Four

THE PHILOSOPHICAL BACKGROUND

It is tempting to stigmatize Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on Jews as an unfortunate relic of anti-Semitic stereotyped conceptions about Jews preva- lent in his time and contributing to his difficulties with his self-identity. While this claim may be correct, it does not sufficiently elucidate Wittgenstein’s philosophical attempt to clarify the concept of a Jew in the way he does, plac- ing the concepts of disease, imitation, talent and cleverness at its spiritual core. Nor does it explain why he considers the clarification of the stereotypi- cal concept of a Jew propagated in his culture a proper philosophical topic at all, revealing important aspects of both the spiritual forces operating in a cul- ture, the Jews’ particular spiritual nature and their damaging affect on the arts in the modern period. As though in response to such implied criticism, he snipes back: “One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunders- tands all the others in its own ugly way.”1 To understand these matters better, it may help to look into the philosophical background of these comments, at which Wittgenstein mostly only hints. For they stem from his interweaving of two similar, but different, ideas about the spiritual forces underlying modern culture. These ideas are derived primarily from two different philosophical sources, which he both acknowledges and employs to reflect on the spiritual nature of Jews and their impact on modern culture and society. It is edifying to trace their impression on his thinking.

1. Spengler’s Spiritual Dichotomy

The first idea about the spiritual forces embodied in modern culture that un- derlies Wittgenstein’s remarks is that there are two fundamentally different attitudes toward life from within which human beings live and engender. First, a more basic attitude, the spiritual life force of which is manifested in will, emotion, action, and response, and second, a more artificial attitude, the spiritual life force of which is manifested in intellect and abstract reasoning. What emerges is a metaphysical distinction concerning two different funda- mental ways in which human beings operate, pursue their existence, and ex- press what is valuable to them. It provides a central and dominant metaphysi- cal theme in both Romantic philosophy and conservative ideology. It is a theme that in existential philosophy was transformed into an ontological dis- tinction between authentic and inauthentic modes of existence-in-the-world.2 Wittgenstein derives this approach mostly from Oswald Spengler, who wrote on the spiritual underpinnings of human cultures as manifested in prominent 36 WITTGENSTEIN ON THE HUMAN SPIRIT historical communities and whose pessimistic volume on the spiritual decline of the West as a culture appeared at the end of the First World War.3 According to Spengler, that to which we refer as “a culture” is the spiri- tual orientation of an historic group of people who have achieved a unitary conception of their world, which is oriented on a distinctive conception of the physical space in which they live and act. This spiritual orientation informs all their activities: in art, religion, philosophy, politics, economics, and ways of waging war. Transcending the distinction between culture and civilization, which equated culture (Kultur) with the arts and civilization with practical innovations, Spengler distinguished between four separate periods in the his- tory of all great human communities, the first three of which he called (fol- lowing Nietzsche) periods of culture and the last, a period of “civilization.” Culture, he explained, is an historical period in which original and authentic human activity takes place. Civilization is an historical period in which re- fined, theoretical, technical, and sophisticated elaboration on what has pre- viously been created takes place. In civilization, explained Spengler, the highest creative works are those of administration and the application of science to industry. It is a period in which the spiritual forces that in the past had provided for an historical community’s culture are in decline, heralding its demise. (Culture, explained Spengler by way of one illustration among several, is classical Greece; civilization is Rome.) Although the culture and civilization of an historical society are linked by being a continuing historical effort to live, create, and act out of the same conception of the world and human life, the spiritual disposition behind pe- riods of culture is different from that of civilization. The spiritual disposition that gives rise to culture stems from an effort that is more primitive, basic, and instinctive to human beings—one that is closer in nature to action. The spiritual disposition that finds expression in civilization stems from a more artificial and complex effort, one that belongs to the realm of thought. Cul- ture, Spengler claimed, is soul. Civilization is intellect—a period when a cul- ture has lost its soul. Culture resembles the spiritual world of a child, civiliza- tion that of an adult. The two spiritual dispositions behind culture and civili- zation find expression in the history of all mature human communities, through two separate social classes: peasants and nobles, on the one hand, priests and bourgeoisie, on the other. The former are dynamic and spontane- ous, the latter search for eternal truths. Spengler compared the former to a plant that sprouts directly from the earth, the latter to an animal roving the land for its sustenance. These two classes’ control of society in various pe- riods coincides, in his view, with the existence of either culture or civilization in each period. Wittgenstein, it seems, takes the Spenglerian distinction between two different spiritual dispositions underlying culture and civilization and applies it to Western culture in the modern age, regardless of historical periodicity. In this way, according to him, it is possible in modern Western culture to detect