Simplex sigillum veri:

The Exemplary Life of an Architect

David Theodore

Chora
The Exemplary Life of an Architect

§1. let this be known right from the start, even though it comes at
the very end of his book: “Tractatus §7.0: Wovon man nicht sprechen
kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (whereof one cannot speak, there-
of one must be silent).1 This restraint is the best, the very best we can
achieve in all things. In thinking, for instance: “The difficulty in philos-
ophy is to say no more than we know.”2 Even in polemic, “or the art of
throwing eggs,” the “difficulty is not to make superfluous noises, or ges-
tures, which don’t harm the other man but only yourself.”3
(Tractatus §5.47321: “Occam’s razor is, of course, not an arbitrary
rule nor one justified by its practical success. It simply says that unnec-
essary elements in a symbolism mean nothing. Signs which serve one
purpose are logically equivalent, signs which serve no purpose are mean-
ingless.)
Tractatus §7.0 is a logical truth and an ethical precept.4 In the 1930s
he told a friend: “To be sure, I can imagine what Heidegger means by
being and anxiety. Man feels the urge to run up against the limits of lan-
guage … This running up against the limits of language is ethics. In
ethics we are always making the attempt to say something that cannot
be said … But the inclination, the running up against something, indi-
cates something.”5

§2. His architecture, too, assumes the principle, the virtue, of simplicity.
It is lucid. It shows clearly its clarity. It strives to leave out the unneces-
sary, the tautological. Minimal precision has thus a clear moral purpose.
It “indicates something,” something important. His concern for preci-
sion, abstraction, and minimalism arises from deep ethical preoccupa-
tions: reduction need not designate a style, functionalism or formalism,
but rather demonstrates right action. (Tractatus §6.421: “Ethics and
aesthetics are one.”)
How much did architecture mean to him? Did he have architectural
genius? Does his architecture depend on his philosphy?6 He liked to say:
“Work on philosophy – in many ways like working on architecture – is
really more like working on the self. On your own interpretation. That
is, on how you see things yourself. And what you demand of them.”7
Architecture’s contribution to transforming the world, therefore,
works through a transformation of the architect: “Just improve your-
self,” he told his disciples, “that is all you can do to improve the
world.”8 Kundmanngasse 19, the celebrated house in Vienna he worked

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 David Theodore

Door hardware for Kundmanngasse

designed by Wittgenstein. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein

The Kundmanngasse 19.

Photo courtesy Terrance Galvin

on from 1926 to 1928 for his sister Margaret Stonborough, did not
change his philosophy. Building it, working on it, had changed him, so
that he made different demands on his philosophy. In 1929 Cambridge
University accepted the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, his already
famous first published book (1921), as his doctoral dissertation. G.E.
Moore and Bertrand Russell asked him a couple of questions about it for
his defense. John Maynard Keynes helped him to receive a fellowship at
Trinity College. But now when he started to do philosophy again, some-
thing was askew.

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The Exemplary Life of an Architect

§3. All personal reorientation is difficult. It is crippling. It is discipline.

While he worked on Kundmanngasse, the nascent Vienna Circle gath-
ered around him: Moritz Schlick, Friedrich Waismann, sometimes Her-
bert Feigl and Maria Kasper (later Mrs Feigl) and Rudolf Carnap. They
came to his rooms. Schlick’s great culture set him at ease. He detested
Carnap. Waismann took notes. But “preoccupied with other things and
with his architectural work in particular, [he] was not always prepared
to talk about philosophy. Sometimes he preferred to read out poems,
especially those of Rabindranath Tagore, usually sitting with his back to
the audience.” Later he declared these camp followers orgulous and
derivative: “What the Vienna School has achieved, it ought to show not
say … The master should be known by his work.”9
But showing is not picturing. At Saturday afternoon philosophy meet-
ings in the 1930s he “related a riddle for the purpose of throwing some
light on the nature of philosophy. It went as follows: Suppose that a cord
was stretched tightly around the earth at the equator. Now suppose that
a piece one yard long was added to the cord. If the cord was kept taut
and circular in form, how much above the surface of the earth would it
be?”10 To answer this riddle, we make a picture of the situation. If we
have the right picture, though, the best representation, we do not neces-
sarily arrive at the right answer.
(“The most accurate picture of an entire apple tree has in a certain
sense much fewer similarities with the tree than the smallest daisy.”11)

