Wittgenstein's Nephew 
by 

Thomas Bernhard

 

A Philosophy Of and For the Curmudgeon

A catalogue of pet-hates and prejudices masquerading as a memoir, Wittgenstein’s Nephew is a perennial rant of the old against not just the young but against the world in general. This is a world of unmet expectations, incivility, and bad taste. The only possible response to this world is a resigned snobbishness accompanied by the occasional whine of despair. Paul, the nephew of the philosopher, is simply a foil for presenting this as a philosophy rather than as merely an experience.

Paul and the author share much the same view. For example, Austrians are perfidious toads who appreciate nether art nor culture. Hospitals and the medical establishment exist to torture their patients using “the most inhuman, murderous, and deadly methods... Of all medical practitioners, psychiatrists [a Viennese creation] are the most incompetent, having a closer affinity to the sex killer than to their science.” The sick are in any case insufferable - when they are sick because they are inhuman and when they become well because they believe they should have human rights once again. 

The world of course is in a constant state of deterioration for the old: “where the food has always been cheap but was still of excellent quality, as it no longer is.” Because the old see the world in the round, as it were, they have little trust in it, “being unable to contemplate the beauties of nature without at the same time contemplating its malignity and implacability, I fear it and avoid it whenever I can.” Only the old can appreciate the aversion to life produced by experience.

A certain cynicism and irrational obstinacy is therefore inevitable. Public recognition is simply receiving pearls from the swine to whom one has given them in the past: “For a prize is always awarded by incompetents who want to piss on the recipient.” The only thing that makes such recognition tolerable is the cash that comes with it, if it comes at all. But eventually even the cash doesn’t compensate for the debasement one suffers at the hands of the ignorant. Is it any wonder, therefore that one eventually becomes obsessed with trivial details: “I also realized at the time that no one with intellectual pretensions could possibly exist in a place where the ...Neue Zürcher Zeitung is unobtainable.” Survival consists of maintaining routine after all.

At bottom of course is not so much the certainty of impending death but the terrible, uncertain threat of living madness, largely self-induced: “I had behaved toward myself and everything else with the same unnatural ruthlessness that one day destroyed Paul and will one day destroy me. For just as Paul came to grief through his unhealthy overestimation of himself and the world, I too shall sooner or later come to grief through my own unhealthy overestimation of myself and the world.”The madness to be feared is precisely oneself.

There is something peculiarly Viennese about this impending madness for Bernhard and for Paul Wittgenstein. And it seems to affect intellectuals uniformly, “In the same way Nietzsche’s mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead.” Or perhaps this is merely an example of languid Viennese sarcasm. The import is the same: one’s intellectual capacity simply and inevitably evaporates - a mental sterilisation far worse than the accompanying sexual decline.

In Wittgenstein’s Nephew, Bernhard shows himself a master of self-mockery: an entertaining tale of the old at their best and their worst. My wife thinks I should study it carefully.