Ludwig Wittgenstein

:For other people of this name, see Wittgenstein (disambiguation)

Life

Ludwig Joseph Johann Wittgenstein was born in Vienna on April 26, 1889, to Karl and Leopoldine Wittgenstein. He was the youngest of eight children, born into one of the most prominent and wealthy families in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His father's parents, Hermann Christian and Fanny Wittgenstein, were born into Jewish families but converted to Protestantism, and after they moved from Saxony to Vienna in the 1850s, assimilated themselves into the Viennese Protestant professional classes. Ludwig's father, Karl Wittgenstein, became an industrialist, and went on to make a fortune in iron and steel. Ludwig's mother Leopoldine, née Kalmus, was also of Jewish descent on her father's side, but had been brought up as a practising Roman Catholic. Ludwig, like all his brothers and sisters, was baptized as a Roman Catholic and was given a Catholic burial by his friends when he died.

Related Topics:
Vienna - April 26 - 1889 - Austro-Hungarian Empire - Jew - Protestantism - Saxony - 1850s - Iron - Steel - Roman Catholic - Baptized

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Early life

Ludwig grew up in a household that provided an astonishingly intense environment for artistic and intellectual achievement. Ludwig's parents were both very musical and all their children were artistically and intellectually gifted. Karl Wittgenstein was a leading patron of the arts, and the Wittgenstein house hosted many figures of high culture — above all, musicians. The family was often visited by artists such as Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler. Ludwig's brother Paul Wittgenstein went on to become a world-famous concert pianist, even after losing his right arm in World War I. Ludwig himself did not have prodigious musical talent, but 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 said to be unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. A less fortunate family trait was a tendency to intense self-criticism, to the point of depression and suicidal tendencies. Three of his four brothers committed suicide.

Related Topics:
Arts - High culture - Musician - Artist - Johannes Brahms - Gustav Mahler - Paul Wittgenstein - Pianist - World War I - Depression - Suicidal

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Until 1903, Ludwig was educated at home; after that, he began three years of schooling at the Realschule in Linz, a school emphasizing technical topics. Adolf Hitler was a student there at the same time, and the two (both 14 or 15) can be seen near each other in a school photograph of about 40 students, all roughly the same age.1.

Related Topics:
Linz - Adolf Hitler - 1

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In 1906, Wittgenstein took up studying mechanical engineering in Berlin, and in 1908 he went to the University of Manchester to study for his doctorate in engineering. For this purpose he registered as a research student in an engineering laboratory. There he did research on the behaviour of kites in the upper atmosphere. From that, he moved to aeronautical research on the design of a propeller with small jet engines on the end of its blades. He successfully designed and tested a prototype of this design. During his research in Manchester, Wittgenstein became interested in the foundations of mathematics, particularly after reading Bertrand Russell's Principles of Mathematics and Gottlob Frege's Grundgesetze. In the summer of 1911, Wittgenstein visited Frege (after having corresponded with him for some time), and Frege advised him to go to the University of Cambridge and study with Russell.

Related Topics:
Mechanical engineering - University of Manchester - Doctorate - Engineering - Atmosphere - Foundations of mathematics - Bertrand Russell - Gottlob Frege - 1911 - University of Cambridge

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In October 1911, Wittgenstein arrived unannounced at Russell's rooms in Trinity College, and was soon attending Russell's lectures and discussing philosophy with him at great length. He made a great impression on Russell and G. E. Moore and started to work on the foundations of logic and mathematical logic. Russell was increasingly tired of philosophy, and at this time he saw Wittgenstein as a successor who would carry on his work. During this period, Wittgenstein's other major interests were music and travelling, often in the company of David Pinsent, an undergraduate who became a firm friend. He was also invited to join the elite secret society, the Cambridge Apostles, which Russell and Moore had both belonged to as students. Wittgenstein joined, but resigned after a little more than a month.

Related Topics:
Trinity College - G. E. Moore - David Pinsent - Secret society - Cambridge Apostles

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In 1913, Wittgenstein inherited a great fortune when his father died. He donated some of it, initially anonymously, to Austrian artists and writers including Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl. In 1914 he would go to see Trakl when the latter wanted to meet his benefactor, but Trakl killed himself days before Wittgenstein arrived.

