replied to your post
“I know that 1) making amateur diagnoses of historical figures is…”
He s had a lot of posthumous diagnoses - i cant remember them all!! They all explain everything. I find it all a bit repulsive, as he took so much care & pains to live philosophically & diagnosing makes it like he didn’t chose but was compelled.
He definitely did take such efforts – but I’m thinking of things like, say, the way he decided that he should kill himself unless he had a definite duty he could fulfill in life (taking cues from Weininger), and decided he was worthy of life only when Bertrand Russell told him he was a genius (a standard that is likely to strike the average person as both extraordinarily strict and somewhat arbitrary). One could say that he was just trying to live philosophically – taking Weininger seriously, I guess – but this is not a kind of “living philosophically” I would not want most people to pursue! (Re: your other comment, this was all before the war)
Another example is the later, post-war episode where he wrote a confession of his sins (most of which seem very minor to me, and seemed so to his audience), and went around confessing them to people, some of whom were bewildered or annoyed. Did he have a philosophical reason for doing this? It doesn’t seem like it – it seems like he just felt it would exorcise an extremely painful sense of guilt he was feeling at the time. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with treating this sort of episode as part of his emotional life rather than some sort of intellectual choice, as he talks about it in emotional terms.
I guess part of what I’m saying is that on the opposite extreme I see a danger of treating everything W did as divinely inspired by the Philosophy Gods and possessing some hidden inner logic, when really he went through episodes of “merely” emotional pain with no greater “meaning,” just like the rest of us.