The trouble with Paul was that he was as profligate with his intellectual fortune as he was with his financial fortune, but his intellect, unlike his finances, was inexhaustible. He never ceased to throw it out of the window, yet it never ceased to grow; the more he threw it out of the window, the more it grew. It is characteristic of people like Paul, who are at first merely crazy and are finally pronounced insane, that their intellectual fortune increases as fast as they throw it out of the window (of the mind). As they throw more and more of it out of the window, it goes on building up in the mind and naturally becomes more and more dangerous. Eventually they cannot keep up the pace, with the result that the mind can no longer endure the buildup and finally explodes. Paul’s mind quite simply exploded because he could not discard his intellectual fortune fast enough. In the same way Nietzsche’s mind exploded, just as all the other mad philosophical minds exploded, because they could no longer sustain the pace. Their intellectual fortune builds up at a faster and fiercer rate than they can discard it, then one day the mind explodes and they are dead. In the same way Paul’s mind exploded one day and he was dead. We were alike and yet completely different. Paul, for instance, had a concern for the poor and was also touched by them: I too had a concern for the poor, but I was not touched by them; my mind works in such a way that I have never been able to be touched as Paul was. On one occasion Paul burst into tears at the sight of a child squatting by the Traunsee. I saw at once that it had actually been stationed there by a scheming mother in order to arouse sympathy and a bad conscience in passersby and induce them to open their wallets. Unlike Paul, I saw not only the wretched child, shamefully exploited by a greedy mother, but the mother herself, crouching in the bushes and counting a wad of bills in an appallingly businesslike manner. Paul saw only the child and its wretchedness, not the mother in the background, counting the takings. He actually cried and gave the child a hundred-schilling bill, feeling ashamed of his own existence, as it were. While I saw through the whole scene, Paul saw only the surface—the distress of the innocent child, not the monstrous mother in the background. This shameful exploitation of my friend’s good nature was bound to remain concealed from him, while I could not fail to see it. It was typical of him that he saw only the superficial picture of the suffering child and parted with the hundred-schilling bill, while I could not help seeing through the whole scene and naturally gave the child nothing. And it was typical of our relationship that I kept my observation to myself, wishing to spare my friend, and did not tell him about the unspeakable mother counting her money behind the bushes and forcing her child to act out this charade of suffering. I left him with his superficial view of the scene; I let him give the child the hundred-schilling bill and go on blubbering, and even later I forbore to enlighten him. He often referred to this incident and recounted how he had given a hundred-schilling bill to a poor lonely child (in my presence), but I never disclosed the truth of the matter. Where the wretchedness—or ostensible wretchedness—of human beings (and humanity) was concerned, Paul never saw beneath the surface; he never saw the whole picture as I did, and the likelihood is, I fancy, that throughout his life he quite simply refused to see the whole picture, contenting himself with surface appearances for reasons of self-protection. I was never content with surface appearances—also for reasons of self-protection. That was the difference between us. In the first half of his life Paul squandered millions in the belief that he was helping the helpless (and thereby himself!), but in reality he squandered those millions on the basest and unworthiest causes—though in doing so he was of course helping himself. He continued to squander his money on those who were supposedly destitute and deserving of charity until he had none left, until he was thrown upon the mercy of his family, but their mercy was short-lived and quickly withdrawn, since mercy was to them an alien concept. Paul, for his sins, was born into one of Austria’s three or four richest families, whose millions automatically multiplied year by year under the monarchy, until the proclamation of the republic led to the stagnation of the Wittgenstein fortune. Paul very soon threw away his share, more or less in the belief that by doing so he could combat poverty. The result was that for most of his life he had virtually nothing, being persuaded, like his uncle Ludwig, that it was his duty to distribute his dirty millions among his spotless fellowmen and so ensure their salvation and his own. Paul would walk through the streets with wads of hundred-schilling bills in order to distribute those dirty bills among his spotless fellow citizens. But the recipients were nearly always like the Traunsee child: wherever he found people to press his money on, in order to help them and to make himself feel good, they were always Traunsee children. When his money was gone, his relatives supported him for a very short time, acting out of a certain perverse sense of propriety, not out of generosity and not as a matter of course, because they too, it must be said, saw not just the superficial aspect of his situation but the whole dreadful picture. For a whole century the Wittgensteins had produced weapons and machines, until finally they produced