According to Wittgenstein all claims are baseless, so you’re fighting the good fight
That said this one might actually be true.
In 1935, during the ice age of Stalinism, Wittgenstein travelled to the Soviet Union and with typical eccentricity requested permission to become a manual worker there. The authorities were apparently less than enthused by this bizarre proposal. That Wittgenstein was a Stalinist of sorts is not the most well-aired of topics among his admirers, yet it seems to have been the case. His biographer, Ray Monk, is affronted by the suggestion and curtly dismisses it as “nonsense,” while at the same time providing plenty of evidence of his subject’s admiration for Stalin’s regime. Wittgenstein was unimpressed by talk of labor camps and Soviet tyranny, insisting that those who denounced Stalin had no idea of the problems and dangers he confronted. He continued to look favorably on the Soviet Union even after the show trials and the Nazi-Soviet pact, and claimed that what would most erode his sympathy for the regime would be the growth of class distinctions.
I had four semesters at uni on Wittgenstein and I had no idea he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union. His philosophy has is very focused on abstract logic, not at all dialectical materialism, but I guess he might have reached similar conclusions about politics
I’d encourage you to read the article, it covers that. He almost certainly wasn’t a communist but was sympathetic because he hated “modernity.”
Even so, Marxism was an important if oblique influence on Wittgenstein’s later thought. It was Piero Sraffa’s critique of bourgeois economics, one which sought to restore its reified categories to their historical contexts, which helped to inspire what one might call the anthropological turn in his Wittgenstein’s philosophical thought, and which provided the Philosophical Investigations with what Wittgenstein, in the Preface to that work, called its “most consequential ideas.” It was also Sraffa who made the Neapolitan gesture, fingers swept out from under chin, which played a part in transforming Wittgenstein’s conception of language while the two men were traveling together on a train.
Treating a philosophical problem, Wittgenstein remarks in the Investigations, is like treating an illness. “It is possible,” he writes in his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, “for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured only through a changed mode of thought and of life, not through a medicine invented by an individual.” Marx might have said just the same of ideology. For both thinkers, such conceptual problems are symptomatic, rather as the neurotic symptom for Freud marks the site of some pathological disturbance in everyday life—one that, like ideology, it both reveals and conceals. Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Wittgenstein are not in the business of treating symptoms. Instead, they seek to tackle the root cause of the disorder, which means approaching its various expressions in a diagnostic spirit. Only through a change of behavior might some of our conceptual snarl-ups be consigned to the ashcan of history. “I am by no means sure,” Wittgenstein comments, “that I should prefer a continuation of my work by others to a change in the way people live which would make all these questions superfluous.”
I’m really baffled by this. It’s probably worth considering that Wittgenstein’s view wasn’t sympathy with Stalin on the basis of Marxism but just understanding the highly embattled position the Soviets were in and not seeing them as some sort of special evil, since I really don’t remember there being a trace of Marx in his writings beyond the fact that he certainly was interested in “ruthless criticism of everything that exists”.
IF WITTGENSTEIN WAS attracted to the Soviet Union, it may well have been for largely conservative reasons: his respect for order, discipline, and authority; his Tolstoyan idealizing of manual labor (at which he himself was remarkably adept); his high modernist affection for austerity (which he called “going barefoot,” but which in the Russia of the day might more candidly be called destitution); not to speak of his sympathy for a nation that had produced his beloved Dostoyevsky along with a precious spiritual heritage. As for idealizing manual labor, Wittgenstein regularly exhorted his colleagues and students to give up philosophy and do something useful for a change. When a gifted young disciple took him at his word and spent the rest of his life toiling away in a canning factory, Wittgenstein was said to be overjoyed. He did, to do him justice, try to heed his own advice, fleeing from Cambridge from time to time to some more menial way of life, only to be hunted down and taken back into intellectual captivity.
Yeah, I’ve read the article and I can’t help but feel that I’m looking through a warped lens reading this, not that I take Eagleton lightly.
