Benjamin
Gustafsson
603A
Bump
10/27/05
On the Meaning of Certain Words
It was upon returning to Yale’s campus now as a student of
another alma mater that I experienced an extraordinary glimpse into an
all-at-once strange and familiar world. For many years it had been my dream to
carry on my scholarly ambitions by looking outward from Yale’s campus as an
insider under the eclectic facade of Gothic cobblestone towers with archaic
names like Saybrook and Timothy Dwight. These names
were the signposts along the road to a great destiny. With their help I would
discover, effortlessly, the meaning of the words success, prestige and happiness.
A plaintive cry from a group of tourists taking snap-shots
around a small copper statue of a proud and utterly displaced Isaac Newton, far
from his native England, brought me back to the present moment. I shuddered
briefly from the cool air. On this September morning as I searched for my
friend, Xiaoxuan, the Valedictorian of our magnet high school who had, for her
extraordinary efforts, received the prize of a scholarship to Yale, my mind was
full of conflicting feelings. Not even the clean, crisp autumn air could
diffuse this dyspeptic fog that swirled around and within me. I kept wondering if the students who
were being inducted into Yale’s secret societies would discover that I was an
outsider – someone not suited for these manicured lawns.
Hoping to build some primitive fortification against this
ubiquitous siege of self-destructive thinking, I searched for entrenching
notions of belonging to my new college community. Where was Xiaoxuan, I asked myself nervously? She had undoubtedly been delayed on
some important errand. I wanted desperately to be home in our “quad.” There I
would walk with my friends among the comforting limestone buildings, where
Spanish architecture mixed playfully with the jutting angles of modern
industrial structures. At the heart of our “40 acres,” an awesome obelisk of
ancient learning watches over us.
With a warm orange glow that blends imperceptibly with the humid night
air, this monument gently reminds us that knowing the truth will set us free.
Soon my mind wandered to 
a foggy old 
greenhouse and rested at a green 
turtle pond full of algae, whose inhabitants care little
for what lies 
beyond its stony banks. I imagined myself brewing dark,
warm cups of Andersons’ coffee with my perpetually cheerful friend Michael.
Through endless nights we confronted the darkness of our undefined destinies
and celebrated our starving ambitions at the break of dawn. We smiled inwardly
at our grandiloquence, and studied each other cautiously for signs of
skepticism. Had we not lain to rest our hopelessness? Had we not, together,
given countless eulogies to our inhibitions and taken flight on wings of camaraderie
and boundless horizons? In the maze-like corridors of “The Stacks” above the
Natural Science Library I made promises to these distant lands through the
sacrifice of hours. High above the narrow streets below I soared. With only the
dim light bulb hanging above me, I saw the road ahead lit by a new day. But
finding myself once again in New Haven, I continued to ruminate, struggling
with my underdeveloped concepts of prestige and self-worth, without truly
coming to know what such things meant.
A subtle stirring of leaves brought a colder wind, which
swept through my thin red sweater. Before my eyes a subtle change passed over
the Gothic buildings, causing them to appear serious and austere. The arrogance
of the buildings began to diminish. I felt the presence of a worn and yet
vibrant sense of responsibility emanating from my surroundings, as if I were in
the presence of something majestic. The small courtyard grew into an expansive
quadrangle, which almost caused me to lurch into nausea. In these moments I
became aware of a new sensation, as if I were approaching a great work of art
and suddenly sensed that nebulous quality of knowing that I was no longer
merely in the presence of a replica.
“Am I near Branford College, or was it Trumbull?” I asked myself. In the form of some childhood memory
from Chariots of Fire or perhaps a
story from my mother’s college days at King’s College, Cambridge, I realized
that I had left behind both the acid-washed walls of Yale and the glowing 
limestone of the “40 Acres.” I stood beside an ancient fountain whose twinkling waters, I
later learned, had trickled here devotedly 
from a spring to the west for over three hundred years [1].
Red brick towers and aging grey cobblestone buildings occasionally covered in
ivy formed a large rectangle. A wide path leading in four directions formed a
cross in the center of the courtyard.
Somehow I was standing in the center of the Great Court at Trinity College in the heart of
Cambridge University in the year 1930!
