‘I often feel miserable.’
(Heroic understatement from 30-year-old Ludwig Wittgenstein, who in fact often felt stupid, futile, wretched, ashamed and suicidal)

This is a huge book (580 pages of text, 70 of notes and index etc, making 654 pages in all) and a hugely enjoyable biography of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the man many take to be the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century (‘By 1939 he was recognised as the foremost philosophical genius of his time,’ p.415).

Executive summary

The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 to 1951) is widely considered among the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century for many reasons. The easiest one to grasp is that he produced not one but two entirely distinct systems of thought, the first expressed in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, completed by 1918 but only published in 1922; and the second expressed in a series of notebooks, sketches, remarks and mental exercises on various subjects published posthumously, the closest thing to a finished work being the Philosophical Investigations (1953) – and that both these philosophies were hugely influential, but in different ways.

1. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The Tractatus is notorious because:

1. It’s relatively short and consists of just 7 numbered propositions, numbers 2 to 6 going on to have sub-propositions (2.1), sub-sub-propositions (2.1.1) and so on. There’s a nifty visual summary online.
2. Following on from the work of his mentor, Bertrand Russell, Wittgenstein set out to establish a watertight logical basis for mathematical philosophy. With the completion of the work and convinced that he had achieved his goal, Wittgenstein quit philosophy for most of the 1920s and went off to do other things.
3. In the Tractatus Wittgenstein doesn’t show his working-out, he doesn’t take us through the stages of his reasoning as academic philosophers are supposed to; instead the propositions are assertions which the tone demands you assent to, exemplified in the hieratic opening, proposition 1. ‘The world is everything that is the case’. This creates a quasi-religious effect.
4. This effect is reinforced by the preface which claims that only those who see the world his way, will understand what he’s on about i.e. the book is for an intellectual elite. And proposition 6.54:

‘My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.

5. His aim was to define completely what may, and may not, be meaningfully stated. If propositions could be analysed using his system, they meant something. Everything else – morality, metaphysics and so on – people will obviously continue to talk about but has no logical meaning in his system. This is the meaning of the famous last sentence, proposition 7. ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’ Of course absolutely nobody has followed this injunction and the world is more full of meaningless chatter than ever before but you understand what he was getting at.

2. Philosophical Investigations

For a decade or so after the Tractatus‘s publication, Wittgenstein thought he had solved philosophy – but then, from the early 1930s until about 1948, Wittgenstein slowly developed a new philosophy which is, unlike his first one, very much not a theory or a system.

In fact he came to think that the very attempt to create a unified system for assessing the meaning of propositions (as he had done in the Tractatus) was, literally, nonsense. He came to hold a completely different view, namely that meaning inheres not in analysable units but in language games, which are played according to specific rules, which arise in specific contexts and specific cultures.

The term ‘language-game‘ is meant to bring into prominence the fact that the speaking of language is part of an activity or of a ‘form of life’. (PI, Part I, section 23)

The world of discourse consists of so many overlapping language games that it would be impossible to produce a total, encyclopedic overview of them all – all Wittgenstein could hope to do was produce ‘remarks’ and exercises, observations on aspects of the types of ‘games’ or subjects which took his fancy, or develop some of the implications of this way of thinking.

(A digression on ‘remarks’: Monk refers to the type of writing which make up the Philosophical Investigations and notebooks as ‘remarks’, and the editors of his posthumous works titled many of them ‘Remarks on…’ yet when you actually read the Investigations, many of these so-called remarks actually take the form of 1) highly pedagogic instructions for mental exercises:

• Think of the recognition of facial instructions
• Look at a stone and imagine it having sensations
• Examine the following description…
• Look at the sky and…
• Imagine someone saying…
• Imagine the following case…

Or 2) rhetorical questions:

• Why can’t a dog simulate pain?
• What is the natural expression of an intention?

The more I read, the more it felt like these things are closer to the kind of exercises you might find in a school or student textbook, designed to make the student, stop, think and work through particular problems. I’ll go along with Monk’s general term ‘remarks’, but bear in mind that I actually think of them more as exercises.)

The subjects of these remarks and exercises are potentially limitless in number and so the second half of Monk’s biography shows Wittgenstein first pouring out reams of these remarks/insights/exercises on subjects such as mathematics, logic, language, aesthetics, psychology as his interests changed and evolved, in different times and settings – and then struggling for years to gather these thoughts into some kind of coherent order for the purpose of publication – a struggle made all the more difficult because Wittgenstein was now expressly against the concept of one totalising system.

So no surprise that he failed and that, at his death in 1951, Wittgenstein left behind a large number of notebooks, typescripts, notes taken by his students in lectures and seminars, which have, in the decades since, been edited and published in multiple volumes, creating quite a clutter of incomplete and difficult texts to work through. The main one, the one he got closest to considering ‘finished’, was the Philosophical Investigations, tidied up and published in 1953, but Monk gives a convincing explanation of why even this is far from ideal in both structure and content.

The second aspect of Wittgenstein’s later thought was an even greater emphasis on the notion of ‘seeing it his way’. He thought most philosophical problems arose from incorrect uses of languages but not in a trivial way, like correcting bad grammar or spelling. He thought most philosophical problems were misunderstandings of the way language worked; this is why so many philosophical questions can in fact never be solved because they aren’t really ‘questions’ in the first place. They can never be answered but they can be dissolved by what he called a change of aspect or perspective or view.

What this change was can’t be explained in a few sentences, it required what – at his most grandiose – he described as a change of being in his readers, a complete change of mentality. And that’s why the Investigations and subsequent publications consist of ad hoc ‘remarks’ and meditations and exercises – because they’re more like the fables or parables told by a holy man aiming to bring you to a whole new way of thinking about life, than like an academic philosopher laying out yet another theory.

All of which explains why, following the Second World War, a new generation of philosophy students at Cambridge (where Wittgenstein had a lectureship and then a professorship) came not just to admire but almost to venerate him as the prophet of an entirely new way of thinking – prompting mirth and mockery among rival philosophers and outside commentators of this ‘cult’. But it was these disciples who preserved and edited the long sequence of publications which followed his death, and continue up to the present day.

Key learnings

‘I have continually thought of taking my own life.’ (p.184)

1. Suicide

Wittgenstein was incredibly highly strung. He was so self-critical and self-hating that he was on the verge of committing suicide for much of his adult life. It didn’t help that no fewer than three of his brothers committed suicide (p.221). For a while I noted the references to him considering suicide, on pages 115, 154, 158, 173, 180, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, before I gave up.

When not pondering suicide, Wittgenstein was morbidly convinced that he would die young, before he could finish his work. The slightest setback plunged him into days if not weeks and months of gloom and despair. His letters are full of descriptions of his wretchedness, misery, depression and sense of futility.

Far from being anyone’s idea of sanity, logic and reason, Wittgenstein was pitifully unhappy, over-emotional and almost unhinged, for a lot of the time.

2. Religion

And he was far, far, far more religious than I had realised. He was converted to Christianity like a thunderbolt from the blue during his service in the Austrian army in the First World War, and never resiled from a profound though (of course) eccentric form of Christian faith.

