BV: Mr. Wittgenstein, so it was around 1929 that you came back to philosophy and started teaching at Cambridge?
LW: That’s right. I was back in the thick of it all, and had to rethink what I had written earlier.
BV: When you came back to philosophy, did you change your mind about the idea that philosophy is a kind of disease?
LW: Not at all. That part remained the same. But I changed my views about how the disease gets a hold of us, what language is, and how language goes on a holiday.
BV: This is something I have always wanted to ask you. If you still thought that philosophy is a kind of disease, how were you able to be a philosophy professor? I mean, you were getting paid to do philosophy, right? Presumably your students were inspired by you and wanted to do philosophy more. Weren’t you worried that the fact that you were a teacher might mislead people into thinking that philosophy is a form of knowledge and something positive after all? And that in this way you might be spreading the disease to others?
LW: Yes! Yes! I did worry about that. I tell you, it was pure torture. I was a man with an illness. I couldn’t stop worrying about whether we know we have hands or if there is a non-physical realm of numbers, if others can know what I feel or if we could understand lions. I was like a man possessed. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about these issues, and I was driven every waking hour to find out how I could stop thinking about them. And if I succeeded in making some headway in freeing myself from these problems, suddenly some twit would come along and say how I was an exemplary philosopher and that I was making philosophy come alive for them. Come alive? Are you crazy? Why would you want to wake the demons? That is why I told them to become nurses and janitors and engineers. Anything but professional philosophers. But unfortunately, none of it helped. Somehow just because I was a professor of philosophy, they seemed to think that it was good to be one.
BV: That is a rather natural inference to make, wouldn’t you say? They admired you. So they wanted to be like you. They saw you were a professor. So they wanted to be a professor too.
LW: No! You don’t understand, just like they didn’t. True, later in 1939 I became a professor at Cambridge. Yes, I succeeded Moore in his position. But this was because of my weakness. I was addicted to philosophy, the way one might be to drugs or gambling. If I was capable of it, I would have left professional philosophy far behind, and never looked back. But the disease was too strong within me. It was like I was in an asylum seeking my cure. And I was the only sane one because I knew I was in an asylum. The others, the admiring throngs, didn’t realize that they were in an asylum. That is what I could never tolerate, never give my blessings for: their wanting to be philosophy professors as if it were an honorific! An honor? It was suffocating. That is why I had to leave it, give up my chair. How could I free myself of philosophy if through my job I was implying that philosophy is a virtue? So, yes, I was a professor. But was I proud of it? No. I had to be one because I gave away all my inheritance to my family (not to the poor, mind you, since they would only be corrupted by the wealth).