Related Topics:
Rainer Maria Rilke - Georg Trakl

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Although he was invigorated by his study in Cambridge and his conversations with Russell, Wittgenstein came to feel that he could not get to the heart of his most fundamental questions while surrounded by other academics. In 1913, he retreated to the solitude of a remote mountain cabin in Skjolden, Norway, which could only be reached on horseback. The isolation allowed him to devote himself entirely to his work, and he later saw this period as one of the most passionate and productive times of his life. While there, he wrote a ground-breaking work in the foundations of logic, a book entitled Logik, which was the immediate predecessor and source of much of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

Related Topics:
Cambridge - Skjolden - Norway - Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

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World War I

The outbreak of World War I in the next year took him completely by surprise, as he was living a secluded life at the time. He volunteered for the Austro-Hungarian army as a private soldier, first serving on a ship and then in an artillery workshop. In 1916, he was sent as a member of a howitzer regiment to the Russian front where he won several medals for bravery. The diary entries of this time reflect his contempt for the baseness, as he saw it, of his fellow soldiers.

Related Topics:
World War I - Austro-Hungarian army - Artillery - Howitzer - Russia

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An interlude with Christianity

Throughout the war, Wittgenstein kept notebooks in which he frequently wrote philosophical and religious reflections alongside personal remarks. The notebooks reflect a profound change in his religious life: a militant atheist during his stint at Cambridge (Monk 44), Wittgenstein discovered Leo Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Galicia. He devoured Tolstoy's commentary and became an evangelist of sorts; he carried the book everywhere he went and recommended it to anyone in distress (to the point that he became known to his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels") (Monk 116). However, Monk also notes that he began to doubt at least by 1937 (Monk 382-384), and that by the end of his life he said he could not believe Christian doctrines.

Related Topics:
Leo Tolstoy - Galicia

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Developing the Tractatus

Wittgenstein's work on Logik began to take on an ethical and religious significance. With this new concern with the ethical, combined with his earlier interest in logical analysis, and with key insights developed during the war (such as the so-called "picture theory" of propositions), Wittgenstein's work from Cambridge and Norway was transfigured into the material that eventually became the Tractatus. In 1918, toward the end of the war, Wittgenstein was promoted to reserve officer (Lieutenant) and sent to north Italy as part of an artillery regiment. On leave in Summer 1918, Wittgenstein received a letter from David Pinsent's mother telling him that her son had been killed in an airplane accident. Suicidal, Wittgenstein went to stay with his uncle Paul, and completed the Tractatus, which was dedicated to Pinsent. In a letter to Mrs Pinsent, Wittgenstein said "only in him did I find a real friend". The book was sent to publishers at this time, without success.

Related Topics:
Norway - Italy - 1918

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In October, Wittgenstein returned to Italy and was captured by the Italians. Through the intervention of his Cambridge friends (Russell, Keynes and Pinsent had corresponded with him throughout the war, via Switzerland), Wittgenstein managed to get access to books, prepare his manuscript, and send it back to England. Russell recognized it as a work of supreme philosophical importance, and after Wittgenstein's release in 1919, he worked with Wittgenstein to get it published. An English translation was prepared, first by Frank P. Ramsey and then by C. K. Ogden, with Wittgenstein's involvement. After some discussion of how best to translate the title, G. E. Moore suggested Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in an allusion to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. Russell wrote an introduction, lending the book his reputation as one of the foremost philosophers in the world.

Related Topics:
Russell - Keynes - England - English - Frank P. Ramsey - C. K. Ogden - G. E. Moore - Baruch Spinoza

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However, difficulties remained. Wittgenstein had become personally disaffected with Russell, and he was displeased with Russell's introduction, which he thought evinced fundamental misunderstandings of the Tractatus. Wittgenstein grew frustrated as interested publishers proved difficult to find. To add insult to injury, those publishers who were interested proved to be mainly interested in the book because of Russell's introduction. At last, Wittgenstein found a publisher in Wilhelm Ostwald's journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, which printed a German edition in 1921, and in Routledge Kegan Paul, which printed a bilingual edition with Russell's introduction and the Ramsey-Ogden translation in 1922.