In fact Wittgenstein emerges here as a religious mystic, a deeply deeply Christian believer, and unless you realise the depth of his attachment to the religious view of life and self – the decisive importance of ‘the spiritual and moral attitudes that underpinned Wittgenstein’s life and work’ (p.265) – you won’t really ‘get’ his philosophy.

Wittgenstein is famous for producing two completely different systems but both the ‘first’ philosophy, expressed in the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ (1922) and the ‘second’ philosophy, expressed in the ‘Philosophical Investigations’, both were based on the idea that his work on the logic of propositions was almost ludicrously beside the point. When he concluded the Tractatus by declaring ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent’, he wasn’t saying metaphysics was trivial twaddle, he was saying questions of religious faith and ethics are too important to be discussed in the kinds of relatively simplistic propositions he has been defining. And then his later philosophy moved beyond the focus on propositions altogether.

The key to Wittgenstein’s personality

Monk builds his model of Wittgenstein’s personality on a book the great man read when still a teenager, ‘Sex and Character’ by Otto Weininger, published in 1903.

Like lots of German ‘philosophy’, this is a highly subjective, irrationalist rant masquerading as knowledge, in Weininger’s case a fantastically antisemitic and misogynist screed. Weininger claims, for example, that women are incapable of thought, reason, ethics or morality, are barely people at all, that their life is utterly consumed by their sexual function, either as mothers or prostitutes – and much more in the same spirit.

So far, so bonkers. The bit that Monk thinks Wittgenstein took very much to heart, was Weininger’s passages about men. Men, Weininger claims, have a duty to strive to become a genius. A man must do anything it takes to reach excellence, forgoing love or sex, relationships and normal social standards.

Weininger’s book was at first badly reviewed and made little impression until the 23-year-old author shot himself in the house in Vienna where Beethoven had lived, leaving a note saying that, knowing he could never live up to the impossible standards for men set in his creed, it was the only honourable thing to do. He knew he wasn’t a great genius of the kind he portrayed in his book and so regarded his existence as nugatory, de trop, unnecessary, so took the necessary steps to end it.

This made author and book into a succès de scandale – suddenly everyone wanted to read the book which made the young man kill himself. It inspired several imitation suicides and received a glowing review from the full-time misogynist and part-time playwright, August Strindberg.

Back to Wittgenstein, Monk thinks Weininger’s passages about the moral duty of the gifted man to ignore all social values, ignore morality, ignore everything, in order to achieve complete mastery in his chosen field, was central to Wittgenstein’s conception of himself.

Monk shows how, during his later teens and student years and then first job (studying to be an aeronautics engineer in the Manchester), Wittgenstein worried incessantly that he had no special gift and so was, as a result, on the Weininger model, redundant, unnecessary, and fit only to kill himself. And then, when he didn’t kill himself, he underwent a kind of squaring of the original anxiety, seeing himself as not only an intellectual failure but a moral coward to boot, for not doing ‘the decent thing’ and not taking the Weininger way out of this mental cul-de-sac.

Sounds unlikely but on page after page after page Monk quotes from Wittgenstein’s own letters, other people’s letters, diaries and memoirs, proving that he never lost an intense, hyper-neurotic anxiety, a lifelong readiness to fall into the deepest despair at his failure to reach the highest heights of genius achievement.

All this, according to Monk, explains the most important moment in Wittgenstein’s life. This was when he travelled to Cambridge, on 18 October 1911, to meet the philosopher of mathematics, Bertrand Russell, and present to him certain solutions he’d come up with to the problems about the basic logic of mathematics with which Russell had ended his and Alfred Whitehead’s great work on the subject, the Principia Mathematica (1910 to 1913) (p.38).

Russell was impressed by the young man’s solutions and intense earnestness and, over the coming weeks, as they met and discussed the logical foundations of mathematics in more detail, came to realise that Wittgenstein was on an altogether different level from any of his other students of the same age, and likely to do great things.

So it was Russell’s endorsement and faith and belief in him, which at last gave Wittgenstein a sense of purpose and validity. In Monk’s view it literally saved his life. After nine years of teenage and student despair he finally felt he had a métier and a purpose.

Wittgenstein later told David Pinsent that Russell’s encouragement had ended nine years of loneliness and suffering, during which he had continually thought of suicide. (p.41 cf p.50 and many others)

In a sense, once you’ve grasped this, you’ve grasped the man. A fiendishly well-educated but harrowingly self-obsessed intellectual who, if he wasn’t forging ahead with his philosophical theories, was likely to be plunged into absolute despair, overcome with Angst, barely capable of eating or drinking, convinced he was going to die young before he achieved anything, often talking about suicide, his friends worried that if he didn’t show up for a few days he might have topped himself.

‘Deep inside me there’s a perpetual seething, like the bottom of a geyser… Every day I was tormented by a frightful Angst and by depression… It’s terrifying beyond description the kinds of mental torment there can be.. I never knew what it felt to be one step away from madness…’ (p.98)

For someone so passionately logical and unforgiving, socialising was murder and small-talk a torture with the result that he struggled with English Edwardian society and his plain-speaking frequently insulted people. As one of the few Englishmen he got close to, David Pinsent, remarked:

‘He dislikes half measures of all sorts and disapproves of everything not in deadly earnest.’ (p.73)

Pinsent went on several holidays with Wittgenstein and found it impossible to related to his moodiness, his neurotic self-centredness and his self-hatred. Wittgenstein was given to hour-long speeches, pacing up and down the room, detailing what a failure he was, how unforgivably stupid, how disgusted he was with himself. Pinsent, his best friend at the time, often though Wittgenstein was ‘mad’.

Although he went on to devise not one but two major philosophical theories, Wittgenstein was never happy with himself. All his life he looked for ways to turn into another person. Above all, his lifelong struggle to be anständig, to achieve Anständigheit meaning ‘decency’ which, right till the end, he thought he’d failed to achieve.

Self-hatred, despair and madness

‘I am cowardly beyond measure.’ (p.372)

‘Think only of myself, that my life is wretched.’ (p.374)

‘I cannot see how I can ever in my life be freed from this guilt (p.428 and p.534)

‘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 see how I can bear this life.’

‘My unhappiness is so complex that it is difficult to describe.’ (p.442)

‘I am sad, very often sad. I feel as if my life is now coming to an end.’ (p.491)

‘I feel that my mental health is hanging on a thin thread.’ (p.492)

‘I often feel that I am on the straight road to insanity.’ (p.523)

‘Often it is as though my soul were dead.’ (p.540)

And so on and on for page after page for his entire life. Although not many of us are this neurotic and this driven, most of us can relate to feelings of failure and depression. On the other hand, hardly any of us understand the language of logic or advanced maths with which these passages of self-pity alternate.

Philosophy

Monk covers all aspects of Wittgenstein’s philosophy with marvellous ease and clarity, going back to explain antecedents to this though in the mathematical logic of Russell or Gottlob Frege, or, later, back to the organic philosophy of Goethe, or explaining the philosophical approach of Oswald Spengler.

