Before the month has passed I thought I would share a work in progress - still in progress, that is, from the original blog entry made some four years ago. The 7th October 2013 was the 100th anniversary of Ludwig Wittgenstein's dictation of the Birmingham part of his Notes on Logic; the first summary of his philosophy. This was made at the Berlitz School of Language which, in 1913, was housed at Albert Chambers, 32 Paradise Street, Birmingham. With the recent opening of the new Birmingham library in the nearby Centenary Square, it is perhaps apt to mark the occasion of this particular centenary. I should emphasise that this is a work in progress and it is presented very roughly, otherwise the month would pass without any such post.
There is a simple rule
for verifying the genuineness of your life - to ask yourself whether what you
are feeling and thinking at the moment would retain its strength if you knew
that you were about to die. Would you continue to do what you are doing? Ask
yourself this always about everything.
I call this measuring
everything by the just measure of death.
Only that has right to
being which stands this test, which comes out of it unscathed and justified
anew. And whatever, at this touch, pales, droops and withers only counterfeits
life and ought to be torn out and thrown away.
Purified of these waste
products, life will become divinely intense.
[from 'In Praise of Death' in Nicholas Bachtin - 'Lectures and
Essays' (University of Birmingham, 1963), p145]
He is morbidly afraid
he may die before he has put the Theory of Types to rights, and before he has
written out all his other work in such a way as shall be intelligible to the
world and of some use to the science of Logic.
[from David Pinsent’s Diary 17/9/1913]
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| Ludwig Wittgenstein |
When Ludwig Wittgenstein [1889-1951] became a pupil of Bertrand Russell [1872-1970], he was a man in search of a purpose, and being a member of one of the wealthiest families in Europe did not make this task an easy one. Three of his brothers committed suicide. Compounding the grief felt in the household was the demand by their father never to speak of those whom they had lost.
Karl Wittgenstein was a self-made man; a
tough yet cultured steel magnate who ran away from home to spend two
adventurous years in America. He returned to the continued disapproval of his
father, despite having survived on those very qualities of which his father
valued. Karl was hardworking and resourceful. When he returned he studied engineering
and became a draughtsman for the Teplitz Rolling Mill. By the time he was
thirty he had become a company director, and proceeded to gamble on
supplying Russia with railway track, despite not having the means to do so
until the deal was actually struck. He became seriously rich over the years, possessing
a wealth in comparison to few men – Carnegie and Rothschild, for instance.
To fit with his father’s desire for his
sons to follow him into engineering or business, Ludwig Wittgenstein chose to study engineering in Berlin followed by aeronautics
in Manchester. It was during his first three years in Britain that his
interest in the philosophy of mathematics grew and compelled him to seek out
the logician Gottlob Frege (1848-1925). At their meeting, Frege promptly
wiped the floor with Wittgenstein's arguments. However it was not a complete
disaster as Frege was sufficiently impressed to recommend Russell as a suitable
teacher. And so, one day in October 1911, Bertrand Russell, Lecturer in Logic
and Principles of Mathematics at Trinity College, Cambridge, opened his door to
find the man he would later proclaim to be his successor in mathematical logic.
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| Bertrand Russell |
It was good timing for Russell. Since the
turn of the century he had worked himself to breaking point, and when
Wittgenstein entered his life, he had been doubting his ability to carry on in
a subject which required, above all, a high aptitude for technical precision.
Russell's interest in carrying on was nearly exhausted. In future his work would
utilise a particularly attuned skill for communicating complex ideas
intelligibly by writing a series of philosophy books intended for the masses.
The type of which he called a 'shilling shocker'. In the years of
the First World War he came to feel he had made the right decision in
taking the path which would engage him most with the people. Even if he
received a hostile reception, he did so outside of the ivory tower of Cambridge
academia.
Bertrand
Russell’s search for certainty in mathematics had begun in childhood when his
older brother introduced him to Euclid’s axioms of geometry. Fascinated that a
whole world could be built upon a group of simple assertions, he nevertheless
remained unsatisfied that these had to be accepted without proof. For Russell,
mathematics was entwined with the Pythagorean mystical realm which gave all
knowledge its foundations. To be able to describe these foundations would bring
the absolute certainty to Russell’s world which had been tragically removed in
childhood when both his parents and his sister died, leaving him in the care of
his grandmother. The prospect of the elderly Countess Russell also dying and
leaving him alone in the world kept Bertrand awake at night, isolated and
frightened.
