Wittgenstein and “Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn”

​Portrait on Wittgenstein's being awarded a scholarship from Trinity College, 1929. Clara Sjögren - Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein#/media/File:35._Portrait_of_Wittgenstein.jpg. Public domain.

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​Somewhere—probably in Ray Monk’s biography—I’ve read of the value the philosopher Wittgenstein placed on a poem by Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862), “Graf Ebenhards Weißdorn.” In that poem, Wittgenstein claimed the unsayable was “contained in what has been uttered” (qtd. in Tilghman, Wittgenstein, Ethics, and Aesthetics, 64).

When positivists of the Vienna Circle “met with Wittgenstein at times expecting elucidations on the nature of logic… instead [they] received defenses of religion or listened to Wittgenstein recite and discuss poetry” (Tilghman 18; Martin Pulido, "The Place of Saying and Showing in Wittgenstein's Tractatus," Aporia 19:2, 2009, 25).

Here's my rendition of Uhland’s poem. I wrote it several years with the help of Google Translate and other translations posted on the web; I no longer recall the sources. At the time, I was puzzled by what Wittgenstein claimed to have seen in the poem, but now I think I understand a little. In Christian legend, Christ’s crown of thorns was sometimes said to be from a hawthorn.  I do not know whether Wittgenstein associated the sprig in the count’s helmet with the crown of thorns, but it seems possible.

Please send comments to jsabsherphd@gmail.com.

Count Eberhard’s Hawthorn
by Ludwig Uhland (1787-1862)

Count Eberhard the Beard
From Wurttemberg’s domain
On a pious journey fared
To the shores of Palestine.

One day as he was riding
A woodland path in spring
From a hawthorn bush
He took a little cutting.

In his iron helmet
He placed the hawthorn spray;
He carried it off to war
Over the flowing sea.

And when he was back home
He set it in the earth,
And soon the leaves and buds
Into life were stirred.

The count, faithful and true,
Each year came to the sprig;
He was filled with joy
To see it grow so big.

The count shrank with age,
The sprig became a tree.
Beneath it the old man sat
In deepest reverie.

Its high-arching limbs,
Its whisper in his ear
Remind him of the past
And of the distant shore.