In the 1950s, the English Dominicans used to organize an annual gathering of Catholic philosophers at their priory at Spode in Staffordshire. It was there that Herbert McCabe introduced me to a remarkable couple – Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. It quickly became clear to me that the two were the most talented philosophers in the Catholic community, and they were generous of their time in discussion. While Peter taught philosophy at Birmingham, Elizabeth at that time was a college lecturer at Somerville. She was one of the literary executors of the great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in 1953 she had published the English translation of his posthumous Philosophical Investigations.
The first lecture series I attended when I went to Oxford as a graduate philosophy student in 1957 was a course on Thought and Action given by Stuart Hampshire. He began by telling us all to read Miss Anscombe’s recently published Intention. It was indeed the publication of this book which established her as an influential philosopher in her own right. Her account of the nature of one’s knowledge of one’s own intentional actions, and her development of Aristotle’s discussion of practical reasoning, set the terms of several debates that continue to the present day.
Anscombe had already become famous in Oxford, but not for theoretical philosophy. In 1956, the university offered an honorary degree to the US president who had authorized the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anscombe opposed the proposal, arguing in a pamphlet, ‘Mr Truman’s Degree’, that it was monstrous to honour a man responsible for two massacres. She set out the doctrine of the just war, as developed long ago by Catholic theologians such as Suárez and Protestant jurists such as Grotius. According to that doctrine, nothing could justify the deliberate killing of non-combatants in war.
Anscombe did not succeed in persuading her fellow dons: only four people voted against the conferment of the degree. Surprisingly, however, the theory of the just war – which had been almost totally forgotten during the 1939–45 war – has gradually become accepted, not only in ecclesiastical circles but also in official and military ones. In the last decade, for instance, several of the cardinal principles of that doctrine were enunciated in the counter-insurgency manual issued by General Petraeus to the US forces under his command. The revival of the theory, I believe, is due more to Anscombe than to any other individual.
As a graduate student, while still a priest, I began to see a great deal of Elizabeth, who was warmly welcoming to graduate students with a serious interest in philosophy. She kept open house at 27 St John Street: one could drop in at any hour of day or night and start a discussion of a philosophical problem. Elizabeth had a houseful of children, to whom she would attend from time to time, but that did not interrupt the flow of philosophy. She was also, in those days, a chain-smoker, dropping her butts into a huge wooden bowl. It was only in later years, as a tutor myself beset with the enthusiasms of young graduate students, that I came to appreciate fully the generosity with which she made herself available.
Among my many memories of these discussions, one stays in my mind. A fellow student who also enjoyed discussions with Anscombe was Tom Nagel. One evening, trying to understand the Catholic opposition to artificial contraception, Tom put the question: ‘Elizabeth, would it be sinful if I were to play the piano with my penis?’ There was a long pause, and then Anscombe said slowly ‘An und für sich – No.’
Elizabeth had an earthy side: she frequently used four-letter words, and from time to time would give me graphic accounts of various aspects of sex that she thought I needed to know about when hearing confessions, and about which she believed (rightly) I was not well informed. She was famous for having defeated C. S. Lewis in debate, and that had left him with a grudge against her. He once told my Oxford landlord – a fellow member of a drinking group, called the Inklings – that she had once publicly asked him, ‘When did you last masturbate?’ I once plucked up courage to ask Elizabeth whether the story was true. She denied it, but admitted that in the course of a truth game she had put the question to him, and to the other players, ‘What is your most disgusting personal habit?’
The most educational experience of my life was attending the evening seminars in a run-down annex of Somerville in which Anscombe inducted us into Wittgenstein’s argument against private ostensive definition. From time to time, she would single me out as a spokesperson on behalf of the idea of private language, and then gradually demolish everything I could say in its defence. It was a painful experience – the intellectual equivalent of defoliation by wax – but immensely rewarding. I gradually came to understand what Wittgenstein meant and to see why it was important. As a result of her seminars I found my whole mindset altered, so that every philosophical problem looked different from the new perspective I acquired.
