To the left, the cabin Wittgenstein built near Skjolden, in Norway (the graphic reconstruction was done by me). It was at the head of the enormous and dramatic Sognefjord, on the west coast.
Sognefjord in Russian (it has the best pictures).
I got an interesting letter from Rik Kabel about the title of the blog:
I recently came across your blog at abadguide and noticed the line attributed to Wittgenstein. The date given is 1946. You can probably move that date back a bit after reviewing the page (taken from Wittgenstein’s Lectures On The Foundations Of Mathematics, Cambridge, 1939 by R. G. Bosanquet and others, edited by Cora Diamond, U Chicago Press 1976, 1989). It does appear that he used the metaphor in various forms.
I suppose that he said it in English, although I get the impression that he relied on native English speakers for more careful, idiomatic translations from German, as Ogden for_Tractatus_. If you know of a German statement of it by him, I would enjoy learning of it.
Rik explained his interest:
I have a thing about quotations (and pretend to be writing a book about it). I find many are inaccurate in body or attribution, including many in the standard quotation dictionaries. I also don’t really think that translations should be considered quotation as much as allusion. So, I just had to check out the Wittgenstein. It is a bad habit, but like all bad habits, it provides great pleasure.
I like to see the quotation in a slightly different form like the one Rik links to, but that he was repeating the same metaphor years later — isn’t that a little disappointing? Middle-aged Wittgenstein is usually portrayed biographically as a man rethinking his ideas and coming to bold new conclusions, but this seems more like the bloke down the pub who says “Stop me if you’ve heard this one…”. I don’t like to think of him repeating himself — however, Wittgenstein was a university teacher and he probably did. And the truth is I’m quite happy to be rereading it a year after I first put it at the top of the page. It implies that I might have a master plan that will reveal itself over time; and who knows, perhaps I do and perhaps it will. At the moment I’m very interested in Language Hat’s recent Goats From All Over; there’s no connection, but they complement quite well, say, our three-day binge of ice cream shop naming. The Wittgenstein quote reassures me, and hopefully others, that it’s quite okay.
To return to Rik’s question; in a note about the book, Wittgenstein’s Lectures, it says:
For several terms at Cambridge in 1939, Ludwig Wittgenstein lectured on the philosophical foundations of mathematics. A lecture class taught by Wittgenstein, however, hardly resembled a lecture. He sat on a chair in the middle of the room, with some of the class sitting in chairs, some on the floor. He never used notes. He paused frequently, sometimes for several minutes, while he puzzled out a problem. He often asked his listeners questions and reacted to their replies. Many meetings were largely conversation. These lectures were attended by, among others, D. A. T. Gasking, J. N. Findlay, Stephen Toulmin, Alan Turing, G. H. von Wright, R. G. Bosanquet, Norman Malcolm, Rush Rhees, and Yorick Smythies. Notes taken by these last four are the basis for the thirty-one lectures in this book.
I believe that at this stage in his life Wittgenstein did his own translating. Yorick Smythies — one of a long line of Yorick Smythies, according to google — typed some of Wittgenstein’s handwritten notes, possibly those translated by the author into English for the postwar version of Philosophische Untersuchungen. Unfortunately he died in 1978. Like Rik, I’m interested to see if anyone knows of an earlier attribution of Wittgenstein’s “bad guide” metaphor in either English or German There will be a special prize for German, perhaps a guided weekend tour of A Bad Guide’s technical workshops and studios, culminating in a working lunch with the goats at the reservoir, where any day now they are due to start their summer job…
A Bad Guide 
Wonderful spot! Do you mean that you rebuilt the cabin yourself? How did that happen?
Nothing so useful, I stuck a picture of the cabin on top of another picture of where it had been standing. The house’s foundation was clear in the site photo, so I was able to adjust the relative sizes.
I see! I am not familiar with photoshop, etc, so unless it is very obvious, I don’t think of photo tricks.
They are on every other page of glossy magazines like Vogue, and only because in the right hands the trickery is completely invisible.
Who can we trust?
Incidentally, I was just forcefully denied permission to look at the Sognefjord link.
I have danced on Wittgenstein’s grave. But only literally.
The Sognefjord link works for me, brings back fond memories; I think the problem must be something to do with your computer environment.
Well, now it doesn’t work for me, either (it did earlier). I’ll have to change it.
Did you climb the ladder, Dearie?
*ahegm*
There was no ladder there when I did my wee jig. But thanks for the link, Crown – I’m struck by the letter to the Times from Nick Ingham: I used to know him – our daughters went to school together.
