Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in
logic, the
philosophy of mathematics, the
philosophy of mind, and the
philosophy of language. From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the
University of Cambridge. During his lifetime he published just one slim book, the 75-page
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), one article, one book review and a children's dictionary. His voluminous manuscripts were edited and published posthumously.
Philosophical Investigations appeared as a book in 1953, and has since come to be recognised as one of the most important works of philosophy in the twentieth century. His teacher
Bertrand Russell described Wittgenstein as "the most perfect example have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived; passionate, profound, intense, and dominating."
Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a large fortune from his father in 1913. He gave some considerable sums to poor artists. In a period of severe personal depression after the first World War, he then gave away his entire fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Wittgenstein contemplating it too. He left academia several times—serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working as a hospital porter duringWorld War II in London where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed while largely managing to keep secret the fact that he was one of the world's most famous philosophers. He described philosophy, however, as "the only work that gives me real satisfaction."
His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the
Tractatus, and a later period, articulated in the
Philosophical Investigations. The early Wittgenstein was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world and believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems. The later Wittgenstein rejected many of the assumptions of the
Tractatus, arguing that the meaning of words is best understood as their use within a given
language-game.
Wittgenstein's influence has been felt in nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences, yet there are diverging interpretations of his thought. In the words of his friend and colleague
Georg Henrik von Wright:
He was of the opinion... that his ideas were generally misunderstood and distorted even by those who professed to be his disciples. He doubted he would be better understood in the future. He once said he felt as though he was writing for people who would think in a different way, breathe a different air of life, from that of present-day men.
Background
The Wittgensteins
According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after World War II, Wittgenstein's paternal great-grandfather was Moses Meier, a
Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in
Bad Laasphe in the
Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. In July 1808,
Napoleon issued a decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable
family surname, and so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the
Sayn-Wittgensteins, and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein. His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein—who took the middle name "Christian" to distance himself from his Jewish background—married Fanny Figdor, also Jewish, who converted to
Protestantism just before they married, and the couple founded a successful business trading in wool in Leipzig. Ludwig's grandmother Fanny was a first cousin of the famous violinist
Joseph Joachim.
[22]
They had 11 children—among them Wittgenstein's father. Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein (1847–1913) became an industrial tycoon, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in Europe, with an effective monopoly on Austria's steel cartel. Thanks to Karl, the Wittgensteins became the second wealthiest family in
Austria-Hungary, behind only the
Rothschilds. As a result of his decision in 1898 to invest substantially in the Netherlands and in Switzerland as well as overseas, particularly in the US, the family was to an extent shielded from the hyperinflation that hit Austria in 1922. However, their wealth diminished due to post-1918 hyperinflation and subsequently during the
Great Depression, although even as late as 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.
Early life
Wittgenstein's mother was Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known among friends as Poldi. Her father was a
Bohemian Jew and her mother was
Austrian-
Slovene Catholic—she was Wittgenstein's maternal grandmother and only non-Jewish grandparent, whose ancestry was Austrian, and so by Jewish law Wittgenstein was not Jewish. She was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate
Friedrich Hayek on her maternal side. Wittgenstein was born at 8:30 pm on 26 April 1889 in the so-called "Wittgenstein Palace" at Alleegasse 16, now the Argentinierstrasse, near the
Karlskirche.
[30] Karl and Poldi had nine children in all. There were four girls: Hermine,
Margaret (Gretl), Helene, and a fourth daughter Dora who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes (Hans), Kurt, Rudolf (Rudi),
Paul—who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in
World War I—and Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family.
The children were baptized as Catholics, received formal Catholic instruction, and raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family was at the center of Vienna's cultural life;
Bruno Walterdescribed the life at the Wittgensteins' palace as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture." Karl was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by
Auguste Rodin and financing the city's exhibition hall and art gallery, the
Secession Building.
Gustav Klimt painted Wittgenstein's sister for her wedding portrait, and
Johannes Brahms and
Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family's numerous music rooms.
For Wittgenstein, who highly valued precision and discipline,
contemporary music was never considered acceptable at all. "Music," he said to his friend Drury in 1930, "came to a full stop with Brahms; and even in Brahms I can begin to hear the noise of machinery." Wittgenstein himself had
absolute pitch, and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life: he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. He also learnt to play the
clarinet in his thirties. A fragment of music (three bars), composed by Wittgenstein, was discovered in one of his 1931 notebooks, by Michael Nedo, Director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge.
Family temperament and the brothers' suicides
From left, Helene, Rudi, Hermine, Ludwig (the baby),
Gretl,
Paul, Hans, and Kurt, around 1890
Ray Monk writes that Karl's aim was to turn his sons into captains of industry; they were not sent to school lest they acquire bad habits, but were educated at home to prepare them for work in Karl's industrial empire. Three of the five brothers would later commit suicide. Psychiatrist
Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Johannes Brahms said of the family, whom he visited regularly: "They seemed to act towards one another as if they were at court." The family appeared to have a strong streak of depression running through it.
Anthony Gottlieb tells a story about Paul practicing on one of the pianos in the Wittgensteins' main family mansion, when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room: "I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your scepticism seeping towards me from under the door!"
Ludwig (bottom-right), Paul, and their sisters, late 1890s
The family Palais housed seven grand pianos and each of the siblings pursued music "with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological." The eldest brother, Hans, was hailed as a musical prodigy. At the age of four, writes
Alexander Waugh, Hans could identify the
Doppler effect in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, and at five started crying "Wrong! Wrong!" when two brass bands in a carnival played the same tune in different
keys. But he died in mysterious circumstances in May 1902, when he ran away to America and disappeared from a boat in
Chesapeake Bay, most likely having committed suicide.
Two years later, aged 22 and studying chemistry at the
Berlin Academy, the third eldest brother, Rudi, committed suicide in a Berlin bar. He had asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich" ("Forsaken, forsaken, forsaken am I"), before mixing himself a drink of milk and
potassium cyanide. He had left several suicide notes, one to his parents that said he was grieving over the death of a friend, and another that referred to his "perverted disposition". It was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the
Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that was campaigning against
Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex. His father forbade the family from ever mentioning his name again.
| “ | I won't say 'See you tomorrow' because that would be like predicting the future, and I'm pretty sure I can't do that. | ” |
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The second eldest brother, Kurt, an officer and company director, shot himself on 27 October 1918 at the end of World War I, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse. According to Gottlieb, Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "...the germ of disgust for life within himself." Later Wittgenstein wrote: "I ought to have... become a star in the sky. Instead of which I have remained stuck on earth."
1903–1906: Realschule in Linz
Realschule in Linz
Wittgenstein was taught by private tutors at home until he was fourteen years old. Subsequently, for three years, he attended a school. After the deaths of Hans and Rudi, Karl relented, and allowed Paul and Ludwig to be sent to school. Waugh writes that it was too late for Wittgenstein to pass his exams for the more academic
Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt; having had no formal schooling, he failed his entrance exam and only barely managed after extra tutoring to pass the exam for the more technically oriented
K.u.k. Realschule in
Linz, a small state school with 300 pupils. In 1903, when he was 14, he began his three years of formal schooling there, lodging nearby in term time with the family of a Dr. Srigl, a master at the local gymnasium, the family giving him the nickname Luki.
