The Philosopher And The Birds – Ludwig Wittgenstein And The Irish Language.

Perhaps few people outside of academia will have heard of the Austrian philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and perhaps fewer still will have absorbed his ‘ordinary language philosophy’ which revolutionized the way we analyse and make sense of everyday speech. And yet Wittgenstein was to philosophy what his muse Einstein was to physics, two of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century whose work would change our thinking forever: one through an understanding of the world around us; the other, the world within.

In the 1930’s, Wittgenstein was professor of philosophy at Cambridge University and although his ground-breaking theories were beginning to gain traction in universities and intellectual circles around the world, much of what he was teaching was so misunderstood that he resigned his position in protest and sought refuge from what he saw as the falsehood of such a ‘dishonest and pointless occupation’. 

He found that refuge in the remote fishing village of Rosroe in Connemara nestling under the Mweelrea mountain where he developed what would become a life-long fascination with Gaeilge, a tongue he regarded as unique among all those known to him. He later described his new-found freedom in Ireland as a moment of curious magic that finally awarded him the peace of mind to compose and commit ‘Philosophical Investigations’ to the record, one of the most influential philosophical works of all time.

In his collection of poems ‘Sailing To An Island’, Richard Murphy recalls Wittgenstein’s visit and his instant love of the Gaeltacht:

A solitary invalid in a fuchsia garden
Where time’s rain eroded the root since Eden,
He became for a tenebrous epoch the stone.

Here wisdom surrendered the don’s gown
Choosing for Cambridge, two deck chairs,
A kitchen table, undiluted sun.

He clipped with February shears the dead
Metaphysical foliage. Old, in fieldfares
fantasies rebelled though annihilated.

Through accident of place, now by belief
I follow his love which bird-handled thoughts
to grasp growth’s terror or death’s leaf.

He last on this savage promontory shored
His logical weapon. Genius stirred
A soaring intolerance to teach a blackbird.

So before alpha you may still hear sing
In the leaf-dark dusk some descended young
Who exalt the evening to a wordless song.

Language lay at the heart of Wittgenstein’s most fundamental ideas. He saw how the answers to all problems lay in how we communicate with each other and how the words we use in that process can carry genuine meaning or no meaning at all. A language, Wittgenstein argued, was ‘the soul of a nation’ and were it to be lost so would the emotional connection linking a group of speakers to the world around them. We do not only think through language but we use language as a way of feeling about everyday experience and, uniquely for Gaeilge, this feeling he thought was occasionally imbued with mysticism and often ‘other-worldly’ connections.

‘What we see is not always what there is,’ Wittgenstein argues, ‘and what there is might not always be seen.’

Set against the outbreak of World War II, ‘The Philosopher And The Birds’ is a feature film currently in pre-production in Ireland focusing on Wittgenstein’s fascination with the Irish language and its unique insights into those real and imagined worlds that only Gaeilge can summon. It is the first fictive attempt, in English, to showcase the beauty, wisdom and uniqueness of one of the longest enduring languages spoken in the world today as seen through the critical lens of ‘The Master of Language’.

When Ludwig befriends Paudie Daley - a dyslexic fisher boy with a rousing passion for his spoken native tongue – it is agreed that each will teach the other what the other lacks: for Paudie, how to ‘make words on paper’; for Ludwig, how to interpret the age-old paradoxes of an ancient tongue. Both embark upon a process of discovery and revelation and much of what Ludwig had been struggling to understand in the cloisters of dusty universities becomes dazzlingly clear as the lettered genius of global renown learns linguistic truths from an illiterate child.

[EXTRACT]

LUDWIG: Whenever you open a book, clouds are all you can see. But there was a time when I, too, saw only patterns without meaning. And as I assumed the pictures I saw were merely tiny specks of colour glued together, I assumed that every notion in the universe could be reduced to its absolute tiniest portion.

PAUDIE: ‘Cáithnín!’ It’s like a speck of dust... or an ear of corn... or a tiny smidge of butter... or the biteen that gets stuck in your eye and you’ve to scratch it out or you’ll be wakin’ the dead with your nigglin’!’

In recent years there has been greatly renewed interest in Irish themes in film-making culminating in the highest awards for home-grown material on the world’s major stages. ‘The Philosopher And The Birds’ seeks to showcase a unique perspective of the Irish language to an international audience and, hopefully, encourage further interest in Gaeilge at home.

If anyone has knowledge of accredited folklore about the famous visit of Wittgenstein to Ireland’s west coast we would be delighted to hear from you.

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