Afterword

What Happened When Wittgenstein
Met Tristram Shandy

Philosophers and philosophical works pop up as aspirational or influential texts more often than any others—and no wonder, philosophers are, after all, supposed to be the “big ideas” people. But where do philosophers get their ideas from? We usually imagine such thinkers starting from scratch, yet that’s not quite right. In fact, philosophers, just like the rest of us, are often following up something they were told or read.

The writings of Plato are famously credited as the source for which all subsequent philosophy is merely footnotes–and with good reason–yet Plato too was influenced by his reading of texts by mystical figures such as Pythagoras. But to see how books influence books let’s finish by taking perhaps the most famous, if by no means the smartest let alone the most productive, philosopher of the twentieth century, the Austrian eccentric Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein only published one book in his lifetime, called obscurely the Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus, which is a mix of the views of his academic supervisor at Cambridge, Bertrand Russell, and a rather nasty tract by Otto Weininger called Sex and Character, which was also—wait for it!—much admired by one Adolf Hitler.

But that’s politics. Sticking to Wittgenstein and philosophy, it is his second book, Philosophical Investigations, which is both rather better and more interesting to us. And without doubt, this was inspired in crucial ways by another text. And it is not the sort of book you would expect to be influencing an otherwise very earnest, even monomaniac philosopher like Wittgenstein. After all, the Irish clergyman Laurence Sterne’s account of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, written in nine chunks with the first appearing as long ago as 1759, is not on the face of it a serious book at all, let alone a work of philosophy. Instead it is an extended parody of what is otherwise offered as the autobiographical, personal story of the life of a humble pastor living in the north of England.

The book is ostensibly Tristram’s woeful narration of key episodes in his life, from the time as a toddler the sash window fell on his “manhood,” accidentally circumcising him—“’Twas nothing, I did not lose two drops of blood by it—’twas not worth calling in a surgeon, had he lived next door to us—thousands suffer by choice, what I did by accident”—to his father’s neglect of his education on account of his determination to first write a “Tristra-paedia,” meaning a book to outline the system under which Tristram was to be educated. And all the time it is one of the central jokes of the novel that Tristram cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and color to his tale, to the extent that it is well into Volume III before he manages to even mention his own birth.

Wittgenstein liked the book so much that he constantly referred to it, and his contemporaries recall him claiming to have read and reread it a dozen times! Maurice O’Connor Drury, psychiatrist and loyal follower, for example, notes in his book, Conversations with Wittgenstein, that the celebrated philosopher once told him, “Now a book I like greatly is Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. That is one of my favourite books.”

The debt of Wittgenstein—and hence much modern philosophy—to Laurence Sterne’s humorous novel is as remarkable as it is unexpected. The first influence is stylistic—but the style is also the content and provides new ways to see issues. Within the world of philosophy, Wittgenstein is celebrated for his “language games,” yet the first round of the game was clearly played by Sterne.

Wittgenstein seems to have found inspiration in the permanent digressions that thwart the telling of Shandy’s story as well as in the way that Sterne plays with words, often teasing the reader with the many ways that they can be used. Sometimes they are a straightforward record or a conversation, but other times they “point beyond the text” and force the reader to suddenly reevaluate all that has come before. In such changes of perspective, much of the humor lies.

Both Sterne and Wittgenstein demand “reader participation and response.” Or as Wittgenstein says in the preface to Philosophical Investigations, “I should not like my writing to spare people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.”

The same playfulness that leads Sterne to use typographical tricks and techniques such as dots, dashes, blank pages, and even a “black page” reappear in Wittgenstein’s book as intriguing graphics, including the famous doodle of a duck that might be a rabbit depending on what you are thinking as you look at it.

In a book called Wittgenstein’s Place in Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy (1996), a British professor named Peter Hacker, who is counted in philosophy circles as one of the “principal commentators” on Wittgenstein’s work, observes that “although the Investigations is written in brief and often apparently disconnected remarks, although it frequently jumps from topic to topic without indicating the reasons for such sudden transitions, and although it has seemed to many readers to be a philosophy that revels in lack of systematically, it is in fact . . . a highly systematic, integrated work, and anything but a haphazard collection or apercus.”

Exactly the same could be said of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy.

Similarly, in her book called Wittgenstein’s Art of Investigation, Beth Savickey identifies key elements in Wittgenstein’s work that are more literary than philosophical, let alone “logical,” saying, “Wittgenstein’s later writings are, perhaps, the only truly twentieth century philosophical writings we have. They are characterised by a participatory mystique, the fostering of a communal sense, the concentration of the present moment, and the repetition of grammatical techniques.”

All of this is deeply “Shandyan,” but oddly enough Savickey sees only a superficial link between the two writers—indeed she claims several German-language philosophers,¹ from Hegel and Schopenhauer and on to Marx and Nietzsche, are writers whose thinking was more directly affected by the Irish humorist. That seems a stretch, but it certainly makes two important points: first, that all kinds of books can have an influence well beyond their intended audience, and second, that that influence can sometimes be completely forgotten! Perhaps this book can be a small remedy for that.

Notes

1. Sterne being Irish, Tristram Shandy was, indeed, written originally in English, but it had been speedily translated into German in 1769. It is said that the celebrated German philosopher Schopenhauer liked the book so much that he wanted to provide the service himself—but the publisher declined his offer.