On starting at the Realschule, Wittgenstein had been moved forward a year. Historian
Brigitte Hamannwrites that he stood out from the other boys: he spoke an unusually pure form of
High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable. Monk writes that the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "
Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts"("Wittgenstein strolls wistfully Vienna-wards due to adverse winds"). In his leaving certificate, he received a top mark (5) in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English, 3 for French, geography, history, mathematics and physics, and 4 for German, chemistry, geometry and freehand drawing. He had particular difficulty with spelling and failed his written German exam because of it. He wrote in 1931: "My bad spelling in youth, up to the age of about 18 or 19, is connected with the whole of the rest of my character (my weakness in study)."
Faith
Wittgenstein was baptized as an infant by a Catholic priest and received formal instruction in Catholic doctrine as a child. It was while he was at the
Realschule that he decided he had lost his faith in God. He nevertheless believed in the importance of the idea of confession. He wrote in his diaries about having made a major confession to his oldest sister, Hermine, while he was at the
Realschule; Monk writes that it may have been about his loss of faith. He also discussed it with Gretl, his other sister, who directed him to
Arthur Schopenhauer's
The World as Will and Representation. As a teenager, Wittgenstein adopted Schopenhauer's epistemological idealism. However, after his study of the philosophy of mathematics, he abandoned epistemological idealism for
Gottlob Frege's conceptual realism. In later years, Wittgenstein was highly dismissive of Schopenhauer, describing him as an ultimately "shallow" thinker: "Schopenhauer has quite a crude mind... where real depth starts, his comes to an end."
Wittgenstein's faith would undergo developmental transformations over time, much like his philosophical ideas; his relationship with Christianity and religion, in general, for which he professed a sincere and devoted reverence, would eventually flourish. Undoubtedly, amongst other Christian thinkers, Wittgenstein was influenced by
St. Augustine, with whom he would occasionally converse in his
Philosophical Investigations. Philosophically, Wittgenstein's thought shows fundamental alignment with religious discourse. For example, Wittgenstein would become one of the century's fiercest critics of
Scientism.
With age, his deepening Christianity led to many religious elucidations and clarifications, as he untangled language problems in religion, attacking, for example, the temptation to think of God's existence as a matter of scientific evidence. In 1947, finding it more difficult to work, he wrote, "I have had a letter from an old friend in Austria, a priest. In it he says that he hopes my work will go well, if it should be God's will. Now that is all I want: if it should be God's will." In Wittgenstein's Culture and Value, it is found, "Is what I am doing [my work in philosophy] really worth the effort? Yes, but only if a light shines on it from above." His close friend Norman Malcolm would write, "Wittgenstein’s mature life was strongly marked by religious thought and feeling. I am inclined to think that he was more deeply religious than are many people who correctly regard themselves as religious believers." At last, Wittgenstein writes, "Bach wrote on the title page of his Orgelbuechlein, ‘To the glory of the most high God, and that my neighbour may be benefited thereby.’ That is what I would have liked to say about my work."
Influence of Otto Weininger
While a student at the
Realschule, Wittgenstein was influenced by Austrian philosopher
Otto Weininger's 1903 book
Geschlecht und Charakter (
Sex and Character). Weininger (1880–1903), who was also Jewish, argued that the concepts male and female exist only as
Platonic forms, and that Jews tend to embody the platonic femininity. Whereas men are basically rational, women operate only at the level of their emotions and sexual organs. Jews, Weininger argued, are similar, saturated with femininity, with no sense of right and wrong, and no soul. Weininger argues that man must choose between his masculine and feminine sides, consciousness and unconsciousness, Platonic love and sexuality. Love and sexual desire stand in contradiction, and love between a woman and a man is therefore doomed to misery or immorality. The only life worth living is the spiritual one—to live as a woman or a Jew means one has no right to live at all; the choice is genius or death. Weininger committed suicide, shooting himself in 1903, shortly after publishing the book. Many years later, as a professor at Cambridge, Wittgenstein distributed copies of Weininger's book to his bemused academic colleagues. He said that Weininger's arguments were wrong, but that it was the way they were wrong that was interesting.
Jewish background and Hitler
There is much debate about the extent to which Wittgenstein and his siblings, who were of 3/4 Jewish descent, saw themselves as Jews. The issue has arisen in particular regarding Wittgenstein's schooldays, because
Adolf Hitler was at the same school for part of the same time.
Laurence Goldstein argues it is "overwhelmingly probable" the boys met each other: that Hitler would have disliked Wittgenstein, a "stammering, precocious, precious, aristocratic upstart ..." Other commentators have dismissed as irresponsible and uninformed any suggestion that Wittgenstein's wealth and unusual personality may have fed Hitler's antisemitism, in part because there is no indication that Hitler would have seen Wittgenstein as Jewish.
Wittgenstein and Hitler were born just six days apart, though Hitler had been held back a year, while Wittgenstein was moved forward by one, so they ended up two grades apart at the Realschule. Monk estimates they were both at the school during the 1904–1905 school year, but says there is no evidence they had anything to do with each other. Several commentators have argued that a school photograph of Hitler may show Wittgenstein in the lower left corner, but Hamann says the photograph stems from 1900 or 1901, before Wittgenstein's time.
In his own writings Wittgenstein frequently referred to himself as Jewish, at times as part of an apparent self-flagellation. For example, while berating himself for being a "reproductive" as opposed to "productive" thinker, he attributed this to his own Jewish sense of identity, writing: "The saint is the only Jewish genius. Even the greatest Jewish thinker is no more than talented. (Myself for instance)." While Wittgenstein would later claim that "[m]y thoughts are 100% Hebraic," as
Hans Sluga has argued, if so, "His was a self-doubting Judaism, which had always the possibility of collapsing into a destructive self-hatred (as it did in
Weininger's case) but which also held an immense promise of innovation and genius."
1906–1913: University
Engineering at Berlin and Manchester
He began his studies in mechanical engineering at the
Technische Hochschule in
Charlottenburg, Berlin, on 23 October 1906, lodging with the family of professor Dr. Jolles. He attended for three semesters, and was awarded a diploma on 5 May 1908. During his time at the Institute, Wittgenstein developed an interest in aeronautics. He arrived at the
Victoria University of Manchester in the spring of 1908 to do his doctorate, full of plans for aeronautical projects, including designing and flying his own plane. He conducted research into the behavior of kites in the upper atmosphere, experimenting at a meteorological observation site near Glossop. He also worked on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades, something he patented in 1911, and which earned him a research studentship from the university in the autumn of 1908.
Wittgenstein stayed at the Grouse Inn in 1908 while engaged in research near
Glossop.