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The "lost years": life after the Tractatus

At the same time, Wittgenstein was a profoundly changed man: he had embraced the Christianity which previously he had opposed, faced harrowing combat in World War I, and succeeded in crystallizing the upheavals in his intellectual and emotional life with the exhausting composition of the Tractatus. It was a work which transfigured all of his past work on logic into a radically new framework that he believed offered a definitive solution to all the problems of philosophy. These changes in Wittgenstein's inner and outer life left him both haunted and yet invigorated to follow a new, ascetic life. One of the most dramatic expressions of this change was his decision in 1919 to give away his portion of the family fortune that he had inherited when his father had died. The money was divided between his sisters Helene and Hermine and his brother Paul, and Wittgenstein insisted that they promise never to give it back. He felt that giving money to the poor could only corrupt them further; the rich would not be harmed by it.

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Since Wittgenstein thought that the Tractatus had solved all the problems of philosophy, he left philosophy and returned to Austria to train as a primary school teacher. He was educated in the methods of the Austrian School Reform Movement which advocated the stimulation of the natural curiosity of children and their development as independent thinkers, instead of just letting them memorize facts. Wittgenstein was enthusiastic about these ideas but ran into problems when he was appointed as an elementary teacher in the rural Austrian villages of Trattenbach, Puchberg-am-Schneeberg, and Otterthal. During his time as a schoolteacher, Wittgenstein wrote a pronunciation and spelling dictionary for his use in teaching students; it was published and well-received by his colleagues. This would be the only book besides the Tractatus that Wittgenstein published in his lifetime.

Related Topics:
Austria - Austrian School Reform Movement - Trattenbach - Puchberg-am-Schneeberg - Otterthal

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Wittgenstein had unrealistic expectations of the rural children he taught, and his teaching methods were intense and exacting - he had little patience with those children who had no aptitude for mathematics. However, he achieved good results with children attuned to his interests and style of teaching, especially boys. His severe disciplinary methods (often involving corporal punishment) — as well as a general suspicion amongst the villagers that he was somewhat mad — led to a long series of bitter disagreements with some of his students' parents, and eventually culminated in April 1926 in the collapse of an eleven year old boy who Wittgenstein had struck on the head. The boy's father attempted to have Wittgenstein arrested, and despite being cleared of misconduct he resigned his position and returned to Vienna, feeling that he had failed as a school teacher.

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After abandoning his work as a school teacher, Wittgenstein worked as a gardener's assistant in a monastery near Vienna. He considered becoming a monk, and went so far as to enquire about the requirements for joining an order. However, at the interview he was advised that he could not find in monastic life what he sought.

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Two major developments helped to save Wittgenstein from this despairing state. The first was an invitation from his sister Margaret ("Gretl") Stoneborough (who was painted by Gustav Klimt in 1905) to work on the design and construction of her new house. He worked with the architect, Paul Engelmann (who had become a close friend of Wittgenstein's during the war), and the two designed a spare modernist house after the style of Adolf Loos (whom they both greatly admired). Wittgenstein found the work intellectually absorbing, and exhausting — he poured himself into the design in painstaking detail, including even small aspects such as doorknobs and radiators (which had to be exactly positioned to maintain the symmetry of the rooms). As a work of modernist architecture the house evoked some high praise; G. H. von Wright said that it possessed the same "static beauty" as the Tractatus. The effort of totally involving himself in intellectual work once again did much to restore Wittgenstein's spirits.

Related Topics:
Paul Engelmann - Adolf Loos - G. H. von Wright

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Secondly, toward the end of his work on the house, Wittgenstein was contacted by Moritz Schlick, one of the leading figures of the newly formed Vienna Circle. The Tractatus had been tremendously influential to the development of the Vienna positivism, and although Schlick never succeeded in drawing Wittgenstein into the discussions of the Vienna Circle itself, he and some of his fellow circle members (especially Friedrich Waismann) met occasionally with Wittgenstein to discuss philosophical topics. Wittgenstein was frequently frustrated by these meetings — he believed that Schlick and his colleagues had fundamentally misunderstood the Tractatus, and at times would refuse to talk about it at all. (Much of the disagreements concerned the importance of religious life and the mystical; Wittgenstein considered these matters of a sort of wordless faith, whereas the positivists disdained them as useless. In one meeting, Wittgenstein refused to discuss the Tractatus at all, and sat with his back to his guests while he read aloud from the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore.) Nevertheless, the contact with the Vienna Circle stimulated Wittgenstein intellectually and revived his interest in philosophy. He also met with Frank P. Ramsey, a young philosopher of mathematics who travelled several times from Cambridge to Austria to meet with Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle. In the course of his conversations with the Vienna Circle and with Ramsey, Wittgenstein began to think that there might be some "grave mistakes" in his work as presented in the Tractatus — marking the beginning of a second career of ground-breaking philosophical work, which would occupy him for the rest of his life.