§4. Here is an accurate picture of him. He had chestnut hair, was about
5’6”, patrician, never fat, an ascetic aesthete. His clothes were carefully
chosen from the best English tailors, but he was known for his shabby
appearance: “brown coat and grey, probably patched, flannel trousers,
with open shirt and without tie.”12 He was trying to be honest. He gave
away all of his inherited fortune, first anonymously to artists such as
Georg Trakl, Oskar Kokoschka, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Adolf Loos,
and then just away. He was at the front in World War I.
In group photos he sometimes appears to be sleeping.
He was a school teacher, a philosopher, a musician and a sculptor, a
soldier and a gardener. He lived the exemplary life of an architect.
For him “knowledge … was intimately connected with doing.”13 His
own training echoed Vitruvius’s prescription for the education of an
architect: manual skill, liberal arts, geometry, arithmetic, medicine,

290
A friend of Thomas Stonborough, Ludwig Wittgenstein [dressed in workman’s clothes],
and construction supervisor Friedl on a balcony of the Kundmanngasse. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein

astronomy, music, and philosophy, including physics. He learned to

whistle, to conduct music, and to make sculpture. He built machines.
When he was ten he contrived a working sewing machine out of wood.
In 1910 he patented some “Improvements in Propellers applicable for
Aerial Machines.” He called himself an “aeronaut”; he wanted to fly. He
developed an idea for propulsion later adapted to build helicopters in
World War II.14 He built kites with William Eccles, staying at the Grouse
Inn at Glossop in the Derbyshire Moors amidst a clutter of books.
He would be Daedalus.
In Derek Jarman’s film this ambition is caught in an image: “wearing
kite wings [he] picks up two lawn mower sprinklers and holds them out

291
 Construction drawing
of the variable volume
combustion propeller
engine. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (right) and William Eccles at the

Kite Flying Upper Atmosphere Station, near Glossop,
c. 1908. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 David Theodore

Older Wittgenstein as Daedalus. From Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein

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The Exemplary Life of an Architect

like the propellers of a plane. The light catches the swirling water like a
Catherine wheel.”15
He thought of his aeronautical experiments as a failure. But in search-
ing for mathematical solutions to aeronautical problems, he discovered
a talent and appetence for thinking about logical problems. If this was a
real talent, if he could make a real contribution, he had a moral duty to
exercise his talent.

§5. He wrote in a note to himself: “Genius is talent in which character

makes itself heard … [it shows] no mere intellectual skeleton, but a com-
plete human being … That too is why the greatness of what a man
writes depends on everything else he writes and does” [emphasis
added].16
“Meaning,” “character,” “purpose,” and “symbol” have to do with
culture. “A stylistic device may be useful and yet I may be barred from
using it. Schopenhauer’s ‘as which’ for instance. Sometimes this would
make for much more comfortable and clearer expression, but if someone
feels it is archaic (altväterisch), he cannot use it; and he must not disre-
gard this feeling either.”
In the introduction to the Philosophische Bemurkungen he added: “I
would like to say ‘this book is written to the honour of God,’ but nowa-
days this would be the trick of a cheat, i.e., it would not be correctly
understood. It means the book was written in good will, and so far as it
was not but was written from vanity etc, [sic] the author would wish to
see it condemned. He can not make it more free of these impurities than
he is himself. (Translated by Mr. Rush Rhees.)”17
“Impurities”: the problem is ethical, about having the right relation-
ship to the work. He told a friend in conversation: “Bach wrote on the
title-page of his Orgelbuchlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and
that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have
liked to say about my work.”18

§6. He used his work to understand the world and himself. At first he
thought: “The human body … my body in particular, is a part of the
world among others, among beasts, plants, stones, etc., etc. … Whoev-
er realizes this will not want to procure a pre-eminent place for his own
body or for the human body. He will regard humans and beasts quite
naively as objects which are similar and which belong together.”19 But

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 David Theodore

he realized this description could lead to philosophical errors, namely,

that readers might mistake its moral injunction for a philosophy of pos-
itivist objectivism. He wanted to say that philosophy should help us to
resolve the delusion that there are two kinds of material, one mental and
one physical. So he wrote this instead: “The world is my world: The sub-
ject does not belong to the world; rather it is a limit of the world: the
world and life are one” (Tractatus §5.6–5.641).
Terry Eagleton, “the most significant Marxist literary critic of his gen-
eration,”20 glosses this passage thus: “Value cannot be in the world,
since it resides in the human subject; and the human subject is not an
object within reality, but the limit or horizon which brings that reality
into focus.”21
So who is “I”? We read in his notebooks:

Now let us ask ourselves what sort of identity of personality it is we are refer-
ring to when we say “when anything is seen, it is always I who see.” What is
it I want all these cases of seeing to have in common? As an answer I have to
confess to myself that it is not my bodily appearance. I don’t always see part
of my body when I see. And it isn’t essential that my body, if seen amongst the
things I see, should always look the same. In fact I don’t mind how much it
changes; and I feel the same way about all the properties of my body, the char-
acteristics of my behaviour, and even about my memories. – When I think
about it a little longer I see that what I wished to say was “Always when any-
thing is seen, something is seen.” I.e. that of which I said it continued during
all the experiences of seeing was not any particular entity “I,” but the experi-
ence of seeing itself.22

More important, and more difficult to articulate – thereof must one be

silent, after all – were all the experiences of living, of culture, that “I” has.

§7. He came from Vienna. The culture that he understood so well was
bourgeois and artistic, with profound roots in the ways of life estab-
lished around the Hapsburg court. He had a deep appreciation of Vien-
nese aristocratic building traditions. He grew up in the Alleegasse, with
its “seven pianos” and Wiener Werkstätte interiors. Bruno Walter, Gus-
tav Klimt, Johannes Brahms were frequent guests. While he worked on
Kundmanngasse, he stayed with his sister Margaret Stonborough in her
baroque palace, the eighteenth-century Palais Batthyány-Schönborn,

295
Above:The Galerie in Wittgenstein’s family
home in the Alleegasse. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Right: Johann Bernard Fischer von Erlach,

Palais Batthyány-Schönborn, 1698 –1705; the
home of Margareth Stonborough in the
1920s. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein

built by Johann Fischer von Erlach. His father financed the Wiener
Secession exhibition building in the Karlplatz.
He remained self-consciously Viennese. He liked Beethoven and Karl
Kraus. He sent postcards to Adolf Loos in Paris. (Loos der einmal zu
[ihm] gesagt hat “Sie sind ich!” [Loos once said to him, “You are
me!”].)23 His declared influences were Ludwig Boltzmann, Heinrich
Hertz, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Arthur Schopenhauer, Otto
Spengler, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos, Otto Weininger, Piero Sraffa.24 Two
physicists, a logician, three philosophers, a journalist, an architect, a sex-
ologist and an economist.
Although baptized and buried a Catholic, he believed in the signifi-
cance of his Jewish origins. He believed his “race” determined his think-
ing, his second-rate imitative “Jewish reproductive” talent, his lack of
genius, his exiguous groping towards significance. Greatness in music
was Beethoven, Brahms; second rate was Mendelssohn, Jewish.25

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 David Theodore

Postcard from Wittgenstein to Adolf Loos, September 1925, showing where he lived as a
school teacher in Otterhal. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein

The times determined things, too. The things we say, the gestures we
make are meaningful within a culture that shares our judgment. Thus
the “great architect in a bad period (Van der Nüll) has a totally different
task from the great architect in a good period.”26 This exigent charge
evokes judgments not just of our work but of ourselves. Van der Nüll,
architect of the Wiener Staatsoper, committed suicide when Emperor
Franz Joseph expressed displeasure with the entrance.
Suicide was everywhere. The poet Georg Trakl overdosed on cocaine
in a military hospital near Krakow two days before he was set to visit.
(“Wie Traurig, wie traurig!!!” he wrote.)27 Boltzmann killed himself the
year he was applying to study with the physicist at the University of
Vienna.
Three of his brothers took their own lives: Hans disappeared from a
boat in Chesapeake Bay in 1903; Rudolf took cyanide in a Berlin pub in
1904; Kurt shot himself after his troops disobeyed him in World War I.
(He barely escaped suicide himself. Architecture saved his life. He told
Marguerite Respinger that “the design and building of the house [Kund-
manngasse] had rescued him from the deep moral crisis caused by his
failure as a teacher.”)28
In October 1903 he was a student at the Realschule in Linz. Adolf
Hitler was there, too; they shared a history teacher who foretold the
decline of the “decadent” Hapsburg dynasty.29 Here he learned that
twenty-three-year-old Otto Weininger shot himself in the “death place,”
Beethoven’s house in Schwarzspaniergasse in Vienna.