[77]
It was at this time that he became interested in the
foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading
Bertrand Russell's
The Principles of Mathematics (1903), and
Gottlob Frege's
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. 1 (1893) and vol. 2 (1903). Wittgenstein's sister Hermine said he became obsessed with mathematics as a result, and was anyway losing interest in aeronautics. He decided instead that he needed to study logic and the foundations of mathematics, describing himself as in a "constant, indescribable, almost pathological state of agitation." In the summer of 1911 he visited Frege at the
University of Jena to show him some philosophy of mathematics and logic he had written, and to ask whether it was worth pursuing.He wrote: "I was shown into Frege's study. Frege was a small, neat man with a pointed beard who bounced around the room as he talked. He absolutely wiped the floor with me, and I felt very depressed; but at the end he said 'You must come again', so I cheered up. I had several discussions with him after that. Frege would never talk about anything but logic and mathematics, if I started on some other subject, he would say something polite and then plunge back into logic and mathematics."
Arrival at Cambridge
Wittgenstein wanted to study with Frege, but Frege suggested he attend the University of Cambridge to study under Russell, so on 18 October 1911 Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in
Trinity College. Russell was having tea with
C. K. Ogden, when, according to Russell, "an unknown German appeared, speaking very little English but refusing to speak German. He turned out to be a man who had learned engineering at Charlottenburg, but during this course had acquired, by himself, a passion for the philosophy of mathematics & has now come to Cambridge on purpose to hear me." He was soon not only attending Russell's lectures, but dominating them. The lectures were poorly attended and Russell often found himself lecturing only to
C. D. Broad,
E. H. Neville, and H. T. J. Norton. Wittgenstein started following him after lectures back to his rooms to discuss more philosophy, until it was time for the evening meal in
Hall. Russell grew irritated; he wrote to his lover
Lady Ottoline Morrell: "My German friend threatens to be an infliction."
Russell soon came to believe that Wittgenstein was a genius, especially after he had examined Wittgenstein's written work. He wrote in November 1911 that he had at first thought Wittgenstein might be a crank, but soon decided he was a genius: "Some of his early views made the decision difficult. He maintained, for example, at one time that all existential propositions are meaningless. This was in a lecture room, and I invited him to consider the proposition: 'There is no hippopotamus in this room at present.' When he refused to believe this, I looked under all the desks without finding one; but he remained unconvinced." Three months after Wittgenstein's arrival Russell told Morrell: "I love him & feel he will solve the problems I am too old to solve ... He is the young man one hopes for." The role-reversal between him and Wittgenstein was such that he wrote in 1916, after Wittgenstein had criticized his own work: "His criticism, 'tho I don't think he realized it at the time, was an event of first-rate importance in my life, and affected everything I have done since. I saw that he was right, and I saw that I could not hope ever again to do fundamental work in philosophy."
Cambridge Moral Sciences Club and Apostles
In 1912 Wittgenstein joined the
Cambridge Moral Sciences Club, an influential discussion group for philosophy dons and students, delivering his first paper there on 29 November that year, a four-minute talk defining philosophy as "all those primitive propositions which are assumed as true without proof by the various sciences."
[86] He dominated the society and stopped attending entirely in the early 1930s after complaints that he gave no one else a chance to speak.
The club became infamous within popular philosophy because of a meeting on 25 October 1946 at
Richard Braithwaite's rooms in
King's, where
Karl Popper, another Viennese philosopher, had been invited as the guest speaker. Popper's paper was
Are there philosophical problems?, in which he struck up a position against Wittgenstein's, contending that problems in philosophy are real, not just linguistic puzzles as Wittgenstein argued. Accounts vary as to what happened next, but Wittgenstein apparently started waving a hot poker, demanding that Popper give him an example of a moral rule. Popper offered one—"Not to threaten visiting speakers with pokers"—at which point Russell told Wittgenstein he had misunderstood and Wittgenstein left. Popper maintained that Wittgenstein 'stormed out', but it had become accepted practice for him to leave early (because of his aforementioned ability to dominate discussion). It was the only time the philosophers, three of the most eminent in the world, were ever in the same room together. The minutes record that the meeting was "charged to an unusual degree with a spirit of controversy."
John Maynard Keynes also invited him to join the
Cambridge Apostles, an elite secret society formed in 1820, which both Russell and
G. E. Moore had joined as students, but Wittgenstein did not enjoy it and attended infrequently. Russell had been worried that Wittgenstein would not appreciate the group's unseriousness, style of humour, or the fact that the members were in love with one another. He was admitted in 1912 but resigned almost immediately because he could not tolerate the level of the discussion on the Hearth Rug; they took him back though in the 1920s when he returned to Cambridge. (He also had trouble tolerating the discussions in the Moral Sciences Club.)
Sexual orientation and relationship with David Pinsent
Wittgenstein had romantic relations with both men and women. He is generally believed to have fallen in love with at least three men:
David Hume Pinsent in 1912,
Francis Skinner in 1930, and Ben Richards in the late 1940s. He later revealed that, as a teenager in Vienna, he had had an affair with a woman. Additionally, in the 1920s Wittgenstein became infatuated with a young Swiss woman, Marguerite Respinger, modelling a sculpture of her and proposing marriage, albeit on condition that they did not have children.
Wittgenstein's
platonic relationship with David Pinsent (1891–1918) occurred during an intellectually formative period, and is well documented. Bertrand Russell introduced Wittgenstein to Pinsent in the summer of 1912. A mathematics undergraduate and descendant of
David Hume, Pinsent soon became Wittgenstein's closest friend. The men worked together on experiments in the psychology laboratory about the role of rhythm in the appreciation of music, and Wittgenstein delivered a paper on the subject to the
British Psychological Association in Cambridge in 1912. They also travelled together, including to Iceland in September 1912—the expenses paid by Wittgenstein, including
first class travel, the hiring of a private train, and new clothes and spending money for Pinsent—and later to Norway. Pinsent's diaries provide valuable insights into Wittgenstein's personality - sensitive, nervous and attuned to the tiniest slight or change in mood from Pinsent. In his diaries Pinsent wrote about shopping for furniture with Wittgenstein in Cambridge when the latter was given rooms in Trinity; most of what they found in the stores was not minimalist enough for Wittgenstein's aesthetics: "I went and helped him interview a lot of furniture at various shops ... It was rather amusing: he is terribly fastidious and we led the shopman a frightful dance, Vittgenstein [sic] ejaculating "No—Beastly!" to 90 percent of what he shewed [archaic spelling] us!"
He wrote in May 1912 that Wittgenstein had just begun to study the history of philosophy: "He expresses the most naive surprise that all the philosophers he once worshipped in ignorance are after all stupid and dishonest and make disgusting mistakes!" The last time they saw each other was at a Birmingham railway station on 8 October 1913, when they said goodbye before Wittgenstein left to live in Norway.
