Yesterday I woke from a nightmare. I had forgotten my German.
All the words, all the great phrases of philosophy, etched in my memory. In vain I searched for a foothold to lead me back to the beginning of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus.
Professor Zemach was there, reading from his soft-cover edition, crammed with notes, pages worn soft, like shavings from reading. It was the first lecture of the Wittgenstein seminar.
“Wittgenstein’s German is not pretentious,” he said. A sober German without literary flair. Yet, extremely precise. It seeks not elegance but precision. Each sentence stretched to the very limit of what can be said. Zemach, the pianist and secret writer, began a disquisition not so much on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, but on his literary style. He listed the opinions of philosophers and writers: Marjorie Perloff interprets the Tractatus as a conceptual poem and an experimental form of the 20th century. For Blanchot, Wittgenstein appears as the author of structural silence: to say is not to say, and vice versa. Stanley Cavell opines that the Cambridge professor is a dramatic author. “It’s not beautiful German,” Zemach added. He used the word “geometric.” Did he say “geometrisch”? “Wittgenstein’s language is architectural: short, numbered, hierarchical propositions, with a cold and controlled syntax.” I wrote it all in my notebook.
Heidegger, for example, was the complete opposite: dense, neologistic, ontological. Professor Gertrude Georges (an expert on Heidegger) was fond of comparing both. “You cannot have two more diametrically opposed individuals.” She had a fixation on Heidegger’s term Eigentlichkeit (a neologism in which Heidegger stresses the root eigen, meaning “own,” usually translated as “authenticity”). Georges was fond of suggestive metaphors: “Eigenlicht isn’t a light like a lamp, not a spotlight, not a flashlight —takes a deep breath—. It’s more like when you walk into a dark room, you know where each piece of furniture is.” Her speech moved fluidly between English and German, forming a hybrid idiom rather than a mixture. She admonished her language-learning theory: “First, watch movies and listen to love songs.”
George’s language learning advice: Nothing is more important in language than popular sayings (I treasured her gift).
There’s a kind of fog in my dream. A reminder of the horror of forgetting a language through willful disuse. One feels inept. German is this uncharted territory. The mind doesn’t know how to navigate without precise, longer words. I didn’t get it at first. The thing about German is that it doesn’t fragment: it compacts! What other languages say with several words, German says with a single one. This is my typical example: Geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung (speed limit).
For the abecedarian, it’s kind of funny & it doesn’t make much sense unless one goes: Ge-schwin-dig-keits-be-gren-zung.
There are two Wittgensteins —like there are two Foucaults, two Sartres, two Schoenbergs (and why not three? One doesn’t live that long). The German of the second Wittgenstein (of Philosophical Investigations) is quite different from the first. The style is characterized by staccato sentences, unexpected questions, minimalist examples, colloquial turns of phrase, and a conversational tone, as if two friends are chatting in a bar. In the seminar, Zemach used a term that stuck in my mind: Karge Sprache, he said, the “frikative “r” spat in my face. “Austere language.”
Usually, after the class, Zemach and I kept conversing. “Did you know that Paul Wittgenstein, Ludwig’s brother, was a concert pianist? He had lost his right arm in the First World War, and commissioned Maurice Ravel to write a concerto for the left hand?” Reluctantly, I admitted I didn’t know (it bothered me not to know, and I thought, “Ok, considering Ravel’s oeuvre is not such a big thing”—wrong, I was). Zemach continued in his peculiar heavy R‑enunciated English: “Ravel composed the concerto with a dark, somber style, designed to make it seem as if two hands were playing. Isn’t that amazing! Well, when Paul Wittgenstein received the score, he didn’t like it.” Zemach smiled; he rarely smiled.
Back to the dream. I feel a chill in my bones. I’m in Königsberg Cathedral (and who chooses the day the church is closed on a snowy Monday?), my girlfriend Ricoh guards the entrance to make sure. Standing in front of a plaque reading Kant’s German words in German. This was the purpose of the trip. What did it say? It referred to two things that “fill the mind.” How many times have I repeated Kant’s phrase only to recite it later in my ethics class? There are zwei Dinge (two things). Kant talks a lot about things; But Kant doesn’t say Sache an sich. He says Ding an sich. He’s not talking about a problem, topic, but about a reality independent of the subject.
It’s ontological!
Just as I had read it. Zwei Dinge erfüllen das Gemüt (“two things fill the mind”). A long sigh. What fills the mind? … Immer neuer und zunehmender Bewunderung (“a new and growing wonder”). In the dream, I murmured the words that I know by heart. The cold froze my mouth.
Coming back to the philosopher. Wittgenstein also talks about things, but differently: Sache (as matter), Sachverhalt (state of affairs), Tatsache (fact). Ortega y Gasset has a thing with things (another German at heart). His cosa for a “thing” is as pragmatic as Wittgenstein’s Sache.
Fast-forward to the end. The phrase I was looking for at the beginning of the Tractatus was like poetry from beyond, a concrete and futuristic verse to summarize the world; pronounced in the peculiar accent of this German-speaking Jewish professor:
THE WELT IS ALLES, WAS DER FALLEST.