‘D’you know, Tony’, Elizabeth once said to me, ‘I don’t have a single idea in my head that wasn’t put there by Wittgenstein.’ The remark was revealing, but wholly inaccurate. In the first place, there were the ideas that were put there by her husband, Peter Geach, who had been teaching her long before she met Wittgenstein. Obviously, Geach and Anscombe had a great influence on each other; but as philosophers they operated quite differently. Anscombe was the better tutor, Geach the better lecturer and much the better writer. Geach was more influenced by Aquinas and by Frege than he was by Wittgenstein. He could take offence when people asked him what his wife thought on a philosophical topic, and assumed that he knew and agreed with whatever it might be. ‘As her husband’, he used to say, ‘I have privileged access to her body, but not to her mind.’ In the second place, Anscombe’s head was full of Catholic thoughts that were at some distance from the ideas of Wittgenstein. At a different time she said to me, ‘On the topic of religion, Wittgenstein is sheer poison.’
As a graduate student, I was never officially supervised by Elizabeth. It was she, however, who suggested to me the topic of my dissertation – namely, the intentionality of psychological verbs. The topic was approved by the philosophy sub-faculty, and I was assigned Anthony Quinton as my supervisor – the beginning of a lifelong friendship. Elizabeth gave me access to appropriate unpublished papers of Wittgenstein, and Quinton was a wonderful guide to contemporary philosophical literature.
I left Oxford to take up a curacy in Liverpool without having finished my dissertation. However, I was able to send drafts to Oxford for Elizabeth and Peter to read, and they were most encouraging about it. Elizabeth told me that they felt a sense of disappointment when it was concluded and there was no more of it to read: ‘Othello’s occupation’s gone’, she said, not very appropriately.
In 1961, I returned briefly to Oxford to defend my dissertation on intentionality. The thesis was examined by David Pears and Patrick Gardner. As I mentioned in Chapter 3, viva voce examinations are theoretically public in Oxford, but rarely attract an audience. Surprisingly, Elizabeth turned up to listen to mine. Her presence seemed to disconcert the examiners no less than myself. Fortunately, they retained enough composure to accept the dissertation, which was later published as Action, Emotion and Will.
In 1959, the Oxford Chair of Logic fell vacant. After a stormy meeting, which led both Austin and Ryle to resign from the electoral board in protest at the way the vice chancellor had conducted the election, A. J. Ayer was appointed. Anscombe was disgusted: ‘We’ve already had Ayer in Oxford’, she said to me. ‘We don’t need him again.’ In public discussion the two were willing to be quite rude to each other, as in the legendary exchange: ‘Professor Ayer, if you didn’t speak so fast, people wouldn’t think you were so very clever.’ ‘Miss Anscombe, if you didn’t speak so slowly, people wouldn’t think you were so very profound.’
During my time as a curate in Hall Lane, Liverpool, I more than once went to stay with the Geachcombes. I stayed in the house in St John Street, where no door was ever locked. When I took a bath, Elizabeth would come and sit on the edge of it to continue a philosophical discussion. I stayed also in Elizabeth’s rustic farmhouse in the Shropshire hills – the Foxholes. Life there was primitive, and one was dependent on an open-air privy illustrated with primitive frescoes of the Last Judgement. Elizabeth tried to teach me to ride a horse. She placed me on a well-tempered mare – but two of her children unlocked the door of the stable where the stallion was kept, and I had to cling on for dear life as the mare fled headlong from his approaches. I was put off riding for ever. It was while driving one of Elizabeth’s sons to Foxholes that I caught from him the infective hepatitis that caused me to be moved from Hall Lane to Crosby.
I wrote from Liverpool to confess to Elizabeth that I was suffering grave doubts about the Catholic faith. She responded with great generosity to my confession of faltering belief, and we corresponded for months about the nature of knowledge, certainty and faith. We also had an exchange of daily postcards arguing for and against the existence of God. But this was not sufficient to restore my faith. I came to think that the right thing for me to do would be to seek laicization. She told me that this would make no difference to our friendship: ‘You are the kind of friend’, she said, ‘whose good is our good, and harm to whom is harm to us.’