1913–1920: World War I and the Tractatus
Work on Logik
Karl Wittgenstein died on 20 January 1913, and after receiving his inheritance Wittgenstein became one of the wealthiest men in Europe. He donated some of his money, at first anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers, including
Rainer Maria Rilke and
Georg Trakl. Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics, and so in 1913 he retreated to the village of
Skjolden in Norway, where he rented the second floor of a house for the winter. He later saw this as one of the most productive periods of his life, writing
Logik (
Notes on Logic), the predecessor of much of the
Tractatus. While in Norway, Wittgenstein learned
Norwegian to converse with the local villagers, and
Danish to read the works of the Danish philosopher
Søren Kierkegaard.
At Wittgenstein's insistence, Moore, who was now a Cambridge don, visited him in Norway in 1914, reluctantly because Wittgenstein exhausted him.
David Edmonds and John Eidinow write that Wittgenstein regarded Moore, an internationally-known philosopher, as an example of how far someone could get in life with "absolutely no intelligence whatever." In Norway it was clear that Moore was expected to act as Wittgenstein's secretary, taking down his notes, with Wittgenstein falling into a rage when Moore got something wrong. When he returned to Cambridge, Moore asked the university to consider accepting
Logik as sufficient for a bachelor's degree, but they refused, saying it wasn't formatted properly: no footnotes, no preface. Wittgenstein was furious, writing to Moore in May 1914: "If I am not worth your making an exception for me
even in some STUPID details then I may as well go to Hell directly; and if I
am worth it and you don't do it then—by God—
you might go there." Moore was apparently distraught; he wrote in his diary that he felt sick and could not get the letter out of his head. The two did not speak again until 1929.
Military service
On the outbreak of World War I, Wittgenstein immediately volunteered for the
Austro-Hungarian Army, despite being eligible for a medical exemption. He served first on a ship and then in an artillery workshop 'several miles from the action'. He was wounded in an accidental explosion, and hospitalised to
Kraków. In March 1916, he was posted to a fighting unit on the front line of the Russian front, as part of the Austrian 7th Army, where his unit was involved in some of the heaviest fighting, defending against the
Brusilov Offensive. Wittgenstein directed the fire of his own artillery from an observation post in no-man's land against Allied troops - one of the most dangerous jobs there was, since he was targeted by enemy snipers. In action against British troops, he was decorated with the
Military Merit with Swords on the Ribbon, and was commended by the army for "His exceptionally courageous behaviour, calmness, sang-froid, and heroism," that "won the total admiration of the troops." In January 1917, he was sent as a member of a
howitzer regiment to the Russian front, where he won several more medals for bravery including the Silver Medal for Valour, First Class. In 1918, he was promoted to lieutenant and sent to the
Italian front as part of an artillery regiment. For his part in the final Austrian offensive of June 1918, he was recommended for the Gold Medal for Valour, one of the highest honours in the Austrian army, but was instead awarded the Band of the Military Service Medal with Swords — it being decided that this particular action, although extraordinarily brave, had been insufficiently consequential to merit the highest honour.
Throughout the war, he kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical reflections alongside personal remarks, including his contempt for the character of the other soldiers. He discovered
Leo Tolstoy's 1896
The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in
Tarnów, and carried it everywhere, recommending it to anyone in distress, to the point where he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels." In 1916 Wittgenstein read
Dostoevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov so often that he knew whole passages of it by heart, particularly the speeches of the elder Zosima, who represented for him a powerful Christian ideal, a holy man "who could see directly into the souls of other people."
Iain King has suggested his writing changed substantially in 1916, when he started confronting much greater dangers. Russell said he returned from the war a changed man, one with a deeply mystical and ascetic attitude.
Completion of the Tractatus
In the summer of 1918 Wittgenstein took military leave and went to stay in one of his family's Vienna summer houses, Neuwaldegg. It was there in August 1918 that he completed the Tractatus, which he submitted with the title Der Satz (German: proposition, sentence, phrase, set, but also "leap") to the publishers Jahoda and Siegel.
A series of events around this time left him deeply upset. On 13 August, his uncle Paul died. On 25 October, he learned that Jahoda and Siegel had decided not to publish the
Tractatus, and on 27 October, his brother Kurt killed himself, the third of his brothers to commit suicide. It was around this time he received a letter from David Pinsent's mother to say that Pinsent had been killed in a plane crash on 8 May. Wittgenstein was distraught to the point of being suicidal. He was sent back to the Italian front after his leave and, as a result of the defeat of the Austrian army, was captured by
Allied forces on 3 November in
Trentino. He subsequently spent nine months in an Italian prisoner of war camp.
He returned to his family in Vienna on 25 August 1919, by all accounts physically and mentally spent. He apparently talked incessantly about suicide, terrifying his sisters and brother Paul. He decided to do two things: to enroll in teacher training college as an elementary school teacher, and to get rid of his fortune. In 1914, it had been providing him with an income of 300,000
Kronen a year, but by 1919 was worth a great deal more, with a sizable portfolio of investments in the
United States and the
Netherlands. He divided it among his siblings, except for Margarete, insisting that it not be held in trust for him. His family saw him as ill, and acquiesced.
1920–1928: Teaching, the Tractatus, Haus Wittgenstein
Teacher training in Vienna
In September 1919 he enrolled in the
Lehrerbildungsanstalt (teacher training college) in the
Kundmanngasse in Vienna. His sister Hermine said that Wittgenstein working as an elementary teacher was like using a precision instrument to open crates, but the family decided not to interfere.
Thomas Bernhard, more critically, wrote of this period in Wittgenstein's life: "the multi-millionaire as a village schoolmaster is surely a piece of perversity."
Teaching posts in Austria
In the summer of 1920, Wittgenstein worked as a gardener for a monastery. At first he applied, under a false name, for a teaching post at Reichenau, was awarded the job, but he declined it when his identity was discovered. As a teacher, he wished to no longer be recognized as a member of the famous Wittgenstein family. In response, his brother Paul wrote:
"It is out of the question, really completely out of the question, that anybody bearing our name and whose elegant and gentle upbringing can be seen a thousand paces off, would not be identified as a member of our family... That one can neither simulate nor dissimulate anything including a refined education I need hardly tell you."
In 1920, Wittgenstein was given his first job as a primary school teacher in
Trattenbach, under his real name, in a remote village of a few hundred people. His first letters describe it as beautiful, but in October 1921, he wrote to Russell: "I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness. I know that human beings on the average are not worth much anywhere, but here they are much more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere." He was soon the object of gossip among the villagers, who found him eccentric at best. He did not get on well with the other teachers; when he found his lodgings too noisy, he made a bed for himself in the school kitchen. He was an enthusiastic teacher, offering late-night extra tuition to several of the students, something that did not endear him to the parents, though some of them came to adore him; his sister Hermine occasionally watched him teach and said the students "literally crawled over each other in their desire to be chosen for answers or demonstrations."
