Ludwig Wittgenstein

"Edward Kanterian is a reader in philosophy at the University of Kent. This book is a short intellectual biography. It gives one an overview of Wittgenstein’s life which is very well synthesised with an overview of his philosophical thought, in a way that any intelligent reader would be comfortable with. It makes very clear what an extraordinary man he was, but also what extraordinary originality he had. It explains the contours of his philosophical work with admirable clarity. I thought this would be the best work to start with. On the whole, he was terribly serious except with people who weren’t intellectuals. Then, a certain innocent playfulness and childish kind of humour would come out. The ordinary people he liked weren’t hypocrites, they weren’t two-faced, and they weren’t trying to conceal anything. In his contact with intellectuals, he is always dead serious and there’s never any small talk. One of his great pupils—perhaps the greatest of his pupils—Georg Henrik von Wright said that to spend a couple of hours with Wittgenstein was like facing the day of judgement. He stripped one’s soul bare and insisted on absolute honesty. He detested any form of deception, dishonesty, or reluctance to face up to deep problems no matter whether about oneself and one’s life, or about ideas in philosophy. He was quite ruthless about that. “He is the most important philosopher since Kant, but at least as difficult to understand as Kant” Sometimes one would say something, von Wright related, and Wittgenstein would fly into a rage. von Wright wouldn’t have the faintest idea why he was so angry. Interestingly, he said it was alright with his wife Elizabeth because if Wittgenstein shouted at Elizabeth then she would shout back. Wittgenstein respected that. But von Wright said “I just couldn’t do that,” and one sympathizes. But when Wittgenstein chatted with uneducated people, he could be perfectly congenial and relaxed. I don’t think he relaxed with many of his intellectual friends or pupils. Wittgenstein thought that philosophy in particular lends itself to intellectual dishonesty—to coming out with things which you didn’t fully understand yourself, but pretend to understand. Or not confessing that you didn’t understand something because you’d lose face. Or advancing ideas and theories which you had only the faintest grasp of yourself. Since philosophy is concerned with the bounds of sense, a mistake in philosophy is not an empirical falsehood, but sheer nonsense, albeit well-concealed nonsense. As a consequence, philosophy is a subject which you can spend your whole life doing and yet everything you’ve done may be worthless. That is terrible. In history you might be working on some tiny subject, like the increase in the size of the cow in Norfolk between 1350-1560. It’s not wildly exciting, but it might add a tiny tessera to somebody else’s mosaic. So, it’s not totally worthless. But, in philosophy, you may just be talking nonsense from beginning to end. It may be completely worthless. It needn’t be, because great mistakes are important too. But there’s an awful lot of nonsense that is just too confused to be useful even as a confusion to argue against. Wittgenstein was very aware of that."