Philip K. Zimmerman, ‘The Philosopher and the Detectives: Ludwig Wittgenstein's Enduring Passion for Hardboiled Fiction’, September 2020 :
“…Wittgenstein’s central question, the conundrum that haunted him throughout his life, was what can and cannot be said. With time his position on this question changed, but even at his most expansive, he remained skeptical about the ability of words to capture, or even explore, universal truths—precisely what most philosophers believe their words to be doing. The young Wittgenstein thought it was impossible to say anything truly meaningful about God, the soul, ethics, the nature of being or virtually any of the other subjects that philosophers go on about. His claim was not that these things don’t exist but merely that words can’t touch them.
…And in fact the hardboiled hero is a model he embodied with admirable consistency, in his own intellectual way. Sangfroid, indifference to popular opinion, contempt for authority, unflinching determination to face our human limits—these were all hallmarks of his personal style. Wittgenstein, we might say, was a hardboiled thinker. Like a hardboiled hero, he was obsessed by right and wrong but only on his own terms, and he refused to preach about it. Like a hardboiled hero, when faced with the choice between misunderstanding and silence, he chose silence. His primary loyalty was to himself and his work—which in the final analysis were the same thing.
In 1951, aware he was dying of cancer, Wittgenstein was still writing intense, original and penetrating philosophy. He was also still reading Street & Smith’s Detective Story Magazine.”
