All language subtitles for Wittgenstein + Extras (1993) UK

- If people

did not sometimes

do silly things,

nothing

intelligent would

ever get

done.

If people did not sometimes do silly things,

nothing intelligent would ever get done.

(gong banging)

Hello.

My name is Ludwig Wittgenstein.

I'm a prodigy.

I'm going to tell you my story.

I was born in 1889 to a filthy-rich family in Vienna.

I would like to introduce them to you.

This is my mother, Leopoldine.

She was crazy about music.

In fact, she was so busy entertaining Brahms and Mahler

that we were left with the 26 tutors and seven grand pianos.

Hermine, my oldest sister, was an amateur painter.

Gretyl married an American and was psychoanalyzed by Freud.

Of Helene, we will remain silent.

Three of my brothers died young.

Hans ran away to America to escape Dad,

and disappeared off a boat in Chesapeake Bay.

Kurt's troops rebelled in the First World War

and the shame drove him to suicide.

Rudolf, who was bent, spent most of his time in Berlin.

When he wasn't being theatrical,

he hung out at the Scientific Humanitarian Committee.

He topped himself drinking a glass of cyanide

in his favorite bar.

That leaves Paul.

He was a concert pianist, but lost an arm in the war.

Ravel composed the Concerto for the Left Hand

especially for him.

And as for Dad, he was always in

the office investing in American bonds.

That's how we escaped inflation and stayed rich,

mega-rich, like the Rockefellers.

(piano music)

In art, it is hard to say anything

as good as saying nothing.

Even to have expressed false thought boldly

and clearly is to have gained a great deal.

Of time.

The horrors of hell can be experienced in a single day.

That's plenty of time.

(group muttering)

I was to spend a lifetime disentangling

myself from my education.

"Quite the best to be had in Vienna." Mum said.

I shared a history teacher with Adolf Hitler.

What a scream.

(group screaming)

(gun fires)

(emulating gun firing)

If someone is merely ahead of time,

it will catch him up one day.

I am in England.

Everything around me tells me so.

- Tell me how you're searching,

and I'll tell you what you're searching for.

- Who's that?

- Hail, earthling.

- Earthling, I'm a philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Who are you?

You could call me Mr. Green.

May I ask you a question?

How many toes do philosophers have?

- 10.

- Fascinating.

That's how many humans have.

- Mr. Green, philosophers are humans

and know how many toes they have.

- Oh dear.

Does that mean Martians can't be philosophers?

- Oh God. (xylophone ringing)

I escaped the family by going to Manchester University.

Manchester, an industrial town in the English north.

I remember my father saying,

"Where there's muck, there's brass."

Well, my aim was to be a pioneer in aeronautics.

But my experiments ended in a teenage failure and I gave up.

I abandoned my unsuccessful attempt to design an engine,

and, like the English hero, Dick Whittington,

went south to Cambridge to study philosophy

with Bertrand Russell.

- Why won't you just admit

there's no rhinoceros in this room?

- Because, Professor Russell,

the world is made up of facts, not things.

- Look for yourself.

I tell you for a fact, there is no rhinoceros in this room!

The issue is metaphysical, not empirical.

- I thought the next big step in philosophy would be yours.

Now I am not so sure.

- Professor Russell.

Professor Russell.

Ssshht!

- Dear Ottoline, Herr Schwinckel-Winkel,

hard at it on universals and particulars.

He has the pure intellectual passion

in the highest degree, and it makes me love him.

He says every morning he begins his work with hope,

and every evening he ends in despair.

- We both have the same feeling

that one must understand or die.

He is the young man one hopes for.

His disposition is that of the artist, intuitive and moody.

He affects me, just as I affect you.

I get to know every turn and twist of

the ways in which I irritate and depress you

from watching how--

- [Bertrand] He irritates and depresses me.

And at the same time I love and admire him.

His boiling passion may drive him anywhere.

(piano music)

♪ In short, my medievalism's affectation ♪

♪ Born of a morbid love of admiration ♪

- God, the English are a queer bunch.

Lady Ottoline Morrell was the queerest.

She was fucking the gardener and Russell.

All the fun was in the country houses.

Everyone else was miserable.

Cambridge was miserable.

There was no oxygen there.

Can you imagine spending your evenings

with those pretentious apostles?

I was no fun at parties.