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The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli

Tractatus §4.31: truth tables

From Weininger’s Sex and Character he learned to separate love from

sex, a split necessary because “sexuality is incompatible with the honesty
genius demands.”30 Derek Jarman notes that he died in 1951 of “cancer
of the prostate – the most unexplored of erogenous zones.”31 Jarman is
probably right to insist that from our point of view the links between his
hatred of disorder, his Viennese background, and his (homo)sexual guilt
should be taken seriously. Not because there is some eternal truth about
such links – i.e., in Ernest Jones’s conception in “Anal-Erotic Character
Traits”32 – but rather because they form an adequate first description of
his personality. They are the terms in which he and his peers have
described him. They sketch possible moralities. He was, after all, inca-
pable of living in a messy room or of staying in a room when sexual mat-
ters were discussed if women were present.

§8. Of all these preoccupations (philosophy, sex, death), art (literature,

music, architecture) was the most important. The Tractatus “assigns a
central importance in human life to art, on the ground that art alone can
express the meaning of life. Only art can express moral truth, and only
the artist can teach the things that matter most in life.”33 Frank Ramsey
once commented, “But what we can’t say we can’t say, and we can’t
whistle it either,” but of course that is exactly how we can mean what
we cannot say. That is exactly the necessity of whistling.

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 David Theodore

“How can I say how much music has meant to me?” he asked in his
diary.34
At Cambridge he worked with his friend David Pinsent, a musician
and mathematician, on psychological “rhythm-experiments” in the psy-
chological laboratory.35 “He had hoped that the experiments would
throw light on some questions of aesthetics that interested him.”36 What
was so important about aesthetics?
(Even logic had to be a mere tool to art. He had told Bertrand Russell
that studying logic improved one’s aesthetic judgment.)37
(The truth tables are his most important contribution to formal logic
[e.g., Tractatus §4.31]; they make accurate pictures of logical problems.
He came to despise them.)
But logic is bounded. There are nonverbal meanings, meanings out-
side of language, extra-nuncupative but irrefragable. Gestures. Move-
ments. Conditions. Places. Buildings. Friendships. Music. These are in
some way aesthetic: beyond language, beyond logic.
The meaningful gesture appears in a culture. “Architecture is a ges-
ture. Not every functional movement of the human body is a gesture.
Likewise, not every functional building is architecture.”38 The Italian
economist Piero Sraffa, a friend of Gramsci no less, once made this dis-
tinction clear with an illogical yet meaningful gesture.
“Recall the impression of good architecture,” he wrote later to himself,
“that it expresses a thought. One would like to follow it with a gesture.”39
But can someone be taught to understand a gesture, gestures like kiss-
ing a photo or making music? What does understanding music mean?40
He thought about Brahms and ground his teeth together. Then he
noticed himself grinding his teeth. He stopped and continued to think
about Brahms, but the notes were less clear, less rich, ghostlier.41

§9. Art could connect logic and culture, but what connected logic and
life? Apparently nothing. “The author of the Tractatus thought he had
solved all philosophical problems. It was consistent with this view that
he should give up philosophy.”42 Upon release from an Italian prisoner
of war camp in 1919, he attended the Leherbildungsanhalt in the third
Bezirk in Vienna to become a schoolteacher in rural Austria.
Niederösterreich was like this: loneliness, music, failure. He beat on
hebetudinous schoolchildren, boxing ears and pulling hair. He recited
The Brothers Karamazov out loud to the village priest. He wrote letters

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The Glass Architecture of Fra Luca Pacioli

Still from Jarman’s film Wittgenstein, showing British and American variants of Sraffa’s gesture.
From Jarman and Eagleton, Wittgenstein

300
 David Theodore

to architect Paul Engelmann and played clarinet. He published a Wörter-

buch für Volkschule, not a dictionary, in which language homogenizes
the world, but a spelling book.43 He taught at Trattenbach, Hassbach,
Puchberg, and Otterthal. He thought he had failed as a teacher, miser-
ably failed.
He went to work as a gardener in the monastery at Hütteldorf, living
in the tool shed. His mother died; in 1926 he returned to Vienna to work
with Engelmann on the house in Kundmanngasse.44

§10. The first house he had built was like this: “The house was con-
structed of wood in the local fashion. It was modest in size, with a base-
ment, a ground floor with a few rooms, and an attic. … Because it was
situated against a steep slope high above a lake (one could reach it only
by rowing over) there was, among other things, a winch and cable mech-
anism which enabled a bucket to be lowered to hoist water.”45 It was
built in 1914 near the Norwegian village of Skjolden on the shore of the
Sognefjord. A simple house, but apart from the world. He returned to it

