Table Of ContentWittgenstein’s Secret Diaries
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Wittgenstein’s Secret Diaries
Semiotic Writing in Cryptography
Dinda L. Gorlée
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First published in Great Britain, 2020
Copyright © Dinda L. Gorlée, 2020
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Contents
Dzh hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn pzhhg, pzhhg hrxs nrxsg hxsivryvn
(Whereof one cannot write, one must not write)
(MS 107: 75, 1929, my translation).1
Foreword vi
Acknowledgements ix
1 Introduction: Silence and secrecy 1
2 Symptoms 17
3 Cryptography 53
4 Cryptomnesia 95
5 Fact or fiction 127
6 Cryptosemiotician 163
7 Tentative conclusion 203
Appendix: List of coded passages from Wittgenstein’s Nachlass 213
Notes 231
Bibliography 249
Index 266
1 Was sich nicht schreiben lässt, lässt sich nicht schreiben.
Foreword
Cryptography and semiotics: Dinda Gorlée’s in-depth analysis
of Wittgenstein’s secret diaries
Marcel Danesi
University of Toronto
As a science of signs and how they are used in representational ways, semiotics has
never ventured, as far as I can tell, into the domain of cryptography—an area that
would actually lend itself concretely to exploring sign theories and methods. Aware of
the significance of cryptography as a mirror of human thinking, Edgar Allan Poe used
it as a central element in one of his best-known mystery stories, “The Gold Bug” (1843),
which literary critics aptly emphasize was the main reason for the huge success of the
story. Ciphers and codes are now found throughout the crime fiction literature greatly
enhancing its appeal. Aware of its importance to the study of the “semiotic brain,” Dinda
Gorlée is the first semiotician to look at cryptography from the lens of semiotic theory,
focusing on the secret diaries of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and in the process establishing
him as a semiotic epistemologist, whether this is acknowledged or not within the field.
If there is one phrase that encapsulates the main insight of Gorlée’s book, it is that
the human mind reveals its features best when it is engaged in “the mysterious.” As
the American writer Henry David Thoreau once remarked, for some truly enigmatic
reason, “we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable” (1854: 485).
As is well known, the philosophical-mathematical theory of reference, formulated
by Gottlob Frege in 1879 as a distinction between reference and sense, was taken up by
Ludwig Wittgenstein in his 1921 Tractatus. For example, Wittgenstein saw sentences
as Fregean propositions about world facts; that is, he viewed them as representing
features of the world in the same way that pictures did. However, in his posthumously
published Philosophical Investigations (1953), he became perplexed by the fact that
language could do much more than just construct propositions about the world. So
he introduced the idea of “language games,” by which he claimed that there existed
a variety of communicative games (describing, reporting, guessing riddles, making
jokes, and so on) that went beyond simple Fregean semantics. Wittgenstein became
convinced that everyday language had a substantive impact on the language faculty
itself. Reading Gorlée’s book, I have finally understood why Wittgenstein felt this way.
He wanted to literally “play” with language forms in order to experience what this
would yield psychologically. One of his games was cryptic or secret writing. Gorlée
focuses on the latter, showing us two important things: (1) how cryptography mirrors
the semiotic process of a form X standing for a meaning Y, and (2) how cryptographic
writing can help shed light on this process.
Foreword vii
Gorlée’s book is rich with details about the reasons why Wittgenstein wrote his private
thoughts in code—he was a very secretive and private person, turning to cryptography
to encode his private thoughts in his diaries, so as to keep them “silent.” The reasons for
his use of secret writing provides significant light on the inner workings of his mind,
which was enwrapped in turmoil, in part because of the troubled times (politically
and socially) in which he lived. Calling him a “cryptosemiotician,” the central value of
Gorlée’s treatment is that it focuses on how Wittgenstein used cryptography to reveal
his inner Angst—which he could hide on the surface through a cryptic code and thus
be able express himself below it freely.
Secret writing has ancient origins. The sacred Jewish writers, for instance, concealed
their messages by reversing the alphabet, that is, by using the last letter of the alphabet
in place of the first, the next last for the second, and so on. This code, called Atbash,
is exemplified in Jeremiah 25:26, where “Sheshach” is the encrypted word for “Babel”
(Babylon). Gorlée suggests that Wittgenstein unconsciously understood the emotional
power of such writing. To understand himself, and for others to understand him, a
first-order decoding of his messages was needed (the actual form-based unraveling
of the code) and then, a second-order decoding would allow for their psychological
interpretation. The semiotician Roland Barthes (1957) maintained that this kind of
two-level process is what generates meaning. Like riddles, cryptograms are puzzles
that cry out for a meaning; and like any riddle, if a cryptogram remains unsolved it
seems to leave us in a quandary. The “key” to solving them is the code—the system
understanding the message. As is well known, this term was introduced into semiotics
by Ferdinand de Saussure, as a system of signs structured in a specific way (1916: 31).