To the less able, it seems that he became something of a tyrant. The first two hours of each day were devoted to mathematics, hours that Monk writes some of the pupils recalled years later with horror. They reported that he caned the boys and boxed their ears, and also that he pulled the girls' hair; This was not unusual at the time for boys, but for the villagers he went too far in doing it to the girls too; girls were not expected to understand algebra, much less have their ears boxed over it. The violence apart, Monk writes that he quickly became a village legend, shouting "Krautsalat!" ("coleslaw" - i.e. shredded cabbage) when the headmaster played the piano, and "Nonsense!" when a priest was answering children's questions.
Publication of the Tractatus
| “ | The whole modern conception of the world is founded on the illusion that the so-called laws of nature are the explanations of natural phenomena.
Thus people today stop at the laws of nature, treating them as something inviolable, just as God and Fate were treated in past ages. And in fact both were right and both wrong; though the view of the ancients is clearer insofar as they have an acknowledged terminus, while the modern system tries to make it look as if everything were explained.
| ” |
|
|
While Wittgenstein was living in isolation in rural Austria, the
Tractatus was published to considerable interest, first in German in 1921 as
Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, part of
Wilhelm Ostwald's journal
Annalen der Naturphilosophie, though Wittgenstein was not happy with the result and called it a pirate edition. Russell had agreed to write an introduction to explain why it was important, because it was otherwise unlikely to have been published: it was difficult if not impossible to understand, and Wittgenstein was unknown in philosophy. In a letter to Russell, Wittgenstein wrote "The main point is the theory of what can be expressed (gesagt) by prop[osition]s—i.e. by language—(and, which comes to the same thing, what can be
thought) and what can not be expressed by pro[position]s, but only shown (gezeigt); which, I believe, is the cardinal problem of philosophy." But Wittgenstein was not happy with Russell's help. He had lost faith in Russell, finding him glib and his philosophy mechanistic, and felt he had fundamentally misunderstood the
Tractatus.
An English translation was prepared in Cambridge by
Frank Ramsey, a mathematics undergraduate at King's commissioned by
C. K. Ogden. It was Moore who suggested
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus for the title, an allusion to
Baruch Spinoza's
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Initially there were difficulties in finding a publisher for the English edition too, because Wittgenstein was insisting it appear without Russell's introduction; Cambridge University Press turned it down for that reason. Finally in 1922 an agreement was reached with Wittgenstein that Kegan Paul would print a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation. This is the translation that was approved by Wittgenstein, but it is problematic in a number of ways. Wittgenstein's English was poor at the time, and Ramsey was a teenager who had only recently learned German, so philosophers often prefer to use a 1961 translation by
David Pears and Brian McGuinness.
An aim of the Tractatus is to reveal the relationship between language and the world: what can be said about it, and what can only be shown. Wittgenstein argues that language has an underlying logical structure, a structure that provides the limits of what can be said meaningfully. The limits of language, for Wittgenstein, are the limits of philosophy. Much of philosophy involves attempts to say the unsayable: "What we can say at all can be said clearly," he argues. Anything beyond that—religion, ethics, aesthetics, the mystical—cannot be discussed. They are not in themselves nonsensical, but any statement about them must be. He wrote in the preface: "The book will, therefore, draw a limit to thinking, or rather—not to thinking, but to the expression of thoughts; for, in order to draw a limit to thinking we should have to be able to think both sides of this limit (we should therefore have to be able to think what cannot be thought)."
The book is 75 pages long—"As to the shortness of the book, I am awfully sorry for it ... If you were to squeeze me like a lemon you would get nothing more out of me," he told Ogden—and presents seven numbered propositions (1–7), with various sub-levels (1, 1.1, 1.11):
- Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.
- The world is everything that is the case.
- Was der Fall ist, die Tatsache, ist das Bestehen von Sachverhalten.
- What is the case, the fact, is the existence of atomic facts.
- Das logische Bild der Tatsachen ist der Gedanke.
- The logical picture of the facts is the thought.
- Der Gedanke ist der sinnvolle Satz.
- The thought is the significant proposition.
- Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze.
- Propositions are truth-functions of elementary propositions.
- Die allgemeine Form der Wahrheitsfunktion ist:
![[\bar p,\bar\xi, N(\bar\xi)]](https://upload.wikimedia.org/math/0/1/a/01a3cf5f91211db95ef402b4bd20508b.png)
. Dies ist die allgemeine Form des Satzes.
- The general form of a truth-function is: . This is the general form of proposition.
- Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muß man schweigen.
- Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.
Visit from Frank Ramsey, Puchberg
In September 1922 he moved to a secondary school in a nearby village, Hassbach, but considered the people there just as bad—"These people are not human
at all but loathsome worms," he wrote to a friend—and he left after a month. In November he began work at another primary school, this time in
Puchbergin the
Schneeberg mountains. There, he told Russell, the villagers were "one-quarter animal and three-quarters human."
Frank P. Ramsey visited him on 17 September 1923 to discuss the
Tractatus; he had agreed to write a review of it for
Mind. He reported in a letter home that Wittgenstein was living frugally in one tiny whitewashed room that only had space for a bed, washstand, a small table, and one small hard chair. Ramsey shared an evening meal with him of coarse bread, butter, and cocoa. Wittgenstein's school hours were eight to twelve or one, and he had afternoons free. After Ramsey returned to Cambridge a long campaign began among Wittgenstein's friends to persuade him to return to Cambridge and away from what they saw as a hostile environment for him. He was accepting no help even from his family.Ramsey wrote to
John Maynard Keynes:
"[Wittgenstein's family] are very rich and extremely anxious to give him money or do anything for him in any way, and he rejects all their advances; even Christmas presents or presents of invalid's food, when he is ill, he sends back. And this is not because they aren't on good terms but because he won't have any money he hasn't earned ... It is an awful pity."
Haidbauer incident, Otterthal
He moved schools again in September 1924, this time to
Otterthal, near Trattenbach; the socialist headmaster, Josef Putre, was someone Wittgenstein had become friends with while at Trattenbach. While he was there, he wrote a 42-page pronunciation and spelling dictionary for the children,
Wörterbuch für Volksschulen, published in Vienna in 1926 by Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, the only book of his apart from the
Tractatus that was published in his lifetime. A first edition sold in 2005 for £75,000.
An incident occurred in April 1926 and became known as Der Vorfall Haidbauer (the Haidbauer incident). Josef Haidbauer was an 11-year-old pupil whose father had died and whose mother worked as a local maid. He was a slow learner, and one day Wittgenstein hit him two or three times on the head, causing him to collapse. Wittgenstein carried him to the headmaster's office, then quickly left the school, bumping into a parent, Herr Piribauer, on the way out. Piribauer had been sent for by the children when they saw Haidbauer collapse; Wittgenstein had previously pulled Piribauer's daughter, Hermine, so hard by the ears that her ears had bled. Piribauer said that when he met Wittgenstein in the hall that day: "I called him all the names under the sun. I told him he wasn't a teacher, he was an animal-trainer! And that I was going to fetch the police right away!"
