Ludwig Wittgenstein, D. H. Lawrence, and Bertrand Russell
photographed in 1929
I.
In the early 20th century, the phrase high-maintenance was one confined to the world of technical engineering and referred to sensitive machines that demanded constant monitoring and often frequent servicing or repair with specialised parts to ensure smooth running.
But by the late 1980s, it was being used by those hip to the latest slang to describe romantic partners and emotionally draining personality types, as well as racing cars and fighter jets. The phrase only gained wide circulation, however, thanks to the hugely popular and influential rom-com When Harry Met Sally (dir. Rob Reiner, 1989) [1].
II.
I'm not here to discuss the Harry Burns & Sally Albright relationship, however, and whether the latter was or was not difficult to date due to her being very particular about the manner in which her food was served.
I'm here, rather, to discuss an English writer and an Austrian-born thinker, both of whom I'm sure Bertie Russell would agree were extremely exacting, hyper-sensitive, and emotionally volatile men of genius: D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein.
While Lawrence was a passionate, prophetic novelist who used poetic language to describe being and Wittgenstein an analytic philosopher who used rigorous logic to define the limits of language, they had similar temperaments and shared an intensity that many people found exhausting.
III.
Born in an East Midlands mining community in 1885, Lawrence was a visionary who - by his own admission - preferred his own subjective model of the truth and waged a relentless crusade against many - perhaps most - aspects of the modern industrial world and the moral-rational idealism rooted in Plato that gave rise to Christianity.
Sensitive to criticism, social convention and all forms of authority - and happy to tramp around the world on what he termed a savage pilgrimage, picking fights with friends and enemies along the way - Lawrence was someone who seemed to actively court controversy and thrive on conflict.
His books were censored and sometimes banned. And if he can legitimately be thought of as carrying forward Nietzsche's project of a revaluation of all values, Lawrence can also be viewed as a forerunner of the countercultural revolution of the 1960s.
IV.
Born just outside Vienna in 1889 into an extremely wealthy family, Wittgenstein was unsparing in his demand for absolute conceptual clarity and perfection from himself and everyone around him. Whether spending years obsessing over a single architectural detail, pushing students to breaking point with his teaching methods, or waving pokers in the faces of visiting professors [2], he tolerated no sloppy thinking (as might be expected of someone who originally wished to study aeronautical engineering).
His close companion and friend - the brilliant Cambridge mathematician David Pinsent - noted that Wittgenstein was always on edge and easily upset by the smallest thing or any imagined insult. If someone made a casual remark or used a cliché, Wittgenstein would react with genuine horror and fury, viewing it as a moral failing rather than innocent small talk.
Like Lawrence, his personal life was marked by a series of fierce arguments, abrupt ruptures and intense reconciliations. He swung between deep self-loathing and absolute certainty in his own rightness in matters of philosophical logic. Prone to severe bouts of depression, he would sometimes have suicidal thoughts and seek out total isolation.
In brief: both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were highly-strung as well as high-maintenance individuals.
V.
Just to be clear: Lawrence and Wittgenstein never met.
When Lawrence visited the University of Cambridge in March 1915, at the invitation of Bertrand Russell, he was introduced to several prominent figures, including the economist John Maynard Keynes, but Wittgenstein was then serving on the Eastern front as a soldier in the Austro-Hungarian Army.
Probably it's just as well that they didn't meet.
For Lawrence was less than comfortable in the hallowed halls of Cambridge and came away detesting the Apostles, describing his visit as a major crisis that revealed to him the rotten nature of English intellectual life [3].
His visceral response was in part triggered by the rational cynicism of those he encountered and in part by his homophobia. For several members of the Cambridge Apostles and the affiliated Bloomsbury Group were either homosexual or had bisexual leanings and Keynes once rather amusingly declared that "practically everyone at Cambridge [...] is an open and avowed sodomite" [4] - this included Wittgenstein, of course.
VI.
Although they never met, there was one man - already twice mentioned in this post - who knew them both and was exasperated first by Wittgenstein (in the period 1911-1913) and then by Lawrence (1915-1916): Bertrand Russell ...
Born in 1872 - so a generation older than Lawrence and Wittgenstein - Russell would become one of England's most celebrated thinkers, social reformers, and outspoken opponents of the First World War (even spending six months in Brixton prison in 1918 for his pacifist writings and activism).