Related Topics:
Moritz Schlick - Vienna Circle - Friedrich Waismann - Rabindranath Tagore - Frank P. Ramsey

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Returning to Cambridge

In 1929 he decided, at the urging of Ramsey and others, to return to Cambridge. He was met at the train station by a crowd of England's greatest intellectuals, discovering rather to his horror that he was one of the most famed philosophers in the world. In a letter to Lydia Lopokova, Lord Keynes wrote: "Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5.15 train."

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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 in fact sufficient for a doctoral degree, and urged him to offer the Tractatus as a doctoral thesis, which he did in 1929. It was examined 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 commented in the examiner's report to the effect that: "In my opinion this is a work of genius; it is, in any case, up to the standards of a degree from Cambridge." Wittgenstein was appointed as a lecturer and was made a fellow of Trinity College.

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Although Wittgenstein was involved in a relationship with Marguerite Respinger (a young Swiss woman whom he had met as a friend of the family), his plans to marry Marguerite were broken off in 1931, and Wittgenstein never married. Most of his romantic attachments were to young men. There is considerable debate over how active Wittgenstein's homosexual life was--inspired by W. W. Bartley's claim to have found evidence of several casual liaisons during Wittgenstein's time in Vienna. What is clear, in any case, is that Wittgenstein had several long-term homosexual attachments, including an infatuation with his friend David Pinsent and long-term, active affairs during his years in Cambridge with Francis Skinner and possibly Ben Richards. Wittgenstein, writing in his diaries as an adult, used the word "tenderness" to specifically describe the sex act in these relationships. It is somewhat thought-provoking that he used the very same word in his diary entry describing his relationship with Josef ("Pepi") Strigl - a student (and son of a schoolmaster) at the Realschule in Linz that he attended with Adolf Hitler - specifically connecting it to learning the "facts of life".

Related Topics:
Homosexual - W. W. Bartley - David Pinsent - Francis Skinner - Ben Richards

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Wittgenstein's political sympathies lay on the left, and while he was opposed to Marxist theory, he described himself as a "communist at heart" and romanticized the life of labourers. In 1934, attracted by Keynes' description of Soviet life in Short View of Russia, he conceived the idea of emigrating to the Soviet Union with Skinner. They took lessons in Russian and in 1935 Wittgenstein travelled to Leningrad and Moscow in an attempt to secure employment. He was offered teaching positions but preferred manual work and returned three weeks later.

Related Topics:
Left - Marxist - Keynes - Soviet Union

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From 1936 to 1937, Wittgenstein lived again in Norway, leaving Skinner behind. He worked on the Philosophical Investigations. In the winter of 1936/37, he delivered a series of "confessions" to close friends, most of them about minor infractions, in an effort to cleanse himself. In 1938 he travelled to Ireland to visit Maurice Drury, a friend who was training as a doctor, and considered such training himself, with the intention of abandoning philosophy for psychiatry.

Related Topics:
Maurice Drury - Psychiatry

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While in Ireland, the Anschluss took place. Wittgenstein was now technically a German citizen, and a Jew under the German racial laws. While he found this intolerable, and started to investigate the possibilities of acquiring British or Irish citizenship (with the help of Keynes), it put his siblings Hermine, Helene and Paul (all still residing in Austria) in considerable danger. Wittgenstein's first thought was to travel to Vienna, but he was dissuaded by friends. Had the Wittgensteins been classified as Jews, their fate would have been no different from that of any other Austrian Jews (of approximately 600 in Linz at the end of the 1930s, for example, only 26 survived the warhttp://www.linz.at/archiv/nationalsoz/ekapitel7.html). Their only hope was to be classified as Mischlinge ? officially, Aryan/Jewish mongrels, whose treatment, while harsh, was less brutal than that reserved for Jews. This reclassification was known as a "Befreiung". The successful conclusion of these negotiations required the personal approval of Adolf Hitler. "The figures show how difficult it was to gain a Befreiung. In 1939 there were 2,100 applications for a different racial classification: the Führer allowed only twelve." (Edmonds and Eidinow, p. 105).