Piribauer tried to have Wittgenstein arrested, but the village's police station was empty, and when he tried again the next day he was told Wittgenstein had disappeared. On 28 April 1926, Wittgenstein handed in his resignation to Wilhelm Kundt, a local school inspector, who tried to persuade him to stay; however, Wittgenstein was adamant that his days as a schoolteacher were over. Proceedings were initiated in May, and the judge ordered a psychiatric report; in August 1926 a letter to Wittgenstein from a friend, Ludwig Hänsel, indicates that hearings were ongoing, but nothing is known about the case after that. Alexander Waugh writes that Wittgenstein's family and their money may have had a hand in covering things up. Waugh writes that Haidbauer died shortly afterwards of haemophilia; Monk says he died when he was 14 of leukaemia.
Ten years later, in 1936, as part of a series of "confessions" he engaged in that year, Wittgenstein appeared without warning at the village saying he wanted to confess personally and ask for pardon from the children he had hit. He visited at least four of the children, including Hermine Piribauer, who apparently replied only with a "Ja, ja," though other former students were more hospitable. Monk writes that the purpose of these confessions was not "to hurt his pride, as a form of punishment; it was to dismantle it—to remove a barrier, as it were, that stood in the way of honest and decent thought." Of the apologies, Wittgenstein wrote, "This brought me into more settled waters... and to greater seriousness."
The Vienna Circle
The
Tractatus was now the subject of much debate amongst philosophers, and Wittgenstein was a figure of increasing international fame. In particular, a discussion group of philosophers, scientists and mathematicians, known as the
Vienna Circle, had built up largely as a result of the inspiration they had been given by reading the
Tractatus. While it is commonly assumed that Wittgenstein was a part of the Vienna Circle, in reality, this was not actually the case. German philosopher
Oswald Hanfling writes bluntly: "Wittgenstein was never a member of the Circle, though he was in Vienna during much of the time. Yet his influence on the Circle's thought was at least as important as that of any of its members." From 1926, with the members of the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein would take part in many discussions. However, during these discussions, it soon became evident that Wittgenstein held a different attitude towards philosophy than the members of the Circle whom his work had inspired. For example, during meetings of the Vienna Circle, he would express his disagreement with the group's misreading of his work by turning his back to them and reading poetry aloud. In his autobiography,
Rudolf Carnap describes Wittgenstein as the thinker who gave him the greatest inspiration. However, he also wrote that "there was a striking difference between Wittgenstein's attitude toward philosophical problems and that of Schlick and myself. Our attitude toward philosophical problems was not very different from that which scientists have toward their problems." As for Wittgenstein:
His point of view and his attitude toward people and problems, even theoretical problems, were much more similar to those of a creative artist than to those of a scientist; one might almost say, similar to those of a religious prophet or a seer... When finally, sometimes after a prolonged arduous effort, his answers came forth, his statement stood before us like a newly created piece of art or a divine revelation ... the impression he made on us was as if insight came to him as through divine inspiration, so that we could not help feeling that any sober rational comment or analysis of it would be a profanation.
Haus Wittgenstein
| “ | "I am not interested in erecting a building, but in [...] presenting to myself the foundations of all possible buildings." | ” |
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In 1926 Wittgenstein was again working as a gardener for a number of months, this time at the monastery of Hütteldorf, where he had also inquired about becoming a monk. His sister, Margaret, invited him to help with the design of her new townhouse in Vienna's
Kundmanngasse. Wittgenstein, his friend
Paul Engelmann, and a team of architects developed a spare modernist house. In particular, Wittgenstein focused on the windows, doors, and radiators, demanding that every detail be exactly as he specified. When the house was nearly finished Wittgenstein had an entire ceiling raised 30mm so that the room had the exact proportions he wanted. Monk writes that "This is not so marginal as it may at first appear, for it is precisely these details that lend what is otherwise a rather plain, even ugly house its distinctive beauty."
It took him a year to design the door handles and another to design the radiators. Each window was covered by a metal screen that weighed 150 kg, moved by a pulley Wittgenstein designed. Bernhard Leitner, author of The Architecture of Ludwig Wittgenstein, said there is barely anything comparable in the history of interior design: "It is as ingenious as it is expensive. A metal curtain that could be lowered into the floor."
The house was finished by December 1928 and the family gathered there at Christmas to celebrate its completion. Wittgenstein's sister Hermine wrote: "Even though I admired the house very much....It seemed indeed to be much more a dwelling for the gods."Wittgenstein said "the house I built for Gretl is the product of a decidedly sensitive ear and good manners, and expression of greatunderstanding... But primordial life, wild life striving to erupt into the open - that is lacking." Monk comments that the same might be said of the technically excellent, but austere, terracotta sculpture Wittgenstein had modelled of Marguerite Respinger in 1926, and that, as Russell first noticed, this "wild life striving to be in the open" was precisely the substance of Wittgenstein's philosophical work.
1929–1941: Fellowship at Cambridge
PhD and fellowship
At the urging of Ramsey and others, Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge in 1929. Keynes wrote in a letter to his wife: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train." Despite this fame, he could not initially work at Cambridge as he did not have a degree, so he applied as an advanced undergraduate. Russell noted that his previous residency was sufficient to fulfill eligibility requirements for a PhD, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as his thesis. It was examined in 1929 by Russell and Moore; at the end of the thesis defence, Wittgenstein clapped the two examiners on the shoulder and said, "Don't worry, I know you'll never understand it." Moore wrote in the examiner's report: "I myself consider that this is a work of genius; but, even if I am completely mistaken and it is nothing of the sort, it is well above the standard required for the Ph.D. degree." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.
Anschluss
From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, where he worked on the
Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of 1936/7, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions like white lies, in an effort to cleanse himself. In 1938, he travelled to Ireland to visit
Maurice O'Connor Drury, a friend who became a psychiatrist, and considered such training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for it. The visit to Ireland was at the same time a response to the invitation of the then Irish
Taoiseach,
Éamon de Valera, himself a mathematics teacher. De Valera hoped Wittgenstein's presence would contribute to an academy for advanced mathematics.
While he was in Ireland in March 1938, Germany annexed Austria in the
Anschluss; the Viennese Wittgenstein was now a citizen of the enlarged Germany and a Jew under the
1935 Nuremberg racial laws, because three of his grandparents had been born as Jews. The Nuremberg Laws classified people as Jews (
Volljuden) if they had three or four Jewish grandparents, and as mixed blood (
Mischling) if they had one or two. It meant
inter alia that the Wittgensteins were restricted in whom they could marry or have sex with, and where they could work.
After the Anschluss, his brother Paul left almost immediately for England, and later the US. The Nazis discovered his relationship with Hilde Schania, a brewer's daughter with whom he had had two children but whom he had never married, though he did later. Because she was not Jewish, he was served with a summons for
Rassenschande (racial defilement). He told no one he was leaving the country, except for Hilde who agreed to follow him. He left so suddenly and quietly that for a time people believed he was the fourth Wittgenstein brother to have committed suicide.
