[HN Gopher] Wittgenstein at War
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Wittgenstein at War
Author : lermontov
Score : 50 points
Date : 2022-07-14 17:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newstatesman.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newstatesman.com)
| abeppu wrote:
| > Remarkably, Wittgenstein was in occasional correspondence with
| English friends throughout the war. He records letters from
| Russell, John Maynard Keynes, and especially David Pinsent, a
| Cambridge contemporary whom he loved and thought of constantly.
|
| That does seem almost shocking. How does that even work? I would
| have thought that if an active service military personnel tried
| to mail something from the front to an enemy country, it would
| surely be intercepted and thoroughly examined and/or stopped.
| Would each side send letters through some mutual acquaintance in
| some neutral country? Did the Austo-Hungarians not have censors
| on military communication? Did the already alienated author of so
| many numbered cryptic statements ever fear he would be
| investigated as a spy?
| pomian wrote:
| I would think that the sanctity of "the mail" was observed
| internationally. Mail was opened only secretly, and by spies,
| and spying was always considered a dishonourable profession. So
| even if opened, it would have been done secretly, and not
| revealed to anyone, except on a bed to know, basis.
| ginko wrote:
| WW1 was this weird inbetween of 19th century formation warfare
| and 20th century all-out total industrial war. The level of
| information control and propaganda was nothing like WW2,
| especially in the beginning.
| abeppu wrote:
| Ok, but if you're an Austro-Hungarian or German postmaster,
| and you have some number of letters going to French or
| British recipients, and somewhere there's a shifting front
| line of trenches and tanks and mustard gas, can you really
| roll up with mail bag to some quiet point and exchange it for
| incoming mail with some French or Italian counterpart? That
| seems like even if there wasn't a system of censors trying to
| make sure no military secrets are leaked, it would have
| required a great act of trust that no one on the other side
| had decided to mail a bomb or poison or at least instructions
| to a saboteur.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Maybe they'd be transported through neutral territory or
| over the sea on neutrally-flagged vessels.
| mudita wrote:
| Yes, I found this related answer to a question on
| r/askhistorians about letters from prisoners of wars: htt
| ps://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/55p22q/how_w
| ...
|
| "letters from and to POWs were usually sent through non-
| belligerent countries and humanitarian organizations such
| as Switzerland or the International Red Cross"
| _0ffh wrote:
| It might be interesting to know that the author of this, Thomas
| Nagel, is quite renowned himself.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/8M030
| gumby wrote:
| > Now, for the first time in his life, he was living and working
| side by side with a bunch of illiterate peasants and
| proletarians, and he found it hard to keep his disgust in check.
|
| It's easy to see how Witgenstein could fit into midcentury
| British academia. This attitude is echoed by Eric Blair.
|
| He's famous as a writer (under the name George Orwell) focused on
| the suffering of the lower classes, yet he explicitly despised
| the choices of the unfortunate. His writing on his time in Burma
| is correctly recognised as fundamentally anti-colonialist, yet
| his contempt for the colonized is just as clear (but not
| discussed). In Wigan Pier it's not just the workers but the
| socialists he scorns (sure, I agree the Fabians were useless, but
| he sneeringly refers to them as 'sandal-wearing vegetarians.')
| And his most famous book, 1984, he despairs the placidity and
| fecklessness of the proletariat.
|
| Where are the nice people who are also influential?
| scythe wrote:
| As far as I know, LW was no fan of the upper class either,
| famously declaring that GE Moore had "no intelligence" and
| asserting that Bertrand Russell would "never understand" his
| _Tractatus_.
| 50 wrote:
| Reminds me of an excerpt from Cioran's _The Temptation to
| Exist_ : "Only the illiterate have given me that frisson of
| being which indicates the presence of truth. Carpathian
| shepherds have made a much deeper impression upon me than the
| professors of Germany, the wits of Paris. I have seen Spanish
| beggars, and I should like to have been their hagiographer."
| mudita wrote:
| I did mandatory military service in Germany and from my own -
| much milder, of course - personal experience I can emphasise
| with Wittgenstein.
|
| Military service can really force you out of your bubble: All
| my friends chose to do civil service instead or were unfit for
| duty. The other conscripts were very different from me and I
| never before or after in my life felt so alienated from the
| people around me.
|
| Just one example: From the environment I grew up in, I though
| that it was natural that women could be leaders, until then I
| thought that sexism would be a subtle thing, mostly of
| implicit, hidden biases. I was shocked to hear how my fellow
| soldiers talked about the one female sergeant. They made fun of
| her behind her back (even though she was a hypercompetent
| badass, for example sneaking through the forest mock killing
| all the guards during a training exercise), talked about how
| they could never respect her, because she was a woman,
| fantasised together about going up to her room to have rough
| sex with her....
|
| I really did not like them as persons, I did not want to be
| friends with any of them and I generally hated spending time
| with them (playing football together was still fun though).
| Maybe I was arrogant, too?
|
| I don't know, it's kinda fun to accuse Wittgenstein of
| arrogance from the comfort of ones chair, surrounded by ones
| bubble of similar-minded people, while imagining how one would
| be friends with the proletariat one never meets - but I kinda
| believe Wittgenstein, when he called his fellow soldiers
| bigoted. I can feel with him, trying to do his best in a
| horrible, scary situation, praying to be brave, while being
| surrounded by people he really does not like and there are
| worse things than complaining a bit in your diary in a
| situation like this.
| dwheeler wrote:
| > Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921)
| appears to be the only major work of philosophy to have been
| composed while the author was an active military combatant.
|
| I would add Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor's "Meditations" were
| probably largely written at Sirmium, where he spent much time
| planning military campaigns from 170 to 180. Not quite the same
| thing, but related.
| zabzonk wrote:
| Actually, for some computerish stuff, he and Allan Turing used
| enjoy an argument:
|
| https://www.cantorsparadise.com/when-alan-turing-and-ludwig-...
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