♪ Stick away, if he sometimes expresses ♪ ♪

- The drunken chit-chat of British intellectuals bored me.

So, in desperation,

I fled to Norway and built a small house on a fjord at

the end of the world.

I started to write Notes On Logic.

How can I be a logician before I'm a human being?

The most important thing is to settle accounts with myself.

It's much easier here in Norway.

The solitude is bliss.

I can do more work here in a day

than I can in a month around people.

Cambridge was absolutely unbearable!

A brothel.

Impossible to concentrate.

Here at last,

I feel, I'm solving things.

- I've heard Herr Wittgenstein has gone to Norway.

- I told him it would be dark.

He said he hated day light.

I told him it would be lonely.

He said he prostituted his mind talking

to intelligent people.

I said he was mad.

He said God preserve him from sanity.

- God certainly will.

It's shocking that he's never read Aristotle.

- I don't merely have the visual impression of a pillar box.

I know this is a pillar box.

- I know this is a hand.

And what is a hand?

Why this for example.

It's a certain certainty.

- I'm familiar with certainty.

- I know this film studio is in Waterloo.

But how do I know that you are Ludwig Wittgenstein?

(piano music)

- Ludwig, Ludwig!

I've just heard from Mother that you're going to join up.

Now, look, I understand wanting to do

your bit in this terrible war,

but why do you want to die in the trenches?

Why not get a clerical job in Vienna?

- Because I want to go to the front.

- Why put yourself at risk like this, Ludwig?

You've been exempted, for Christ's sake.

- Standing eye to eye with death will

give me the chance to be a decent human being.

I'll be doing something.

(piano slamming)

- I'm going as well.

We've got to do our duty.

(bombs exploding) (guns firing)

- Where two principles meet which cannot

be reconciled with one another,

then each calls the other a fool or a heretic.

(gun fires)

I'm hated because I'm a volunteer!

I'm surrounded by people who hate me.

The nearness of death will bring me the light of life.

God, enlighten me.

God, enlighten me!

(gun fires)

I am a worm.

Pray God that I become a man.

God be with me.

God be with me!

Amen!

(gun fires)

I know this world exists.

But its meaning is problematic.

Am I good or am I evil?

When my conscience upsets my equilibrium,

then I am not in agreement with

something.

What is it?

Is it the world?

Or is it God?

- Wittgenstein has been taken prisoner.

- Oh, how fascinating!

- I am a prisoner of war in Monte Cassino

under the Italians.

I hope we shall see each other after the war.

Being shot at many times has altered

the way I think about philosophy.

So has Tolstoy's Gospel In Brief.

I have written a book called Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

It combines logical symbolism with religious mysticism.

It's better with no shoes, no shoes at all.

Love, Ludwig.

- I must send him some more cocoa tablets.

Sounds like he's rather depressed.

Does he know you've been in prison, Bertie?

- I doubt it.

- Such nice manners always, Ludwig.

Good stock.

What is logical symbolism?

- Oh, it's too difficult to explain.

- That's the trouble with you, Bertie.

You can never answer a straight question.

(bells ringing)

- I was released from prison camp

on the 21st of August, 1919.

I wanted to get my Tractatus published,

so I went back to Vienna.

(piano music)

- Ludwig!

Ludwig, what do you mean you want to

teach in a rural school?

It would be like a precision instrument opening crates.

Look, you were decorated in the war.

Bertrand Russell says you're the great philosophical hope.

You can't go and teach in the provinces.

- Hermine, you remind me of someone

looking out through a closed window

who cannot explain the strange movements of someone outside.

You can't tell what sort of storm is raging,

or that this person might only be managing to

stay on his feet with difficulty.

- Well, I still think it's a waste of your talents.

If you hadn't been so daft and given all your money to us,

you could publish your book yourself,

without having to bow and scrape to publishers.

- I don't want to force my philosophy on the world,

if a publisher won't publish it.

Can't you understand that?

Well, I would rather have a happy person

for a brother than an unhappy saint.

- I am going to teach.

♪ Three blind mice ♪

- Those truth possibilities of its truth-argument

which verify, and prositions,

I shall call its truth grounds.

- Yes, good.

Proposition, so what is this here?

What do you call this here?

Logic.

What's this here?

What do you call this here?

Teaching you is a, thoroughly, unrewarding experience.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Do you understand what I'm saying?