Ludwig and Paul—the famous, epoch-making philosopher and the madman who, in Vienna at least, was equally famous and possibly more so. Paul the madman was just as philosophical as his uncle Ludwig, while Ludwig the philosopher was just as mad as his nephew Paul. Ludwig became famous through his philosophy, Paul through his madness. The one was possibly more philosophical, the other possibly more mad. But it may well be that the philosophical Wittgenstein is regarded as a philosopher merely because he set his philosophy down on paper and not his madness, and that Paul is regarded as a madman because he suppressed his philosophy instead of publishing it, and displayed only his madness. Both were quite extraordinary men with quite extraordinary brains; the one published his brain, and the other did not. I would go so far as to say that whereas the one published his brain, the other put his brain into practice. And where is the distinction between a brain that is published and constantly publishing itself and a brain that is constantly putting itself into practice? Yet if Paul had published anything, it would have been quite different from anything that Ludwig published, just as Ludwig would have practiced a form of madness quite different from Paul’s. In either case, the Wittgenstein name guaranteed a certain standard, indeed the highest standard. Paul the madman unquestionably achieved a standard equal to that of Ludwig the philosopher: the one represents a high point in philosophy and the history of ideas, the other a high point in the history of madness—that is, if we insist on adhering to the conventional designations of philosophy, history, ideas, and madness, which are nothing but perverse historical concepts. (Wittgenstein's Nephew)

I thought of how I had met this man, who really had been my friend, who had so often brought so much happiness into my existence, which, though not actually unhappy, was a burden most of the time, who had acquainted me with so much that was at first quite foreign to me, pointing me in ways I had not known before, opening doors that had previously been closed, and who brought me back to my true self at the crucial moment when I might easily have gone to pieces in the country. For before I met my friend there had been a period when I was prey to a morbid melancholy, if not depression, when I really believed I was lost, when for years I did no proper work but spent most of my days in a state of total apathy and often came close to putting an end to my life by my own hand. For years I had taken refuge in a terrible suicidal brooding, which deadened my mind and made everything unendurable, above all myself—brooding on the utter futility all around me, into which I had been plunged by my general weakness, but above all my weakness of character. For a long time I could not imagine being able to go on living, or even existing. I was no longer capable of seizing upon any purpose in life that would have given me control over myself. Every morning on waking I was inevitably caught up in this mechanism of suicidal brooding, and I remained in its grip throughout the day. And I was deserted by everyone because I had deserted everyone—that is the truth—because I no longer wanted anyone. I no longer wanted anything, but I was too much of a coward to make an end of it all. It was probably at the height of my despair—a word that I am not ashamed to use, as I no longer intend to deceive myself or gloss over anything, since nothing can be glossed over in a society and a world that perpetually seeks to gloss over everything in the most sickening manner—that Paul appeared on the scene at Irina’s apartment in the Blumenstockgasse. He was so different from anyone I had ever met, so new to my experience (and with a name, moreover, that for decades I had revered like no other), that I at once felt him to be my deliverer. Sitting on the park bench, I suddenly saw it all clearly again, and I was not ashamed of the pathos I succumbed to, of the fine words that I allowed to flow into me for the very first time; they suddenly made me feel tremendously good, and I made no attempt to tone them down. I let them all descend on me like a refreshing rain. And today it seems to me that we can count on the fingers of one hand all the people who have really meant anything to us in the course of our lives, and very often this one hand protests at our perversity in believing that we need a whole hand in order to count them, for to be honest we could probably make do without a single finger. There are times, however, when life is endurable, and at such times we occasionally manage to count three or four people to whom in the long run we owe something, and not just something but a great deal—people who have meant everything and been everything to us at certain critical moments or certain critical periods of our lives. Yet we know that as we get older we have to employ ever subtler means in order to produce such endurable conditions, resorting to every possible and impossible trick the mind can devise, though it may be stretched to the limits of its tolerance even without having to perform such unnatural feats. Yet at the same time we should not forget that the few people in question are all dead, that they died long ago, for bitter experience naturally inhibits us from including the living in our calculation—those who are still with us, perhaps even at our side—unless we want to risk being totally, embarrassingly, and ludicrously wrong, and hence making fools of ourselves, above all in our own eyes. (Wittgenstein's Nephew)