Wittgenstein’s first house,

made of wood, near the
Sognefjord. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Christopher Wood’s painting of Villa Savoye, 1929. From Richard Ingleby, Christopher Wood:
An English Painter (London: Allison & Busby 1995)

in 1931. This was the best place for thinking (about logic and about sin).
“‘Then my mind was on fire!’ he used to say.”46
Kundmanngasse, on the other hand, brought together culture and
order; it is architecture that connects ways of life and logic. He sent
some photos of the house to John Maynard Keynes. “A la Corbusier,”
Keynes wrote to his wife Lydia – as if it were merely fashionable, like a
Christopher Wood painting.47 But he had little truck with the homoge-
nized, unlimited space of the New Architecture, its “indecent open-
ness,”48 its functionalism. Kundmanngasse has no ribbon windows
(solid over solid, void over void), no roof terrasse (the house sat origi-
nally in a large landscaped garden), no pilotis, no free plan, no techno-
logical optimism – and no harmful “superfluous gestures” either. He
understood his work as precise and honest, showing the virtue of
restraint, he did the least that he could at that time.
That is, Kundmanngasse was a failure. “In this same sense: my house
for Gretl is the product of a decidedly fine ear, good manners, the expres-
sion of a great understanding (of a culture, etc.),” he wrote. “But pri-
mordial life, wild life that tries to break out – is missing. One could also
say, that it lacks health. (Kierkegaard) (Hothouse plant).”49

302
Clockwise from left:
A comparison of Viennese staircases

Stairs in the Palais Batthyány-

Schönborn. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig
Wittgenstein

The grand staircase of the

Alleegasse. From Wijdeveld, Ludwig
Wittgenstein

Wittgenstein’s entrance hall at

Kundmanngasse. From Wijdeveld,
Ludwig Wittgenstein

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The Exemplary Life of an Architect

After finishing Kundmanngasse, he returned to Cambridge, to reading

and writing, to philosophy, a revenant.

His two rooms in Whewell’s Court at Cambridge were like this: The walls were
bare, with the exception of a silhouette of a young woman in an elaborate gilt
frame, a small bookcase and, [sic] in his bedroom a zinc bathtub which hung
against the wall when not in use. The other furniture consisted of one simple
wooden chair and a few [canvas] deck chairs (during lectures more deck chairs
were brought in from the corridor) and, in front of the window, a folding card
table used as a writing desk on which stood a fan which muffled the noise from
neighbours [a piano-playing undergraduate]. On the mantelpiece was a low-
powered bulb on a retort-stand for lighting. Instead of the fireplace, [he] used
an old-fashioned black stove, the pipe of which disappeared straight through
the ceiling. As in Kundmanngasse there were always flowers in a vase on the
windowsill, and there was a house plant. [He] changed the proportions of the
(neo-Gothic) window by gluing black strips of paper across it.50

Wittgenstein’s rooms at Cambridge.

From Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein

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 David Theodore

“There was a metal safe in which he kept his manuscripts. The rooms
were always scrupulously clean.”51 This is a hard spartan space, showing
at once a concern with aesthetics (he manipulated the window propor-
tions), moral hygiene (“scrupulously clean”), the erotic body (bathtub and
nubile silhouette), purist, functional, mechanical objects (deck chairs, fan,
folding card table). As usual, he organized a simple architecture that blurs
the boundaries between good thinking and good living.

§11. At Cambridge he tried again to write philosophy. At first he thought

he would start his book with a description of nature, untrammeled na-
ture, Goethe’s great teacher.52 It is a question of order. “If I am thinking
for myself, without wanting to write a book, I jump around the theme.
That is my natural way of thinking. To force my thoughts in a row is a
torment for me. Should I try to do it now? I waste an unspeakable effort
in ordering my thoughts, an effort that perhaps has no value at all.”53
He wrote in metaphors, apothegms, aphorisms.54 Self-knowledge is
different from knowledge of objects. The former is the more urgent
problem. “Scientific questions might interest me, but never really grab
on to me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that for me. I am
indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not to the other
questions.”55
He left mostly fragments, annotations, notebooks, marginalia, an
enormous Nachlass.56 His method resists systematization. It is a dia-
logue, a confession.57

§12. That is what he wrote; what did he read? He “was fond of short
detective stories, especially those published in a detective story magazine
by the American firm Street & Smith.”58 “They are rich in mental vita-
mins and calories” he said.59 He read American detective stories, then,
but also Weininger, William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience,
Augustine’s Confessions, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief and Hadji Murad,
Hebel’s Schatzkaestlein, Renan’s Le peuple d’Isräel, George Fox’s Jour-
nal, and Dr Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations.