Some central points come over. Wittgenstein version 1 thought metaphysics (‘the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, identity, time, and space’) was impossible as there were no data to work with. He thought epistemology (‘the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion’) was a form of psychology. Morality was completely out of consideration, being a purely personal matter. For him all that counted as philosophy was logic. Everything else, along with most socialising, friends, family, was ‘muck’, ‘swamp’, filth he had to escape from in order to be free, clear-headed and produce new work.

(Monk associates this puritanical zeal with the feeling widespread among educated young people in turn-of-the-century Vienna, that its once great cultural legacy (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert) had decayed and, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, become a sham of bourgeois conventions and facades. Hence the enthusiasm of Viennese artists, writers and architects to revolt against heaviness, ornamentation, luxury Biedermeyer furniture; their wish to strip away ornament and get to the heart of the thing. Hence Adolf Loos stripping away ornament in architecture, George Trakl stripping it away in his poetry, Freud unmasking bourgeois psychology, Egon Schiele’s drawings stripping the human figure of all comfort and softness. Ludwig was at one with his generation’s impatience to reduce things to their basics.)

(Compare with Wittgenstein’s fanatical attention to detail and insistence on a minimalist, stripped-down appearance and interior, when he got involved with the architect designing a new house for his sister Gretl in Kundmanngasse, p.236.)

In 1911 Wittgenstein drafted some Notes on Logic. Monk breaks the short preface up into bullet points which, he says, underpinned the rest of his thinking.

In philosophy there are no deductions; philosophy is purely descriptive.

The word ‘philosophy’ ought always to designate something over or under, but not beside, the natural sciences.

Philosophy gives no pictures of reality, and can neither confirm nor confute scientific investigations.

Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics, the former its basis.

Epistemology is the philosophy of psychology.

Distrust of grammar is the first requisite for philosophising.

Philosophy is the doctrine of the logical form of scientific propositions (not primitive propositions only).

A correct explanation of the logical propositions must give them a unique position as against all other propositions.

He said that physics, like the natural sciences, was concerned with deciding what was true or false. He wasn’t interested in that; he was only concerned with ‘distinguishing sense from nonsense’ (p.286).

The First World War

Once Wittgenstein reaches young manhood, Monk gives a detailed chronological account, scraped together from sources such as Wittgenstein’s own diary, the diaries of all who knew and met him, and all surviving letters to, from or about him. Monk’s book amounts to a giant jigsaw assembled from these sources. His account of Ludwig in the First World War is no exception.

The key points are that: 1) Wittgenstein volunteered to join the Austrian Army. Like most soldiers he underwent extended training and boring hanging-round in domestic barracks, before being posted to a warship patrolling rivers far behind the front line. It was a full two years before he was sent to the (Eastern) front, in March 1916. When he managed to get ill at the crucial moment and was told he might be left behind, he responded with characteristic extremity, writing in his diary that if that happened, he would kill himself (p.138).

But the second key point is that 2) Wittgenstein was champing at the bit to be placed in the maximum danger. He thought that confronting death would help him be transformed, to see the light, to become a new man etc etc.

And 3) the third point is the surprising fact that during the war Wittgenstein became a passionate Christian. This was triggered by picking up a copy of Tolstoy’s ‘The Gospel in Brief’ (1892) in a bookshop. It hit him like a train. Like everything else in his life, Wittgenstein principally saw Christianity as a means of escaping from himself and it did, for a few years, have a transformative effect. His wartime diaries are drenched in vehement belief and prayers. So when his dream of facing death finally came true and he was placed in an advanced observation post his diary reads:

Was shot at. Thought of God. Thy will be done. God be with me. (29 April 1916)

And:

Perhaps the nearness of death will bring me the light of life. May God enlighten me. I am a worm but through God I am a man. (4 May 1916)

Monk says that Wittgenstein had the main text of the ‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’ ready by about 1916. What his wartime experiences added to it was the mystical religious topics which appear at the end. Like almost everything else he wrote privately, his notebooks from the entire period have now been published, and contain a number of meditations which combine a kind of probing of the basis of philosophical thinking, with a surprisingly Christian flavour:

What do I know about God and the purpose of life?
I know that this world exists.
That I am placed in it like my eye in its visual field.
That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning.
This meaning does not lie in it but outside of it.
That life is the world.
That my will penetrates the world.
That my will is good or evil.
Therefore that good and evil are somehow connected with the meaning of the world. The meaning of life, i.e. the meaning of the world, we can call God.
And connect with this the comparison of God to a father. (p.140)

Difficult not to be disappointed and disillusioned by this, as by any serious thinker who gives up the struggle to analyse life as it is and instead reverts to a two thousand year-old tradition; gives themselves up to the embrace of their ideal Daddy, and then wastes time wondering how much Daddy loves them.

Saying and showing, in logic and religion

Monk early on raises the distinction in Wittgenstein’s thought between showing and telling. His idea was that a logical proposition doesn’t describe but embodies or shows the logical connections it makes (pages 156, 164).

In a comparable way, ethics or morality cannot be talked about but can only be shown by living them. There are ethical and aesthetic (and religious) truths but they can’t be uttered; they can only be shown.

The ‘early Wittgenstein’ was concerned with the logical relationship between propositions and the world, and he believed that by providing an account of the logic underlying this relationship, he had solved all philosophical problems.

What the Theory of Types attempts to say can be shown only by a correct symbolism and what one wants to say about ethics can be shown only by contemplating the world sub specie aeternitatis. Thus: ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. It shows itself it is the mystical.’ (p.156)

This explains why, when Wittgenstein finally finished compiling and structuring the Tractatus, he realised the relative unimportance of what he’d done.

…The truth of the thoughts communicated here seems to me unassailable and definitive. I am, therefore, of the opinion that the problems have in essentials been finally solved. And if I am not mistaken in this, then the value of this work secondly consists in the fact that it shows how little has been done when these problems have been solved.

This was because the Tractatus attained its goal of stating the logical bases of mathematics – and yet (deliberately) didn’t address any of the religious and mystical ideas which had come to dominate his life during the war.

The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

So many people have tried to summarise and interpret it feels pointless me adding my uninformed granule to the pile. Try this video:

• Wittgenstein’s Tractatus by Attic Philosophy

Ways to understand

For me there are two really important learnings about how to handle the Tractatus:

1. The numbers The first is that I was always misled by the numbering of the propositions, from 1 to 7, to think that they progress in a logical order. It was a revelation in Monk’s book, and also various criticism I’ve read around it, to realise that the numbers do not necessarily follow. In other words, that Wittgenstein addressed a number of philosophical problems in the book and that these overspill the (apparently neat) numbering framework. In other words, the numbered headings could be dropped and the text relabelled with headings such as ‘Logical Atomism’ or ‘The Picture Theory of Language’, as in a normal textbook. If it was reconfigured like this, by clearly stated topics, it would be much more approachable, not least because you could take it one topic at a time.

But when Frege – who Wittgenstein consulted – suggested breaking it up into essays like this, with headings to clarify which philosophical problem he was seeking to solve, Wittgenstein refused. He insisted on not only the content but the form he had created. This is to some extent because, as Monk points out, the book has a consciously artistic or literary side. Wittgenstein himself said:

‘The work is strictly philosophical and at the same time literary…’ (p.177)

But mostly because Wittgenstein needed the numbered sections to structure his thoughts.