Incidentally, I was looking at Wikipedia’s summary of his Why Marx Was Right to remind myself of what his perspective was and it had this claim (emphasis mine):
African nationalism incorporated Marxist ideas and Bolsheviks supported self-determination, despite Marx speaking in favour of imperialism in some cases.
I don’t think that I’ve ever heard even ardent anti-communists make this claim, much less seen what statements by Marx they might be talking about.
I imagine the “speaking in favour of imperialism” claim is probably regarding young Marx’s statements about how history is progressive and to get to communism you have to pass through capitalism and the imperial ventures in Africa were therefore “good” because they hoisted capitalism upon Africans. Not an entitely fair reading, and something the more mature Marx would definitely disagree with, but that’s how I could see somebody arriving at that statement.
Yeah sounds like they are quoting from his pre-Engels collaboration era.
Genuinely, I really hate people who only read Marx and don’t actually read Engels, when Engels was the one who really was able to hone Marx’s extremely keen intellect and voracious appetite for the truth away from just reversing Hegelian causality, and towards more journalistic and economic works. Like, Marx’s sudden shifts in thought don’t really make sense without Engels.
Wittgenstein was unimpressed by talk of labor camps and Soviet tyranny, insisting that those who denounced Stalin had no idea of the problems and dangers he confronted.
I don’t know the first thing about Wittgenstein, but I see he was smart enough to recognize that the Soviet security state existed for a reason.
I will not stop posting baseless claims that I have not validated
According to Wittgenstein all claims are baseless, so you’re fighting the good fight
That said this one might actually be true.
Per https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/revolutionizing-ourselves
I had four semesters at uni on Wittgenstein and I had no idea he was sympathetic to the Soviet Union. His philosophy has is very focused on abstract logic, not at all dialectical materialism, but I guess he might have reached similar conclusions about politics
I’d encourage you to read the article, it covers that. He almost certainly wasn’t a communist but was sympathetic because he hated “modernity.”
Thanks for the copypaste
In the Tractatus era, yeah. Definitely not so for later Wittgenstein though.
Yeah it’s easy to forget that Wittgenstein wrote the tractatus when he was essentially a kid.
Right yes, we mostly studied (critically enough) the Tractatus because it’s the most historically relevant for the Vienna Circle bros and shit
I’m really baffled by this. It’s probably worth considering that Wittgenstein’s view wasn’t sympathy with Stalin on the basis of Marxism but just understanding the highly embattled position the Soviets were in and not seeing them as some sort of special evil, since I really don’t remember there being a trace of Marx in his writings beyond the fact that he certainly was interested in “ruthless criticism of everything that exists”.
Yeah the article covers this a bit
Yeah, I’ve read the article and I can’t help but feel that I’m looking through a warped lens reading this, not that I take Eagleton lightly.
Incidentally, I was looking at Wikipedia’s summary of his Why Marx Was Right to remind myself of what his perspective was and it had this claim (emphasis mine):
I don’t think that I’ve ever heard even ardent anti-communists make this claim, much less seen what statements by Marx they might be talking about.
I imagine the “speaking in favour of imperialism” claim is probably regarding young Marx’s statements about how history is progressive and to get to communism you have to pass through capitalism and the imperial ventures in Africa were therefore “good” because they hoisted capitalism upon Africans. Not an entitely fair reading, and something the more mature Marx would definitely disagree with, but that’s how I could see somebody arriving at that statement.
Yeah sounds like they are quoting from his pre-Engels collaboration era.
Genuinely, I really hate people who only read Marx and don’t actually read Engels, when Engels was the one who really was able to hone Marx’s extremely keen intellect and voracious appetite for the truth away from just reversing Hegelian causality, and towards more journalistic and economic works. Like, Marx’s sudden shifts in thought don’t really make sense without Engels.
I don’t know the first thing about Wittgenstein, but I see he was smart enough to recognize that the Soviet security state existed for a reason.
Lfg, I am once again vindicated