Engelmann's Drawer

On 22 August 1930 Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote down, in the notebook now catalogued as Manuscript 109, something his friend Paul Engelmann had told him. When Engelmann rummaged at home in a drawer full of his own manuscripts, they struck him as so fine that they seemed worth giving to other people; the same happened with the letters of his dead relatives. "But when he imagines a selection of them published," in Peter Winch's translation, "the whole business loses its charm and value and becomes impossible."

Engelmann was an architect from Olmütz, in Moravia, two years younger than Wittgenstein. They had been friends since 1916, and a few years before this conversation they had built a house in Vienna together for one of the philosopher's sisters. Wittgenstein's reply is not about manuscripts. It is about a theatre: "the curtain goes up and we see someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are observing a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves." It would be "at once uncanny and wonderful." "We should be seeing life itself."

Then the remark runs into an objection. "But then we do see this every day and it makes not the slightest impression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that point of view." When Engelmann looks at his writings and finds them splendid, Wittgenstein goes on, he is seeing his life as God's work of art, and as such it is worth contemplating, "as is every life and everything whatever." But only the artist can represent the single thing so that it appears to us as a work of art. Taken one by one, and by someone who was not already enthusiastic, the manuscripts "rightly lose their value." "The work of art compels us – as one might say – to see it in the right perspective, but without art the object is a piece of nature like any other." In brackets he adds those "insipid photographs of a piece of scenery" that interest only the person who took them, because he was there.

So the point is not that everyday life is marvellous and we have forgotten how to look at it. The value Engelmann feels in the drawer lives inside a perspective, his own, which a printed selection cannot simply hand over to the reader. There is also a detail that is easy to miss. The philosopher Joachim Schulte has pointed out that the phrase about seeing a person "in a way that ordinarily we can never observe ourselves" slides from the spectator to the man on stage: what would enchant us is seeing him as he can never see himself. It is a perspective the man on stage cannot have on himself.

Thirty-five years later the question came back to Engelmann in a very concrete form. He had lived in Tel Aviv since 1934, and once Wittgenstein became famous there was no shortage of requests to publish the letters he had received from him. In January 1965 he explained why he had held back. The man the letters were addressed to, he wrote, was indeed identical with him, and yet the saying that someone "has since become another person" fitted him all the same. Wittgenstein's generous judgements of him back then now embarrassed him, not least because readers might transfer them to the man he was now.

In 1958, he says, he had asked Elizabeth Anscombe for advice: Wittgenstein's student, and the editor of the Investigations. She replied that if pressing a button could have stopped people concerning themselves with his personal life, she would have pressed it; since it could not, "it seems to me reasonable that anyone who can write a truthful account of him should do so." Then came a warning. It is difficult "not to give a version of his attitudes, for example, which one can enter into oneself, and then the account is really of oneself." Engelmann did not argue. His portrait, he wrote, was subjective, like a painter's, and was indeed an "account really of myself," marked by the mediocrity, ordinariness and lack of complexity Anscombe had named, "and certainly by all three." Whether the book was justified, he concluded, depended on how far he had managed "to illuminate not only myself through him, but him through myself."

He died the following month, in February 1965. The book remained unfinished: according to his friend Josef Schächter, he had still meant to write about the years when he and Wittgenstein were building the Vienna house. The chapters of recollections were put together by Shimshon Stein and Schächter himself, chosen from notes that Ilse Somavilla, editor of the 2006 re-edition, calls extensive and "almost impossible to survey." They appeared in English in 1967 and in German in 1970. In May 1965 Schächter had ended his preface with a wish: "Let us hope that his writings can be published."

Wittgenstein's remark, too, has reached us as a selection. It stayed in the notebook until Georg Henrik von Wright, one of the literary executors, was given the task, as he puts it, of making a selection. He began in 1965, the year Engelmann died, then set the work aside until 1974. In his 1977 preface he says he had once thought of including only the best remarks, since a mass of material would weaken the impression of the good ones. "That is probably true – but my task was not that of a judge of taste." He left out the purely personal notes, and admits that without the help of his collaborator Heikki Nyman he would "probably never have been able to bring myself" to prepare the collection for print. In English it is Culture and Value. The German subtitle says it plainly: Eine Auswahl aus dem Nachlaß, a selection from the papers.

In 2006 Somavilla placed this very drawer remark in her preface to the letters between the two friends. Publishing all of Engelmann's manuscripts, she writes, would mean presenting an enormous body of work; only a selection was possible, one that should still let readers see him "from the right perspective." In his lifetime Engelmann had circulated, among other things, hectographed pamphlets in Tel Aviv, some marked "internal." His papers are now mainly in Jerusalem, at the National Library of Israel, and in Innsbruck. The Brenner-Archiv inventory in Innsbruck lists titles such as Buch der Erinnerung ("Book of Remembrance"), an incomplete diary from 1926, an essay called How Does One Write a Book?, and a ghost story "with a happy ending." On the page of the project the institute devoted to him from 1996 to 2003, "a selection of Engelmann's writings" is still listed under "unpublished publications."

Wittgenstein imagined a man who believes himself unobserved. Engelmann, in 1965, knew he would be observed, and tried to set the light: him through me, me through him. We read the 1930 conversation from outside, in a selection made by someone else, and the remark itself tells us what a selection can take away. What remains open is whether the right perspective is something only a work of art can impose, or whether it sometimes arrives later, when someone opens another person's drawer.