It's a waste of time.

It's a waste of my time, your time, everybody's time.

Do you understand, do you understand what I'm saying?

Oh, my God!

Oh, my dear, dear God!

Teaching proved to be a sham.

I had to do a runner,

and lie about my brutality towards the children.

They just weren't any good at logic or maths,

and they drove me crazy.

I kidded myself that my background

and class weren't important, but I stood out like

a sore thumb at these provincial schools.

The parents hated me and called me strange.

I felt guilty for years.

Somehow I had failed.

Morally.

- This is a red pillar box.

- How do you know that?

- I've done my homework.

Green is green.

- Children learn by believing adults.

Doubt comes after belief.

- I know what I believe.

Where I come from there are no adults, and so no doubts.

- If I post this letter to New York,

does that strengthen my conviction

that the earth exists?

- The earth does exist.

And so do Martians.

(xylophone ringing)

- Well, you end the book with the line,

whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.

Why didn't you?

I don't understand a word, Ludwig.

It's gobbledygook.

How much were you paid for this?

- I was paid nothing for the rights,

and will receive no royalties.

- Typical, you won't be able to buy a pair of socks soon.

- But I have published a book.

- I heard that the book was only published

because Bertrand Russell wrote an introduction.

- [Ludwwig] I have Russell's introduction.

He can't understand a word either.

- [Hermine] Who can?

- Hermine, we must improve ourselves.

That's all we can do to better the world.

- Is it true you're designing Gretyl a brand-new house?

- That's right, the whole thing.

Right down to the window latches and the door handles.

- Well, I hope it's more comprehensible than your book.

(phone ringing)

- Maynard?

Maynard?

- Waistcoat!

- Ah.

His book is obscure and too short.

But good.

My introduction got it published.

- Yes of course Bertie,

but I still think we should get him back to Cambridge.

- Maynard we're gonna be late.

- Well Maynard, you're going to have to sort out his grants.

In a moment of amnesia,

he gave away all his money to his brothers and sisters.

An absolute fortune, I'm told.

- If I can sort out the economies of the world,

I ought to be able to sort out a stipend for Wittgenstein.

That is, if Cambridge will still have him.

- Oh, I'm sure they'll have him.

His Tractatus is all the rage, whatever we may think of it.

- Well, leave it to me, I know how to get him back.

- Oh, er, Maynard, hold on a moment, I just...

- Johnny, do you feel like a trip to Vienna?

- Vienna?

(religious chanting) (bells ringing)

Dr. Wittgenstein.

Dr. Wittgenstein.

I've come to take you home.

- Home?

Where's that? - Cambridge.

- Cambridge.

God help me.

- I have letters from Mr. Keynes and Mr. Russell.

I should introduce myself.

Johnny.

Mr. Russell asked me to tell you that

you're the greatest philosopher of our time.

- Well...

Tell me, Johnny, are you a philosopher?

- Yes.

- Are you happy?

You know, you really should give it up.

Get out while you still can.

(calming piano music)

- Lydia!

- Ah, Maynard.

- God has arrived.

He was on the 5:15 train.

- Are you sure it's a good idea bringing him here, Maynard?

I've heard he's difficult and peculiar.

- A philosopher is a citizen of no community.

- Does he make fit with Bloomsbury friends?

He seems so heavy-handed and Germanic.

- Yes, he is.

- Why are you all so interesting in him?

- Because he's a genius, Lydoushka.

- Yes, but what is he doing?

- He's trying to define for us the limits of language.

And what it is to have communication, one with another.

- Don't be so pompous.

- Dearest darling, I am going to be pompous.

The country needs more than one decent philosopher.

Bertie needs some competition.

Our Viennese import might just do the trick.

- Maynardoushka, your head, infinitely more flexible

than my legs.

(laughing)

- What are you doing?

Everyone's waiting for you.

- [Ludwig] Go away, please!

They're torturing me!

- For God's sake, just open your mouth

and say the first thing that comes into your head.

- [Ludwig] Don't be so ridiculous.

- Listen, just get through this seminar

and we can go to the cinema.

A dog, cannot lie.

Neither can he be sincere.

A dog may be expecting his master to come.

Why can't he be expecting him to come next Wednesday?

Is it because he doesn't have language?

If a lion could speak,

we would not be able to understand what he said.

Why do I say such a thing?

