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How Queer Was Ludwig Wittgenstein? | The New Yorker

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No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation keeps them productive. They can cultivate the odd quirk—elbow patches or, naughtily, a cigar habit—but more outlandish idiosyncrasies are ruled out by the institutions that discipline them into tameness. Of course, the archetypal Western philosopher, Socrates, lived before there was an academy to tame him. And he was seen, even in his time, to be—using the word advisedly—queer. Undoubtedly, that was the case in the modern, pejorative-not-pejorative sense: he was attracted to men. But he was also queer in ways that are harder to define. The Greek word often applied to him was atopos, literally, “out of place.” His out-of-placeness consisted in what the scholar Martha Nussbaum has called a “deeper impenetrability of spirit.” Socrates simply could not be counted on to say what one expected him to

Save this story Save this story No one expects contemporary philosophers to be more than mildly eccentric. Creatures of the modern academy, they have careers, not vocations. Some mixture of incentive and professional obligation keeps them productive. They can cultivate the odd quirk—elbow patches or, naughtily, a cigar habit—but more outlandish idiosyncrasies are ruled out by the institutions that discipline them into tameness. Of course, the archetypal Western philosopher, Socrates, lived before there was an academy to tame him. And he was seen, even in his time, to be—using the word advisedl

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