Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein was an Austro-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language.
From 1929 to 1947, Wittgenstein taught at the University of Cambridge. Despite his position, only one book of his philosophy was published during his life: the 75-page Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung, which appeared, together with an English translation, in 1922 under the Latin title Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. His only other published works were an article, "Some Remarks on Logical Form" ; a review of The Science of Logic, by P. Coffey; and a children's dictionary. [|His voluminous manuscripts] were edited and published posthumously. The first and best-known of this posthumous series is the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations. A 1999 survey among American university and college teachers ranked the Investigations as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".
His philosophy is often divided into an early period, exemplified by the Tractatus, and a later period, articulated primarily in the Philosophical Investigations. 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. 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. More precisely, Wittgenstein wrote, "For a large class of cases of the employment of the word 'meaning'—though not for all—this word can be explained in this way: the meaning of a word is its use in the language."
Born in Vienna into one of Europe's richest families, he inherited a fortune from his father in 1913. Before World War I, he "made a very generous financial bequest to a group of poets and artists chosen by Ludwig von Ficker, the editor of Der Brenner, from artists in need. These included Trakl as well as Rainer Maria Rilke and the architect Adolf Loos", as well as the painter Oskar Kokoschka. "In autumn 1916, as his sister reported, 'Ludwig made a donation of a million crowns for the construction of a 30 cm mortar.'" Later, in a period of severe personal depression after World War I, he gave away his remaining fortune to his brothers and sisters. Three of his four older brothers died by separate acts of suicide.
Wittgenstein left academia several times: serving as an officer on the front line during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for using sometimes violent corporal punishment on both girls and boys, especially during mathematics classes; working during World War II as a hospital porter in London; and working as a hospital laboratory technician at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Background
The Wittgensteins
According to a family tree prepared in Jerusalem after World War II, Wittgenstein's paternal great-great-grandfather was Moses Meier, an Ashkenazi Jewish land agent who lived with his wife, Brendel Simon, in Bad Laasphe in the Principality of Wittgenstein, Westphalia. In July 1808, Napoleon issued a decree that everyone, including Jews, must adopt an inheritable family surname, so Meier's son, also Moses, took the name of his employers, the Sayn-Wittgensteins, and became Moses Meier Wittgenstein. His son, Hermann Christian Wittgenstein — who took the middle name "Christian" to distance himself from his Jewish background — married Fanny Figdor, also Jewish, who converted to Protestantism just before they married, and the couple founded a successful business trading in wool in Leipzig. Ludwig's grandmother Fanny was a first cousin of the violinist Joseph Joachim.They had 11 children – among them Wittgenstein's father. Karl Otto Clemens Wittgenstein became an industrial tycoon, and by the late 1880s was one of the richest men in Europe, with an effective monopoly on Austria's steel cartel. Thanks to Karl, the Wittgensteins became the second wealthiest family in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, only the Rothschilds being wealthier. Karl Wittgenstein was viewed as the Austrian equivalent of Andrew Carnegie, with whom he was friends, and was one of the wealthiest men in the world by the 1890s. As a result of his decision in 1898 to invest substantially in the Netherlands and in Switzerland as well as overseas, particularly in the US, the family was to an extent shielded from the hyperinflation that hit Austria in 1922. However, their wealth diminished due to post-1918 hyperinflation and subsequently during the Great Depression, although even as late as 1938 they owned 13 mansions in Vienna alone.
Early life
Wittgenstein was ethnically Jewish. His mother was Leopoldine Maria Josefa Kalmus, known among friends as "Poldi". Her father was a Bohemian Jew, and her mother was an Austrian-Slovene Catholic—she was Wittgenstein's only non-Jewish grandparent. Poldi was an aunt of the Nobel Prize laureate Friedrich Hayek on his maternal side. Wittgenstein was born at 8:30 on 26 April 1889 in the "Villa Wittgenstein" at what became Neuwaldegger Straße 38 in the suburban parish Neuwaldegg outside Vienna.Karl and Poldi had nine children in all—four girls: Hermine, Margaret, Helene, and a fourth daughter Dora who died as a baby; and five boys: Johannes, Kurt, Rudolf, Paul—who became a concert pianist despite losing an arm in World War I—and Ludwig, who was the youngest of the family.
