Why Philosophy's Greatest Genius Loved Going To The Movies

Can't stop thinking about your problems? Take a tip from one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers.

How do you switch off a mind like Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man who wrote perhaps the most influential philosophical treatise of the 20th century, spawning a whole new school of thought, and then rowed back on it entirely, forming another whole school of thought? Apparently, he barely even read any philosophy himself. He was an engineer by training. Basically, he did all that with the power of his mind alone. It was a mind that was hard to turn off.

Switching Off In The Cinema

We can see this in his career, which was split into intense periods of work followed by long periods where he avoided academic work entirely. He volunteered to fight in WWI, taught at a school in rural Austria, and worked in a hospital during WWII. These sabbaticals helped him manage his busy mind until he was ready to work again, but on a day-to-day basis he had a different way of switching off: going to the movies.

"Like a Shower Bath"

While teaching philosophy, he would rush off to the cinema almost as soon as classes finished, sit in the front row, and lean forward as he watched, focusing intensely on the movie no matter how trivial it was. He was especially fond of Westerns. However, he was no cinephile in the normal sense. He seemed to like watching movies on the big screen because they were, in his words, "like a shower bath" for his brain.

A Daily Ritual

Some have described his going to the movies, which at times he did every day, as ritualistic. He often didn't remember anything about the films the next day. In that sense, it really was like a shower. He was even said to do it because he felt disgusted with himself at the end of classes. (This made me chuckle. As a former lecturer, I've definitely had a few lessons I wish I'd forgotten straight after!)

Visual Overwriting?

This is purely my speculation, but I wonder if he had figured out a form of 'visual overwriting.' This is the theory in psychology that intense visual inputs, such as the vivid colours of the game Tetris in some studies on the topic, can disrupt or 'overwrite' harmful mental habits, like PTSD sufferers replaying traumatic events in their mind. Perhaps the movies helped Wittgenstein stop losing himself in abstract thought.

For more about his viewing habits, I highly recommend you check out this wonderful Substack article.

Enjoyed this?

Learn more about movies

or 

Commission a piece about this for your website