After finding the study of mathematics at
Cambridge to be disappointing for a man so concerned with the foundations of
the subject, Russell switched to philosophy, but once again, it was geometry
which drew his attention, and this time from the perspective of Kantian
transcendental idealism. The accepted Platonic position of Euclidean geometry,
which had been so important to Russell, was being challenged by the
non-Euclidean systems as proposed by Georg Riemann and Nikolai Lobachevsky.
Negotiating his Kantian position in light of the new developments, Russell wrote
The Foundations of Geometry (1895) which proposed the idea that space had a constant curvature. Unfortunately,
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity utterly refuted this with its varied curvature
of space. Russell, though, had moved on. He had begun to contemplate the unity
of logic and mathematics. This time he was under the influence of Hegelian
dialectics which sought to remove contradictions by synthesis of opposites and
embrace Reality as one Absolute Idea. The contradictions which Russell sought
to resolve were those of continuity, infinity and the infinitesimal. Soon he
discovered that others had been doing just that, and after acquainting himself
with the work of Karl Weierstrass, Georg Cantor and Richard Dedekind, he abandoned his Hegelian
approach.
The task of philosophy, then, was no longer to demonstrate the
interconnectedness of everything, to prove that Reality was an indivisible
whole; rather the task was to identify, through analysis, the discrete atoms –
material, psychological and logical – of which the world is constructed. [MONK (1997), p21-22]
Shoring up the foundations of mathematics
was a challenge evidently suited to Wittgenstein. The way in which it consumed
him was indicative of the all-or-nothing trait in his character. Once he had
got to grips with the subject, he first became Russell's equal and then his
master. The succession which Russell had hoped for, was on course. After
a year of their relationship, Russell was keen for Wittgenstein to hear his
ideas and needed his pupil to give him a positive response. Later still however,
Russell was not at all receptive to his protégé's brutal honesty. It undermined Russell's confidence in his own work.
Russell had been working on Theory of
Knowledge which, until Wittgenstein learnt of it, had been progressing
satisfactorily over 80 pages. However, it did not take much to stop Russell in his tracks.
Without knowing why Wittgenstein's objections were correct, he believed 'in his bones' they
were because he believed in Wittgenstein. From his pupil's perspective,
Russell's stumbling block was the need of 'a correct theory of propositions' which Wittgenstein may have considered beyond his master who indeed
was coming to the same conclusion. Russell had wanted such a theory to be
developed by his successor, and it was this which formed the basis of
Wittgenstein's Notes on Logic.
The succession would have been complete if
only Wittgenstein had not been suffering from (and making others suffer the
consequences of) an 'artistic temperament' which manifested
itself in a perfectionism that made him reluctant to commit himself to paper.
The frustration this was causing came to a head in 1913, not just for
Wittgenstein, but particularly for Russell who was not just investing time with
Wittgenstein but was preparing him as his philosophical heir. In order for
Russell to have a successor, the candidate had to learn from his master and
match him in ability. In order for the pupil to advance in his field, he would
have to become his master's master by progressing through the problems which
had defeated him. It was always going to be a difficult transition.
As Wittgenstein's work developed, the
friendliness in his relationship with Russell declined. Although this fact may
have been beyond the emotionally myopic Wittgenstein's comprehension. A state
of cordiality remained, but the moodiness and intensity of Wittgenstein
regularly drained Russell, though he was not without sympathy. He imagined that
this was what life with a philosopher was like, which forced him to realise
something of how his own family would have felt during his all-consuming
devotion to the completion of Principia
Mathematica.
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| A page from Principia Mathematica |
It was thanks to
Russell that Wittgenstein found his purpose by engaging in a philosophical
journey with the blessing of a man respected amongst the leaders of his field.