Having won a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge in 1890, he graduated in 1893 with a degree in mathematics. Two years later, he won a prize fellowship in philosophy and was eventually given a teaching post in 1899. Aligning himself with figures such as G. E. Moore and Alfred North Whitehead, Russell was part of the revolt against idealism and one of the founding figures in analytic philosophy.
VII.
Russell first met Wittgenstein in October 1911, when the latter suddenly appeared one tea time, unannounced and unexpected. Wittgenstein introduced himself as an engineering student from Austria who wanted to study mathematical logic.
Intrigued, Russell welcomed the earnest young fellow and quickly recognised he was an extraordinary individual - so much so, that he came to think of Wittgenstein not merely as his student and research collaborator, but his protégé. Between their first meeting and the summer of 1913, the two men developed an intense intellectual bond and worked tirelessly to solve some of the fundamental problems in mathematical logic.
However, Russell soon discovered that Wittgenstein could be difficult, to put it mildly - not least of all when insisting on the impossibility of proving there were no rhinos in the room - and in May 1913 their relationship suffered a significant strain when Wittgenstein criticised Russell's work on the Theory of Judgment with such savagery that it shattered Russell's confidence in his own writings.
Shortly afterwards, Wittgenstein decided to leave Cambridge and retreat to a secluded wooden hut in Norway, before eventually volunteering to fight in the Great War. Afterwards, the relationship between the two men was never the same again.
Nevertheless, Russell helped Wittgenstein publish his groundbreaking Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (in German in 1921 and in English translation the following year) - he even generously wrote an introduction, despite the fact that Wittgenstein made clear his view that Russell fundamentally misunderstood the work.
Russell also facilitated Wittgenstein's return to Cambridge in 1929, by agreeing to accept the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis (and act alongside Moore as the examiner). But Wittgenstein wasn't particularly grateful and he increasingly grew to dislike Russell's popular writings and changing philosophical direction.
VIII.
And then there was Lawrence ... Someone whom Russell found even more of a high-maintenance madman. At least Wittgenstein, for all his idiosyncrasies, was logical in his thinking and didn't subscribe to a libidinal philosophy based on an intuitive way of knowing described as blood-knowledge [5].
Russell first met Lawrence in February 1915. They were introduced, I believe, by their mutual acquaintance Lady Ottoline Morrell, who, for some reason, imagined that both men would greatly benefit from the meeting.
And, to be fair, at first they seemed to get along like a house on fire - united in their passionate opposition to the War, if nothing else. Russell initially found Lawrence an astounding figure: "He is like Ezekiel or some other Old Testament prophet [...] he sees everything and is always right" [6]. They even planned to co-author and deliver jointly a series of public lectures on social reconstruction.
However, their brief working and personal relationship quickly deteriorated due to deep philosophical differences and by early 1916 Lawrence chose to cut all ties with Russell - though not before sending him a number of outrageously aggressive and insulting letters that, for a while, made Russell feel so wretched that he even considered killing himself.
Take a butcher's at this one for example, written on 14 September 1915, which opens: "Dear Russell, I'm going to quarrel with you again. You simply do not speak the truth, you simply are not sincere" and which then goes on to say:
"You are simply full of repressed desires [...] Your will is false and cruel. You are too full of devilish repressions to be anything but lustful and cruel. [...] The enemy of all mankind, you are, full of the lust of enmity. It is not the hatred of falsehood which inspires you. It is the hatred of people, of flesh and blood. It is a perverted mental blood-lust. Why don't you own it. Let us become strangers again, I think it is better." [7]
Wittgenstein may have made Russell feel intellectually inferior - and he may have found Wittgenstein's moral perfectionism tiresome - but Lawrence left him feeling completely worthless as a human being - and who needs that?
IX.
On reflection - and despite my not much caring for him - it's difficult not to afford Bertrand Russell a significant degree of sympathy.
In D. H. Lawrence and Ludwig Wittgenstein, he was obliged to manage two of the most intensely high-maintenance individuals of the modern era - young men who were incredibly exhausting and demanding to be around.
Biographers, friends, and peers have extensively documented how both Lawrence and Wittgenstein were routinely impossible - prickly, combative, tormented, and heavily burdened by an agonizing duty of genius. Both actively thrived on opposition, were prone to explosive rages, and would rather sit in hours of tense, excruciating silence rather than tolerate casual small talk.