When, after laicization, I went back to Oxford, we resumed our close philosophical friendship. While I was a philosophy tutor at Balliol, I gave a number of joint classes with Anscombe, and we benefited from the flexibility of Oxford tutorial arrangements to exchange students. I sent some of my most promising Balliol undergraduates to her, and she allowed me to give tutorials to some of her brightest Somerville students. I was approached by Random House to write a book about Descartes. ‘Why would anyone want to write a book about Descartes?’, I asked Elizabeth. ‘His whole system could be written on the back of a postcard and he had only two ideas, both of them wrong.’ ‘If that’s what you think about the great man’, she replied, ‘you had better write a book about him to teach you better.’ I did, and was indeed brought to a sounder mind.
Elizabeth was a feminist, but one of an unusual kind. She resolutely refused to change her name on marriage, and letters to Mrs Geach were returned unopened. But she was hostile to any concessions being made to women as women. One week, a delinquent student made some stammering excuse in a tutorial for not having written the week’s essay. ‘Let me show you what I’ve been doing since last week’, Elizabeth said, and produced a five-day-old baby.
Sadly, our friendship came to an abrupt end. Elizabeth reacted with indignation when, in 1965, I told her that I planned to get married without a papal dispensation: ‘Our dearest wish for you’, she said, ‘must be that you will be desperately unhappy in your marriage.’ Thus excommunicated, I hardly saw her again for many years, until I found myself doing business with her as a fellow trustee of Wittgenstein’s literary estate.
It was through my friendship with Elizabeth Anscombe that I first got to know Peter Geach, while I was a graduate student in Oxford. As a lecturer in Birmingham, he was only at home at weekends, and was absent for most of my student meetings with Elizabeth. But when I returned to Oxford as a fellow of Balliol, Peter had a double reason for making friends with me, because he had a great affection for that college, where he had spent his undergraduate years in the 1930s.
In his old age, Peter would often say that Balliol had saved his immortal soul. He meant this literally. His father, a philosophy professor in the Indian Education Service, was a man who constantly changed his religion. (When he was a schoolboy at Clifton College, friends would greet Peter after the vacation with, ‘Hullo Geach! Good hols? Does God exist this term?’) One of Geach père’s mystical experiments was devil worship, of the style promoted by Aleister Crowley. He encouraged his teenage son to join him in this supernatural quest. It was arriving at Balliol in 1934, Peter would later explain, that cured him once for all of any temptation to indulge in such pernicious nonsense.
Whether or not this is true – and it must be confessed that, as he got older, Peter’s memory became more and more creative – it is certain that his years as a Balliol undergraduate had a lifelong influence on his intellect and his character, and left him with a passionate, indeed romantic, love for the college. His childhood had been unhappy: his father’s marriage to Eleonora Sgonina, the daughter of Polish emigrants, had broken up shortly after his birth, and when he was four years old he had been made a ward of court and was forbidden to have contact with his mother. Years at Llandaff Cathedral School and Clifton College left little mark: it was at Balliol that, for the first time, Peter found himself in congenial company.
Like many another Balliol man, he owed far more to his contemporaries than to his tutors. In 1991 he wrote, in a preface to a Festschrift:
Apart from the healthy immersion in Plato and Aristotle that I owe to my tutor, Donald Allan, I owe far more to Balliol for the freedom of endless discussion with my peers than for any formal philosophical teaching. In retrospect I seem to have spent four years almost entirely in Balliol; I never went to philosophy lectures outside the college and knew hardly anybody in other colleges.
In Peter’s Balliol years, 1934–8, there were certainly many interesting undergraduates to converse with. When he arrived, Jo Grimond and Stuart Hampshire were already in residence; George Malcolm and John Templeton were his exact contemporaries; and during his years in college Edward Heath and Denis Healey arrived. In the last years of his life, Peter was one of the very few survivors of that fascinating pre-war generation.