The blessing was taken very seriously by Wittgenstein, it allowed him the
justification to be utterly dedicated to a task which might satisfy that
all-or-nothing character trait. If Russell had relieved Wittgenstein of the
loneliness with which he had been suffering from for years, there was a danger
of its return without him, but this was averted by a new friendship begun at
one of Russell's informal social gatherings, known as 'squashes', in the summer
term of 1912.
Just over a year
later, Wittgenstein made a breakthrough in his work on logic, and it was to his
new friend, David Pinsent, that he first explained it. Unfortunately no record
exists of what the breakthrough entailed, however, it was deemed by Pinsent to
'clear everything up' no less, and we know this
because Pinsent kept a diary. When eventually published, it was entitled A Portrait of Wittgenstein as a Young Man.
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| David Pinsent |
David Hume Pinsent (1891-1918), who was in
his second year at Cambridge reading mathematics, came from a respected
middle-class family in the Birmingham suburb of Harborne. Lordswood House was a
large, three-storeyed 'turreted building standing in four acres of orchards and
grassland' [BIRMINGHAM EVENING MAIL 14/8/1970]. It was demolished in the early
1970s after falling into ruin. Located at 44 Lordswood Road, its neighbour at
42 would later become the family home of W.H. Auden. This too was demolished.
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| Hume Pinsent |
David's father, Hume Chancellor Pinsent, was a descendent of the philosopher David Hume, a solicitor and
also a treasurer of Birmingham University. His mother was born Ellen Frances
Parker (1866-1949), a rector's daughter, the youngest of his thirteen children.
She became the first woman to be elected to Birmingham City Council in 1911,
and was later made a dame in 1938 particularly for her work in the care of
mentally impaired children. Her concern in this area was part of her
involvement in the eugenics movement which had begun when she fell under the
spell of Karl Pearson, the statistician and eugenicist, a friend of her brother
Robert Parker. When Pearson joined Robert on a visit to the family home at
Claxby in Lincolnshire, Ellen, then a young woman, absorbed his 'unorthodox
views' [INTRODUCTION TO DIARY PXII, ANNE PINSENT KEYNES]. Soon she became a
member of the Men's and Women's Club founded by Pearson, and it was here that
Ellen met her husband-to-be who was studying law with Robert at Cambridge.
Ellen and Hume married in 1888 and moved to Birmingham where he joined his
brother Richard's firm, Pinsent & Co, based then at 6 Bennett's Hill, and
she wrote novels.
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| Ellen Pinsent |
We know from David Pinsent's diary that
Wittgenstein visited Birmingham a year before he dictated his Notes on Logic.
It was on return from a holiday they had spent together in Iceland, when
Pinsent persuaded Wittgenstein to stop in the city and stay the night at
Lordswood House.
They arrived at New Street Station at seven in the morning of 4th October 1912, and breakfasted at Lordswood where they showed their photographs from the trip to the rest of David's family before hurrying by bus and taxi back to the city centre to attend the very last concert of the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival at the Town Hall. Established in 1784 to help raise funds for the General Hospital on Summer Lane, the festival had grown over the years. The Town Hall itself had been built in 1834 to accommodate its expanding audience, but by 1912 the money it generated barely, if at all, covered the costs of staging the festival. Consequently the General Hospital received no funds that year and, with the intervention of the First World War, the festival was never held again.
They arrived at New Street Station at seven in the morning of 4th October 1912, and breakfasted at Lordswood where they showed their photographs from the trip to the rest of David's family before hurrying by bus and taxi back to the city centre to attend the very last concert of the Birmingham Triennial Music Festival at the Town Hall. Established in 1784 to help raise funds for the General Hospital on Summer Lane, the festival had grown over the years. The Town Hall itself had been built in 1834 to accommodate its expanding audience, but by 1912 the money it generated barely, if at all, covered the costs of staging the festival. Consequently the General Hospital received no funds that year and, with the intervention of the First World War, the festival was never held again.
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| The Last Triennial Music Festival, Birmingham Town Hall 1912 |
The Pinsents and their Austrian guest
arrived too late for the beginning of Brahms' Requiem. Nevertheless it was too their liking, "Wittgenstein
said he had never enjoyed it more - and he has heard it pretty often."