What Russell encountered in both men was an insane refusal to compromise with the world as it was. Crucially, however, while Lawrence insisted on raw, emotional vitality at all times, Wittgenstein enforced a standard of absolute intellectual integrity and this fundamental divergence explains why Russell ultimately drew such a sharp line of distinction between the two.
In his Autobiography, reflecting on his state of mind during the tumultuous period in which he was closely associated with both men, Russell summarised the difference: "Lawrence is just as ferocious a critic as Wittgenstein, but I thought Wittgenstein right and I think Lawrence wrong." [8]
In other words, Russell respected Wittgenstein's hostility because its strict conceptual honesty acted as a rigorous intellectual challenge, forcing him to abandon untenable logical theories.
Lawrence's hostility, on the other hand, was purely personal and rooted in Lawrence's need to psycho-pathologise the people he met. Lawrence successfully drove Russell to the edge of despair, but his criticisms lacked any substantive philosophical basis, leaving Russell unconvinced by his arguments.
Push comes to shove, then, Russell chooses the logical fanaticism of Wittgenstein over the destructive emotional chaos of Lawrence. For at least with the former, you can reason - which is difficult with a man who sings If it be not true to me / what care I how true it be [9] and talks an awful lot about his solar plexus.
Notes
[1] In a famous scene in the movie, Harry (played by Billy Crystal) informs Sally (Meg Ryan) that there are, in his view, two types of women: high and low maintenance. This permanently shifted the phrase from a niche piece of slang into a universal linguistic shorthand for a demanding partner - and for this we can thank the film's writer Nora Ephron.
It might be noted, however, that there are critics of the term - especially as it is often used by men as a sexist insult about women (particularly women who are simply more than they can handle or out of their league).
[2] See the post 'Did You Hear the One About the Philosopher and the Actress?' (30 Oct 2025) in which I discuss the infamous 1946 incident where Wittgenstein brandished a poker in Karl Popper's direction.
[3] In a notorious letter [19 April 1915] to David Garnett, Lawrence wrote that the scene at Cambridge filled him with "misery and hostility and rage" and he compared Keynes and co. to "black-beetles" (perhaps of the very same species that Wittgenstein would later place in an imaginary box to make a point about the meaning of words for inner sensations coming from public use rather than private hidden objects; see Philosophical Investigations (1953), § 293).
See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. II, ed. George J. Zytaruk and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 320-321.
[4] Keynes wrote this playful observation in a 1906 letter to his close friend and lover Duncan Grant, with reference to the tight-knit, intellectually progressive circles at the university. It is quoted by Simon Goldhill in Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History (Cambridge University Press, 2025). See Chapter 2: 'The Politics of Homosexuality', pp. 92-144.
Lawrence, who struggled with his own homoerotic impulses, was disgusted by how casually and cynically the Cambridge crowd treated sexuality. He viewed their lifestyle not as a genuine form of love, but as a sterile, intellectualised perversion (they had their sex in the head, as he liked to say).
[5] In a famous letter (17 Jan 1913) to Ernst Collins, Lawrence writes: "My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true."
See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, Vol. I, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 502-504. Lines quoted are on p. 503.
When, a couple of years later, Lawrence tried to convince Russell of a non-mental, elemental form of consciousness, the latter was unimpressed and unpersuaded. And, rather unfairly and somewhat crassly, Russell would later write that Lawrence's mystical philosophy of blood was essentially fascist in character and led straight to the Nazi death-camps
See Vol. II (1914-1944) of his three-volume Autobiography (George Allen & Unwin, 1967-1969), p. 23.
[6] Bertrand Russell, quoted by John Worthen in D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider (Allen Lane /Penguin Books, 2005), p. 158.
[7] D. H. Lawrence, Letters ii. 392.
As John Worthen notes, this letter went too far for Russell, who from this point on found Lawrence "increasingly absurd, incapable of real thinking and madly unrealistic". See D. H. Lawrence: The Life of an Outsider, p. 160.
[8] Bertrand Russell, Autobiography, Vol. II (1968), p. 54. Russell originally wrote these lines to Lady Ottoline Morrell in a letter of July 1915.
[9] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction' to Fantasia of the Unconscious, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 70. (My italics.)