The children were baptized as Catholics, received formal Catholic instruction, and were raised in an exceptionally intense environment. The family was at the centre of Vienna's cultural life; Bruno Walter described the life at the Wittgensteins' palace as an "all-pervading atmosphere of humanity and culture". Karl was a leading patron of the arts, commissioning works by Auguste Rodin and financing the city's exhibition hall and art gallery, the Secession Building. Gustav Klimt painted a portrait of Wittgenstein's sister Margaret for her wedding, and Johannes Brahms and Gustav Mahler gave regular concerts in the family's numerous music rooms. According to John King, Wittgenstein "was always immaculately neat and tidy, small of stature and with piercing blue eyes under a shock of curly hair."
Wittgenstein, who valued precision and discipline, never considered contemporary classical music acceptable. He said to his friend Drury in 1930: Ludwig Wittgenstein himself had absolute pitch, and his devotion to music remained vitally important to him throughout his life; he made frequent use of musical examples and metaphors in his philosophical writings, and he was unusually adept at whistling lengthy and detailed musical passages. He also learnt to play the clarinet in his 30s. A fragment of music, composed by Wittgenstein, was discovered in one of his 1931 notebooks, by Michael Nedo, director of the Wittgenstein Institute in Cambridge.
Family temperament and the brothers' suicides
writes that Karl's aim was to turn his sons into captains of industry; they were not sent to school lest they acquire bad habits but were educated at home to prepare them for work in Karl's industrial empire. Three of the five brothers later committed suicide. Psychiatrist Michael Fitzgerald argues that Karl was a harsh perfectionist who lacked empathy, and that Wittgenstein's mother was anxious and insecure, unable to stand up to her husband. Johannes Brahms said of the family, whom he visited regularly: The family appeared to have a strong streak of depression running through it. Anthony Gottlieb tells a story about Paul practising on one of the pianos in the Wittgensteins' main family mansion, when he suddenly shouted at Ludwig in the next room:The family palace housed seven grand pianos and each of the siblings pursued music "with an enthusiasm that, at times, bordered on the pathological". The eldest brother, Hans, was hailed as a musical prodigy. At the age of four, writes Alexander Waugh, Hans could identify the Doppler effect in a passing siren as a quarter-tone drop in pitch, and at five started crying "Wrong! Wrong!" when two brass bands in a carnival played the same tune in different keys. But he died in mysterious circumstances in May 1902, when he ran away to the US and disappeared from a boat in Chesapeake Bay, most likely having committed suicide.
Two years later, aged 22 and studying chemistry at the Berlin Academy, the third eldest brother, Rudi, committed suicide in a Berlin bar. He had asked the pianist to play Thomas Koschat's "Verlassen, verlassen, verlassen bin ich", before mixing himself a drink of milk and potassium cyanide. He had left several suicide notes, one to his parents that said he was grieving over the death of a friend, and another that referred to his "perverted disposition". It was reported at the time that he had sought advice from the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, an organization that was campaigning against Paragraph 175 of the German Criminal Code, which prohibited homosexual sex. His father forbade the family from ever mentioning his name again. The second eldest brother, Kurt, an officer and company director, shot himself on 27 October 1918, just before the end of World War I, when the Austrian troops he was commanding refused to obey his orders and deserted en masse. According to Gottlieb, Hermine had said Kurt seemed to carry "the germ of disgust for life within himself". Later, Ludwig wrote:
1903–1906: Realschule in Linz
Realschule in Linz
Wittgenstein was taught at home by private tutors until he was 14 years old. Subsequently, he attended a school for three years. After the deaths of Hans and Rudi, Karl relented and allowed Paul and Ludwig to attend school. Waugh writes that it was too late for Wittgenstein to pass his exams for the more academic Gymnasium in Wiener Neustadt; having had no formal schooling, he failed his entrance exam and only barely managed after extra tutoring to pass the exam for the more technically oriented Imperial and Royal Realschule in Linz, a small state school whose 300 pupils included Adolf Hitler. In 1903, when he was 14, he began his three years of formal schooling there, lodging nearby during the term with the family of Josef Strigl, a teacher at the local gymnasium, the family giving him the nickname Luki.On starting at the Realschule, Wittgenstein had been moved forward a year. Historian Brigitte Hamann writes that he stood out from the other boys: he spoke an unusually pure form of High German with a stutter, dressed elegantly, and was sensitive and unsociable. Monk writes that the other boys made fun of him, singing after him: "Wittgenstein wandelt wehmütig widriger Winde wegen Wienwärts". In his leaving certificate, he received a top mark—a 5—in religious studies; a 2 for conduct and English; 3s for French, geography, history, mathematics, and physics; and 4s for German, chemistry, geometry, and freehand drawing. He had particular difficulty with spelling and failed his written German exam because of it. He wrote in 1931: