Wittgenstein as Exile:
A Philosophical Topography
Michael A. Peters
The philosopher is not a member of any community of ideas.
âWittgenstein (1981, § 455)
I felt strange/a stranger/in the world. When you are bound neither to men nor to God, then you are a stranger.
âWittgenstein (cited in Nedo et al. 2005, 11)
If true exile is a condition of terminal loss, why has it been transformed so easily into a potent, even enriching motif of modern culture? ⊠Modern western culture is in large part the work of exiles, émigrés, refugees.
âEdward Said (1994, 138)
Wittgenstein as Exile, Wanderer, Stranger
Wittgenstein talked of himself as an exile not only from his home city of Vienna but also of an age. He wrote of his alienation from the dominant spirit of the age and questioned its status as âcivilizationâ or even âculture.â He traveled a great deal, often spending long periods in isolation in foreign countries, mostly in the United Kingdom and Europeâin England, Norway, and Irelandâbut also in the United States. He felt his work demanded a certain location, and he used the experience of travel, of finding oneâs way in foreign countries, negotiating entry into new cultures, acquiring new languages, and learning the streets of new cities as core operating metaphors as part of his philosophy that gave thought a spatial dimension. This chapter begins by outlining the notion of exilic thought as a central trope for understanding writing in philosophy and for understanding Wittgensteinâs thinking and the intimate connection between the geography of Wittgensteinâs movements and his experience of other cultures, and his philosophy, his style of doing philosophy.1 It also discusses the notion of the philosopher as exile and how we might begin to understand the basis of exile and of being removed from oneâs own culture as a basis for thought. The chapter proceeds to discuss Wittgenstein as exile and to suggest some lines of inquiry in philosophy that might recognize the importance of location on thinking, especially in relation to education in an age where increasingly globalization, multiculturalism, and internationalization are the norm rather than the exception. This chapter then is an experiment in charting and thinking through the geography of ideas, not so much how ideas travel, as the extent to which the experience of exile and being a stranger in another culture can be the basis for a new understanding of thought that takes space and movement as twin aspects of increasingly common experiences. It represents a first attempt to extend theoretically the old saw that âtravel broadens the mindâ and to examine the educational significance of movement across and between different locations and cultures that has strong implications for questions of belonging and identity, even powerfully foreshadowing a model of postmodern subjectivity.
Exilic Thought: Exiles, ĂmigrĂ©s, Refugees
Exilic thought is the thought and âeducationâ of the exile, the wanderer, the stranger. It is a kind of uprooted thought developed away from âhomeâ under conditions of displacement and uncertainty, often in a different mother tongue, language tradition, and culture. Exilic thought is sometimes the self-imposed discipline of the âstrangerâ who develops his or her identity as an âalienâ or immigrant against the conventions of a host culture and from the perspective of an outsider. The motif of the exile/stranger in a foreign land finding his or her way about for the first time is fableized in ancient accounts of âfirst contactsâ and early cultural exchanges.2 This notion of the exile invokes the model of the anthropologist as âparticipant observer,â of someone perpetually looking in through the window of another culture, who is both observer and participant, and its self-transformative aspects. At the same time the concept of exile often marks a complex ambivalence to oneâs own home culture and, therefore, also to questions of oneâs own national, cultural, and personal identity and belongings. Exile is one of the central and most powerful motifs of the intellectual in the twentieth century: It describes a profound existential condition of cultural estrangement and sometimes alienation that defines identity in terms of migration, movement, departure, and homelessness. It prefigures a notion of thought that is ânomadic,â formed in a different context, and laced with observations that at once make the familiar strange and the strange familiarâan anthropological theme that Wittgenstein returns to again and again.
The condition of exile, although a characteristic of a globalized late modernity, has its diasporic roots in prebiblical times, defining Judaic religious identity. It has been revisited by each major ethnic and religious persecution down through the centuries. In an essay called âBeing Jewishâ from The Infinite Conversation, Maurice Blanchot, for example, argues that the positive aspect of the Jewish experience and of being Jewish is that
[T]he idea of exodus and the idea of exile can exist as a legitimate movement; it exists, through exile and through the initiative that is exodus, so that the experience of strangeness may affirm itself close to hand as an irreducible relation; it exists so that, by the authority of this experience, we might learn to speak. (1993, 125)
Gary Sauer-Thompson (2005) notes that â[b]eing Jewish affirms uprooting, the affirmation of nomadic truth, exodus, the exile. For Blanchot being Jewish is being destined to dispersion, to a sojourn without place, to a setting out on the road, a state of wandering, and not being bound to the determination of place.â3 This metaphorical reading of Blanchotâs ânomadic truthâ that foreshadows Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattariâs notion suggests that we take the idea of thinking as both a journey and as âeducationâ seriously.4 The forced or self-imposed journey requires continual readjustment under new and changing cultural conditions without the security or familiarity of âhomeâ and thus, without the normal structures that anchor and prop up identity. âNomadic truthâ is born of the travelerâs education, the exchange of ideas, and acquaintance with new landscapes of thought, born of encounters with the Other, with different cultures often producing new hybridities that are not simply the result of grafted cultural stock. Michael J. Brogan (2004), for instance, argues that the dominance of the question of âradical othernessâ in cultural and religious theory is due in no small measure to the influence of Emmanuel Levinasâs ethics of alterity, which he puts alongside Blanchotâs reflections on âbeing Jewish.â5 Both Levinas and Blanchot emphasize themes that tie truth to an existential condition of Otherness; it is these very themes that have provided a series of metaphors for living and being in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
Jewishness, Blanchot says, is âuneasiness and afflictionâ that is not restored through exile so much as attenuated and becomes the condition for the intellectual. As Levinas says of Blanchot, his philosophy of art is a
âcall to errancy,â a truth (or better, a ânon-truthâ) of ânomadism,â an affirmation of the âauthenticity of exileâ which âuprootsâ the Heideggerian universe, this fundamentally Greek world which remains stubbornly indifferent or altogether deaf to the call issued by the Hebrew scriptures. (cited in Brogan 2004, 31)
The Jewish exodus, synonymous with freedom from persecution, serves to emphasize ânomadic truthâ of the exile against âsedentary truthâ of the homelander. (There is a necessary connection here between freedom from persecution and freedom of thought.) Blanchot argues against Heidegger, and mobility and homelessness of the refugee against settled nationalism, against the notion of âroots,â âhomeland,â and âbelongingâ as a natural condition.6 To adopt this orientation is also to set up a series of less desirable parallelsâthe pilgrimsâ migration to America, the African American slave fugitives, the establishment of modernday Israel, the âhomelessnessâ of the Palestiniansâseeking the âhomelandâ or the âpromised land.â The notion of exile and âexilicâ here refers to the origin and to âreturn to the originâ as a source of identity and ethnic nationalism. Both these ideas have a ready application to Wittgenstein, who at one point, after the 1930s and 1940s, began to recognize his Jewish origins and who referred to himself as both Jewish and someone in exile.
John G. Cawelti (2001, 38) makes the most general theological and existential case when he writes, âExile is, perhaps, the central story told in European civilization: the human estate as exile from God, the garden of Eden, the homeland, the womb, or even oneself.â He goes on to make the following pertinent observation:
It may be true that exile is the central myth of European civilization, but it takes a twentieth-century mind to make such an observation and to realize its full significance. Exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern of artistic modernism. In all the arts, a surprising number of the central figures of high modernism were exiles from their native countries: Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schonberg, Bela Bartok, Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Pier Mondrian, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ford Madox Ford, W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, Paul Gropius, Mies van der Rohe, Laszlo Moholy-Nagyâthe list is extraordinary.7
âExile,â in the context of postmodernity, has the same theoretical legitimacy that âalienationâ had in the context of the modern. âAlienationâ in Marxist theory refers to the way in which human beings become estranged from the products of their labor under capitalism, the labor process, and their own nature. (âWorkâ in this context is viewed in Hegelian terms as self-realization.) In On the Jewish Question, Marx saw âalienationâ as originating in the Judeo-Christian problematic and the Christian accomplishment of the alienation of man from himself and from nature. Marx takes the notion of alienation from Ludwig Feuerbach, who shows the alienation of man from God. Thus, both concepts have their source in the Judeo-Christian problematic, but whereas alienation in particular seems more wedded to an industrial age, exile is emblematic of the age of globalization with its problems arising from (often forced) human movement and its consequencesâdisplacement, uprootedness, and homelessnessâthe effects of a space-time compression that both enables greater movement and also demands it.
As Eva Hoffman (1999, 44) explains, âtoday, at least within the framework of postmodern theory, we have come to value exactly those qualities of experience that exile demandsâuncertainty, displacement, the fragmented identity. Within this conceptual framework, exile becomes, well, sexy, glamorous, interesting.â Nomadism and diasporism have become fashionable terms in intellectual discourse. Mark Taylor (1984), the postmodern theologian, describes the postmodern self as a âwanderer,â a âdrifter,â âattached to no home,â and âalways suspicious of stopping, staying and dwelling.â This ârootless and homelessâ self is no more than a âcareless wandererâ yearning for neither âcompletionâ nor âfulfillmentâ and therefore is not unhappy.8 The figures of the exileâthe refugee, the nomad, the stranger, the wanderer, and the diasporic intellectualâbring into play a set of concepts that politically help to define the major movements of romanticism, nationalism, and imperialism: âhome,â âhomeland,â âhomelessness,â âroots,â âtradition,â and ânational identity.â
Multiculturalism defined against Kantâs universalism and âculture,â as the human capacity to will moral laws is an affirmation of the belief in the value of other cultures and of group belonging. In its radical pluralistic form it also signals a belief in the incommensurability of different cultures and societies. In one sense, as a late twentieth century ideal expressed in the notion of cultural diversity, which the modern state can accommodate constitutionally, it is not just âthe politics of recognitionâ expressed through the claims of nationalist movements, supranational associations, ethnic minorities but also the cross-cutting and sometimes conflicting âmulticultural or intercultural voices of hundreds of millions of citizens, immigrants, exiles and refugees of the twentieth centuryâ (Tully 1995, 2).9 In this sense we might argue figures of the wanderer, the stranger, and the exile increasingly characterize the shifting metaphysics of identity in an era of globalization and of âconstitutionalism in an age of diversity.â As Tully (1995, 11) puts it so forcefully âcultures are not internally homogeneous. They are continuously contested, imagined and reimagined, transformed and negotiated, both by their members and through interaction with others. The identity, and so the meaning, of any culture is, thus, aspectival rather than essential.â10
The Philosopher as Exile
In relation to exilic thought we can usefully talk of the thought of the outsider, thought in its home contextâits linguistic traditionâas against its border-crossings and, not least, the globalization (and spatialization) of philosophy. How ideas travel and are receivedâthe geography of ideasâis a philosophical trope of some significance, especially with the rise of global science and the international knowledge system. Philosophers increasingly have begun to pay attention to philosophy as biography and the influence of biography on philosophy, such as with Ray Monkâs (1990) splendid biography of Wittgenstein. By contrast, they have paid little attention to the question of exile (or travel, movement, space), with the exception of Albert Camus,11 which has been left to poets, novelists, and historians. Yet the theme of exile and stranger, which emphasizes the relation between place and thought, its place in linguistic and cultural traditions, and, perhaps strangely, the materiality and geography of thought, is a philosopheme that characterizes the present age and calls out for further analysis.12 As Michael Dummett (2001, 7) argues, place does not only refer to a land. It also refers to what gives people an identity, which if âit is not grounded in a common ethnicity, religion or language, it must be grounded in shared ideals, a shared vision of the society it is striving to create.â Place, âhome,â is that which offers a grid for identity, not merely a spatial-temporal location that individuates, but a broad cultural milieu that frames our identities. The exile, the refugee, the Ă©migrĂ©, thus is someone who becomes displaced.13
This chapter focuses on the figure, the trope, and the thought of exileâthe wanderer and the strangerâin relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein, both the man and his work, as a means to discuss its contemporary philosophical significance. Wittgenstein was a self-imposed exileâone might say a ârefugeeâ from the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. The bare bones and chronology of his movements tell a story of ceaseless mobility, of the stranger working and living in a foreign land, of a man who deliberately removed himself from his home, his family, his fortune, his country, and his native culture. He left home early to enroll in the Realschule in Linz, where he studied for three years beginning in 1903, before going to Berlin to get a degree in engineering. In 1908, when he was nineteen years old, he moved to England to study aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester. In 1911 he moved to Cambridge University to study the foundations of mathematics with Bertrand Russell. Later he went to live briefly in Skjolden in Norway with David Pinsent, where he lived in isolation in order ...