Dear reader, if these things seem unthinkable I must warn
that what followed was still more incredible. Moments later the clock began to
strike noon, and a man raced ferociously around the side of the courtyard. I
became suddenly aware that I stood among a mob of shouting students. A moment
before the final stroke of the bell he was caught up at the finish line by a
group of students who hoisted him onto their shoulders. I asked a nearby spectator
what had happened, and was told that the sprinter had just completed “The
College Dash” – something that had not occurred in over seven hundred
years! The crowd erupted in wild cheers as champagne seemed to rain from the
sky. [2].At first I had been overwhelmed by delirious confusion, but now a
sense of terrible awe swept through me. Though the familiar world had departed
before my eyes with the senseless humor of a dream, I saw only a vision of
myself carried on the shoulders of peers. As spectators rushed by me to
congratulate the runner, I became aware of my surroundings once again. As I
looked about me in the midst of the exited crowed I began to feel sick. My mind
raced through impossible thoughts. I felt at once like a man who could not
awaken from a dream, and a man who could not sleep because of his restless
conscience. As claustrophobia began to set in, I looked desperately for an
escape from the noise. I pressed
through the crowd until I arrived at an archway covered in ivy and stepped
inside [3]. I walked, dazed, through a wood paneled hallway broken by squares
of warm light, which fell upon the floor through the rectangular windows facing
the court [4]. This place was utterly silent. Only my quiet footsteps could be
heard as I cautiously examined the room. My nerves began to settle and a sense
of curiosity arose within me. At last I arrived at a big wooden door behind
which I heard the scrambling of chairs and low voices. Summoning my courage I
opened the door and found a group of fifteen students packed tightly in an
“austerely furnished” living room [5]. The room’s walls were barren, devoid of
any “ornaments, paintings or photographs.” An extraordinary sense of order and
cleanliness contrasted sharply with the mass of students surrounding a surprisingly
young looking man [6]. A “lean and brown” face looked up beneath a head of
curly brown hair [7]. Upon my appearance in the room he cast a scornful look
and said coldly “my lectures are not for tourists” [8]. He spoke in a high,
clear British, punctured occasionally by germanisms. As I looked back at him, startled, someone whispered,
“Wittgenstein expects all students to attend at least six lectures so that we
contribute to the dialogue.”
After a few silent moments I cautiously answered. 
“I have to tell you that I am not, in fact, a student here
at Trinity College. In all honesty I believe that I should not yet be born for
another fifty-six years, and even then it will be far away in the American
southwest.”
Neither the man they called Wittgenstein nor the other
students seemed disturbed by this statement. A few smiled, as though I had
purchased myself a place among them with this clever “excuse” and the man at
the center of the room pointed toward a chair in the corner of the room. Slowly
and with a pounding heart, I began to realize that I might somehow be in the
presence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the
great logician and philosopher, who was touted by Bertrand Russell as the
reconciler of all western philosophy.
And he had done this not just once, but twice! First, with the publication the Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein
introduced the use of the “truth table” to elucidate the “theory of truth
functions” and the concept of “language as a picture of reality” [9]. Then again, almost twenty years later,
when he repudiated his earlier work in his far more esoteric Philosophical
Investigations. In the later work, Wittgenstein jettisoned the
“correspondence theory of truth” (the theory that a proposition “pictures” or
“corresponds” with facts) in favor of a more anthropological approach, which
dissolves philosophical problems by painstakingly imagining and examining
“language games,” in which concepts such as “belief,” “knowledge” and “truth”
arise quite naturally in the context of everyday life or quite strangely and
paradoxically in the context of philosophical discussion. Since
his death in 1951 little new ground had been broken in western philosophy as
students who sided with “the early” and those who sided with “the late”
Wittgenstein argued among themselves [10]. I had often thought of Wittgenstein
as role model because he had approached philosophy with such a unique
perspective and tireless desire to solve problems thoroughly.
Suddenly, without introduction he began to speak. “An
Austrian general said to someone: ‘I shall think of you after my death, if that
should be possible.’ We can imagine one group who would find this ludicrous,
another who wouldn’t” [11]. At the present moment I fell decidedly among the
latter group. He continued. “When
we talk about a ‘belief’ during a discussion of the ‘supernatural’ we are no
longer using the word as we would in scientific or rational conversation. In a
conversation about an experiment we may say that we believe that the conclusion
supports our hypothesis. This kind of ‘belief’ is graduated on a scale of
probability. In the context of the supernatural we accept the term ‘belief’ to
mean something absolute. If a man were to draw a scribbled image on a paper and
call this ‘death’ we would not ask him how firmly he believed that this image
was in fact death.” [12] Here he seemed to grin inwardly at his own analogy.
