The World as I Found It by Bruce Duffy
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rumpelstiltskin, Hamlet, and Dionysus: The Dynamic Logic of Human Association

A psychological drama as complex and sustained as that in The World As I Found It must have a theory lest it fall apart into narrative chaos. Although there are necessarily numerous references to Freudian theory given the importance of Vienna to the central character of Ludwig Wittgenstein, I don’t think the book relies on Freud for its dynamic structure. Rather, the framework is markedly Jungian.

Although Freud had a well-developed theory of the individual personality, he had little to say about how personalities interacted. Jung, on the other hand, built his theory on a social conception of psychic health. Jung’s theory provided a much wider freedom of action for the psyche in search of what he called ‘integration.’ So, as in Freudian analysis the individual could seek to understand his own personality as a consequence of its history; or, and much more commonly, enter into relationships which ‘balance out’ one’s personal deficiencies.

This latter tactic may not be as effective in the long term as therapy in ‘adjusting’ a personality to reality. But it has the great advantage of being far less painful... and far less costly in terms of the time and money devoted to analysis. The fact that relationships are essentially temporary - absence and death are inevitable - and unstable - love and hate have their independent effects - means that one must constantly strive to recreate a sort of relational equilibrium among others who are trying to do the same. A complex task indeed.

The central figure of the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein, a personality forged in a large family with a domineering father and a collusive mother. The family also includes two ‘ghosts’ of brothers who have committed suicide before Ludwig had reached his teens, probably in revenge against paternal tyranny. Ludwig survives by developing an extremely strong and extremely abstract ‘inner life.’ In Jungian terms, he is markedly Subjective, that is, he is relatively immune from external pressure. In fact, under the tutelage of his father, he barely notices what goes on around him.

Ludwig is so extreme in his Subjectivism that he is overtly solipsistic. He seriously questions the existence of other minds. And he insists that only propositions about the world are what exists. Eventually as he matures he will moderate his enthusiasm for solipsism; but as he enters the academic world of Cambridge he is seriously close to a sort of intellectual insanity: “Witt-gen-stein, that fractious weather system of remembering and forgetting which finally consumes the life of the thing remembered.”

Ludwig has also learned through his father’s insistent bullying how to resist the forces in the world which might want to change him. By attacking the world head on he has found that he can change it before it has a chance to change him. He is an accomplished Jungian Extrovert, constantly seeking to change those around him lest they intrude on his ‘mission,’ whatever that may be.

Subjective Extroverts like Wittgenstein are awkward folk. They appear to have little sensitivity to others and are constantly imposing their will by whatever means available. In extreme cases, like that of Wittgenstein, their dogged intransigence causes others in their orbit to adapt themselves to his presence, often in ways that are not really healthy for the individuals involved but do create a sort of relational equilibrium.

So, for example, Wittgenstein’s appearance in Bertrand Russell’s life at Cambridge has a dramatic, almost immediate effect. The pair are drawn to one another because Russell is the Jungian opposite of Wittgenstein, an Objective Introvert who is relatively sensitive to his environment and habitually adapts himself to circumstances.

Because Wittgenstein is such an extreme case, he, a student, essentially forces Russell, his mentor, to move even further into his Objective Introversion, a condition noticed and responded by his colleagues at King’s College High Table: “to Russell, Wittgenstein was infallible — sibylline.” Russell even allows Wittgenstein to be the judge of his life’s work: “Despite appearances, though, Russell was slipping by with mounting difficulty. One big problem was his craving for Wittgenstein’s imprimatur, as when he asked Wittgenstein to read the proofs for the third volume of his Principia Mathematica”

Chief among these is the philosopher George Moore, Russell’s long-term collaborator. Moore is a sort of joker in the pack. He is in Jungian terms the most Centroverted of the bunch. That is, he has a reasonably wide repertoire of psychic abilities. He is at times quite sensitive to what’s going on around him; and at other times he prefers to ‘live in his head.’ And although he does attempt to change what’s going on around him in college life from time to time, he is quite capable of shutting his mouth and letting things ride.

Moore was not so much the peacemaker as the balancer of the group, the one who ensured it remained functional. As both Wittgenstein and Russell conduct their wild dance, Moore compensates for the most bizarre moves of each, shifting the centre of gravity of the group. This was the role he had always played, even in his professional life as an ethicist. “Moore admitted that it was at first a little dispiriting to realize that ethics was really a matter of brokering, in a given instance, something better than worse, and likely rather worse than good.”

Moore’s intermediate position between Wittgenstein and Russell is a precarious one however. They come to rely on him to maintain the stability of the triad no matter how extreme their behaviour becomes. Moore is the force which maintains a semblance of normality, a sort of unrecognised touchstone for the other two. He is trapped in their joint psychic drama. His prospective marriage, and consequent absence from the relationship, threatens disaster for both Wittgenstein and Russell.

This, I believe, is the basic structure of the psychodrama which Duffy has created. Any such drama is necessarily situational - the actors would all act differently when placed in different circumstances. Nevertheless Duffy has created a fiction which fits the circumstances as defined by historical documents. His book is both insightful and informative about what might be called the background of genius. His use of a quote by Wittgenstein as an epigraph seems exactly right: “I once said, perhaps rightly: The earlier culture will become a heap of rubble and finally a heap of ashes, but spirit will hover over the ashes.”

The spirit in question is, it seems to me, that evanescent but real relationship among three men: Rumpelstiltskin (Wittgenstein’s fantasy life), Hamlet (Russell’s drama with his dead father), and Dionysus (Moore’s easy-going life of both the mind and the stomach), who somehow formed a temporary but cohesive whole enabling each other’s talent as well as their complementary neuroses. Duffy’s interweaving of a fairy tale, a Shakespearean tragedy, and a Greek myth is masterful, and very, very Jungian indeed.

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