want to die in an English hospital. His doctor, Edward Bevan, was able
to spare him such a fate. Bevan had invited Wittgenstein, whose prostate cancer had become
untreatable, to stay with him and his wife in their house on Storey’s Way in Cambridge and
live out his last days there. Dr. Bevan’s wife, Joan, initially experienced the philosopher,
famous for his flashes of temper and his unsettling insistence on the precision of words, as
intimidating. But the two soon found their feet with one another and became good friends.
They took regular walks together to the local pub and would always, in keeping Wittgenstein’s
love of informal ritual, order two glasses of port—one for Joan Bevan to drink, the other for
Wittgenstein to pour into an Aspidistra plant. (The plant must have loved that.) On the night
in late April when Wittgenstein lost consciousness and slipped into a quiet death, it was to the
vigilant Joan that he had delivered his parting words: “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.” 1
Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein’s American student and a professor at Cornell, had this
to say about his teacher’s last words:

By ‘them’ he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound
pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in
which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that
repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at
the end he himself exclaimed that it had been ‘wonderful’! To me this seems a
mysterious and strangely moving utterance.2
1
Ray Monk’s justly celebrated biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New
York: The Free Press, 1990), is the fairest to Joan Bevan and her role in reconciling Wittgenstein to his own death.
See the chapter, “Storeys End.”
2
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, second edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), p. 81.

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: James Wetzel, james.wetzel@villanova.edu

Citation: Wetzel, J. (2021). Death of the Philosopher. Academia Letters, Article 154.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL154.

1
 Yes, mysterious and strangely moving. I vividly remember taking in Malcolm’s senti-
ment about Wittgenstein when I was a sophomore engineering student, uneasily situated in a
seminar on Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. It seemed to me at the time that what-
ever Wittgenstein might have meant by “a wonderful life,” he surely was meaning to offer his
friends something other than a consoling lie. The prospect here of a truthful conjunction—a
fiercely unhappy life and a wonderful one—propelled me out of the sciences and into phi-
losophy and its regime of conceptual clarification. Eventually I found myself having to pack
for a long stay with Augustine, Wittgenstein’s saint of choice, whose notion of sanctity mixes
grace into misery and evokes gratitude. (I am, unsurprisingly, still seeking clarity here.)
At the risk of sounding sophomoric, Malcolm’s gloss changed my life. And so it was with
some defensiveness, I admit, that I encountered, decades later, his revised sentiment about the
dying Wittgenstein.3 Apparently it was, upon second thought, not so difficult to understand
Wittgenstein’s sense of the wonder of his life. Just count up the good stuff and weigh it against
the bad: deep friendships outweigh broken relationships; days given over to the pleasure of
thinking outweigh the frustrating times of not being understood. “So, though there was plenty
of pain, there was,” Malcolm concludes, “also joy—and much that was ‘wonderful.”’
At one level, I am inclined to concede. What do I know? Malcolm was Wittgenstein’s
friend as well as his student. Two years before his death, Wittgenstein crossed an ocean to
visit Malcolm in Ithaca and stayed there for months, meeting with American admirers—a last
hurrah. I never knew Wittgenstein, except in my imagination. He died before I was born.
Surely Malcolm gets to comment on the fine points of Wittgenstein’s happiness, and I do not.
But I am not contesting Malcolm’s right to apply a calculus of happiness to Wittgenstein; I am
not even contesting the accuracy of his application (which seems to require weighing things
on the metaphor of a scale). I am contesting the notion that a calculus of happiness somehow
manages to convey what Wittgenstein takes happiness—and the wonder of a life—to be.
In the Tractatus, where absolute precision veils or perhaps just rehearses what cannot be
said, Wittgenstein tells us—TLP 6.43—that the world of the happy (Die Welt des Glücklichen)
and the world of the unhappy (die des Unglücklichen) are not the same world.4 We know from
the notebooks of 1914-1916, the prequel to the Tractatus, that Wittgenstein has come to think
of “happiness” as an irreducibly ethical category. It makes no sense to him to add a question of
desert to an ascription of fundamental well-being or the lack thereof. You say: “Wittgenstein
was fiercely unhappy in life.” I respond: “Yes, but did he deserve to be?” That is already one
question too many.
In keeping with the quasi-Stoic character of Tractarian ethics, let me suggest this as a
3
See Malcolm, p. 84, note 4.
4
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (New York: Routledge, 1961).