Among the books he brought with him to England as a student were a beauti-
fully made facsimile edition of Leonardo da Vinci’s technical inventions, the
mathematical work concerning the mechanics of Galileo Galilei, the sixteenth
century Machinae novi by the Italian Veranzio Fausti, a number of seventeenth

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The Exemplary Life of an Architect

century German Theatri machinarum on mechanical and hydraulic engineer-

ing, and eighteenth century French and Italian studies on the aeronautics of bal-
looning. He had two works by Gottlob Frege, the logician whom he so much
admired, bound in one volume with a cover of saffian leather designed by the
Wiener Werkstätte and provided with new titles that pleased him better.60

An architect’s library, then, on Vitruvian subjects; yet, he died while

reading Black Beauty.61
(“It is questionable if when he died he had ever come to any under-
standing of the number 2. Two what?”)62

§13. At Cambridge he again felt he was a failure as a teacher. His lack

of connection with these shy young Englishmen had to do with his ten-
dency toward homiletic instead of maieutic pedagogical relationships.
He was farouche, scabrous, refulgent. He was accused of not being able
to hold a discussion. Julian Bell circulated a poem:

For he talks nonsense, numerous statements makes,

Forever his own vow of silence breaks:
Ethics, aesthetics, talks of day and night,
And calls things good or bad, and wrong or right.
Who, on any issue, ever saw,
Ludwig refrain from laying down the law?
In every company he shouts us down,
And stops our sentence stuttering his own;
Unceasing argues, harsh, irate and loud,
Sure that he’s right, and of his rightness proud.

Obviously disciples were better than collaborators.

Disciples included Maurice Drury. S.K. Bose. Desmond Lee. Norman
Malcolm.
Friends included Engineer William Eccles. Economist John Maynard
Keynes. Gardener Hermann Postl. Architect Paul Engelmann. Chartered
accountant Gilbert Pattisson.
Lovers included Marguerite Respinger. Ben Francis. David Pinsent. Ben
Richards. The rough boys at the Prater. Georg Kreisel. Francis Skinner.63
(The list of people missing from his life, given his social connections,
is also significant. Conspicuous absences include Virginia Woolf,

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 David Theodore

Robert Musil, Les Ballets Russes, Arnold Schoenberg [whose music he

despised], Arthur Schnitzler, anyone from Paris.)
Sometimes a number of these companions might gather in his rooms
for philosophical “at-homes”: at home, thinking, among friends, disci-
ples, lovers.

§14. And the riddle of the earth and the cord? Malcolm continues:
”Without stopping to work it out, everyone present [at the Saturday
afternoon philosophy meetings] was inclined to say that the distance of
the cord from the surface of the earth would be so minute that it would
be imperceptible. But this is wrong. The actual distance would be near-
ly six inches … This is the kind of mistake that occurs in philosophy. It
consists in being misled by a picture.”64
We should not be misled by pictures of his one white house. Kund-
mangasse is not a representation of the logic of the Tractatus. It does not
illustrate his philosophy. His architecture is not doctrinal; it is ethical. It
does not belong to a movement in architecture, but rather to the move-
ment of his days. It consists not simply of what he built but of how he
lived. “Sound doctrines are useless,” he brooded to himself. “You have
to change your life. (Or the direction of your life.)”65

§15. Can we say what Kundmanngasse means? Is it a gesture? Can we

“follow it with a gesture”? “Architecture immortalizes and glorifies
something,” he wrote. “Therefore there can be no architecture where
there is nothing to glorify.”66 He believed that in times to come, we
might again have something to celebrate, something to monumentalize.
Then ornament, his beloved baroque, would again have meaning, the
architectural gesture would again be gravid and full.

§16. There is no small irony that in 1971 Kundmanngasse, his “hot-

house plant,” was declared a monument and spared demolition.67

notes

i Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Rout-

ledge and Kegan Paul 1922).
2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harper &
Brother, 1958), 45.

