Abstract
In December 1949, after several months of illness, Wittgenstein was discovered to have cancer of the prostate gland. At the time of diagnosis secondary deposits were already present in his spine, so there was no hope of cure. A palliative treatment in the form of hormones, however, had recently become available and he was started on Stilboestrol. For the next thirteen or fourteen months, while he was ‘letting the hormones do their work’1 he found himself quite unable to think:
My mind’s completely dead. This is not a complaint, for I don’t really suffer from it. I know that life must have an end once and that mental life can cease before the rest does.2
It is so difficult to find the beginning
Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning.
And not try to go further back
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Notes and references
Letter from Wittgenstein to M. O’C. Drury, quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Personal Recollections, edited by Rhush Rees (Oxford: Blackwell, 1981).
Letter from Wittgenstein to Norman Malcolm, quoted in Ludwig Wittgenstein. A Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 98.
William Warren Barkley III, Wittgenstein (London: Quartet Books, 1974), p. 130.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, edited by G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Translated by Denis Paul and G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974).
G.H. von Wright, Ludwig Wittgenstein: a Biographical Sketch (Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 18.
R. Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by Elizabeth Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Volume 1 (Cambridge University Press, 1967).
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (New York: Dolphin Books, 1961), p. 199.
Quoted in John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1968), p. 61.
S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Project, translated by David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton University Press, 1944).
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), 6.51.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, edited and translated by G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1963), p. 111.
Quoted in Ronald Clark, Bertrand Russell (London: Penguin, 1975), p. 211.
G. E. Moore, Autobiography. Quoted in John Passmore. A Hundred Years of Philosophy (London: Penguin, 1968) p. 201.
Novalis, in Pollen, collected in Hymns to the Night and Other Selected Writings, translated by Charles E. Passage (Liberal Arts Press, 1960), p. 70.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, letter to Russell, collected in Letters to Russell, Moore and Keynes, edited by G.H. von Wright, translated by B.F. McGuinness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), p. 45.
Ludwig Wittgenstein Notebook 1914–1916 translated G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969), p. 73.
Samuel Beckett, Proust and Three Dialogues with Georges Duthuit (London: Calder and Boyars, 1970.)
Samuel Beckett, The Unnameable (London: Calder and Boyars, 1959).
Philip Larkin, ‘The Old Fools’. In High-windows (London: Faber, 1974).
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© 1999 Raymond Tallis
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Tallis, R. (1999). On the Edge of Certainty. In: On the Edge of Certainty. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598867_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598867_5
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