You should let it into your heart. Nor should you be afraid of madness. It comes to you perhaps as a friend and not as an enemy, and the only thing that is bad is your resistance. Let grief into your heart. Don’t lock the door on it. Standing outside the door, in the mind, it is frightening, but in the heart it is not.

- Ludwig Wittgenstein's notebook

Once, when Wittgenstein and Drury were walking together in the west of Ireland, they came across a five-year-old girl sitting outside a cottage. ‘Drury, just look at the expression on that child’s face’, Wittgenstein implored, adding: ‘You don’t take enough notice of people’s faces; it is a fault you ought to try to correct.’ It is a piece of advice that is implicitly embodied in his philosophy of psychology: ‘An inner process stands in need of outward criteria.’ But those outward criteria stand in need of careful attention.

What is ‘internal’ is not hidden from us. To observe someone’s outward behaviour – if we understand them – is to observe their state of mind. The understanding required can be more or less refined. At a basic level: ‘If I see someone writhing in pain with evident cause I do not think: all the same, his feelings are hidden from me.’ But at a deeper level some people, and even whole cultures, will always be an enigma to us.

This is because the commonality of experience required to interpret the ‘imponderable evidence’, the ‘subtleties of glance, gesture and tone’, will be missing. This idea is summed up in one of Wittgenstein’s most striking aphorisms: ‘If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.’

- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)

One evening, Bouwsma took Wittgenstein in his car up to the top of the hill overlooking the town. The moon was up. ‘If I had planned it’, said Wittgenstein, ‘I should never have made the sun at all’:

See! How beautiful! The sun is too bright and too hot … And if there were only the moon there would be no reading and writing.

My guy looks like a war criminal

One of Wittgenstein's last photos

It was said by many people about the elder Zossima that, by permitting everyone for so many years to come to bare their hearts and beg his advice and healing words, he had absorbed so many secrets, sorrows, and avowals into his soul that in the end he had acquired so fine a perception that he could tell at the first glance from the face of a stranger what he had come for, what he wanted and what kind of torment racked his conscience.

- The Brothers Karamazov

Such people (like Zossima), Wittgenstein suggests, have more to teach us about understanding ourselves and other people than the experimental methods of the modern-day ‘science’ of psychology. This is not because the science is undeveloped but because the methods it employs are inappropriate to its task:

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics, for instance, in its beginnings. For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion.

- The Duty Of Genius (a biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein)

When told by Dr. Bevan that he would live only a few more days, he exclaimed ‘Good!’
Mrs Bevan stayed with him that night, and told him that his close friends in England would be coming the next day. Before losing consciousness he said to her: ‘Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life.’

- Wittgenstein's last words

Bot:
This channel is now a Wittgenstein stan account

😂😂😂😂😂not anymore, sadly
خلصت سيرته، لازم أشوفلي شي ثاني هسة

Right-left conflict is escalating quickly...

اليمين واصلين مرحلة بالإبداع والـ shitpost😂
They're turning it into a "tradition"