The numbers are necessary because it would be an incomprehensible jumble without them. (p.180)

But many people from that day to this have considered the numbering to clutter and obscure the thinking, unnecessarily.

2. Disagreements It was really reassuring to learn that even the people most closely connected to the subject, the people best qualified in the world to understand it – namely Wittgenstein’s sometime mentor Russell and his German forebear Frege – understood the Tractatus but disagreed with it. In Monk’s account, Frege wrote to say he had so many objections to the phraseology of the first proposition that he didn’t get past the first page.

For his part, when Russell read a copy – sent to him while Wittgenstein was still in an Italian prisoner of war camp after the war (where he remained until August 1919) – he wrote to say he understood the central distinction between saying and showing but just thought it ‘obscure and unnecessary’. It could be dispensed with, on his (Russell’s) approach to logic, by introducing a higher-level language (a meta-language) to say the things that could not be said using the original symbolic language (p.165). Russell didn’t ‘get it’ because he didn’t feel Wittgenstein’s fundamentally religious motivation. As Monk puts it:

It is no coincidence that Russell’s insistence of the application of meta-languages abolishes the sphere of the mystical, while Wittgenstein’s insistence on the impossibility of saying what can only be shown, preserves it. (p.166)

When Russell finally met Wittgenstein after the war (in The Hague) he was astonished at how mystical he had become.

3. Short cut Wittgenstein wrote a revealing letter to the German magazine editor Ludwig von Ficker, in which he explains the Tractatus in ordinary language, so revealing it’s worth quoting at length:

‘The point of the book is ethical…My work consists of two parts: the one which is here and everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within, as it were, by my book; and I’m convinced that, strictly speaking, it can ONLY be delimited in this way. In brief, I think: all of that which many are babbling today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it. Therefore the book will, unless I’m quite wrong, have much to say which you want to say yourself. For the time being, I’d recommend that you read the foreword and the conclusion since these address the point most directly,’ (quoted p.178)

Go read the preface and the conclusion for yourself.

After the war

In total Wittgenstein spent five years in the army – four full years of active service and one entire year in captivity in Italy. His efficiency but also his bravery under fire (when he finally made it to the front) meant he was promoted to lieutenant. He wore his uniform for years afterwards. But in the end, the country he fought for ceased to exist. The Austro-Hungarian Empire he’d risked his life for split up into ten or so new nation states, leaving a much shrunken, poorer, smaller state of Austria with a population of just 6 million.

Wittgenstein returned from the war to discover he was one of the richest men in Austria due to his father having invested the family fortune in US bonds which, of course, survived the collapse of the empire. But, in the kind of earnest gesture which was later to fuel the Wittgenstein legend, within a month he had given it all away.

Teaching at Trattenbach and elsewhere

Part of the mystique around Wittgenstein is the legend that, having solved the problems of philosophy (or the very narrow definition of philosophy which he worked on), he packed in academia and went off to teach at remote schools in the Alps. He secured jobs at infant schools in the villages of Trattenbach, then Otterthal, then Puchberg (p.212). Like everything else, Monk gives a full, factual and riveting account, from which several things emerge.

One is that, as usual, this apparently altruistic decision was, in fact, about what was best for Wittgenstein’s moral development. It was one more way to try and assuage the sense of unworthiness and impurity which dogged him all his life. Like Tolstoy, Wittgenstein thought that if he abandoned all the perquisites of his class and went and lived among ‘the people’, then it would be a spiritually cleansing experience. Of course it was nothing of the sort and Wittgenstein soon encountered a) dislike from his teaching colleagues, which was nothing compared to b) the outright animosity of the villagers he lived among.

These peasants needed their children to help around the house and on their farms. When Ludwig started to give the brightest of them extra tuition, keeping them after school for hours to cram them for exams for good secondary schools, the parents complained, sometimes very vehemently and to his face. After a few months he became disillusioned. After a year, Monk quotes a succession of letters in which Ludwig describes the villagers as ‘loathsome worms’ (p.212), hopeless and barely human (p.228). So much for living among ‘the people’, which was always going to be an asinine upper-class fantasy.

But the second learning is that Wittgenstein beat the children, really badly. He became notorious for his corporal punishment, beating, punching and cuffing small children round the head. One time he pulled a girl’s hair so hard a lot of it came out when she later combed it. He hit a girl so hard she bled behind her ears.

And the final straw came when he hit a boy, Josef Haidbauer, so hard that he collapsed, at which Wittgenstein panicked. The father of the girl he’d hit was fetched by some of the children, confronted Wittgenstein in the corridor and called him all the names under the sun. Then he instigated an official hearing into his conduct. Here, in court and under oath, Wittgenstein directly lied about the extent of his beating (p.370). He was cleared and the headmaster wanted him to stay on but he’d had enough. It was April 1926 (p.232).

Apparently the sense of moral failure triggered by this episode haunted Wittgenstein for a decade but it wasn’t hurting the children he remembered; for years afterwards he remembered that he had lied under oath, that’s what galled him. In fact ten years later, when he felt the overwhelming need to confess his sins to (deeply embarrassed) friends and colleagues, this lying was the centrepiece of the Grand Confession he made them listen to (p.370). That is how self-centred he was.

Hardly an Alpine idyll, then, and a passage of his life which went a long way to turning me against Wittgenstein as a person.

Revising the first system

The attempt at teaching was a failure. Lots of his fantasies from the 1920a of doing other types of work to escape himself, to reform himself, to change his life, came to nothing. He worked for a while as a gardener. He worked in a monastery.

A classic example was the fantasy he developed in the mid-1930s of going to Soviet Russia to become a labourer. He actually travelled to Russia in 1935 but discovered – surprise surprise – that the Soviet authorities would welcome him as a philosophy tutor or teacher but not as an unskilled labourer. Unskilled labour was the one thing Soviet Russia had no shortage of.

Monk’s chronological approach describes in fascinating detail how a range of interactions with the philosophical world, with other thinkers, students, reading books, intense discussions with friends, all led him to reconsider the conclusions of the Tractatus almost from the moment it was published (after many frustrating delays) in 1922.

Chief among these were his interactions with the so-called Vienna Circle led by Rudolf Carnap, the leader of what came to be known as logical positivism. These guys were surprised and dismayed when they finally met Wittgenstein in person to discover that he didn’t share their promotion of the scientific approach, that he didn’t take such an astringent view of the unsayable in the Tractatus because he thought metaphysics and mysticism were nonsense but, precisely the opposite, because he thought it was too important to put into writing.

At his worst, in meetings with the Vienna Circle of logical positivists 1927 to 1928, he sometimes turned his back on the entire group and read poetry (the mystical poetry of Rabindranath Tagore) (p.243).

So, despite all his intentions to find meaningful work somewhere else, in the end, in 1929, Wittgenstein was lured back to Cambridge, where Russell and, in particular, John Maynard Keynes persuaded the authorities of Trinity College to fund a research and teaching post for him, a five-year fellowship starting Michaelmas term 1930.