[DP's Diary] During the lunchtime interval the party retired to the
offices of Pinsent & Co nearby on Bennett's Hill for refreshments.
They returned to hear excerpts from Strauss's Salome, except, that is, for Wittgenstein who refused to listen to
any such thing. Instead he left the Town Hall and stood outside the front of the building on Paradise
Street. However, he returned for
Beethoven's 7th Symphony, but left
again, and, intriguingly, made his own way back to Harborne.
Together again at Lordswood House they took tea and went out for a walk with David's mother Ellen, his sister Hester and his aunt Beatrice Craycroft who was Ellen's elder sister. It took a while for Wittgenstein to relax in the company of David's family, but after dinner he seems to have overcome his initial shyness enough to respond positively to David's request to explain some of his work in Logic to his father Hume. "I think father was interested, and certainly he agreed with me afterwards that Wittgenstein is really very clever and acute." [David Pinsent's diary, p34]
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| 6 Bennett's Hill (Pinsent & Co in 1912) |
Together again at Lordswood House they took tea and went out for a walk with David's mother Ellen, his sister Hester and his aunt Beatrice Craycroft who was Ellen's elder sister. It took a while for Wittgenstein to relax in the company of David's family, but after dinner he seems to have overcome his initial shyness enough to respond positively to David's request to explain some of his work in Logic to his father Hume. "I think father was interested, and certainly he agreed with me afterwards that Wittgenstein is really very clever and acute." [David Pinsent's diary, p34]
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| Remaining boundary wall of Lordswood House, 2010 |
Perhaps in one way the timing of
Wittgenstein's 1913 breakthrough was unfortunate. It came shortly before the
friends set sail together for a holiday in Norway in September, and, although
Wittgenstein had time to meet with Russell for a brief explanation of his
new ideas, the sojourn to Norway gave Wittgenstein time to ruminate before the
ghastly business of publication could begin.
They had not even set sail when
Wittgenstein's anxious state of mind became apparent. His portmanteau of
manuscripts had been misplaced, which put his head into a spin, and
when they arrived in Norway, he was being difficult with Pinsent whose normal
patience with Wittgenstein would be pushed to the limit on holiday. 'He is a
chaotic person. I have to be frightfully careful and tolerant when he gets
these sulky fits.' [p64, David Pinsent's diary] During the long train journey to
Bergen they discussed the friction between them which was, they seemed
to agree, emanating largely from Wittgenstein. For a man on holiday, he
was in desperate need of relaxation. But it was both their intentions to spend as
much time working as walking. Pinsent had now completed his mathematics degree,
obtaining a first and the enviable position as a Senior Wrangler. He was to
study law in Birmingham with a view to following in the family's footsteps.
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| Wittgenstein on holiday in Norway, 1913 |
Pinsent's diary of their holiday together
is almost painfully routine in nature. Working, walking, supper at 8, dominoes,
playing Schubert, and throughout are references to Wittgenstein's nervous
tension and morbidity. Pretty soon Pinsent's exasperation begins to
show. Despite Wittgenstein's extreme focus on logic, he is anything but
rational about his own fears of his approaching and imaginary death:
He is really in an awful neurotic state: this evening he blamed
himself violently and expressed the most piteous disgust with himself. At first
I was rather annoyed with him - it seemed to me that his feelings were silly
and rather selfish. But afterwards I could only pity him - it is obvious he is
quite incapable of helping these fits. I only hope that an out of doors life
here will make him better: at present it is no exaggeration to say he is as bad
- (in that nervous sensibility) - as people like Beethoven were. He even talks
of having at times contemplated suicide. [p67 DP diary 4/9/1913]
It was as if Wittgenstein was
cutting his tethers to the living world, even pushing Pinsent away with
his impossible sulkiness, until there would only be one reason to live, the
most important one of all - resolving the fundamental problems of logic, the
task he alone inherited from Russell. The Theory of Types and
the problem of living had become intimately entwined, and to Wittgenstein
it was not 'decent' that this precarious existence should be brought about by
the threat of death by his own hand. In a sense, it was sinful. After a
fortnight of this, David states simply that Wittgenstein is mad, but he never
renounced their friendship. And despite all this, Wittgenstein stated to
Pinsent that 'he has never before enjoyed a holiday so much as this' [p79,
DP diary, Tues 23/9/1913].
