Wittgenstein ’ s remote cabin gets a revamp
In June, a small ceremony of celebration took place on a rocky outcrop overlooking a lake in Norway. Members of the Wittgenstein Foundation, the Austrian ambassador and local politicians, gathered a few kilometres from the village of Skjolden.
They had hiked halfway up the mountainside, along an occasionally precipitous path, to a small wooden house with breathtaking views across the opalescent waters. Five years in the planning, the reconstruction of a dwelling built by local craftsmen in 1914 for the Austrian-born philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein was finished at the end of May.
The project was the brainchild of Harald Vatne, a retired schoolteacher and native of Skjolden, on the shores of Lustrafjord, an arm of Sognefjord: at 200km, the longest fjord in Norway and the second-longest in the world.
Vatne was raised on tales of the “Austrian ”, as Wittgenstein was known in Skjolden (locals called the house itself “Austria ”).
In 1913, Wittgenstein, then the 24-year-old scion of one of Habsburg Vienna ’ s wealthiest families and later recognised as one of the 20th century ’ s most influential thinkers, was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, having first gone to Britain in 1908 to study engineering in Manchester. He was a protégé of Bertrand Russell, with whom he endlessly, and often tempestuously, debated the fundamental principles of logic.
That summer, Wittgenstein proposed to his friend David Pinsent that they take a holiday in Andorra, the Azores, or Bergen in Norway. But it was clear where Wittgenstein wanted to go. “So we are going to Norway and not Spain after all,” Pinsent wrote in his diary.
Wittgenstein wrote to Russell: “I am sitting here in a little place inside a beautiful fjord and thinking about the beastly theory of types [a problem in mathematical logic].” By this time, he had already decided that he would return to Norway for an extended period in order, as Pinsent later put it, to “live entirely alone and by himself … and to do nothing but work in logic ”.
Russell warned him it would be dark. Wittgenstein replied that he hated daylight. Russell said he ’ d be lonely. Wittgenstein insisted “he prostituted his mind talking to intelligent people ” in Cambridge. As biographer Ray Monk relates, Wittgenstein craved solitude above all else.
Wittgenstein travelled to Skjolden in October 1913 by boat from Bergen, a journey along Sognefjord that could take anywhere between 20 and 40 hours, depending on the weather. Skjolden is just 3km away from the house and now partially accessible by road (in Wittgenstein ’ s day, you had to row to the village, or skate in winter when the lake froze).
But when he first arrived in Skjolden, he lodged in the village with the local postmaster. He was at least able to eschew the sort of sophisticated society that tormented him in Cambridge (and his native Vienna, for that matter). In Skjolden, he wrote, “my day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed ”.
During this first visit to Skjolden, Wittgenstein engaged a local builder to construct the house with three rooms: a small living room, a kitchen and bedroom. There was also an attic with a balcony. When he spent nine months at the house in 1936-1937, working on what would become his second, posthumous masterpiece, villagers would see him in the distance pacing back and forth, pondering the complete overhaul of his views about the nature of logic and language.
Alois Pichler, who runs the Wittgenstein Archives at the University of Bergen, says he was “suffering a lot ” during this sojourn — suffering that was partly philosophical (how do we unravel the confusions in which many of the discipline ’ s traditional problems consist?) and partly spiritual (how do we reckon with our own sins?).