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The Exemplary Life of an Architect

3 Quoted in Rush Rhees, “Postscript,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Rec-

ollections, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield 1981),
224–5.
4 Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York:
Macmillan 1990), 156.
5 Friedrich Waismann, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle: Conversations
Recorded by Friedrich Waismann, ed. Brian McGuinness, trans. Joachim
Schulte and Brian McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1979), 68–9. To
be sure, this is not what Heidegger meant, although it is still an insightful
comment about Heidegger. Much has been written lately about the rela-
tionships between Wittgenstein (analytic) and Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty,
and Husserl (continentals; a bibliography is included in Nicholas F. Grier,
Wittgenstein and Phenomenology: A Comparative Study of the Later
Wittgenstein, Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty [Albany, ny: State
University of New York Press 1981]) detailing connections both superfi-
cial (e.g., Heidegger and Wittgenstein loved nature, dressed like peasants,
thought music beyond the power of philosophy, etc.) and complex (e.g.,
the similarity of arguments and argument structures in Wittgenstein and
Merleau-Ponty: see Philip Dwyer, Sense and Subjectivity: A Study of
Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty [Leiden: E.J. Brill 1990]). The Wittgen-
stein I detail here would differ from Heidegger on exactly this question of
ethics, from Husserl on the question of science, and from Merleau-Ponty
on the availability of prelinguistic experience.
6 The relationship between Wittgenstein’s architecture and his philosophy,
the search for what Nana Last calls “a possible mediation between archi-
tecture and philosophy,” is the crux of most considerations of Wittgen-
stein as an architect; see Nana Last, “Transgressions and Inhabitations:
Wittgensteinian Spatial Practices between Architecture and Philosophy,”
Assemblage 35 (1998): 36–47. But it is precisely this search for a symme-
try between the two, an isomorphism of philosophical and architectural
structures, that I try to lay aside here. The actual forms of Wittgenstein’s
buildings are quite secondary to the question of whether the shape of his
entire life made him an architect.
7 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 2d ed., ed. G.H. von Wright and Heikki
Nyman, trans. Peter Winch (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980), 20.
8 Quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 17–18.
9 Waismann, Wittgenstein, 18. Likewise, he disapproved of G.E. Moore’s
cooperating on the book The Philosophy of G.E. Moore (1942); see

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Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 2d ed. (New York:

Oxford University Press 1984), 92.
10 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 46.
11 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 20.
12 “Excerpts from the Family Recollections” by Hermine Wittgenstein, quot-
ed in Bernhard Leitner, The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Doc-
umentation (New York: New York University Press 1976), 22.
13 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 18.
14 “It is interesting to note that Wittgenstein’s idea of a combustion chamber
together with a tangential reaction nozzle at the tip of a propeller blade
was brought into practical use for the rotor blade of a helicopter by the
Austrian designer Doblhoff during the second world war and is now
adopted by Fairey’s for their Jet Gyro dyne as well as by others.” Brian
McGuinness, Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig 1889–1921 (London:
Duckworth 1988), 68–9.
15 Terry Eagleton and Derek Jarman, Wittgenstein: The Terry Eagleton
Script, The Derek Jarman Film (London: bfi Publishing 1993), 76.
16 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 65.
17 M.O’C. Drury, “Some Notes on Conversations with Wittgenstein,” in
Jaakko Hintikka, ed., Essays on Wittgenstein in Honour of G.H. von Wright,
Acta Philosophica Fennica 28, nos. 1–3 (Amsterdam: North-Holland Pub-
lishing Co. 1976), 24.
18 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 83.
19 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, 2d ed., ed. G.H. von Wright
and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell
1979), 82.
20 Colin MacCabe, preface to Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 3.
21 Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 6.
22 Wittgenstein, Blue and Brown Books, 63.
23 Paul Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Architect (Cambridge, ma: mit Press
1993), note to page 32.
24 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 19.
25 Ibid., 16–22. Monk (Wittgenstein, 313–17) clarifies that Wittgenstein fol-
lows the racial conception of Jewishness formulated by Otto Weininger, as
opposed, say, to Karl Kraus’s cultural conception of Judaism. (Both writ-
ers had great influence on Wittgenstein.) Monk also notes the reverbera-
tions of Wittgenstein’s thoughts on Jewishness with those of Hitler in Mein
Kampf. For some recent speculation on the importance of the Hitler-