Essentially, the code is the method of determining how we extract meaning from signs,
and the end result is what Saussure called valeur (value), a form of conceptualization
that crystallizes through an unconscious set of relations among the signs within the
same code. In a phrase, to understand anything it must be decoded semiotically.
In a fundamental sense, the methods of all the sciences are akin to this cryptographic
method, which Gorlée calls appropriately, “cryptosemiotics.” Leibniz characterized
scientists as cryptographers, suggesting that their primary objective was to crack the
infinite array of ciphers that nature presented to them. Because we have to decode
and interpret Wittgenstein’s secret messages as analogous kinds of ciphers, we become
involved directly into what Gorlée calls his “vision of multiple realities.” Using the
sign theories of Charles Peirce, a cryptogram is at a prima facie level an iconic form
which allows the writer to model his thoughts through a code; at a different level it is
an indexical form, pointing to something that the reader must discover through the
decipherment key; and at a psychological level, it is a symbolic form that reveals the
cryptographer’s mind in its cultural context.
Gorlée maps Wittgenstein’s mode of secret writing against the study of symptoms
as signs that are produced by nature, but which require human intervention to be
understood—that is, they must be decoded not only biologically but also historically
and culturally. When we ignore the relation between the two domains—the biosphere
and the semiosphere, as the Estonian semiotician Yuri Lotman (1991) pointed out—
then we end up with “cryptomnesia,” a kind of memory loss that must be recovered
through the writing process itself—hence a “cryptobiography.” The latter, as can be seen
viii Foreword
in Wittgenstein’s diaries, obliterates the boundary line between fact and fiction. So they
can be read as fiction and as therapeutic self-analysis at once. However, there is a price
to pay for all this—the codes we acquire in cultural contexts constitute mental and
emotional filters for interpreting the world, guiding us constantly in our attempts to
grasp the meaning of that very world. If no meaning can be found, then we end up, as
did Wittgenstein, in an emotional quandary. For this reason, the idealistically minded
Wittgenstein resorted to secret writing as a way to attenuate his psychological distress
over the state of a troubled world and his relation to it. It allowed him, as Gorlée writes,
“to rid himself of the madness of the psychic alienation he deeply suffered.”
Oscar Wilde stated that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,”
because, as he put it, “the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression” (2007: 94).
Wilde used the example of the London fog to make his case. Although fog is part
of London, it goes unnoticed because people have become habituated to it, and may
thus miss its metaphorical implications. So, it is the “poets and painters [who] have
taught the loveliness of such effects. They did not exist till Art had invented them”
(95). Wittgenstein was seemingly immersed in the fog that enwrapped the world in
which he lived. As Gorlée so brilliantly shows, when the meanings of that world are
encoded in a cryptic form that requires clarity of mind to resolve, the fog dissipates
and brightness returns.
Acknowledgements
My warm thanks go to those who have generously given me access to Wittgenstein’s
Nachlass deposited in a total of approximately 5,000 pages, existing in notes,
typescripts, and dictations. The manuscripts have been transposed into electronic
form (the project of HyperWittgenstein) at the Wittgenstein Archives, associated
with the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Bergen (Norway). My friend and
colleague Professor Alois Pichler, director of Wittgenstein Archives, has welcomed me
as a research fellow, enabling me to study and write about the extensive linguistic and
cultural material of Wittgenstein’s published and unpublished heritage. The extensive
legacy of the unpublished parts of Wittgenstein’s writings supplies the unfamiliar
diaries in uncoded plaintext but equally those in coded script (Geheimschrift) (Pichler
2006: 143–146). This combination of coded with uncoded will be investigated in this
book to analyze Wittgenstein’s cryptography to illustrate the supposed secrecy of
the secret diary. The machine-readable transmission of Wittgenstein’s total heritage,
including the transcription of his diaries (see the list in the Appendix), provides
both the construction and perhaps the deconstruction of the technical side of the
logical notations to all his writings. Alois Pichler’s helpful comments and generous
encouragement have supported me during my visits to write this monograph.
I am grateful to German–English translator Liesbeth Wallien for revising the
translations of Wittgenstein’s diary paragraphs. In particular, my thanks go to my
son Jorrit van Hertum and my friend and colleague Professor Myrdene Anderson for
reading and commenting on sections of the manuscript in its early stages and revising
with expert advice my errors. Editor Andrew Wardell has welcomed my book into
Bloomsbury Publishing; his interest in my work and his generous assistance have
supported and encouraged me. The editorial support of my co-workers has been for
me the act of love, showing me the right way to decode Wittgenstein as I have called
him as a cryptosemiotician.