It was in his final year, just before gaining a first in Greats, that Peter became a Roman Catholic. In his later memoirs, he attributes this above all to discussion with his Balliol contemporaries. He wrote of his Balliol years:
Increasingly, as time went on, I found myself arguing with Catholics. I was certainly cleverer than they, but they had the immeasurable advantage that they were right – an advantage that they did not throw away by resorting to the bad philosophy and apologetics then sometimes taught in Catholic schools. One day my defences quite suddenly collapsed: I knew that if I were to remain an honest man I must seek instruction in the Catholic Religion.
An event in Peter’s undergraduate career that entered into college legend took place on 11 December 1936, the day of the abdication of King Edward VIII. With the help of a freshman history undergraduate, Hugh Fraser, Peter raised a Jacobite flag above the Balliol tower and proclaimed the accession to the throne of the Stuart pretender, Rupprecht of Bavaria. Recording this event later, he explained that at the time, influenced by Hobbes, he had believed that it would be in the nation’s benefit to restore a strong monarchy:
No such thing could be hoped for, I thought, so long as the House of Windsor reigned; I judged them to be quite unfitted, by character, tradition, and training, to assume the role of Sovereign, instead of rubber-stamping Acts of Parliament. Only romantic folly made me ignore the question whether the family who would be de jure claimants if the Hanoverian usurpation were undone were at all likely to be better as Sovereigns.
When recalling in private his Jacobite escapade, Peter would observe tartly that their joint venture had not prevented Sir Hugh Fraser (Secretary of State for Air, 1962–4) from ‘serving as Minister to the Guelph usurper’.
Peter detested the political philosophy of the Oxford of his day which praised Locke and Rousseau and condemned Hobbes. Hobbes is often regarded as the father of British empiricism, but Geach placed him elsewhere in the history of thought. He once wrote to me:
Hobbes belonged to a splendid tradition of Tory politics: I count in a sort of English apostolic succession the following persons (all male): Saint Thomas More, Hobbes, Dr Johnson, William Cobbett, G. K. Chesterton. What a galaxy of fine old eccentrics, who wrote so well!
I think he would not have objected to being regarded as a successor to that tradition. Geach had been brought up by his father to despise the logic then taught in Oxford by the likes of Cook Wilson and F. C. S. Schiller, and he saw no reason, later in life, to revise that opinion. Only his reading of the Nicomachean Ethics with Donald Allen seems to have left a positive, lifelong influence. It was only after leaving Oxford that he began the reading of Aquinas that exhibits itself prominently in much of his later work.
It was at Blackfriars on Corpus Christi Day in 1938, just after his success in Greats, that Peter met his future wife: ‘He massaged my shoulder’, Elizabeth told me, ‘and said, “Miss Anscombe, I like your mind.”’ It was to be three years before they married, but from that moment they forged one of the most fruitful philosophical partnerships of the twentieth century. Peter, in a memoir, offered a moving description of the years between their engagement and their wedding:
Elizabeth had a lot of philosophical teaching from me. I could see that she was good at the subject, but her real development was to come only under the powerful stimulus of Wittgenstein’s lectures and her personal conversations with him. Naturally she then moved away from my tutelage; I am afraid that I resented that, but I could recognize this feeling as base and irrational, and soon overcame it.
When war broke out, Peter, like Elizabeth, became convinced that the British government would not observe the rules of just war, and for that reason he became a conscientious objector. He was willing to serve in the Polish army, but his attempts to do so were unsuccessful, so he spent the war in timber production.