- If we could understand him,

I shouldn't think we'd have too much trouble with a lion.

- We could get an interpreter.

- Do you mean for me or for the lion?

Yes, yes, we, we could get an interpreter.

But what possible use would that be?

To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.

It's what we do and who we are that

gives meaning to our words.

I can't understand the lion's language,

because I don't know what his world is like.

How can I know the world a lion inhabits?

Do I fail to understand him because

I can't peer into his mind?

What's going on behind my words, when I say,

this is a very pleasant pineapple?

No, please, take your time.

- [Man] The thought, Professor.

- I see.

And what is the thought that lies behind the words,

this is a very pleasant pineapple?

- This is a very pleasant pineapple.

Listen to me.

We imagine the meaning of what we say as something queer,

mysterious, hidden from view.

But nothing is hidden!

Everything is open to view!

It's just...

It's just philosophers who muddy the waters.

- Professor Wittgenstein.

You can't know this pain.

Only I can.

- Are you sure you know it?

You don't doubt you had a pain just then?

- How could I?

- If we can't speak of doubt here,

we can't speak of knowledge either.

- I don't follow.

- It makes no sense to speak of knowing something

in a context where we could not possibly doubt it.

Therefore to say, I know I am in pain,

is entirely senseless.

When you want to know the meaning of a word,

don't look inside yourself,

look at the uses of the word in our way of life.

Look at how we behave.

- Are you saying there are no philosophical problems?

- There are,

the linguistic,

mathematical, ethical,

logistic and, religious problems,

but there are no genuine philosophical problems!

- You're trivializing philosophy.

- Philosophy is just the by-product

of misunderstanding language!

Why don't you realize that?

- Oh, dear.

He can't bear disagreement, can he?

- [Ludwig] What are you doing?

- Making notes on your class before I forget it.

- Are you mad?

You'll ruin the plot.

- Ssshht.

There is no plot.

- There might be.

Put it away.

Put it away this instant.

- What did you say about Fortnum & Mason?

- Don't be ridiculous.

There was no competition between the cinema and seminar.

I loved films.

Especially Westerns and musicals.

Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton were my favorite actresses.

I always sat in the front row.

Film felt like a shower bath, washing away the lecture.

I hated the newsreels.

Far too patriotic.

I felt the makers must have been master pupils of Goebbels.

As for playing the national anthem

at the end, I'd sneak out.

(piano music)

Come on, Maynard!

Speed it up.

- Can't go any faster, it's making me giddy.

- Should I go any faster, Ludwig?

- No, no, you keep going as you are.

Come on Maynard, keep it up, keep it up, keep it up!

You're slowing the whole thing down.

- I'm done for.

- You've ruined the whole thing!

We were just getting into rhythm.

- Go away and play with someone else!

- All right.

You can be the sun this time, it's easier.

I'll be the earth,

and Lydia can be the moon.

- We take rest.

Take tea.

Come along, Maynard.

- Oh, dear.

I wonder where I went wrong?

- Oh, Bertie, do listen to this.

It's Julian Bell's satirical poem of Ludwig.

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.

Such faults are common, shared by all in part,

but Wittgenstein pontificates on art.

- [Group] Witters gitters, witters gitters, witters gitters!

Fairy, fairy, fairy!

- Idiot!

- What does this mean?

- It's a gesture of contempt.

- A cyclist did this to me as I was crossing the road.

I decided then and there to kill myself.

- Are you coming to the Palladium with us this evening?

- What's the logical structure of this gesture?

It doesn't have one!

That means I've spent most of my life

groping down a blind alley.

- Isn't it rather an over-reaction to kill yourself,

because somebody gives you a V-sign?

- Philosophy hunts for the essence of meaning.

There's no such thing.

There's no such thing!

Just the way we do things in everyday life

and things like that.

The college porter knows that.

- Is that what you're planning to do

for the rest of your life?

- Well I, I shall start by committing suicide.

- Champagne before you go?

- Um, do you know...

I, I'd love a cup of tea.

(calming music)

- How like a philosopher to hate philosophy.

- He thinks ordinary working people have the answers.

He wants me to give up philosophy.

Perhaps I should.

Philosophy just states what everyone admits.

How does philosophy take the measure of this?

- It's not supposed to.

It'd be like complaining that you can't play

a tune on a carrot. - Precisely.