Through the 1930s Wittgenstein was contracted to give lectures but they differed from conventional lectures. It was more a question of a select few being invited to a college room to watch Wittgenstein think. He would pace up and down the room muttering, sit down and stare into space, occasionally be overcome with a thought which he would stand up and deliver with oracular finality.

A philosophical dictator?

I’m afraid I couldn’t help relating some of this behaviour to the totalitarian regimes which arose between the wars, and finding it off-puttingly Germanic. For two reasons or angles. 1) Wittgenstein was a big fan of Oswald Spengler’s famous work ‘The Decline of the West’, published in 1918 and 1922 (pages 299 to 303).

I knew Spengler suggested that human cultures and civilizations are like biological organisms which have a limited, predictable and determined lifespan. I knew he predicted that Western civilization was entering a pre‑death crisis which, he thought, would lead to 200 years of Caesarism (Hitler, Mussolini) before Western civilisation finally collapsed. What I hadn’t realised, until Monk summarised it, was that Spengler’s work had a complicated philosophical aspect to it, that he, for example, distinguished between the Principle of Form and the Principle of Law, that he saw the historian’s role as seeking not to establish facts (since when did German theorists care about facts?) but instead seeking the morphological or ‘physiognomic’ relations between historical events.

He was, in other words, another German irrationalist. What Wittgenstein took from him (according to Monk) was the idea of not seeking any kind of profound Truth or foundation about history, but the technique of comparing the morphology or shape or function of different historical events. Wittgenstein saw in Spengler’s comparative historicism an approach which he sought to replicate in his approach to language philosophy.

The importance of illuminating comparisons not only lies at the heart of Wittgenstein’s central notion of ‘the understanding which consists in seeing connections’, but was also regarded by Wittgenstein as characterising his whole contribution to philosophy… Wittgenstein imparted a way of thinking and understanding, not by saying what was distinctive about it, but by showing how it can be used to clarify one’s ideas. (p.451)

2) Wittgenstein never showed his working out. The Tractatus is famous for being a series of assertions. He never provided any explanatory material, either at the time or later. He ducked any responsibility for clarifying his thought in lectures or essays, with the excuse that you either got his thought or you didn’t, that you had either had these thoughts before – and so had the pleasure of recognising them in his books, or – you hadn’t, and no amount of explaining would convey them to you.

Initially I found this attitude sort of cool and attractive but by half-way through the book I began to find it high-handed and dictatorial. Time and again he refused to write articles or a conventional book with chapters explaining his theory, partly because he claimed he wasn’t dealing in ‘theory’; theories were what other people dabbled in; he, Wittgenstein, dealt in insights and intuitions which rendered theories unnecessary. Here he is explaining his thinking to Friedrich Waismann, a member of the Vienna Circle, in 1931:

As long as there is a possibility of having different opinions and disputing about a question, this indicates that things have not yet been expressed clearly enough. Once a perfectly clear formulation – ultimate clarity – has been reached, there can be no second thoughts or reluctance any more… (p.320)

Ultimate clarity = the end of debate, the end of all discussion. The end. You can see how profoundly totalitarian this is in ambition…

It was when Monk described the way that, during his ‘lectures’ i.e. students-watching-Wittgenstein-think sessions, he would sometimes not only contradict stuff he’d written some years before (by the 1930s he had dismissed most of the Tractatus) but of what he said last week, or even what he’d said five minutes ago, all the time insisting that whatever he said, now, right now, was the New Truth which, again, he refused to explain, just demanded his students accept it – it was when I read passages like these that my opinion began to change, and I began to see him as a kind of dictator.

Like Il Duce or Der Führer, Wittgenstein gave no explanations, brooked no interruption, delivered his diktats in an exalted state of inspiration, claimed to speak The Truth, even when The Truth changed from week to week, sometimes from minute to minute. (Compare and contrast Waismann despairing of ever completing the book he’d been commissioned to write with Wittgenstein because every time they returned to the manuscript, Wittgenstein rewrote something, rethought something else, changed the order, continually, every time, p.340).

Maybe my own comparison is too extreme. A less extreme way of looking at it would be to point out that Ludwig was the youngest son of eight siblings, in a very well-off, upper middle-class household. Surely his rage against himself when anything was less than perfect, and his seigneurial refusal to explain or account for himself, surely these are just symptoms of the spoilt youngest child, the baby of the family, who’s allowed to get away with anything.

Monk’s book gives countless examples of how not only all his friends and everyone who ever tried to work with him but his own family found him extraordinarily difficult to handle, to be with, to talk to. His friends at Cambridge found it hard to put up with ‘his domineering, argumentative style’ (p.257). As his sister Hermine put it:

It is not easy having a saint for a brother (p.198)

If you like, you can regard his asocial behaviour as the prerogative of a Great Genius. But if you’re a parent like me, you can also see it as the fantastically self-centred behaviour of a spoilt child, who grows up to become something very like a bully.

There’s a thread that links his physical abuse of little children placed in his care with his domineering attitude towards the closest of his students (or ‘disciples’ as they and their enemies saw them) at Cambridge. The best of these, the ones who fell under his sway, he did everything he could to persuade to abandon academic philosophy and go and do something more useful and practical instead. Many of them actually did this, with mixed results, disappointing their families and often ending up miserably unhappy. Notable examples are his student Maurice Drury who he persuaded to become a doctor and carved a successful career as a psychiatrist; and Francis Skinner, who Wittgenstein had a gay love affair with and who he persuaded to drop his academic studies and go and work in an engineering works, much to the horror of his ambitious family and Skinner’s profound unhappiness.

Monk quotes from the letters by John Maynard Keynes – who at one stage was very close to Wittgenstein and remained supportive of his career at Cambridge even after their friendship cooled – in which he wonders whether he has the energy to face the great man coming to stay for a week or so, knowing how Wittgenstein’s unrelenting self-centredness will exhaust him.

Or the diary of 14-year-old Anthony Ryle when his father, the physician John Ryle, brought Wittgenstein to stay in the family home for a few days:

We spent the afternoon arguing – he’s an impossible person every time you say anything he says, ‘No no that’s not the point.’ It probably isn’t the point but it’s ours. A tiring person to listen to.’ (quoted p.434)

Wittgenstein’s books

Wittgenstein published only one book (‘Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus’) and one article (‘Some Remarks on Logical Form’, 1929) in his entire career. What we have of his second or later system derives from the publication of fragments, drafts and notes, some of which he worked up and revised but none of which he approved, for the simple reason that he kept changing his views and, after the war, endlessly cutting and pasting and rearranging the remarks and meditations into ever new combinations.

