Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius

"It was preceded by Brian McGuinness’ biography called Young Ludwig which recounts Wittgenstein’s life until 1921. It is an extremely good biography with much fascinating detail and based on deep knowledge of Viennese culture, but it only gives you half the life. Ray Monk’s gives you the complete biography. It’s a very sympathetically written book with a marvellous instinct for the psychology of the subject. It gives you an intelligible picture of Wittgenstein. To what extent it’s true, I can’t answer. (That’s a problem with all biographies.) But it’s a convincing picture which renders his life intelligible to a considerable degree. It also gives one a good idea of his philosophy. The biographical material is interspersed with philosophical discussion, and that is attractively lucid. It makes clear how fascinating Wittgenstein was in his endeavour to confront the problems of philosophy and resolve them. It makes clear where his genius lay. I’d certainly recommend reading Ray Monk’s book and I’m fairly sure that most people who do read it will become captivated by the personality of the man and interested in his ideas. Very much so. No doubt this lies partly in his upbringing. As I said, he was the youngest of eight children. Two of his brothers committed suicide when he was still a little boy, and a third brother committed suicide in 1918 in the war. This had a terrible impact on him. He went through his life constantly afraid of committing suicide himself. He held suicide in contempt, but he was afraid of its great temptation to anyone suffering appalling psychological burdens. He was intensely lonely. He craved love but found it, as he said himself, extremely difficult to give. If I remember correctly, he once compared himself to a hedgehog trying to huddle up to another hedgehog. On the various occasions in which he thought he loved someone, his first instinct was to flee. He was obsessively preoccupied with his own personality, brooding over his sins as he saw them. I can think one can fairly say that he was a connoisseur of self-torment. It was as if he couldn’t walk down the street in the sunshine without looking at his own shadow. That’s a terrible burden to carry. Notoriously, he had a cottage built for himself at the head of a fjord in Norway right on the edge of a very steep dangerous cliff. He would go and stay there for quite long periods of time. In one case, he stayed there for more than a year in complete solitude. The nearest town was about three miles away and there was no road there. He had to row across a lake and then walk into town. The solitude was in one sense terrible but in another sense he felt it enabled him write without the disturbances of the contact of other people. He was a tragic figure who surely never found peace of mind, let alone love. In one sense yes and in another sense no. He goes from being a young researcher in philosophy when he was first working with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge and then working alone in Norway. Then he volunteers for the armed forces and becomes an ordinary private in the Austrian artillery and later an officer. He continued to work on his book during that period, but he viewed the war as a test of character and personality. He was one of those curious people who thought you could only discover what you really are when you’re risking your life. Where others were trying their best to stay out of gunfire, he was doing his best to get into it. He viewed the war as a personal test. After the war, when he’d finished work on the Tractatus , he thought he’d solved all problems of philosophy. That sounds terribly arrogant, but it was certainly the view he took: that the deepest problems had been resolved. He was very unsure what to do with himself, so he took up the task of being a primary school teacher. He gave up school teaching after the incident with slapping a child and went back to Vienna. He was dragged into the work on architecture by his sister Margareta simply because this would give him something new to preoccupy himself with and get him out of his depression. Indeed, he seemed to have engaged in the architecture work with immense concentration as usual and found satisfaction in so doing. When that came to an end, he again wasn’t sure what to do with himself. “When he’d finished work on the Tractatus , he thought he’d solved all problems of philosophy” He then returned to Cambridge in order to develop his philosophical ideas further. When he became a paramedic, it was because he wanted to do war work in London. As he put it in his inimitable manner, he wanted to be where the bombs are falling. So, he got a job in a hospital and was a simple hospital orderly. That wasn’t due to restlessness but to his sense of obligation to do something worthwhile for the war effort. It was there that he became an assistant to a couple of doctors working on shell-shock wounds. He went up to Newcastle with them working as their assistant for about a year, contributing to a paper that was subsequently published in a medical research journal. After that he went back to philosophy until 1947 when he gave up teaching. During the last four years of his life, he wrote as much as he could. So, the answer is both yes and no. His main preoccupation was clearly philosophy and with struggling to solve its problems. He did think this could be done. In his later view, he holds that solving the problems of philosophy involves two tasks. First, disentangling knotted threads in our thought. He was a great master of doing precisely that. Secondly, clarifying the structure of our conceptual scheme—clarifying the patterns of relationships between concepts that are particularly puzzling. For example: what is the relationship between knowledge and belief? What is the relationship between belief and voluntariness? We do tell people that they shouldn’t believe this and they should believe that . But believing something isn’t an act, so how can one instruct somebody to do it if it’s not an act one can do? There’s a real problem there, and he does resolve it."