“NEITHER SUPER-IDEALIZED GUIDANCE NOR CAPRICE”

Terry Eagleton, in his script for Derek Jarman's film, Wittgenstein, takes up Wittgenstein's image of the “crystalline purity of logic” in contrast to the “rough ground” of what we actually say and do. A young man, we are told, dreams of “reducing the world to pure logic,” a dream he succeeds in realizing in a world “purged of imperfection and indeterminacy, like countless acres of gleaming ice.” That world, perfect as it is, is uninhabitable: “he had forgotten about friction.” As an older man, he “came to understand that roughness and ambiguity and indeterminacy aren't imperfections - they're what make things work.” He dug up the ice to uncover the rough ground, but, “homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute,” he was unable to live on the rough ground, and he ended up “marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither.”