Monk explains the origins of a whole series of texts which were later published, situating them in the changing flux of Ludwig’s beliefs and biography (the cities and hotels where he drafted them in Newcastle, Swansea, Dublin, Norway), explaining how they came about, how much he worked on them, why they were unfinished (p.319):

• Philosophical Remarks (p.292)
• Philosophical Grammar (based on ‘the Big Typescript’, p.325)
• Blue Book – lecture notes 1933 to 1934, introduced into philosophical discourse the notion of language games (p.336)
• Brown Book – lecture notes 1934 to 1935, 72 numbered language games, never intended for publication (pages 344 to 346)
• Philosophical Investigations, working notes, published posthumously
• Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (p.438)
• Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (p.403)
• Culture and Value (pages 531 and 568)
• Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology (pages 518 and 535)
• Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (p.536)
• On Certainty (pages 558, 563, 569)
• Remarks on Colour (pages 561 and 566)

Comparing Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II

Obviously tens of thousands of scholars have written about the difference between Wittgenstein I and Wittgenstein II. The differences I understood are:

The Tractatus was an attempt at making a definitive statement about ‘the general form of propositions (PI, I, 65). The later model relinquishes all attempts at system and instead covers a wide variety of topics using the concepts of language games, rules, forms of life and so on.

In the later model he abandons the position of the Tractatus that atomic propositions are logically independent of each other. He now says that one can influence another i.e. all propositions are enmeshed in networks of meaning, none stand alone.

This is part of the move towards what Monk calls a more anthropological point of view, taking into account what you and I would call the context of any speech act or proposition.

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.

Cleansing language

In lectures and notes Wittgenstein repeated the insistence that we wasn’t interested in arriving at any ‘truth’; he simply wanted to cleanse philosophy of ambiguity, obscurity and wrong thinking; to cleanse it of a certain kind of conceptual puzzlement and linguistic bewitchedness; to clear away the fog (p.306).

Instead of teaching doctrines and developing theories, Wittgenstein came to think, a philosopher should demonstrate a technique, a method of achieving clarity. (Monk, p.297)

Philosophy cannot be transformed into a science because it has nothing to find out. Its puzzles are the consequence of a misuse, a misunderstanding, of grammar, and require not a solution but a dissolution. (Monk, p.298)

‘What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that.’ (Wittgenstein, p.298)

‘All that philosophy can do is destroy idols.’ (Wittgenstein, p.325)

‘I conceive of philosophy as an activity of cleaning up thought.’ (p.330)

He conceived of philosophy as ‘a task of clarification that has no end’ (p.326).

No foundations

Wittgenstein had been attracted to philosophy in 1911 by Russell’s challenge to provide a self-consistent logical underpinning for mathematics and thought he had attained it in the Tractatus. By the later 1920s the entire project seemed pointless. He came to believe that if somebody creates a meta-mathematics (as suggested by Russell to clear up Wittgenstein’s logical anomalies) or a new set of founding principles, they haven’t explained anything, they have just created a new mathematics to go alongside the existing ones.

There is no need for theory; a new theory is just one more entity to lay alongside whatever it was hoping to explain. There is no depth. There is no bottom. There is no foundation. If you can play a game, you understand enough of the rules as you need and don’t need a theory of rules. Playing is enough. We know that we understand something when we use it. No underlying theory is required.

The later Wittgenstein is famous for its use of the term ‘language games’, which picks up and extends this idea of language and meaning in action:

The connection between a word and its meaning is to be found, not in theory, but in practice, in the use of the word. (Monk, p.308)

The technique [of language games] is a kind of therapy, the purpose of which is to free ourselves from the philosophical confusions that result from considering language in isolation from its place in the ‘stream of life’. (Monk, p.330)

For the rest of his life, in the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, Russell continued to believe that it was vital to generate a theory which would underpin logic and mathematics to give them a coherent foundation. He thought Wittgenstein’s abandonment of the quest signified that he had stopped being serious. But Wittgenstein had moved to an entirely new plane where there is no such thing as a single, unifying, underlying theory. Wittgenstein’s aim was to undermine the notion that mathematics even needs foundations (p.327). Wittgenstein’s thinking took elements of Goethe and Spengler (as Monk lucidly explains) to explain why we must not look for depths and foundations, but, as it were horizontally, to look for connections and similarities (p.308).

So:

Philosophy is not aiming to create new theories, discover new facts or produce general conclusions.

Philosophy is a practice, a technique which, through strategies like language games, attempts to clear away the fog of misunderstandings which have surrounded the subject.

Philosophy sets out to create no ‘foundations’ to any of the natural sciences; it is solely concerned with finding family resemblances between linguistic forms and structures.

Wittgenstein isn’t about making theories or coming up with theoretical foundations. He wants to release people from their confusions and perplexities by making them see the ‘problem’ in a new way, from a different perspective. There are no solutions. But if you see problems from the right angle, they cease to be problems any more and so the lack of solutions, also, ceases to cause you anxiety and worry. Philosophy is the therapy which cures anxiety about philosophical problems.

Apparently Wittgenstein was fond of quoting the physicist Heinrich Herz who struggled with the problems in mechanical theory bequeathed by Isaac Newton’s notion of ‘force’. But in his book The Principles of Mechanics, Herz explained that if you dumped the notion of force altogether and simply observed the wide variety of events which used to be corraled together to create the definition – if you actually just looked at what was in front of your eyes – then all the ‘problems’ raised by hanging onto Newton’s out-dated notion simply disappeared.

When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions. (p.446)

Wittgenstein was delighted by this passage because it exactly epitomised his own approach to the so-called ‘problems’ of philosophy.

The Brown Book

In 1938 Wittgenstein took the Brown Book to his retreat in Norway and reworked it. The first part became the basis for paragraphs 1 to 118 of Philosophical Investigations and was the only part of his later work he appeared happy with i.e. expressed no wish to revise or junk.

Monk sums up, not so much the content but how we should approach the Philosophical Investigations thus:

Philosophical Investigations – more, perhaps, than any other philosophical classic – makes demands, not just on the reader’s intelligence but on his involvement. Other great philosophical works – Schopenhauer’s World and Representation, say – can be read with interest and entertainment by someone who ‘wants to know what Schopenhauer said’. But if Philosophical Investigations is read in this spirit it will very quickly become boring and a chore to read, not because it is intellectually difficult, but because it will be practically impossible to gather what Wittgenstein is ‘saying’. For, in truth, he is not saying anything; he is presenting a technique for the unravelling of confusions. Unless these are your confusions, the book will be of very little interest. (p.366)

The Anschluss, Jewishness and Wittgenstein’s family

The Anschluss was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into the German Reich on 13 March 1938. At a stroke Austria ceased to exist as a state and all its citizens became German, including Wittgenstein, his family, everyone he knew back in Vienna.

Monk gives a fascinating account of the implications. Legal contacts advised him not to go back to Vienna with an Austrian passport because he wouldn’t be allowed to leave the country without a German passport and the authorities might put obstacles in the way of getting one, maybe indefinitely. As a result, Wittgenstein was advised to apply for British citizenship. After some delay he acquired it on 2 June 1939, helped by the fact that on 11 February he had been elected Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, and he had taken the post because – he was told – having a job in England would also help him to travel to and from Austria (to see his family).

I was worried that Wittgenstein’s brothers and sisters, because of their Jewish ancestry (which Monk explains very clearly, going back to the various grandparents and great-grandparents, at the start of the book) would be wiped out in the Holocaust. But his brother Paul (the one-armed pianist) escaped early to Switzerland then on to New York, one sister Gretl was already an American citizen by marriage and the remaining two, Hermine and Helene, after lengthy negotiations with the Nazi authorities, handed over a large part of the Wittgenstein family fortunes in order to win legal recognition as Aryans and so, mercifully, survived the war and all its horrors (p.400).