When the holiday was nearing its end,
Wittgenstein decided to return to Norway as soon as possible to isolate himself
and devote himself entirely to his work on logic. When he learnt of his plan
Russell was appalled. He thought that Wittgenstein would go insane. He also feared he may commit
suicide, and from the Wittgenstein family history, this was not a groundless
fear. Worryingly, Wittgenstein had become convinced that he was going to die
soon, and that all his work over the last two years would have been for
nothing. So, prudently, Russell demanded that before he returned to Norway, he
must get his ideas down on paper. The results would come to be known as Notes on Logic. Although this was not
published until later, it is the earliest record of the philosophical
work of Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein caught up with Russell
immediately on his return to Cambridge on 2 October, and read him extracts from
his notebooks. Russell was impressed, but left for London the next day with
nothing having been written down. The following Monday Wittgenstein himself
left Cambridge, and travelled to Birmingham. It was during this second visit to
the city as a guest of the Pinsents that Wittgenstein began to commit his
philosophy to paper.
David Pinsent met Wittgenstein at New
Street Station from where they caught a taxi to Harborne in time for dinner.
Afterwards Wittgenstein talked of his return to Norway, with a plan
to travel the following Saturday. He seems to have played down Russell's
reaction to his scheme of monastic isolation:
He had dreaded talking to Russell about it - fearing that
Russell might be unpleasant and think him a silly ass: but nothing of the sort
seems to have happened. [DP diary (Mon 6/10/1913), p86]
The next day Pinsent took Wittgenstein
into the city centre to shop for suitable clothing. It is hard to imagine
a more incongruous sight than that of Ludwig Wittgenstein wandering through the
Bullring with bags of clothes. There was an outlet of Oswald Bailey on the
corner of High Street and Moor Street, perhaps he went there to be kitted out
for his next Norwegian adventure.
October 1913 was an important
time for the Pinsents. Hume retired, allegedly to avoid being made
vice-chancellor of Birmingham University [INTRO TO DIARY, pXII], and the family
were due to move to Foxcombe Hill, Oxfordshire. Impending elections in
November had forced Ellen to step down from her seat on Birmingham City
Council earlier in October to prevent a clash with the resulting
by-election in her Edgbaston ward. It was much to her regret that she was
cutting ties with the city. And so it would have been if the First
World War had not intervened. Her main area of concern on the council was
the special schools subcommittee which she chaired. Since her conversion to the
eugenics movement, the provision of mental health care had been
her political focus. As a young married woman she had embarked on a career
as a novelist. Amongst the four novels which she had written was Job Hildred, about a mentally ill
artist. From 1904 to 1908 she sat on the royal commission for 'the care and
control of the feeble minded' and had campaigned for the Mental Deficiency Act
which had passed in July of 1913 with only three votes against it. One of those
was cast by Josiah Wedgwood IV who made an astonishing 150 speeches in 3 days
only sustained on barley water and chocolate. The effect of this opposition was
to impose the condition of being able to look after oneself as a determination
of 'fitness'. The Act drove the categories of fit and unfit permanently
into the structure of society. Birmingham was not unique to have the lunatic
asylum, the workhouse and the prison built back-to-back. There were a variety
of levels of existence within this draconian complex, where essentially
everyone within its parts, to those outside, were condemned to control,
irrationality and silence.
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| Lordswood House shortly before demolition |
To mark the occasion of Hume's retirement,
the Pinsents held a lunchtime party at Lordswood House, but David and
Wittgenstein managed to avoid much of the festivities. At the house, the
Pinsents' player piano was an enjoyable distraction for Wittgenstein,
and, as the telephone was out of order, the two friends took a walk
to the post office in Harborne in a fruitless attempt to contact Professor
A.N. Whitehead, Russell's collaborator on Principia
Mathematica. On return it was time for tea after which they
performed Schubert in the special way which they had developed over the course
of their month-long Norwegian holiday. David Pinsent would play the piano and
Wittgenstein would accompany him with his highly accomplished whistling. It is
a touching image of a friendship and to imagine this particular performance
produces a melancholic feeling when one realises that this was the very last
time they did it.