Actually, I find you a pretty good guide.
The ladder is still here, at least virtually speaking, in case any Little People wish to climb it.
About quotation and dwellings, I wonder whether anybody else has noted LW’s (inadvertent?) misquotation of Longfellow in that bit from “The Builders” he so loved?
His version — “For the gods are here” — allows the gods a more passive, disinterested presence than did Longfellow, who insisted on their being voyeurs (“For the gods see here”).
The HLF poem is quoted in full in this bit that also pictures the house that Wittgenstein built. ( It is rather grander than that lovely cabin, but then it is evidently in a state of disrepair — perhaps appropriately so?).
In case anyone’s interested I have done a number of other small related enquiries, including ekphrastic prsentations re. LW On the Myth of the Time Goddess and on Problems of Life.
Well, I’m very interested. That’s a wonderful site you have, Tom. I see myself spending many happy hours there.
The Longfellow experts, most of them, will be getting up shortly.
You wouldn’t catch me swinging from Lincoln’s nosehairs.
I like the comments about the cone-shaped dog-collar.
Yes, others have noted that it might be intentional.
It’s also not inconceivable that he read it wrong, since it’s been misquoted that way a number of times, even in anthologies.
On the other hand, others still make the same memory change spontaneously, without reference to Wittgenstein.
My wife says that it’s a pity that no-one left a poker on Wittgenstein’s grave.
MMcM, the oracle of Boston, brings light where there is only darkness and confusion. That last one’s an odd coincidence. If only one could always excuse a misquotation by saying that Wittgenstein had made exactly the same mistake — I think it must be one or he would have remarked on it, especially if he read it as a kind of motto.
He must have been quite frightening. Hitting the pupil on the head was supposed to be the only physical violence, but the poker incident wasn’t the only time he waved sticks, apparently.
Crown, have you already seen Studiolum’s new post, dedicated to you?
I know… I’m such a “celestina”!
If they had left two pokers, I could have done a sword dance.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scottish_sword_dances
As far as I know, this is the first time I’ve been compared to Tsar Nicholas II. Could be worse, I suppose (Kaiser Wilhelm II, Catherine II, Lenin).
Dearie: couldn’t you send us a picture of yourself, doing a sword dance?
No, no, you miss the point. You were not compared to any petty ruler. You’ve been invoked as the Muse of all Coronations, as the dedication of the Hungarian version expresses it even more unambiguously.
Whether my dear mother kept pictures of the young me at my dancing classes is lost to history. But I’ll tell you this: instruction in Scottish Country Dancing in your tender years doesn’t half give you a lovely sidestep when you start playing rugby.
Megkoronáz, AJP dijo
Köszönöm! Még soha senki sem szentelt valamit velem.
Nobody has ever dedicated anything to me before, I’m very pleased about this. Thank you very much.
Something else I found out:
Megkoronáz is “to crown”, not “a crown”. I seem to be a verb.
:) Yes, it is. I have thought you were intentionally using it like this. Sometimes in my replies I transformed it to Megkoronázott (Crowned), but then I recognized that Megkoronáz as a name is much more pleasantly absurd. Crown is just Korona, but it sounds so plain. Don’t use it in Hungarian, it just does not fit you.
Your Hungarian is almost as perfect as your name! The only necessary small correction is “nekem” (to me) instead of “velem” (with me).
I think I had just forgotten, and I knew it meant coronation. Megkoronáz is certainly a lot more impressive looking than Korona, and absurd is fine with me.
:-)
Interesting, this. But getting back to… nothing as lively as Scottish (or Hungarian) country dancing mind you…the Longfellow quote, I think Wittgenstein simply got it wrong, out of wishful thinking.
He improved upon Longfellow, of course, but I doubt he knew he was doing so, because any arguments he might have made for himself for doing so would have to have been bad ones, and that would never do, if you were him, I don’t think.
Something tells me that both Wittgenstein and Greg Hill encountered the poem in a secondary source, perhaps one of those cited in the useful link provided by MMcM or another like it.
Wishful thinking all round then. (Are not good rememberers sometimes good editors as well?)
It’s a marvelous motto but a rather trite poem, really, when you see the whole of it.
And speaking of proofs that LW was human, that “violent moment” with the student… and then the student’s later refusal of forgiveness… in a curious way, I find it’s these flaws in the picture that make it believable.
We are none of us perfect, thankfully. And nothing that’s done can ever be taken back, really.