Wittgenstein began to investigate acquiring British or Irish citizenship with the help of Keynes, and apparently had to confess to his friends in England that he had earlier misrepresented himself to them as having just one Jewish grandparent, when in fact he had three.
A few days before the invasion of Poland, Hitler personally granted Mischling status to the Wittgenstein siblings. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for this, and Hitler granted only 12. Anthony Gottlieb writes that the pretext was that their paternal grandfather had been the bastard son of a German prince, which allowed the Reichsbank to claim the gold, foreign currency, and stocks held in Switzerland by a Wittgenstein trust. Gretl, an American citizen by marriage, started the negotiations over the racial status of their grandfather, and the family's large foreign currency reserves were used as a bargaining tool. Paul had escaped to Switzerland and then the US in July 1938, and disagreed with the negotiations, leading to a permanent split between the siblings. After the war, when Paul was performing in Vienna, he did not visit Hermine who was dying there, and he had no further contact with Ludwig or Gretl.
Professor of philosophy
After G. E. Moore resigned the chair in philosophy in 1939, Wittgenstein was elected, and acquired British citizenship soon afterwards. In July 1939 he travelled to Vienna to assist Gretl and his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet an official of the Reichsbank. After this, he travelled to New York to persuade Paul, whose agreement was required, to back the scheme. The required Befreiung was granted in August 1939. The unknown amount signed over to the Nazis by the Wittgenstein family, a week or so before the outbreak of war, included amongst many other assets, 1700 kg of gold. There is a report Wittgenstein visited Moscow a second time in 1939, travelling from Berlin, and again met the philosopher
Sophia Janowskaya.
Norman Malcolm, at the time a post-graduate research fellow at Cambridge, describes his first impressions of Wittgenstein in 1938:
"At a meeting of the Moral Science Club, after the paper for the evening was read and the discussion started, someone began to stammer a remark. He had extreme difficulty in expressing himself and his words were unintelligible to me. I whispered to my neighbour, 'Who's that?': he replied, 'Wittgenstein'. I was astonished because I had expected the famous author of the Tractatus to be an elderly man, whereas this man looked young – perhaps about 35. (His actual age was 49.) His face was lean and brown, his profile was aquiline and strikingly beautiful, his head was covered with a curly mass of brown hair. I observed the respectful attention that everyone in the room paid to him. After this unsuccessful beginning he did not speak for a time but was obviously struggling with his thoughts. His look was concentrated, he made striking gestures with his hands as if he was discoursing... Whether lecturing or conversing privately, Wittgenstein always spoke emphatically and with a distinctive intonation. He spoke excellent English, with the accent of an educated Englishman, although occasional Germanisms would appear in his constructions. His voice was resonant... His words came out, not fluently, but with great force. Anyone who heard him say anything knew that this was a singular person. His face was remarkably mobile and expressive when he talked. His eyes were deep and often fierce in their expression. His whole personality was commanding, even imperial."
Describing Wittgenstein's lecture program, Malcolm continues:
"It is hardly correct to speak of these meetings as 'lectures', although this is what Wittgenstein called them. For one thing, he was carrying on original research in these meetings... Often the meetings consisted mainly of dialogue. Sometimes, however, when he was trying to draw a thought out of himself, he would prohibit, with a peremptory motion of the hand, any questions or remarks. There were frequent and prolonged periods of silence, with only an occasional mutter from Wittgenstein, and the stillest attention from the others. During these silences, Wittgenstein was extremely tense and active. His gaze was concentrated; his face was alive; his hands made arresting movements; his expression was stern. One knew that one was in the presence of extreme seriousness, absorption, and force of intellect... Wittgenstein was a frightening person at these classes."
After work, the philosopher would often relax by watching
Westerns, where he preferred to sit at the very front of the cinema, or reading detective stories especially the ones written by
Norbert Davis. Norman Malcolm wrote that Wittgenstein would rush to the cinema when class ended.
By this time, Wittgenstein's view on the
foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. In his early 20s, Wittgenstein had thought logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and
Whitehead's
Principia Mathematica. Now he denied there were any mathematical facts to be discovered. He gave a series of lectures on mathematics, discussing this and other topics, documented in a book, with lectures by Wittgenstein and discussions between him and several students, including the young
Alan Turing who described Wittgenstein as "a
very peculiar man". The two had many discussions about the relationship between computational logic and everyday notions of truth.
World War II and Guy's Hospital
Monk writes that Wittgenstein found it intolerable that a war was going on and he was teaching philosophy. He grew angry when any of his students wanted to become professional philosophers.
In September 1941 he asked John Ryle, the brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, if he could get a manual job at Guy's Hospital in London. John Ryle was professor of medicine at Cambridge and had been involved in helping Guy's prepare for the Blitz. Wittgenstein told Ryle he would die slowly if left at Cambridge, and he would rather die quickly. He started working at Guy's shortly afterwards as a dispensary porter, meaning that he delivered drugs from the pharmacy to the wards—where he apparently advised the patients not to take them.
The hospital staff were not told he was one of the world's most famous philosophers, though some of the medical staff did recognize him—at least one had attended Moral Sciences Club meetings—but they were discreet. "Good God, don't tell anybody who I am!" Wittgenstein begged one of them. Some of them nevertheless called him Professor Wittgenstein, and he was allowed to dine with the doctors. He wrote on 1 April 1942: "I no longer feel any hope for the future of my life. It is as though I had before me nothing more than a long stretch of living death. I cannot imagine any future for me other than a ghastly one. Friendless and joyless."
He had developed a friendship with Keith Kirk, a working-class teenage friend of
Francis Skinner, the mathematics undergraduate he had had a relationship with until Skinner's death in 1941 from polio. Skinner had given up academia, thanks at least in part to Wittgenstein's influence, and had been working as a mechanic in 1939, with Kirk as his apprentice. Kirk and Wittgenstein struck up a friendship, with Wittgenstein giving him lessons in physics to help him pass a
City and Guilds exam. During his period of loneliness at Guy's he wrote in his diary: "For ten days I've heard nothing more from K, even though I pressed him a week ago for news. I think that he has perhaps broken with me. A
tragic thought!" Kirk had in fact got married, and they never saw one another again.
While Wittgenstein was at Guy's he met Basil Reeve, a young doctor with an interest in philosophy, who, with R. T. Grant, was studying the effect of shock on air-raid casualties. When the blitz ended there were fewer casualties to study. In November 1942, Grant and Reeve moved to the
Royal Victoria Infirmary,
Newcastle upon Tyne, to study road traffic and industrial casualties. Grant offered Wittgenstein a position as a laboratory assistant at a wage of £4 per week, and he lived in Newcastle (at 28 Brandling Park,
Jesmond) from 29 April 1943 until February 1944.