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Wittgenstein link, see Kimberley Cornish, The Jew of Linz: Hitler and
Wittgenstein, Uncovering the Secret Connection that Changed the Course
of History (London: Century 1998).
26 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 74.
27 Monk, Wittgenstein, 119.
28 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 40.
29 Cornish’s book The Jew of Linz is based on a group photo purportedly
including both young Hitler and young Wittgenstein.
30 Monk, Wittgenstein, 25.
31 Eagleton and Jarman, Wittgenstein, 65.
32 In this essay Jones develops Freud’s characterization of Analerotik
Charakter in three categories very characteristic of Wittgenstein: orderli-
ness, parsimony, and obstinacy. Ernest Jones, Papers on Psycho-Analysis,
rev. ed. (New York: Wood 1919), 664–88.
33 Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York:
Simon and Schuster 1973), 193.
34 Frank Ramsey, “Last Papers,” in The Foundations of Mathematics (Lon-
don: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1931), 238.
35 G.H. von Wright, A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man from the
Diary of David Hume Pinsent 1912–1914 (London: Basil Blackwell
1990), 5.
36 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 7.
37 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 27.
38 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 42.
39 Ibid., 22.
40 Ibid., 69–70.
41 Ibid., 28.
42 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 11.
43 “The power language has to make everything the same, which shows most
bluntly in the dictionary, and that makes it possible to personify time, is
no less amazing than if we had made gods of the logical constants”
(Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 22).
44 Monk, Wittgenstein, 234–5.
45 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 30.
46 Basil Reeve, quoted in Monk, Wittgenstein, 94.
47 Monk, Wittgenstein, 251.
48 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 182.
49 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 38.

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50 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 195. Based on D.T.A. Gasking and

A.C. Jackson, “Ludwig Wittgenstein,” The Australian Journal of Philoso-
phy 29 (1951): 234–48; Wittgenstein‘s Lectures, Cambridge 1930–1932:
From the Notes of John King and Desmond Lee, ed. H.D.P. Lee (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press 1980); and H.D.P. Lee, “Wittgenstein
1921–1931,” Philosophy 54 (1979): 211–20.
51 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 24–5.
52 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 11–12.
53 Ibid., 28.
54 Jerry H. Gill argues in Wittgenstein and Metaphor (rev. ed., New Jersey:
Humanities Press 1996) that Wittgenstein believed metaphor was consti-
tutive of reality, that meaning existed in lived relationships between the
knower and the known.
55 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 79.
56 On the importance of these notes and miscellaneous materials to the
understanding of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, see David G. Stern, “The
Availability of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” The Cambridge Guide to
Wittgenstein, ed. Hans Sluya and David G. Stern (New York: Cambridge
University Press 1996), 442–76. Wittgenstein’s Nachlass is being released
electronically by the Wittgenstein archive at the University of Bergen: see
http://www.hd.uib.no/wab/.
57 The importance of Wittgenstein’s confessional style is explored in Stanley
Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Wittgen-
stein The Philosophical Investigations, A Collection of Critical Essays, ed.
George Pitcher (New York: Anchor Books 1966), 151–85.
58 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 87. He especially liked the story “Rendezvous
with Fear” by Norbert Davis.
59 Ibid., 32. When these stories became difficult to get during World War II,
he wrote, “If the u.s.a. won’t give us detective mags we can’t give them
philosophy, & so America will be the loser in the end” (ibid., 97).
60 Wijdeveld, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 24.
61 Guy Davenport, “Wittgenstein,” in The Geography of the Imagination
(San Francisco: North Point Press 1981), 335.
62 Ibid. Fania Pascal, who taught him Russian, recalled that “This was the
time [c. 1931] when, under the influence of Wittgenstein, young men went
about saying: ‘It’s absurd to say that 2 is a number – what else could it
be?’”; see “A Personal Memoir,” Ludwig Wittgenstein: Personal Recollec-
tions, ed. Rush Rhees (Totowa, nj: Rowman and Littlefield 1981), 30.

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63 Monk provides standard accounts of Wittgenstein’s sexual relationships.

Monk notes (passim) that it is possible to argue that all these relationships
were unconsummated sexually.
64 Malcolm, Wittgenstein, 46.
65 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, 53.
66 Ibid., 69.
67 This irony seems to have escaped Robert Mugerauer, who, in his chapter
on Wittgenstein in Interpreting Environments: Tradition, Deconstruction,
Hermeneutics (Austin, tx: University of Texas Press 1995), declares that
“Wittgenstein shows us that we can be at home while remaining unsettled
and that a house is a monument to the activity of building” (22).

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