Related Topics:
Anschluss - German - Jew

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Gretl (an American citizen by marriage) started negotiations with the Nazi authorities over the racial status of their grandfather Hermann, claiming that he was the illegitimate son of an "Aryan". Since the Reichsbank was keen to get its hands on the large amounts of foreign currency owned by the Wittgenstein family, this was used as a bargaining tool. Paul, who had escaped to Switzerland and then the United States in July 1938, disagreed with the family's stance. After G. E. Moore's resignation in 1939, Wittgenstein, who was by then considered a philosophical genius, was appointed to the chair in Philosophy at Cambridge. He acquired British citizenship soon afterwards, and in July 1939 he travelled to Vienna to assist Gretl and his other sisters, visiting Berlin for one day to meet with 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 amount signed over to the Nazis by Paul Wittgenstein, a week or so before the outbreak of war, was 1.7 tonnes of gold, 2% of the Austrian national gold reserves.

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After exhausting philosophical work, Wittgenstein would often relax by watching an American western or reading detective stories. These tastes are in stark contrast to his preferences in music, where he rejected anything after Brahms as a symptom of the decay of society.

Related Topics:
Western - Detective stories

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By then, Wittgenstein's view on the foundations of mathematics had changed considerably. Earlier, he had thought that logic could provide a solid foundation, and he had even considered updating Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. Now he denied that there were any mathematical facts to be discovered and he denied that mathematical statements were "true" in any real sense: they simply expressed the conventional established meanings of certain symbols. He also denied that a contradiction should count as a fatal flaw of a mathematical system. He gave a series of lectures which were attended by Alan Turing and in which the two argued vigorously about these matters.

Related Topics:
Foundations of mathematics - Principia Mathematica - Contradiction - Alan Turing

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During a period in World War II he left Cambridge and volunteered as a hospital porter in Guy's Hospital in London and as a laboratory assistant in Newcastle upon Tyne's Royal Victoria Infirmary. This was arranged by his friend John Ryle, a brother of the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, who was working at the hospital then. After the war, Wittgenstein returned to teach at Cambridge until 1947, but he found teaching an increasing burden: he had never liked the intellectual atmosphere at Cambridge, and in fact encouraged several of his students to find work outside of academic philosophy. (There are stories, perhaps apocryphal, that if any of his philosophy students expressed an interest in pursuing the subject, he would ban them from attending any more of his classes.)

Related Topics:
World War II - Guy's Hospital - Newcastle upon Tyne's - John Ryle - Gilbert Ryle

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Final Years

Wittgenstein resigned his position at Cambridge in 1947, in order to concentrate on his writing. He was succeeded as professor by his friend Georg Henrik von Wright. Much of his later work was done in the rural isolation that he preferred, on the west coast of Ireland. By 1949, when he was diagnosed as having prostate cancer, he had written most of the material that would be published after his death as Philosophische Untersuchungen (Philosophical Investigations), which arguably contains his most important work. He spent the last two years of his life working in Vienna, the United States, Oxford, and Cambridge. He worked continuously on new material, inspired by the conversations that he had had with his friend and former student Norman Malcolm, during a long vacation at the Malcolms' house in the United States. Malcolm had been wrestling with G.E. Moore's common sense response to external world skepticism ("Here is one hand, and here is another; therefore I know at least two external things exist"). Wittgenstein began to work on another series of remarks inspired by his conversations, which he continued to work on until two days before his death; the remarks would be collected and published posthumously as On Certainty.

Related Topics:
1947 - Georg Henrik von Wright - Norman Malcolm - United States - G.E. Moore - External world skepticism - On Certainty

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The only known fragment of music composed by Wittgenstein was premiered in November 2003. It is a powerful passage of music that lasts less than half a minute. Wittgenstein died in Cambridge in 1951, just a few days before his friends arrived to pay their last respects. His last words were "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."

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