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: James Wetzel, james.wetzel@villanova.edu

Citation: Wetzel, J. (2021). Death of the Philosopher. Academia Letters, Article 154.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL154.

2
characterization of the world of the unhappy: here I never have an experience of goodness that
does not raise a further, disabling question about what the good really is. There is no integrity
to this world. Being is one thing, goodness another. The two conjoin only accidentally. Jan
Zwicky, one of Wittgenstein’s more inventive readers, neatly encapsulates the trial of having
to live in such a world: “To believe that the need for integrity can never be fully satisfied is
to choose a difficult existence: to negotiate a path bounded by unrequited desire on the one
hand, and banality on the other.”5
“Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life” is a world away from “Tell them I may well have had
a wonderful life, pending confirmation from an ideally comprehensive, albeit (sorry to say)
wholly untranslatable point of view.” The happiness calculus—a game of rootless partialities
and pseudo-wholeness—is doubtless a prominent part of the sciences in unhappy world. (I am
not at all accusing Malcolm of playing this game, by the way; he just wanted to remember his
beloved teacher as happy. Fair enough. So do I.) But what makes for happiness, then, if not a
willingness to select some island of perceived goodness in one’s world and arbitrarily claim it
as home? Writing, friends, vintage clothes, whatever. “You are my one true happiness, dear.”
“Oh, do I have a choice?” “You’re funny, but no, not really.”
It is easy to overplay the difference between Wittgenstein’s early philosophy and his later.
Despite the radical divergence of writing style, both the Tractatus and the Philosophical In-
vestigations affirm the fitness of ordinary language for conveying what is of immediate and
ultimate importance in human life. But the difference in affirmation does turn out to be more
than merely stylistic, and it is this deeper difference that usefully frames the question about
happiness that I have been raising by way of Wittgenstein’s moving, but still very ordinary,
last words.
The first line of the Tractatus is the most banal and the most longing of propositions: “The
world is all that is the case.” Part of what is the case is what cannot be put in the words: namely,
the higher (das Höhere), or the source of all meaning and value. (Already too wordy.) Here
is the important part: the higher is not constituted by an object language. If it were, then its
objects would be entirely esoteric, and ordinary language, left to blather on about shoes and
ships and sealing wax, would become a wasteland. As it stands, ordinary language is perfectly
in order. But to see this, to see the world aright, one must align ordinary language with esoteric
objects—to give language its higher meaning—and fail in the attempt. Wittgenstein famously
speaks of throwing away the ladder one has climbed (TLP 6.54). What he doesn’t so much
emphasize is that you are at the same place at the top of the ladder as you are at the bottom.
You are still going to be able to say on your deathbed, “Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life,”
but not without irony.
5
Zwicky, Lyric Philosophy, second edition (Edmonton: Brush Education, 2014): §296.

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: James Wetzel, james.wetzel@villanova.edu

Citation: Wetzel, J. (2021). Death of the Philosopher. Academia Letters, Article 154.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL154.

3
 Wittgenstein begins the Investigations with a passage from Augustine’s Confessions, the
part where Augustine describes his learning of a first language (conf. 1.8.13). It is a matter
of mapping words onto objects; the child learns to negotiate an already familiar inner world
of meaning with new, publicly available labels. Wittgenstein wants us to notice the odd work
that translating is doing in Augustine’s description: “Augustine describes the learning of a
first language as if the child came into a foreign country and did not understand the language
of the country; that is, as if he already had a language, only not this one” (PI §32).6 Even the
saint, looking to praise the higher, sometimes forgets what a beginning is like and remembers
only estrangement.
Where the Tractatus turns reflection on ordinary language into a kind of negative theology
and binds wonder to bare existence, the Investigations reacquaint us with the world where
wonders show up, one by one. But it is not up to philosophy to determine who shows up in
your life. The real wonder is that people sometimes do, and you can choose to be grateful.
There is no calculus for that.

6
Philosophical Investigations, rev. fourth edition, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Wiley-
Blackwell, 2009).

Academia Letters, January 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: James Wetzel, james.wetzel@villanova.edu

Citation: Wetzel, J. (2021). Death of the Philosopher. Academia Letters, Article 154.
https://doi.org/10.20935/AL154.