Second World War

During the Second World War Wittgenstein volunteered to work as a porter at Guy’s hospital. It was a repeat of his wish to submerge his ever-restless mind in physical labour, the gardening, the fantasy about going to be a labourer in the Soviet Union. Monk drily describes how his sponsor at the hospital kept it hushed up that the new porter was in fact a Cambridge professor.

But while at Guy’s he became interested in research being done into victims of shock being carried out by members of the Medical Research Council’s Clinical Research Unit, led by a Dr Grant. Discussions over dinner turned into an offer to help them with their work and writing up the resulting paper. Wittgenstein particularly warmed to their idea that the concept of ‘shock’ had been inherited from the First World War, was widely used in the literature and yet was nowhere precisely defined. In fact it had so many varying definitions that the word and concept got in the way of observing what was actually happening in patients. The researchers, Dr Grant and Dr Reeve, therefore dropped the traditional concept of ‘shock’ and instead recorded the different types of patient they were seeing, in real life and in the scientific papers they published.

This was right up Wittgenstein’s street because it was exactly what he was trying to do in philosophy – get rid of shibboleths surrounding ‘the logical foundations of mathematics’ and the numerous other concepts which had dogged philosophy for millennia. He thought philosophers had made a profound mistake when they observed people talking about the ‘good’ life or a ‘good’ person or a ‘good’ meal and decided there must be a thing called Goodness, and then set about trying to find and define this thing, Goodness. In this hopeless quest they encountered all kinds of conceptual difficulties, starting with Plato who concluded that the ‘ideal form’ of these abstract nouns must exist in some other world, in the mind of God or some such. This process is known as hypostatisation:

Hypostatisation is a noun that means treating an abstract idea or concept as a physical thing or reality. It is also known as reification, concretism, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. (Internet)

In Wittgenstein’s view succeeding generations of philosophers had treated these adjectives-turned-into-nouns as if they really are things – Goodness, Virtue, Beauty and so on – a fundamental misconception which had led moral and aesthetic philosophers into all kinds of delusions and quagmires, ‘problems’ and misapprehensions.

This is what Wittgenstein wanted to attack, cleanse and demolish – the centuries of gunk which had led to the vast discourse of academic ‘Philosophy’, which was so often based on a wrong way of thinking. Instead he wanted to collect multiple examples of the actual language games people play i.e. how people actually use these terms in everyday language.

The exercises in Philosophical Investigations are designed to re-orientate a reader used to dealing with the textbook philosophical ‘problems’ away from them, to help the reader see them from Wittgenstein’s perspective and to grasp that, seen from this point of view, the problems do not have ‘solutions’, they simply cease to be problems at all. They evaporate.

When Grant’s unit was moved to the Royal Victoria Infirmary Newcastle to study industrial accidents, Wittgenstein asked, and was granted permission, to join them, moving to the city in November 1942. He liked the people and turned out to be an invaluable assistant, not only engaging in useful conversations about their studies but – thanks to his early career in engineering – helping to improve the apparatus they used to measure things like blood pressure and flow in wounded patients.

Eventually, towards the end of 1943, Dr Grant’s unit was shipped to Italy in order to observe more severe battlefield wounds. Grant wrote a testimonial to the head of the MRC recommending Wittgenstein to their replacement, pointing out how punctilious he was in his duties, how stimulating it was discussing results with him, but observing, ‘He is not an easy man to deal with’ (p.456).

In the event Wittgenstein didn’t get on with Grant’s replacement and, in February 1944, left Newcastle and returned to Cambridge. However, he’d developed such an aversion to the university town as a dead, sterile place that, in March 1944, he left for Swansea where a former student of his arranged boarding rooms with a series of families.

Over the next six months Wittgenstein rearranged the mathematical parts of his draft book but, according to Monk, having done so, abandoned mathematical philosophy altogether. For the rest of his life, from 1944 to 1951, he devoted his time to ‘arranging, rearranging and revising his thoughts on the philosophy of psychology’ (p.467).

Philosophical Investigations

‘The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness.’
(Philosophical Investigations part 1, section 255)

‘Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by language.’
(Philosophical Investigations part 1, section 109)

Monk says (p.469) that during the summer of 1944 Wittgenstein doubled the length of part one of the Philosophical Investigations to form what are ‘now considered to be the central parts of the book’, the sections on:

1. rule following (paragraphs 189 to 242)
2. the private language argument (paragraphs 243 to 421)

The Investigations isn’t a set of consecutive reasoned arguments with proofs and conclusions. It’s more like an ‘album’ of meditations (Wittgenstein himself uses the world ‘album’, p.484).

The meaning of words is how they’re used. Don’t ask for the meaning, ask for the use.

The meaning of a word is its use in the language. (PI, I, 43)

One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and function. (PI, I, 340)

Rules on how to use words derive from agreements that come from our social life.

Language games only make sense in this social life.

There cannot be a private language. One individual can’t play a one-person language game. Language is always a joint enterprise.

‘Forms of life’, not abstruse theories, are the bottom point of any investigation. At some point you have to stop digging for meaning and accept that meanings are based on what we do and how we behave.

To really understand this, you have to come to see the world – and the world of philosophy – from his point of view.

Again and again Monk reformulates, or quotes Wittgenstein reformulating, the same basic idea: problems of philosophy (and to some extent psychology) are only problems because of our point of view, because of our quest for totalising theories or definitions of concepts which we ourselves have invented by hypostasising nouns like good, beauty, meaning, and so on.

If we could only change our perspective, our angle of view, to think of these words as they’re actually used in a myriad of language games, embedded in our complex social life, then we would see that they are just part of our human behaviour and require no special explanations.

It could be said of his philosophical method that its aim is to change the aspect under which certain things are seen – for example, to see a mathematical proof not as a sequence of propositions but as a picture, to see a mathematical formula not as a proposition but as a rule, to see first-person reports of psychological states (‘I am in pain’ etc) not as descriptions but as expressions, and so on. The ‘understanding that consists in seeing connections’, one might say, is the understanding that results from a change of aspect. (p.508)

Later, for a while Wittgenstein pondered music, what it means to ‘have a musical ear’, to ‘be’ musical and so on. Monk draws the conclusion that Wittgenstein thought people needed to ‘get’ his point of view, his unusual angle on philosophy, in the same way they ‘get’ a joke or ‘get’ a piece of music. You have to come from the right background, have the right education or from a particular culture, from a particular ‘form of life’, to understand its jokes and music. Same with the perspective he was trying to explain (p.531-2).

This change in perspective – Wittgenstein’s repeated incitements to see the entire field from a completely different point of view – was accompanied in his notebooks, diaries and letters, by the notion of a change of heart. It was wrapped up with his sense, since his religious conversion during the First World War, that not the world but the person needs to change.