1947–1951: Final years
| “ | Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present. Our life has no end in the way in which our visual field has no limits. | ” |
— Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 6.431
|
He resigned the professorship at Cambridge in 1947 to concentrate on his writing, and in 1947 and 1948 travelled to
Ireland, staying at Ross's Hotel in
Dublin and at a farmhouse in
Redcross,
County Wicklow, where he began the manuscript volume MS 137, Band R. Seeking solitude he moved to
Rosro, a holiday cottage in
Connemara owned by Maurice O'Connor-Drury.
He also accepted an invitation from
Norman Malcolm, then professor at Cornell University, to stay with him and his wife for several months at
Ithaca, New York. He made the trip in April 1949, although he told Malcolm he was too unwell to do philosophical work: "I haven't done any work since the beginning of March & I haven't had the strength of even trying to do any." A doctor in Dublin had diagnosed anaemia and prescribed iron and liver pills. The details of Wittgenstein's stay in America are recounted in Norman Malcolm's
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir. During his summer in America, Wittgenstein began his epistemological discussions, in particular his engagement with
philosophical skepticism, that would eventually become the final fragments
On Certainty.
The plaque at "Storey's End", 76
Storey's Way, Cambridge, where Wittgenstein died.
He returned to London, where he was diagnosed with an inoperable
prostate cancer, which had spread to his bone marrow. He spent the next two months in Vienna, where his sister Hermine died on 11 February 1950; he went to see her every day, but she was hardly able to speak or recognize him. "Great loss for me and all of us," he wrote. "Greater than I would have thought." He moved around a lot after Hermine's death staying with various friends: to Cambridge in April 1950, where he stayed with
G. H. von Wright; to London to stay with
Rush Rhees; then to Oxford to see
Elizabeth Anscombe, writing to Norman Malcolm that he was hardly doing any philosophy. He went to Norway in August with Ben Richards, then returned to Cambridge, where on 27 November he moved into
Storey's End at 76
Storey's Way, the home of his doctor,
Edward Bevan, and his wife Joan; he had told them he did not want to die in a hospital, so they said he could spend his last days in their home instead. Joan at first was afraid of Wittgenstein, but they soon became good friends.
By the beginning of 1951, it was clear that he had little time left. He wrote a new will in Oxford on 29 January, naming Rhees as his executor, and Anscombe and von Wright his literary administrators, and wrote to Norman Malcolm that month to say, "My mind's completely dead. This isn't a complaint, for I don't really suffer from it. I know that life must have an end once and that mental life can cease before the rest does." In February he returned to the Bevans' home to work on MS 175 and MS 176. These and other manuscripts were later published as
Remarks on Colour and
On Certainty. He wrote to Malcolm on 16 April 13 days before his death: "An extraordinary thing happened to me. About a month ago I suddenly found myself in the right frame of mind for doing philosophy. I had been
absolutely certain that I'd never again be able to do it. It's the first time after more than 2 years that the curtain in my brain has gone up.—Of course, so far I've only worked for about 5 weeks & it may be all over by tomorrow; but it bucks me up a lot now."
Death
Wittgenstein began work on his final manuscript, MS 177, on 25 April 1951. It was his 62nd birthday on 26 April. He went for a walk the next afternoon, and wrote his last entry that day, 27 April. That evening, he became very ill; when his doctor told him he might live only a few days, he reportedly replied, "Good!" Joan stayed with him throughout that night, and just before losing consciousness for the last time on 28 April, he told her: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." Norman Malcolm describes this as a "...strangely moving utterance."
Four of Wittgenstein's former students arrived at his bedside—Ben Richards,
Elizabeth Anscombe,
Yorick Smythies, and
Maurice O'Connor Drury. Anscombe and Smythies were Catholics; and, at the latter's request, a Dominican friar, Father
Conrad Pepler, also attended. They were at first unsure what Wittgenstein would have wanted, but then remembered he had said he hoped his Catholic friends would pray for him, so they did, and he was pronounced dead shortly afterwards.
Wittgenstein was given a Catholic burial at
Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge. Drury later said he had been troubled ever since about whether that was the right thing to do. The ledger gravestone has recently been refurbished by the British Wittgenstein Society.
On his religious views, Wittgenstein was said to be greatly interested in
Catholicism and was sympathetic to it. In his university years, he expressed belief in the
Resurrection of Jesus. However, he did not consider himself to be a Catholic. According to
Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein saw Catholicism as more of a way of life than as a set of beliefs he personally held, considering that he did not accept any religious faith.
Wittgenstein was said to be
agnostic, in a qualified sense, in the last years of his life.
1953: Publication of the Philosophical Investigations
Illustration of a "
duckrabbit", discussed in the
Philosophical Investigations, section XI, part II
The
Blue Book, a set of notes dictated to his class at Cambridge in 1933–1934, contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later thoughts on language, and is widely read as a turning-point in his philosophy of language.
Philosophical Investigations was published in two parts in 1953. Most of Part I was ready for printing in 1946, but Wittgenstein withdrew the manuscript from his publisher. The shorter Part II was added by his editors, Elizabeth Anscombe and Rush Rhees. Wittgenstein asks the reader to think of language as a multiplicity of language-games within which parts of language develop and function. He argues that philosophical problems are bewitchments that arise from philosophers' misguided attempts to consider the meaning of words independently of their context, usage, and grammar, what he called "language gone on holiday."
According to Wittgenstein, philosophical problems arise when language is forced from its proper home into a metaphysical environment, where all the familiar and necessary landmarks and contextual clues are removed. He describes this metaphysical environment as like being on frictionless ice: where the conditions are apparently perfect for a philosophically and logically perfect language, all philosophical problems can be solved without the muddying effects of everyday contexts; but where, precisely because of the lack of friction, language can in fact do no work at all. Wittgenstein argues that philosophers must leave the frictionless ice and return to the "rough ground" of ordinary language in use. Much of theInvestigations consists of examples of how the first false steps can be avoided, so that philosophical problems are dissolved, rather than solved: "the clarity we are aiming at is indeed complete clarity. But this simply means that the philosophical problems should completelydisappear."
Legacy
Wittgenstein left a voluminous archive of unpublished papers, including 83 manuscripts, 46 typescripts and 11 dictations, amounting to an estimated 20,000 pages. Choosing among repeated drafts, revisions, corrections and loose notes editorial work has found nearly one third of the total suitable for print. An Internet facility hosted by the
University of Bergen allows access to images of almost all the material and to search the available transcriptions. In 2011 two new boxes of Wittgenstein papers were found.
In 1999 a survey among American university and college teachers ranked the
Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations."
[185] The
Investigations also ranked 54th on a list of most influential twentieth-century works in cognitive science prepared by the University of Minnesota's Center for Cognitive Sciences.
Peter Hacker argues that Wittgenstein's influence on 20th-century analytical philosophy can be attributed to his early influence on the Vienna Circle and later influence on the Oxford "ordinary language" school and Cambridge philosophers.