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| Albert Chambers, 32 Paradise Street (DJ Norton) |
Once the incessant ritual of afternoon tea
was out of the way, Wittgenstein went off on his own to the Berlitz school of
language at 5.30. The school was then located in Albert Chambers, 32
Paradise Street, see above. Perhaps it had been during his one-man protest against Strauss
when he stood outside the front of the Town Hall a year previously, that he
noticed the Berlitz school on the opposite side of the street, although it
appears to have been David's father who arranged for Wittgenstein to dictate in
German to a stenographer.
On Tuesday 7 October 1913, between 6 and 8pm, Wittgenstein put down his work so far in analytical philosophy. The dictation evidently proved cathartic, for when he returned to Lordswood House "he was quite cheerful and in very good form". [p87 DP diary, Tues 7/10/1913]
On Tuesday 7 October 1913, between 6 and 8pm, Wittgenstein put down his work so far in analytical philosophy. The dictation evidently proved cathartic, for when he returned to Lordswood House "he was quite cheerful and in very good form". [p87 DP diary, Tues 7/10/1913]
It was time to see Russell again. The next
morning Wittgenstein said his goodbye to David Pinsent at Lordswood
House and departed in a taxi for New Street Station, catching
the 7.30 to Cambridge. Pinsent noted in his diary:
It was a sad parting from him - but it is possible he may pay a
short visit to England next summer... when I may see him again. Our
acquaintance has been chaotic but I have been very thankful for it: I am sure
he has also. [p88 DP diary, Wed 8/10/1913]
The next summer came, and with it war. Up
until the outbreak there were still plans to take another holiday together,
possibly to Andorra, despite Pinsent's vow to never go on holiday with Wittgenstein
again. They never did see eachother again, the friends were now citizens of two
opposing empires. When war broke out Wittgenstein was at home in
Vienna, and once he realised that he could not leave Austria to return to
Norway or England, he volunteered for the army. The patriotic urge was
useful for him to break free of the confinements of an intellectual
life and to reappraise the death instinct which was never far from
his conscious self.
He told me that all his life there had hardly been a day, in
which he had not at one time or other thought of suicide as a possibility. [p81 DP diary, Thurs 25/9/1913]
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| Troops at New St Station, 4th August 1914 |
In facing death at the front, he was
seeking a transcendental experience. Rather than the ignominy of
death by his own hand, the prospect of a heroic death in battle would
bring relief from the constant nervous tension Pinsent had witnessed in
Norway. That had come about from the co-existence of the intractable problems
in logic and of being-in-the-world, with all its sensual frustrations. Insufferably
entwined, a corporeal entity and a conscious being had their limits, and this
was where Wittgenstein placed himself. Only there could he justify the
annoyance he brought upon others, and paradoxically, the suffering he himself
endured. The overwhelming need for Wittgenstein to transform himself under
the shadow of conflict began to replace his all-consuming drive to solve
the underlying problems in logic. Through the 'decent' risk of being a soldier
under mass mobilisation, standing shoulder to shoulder in jeopardy with his
fellow man, he sought to jettison the baggage of self-destruction as a 'sinful'
self-indulgence and transform his relationship to death into something possibly
glorious or heroic, i.e. guiltless. With the resolution of the Theory of Types
no longer bound to a suicidal failure, the self-imposed pressure could be
released. Not coincidently, a strain of mysticism would enter his life and his philosophy
under these conditions.