So you can see how – along with his charismatic presence, his histrionic performances in lectures where he put his head in his hands or sat staring into space for minutes on end, along with the sense that they were being taught to see the entire history of philosophy from a new and unique point of view, this sense that they weren’t just studying an academic subject but were being inducted into an entirely new way of seeing the world – you can see how this created a special sense of devotion among Wittgenstein’s students, the sense of being part of an elect few, which outsiders described as a cult.

Cultural pessimism

I was really disappointed to read Monk’s description of how Wittgenstein, after the war, gave in to that most suburban and clichéd of beliefs, that the world is going to hell. Like Marx, like Nietzsche, like Spengler, like Benjamin, like Adorno, he thought the Western world of his time was uniquely rotten and corrupt. As a German, he was particularly horrified to read about the final passages of the war when the Allies bombed Hamburg and Dresden and, of course, like everyone, horrified by the advent of the atom bomb.

All of this confirmed his really deep hatred of ‘science’ and what he saw as the slavish worship of science which had brought civilisation to this ruinous pass.

In my opinion, like Benjamin and Adorno’s pessimism, this is utterly, transparently autobiographical. Raised in a household of extraordinary high culture (Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of his sister, Brahms performed at the Wittgenstein family home) Wittgenstein revered high art, music and culture with an intensity the philistine English can’t really understand. So it is depressingly inevitable that he attributed the dire situation of the world in 1945 not to the fact that Germany had twice declared war on the rest of the Europe – that thought is never mentioned or countenanced – but that it was all due to the calamitous collapse in reverence for the things he was brought up to love – high art, music and culture. And just as predictable that this clever man would think the only way to ‘save’ the world was to restore widespread reverence for the precious things of his boyhood – high art, music and culture (pages 516, 533). In effect, ‘if only we could all go back to my childhood’… Same with Benjamin, same with Adorno. Can’t help finding this childish-nostalgia-dressed-as-cultural-critique pathetic.

And then it made me quite angry that Wittgenstein came to hate England – the country that gave him refuge during the 1930s and Second World War, that granted him citizenship, a job, the contacts to make a career and name for himself, the country that stood alone against the Nazis who deriving from his country and his cultural tradition (Hitler was Austrian), the country which bankrupted itself to defeat this embodiment of evil – and that he repeatedly described England as ‘disintegrating and putrefying’ (p.488 and p.516), ‘a country whose politics alternates between an evil purpose and no purpose’ (p.516).

This was at exactly the time that the Attlee government (which Wittgenstein voted for) was struggling to set about a massive housebuilding programme, was establishing the welfare state and the National Health Service, was trying to carry out, despite the country’s ruinous bankruptcy, a social revolution. That Wittgenstein described this country struggling to pick itself up from bankruptcy and war as ‘disintegrating and putrefying’ is pretty insulting and also, just plain stupid.

(Talking of Adorno, there’s a comparison to be drawn between the two books of these super-refined, highly educated and grimly pessimistic Teutons: between the fragmentary meditations of Minima Moralia, written during the war and published as as a series of numbered meditations in 1951, and Philosophical Investigations, also written during the war and also published as a series of numbered sections in 1953. And between the lofty cultural pessimism of both authors.)

Last years

‘Explanations come to an end somewhere. (PI. I, 1)

He was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He was treated with hormones which stopped the growth but didn’t halt it. He went to stay in the old family home in Vienna for a while. He went to stay in Ireland near Maurice Drury who’d become a successful psychiatrist. He ended up back in Cambridge where he died in the home of a Dr Bevan, recommended by Drury, who treated him as an out-patient and then very kindly took him into his own home to be cared for in his last weeks.

I was tickled to learn that Bevan’s wife, initially intimidated by this intense stickler for routine, slowly came to like him, and in his last month, weak though able to get about, the pair went to the local pub every evening at 6pm and ordered two ports, one which she drank and the other which Wittgenstein, with a schoolboy grin, enjoyed pouring into one of the pub’s aspidistra plants. He lost consciousness on 28 April 1951 and passed away in his sleep the next day.

The thrust of Wittgenstein’s remarks is to focus the attention of philosophers away from words, from sentences, and on to the occasions in which we use them, the contexts which give them their sense:

‘Am I not getting closer and closer to saying that in the end logic cannot be described? You must look at the practice of language, then you will set it.’ (p.578,)

Haunting question

‘What is the point of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to talk with plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic etc, and if it does not improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life?’ (p.424)

And:

‘What good does all my talent do me if, at heart, I am unhappy? What help is it to me to solve philosophical problems if I cannot settle the chief, the most important thing?’ (p.507)

What indeed?

Comments

1. For most philosophers (Plato, Hume) it’s recommended that you go back to the primary texts and study them closely. Obviously you can also do this with Wittgenstein, spend a couple of weeks working through the Tractatus with study aids to hand, then the Philosophical Investigations ditto. But there’s a good case for saying that, instead, you should read this biography for at least two reasons:

One is that Wittgenstein himself went out of his way to emphasise that all the really important subjects are not covered in his philosophy – metaphysics, morality, ontology, epistemology, all the classic subjects are excluded in favour of his relentless focus on language. And yet, as Monk’s biography makes abundantly clear, you can only really understand the change in perspective, and in life, which he hoped his works would effect in his readers, if you understand the depth and sincerity of his religious convictions. Even the form of his works, short, pithy aphorisms, are more like the cryptic teachings of a religious guru than the step-by-step reasoning of a traditional philosopher and there, more than for those kinds of thinkers, Wittgenstein’s works benefit from a sensitive explanation of their wider context in the man’s personality and beliefs. And this Monk supplies brilliantly and convincingly.

2. While reading the second half of Monk I flicked through my copy of the Philosophical Investigations, which are really a string of remarks or meditations (693 in total), dipping in and out, reading sequences which interested me, as Monk more or less recommends.

And the one major thought which almost all of them prompted is that he was inventing his own thoughts in the disciplines of pedagogy and linguistics. All the sections I read deal with how children learn language, how they use language, how adult use of language based on how we learned it as children, the language games we inherit, the culture (root of life’) we operate in and so on.

But all this was written in the 1940s, 80 years ago. If you want to really understand how children actually learn language (probably in lots of different ways) and how adults use language, shouldn’t you start with the most up-to-date scientific knowledge, based on hundreds of thousands of studies and research, rather than the enigmatic diary jottings of an eccentric Viennese?

The shocking quality of the Vintage paperback edition

Although they charge full price, this Vintage paperback is a cheap edition on very cheap paper. It’s tolerable to read (although the paper is so cheap and thin that the pages start to ripple and bend on contact with the moisture in the air) but the photo reproductions are catastrophically bad. All of them are riddled with black and grey squares, like a chessboard, and many of them are so dark as to be indecipherable. This is especially disappointing since the photos of the later Wittgenstein are uniquely charismatic and striking. Not here, they aren’t; they are shockingly poor quality and Vintage should be ashamed to publish this scandalously poor quality book. Do not buy this book new, look for older editions which were printed on decent paper.

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Credit

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius by Ray Monk was published by Jonathan Cape in 1990. Page references are to the 1991 Vintage paperback edition. All quotations are for the purposes of criticism and review.

Related link

• The Ludwig Wittgenstein Project

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