Geach went on to become one of the dozen best British philosophers of the twentieth century, and to become a master of English philosophical prose second only to Thomas Hobbes, John Henry Newman and Bertrand Russell. He retained a lifelong devotion to Balliol, and was delighted when elected to an honorary fellowship in 1979. I still recall the debate in governing body when he was proposed for election. There were those who were opposed: Geach was too much of a Catholic apologist, and there were other famous Balliol philosophers, X and Y, who had a stronger claim. The issue was settled when an atheist philosophy fellow growled, ‘Geach’s writings will still be read when X and Y are names that everyone has forgotten.’
Many legends circulate about the unconventional style of the family life at 27 St John Street. Some of them are very likely true. Here, I will repeat the only story on the topic that I had from Peter himself. Some neighbour had reported them to the NSPCC for cruelty to their children. When the inspector arrived, it was explained to him that one of the boys had indeed been beaten for breaking some precious object. According to Peter, the inspector, having surveyed the damage to the treasure and the damage to the boy, decided that what had been inflicted was merited and proportionate.
When I first knew the Geachcombes, Peter was much the more ferocious member of the couple. He could work himself into a rage at some foolish intervention in a philosophy seminar, and Elizabeth would have to go up to the podium to soothe him down. But over the years the dynamics between the two changed, reversing the direction of a similar change that overtook Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. In their old age, it was Elizabeth who was the more belligerent, while Peter achieved a degree of serenity – occasionally interrupted by bouts of mental illness. This showed itself, for instance, in his attitude to my marriage. He did not exhibit the hostility to it that Elizabeth had shown, and after her death, Nancy and I several times visited him in the Cambridge home where his children took turns in looking after him. Once he said to me, ‘Tony, are you still faithful to Nancy?’ ‘Er, yes, as a matter of fact’, I said, rather taken aback. ‘I am glad to hear that. It makes me believe that it was genuine intellectual reasoning that took you out of the Church. You aren’t like Brentano [a philosophical ex-priest of the nineteenth century] who got through several wives in a decade.’ At our last meeting before he died, Peter startled me by saying, ‘You are just like Wittgenstein.’ ‘In what way?’, I asked. ‘Like him, you hang on to God by the thinnest possible thread.’
In his sixties, Geach wrote an autobiographical poem in elegiac couplets. It has not been published, and I doubt it ever will be. But it contained two lines which, written when he was sixty-nine, and quoted at the funeral service after his death at the age of 97, are a wonderful summary of his serene old age:
Sexaginta annos complevi hucusque novemque,
In Domino sperans, dum vocet ipse: Veni.*
Georg Henrik von Wright of the Academy of Finland
In his will, of 29 January 1951, Wittgenstein bequeathed to Rush Rhees, Elizabeth Anscombe and Georg Henrik von Wright ‘all the copyright in all my unpublished writings; and also the manuscripts and typescripts thereof to dispose of as they think best’. These heirs were to publish ‘as many of my unpublished writings as they think fit’, and were to share the royalties and other profits equally between themselves.
Wittgenstein’s heirs reflected three different aspects of his own character. Von Wright, a logician and philosopher of science, corresponded to the austere and technical philosophy of Wittgenstein’s early Tractatus; Anscombe was the most suitable proponent of his late philosophy of mind; and Rhees had an affinity for the mystical streak in his early and late thought.
The legacy placed a heavy burden on the heirs. Because of Wittgenstein’s inability to bring his work into a form he thought suitable for publication, a vast quantity of material of great philosophical value remained unpublished at his death. Each of the heirs was assigned an initial task: Anscombe was to edit and publish the Philosophical Investigations, von Wright was to published selections from Wittgenstein’s work on the foundations of mathematics, and Rhees was to edit the Big Typescript, the nearest to a conventional book that Wittgenstein had produced in his lifetime.