- [Maynard] Do you think philosophy is useless?

- Oh, no.

It serves Ludwig as a therapy.

- Are you going to take his advice?

- I was destined for the pit.

My parents gave up everything to get me here.

I'd be quite happy to go back,

but it would break their hearts.

- Well, what about Aristotle?

- What about Aristotle?

I, I've never read Aristotle.

What can he tell us, anyway?

The answers are in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Saint Matthew.

- How marvelous!

I didn't know you were a Christian, Ludwig!

- I'm not.

It's just that I look at everything from

a religious point of view.

Why is there anything at all rather than just nothing?

- Well, how the bloody blue blazes should I know?

I'm the woman, you are the philosopher.

- The most important part of my philosophy

hasn't been written.

I can't write it, it can never be written.

- Oh, bunkum!

A full English breakfast and a spot of application.

- I doubt it'll be understood in the future.

People, culture, the air,

everything will be different in the future.

We're mutating.

- You know, your obsession with perfection is quite,

quite ludicrous.

- I want to be perfect, don't you?

- Christ, no.

- Then I don't see how we can be friends.

- Neither do I.

- I used to believe that language gave us

a picture of the world.

But it can't give us a picture of how it does that.

That would be like trying to see yourself seeing something.

How language does that is beyond expression.

That is the mystery.

That was all wrong.

Language isn't a picture at all.

- What is it, then?

- It's,

a tool.

An instrument.

There isn't just one picture of the world,

there are lots of different language games,

different forms of life,

different ways of doing things with words.

They don't all hang together!

- What do you mean?

- All I mean is the limits of my language

are the limits of my world.

We keep running up against the walls of our cage.

I'm terribly sorry.

You have a worthless teacher today.

I...

I'm all cleaned out.

Please forgive me.

- That was quite masterly.

- It was frightful. - I don't know.

Made me feel like a vegetable.

- How could it possibly?

It doesn't feel like anything to be a vegetable.

- I just can't see it, Professor.

It somehow just seems natural to me to say,

I know I'm in pain.

- Oh,

natural.

Tell me,

why does it seem more natural

for people to believe that the sun goes round the earth,

rather than the other way round?

- Well, obviously, because it looks that way.

- I see.

Then how would it look if the earth went round the sun?

- Erm...

Well, I suppose...

Yes, I see what you mean.

- Seminar,

flick.

Seminar.

Seminar.

Flick.

Seminar.

Flick.

On and on it went.

Cambridge, Cambridge, Cambridge.

No wonder everyone dreamed of Moscow.

Keynes and Russell had both been there.

Bertie, always the opportunist,

wrote a shilling shocker called,

The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism.

He condemned it out of hand.

But, as everyone knows,

the best of the Cambridge lot became spies.

My dream was to go to the Soviet Union

and work as a manual laborer.

I've fixed you up a job with a local engineering firm.

- Why?

- I thought you'd be pleased.

You'd be working with your hands.

You should do something useful.

- But Ludwig, my training's academic.

That's the challenge.

- I'm going to Russia.

I shall try to find us both manual jobs there.

- Why do you want to go to Russia?

- Oh, by the way, you'll have to lend me a tie.

- Professor Wittgenstein,

on behalf of the Institute for Foreign Relations,

I can offer you two things.

The chair in philosophy at Kazan University

or a teaching post in philosophy at Moscow University.

- Err, comrade, please.

I don't want to teach.

I want to work as a manual laborer,

either in a factory or on a collective farm.

- But Professor, (speaking foreign language).

(speaking foreign language)

I'm terribly sorry, Professor Wittgenstein,

but this is absolutely out of the question.

The one thing that is not in short supply

in the Soviet Union is unskilled labor.

(speaking foreign language)

(speaking foreign language), Professor.

We must teach the frozen circumstances to

sing by playing them their own melody.

Professor Wittgenstein,

I do recommend you to read more Hegel.

(laughing)

(speaking foreign language)

- I couldn't possibly read Hegel.

I'd go stark raving mad.

Tell me, have you read Trotsky on art?

That's much more interesting.

- (speaking foreign language), Professor,

(speaking foreign language).

Professor, (speaking foreign language).

(bell ringing)

Next one.

- How was Russia?

- Well, at least Lenin's state has ensured

that there's no unemployment.

It is an ordered society.

Are you enjoying yourself?