After enlisting, Wittgenstein was sent to
an artillery regiment in Kraków. Despite standing shoulder to shoulder with his
fellow Austro-Hungarians, the son of one of the richest in the Hapsburg Empire,
and a neurotically-focused intellectual, felt nothing but contempt for those
around him, with whom, unsurprisingly, he felt little in common. The isolation
returned, and with it, notions of suicide. However, relief was at hand in the
form of a copy of Tolstoy's Gospel in
Brief, which he read again and again. The mystical transformation was
beginning and he was starting to feel alive to the world. Through the darkness
of war, a light was emerging to guide him, and the more he approached death,
the stronger the light. He was leaving the period of isolation of his time at
Cambridge and especially in Norway when he had developed a individualistic
philosophy of language as ‘an instrument for reporting to oneself, for
describing.’ [ANTHONY QUINTON in ‘MEN OF IDEAS: SOME CREATORS OF CONTEMPORARY
PHILOSOPHY’ – BRYAN MAGEE (BBC, 1978), p109]
After graduation from Cambridge, David
Pinsent studied law in Birmingham and worked at Pinsent & Co. As his family
had moved to Oxfordshire, David took lodgings with Miss Dale a
family friend who lived at 105 Harborne Road, Edgbaston, not far from Lordswood
House. Today, Miss Dale's former home carries a Blue Plaque, to mark
another former resident, the novelist Francis Brett Young.
Continuing his studies in law, David Pinsent moved to London to continue
his studies and to work with his uncle, Ellen's brother, Robert Parker who had
become a Chancery judge. At the outbreak of hostilities, he failed to be
enlisted by the army due to his slight build, whereas his younger brother
Richard gave up his place at Balliol College and received a commission as a
second lieutenant in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was killed in
France in October 1915, four months after his deployment. Their cousin Philip
had also been killed a few weeks previously. Again David tried to enlist, and
again he was refused. He returned to Birmingham and trained as a toolmaker
in a local munitions factory before being sent to RAF Farnborough to work in
the factory there. Fatefully, some of his Cambridge contemporaries were working
there in research and persuaded Pinsent to join them. After the rejections of
the army, he was pleased to have found something to which he was so suited in
that time of national emergency. Even his slight build was an advantage for the
cramped conditions in an observer's cockpit. These experimental flights were
risky however, and in 1918 he wrote home in a flimsy attempt to reassure his
family:
There are a lot of experiments we've only recently been
able to do because the old pilots refused to do them - said they were too
dangerous... We've had if anything fewer accidents with these new men than we
had with the old lot. Please don't worry. It really is absurdly safe, and I
sometimes wish it wasn't quite so safe and then I might feel I was sharing some
of the risks of these days. [INTRO TO DP DIARY, PXVII]
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| David Pinsent in the front observer's seat |
On 8 May 1918, David Pinsent and his pilot
were investigating the cause of a previous accident when their aircraft broke
up in flight. Both were killed. For a while his body was missing until it was
found in the canal. On 6 July Ellen wrote to Wittgenstein from
Birmingham. With the death of two of his nephews, Hume had come out of
retirement to help out at Pinsent Co. During this time they lived at Little
Wick in the grounds of Selly Wick House, the home of Hume's brother,
founder of the family business. Although Little Wick was demolished when the
land was developed, Selly Wick House still stands today in use as
offices. It was one of a number of large mid-Victorian houses built across
Selly Hill by a series of small lakes. The others included Highfield which,
unfortunately, was demolished in 1984. Just over a decade after Ellen
wrote to Wittgenstein to inform him of David's death, Highfield was to become a
centre of Birmingham's cultural and bohemian life. In her letter to
Wittgenstein, Ellen Pinsent consoles him by acknowledging the depth of feeling
of her son for his friend:
I want to tell you how much he loved you and valued your
friendship up to the last. I saw him the day before he was killed and we talked
of you. He spoke of you always with great affection. [p108 DP diary, letter EP
to LW 6/7/1918]
When Wittgenstein received the news of his
friend's death, he was overcome with suicidal feelings of
despair. Fortunately he was at home on leave and was taken in by his
uncle Paul. He was also putting the finishing touches to the first manuscript
of the Tractatus. He replied to Ellen
Pinsent:
David was my first and my only friend. I have indeed known many
young men of my own age and have been on good terms with some, but only in him
did I find a real friend, the hours I have spent with him have been the best in
my life, he was to me a brother and a friend. [p108-9 DP diary, letter LW to
EP, not dated]
___
For some background to this post, see Suffering in Silence.
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