The work of the first two heirs was well received, but when, in 1970, Rhees published a highly edited version of the Big Typescript under the title Philosophische Grammatik, it was widely criticized. Of the heirs, Rhees was the one I knew least, but I got to know him briefly when I was commissioned to prepare an English translation of the Grammatik, which appeared in 1974. While working on the text, I visited Rhees in his house in Swansea from time to time to discuss translation problems. There he lived alone, guarded by a massive German shepherd dog that would place his paws on the shoulders of incoming visitors. I became aware that the text Rhees had published, on the basis of a certain stage of Wittgenstein’s own revisions, was only one of many possible orderings that could claim Wittgenstein’s authority. The chief fault of Rhees’ published text was that it gave no indication at all of the amount of editorial activity that lay behind it. Cuts were made silently, and transpositions merely hinted at; important material in the Typescript was simply omitted.
In the course of translating Rhees’ text I drew up a full account of the editorial decisions he had made, along with their justification – when there was one – in Wittgenstein’s papers. I wished to put this as an introduction to the English version, but Rhees forbade it on the ground that it would ‘come between Wittgenstein and the reader’. Eventually I presented my account as a separate piece entitled, ‘From the Big Typescript to the Philosophical Grammar.’ I published this in a Festschrift for von Wright in 1976. By this time, he had become the one of the trustees whom I knew and loved best.
Georg Henrik was a Swedish-speaking Finn who had studied in Helsinki in the 1930s under the logical positivist Eino Kaila, before studying under Wittgenstein and eventually succeeding him as Professor of Philosophy in Cambridge in 1948. Those who met him always had difficulty with the pronunciation of his surname. Should it be pronounced ‘von Frickt’, as continentals always did, or ‘von Ryte’, as some Anglophones preferred? When I once asked him, Georg Henrik told me that the Anglicized pronunciation was correct: he was descended from a seventeenth-century Scotsman called Wright, who had migrated to Germany and there been ennobled.
Before I first met him, I had read his works with admiration. He was renowned for his work in modal logic (the logic of possibility and necessity) and had invented a parallel discipline of deontic logic (the logic of permission and obligation). Two works of moral philosophy – Norm and Action and The Varieties of Goodness – were classics of analytic philosophy. Of all Wittgenstein’s disciples, he was the one who retained a completely independent style of thought and writing.
It was because of the troubled history of the Wittgensteinian Nachlass that he and I became good friends. In 1989, Rhees died. For some time, the trustees had been giving thought to the future of the Nachlass after their death, and each had privately nominated a successor: Anscombe nominated Anselm Müller of Trier, Rhees nominated Peter Winch, and von Wright nominated myself. For quite a while, these nominations were kept secret from the persons involved. Soon after Rhees’ death, however, Peter Winch became a trustee, and in spring 1990, I was invited to join the trust, von Wright having decided that he would wish me to do so before he had ceased to be a member of the board. From this point, the proceedings of the trustees became more formal, with roughly annual meetings minuted by a secretary who, from 1991 until his death, was Winch.
For ten years I used to meet Georg Henrik at meetings of the Wittgenstein trustees. These were sometimes held at Trinity Cambridge, Wittgenstein’s own college, of which Georg Henrik was now an honorary fellow. Sometimes they were held in Helsinki, or another Nordic city. And, on one or two occasions, they were held in my own Oxford residence, Rhodes House.
Entertaining the von Wrights was a pleasure, but it also put hosts on their mettle. Their mere presence enforced certain standards of polite behaviour from a bygone age. Georg Henrik, a most pacific person, bore himself with an upstanding military presence. His wife, Elizabeth, concealed a warm and generous heart beneath a stern patrician exterior. Georg Henrik must have been one the last people I have known who could be described, as a compliment and without irony, as a perfect gentleman.
I soon discovered that my main function as a trustee was to keep the peace between Anscombe and von Wright. They disagreed over many aspects of the publication of Wittgenstein’s works, and if Georg Henrik was a gentleman, Elizabeth was anything but a lady. During this period, there were several abortive attempts at a publication of the complete Nachlass. The most contentious of these was a project that had been started in 1975 by a team under the direction of Michael Nedo and Professor H. J. Heringer of Tübingen, with financial support from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.