- Yes, I am.

You were right.

Did you find yourself a job in Russia?

- Sadly, no.

It looks like I'm stuck with Cambridge and philosophy.

- Ludwig, give it up.

- What the hell are you playing at, Ludwig?

I've just been talking to Johnny.

- What do you mean?

- I mean all this poppycock about engineering

and him getting a job.

What do you think his parents will think?

- I haven't the foggiest.

- Johnny's parents are working people.

His father's a miner.

They sacrificed everything they have to

get him to Cambridge.

- What's Johnny's parents got to do with it?

- Listen, Wittgenstein, Johnny's parents are workers.

That's what you admire,

when it's confined to the pages of Tolstoy.

- I've never met Johnny's parents.

- I strongly advise you not to.

You're foisting your own self-hatred onto their son.

- You've been reading Sigmund Freud.

- [Bertrand] What of it?

- It's dangerous stuff!

Believe me, it takes one Viennese to know another.

- Freud's nothing to do with Johnny sweating it

out in some god-awful factory.

You can't do this, Wittgenstein.

You can't use Johnny as fodder for your own fantasies.

What I do is none of your business.

- It's my business to stop you from,

oh, what's your word, infecting too many young men.

You have a terrible power over them, can't you see that?

Half of Cambridge goes around imitating your mannerisms.

- You know I've never encouraged disciples.

- I'm talking about you, not your ideas.

You lord it over others and you don't even know it.

All aristocrats idealize the common folk,

as long as they keep stoking the boilers.

I should know, I was brought up like that, too.

- If you're talking about my upbringing,

that was a long time ago!

In another country!

How can I possibly speak to a man

who believes I corrupt others?

- I'm simply quoting your own words.

- Russell, I would like you to know that

our friendship is now over.

I had a fearful row with Russell yesterday.

He said I was an evil influence.

- What is worrying you, Ludwig?

Is it your logic or your sins?

- Both.

My sins mostly.

- Sins, sinners, sinning.

What nonsense you do talk.

Well, you mustn't expect any sympathy from me.

I'm not a virtuous man.

- I never imagined you were.

Do you know, Maynard, every hour, every day,

I keep my feet with the greatest difficulty,

and the slightest gust of dishonesty would

be enough to bowl me over forever.

That's why people think I'm so strange.

- I don't know what to say to you.

You're suffering from a terminal case of moral integrity.

If you'd just allow yourself to be

a little more sinful, you'd stand a chance of salvation.

- Salvation is the only thing that concerns me.

And I know we're not here to have a good time.

- Spoken like a true Protestant.

Ludwig, my dear, there's nothing in the world

like the warmth of a sated body.

- For me, it's as if I'm being burnt by a freezing wind.

- Pull yourself together.

- Philosophy is a sickness of the mind.

I mustn't infect too many young men.

How unique and irreplaceable Johnny is.

And yet, how little I realize this when I am with him.

That's always been a problem.

But living in a world where such a love is illegal,

and trying to live open and honest

is a complete contradiction.

I have known Johnny three times.

And each time I began with feeling

that there was nothing wrong.

But after, I felt shamed.

- [Johnny] What are you thinking?

- Oh, just some,

idea.

- What idea?

- Well, for many years at the center of philosophy

was a picture of the lonely human soul brooding

over its private experiences.

- Yeah, everyone knows that.

- This soul is a prisoner of his own body,

and he's locked out from contact with others

by the walls of their bodies.

I wanted to get rid of this picture.

There is no private meaning.

We are what we are, only because,

we share a common language and common forms of life.

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Do you understand what I'm saying?

Yes.

Yes, I'd like that very much.

Yes, Wednesday.

Oh, does that suit you?

It suits me fine, yes.

Yes, I thought so, yes.

Yes, he was.

Really?

Oh, Bertie?

Yes, I know, yes, yes.

For many years, yes.

Christ!

- Professor, you once said the Tractatus had solved

all the problems of philosophy.

- Yes.

So I thought at the time.

What I meant was that I tried to show

the sort of things that philosophy could say,

and these aren't really important.

What's much more important is all

the things it can't articulate.

- Doesn't cut the mustard, philosophy?

You think. - That's right.

So I thought at the time.

In fact, I still think so, but for different reasons.

- Now, talking about your more recent work,

the Philosophical Investigations and so on.

- That's right.

