“I Am a European”

In 1949, two years before his death, Ludwig Wittgenstein traveled to the United States to visit his friend and former student Norman Malcolm, who was then teaching at Cornell University. During the visit, Wittgenstein became seriously ill. The illness was later found to be related to the cancer that would eventually kill him.

According to Malcolm’s memoir, Wittgenstein grew deeply distressed at the prospect of dying in America. At one point he exclaimed:

“I am a European—I want to die in Europe. What a fool I was to come!”

I first encountered the remark as a graduate student in China sometime in the late 1980s.

It made an immediate impression on me.

Not because I understood it. Quite the opposite. I did not understand it at all.

For the next forty years, every now and then, the sentence would return to me. I would think about it for a few minutes, fail to make sense of it, and move on. Life intervened. Work intervened. Other interests came and went. Yet the remark remained, lodged somewhere in the back of my mind.

Recently it returned once more.

This time I decided to confront it directly.

What could Wittgenstein have meant?

The obvious interpretation is that he meant he was a white man. But that explanation seems too shallow. In 1949, Ithaca, New York was hardly a place where Wittgenstein would have felt racially alien. Everywhere he turned he saw faces that looked much like those he had known in Vienna, Cambridge, and elsewhere in Europe.

Nor do I think he simply meant that he was Austrian.

Had that been the point, he could have said so. Instead, according to Malcolm, he chose a larger word.

European.

That choice has always intrigued me.

Wittgenstein was not a nationalist. He spent his life moving from one country to another. He was born in Austria, studied in England, lived in Norway, visited Russia, served in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and traveled to the United States. Few philosophers of the twentieth century lived a more international life.

Yet when confronted by illness and the possibility of death, he did not identify himself as a philosopher, a logician, an Austrian, a Cambridge don, or even a citizen of the world.

He said:

“I am a European.”

Why?

For years I searched for an intellectual answer. Perhaps Europe represented a particular philosophical tradition. Perhaps it referred to a common cultural inheritance. Perhaps it was a shorthand for a certain way of life.

The more I thought about it, however, the less convinced I became that the answer was intellectual.

I began to suspect that Wittgenstein was not expressing a theory.

He was expressing a sense of belonging.

There are attachments that lie deeper than argument.

A man can change his political opinions, his religious beliefs, and even his profession. Yet certain places continue to exert a pull upon him. He may not be able to justify the attachment. He may not even fully understand it. Nevertheless, it remains.

Odysseus longed for Ithaca.

Dante longed for Florence.

Millions of immigrants have spent decades building new lives in distant lands only to discover, near the end, that they still wished to be buried where they were born.

Wittgenstein’s Europe may have been something of that sort.

Not a political entity. Not a geographical expression. Not a theory.

A home.

There is a temptation among intellectuals to dismiss such attachments as parochial. One might even argue that a philosopher who spent his life examining the foundations of language and thought should have transcended them altogether.

Yet I am not so sure.

Perhaps the opposite is true.

Perhaps Wittgenstein’s remark is interesting precisely because it reminds us that even the greatest philosophers remain human beings.

We are not composed entirely of propositions.

We do not live by logic alone.

Beneath our theories and arguments there often lies something older and more stubborn: a sense of where we belong.

For forty years I have returned to Wittgenstein’s sentence, trying to understand it.

I am not certain that I do.

But I think I understand it better than I once did.

When death seemed near, Wittgenstein did not reach for a philosophical doctrine.

He reached for home.

And in the language available to him, the name of that home was Europe.