Sadly, the project was a failure. Though about half the Nachlass was transcribed into a computer, not one volume of text was published during the lifetime of the project. The collaborators quarrelled, and the Tübingen Wittgenstein archive was dissolved. Nedo moved from Tübingen to Cambridge. He and Ms Isabelle Weiss began a new project for a complete transcription of the posthumous writings into a database. In 1981, the then trustees applied to an Austrian government research foundation for support for the Nedo project. The years went by, and by the time I became a trustee Nedo had still not produced any publishable text. Instead, he devoted much of his time to designing software to produce a particular page layout. My first meeting as a trustee resulted in Nedo being given an ultimatum: he would receive no further support from the trust unless he produced four volumes by May 1991. The deadline came and went, and nothing appeared.
Meanwhile, however, Anscombe, despite the collective decision of the trustees, continued to support Nedo, and eventually – 20 months later – Nedo presented the trustees with six volumes ready for the printer. These were published a few years later under the title Wiener Ausgabe. The edition received no authorization from the trustees, and remained incomplete.
A more successful publication of the Nachlass resulted from cooperation between the University of Bergen, and Oxford University Press. In 2000, four CDs were produced which contained facsimiles of all the manuscripts, plus two scholarly printed texts. The edition sold widely, and despite some imperfections it has broadly satisfied scholars’ needs for access to Wittgenstein’s legacy. But until his dying day, I think Georg Henrik regretted that it was available only in electronic form, rather than in a Gesamtausgabe of handsomely bound volumes.
In 1996, Elizabeth Anscombe was involved in a serious car accident and suffered injuries to the head. In succeeding years she suffered occasional periods of disorientation, and this sometimes made it difficult to conduct the business of the Wittgenstein Trust. I had, by now, acquired a thick skin in relation to Elizabeth, but Georg Henrik was more sensitive and lost much sleep as a result of the difficulties of dealing with her.
In 1997 Peter Winch died, and at a meeting of all the trustees in the following year, two distinguished Wittgenstein scholars, Peter Hacker and Joachim Schulte, were elected to join the board. After the meeting, Elizabeth, whose concentration and memory were already beginning to fail, denied that she had consented to their appointment, and raised various objections. So during the last years of her life it was impossible to hold meetings of the trustees.
Early in 2001, I wrote to Georg Henrik to narrate the story of Elizabeth’s death and burial. I reported that after a requiem Mass in Blackfriars, Cambridge, Nancy and I had accompanied the family and a dozen other mourners to Ascension Parish Burial Ground, where Wittgenstein was buried. Though the cemetery was officially closed, Elizabeth had secured special permission from ecclesiastical lawyers to be buried beside Wittgenstein: they dug her grave at twice the usual depth to leave room for Peter, who was eventually buried there after his death in 2013.
I ended my letter by pointing out that it was now once again possible for the trustees (including those recently appointed) to convene. We did so in October 2001, in von Wright’s house in Helsinki, and agreed, without friction, on future policy for the publication of Wittgenstein’s works. It was the last time I saw Georg Henrik, for he died in 2003. On his death, the trust was wound up, and the Wittgenstein papers passed into the control of Trinity College, in accordance with terms set out by the original heirs in a trust deed of 1969.
Georg Henrik used to say that alongside the austere rationality of his early work, he had always fostered another side of himself – one interested in Weltanschauung, rather than analysis. As he grew older, these concerns came to the fore. He began to wonder whether the form of rational thought which he had once regarded as supreme was having negative repercussions upon life as a whole, and in particular its aesthetic and cultural aspects. His latest writings, such as The Tree of Knowledge (1993), echo this solemn and gloomy note. He even began to think that his invention of deontic logic had been a mistake.
In Finland, von Wright was always regarded with profound reverence, not only by academics but by the general public. He was given a special research professorship by the Academy of Finland, among other national honours. His letters and working papers are now among the most treasured possessions of the country’s national library. I am proud that my own long correspondence with him is among the material that has found its home there.
Note
*‘Sixty years and nine have I lived until now, but I await, hoping in the Lord, for the day when he calls me: “Come!”’