In this later work I abandoned the idea that language is

a sort of picture.

That's just a misleading metaphor.

I mean, you might say that the word

handbag is a picture of a handbag.

But what about words like hello, perhaps, oh hell,

what do they give us a picture of?

- So how would you now define the relationship

between language and the world?

- Oh, in lots of different ways.

My mistake had been to think that there

was only one way of talking at stake here.

I came to see that there are lots of

different things we do with language.

Different language games, as I call them.

And the meaning of the word is just the way

it's used in a particular language game.

And what do you now believe the task of philosophy to be?

- Philosophical puzzles arise because

we tend to mix up one language game with another.

For example, people puzzle over

the nature of something they call the soul.

But this may just be because they're thinking

of the soul along the lines of a physical object.

They're confusing one way of talking with another.

- The job of philosophy is to sort out these language games?

- Exactly.

They're all perfectly in order as they are.

Philosophy in no sense can question them.

Philosophy leaves everything exactly as it is.

- Professor Wittgenstein, you've been associated

with the argument that there can't be a private language.

Could you explain this a little?

- What I mean is this,

we learn to use words, because we belong to a culture.

A form of life.

A practical way of doing things.

In the end, we speak as we do, because of what we do.

And all this is a properly public affair.

Philosophers in the tradition of Descartes

start from the lonely self,

brooding over its private sensations.

I want to overturn this centuries-old model.

I want to start from our culture,

our shared practical life together,

and look at what we think and feel,

and say it in these public terms.

- [Man] Professor, thank you very much.

- I'm thinking of going away.

- Not again, Ludwig.

You've spent your entire life running away.

- I'm serious, Maynard.

- Whereto this time?

Norway, Vienna?

Swansea?

Not the Soviet Union again?

- What's wrong with the Soviet Union?

- The place is one enormous labor camp.

- There's nothing wrong with labor.

- There is if they shoot you for not doing it.

- [Ludwig] I want to give up teaching philosophy

and concentrate on my book.

- Why not do it in Cambridge, and be paid?

- I'm going to Ireland to live by the sea.

- In Ireland they shoot you if you work.

Oh, Ludwig.

- I know, I'm a complete bloody disaster.

- We love you.

- Dr. Wittgenstein.

- Oh, you're here, good.

At last.

- You couldn't have chosen a more remote place.

Well, how's the work on your book?

- Creeping along.

- Well that means you've penned a masterpiece.

What's the news from the doctor?

- It's not good, I'm afraid.

- I hope it's not anything serious.

- Last week I saw a specialist in Dublin.

I have cancer of the prostate.

- Oh, I'm sorry.

- Yeah.

It responds well to hormone treatment at early stages.

- Is there anything I can do?

- Don't think I'm afraid of dying.

It's death that gives life its meaning and shape.

You can take me back to Cambridge.

I don't wanna die here.

- Any time you like.

- You know,

I'd quite like to have composed

a philosophical work which consisted entirely of jokes.

- Why didn't you?

- Sadly, I didn't have a sense of humor.

- Let me tell you a little story.

There was once a young man who dreamed

of reducing the world to pure logic.

Because he was a very clever young man,

he actually managed to do it.

When he'd finished his work, he stood back and admired it.

It was beautiful.

A world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy.

Countless acres of gleaming ice stretching to the horizon.

So the clever young man looked around

the world he'd created and decided to explore it.

He took one step forward and fell flat on his back.

You see, he'd forgotten about friction.

The ice was smooth and level and stainless.

But you couldn't walk there.

So the clever young man sat down and wept bitter tears.

But as he grew into a wise old man,

he came to understand that roughness

and ambiguity aren't imperfections,

they're what make the world turn.

He wanted to run and dance.

And the words and things scattered upon the ground

were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous.

The wise old man saw that that was the way things were.

But something in him was still homesick for the ice,

where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless.

Though he had come to like the idea of the rough ground,

he couldn't bring himself to live there.

So now he was marooned between earth and ice,

at home in neither.

And this was the cause of all his grief.

(piano music)

- Hail Chromodynamics, Lord of Quantum.

This is Quark, Charm and Strangeness reporting.

Concerning the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein deceased.

The solution to the riddle of life in space and time

lies outside space and time.

But as you know and I know, there are no riddles.

If a question can be put at all, it can also be answered.

(sad music)