Someone among the students chuckled to which he shouted, “No, no; I’m
serious!” [13] In silence, we all wiped
the smiles off our faces. “One
might then say that this ‘belief’ is unreasonable. I would not say this. I would never call such an argument reasonable either
– meaning they don’t use reason here.” [14] Someone began to ask a
question to which, Wittgenstein simply waved him off with his hand [15]. The
room fell into what seemed to me an uneasy silence, but to which the students
reacted quite calmly, simply waiting for him to continue. As I watched the
heavy lines that drew themselves across his forehead, I “knew that [I] was in
the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect” [16].
Sitting quietly I became aware again of my surroundings. As a student I had
become conditioned to listening to lectures that wandered through planes of
solitary esoteric thought. Out of habit I found it quite natural to listen to
what would otherwise have seemed an enormously remote and abstract discussion.
Even so, I became aware that this “lecture” was very different from those I had
attended at The University of Texas. It seemed as though this enormous
intellect was reasoning out his argument here amongst his peers –
conducting research. The only thing that seems to have made such an approach
possible “was a vast amount of thinking and writing about all the problems under
discussion” for he used no notes whatsoever [17]. I spoke quietly to myself, believing that I was
inaudible. “I must say that by all reasonable accounts you are either dead and I am speaking to a ghost,
or one of us is having a rather strange dream.”
Wittgenstein answered. “I must admit that I do not really know what you mean. ‘When
I use the word ‘death,’ I know that it is a public instrument, which has a
whole technique of usage. Then someone like you says he has an ‘idea of death,’
something queer.’ After all I am still
very much alive and well as far as I can tell. ‘If you treat this ‘idea’ of
yours as something private, with what right are you calling it an ‘idea of
death?’ I say this because we all have a right to say what our ‘idea of death’
is’ [18].”
I maintained my position. “I guess what I mean is, shouldn’t you have ceased to
exist?” A student chuckled slightly in the corner. Another student murmured
that I had taken the joke too far.
Wittgenstein simply continued. “What if I consider death to be a separation of the soul
from the body?” [19]
So, I asked, “Is it possible that we are both ‘dead’ since
I seem to have lost my body?”
Wittgenstein replied. “Can you see now that all we’ve done is
painted a certain ‘picture’ of ‘the idea of death’? You may say ‘I would have
been prepared to use another picture; it would have had the same effect…’
Normally if you say ‘I am dead’ you draw consequences. On the other hand, you
may not wish to draw any such consequences, and this is all there is to it –except
further muddles” [20]. The discussion continued in this manner until the clock
tower began to strike, much as it had at The University of Texas when I was
late to class. At this point Wittgenstein seemed consumed with confusion and
ended his lecture saying, “I’m a fool. You have a dreadful teacher!” and then,
“I’m just too stupid today” [21].
Finally, we all put away our notebooks in which we had been
scribbling frantically to transcribe every word. I felt like Norman Malcolm, a
student of Wittgenstein at Cambridge, who wrote that he had “understood almost
nothing of the lectures” until he studied his notes extensively a decade later
[22].
Wittgenstein remained seated in his canvas chair looking
distressed. Here was clearly a man who placed enormous importance on the
complete resolution of his thoughts. Finally he looked up at me and asked if we
“could go to a flick” [23]? He would later tell me that he was in the habit of
getting to know his students individually over tea or at the movies – a
recreation he undertook to escape the strain of his restless thoughts.
As we made our way out of
Trinity College’s gates and walked along the Cam River I was struck again with
the peculiarity of my current situation. “If I am really walking beside Wittgenstein,”
I thought to myself “I must ask him
something really important -- but what?” I began to think of the important
moral, ethical, theological problems that I could remember. None of these
questions seemed important enough to ask about. I traced back the day’s events
in my mind and remembered that mornings feelings of inadequacy and
hopelessness. Yes, they had been spurred by the seeming self-assurance of
Yale’s campus, but they went deeper. At last I turned to Wittgenstein and said:
”You are the world’s greatest
philosopher, Professor Wittgenstein, do you know what success, happiness and prestige mean?”
He looked up at the night sky and pointed at the stars that
made up Cassiopeia and said that “it was a ‘W and that it meant Wittgenstein.” I told him that it was a ‘B’ for Benjamin. He “gravely
assured me that I was wrong” [24]. I
smiled at him but he appeared completely serious. I could hear the water
running along the banks of the Cam. Wittgenstein appeared to be thinking.
Finally he continued.
“I could present to you a sort of picture of these things.
The kinds of images people often attach to these kinds of things. To many of my
colleagues here, success and prestige mean getting important chairs and sitting at the High
Table at dinner. These sorts of things make me uncomfortable. I was once
accosted for not wearing a tie to one of these events!”
I found it very strange that even Wittgenstein would be
uncomfortable sitting at the elegant and famous High Table! He went on. “In the end we all have the right to decide
what images we attach to these words. All propositions are of equal value. The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In
it no values exist. [25] I was always well-respected for my early work, but it made
me unhappy to know that it was incomplete.
To me happiness is freedom from these problems. Spending time in the Norwegian
forest [sic]. [26] Search yourself. What kind of images do you associate with
these words? This is your private lexicon; it will determine your world. The
world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man. ” [27]
I was reminded
then of how I had stared one sunny afternoon at the solid wooden beams in the
reference library on the second floor of the Tower and saw the words of Anatole
France translated from his elegant French and carved onto the sturdy beams of
the ceiling: “If the object to which one devotes himself is an illusion, the
devotion to it is none the less a reality.” [28]
As I looked up
to answer, I found that I was no longer looking at the face of Wittgenstein but
rather at Xiaoxuan. “Hey,” she said. “Sorry I’m late, I had to watch over my
laundry!” As we strolled across Yale’s Old Campus Xiaoxuan told me about her
experiences. I shared with her my own, calmed by the wise words of Wittgenstein
and no longer plagued by the aching questions of purpose and place. “I can
create whatever image I desire of such things” I thought to myself. I knew then
that I need only remember, as I search for self-understanding, that I am
infinitely capable of creating my world. I am infinitely capable of creating my
place in this world.
Word Count: 2,783
80 words were removed or replaced.
376 words were added.
Website: https://webspace.utexas.edu/bag373/p1a.htm
Image Sources:
Figure 1: www.yale.edu/.../
class_on_old_campus.jpg
Figure 2: http://www.browningconstruction.com/images/hr1.jpg
Figure 3: www.utexas.edu/.../ graphics/buildings/crd.jpg
Figure 4:http://www.kkn.net/~k5tr/photo/pcd2818/utarc-tower-ut-tower-73.3.jpg
Figure 5:
http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=44&stop=2
Figure 6: http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/03/vincent/River%20Cam%20by%20St.%20John's2.JPG
Figure 7: http://www.uib.no/elin/elpub/uibmag/en01/grafikk/wittgenstein.jpg
Endnotes: 1. Trinity College. Dept. home page. Fall 2002. Cambridge University. 27 Sept. 2005
<http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=44>. 2. This imagery is inspired by “The College Dash” scene in: Chariots of Fire. Miramax, 1981.
3.Trinity College. Dept. home page. Fall 2002. Cambridge University. 27 Sept. 2005
<http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/index.php?pageid=44>. 4. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (1958. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 25.5. Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 16.
6. Ibid., 23. 7. Ibid., 23. 8. Wittgenstein Qtd. Ibid., 28. 9. Ibid., 10. 10. Norman. Ibid., 22. A somewhat hyperbolic sentiment 11. Cyril Barrett and others ed., Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 52. Wittgenstein lecturing.
12. Note: Many of these ideas were addressed during a series of lectures about religion and aesthetics in 1938. Cyril, Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, 53-69.
13. Wittgenstein Qtd. Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 29.
14. Ibid., 58. 15. Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 26.
16. Ibid., 26. 17. Ibid., 24. 18. Wittgenstein lecturing. Cyril, Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, 69.
19. Ibid., 69. 20. Ibid., 72. 21. Wittgenstein Qtd. Ibid., 26. 22. Ibid., 23. 23. Wittgenstein Qtd. Ibid., 27.
24. Ibid., 32. A quote from a conversation between Norman Malcolm and Wittgenstein 25. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (New York: the Humanities Press 1961), 125.
26. Note: Norman describes how Wittgenstein would make extended vacation in the Norwegian countryside where he was most relaxed. Norman, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 33..
27. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, (New York: the Humanities Press 1961), 126.
28. From Course packet. Anatole France., 302.